Eihwaz is the thirteenth rune of the Elder Futhark, fifth in the second aett. It carries a sound sometimes reconstructed as a close vowel or a "ei" glide and its phonetic value is one of the more debated of the row. Its reconstructed name means the yew tree, an evergreen long associated with longevity, death and protection. The yew is sometimes identified with the world-tree, so the rune gathers ideas of endurance, the axis linking worlds, and the passage between life and death.
Eihwaz stands fifth in the aett of Hagal. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, eoh, meaning yew, receives a stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing the yew as rough-barked without on the outside, firm in the earth, guardian of fire, sustained by its roots, a tree pleasant on one's estate. Eihwaz is one of the eight Elder Futhark runes with no surviving Younger Futhark counterpart in unaltered form; the later Scandinavian tradition instead developed a separate yew-bow rune, yr, whose shape and precise relationship to Eihwaz is a matter of ongoing scholarly discussion rather than a simple continuation.
Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *īhwaz, part of the comparative linguistic evidence, alongside cognate vocabulary across the older Germanic languages, used to establish the name's original sense independent of the later rune poems themselves.