Eoh

Eoh's stanza describes the yew as rough barked externally yet hard and firm in the earth, a keeper of fire supported by its own roots, and a joy upon an estate, an image built entirely from the tree's physical durability, its long life, tough wood and deep roots offered as the rune's whole content without the moral or social commentary attached to stanzas such as Feoh or Gyfu. The yew's genuine longevity, among the longest lived trees native to northern Europe, and its use across the Germanic world for bow staves and other objects requiring tough, resilient wood, gives the stanza's admiring tone a firm basis in the tree's real properties, comparable to how Ur's stanza draws its admiration from the aurochs' genuine strength and ferocity.

Halsall's critical edition notes the phrase keeper of fire as somewhat obscure in its precise sense, possibly referring to the yew's use in producing charcoal or kindling, or to a more figurative sense of the tree sheltering or containing something valuable within its toughness, one of several points in the poem where a phrase's exact original sense has not survived with full certainty even where the general image remains clear. Yew wood's real historical importance for bow making across the medieval Germanic and later English world gives the stanza's admiration a practical foundation well beyond mere poetic convention, a tree valued for a use its own toughness made possible.

Eoh is the thirteenth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name and reading a direct continuation of Eihwaz, whose own name likewise means yew, both traditions treating the tree's toughness and longevity as the rune's defining image, one of the more stable continuities in the row's later half.

R. I. Page's survey notes that Eihwaz occupies the thirteenth position in the Elder Futhark's own twenty four rune sequence, a position some later esoteric commentary has read as numerically significant given the number's wider symbolic associations in various traditions, though the primary runic evidence gives no indication the row's original compilers attached any special weight to a rune's numeric position beyond its place in a fixed, memorised order.

Eoh's Anglo-Saxon sound value, transliterated eo, represents a diphthong distinctive to Old English phonology, one of several vowel sounds in the futhorc that required the tradition to either adapt an inherited rune's value or, in the case of the row's five later additions, create an entirely new sign to represent a sound the Elder Futhark's original twenty four letters had no need to distinguish. Page adds that Eihwaz's own letterform, a simple zigzag or angled stroke, shows no obvious pictorial connection to a tree at all, one of several runes in the row whose shape and meaning do not visibly reinforce one another the way Gyfu's or Ing's arguably do.