Mannaz is the twentieth rune of the Elder Futhark, fourth in the third aett, carrying the phoneme "m." Its reconstructed name means man in the sense of a human being or humankind. The rune poems reflect on human beings as dear to their kin yet destined to fail one another, a sober meditation on mortality and on the bonds of community. The rune thus gathers ideas of the self, humanity and the social order.
Mannaz stands fourth in the aett of Tyr. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, mann, meaning a person or humankind, receives a stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing mankind as dear to his kinsman in mirth, yet each person is destined ultimately to fail his fellow, since the lord by his decree will commit the frail flesh to the earth, a stanza notably more sombre in its Christian framing than the birth-and-growth imagery attached to several neighbouring runes. Mannaz survived into the Younger Futhark as madr, and appears in both the Norwegian and Icelandic Rune Poems.
Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *mannaz, 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.