ᛚ

Lǫgr

water, sea, liquid

Force in motion that answers to its own gradient

Sound
l /l/
Position
15
Group
Týr's ætt
Descended from
Elder Futhark Laguz (*laguz)
Unicode
U+16DA
Timing
Moving already; not yours to schedule
Yes / No
Yes, if you can go with it

Upright

  • water
  • flow
  • kinetic force
  • the sea
  • what carries
  • depth
  • instinct
  • a current

In the rune poems

Lǫgr er, fællr ór fjalle foss; en gull ero nosser.

Water is what falls from the mountain as a torrent; but gold objects are costly.

Norwegian Rune Poem · Lǫgr
Lögr er vellanda vatn ok viðr ketill ok glömmungr grund. lacus lofðungr.

Water is a boiling stream, a broad kettle, and the land of the fish. Lake; prince.

Icelandic Rune Poem · Lögr

Across the scripts

ᛚ

Laguz

Elder Futhark

The ancestor. Its Old English stanza is about a landsman on a rolling ship, and ends with a sea-steed that will not answer the bridle.

ᛚ

Lǫgr

Younger Futhark

Unchanged in shape and name, and one of the few runes with no short-twig variant, since it was already minimal.

ᛚ

Lagu

Anglo-Saxon Futhorc

Unchanged. Old English lagu means sea or flood and survives in place names and in poetic compounds.

Each country's own water

The three rune-poem traditions describe three different bodies of water, and each one is the water that country actually had.

England wrote about the open sea, from the point of view of someone frightened of it: the ocean seems endless, the ship rolls, the waves terrify, the sea-steed heeds no bridle.

Norway wrote about a mountain waterfall. Lǫgr er, fællr ór fjalle foss — water is what falls from the mountain as a foss, a torrent. Norway's water arrives vertically, down the sides of the fjords, and the word survives in hundreds of place names and in the modern Norwegian foss.

Iceland wrote about something no other European country could have. Vellanda vatn, boiling water. Viðr ketill, a broad kettle. Only then glömmungr grund, the land of the fish, for the sea.

Icelandic geothermal features are not a poetic flourish; they are the landscape. The word geysir itself is Icelandic, from geysa, to gush, and it is the source of the English common noun. A poet in Iceland listing kinds of water put the hot ones first.

The gold at the bottom

The Norwegian second line is en gull ero nosser, but gold objects are costly, and it is the poem's usual rhyme filler — fosse against nosser.

The attempted connection is to Andvari, the dwarf who lives as a pike in a waterfall and whose hoard, taken from him by Loki, carries the curse that runs through the whole Völsung cycle: it kills Hreiðmarr, sets Fáfnir and Reginn against each other, and eventually destroys Sigurðr and the Burgundians.

A waterfall with gold under it is a specific and famous image in this literature, so the pairing is not unreasonable. It is also exactly the kind of connection readers construct after the fact from a line that needed a rhyme.

What can be said is that the Norwegian poem does this repeatedly — Reginn under Reið, Fróði under Ár, Loki under Bjarkan — so a Völsung reference here would be in character.

In reading

Lǫgr is force already in motion that follows its own gradient.

The Norse tradition gives it more energy than the English one. England's stanza is about fear on open water; Norway's is about a torrent coming off a mountain; Iceland's is about water boiling out of the ground. All three are about water not under control, but the Scandinavian ones are kinetic rather than frightened.

So read through this row, Lǫgr is less "you are out of your depth" and more "this is moving and it has a direction of its own". In a spread it marks a situation with momentum: something that will carry the querent if they go with it and hurt them if they stand across it.

The intuition and unconscious readings that modern practice attaches to this rune are twentieth-century in their vocabulary, arriving through Jung and mid-century occultism. They follow reasonably from a medium with things moving under the surface, and they are not what any of the poems say.

The depth sense is fair from glömmungr grund, the land of the fish: there is a whole world under there living its own life.

As a letter

A stave with a single short branch at the top, and one of the few runes with no distinct short-twig form — it was already about as reduced as a letter can be.

The rune lends its name to lǫgrúnar, one of the medieval cipher systems, which encode a letter as its ætt number and position using branches on a stave. Like the ice-runes and hail-runes, the system depends on the ætt division being common knowledge.

Questions to sit with

  • What is already moving here that you are trying to hold still?
  • Are you standing across the current or in it?
  • There is a whole world under the surface of this living its own life. What is it?

Frequently asked questions

Water, in whatever form the poet had to hand. Norway describes a torrent falling from a mountain; Iceland describes boiling water, a broad kettle and the land of the fish. Old Norse lǫgr covers water, liquid and the sea. In reading it means force already in motion following its own gradient.

Because Iceland is geothermal and the poet was describing the water actually there. The word geysir is Icelandic, from geysa, to gush, and it is the source of the English common noun. A poet in Iceland listing kinds of water put the hot ones before the sea.

For the rhyme, fosse against nosser. The attempted connection is to Andvari, the dwarf who lives as a pike in a waterfall and whose stolen hoard carries the curse running through the whole Völsung cycle. A waterfall with gold beneath it is a famous image in that literature, and the Norwegian poem does drop such names repeatedly, so it would be in character.

That reading is twentieth-century, arriving through Jung and mid-century occultism. It follows reasonably from a medium with things moving under the surface, and it is not what any of the three rune poems say. They describe waterfalls, geysers and a frightening sea.

Because it was already minimal: a stave with a single short branch at the top. The short-twig hand exists to reduce branching for carving into wood, and there was nothing left to reduce. Fé, Úr, Þurs, Reið, Kaun and Íss are unchanged for similar reasons.

Younger Futhark

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