Lagu and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Laguz

Lagu is the twenty first of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name and core reading a direct continuation of Laguz, whose own name likewise means water or the sea, both traditions naming the same element though, as with Mann's own case, the sparse Elder Futhark evidence gives no independent confirmation of whether the specifically fearful reading the Old English stanza offers reflects an older, shared association or a development particular to the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition's own well attested wariness of open water.

R. I. Page's account groups Lagu among the runes whose sound value, l, is among the most phonetically stable across every runic tradition's history, a liquid consonant that resisted the kind of sound change affecting some of the row's vowels and diphthongs. Lagu's position as the twenty first of twenty four inherited runes places it within the final stretch of signs shared with the Elder Futhark, only Ing, Ethel and Daeg remaining before the futhorc's five purely Anglo-Frisian additions extend the row beyond what the older continental and Scandinavian tradition ever recognised. Page notes Laguz's letterform as one of the simpler single stroke signs in the row, offering little scope for the kind of pictorial reading proposed for more visually distinctive runes such as Gebo or Ehwaz, its meaning resting entirely on the name rather than on any suggestive shape.