Thorn and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Thurisaz

Thorn is the third of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried over from the Elder Futhark, its Old English name marking one of the clearest cases in the whole row of a rune's reading shifting between the two traditions: the Elder Futhark's Thurisaz names a giant or troll, a supernatural danger, where the Anglo-Saxon Thorn names the plant itself, a mundane physical hazard, the two readings connected by a shared underlying sense of something sharp, hostile and best approached with caution rather than by any surviving direct etymological link between troll and thorn.

R. I. Page's survey of the futhorc's development treats this shift as a genuine reinterpretation the Anglo-Saxon runic tradition made independently rather than a simple continuation of the continental reading, one of several cases where the futhorc's stanza content diverges meaningfully from what can be reconstructed of the Elder Futhark's own, now unwritten, associations for the same rune shape and sound. Both traditions keep the rune in the same third position in their respective rows, Thorn following Ur just as Thurisaz follows Uruz, a structural continuity that survives even where the specific meaning attached to the rune has visibly moved.