Uruz (ᚢ) is the second rune of the Elder Futhark and stands for the sound u. Its name is usually explained as "aurochs," the great wild ox of ancient Europe. In modern rune reading it is taken to mean strength, stamina and raw energy, and it counts as a yes. The medieval rune poems are less tidy: they give the name three different meanings.
What does the Uruz rune mean?
There are two honest answers, and it helps to keep them apart.
The historical answer is short. Uruz was a letter. People who spoke early Germanic languages carved it wherever a word needed a u, in names, on tools and on memorial stones. Like every rune it also had a name, a common word that began with its sound.
The modern answer comes from 20th-century rune reading, which took the old names and built meanings around them. In that practice Uruz covers three ideas:
- Strength. The power to carry something heavy, in body or in spirit.
- Stamina. Energy that lasts through a long task, not a single burst.
- Raw energy. Force that has not been tamed yet and needs direction.
The Uruz sign and its sound
The sign is easy to draw: one tall upright line, a second shorter one beside it, and a slanting stroke that joins them at the top. Many people see a lopsided arch, or the high shoulders and lowered head of an ox.
As a letter, Uruz stands for u. The 24 runes of the Elder Futhark are often called the old futhark, and the first six of them, f, u, th, a, r, k, spell that name. Uruz is the u.
You may also meet the rune under the name Ur or Úr. Those are the forms used in the medieval poems. "Uruz" is the form scholars reconstruct for the first centuries CE.
The name Uruz and what the rune poems say
Nobody wrote down the rune names while the Elder Futhark was in use. They appear in manuscripts centuries later, and linguists work backward from those. The runologist Tineke Looijenga gives the reconstructed name as uruz and its Old English descendant ur as "ox."
The fullest evidence is three medieval rune poems, and for this rune they do not agree.
The Old English poem describes the animal. In Bruce Dickins's 1915 translation: "The aurochs is proud and has great horns; it is a very savage beast and fights with its horns; a great ranger of the moors, it is a creature of mettle."
The Old Norwegian poem uses the same name for something else. There úr is dross, the waste left when iron is smelted: "Dross comes from bad iron," the verse says, before turning to a reindeer running over frozen snow.
The Old Icelandic poem gives a third sense. Úr is a shower of rain, which Dickins renders as "lamentation of the clouds and ruin of the hay-harvest and abomination of the shepherd."
So the wild ox that every modern book starts with rests on one of three poems. The reading is fair, since the reconstructed name points the same way, but the ox is not the whole tradition.
Uruz in a modern rune reading
Rune reading as people practice it now is a product of the 20th century. The meanings below belong to that practice, not to the people who carved the runes.
Drawn alone as a rune of the day, Uruz is taken as a nudge to meet a hard task directly, with steady effort instead of a reckless charge.
In a three-rune cast, the position shapes the reading:
- The situation. There is more energy available than it seems. The question is where it is going.
- The challenge. Strength is being wasted, or held back. The task is to use it in a measured way.
- The likely outcome. Persistence carries the matter forward. This is a direction, not a verdict.
In a yes-or-no question Uruz is read as a yes: the capacity for the job is there.
Draw a rune of the day or cast three runes below, and see where Uruz turns up.
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Is there a reversed Uruz?
Many modern books give each rune a second meaning for when it lands upside down. That convention is recent. The rune poems give one verse per rune and have nothing to say about which way up it lies.
Our rune reading uses upright meanings only. The position in the cast does the work that a reversal does elsewhere: Uruz in the challenge position already asks where strength is being misused.
Uruz in its ætt and neighboring runes
The Elder Futhark is traditionally split into three groups of eight runes, each called an ætt. Uruz is the second rune of the first group, often called Freyr's ætt.
Its neighbors make a neat pair with it. Before it comes Fehu, whose name means cattle: the tame herd, wealth that people own and tend. Uruz is the wild ox no one owns. After it comes Thurisaz, the thorn or giant, where raw force becomes an obstacle.
For all 24 runes side by side, see the guide to the Elder Futhark runes.