Mannaz

“Mannaz” is the name modern scholars give this rune. It is reconstructed from Proto-Germanic *mannaz, “man, human being”. No early source records what the rune’s first users called it, but the later names agree with each other: Old English man (also spelled mon) and Old Norse maðr, so the reconstruction is fairly secure. The rune stood for the sound m. Its shape, two uprights joined by crossing strokes (ᛗ), is generally taken to come from the letter M of the Old Italic and Latin alphabets, which goes back to Greek mu.

On the Kylver Stone from Gotland, carved about 400 AD and the oldest known complete row of the 24 runes, it stands twentieth, in the third group of eight. The same row appears a little later on the Vadstena bracteate from Sweden, where the last two runes trade places but m keeps its own. The older form of this rune shows little variation from one inscription to the next.

When the sixteen-rune Younger Futhark replaced the older row in Scandinavia (the change was complete by the late eighth century), the rune kept its name and sound as maðr but took a new shape, ᛘ, which looks like the older Algiz rune. Scholars treat this as a separate development, not a descent from Algiz. The short-twig runes used a simpler form (ᛙ). In England the Anglo-Saxon futhorc kept the old shape ᛗ under the name man or mon, and scribes went on using it as a shorthand for the word “man”: Dickins points to it in the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Durham Ritual, the Rushworth Gospels and the Exeter Book.

The Austrian occultist Guido von List built his own set of eighteen “Armanen” runes, published as a book in 1908 (Das Geheimnis der Runen). His fifteenth rune, the Man rune, is taken from the Younger Futhark maðr, so it has the ᛘ shape, the same as Algiz. In early twentieth-century German occult and völkisch writing this sign was read as “life” and called the Lebensrune, “life rune”, a reading with no medieval source.

In Nazi Germany the life rune was used widely, including in the SS Lebensborn programme, and on death notices and gravestones it stood for a birth date. After the war the neo-Nazi National Alliance put it in its logo, and the Anti-Defamation League lists it as a common white supremacist symbol today. The ADL also notes that many modern pagans use the sign with no racist meaning, so each use has to be judged in context. The older ᛗ shape of Mannaz has no such history.

Heathen Heritage rejects the use of this sign by Nazis and by today’s racist movements.