Sowilo

No early source records what the first rune carvers called this rune. Scholars reconstruct its Proto-Germanic name as *sōwilō, “sun”, working back from the names in the later rune poems: Old English sigel and Old Norse sól, both meaning the sun. The Old English form is usually explained as a leftover of an older word for the sun, though a link with Latin sigillum has also been proposed. Bruce Dickins noted in 1915 that the same name stands at the beginning and end of an Exeter Book riddle whose answer is “the sun”.

The rune stands for the sound s. Its shape was taken from the s of the Old Italic alphabets, which goes back to Greek sigma. It is found in some of the oldest runic inscriptions, from the second and third centuries AD, such as finds from Vimose in Denmark and from Kovel. On the Kylver Stone from Gotland, about 400 AD, the earliest known listing of all 24 runes in order, it is the sixteenth rune, carved as a four-stroke zigzag (ᛊ) that is mirrored compared with later use. A three-stroke form, more like an S, becomes more common in the fifth to seventh centuries, for example in the name hlewagastiz on the golden horns of Gallehus, made early in the fifth century and melted down by a thief in 1802.

In the Younger Futhark the rune is called sól and closes the second group of the row, with a long-branch form (ᛋ) and a short-twig form (ᛌ) that could stand for s or z. The Anglo-Saxon futhorc kept it as sigel, in the same shape as the Norse sól; English carvers also used a form modelled on the long s of handwriting, as on the Seax of Beagnoth.

The Austrian occultist Guido von List built this rune into his “Armanen” row, published as a book in 1908 after a 1906 article, as its eleventh sign, Sig or Sol. List said the runes came to him in 1902 while he was briefly blind after eye surgery; the row is his own invention, not an old tradition. His form of the rune became known as the Siegrune, “victory rune”.

In 1933 the SS took as its emblem two of these runes side by side, a design credited to Walter Heck. It was first a unit badge of the Leibstandarte and became the sign of the whole SS. After the war neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups around the world took up the double rune, and the Anti-Defamation League lists these “SS bolts” in its hate-symbol database, noting that in some biker circles the sign is used for shock value and has to be read in context. In Germany the Sig rune as used by the SS falls under the ban on symbols of unconstitutional organisations (section 86a of the Criminal Code), with exceptions for art, research and teaching. Heathen Heritage rejects any racist or extremist use of the runes.

Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition 1983), sold with a set of rune stones, brought rune divination to a wide public. It calls this rune Sowelu and gives it the keyword “Wholeness”, a meaning of Blum’s own.