Eolh and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Algiz

Eolh is the fifteenth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, where its cognate Algiz is one of the row's more debated names, connected by some runologists to a root meaning elk or protection, the same ambiguity carrying into the Old English tradition's own reading of a hazardous plant rather than a protective concept, a case where the futhorc stanza and the modern popular reading of the Elder Futhark rune point in genuinely different directions rather than confirming one another.

R. I. Page's account treats this divergence as a caution against assuming any single, unified meaning travelled unchanged across every runic tradition that used a related rune shape, since the Old English poet working centuries after the Elder Futhark's formation, in a different linguistic and cultural setting, plainly understood Eolh as naming a dangerous plant regardless of whatever protective association the shape may or may not have carried further back or further north. The rune's distinctive Y shaped letterform is one of the more visually recognisable in the whole row and survives with only minor variation across the Elder Futhark, the futhorc and, in modified form, later Younger Futhark tradition as well.