Upright
Stillness and suspension. Everything held in place — frustrating if you want movement, useful if you needed to stop.
Rune 11 of 24 · Heimdall's Aett
ᛁ Isa
Isa is rune 11 of the 24 in the Elder Futhark, in Heimdall's Aett, and carries the sound I. It means “Ice”. Upright: Stillness and suspension. Everything held in place — frustrating if you want movement, useful if you needed to stop. The shape is symmetrical, so it has no reversed position at all — true of only 4 runes in the row.
Reversed
Isa is symmetrical — turning it over changes nothing, so it has no reversed meaning.
Position in the row11 of 24
AettHeimdall's Aett
SoundI
Literal meaningIce
ElementWater
Can be reversedNo
Isa is the 11th rune of the Elder Futhark and belongs to Heimdall's Aett. Before it meant anything divinatory it was a letter, carrying the I sound.
This is one of the four symmetrical runes — along with Gebo, Isa, Jera and Ingwaz — which cannot be drawn reversed.
Primary source
What the rune poem says
Ice is very cold and immeasurably slippery; it glistens as clear as glass and most resembles gems. It is a floor wrought by the frost, fair to look upon.
— 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
Isa by the numbers
Position in the row
11 of 24
Odds of drawing it
1 in 24 · 4.17%
Rune of the day in 2026
9 times · 2.47%
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: 27 Feb, 16 Mar, 25 Apr, 29 Jun, 24 Jul, 30 Jul, 6 Aug, 25 Aug
What happened to it
Isa after the Elder Futhark
In the Younger Futhark
Survived as íss, ice. A single vertical stroke, and the simplest rune to carve.
Worth knowing
Because it is one line, it is the rune most often lost to damage on weathered stones.
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
EE-sah
Deity
Rime giants
Tree
Alder
Element
Water
Isa sits in Heimdall's Aett, position 11 of the row, and carries the I sound. Its literal meaning is ice — which is where every later reading of it starts.
The poem above is a source; this table is twentieth-century reconstruction.