ᚢ ur

Line of descent

History

The u rune keeps the elder shape, an upright with a long sloping branch, and its value as the vowel u, long or short. Its English name, ur, is the word for the aurochs, the great wild ox of prehistoric Europe. The animal was long extinct in Britain by the time the rune poem was written, yet the poem describes it as a fierce, horned "moor-stalker". Dickins guessed that the poet knew the beast from a drinking horn or from earlier verse, not from life. The name agrees with the Gothic letter name uraz in Codex Vindobonensis 795 and with Old Norse úrr "aurochs", so it is one of the stronger grounds for reconstructing the elder name *ūruz. The Scandinavian rune poems, by contrast, give úr other meanings, "slag" in the Norwegian poem and "drizzle" in the Icelandic one.

In English inscriptions u is common. It is the third rune of flodu on the front of the Franks Casket and the final rune of medu on the Undley bracteate. It also served as the base for a new rune: yr, which stands for the rounded front vowel y, is the u shape with an extra stroke inside it.

In the rune poems

Original text from the public-domain editions named on each poem's page; translations are our own.

Where it is found

• Seax of Beagnoth, position 2
• Undley bracteate (5th century): medu 'reward'
• Franks Casket, front panel: flodu, greut

On inscriptions described on this site

Sources

• Dickins (1915), pp. 12–13 and note to v. 4.
• Wikipedia, 'Undley bracteate' (after Hines & Odenstedt 1987), checked 2026-10.