Sowilo

This rune is where the history of the futhark collides with the twentieth century, and evasion is not an option, because the shape is instantly recognisable for the wrong reason.

The rune

Sowilo is the sun, and there is nothing obscure about it. The Old English poem calls it a joy to seafarers when they cross the fishes' bath until the sea-horse brings them to land. The Icelandic poem calls it the shield of the clouds and the destroyer of ice. It appears throughout the runic corpus in ordinary words, because words containing an s need an s.

Its historical use carries no political content whatever. It was a letter.

What was added

Guido von List, working between 1902 and 1908, incorporated the character into his invented eighteen-rune Armanen row, renamed it Sig, victory, and read it as a lightning-bolt of triumphant will.

The renaming has no medieval warrant. The Younger Futhark name is sol, sun. Victory is List's.

The insignia

The doubled emblem of the Schutzstaffel was drawn by Walter Heck, a designer at the Bonn badge manufacturer Ferdinand Hoffstaetter, in the early 1930s, sources give 1929 and 1933. What he doubled was List's Sig, with List's meaning. The emblem says victory because an Austrian occultist had decided thirty years earlier that the character meant victory.

Display of it is restricted under German law today.

Holding two facts at once

Both of the following are true and neither cancels the other.

• The historical rune is an alphabetic character for the sound s, named after the sun, used by people who could have no relation to twentieth-century politics. Treating it as inherently a Nazi symbol concedes to appropriation exactly what appropriation wants.
• The reading that was appropriated (victory, the lightning-bolt, the will), is not the historical reading. It is List's, it was made in a volkisch milieu, and it was taken up because of what it had been made to mean.

Anyone reading Sowilo for victory rather than for the sun is, whether they know it or not, using the twentieth-century gloss.

The Elder Futhark was used to write, and every secure thing known about it comes from objects with letters cut into them.

Sixteenth in the row

Sowilo is the sixteenth character of the twenty-four character Elder Futhark, used in the earliest Germanic inscriptions from around the second century onward. It writes the letter s.

A character with more than one drawn form

The s character is one of those that varies visibly in shape across the corpus, appearing with different numbers of strokes and different angles on different objects. Runic writing was cut by hand, often by people who wrote rarely, and the tolerance for variation in letter form is much wider than a printed chart of the futhark suggests. Charts flatten that variation because they have to pick one form per character.

What survives

Short inscriptions on brooches, weapon fittings, combs, bracteates and stones make up most of the record, and many are personal names or maker's formulas. Contested readings are common in the longer texts.

The name

Sowilo is a reconstructed form, projected back from the names the medieval Old Norse and Old English rune poems give the characters of their own later rows. The word behind it means the sun, and the rune poems gloss their equivalent characters accordingly.

Later use

This character's twentieth-century political history belongs to a renamed version of it in a constructed modern row, and is recorded elsewhere in this atlas. It is not a fact about the inscriptional character described here.