Rune of the Week: Haglaz

This week's rune is Haglaz. It means: "hail".

The three poems are:

Hagall
Hail is the coldest of grain;
Christ created the world of old.

The Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem
Haegl
Hail is the whitest of grain;
it is whirled from the vault of heaven
and is tossed about by gusts of wind
and then it melts into water.

The Icelandic Rune Poem
Hail
Cold grain
and shower of sleet
and sickness of serpents.

This section of eight in the runes are under Heimdall's watch. Heimdal is the guardian at the bridge up into Midgard. The patch of which is a rainbow. Because of this many of the runes in this section are primordial forces of nature. Heglaz is no diffrent. This rune is the embodiment of the cold. The pounding of the hail. But there is a duality here in that it is called a grain. The metaphor here is hail as a prize of the gods whirled down into earth. And its existence here is fleeting as it soon becomes water. Which is nourishing. So it's the violent coldness of the initial bounty dissapates into nourishment for the future.

Today's isolation and catastrophe is the seed of tomorrow's pleathora.

The god's give us hail as a gift, so that we might learn from it, and make our own brilliance of it. The presence of the wind in the distribution of the ice grain would seem to allude to the messenger nature of it's arrival. These seemingly painful nuggets, have in them the keys to unlocking a full and filling future.