Sowilo
The Elder Futhark rune for the “s” sound. Its name, *sōwilō, meant the sun.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon reconstructs the name as *sōwilu; the Old Norse is sól, “sun”. The Norwegian rune poem calls the sun “the light of the world”, and the Icelandic poem the “shield of the clouds and shining ray and destroyer of ice”. The Old English poem, where the name is sigel, turns to the sea: the sun “is ever a joy to seafarers” when they journey away over the water.
Origin and history
The Bosworth–Toller dictionary glosses sigel as “the sun; also the name of the rune”. Bruce Dickins notes that sigel is also the answer to a riddle in the Exeter Book whose solution is the sun. The drawing shows the rune once, in a plain inscription form.
Write in runes
stringmash.comRune translatorTurn English into Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark or Anglo-Saxon runes, with a chart of all 24 Elder Futhark runes.Read next
- Next in Elder Futhark runesTiwazThe Elder Futhark rune for the “t” sound, shaped like an arrow pointing up. It is named for the god Týr.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsCǎo 艸The character for ‘grass’, and radical 140 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of plants and flowers are filed.
See also
Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raido, Kaunan, Gebo.
Sources
- Runer (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon, Runenavn (table of rune names)
- Runic and heroic poems of the old Teutonic peoples, Bruce Dickins (ed. and trans.), 1915, Cambridge University Press (Internet Archive), Anglo-Saxon poem v. 45; Norwegian poem 11; Icelandic poem 11
- sigel (Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary), Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898), online edition, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, entry “sigel”
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
Added . Last updated .