nominative singular suffix of almost every masculine noun of the language. Since the name eolh, or more accurately eolh-secg "elk-sedge" in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem represents not the rune's original sound value, but rather the sound of Latin x (/ks/), it becomes highly arbitrary to suggest that the original rune should have been named after the elk. There are a number of speculative suggestions surrounding the history of the rune's name. The difficulty lies in the circumstance that the Younger Futhark rune did not inherit this name at all, but acquired the name of the obsolete Eihwaz rune, as yr. The only independent evidence of the Elder Futhark rune's name would be the name of the corresponding Gothic letter, ezec. The Gothic letter was an adoption of Greek Zeta, and while it did express the /z/ phoneme, this Gothic sound only rarely occurred terminally. Instead, it is found mostly in positions where West and North Germanic have r, e.g. Gothic máiza "greater" (Old Norse meira, English more). The name of the Anglo-Saxon rune is variously recorded as eolx, eolhx, ilcs, ilx, iolx, ilix, elux. Manuscript tradition gives its sound value as Latin x, i.e. /ks/, or alternatively as il, or yet again as "l and x". The reading of this opaque name as eolh "elk" is entirely due to the reading of the Anglo-Saxon rune poem's secg as eolh-secg (eolx-secg, eolug-secg, eolxecg) "elk-sedge", apparently the name of a species of sedge (Carex). This reading of the poem is due to Wilhelm Grimm (1821), and remains standard. The suggestion is that this compound is realized as eolk-secg, thus containing the Latin x (/ks/) sound sequence. The manuscript testimony that the rune is to be read as il would then be simply a mistaken assumption that its name must be acrophonic. The name of the corresponding Gothic letter ezec, however, suggests that the old name of this rune was not just eolx, but the full eolh-secg. This is puzzling, because the sound value of the rune was clearly not /ks/ in the Elder Futhark period (2nd to 4th centuries). Furthermore, the name of the sedge in question is recorded in the older Epinal-Erfurt glossary as ilugsegg (glossing papiluus, probably for papyrus), which cannot be derived from the word for elk. A suggestion by Warren and Elliott takes the Old English eolh at face value, and reconstructs a Common Germanic form of either