Uruz is the second rune of the Elder Futhark, the 24-character runic alphabet used across the Germanic-speaking world roughly between the second and eighth centuries. Its reconstructed name means the aurochs, the massive wild ox of Europe, and it carries the phoneme "u." It stands second in the first of the three groups of eight (aettir), the group often called the aett of Freyr. The medieval rune poems, our main source for rune names, describe the aurochs as a fierce, high-horned beast that roams the moors, an image of untamed physical power.
Uruz stands second in the first of the Elder Futhark's three eight-rune groups (aettir), conventionally called the aett of Freyr. Because the Anglo-Saxon futhorc that the Old English Rune Poem describes directly extends the Elder Futhark's first twenty-four characters before adding further letters of its own, Uruz's stanza survives there under the corresponding name ur, describing the aurochs as fierce and high-horned, a creature that fights with its horns, a well-known beast, an image of danger as much as of strength. Uruz also survived into the reduced sixteen-character Younger Futhark used in Viking Age Scandinavia, where it kept a closely related name and shape, so it additionally receives a stanza in both the Norwegian and Icelandic Rune Poems, one of the runes attested across all three surviving poems rather than in the Old English poem alone.