Eihwaz: The Yew Tree
In the 50s BCE, according to Julius Caesar, a Gaulish king named Cativolcus, too old to fight and too proud to surrender, drank the juice of a yew tree and died. Caesar mentions it in a single line of his Gallic War.
Yet it shows why this tree has always been feared and revered at once. Every part of the yew is deadly, and it is also among the longest-lived trees of Europe, an evergreen that stays dark and alive through the winter. The rune that bears its name, Eihwaz, carries the same double face of death and endurance.
The Thirteenth Rune
Eihwaz is the thirteenth rune of the Elder Futhark, the oldest runic alphabet, used by Germanic peoples roughly from the second to the eighth century. Its name is not recorded in any ancient source. Scholars reconstruct it as *eihwaz, meaning "yew," by comparing later rune names: the Old English rune is called eoh and the Old Norse word for yew is ýr. Its shape is a vertical stave with short hooks at the top and the bottom.
The rune is rare in surviving inscriptions. It is found mostly in complete futhark rows, such as the one carved on the Kylver stone in Sweden around 400 CE, and its exact sound is debated.
What the Old Poems Say
Only one early poem describes this rune. The Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, written down in the early Middle Ages, says that eoh is "outwardly an unsmooth tree, hard and firm in the earth, keeper of fire, supported by its roots, a joy upon the estate." The words capture what people saw: a rugged trunk, a deep hold on the ground and a wood that burns well.
The other great fact of the yew was the bow. Yew heartwood resists pulling and sapwood resists pressure, which makes it ideal for weapons. The bow of the Iceman Ötzi, who died in the Alps about 3300 BCE, was made of yew, and so were the English longbows of the Middle Ages.
In Norse myth, the yew is tied to an archer. In the poem Grímnismál, the god Ullr, master of the bow and the ski, lives in a place called Ýdalir, "the Yew Dales."
A Tree Between Life and Death
The yew is a poisonous tree. Its needles, bark and seeds contain taxines, which can stop the heart. Only the red, fleshy cup around the seed is safe, and the seed inside it is not. Livestock and people have died from eating it, so it should never be tasted or brewed.
Yet this same family of trees gave modern medicine paclitaxel, sold as Taxol, a cancer drug first extracted from the bark of the Pacific yew in the 1960s and approved in 1992. It is a modern case of an old idea: the same plant can kill or heal, depending on knowledge and dose.
The tree also seems to refuse death. Old yews become hollow, and then they may send roots down through the empty heart of the trunk and grow again from within. In Britain and Ireland, yews stand in churchyards older than the churches around them, and why they were planted there is unclear.
Yggdrasil and the Vertical Axis
Modern writers link Eihwaz with Yggdrasil, the World Tree that holds the nine worlds in the Norse cosmos. A word of care is needed here. The medieval sources, the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, call Yggdrasil an ash, not a yew.
The link goes through a few threads: the Swedish temple at Uppsala, where the churchman Adam of Bremen described around 1075 a huge tree that stayed green in winter and summer, "of which no one knows the kind"; and the name Yggdrasil itself, "Ygg's horse," with Ygg being a name of Odin, and "horse of the hanged" being a poetic word for the gallows.
That brings us to Odin's ordeal. In Hávamál, Odin tells how he hung on a windy tree for nine nights, wounded by a spear and given to himself, until he took up the runes and fell back, shrieking. The tree is not named, and calling it a yew is a modern guess.
Even so, the picture fits the rune well: a vertical line joining the depths and the heights, and a pain that ends in knowledge.
How Modern Practice Reads It
The meanings usually given for Eihwaz come from twentieth-century authors, especially Edred Thorsson in Runelore (1987), and are not an ancient tradition. In this reading, Eihwaz stands for endurance, initiation, the axis of the self and the passage through an ending. In divination, it is said to appear when a person must hold on through a hard season, or when one phase of life closes and another waits.
Its shadow, the same writers say, is rigidity: endurance that becomes stubbornness, or suffering that serves no purpose. The yew itself offers the lesson, since its wood is strong because it is also flexible. It is a reflection, not a prediction: no set of runes can foretell events or replace medical, legal or financial advice.
Closing
The yew has watched over graves, armies and gods for thousands of years. It is black in the winter light, poisonous to the careless, and generous to those who know its secret. Eihwaz holds that same strange truth in a single stroke: that what endures does so by going through darkness, not around it.
Next time you pass an old yew in a churchyard or a park, stop for a moment. Look at the hollow heart and the green shoots that rise out of it, and you will understand why people carved its name in the oldest alphabet of the North.
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