Upright
Contentment and shared happiness. Not excitement — the quieter satisfaction of things going well among people you like.
Rune 8 of 24 · Freyr's Aett
ᚹ Wunjo
Wunjo is rune 8 of the 24 in the Elder Futhark, in Freyr's Aett, and carries the sound W. It means “Joy”. Upright: Contentment and shared happiness. Not excitement — the quieter satisfaction of things going well among people you like. Reversed: Discontent, alienation, or joy that depends on something unstable. That reading exists for 17 of the 24 runes; the other 7 are symmetrical or read upright only.
Reversed
Discontent, alienation, or joy that depends on something unstable.
Position in the row8 of 24
AettFreyr's Aett
SoundW
Literal meaningJoy
ElementEarth
Can be reversedYes
Wunjo is the 8th rune of the Elder Futhark and belongs to Freyr's Aett. Before it meant anything divinatory it was a letter, carrying the W sound.
Primary source
What the rune poem says
Bliss he enjoys who knows not suffering, sorrow nor anxiety, and has prosperity and happiness and a good enough house.
— 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
Wunjo by the numbers
Position in the row
8 of 24
Odds of drawing it
1 in 24 · 4.17%
Rune of the day in 2026
19 times · 5.21%
Reversed on those days
21%
Can be reversed
Yes
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: 17 Jan, 2 Feb, 9 Feb, 16 Feb, 21 Feb, 4 Mar, 10 Mar, 14 Apr
What happened to it
Wunjo after the Elder Futhark
In the Younger Futhark
Dropped from the Younger Futhark. The W sound was absorbed by úr.
Worth knowing
Its shape is close to the later Latin P, and inscriptions using both can be genuinely ambiguous.
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
WOON-yo
Deity
Odin
Tree
Ash
Element
Earth
Wunjo sits in Freyr's Aett, position 8 of the row, and carries the W sound. Its literal meaning is joy — which is where every later reading of it starts.
The poem above is a source; this table is twentieth-century reconstruction.