Upright
Disruption from outside, arriving uninvited. Hail destroys the crop and waters the ground — the damage and the clearing are the same event.
Rune 9 of 24 · Heimdall's Aett
ᚺ Hagalaz
Hagalaz is rune 9 of the 24 in the Elder Futhark, in Heimdall's Aett, and carries the sound H. It means “Hail”. Upright: Disruption from outside, arriving uninvited. Hail destroys the crop and waters the ground — the damage and the clearing are the same event. Reversed: That reading exists for 17 of the 24 runes; the other 7 are symmetrical or read upright only.
Reversed
Often read as having no reversed meaning: hail falls the same way regardless.
Position in the row9 of 24
AettHeimdall's Aett
SoundH
Literal meaningHail
ElementWater
Can be reversedNo
Hagalaz is the 9th rune of the Elder Futhark and belongs to Heimdall's Aett. Before it meant anything divinatory it was a letter, carrying the H sound.
Primary source
What the rune poem says
Hail is the whitest of grain; it is whirled from the vault of heaven and is tossed about by gusts of wind and then it melts into water.
— Anglo-Saxon rune poem, recorded around the 8th–10th century
Where the rune poems come from and why the medieval reading is often blunter than the modern one — explained once on the main page.
Calculated
Hagalaz by the numbers
Position in the row
9 of 24
Odds of drawing it
1 in 24 · 4.17%
Rune of the day in 2026
10 times · 2.74%
Can be reversed
No
Of the 24 runes, only 17 have a reversed reading — 71% of the row. Four are symmetrical and cannot be turned over at all, and 3 more are conventionally read upright only.
The rune-of-the-day figures are exact rather than estimated. Our daily draw is derived from the date, so the whole year can be computed — which a site with a random draw cannot do.
Days it falls in 2026: 12 Jan, 13 Feb, 1 Mar, 16 Jun, 5 Aug, 11 Aug, 14 Oct, 23 Oct
What happened to it
Hagalaz after the Elder Futhark
In the Younger Futhark
Survived as hagall, hail, and became the basis of the branching hagall-rune used in later cryptic scripts.
Worth knowing
Its nine-branch form was used as the framework for coded rune systems in medieval Iceland.
Around 800 CE the 24-rune Elder Futhark contracted to the 16-rune Younger Futhark — fewer symbols for more sounds, at exactly the point the language was growing more complex. Eight runes were dropped outright. Which ones survived, and how they changed, is the closest thing to a documented history these symbols have.
Traditional associations
Pronounced
HA-ga-lahz
Deity
Hel and Urd
Tree
Yew
Element
Water
Hagalaz sits in Heimdall's Aett, position 9 of the row, and carries the H sound. Its literal meaning is hail — which is where every later reading of it starts.
The poem above is a source; this table is twentieth-century reconstruction.