Name and sound values
Hagall is a historically transmitted name of the rune and denotes hail. In the Younger Futhark the sign could cover the sound values /h/.
Reducing the row from 24 to 16 signs meant that one rune wrote several different sounds. The correct reading therefore depends on vocabulary, grammar, and inscriptional context.
Historical use
Younger runes primarily served writing: on memorial stones, everyday objects, ownership marks, and short messages. Magical inscriptions exist, but they do not turn every rune into an independent magical sign.
The Norse rune poems
The Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems do comment on the sixteen Younger Futhark runes. They survive, however, only through medieval manuscripts and may transmit divergent imagery.
Hail appears as a cold grain and force of weather, but also as something that melts. Permanent destruction is not the only image.
Modern interpretation
Present-day practice may use Hagall as a symbolic field for “hail”. Such reflection is modern; the rune poems offer images and mnemonics, not a complete surviving system for drawing individual oracle stones.
Rune poems in the original
Old Norwegian
Norwegian Rune Poem
Hagall er kaldastr korna; Kristr skóp hæimenn forna.Hail is the coldest grain; Christ created the ancient world.
A sense-based working translation. The second line is often an independent gnomic statement; a direct semantic link to the rune must not be assumed.
Old Icelandic
Icelandic Rune Poem
Hagall er kaldakorn ok krapadrífa ok snáka sótt.Hail is cold grain, driving sleet, and the sickness of snakes.
The stanza uses three compressed images from nature; “sickness of snakes” is a poetic circumlocution.