Ehwaz

Template:Short description Template:More sources needed Template:Infobox rune Template:Contains special characters is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic name of the Elder Futhark e rune ᛖ, meaning "horse" (cognate to Latin , Gaulish , Tocharian B , Sanskrit , Avestan and Old Irish ). In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, it is continued as ᛖ (properly , but spelled without the diphthong to avoid confusion with ᛇ "yew").

The Proto-Germanic vowel system was asymmetric and unstable. The difference between the long vowels expressed by ᛖ e and ᛇ ï (sometimes transcribed as and ) was lost. The Younger Futhark continues neither, lacking a letter expressing e altogether. The Anglo-Saxon futhorc faithfully preserved all Elder futhorc staves, but assigned new sound values to the redundant ones, futhorc expressing a diphthong.

In the case of the Gothic alphabet, where the names of the runes were re-applied to letters derived from the Greek alphabet, the letter e was named "horse" as well (note that in Gothic orthography, Template:Angbr represents monophthongic /e/).

The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet's E, or from the Greek alphabet's H.

Anglo-Saxon rune poem

The Anglo-Saxon rune poem has:

ᛖ

"The horse is a joy to princes in the presence of warriors.

A steed in the pride of its hoofs,

when rich men on horseback bandy words about it;

and it is ever a source of comfort to the restless."

References

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