Othala

The rune is called othala or odal in modern books. The only name actually recorded is the Old English ēþel (also ēðel), meaning property, inheritance, home or native land, and the Proto-Germanic form *ōþala- is reconstructed from it and from related words in Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German. So the name is a scholarly reconstruction, but a fairly well supported one. Dickins, in 1915, noted that the Gothic letter name utal and a Salzburg manuscript form oedil point the same way.

In the Elder Futhark the rune stands for a long o. Its ancestry is debated: Greek, Latin, Etruscan and North Italic letters have all been proposed. Wikipedia lists early uses on the Hole runestone (Norway) and the Vimose planer (Denmark), both from the early centuries CE, and notes that the Kylver Stone (about 400) carries it at the end of its rune row, though that is not its earliest appearance. Possible single-rune uses, standing for a whole word, have been suggested on the Thorsberg chape and the Pietroassa ring. Such readings are less certain than ordinary spelling.

In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc the sound changed: the rune came to stand for a vowel written œ, and a new rune took over the long o. Scribes also used the rune as shorthand for the word ēþel, for example in Beowulf manuscripts. In Scandinavia it largely dropped out of use around the 8th century, when the Younger Futhark had fewer vowel runes; scholars are not sure why. The usual shape is a diamond with two legs. A form with a single upright is found in some manuscripts and rarely in inscriptions.

Knowledge of the Old English rune and its name survived through early modern collectors such as George Hickes, into the 17th century. In the 20th century the shape was taken up by occultists in Germany. The Austrian writer Guido von List had built his own rune row (the Armanen runes), but the Nazi-era use of this particular rune came from the older Elder Futhark.

Under the Nazis the rune, with added feet or serifs and often called the Odal rune or the SS rune, became an emblem of supposed kinship and blood ties. It was the badge of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, which enforced racial policy, and the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen used it for its ethnic German members. The Anti-Defamation League also records its use by two Waffen-SS divisions.

After 1945 white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe, North America and elsewhere kept using it, in tattoos, on flags and in group logos. The runologist Michael Barnes, cited by Wikipedia, argues that the idea of it standing for white or Aryan heritage is a modern invention with no earlier source. The ADL stresses that the rune also appears in non-extremist settings, including by heathens who reject racism, and that its meaning has to be judged by context. This site rejects every racist use of the rune and teaches it for what the old sources show: home, inheritance and a settled life.