Sowilo
sun•victory•wholeness
In the poems the rune is called: sigel (Old English) sól (Norwegian, Icelandic) sound «s» ᛊ
Sowilo comes when light finally breaks through the clouds.
The meaning
Sowilo is the sun: the light that cannot be beaten back for long, the flash that shows the way home. It is victory, energy, the moment the grey lifts and you can see the whole road at once. This is your will lined up with your purpose, moving like lightning down the readiest path. But the sun sees everything and hides nothing. So this rune favours the goals you can stand behind in full daylight, the ones you are glad to have lit up for all to see.
A modern reading, grounded in the poems below.
Reversed readings are a modern practice. As this site draws it, the rune is the same in both positions, so a reversed one does not exist for it.
For you
Where does your energy flow — and is that where you aim it?
The poems
Sigel semannum symble biþ on hihte,
ðonne hi hine feriaþ ofer fisces beþ,
oþ hi brimhengest bringeþ to lande.
The sun is always a hope to seafarers,
when they carry themselves out over the fish’s bath,
until the sea-horse brings them to land.
why the poem never names it
The poem never names the rune. Each stanza is a riddle whose answer is the name, and the name printed above it in every edition was put there by a later hand.
Sól er landa ljóme;
lúti ek helgum dóme.
The sun is what lights the lands.
I bow before the holy doom.
on the rhyme
The Norwegian poem is written in rhyming couplets. The second line rhymes with the first, and often that is the strongest thing connecting them. Dickins calls each couplet two semi-detached statements of a gnomic character.
Sól er skýja skjöldr
ok skínandi röðull
ok ísa aldrtregi.
gloss rota siklingr
The sun: shield of the clouds,
a shining ray,
and the lifelong grief of ice.
on the last two words
Each Icelandic stanza ends with two words the poem does not need. One is a Latin equivalent of the rune name, the other an Old Norse word for king beginning with the same letter. The manuscript is running a glossary and an alphabetical king-list through the poem at the same time.
where these texts come from
The earliest surviving list of this row was written in the ninth century, and it says nothing about what any rune means. Abecedarium Nordmannicum, 9th century.
Text after Dickins 1915. Checked against Halsall 1981. Translated here from the originals.
Where it comes from
To the sailors in the old rune poems, the sun was hope, the one light that meant land, and warmth, and life still ahead. In the North, where the winter dark can swallow whole months and the sun barely lifts above the hills, no symbol ever carried more force. When it returned in spring it was not a fact of the calendar. It was a mercy. Sowilo closes the second family of runes the way dawn closes the longest night. It does not argue with the dark. It simply rises until the dark has nowhere left to stand.
One object, three uses. England navigates by it. Norway kneels, or rather kneels past it, since helgum dóme is Christian. Iceland measures the winter by it, ísa aldrtregi, the grief that outlasts the ice and the thing that ends it. Aldrtregi is not destroyer, word for word it is lifelong grief, and our translation keeps the grief and lets the reader do the arithmetic.
The English stanza carries two kennings in three lines. Fisces beþ, the fish's bath, is the sea. Brimhengest, the surf-horse, is the ship. Laguz uses the second one again, and once you have them the yew stanza's giant of the arrow becomes readable.
The Latin gloss disagrees with the verse above it. Rota, wheel, sits under a stanza that ends with the end of ice, because two other manuscripts read hverfandi hvél, the turning wheel, in that line. The Latin remembers a version the Norse in front of it has lost.
In the twentieth century the SS emblem doubled a sig rune taken through von List’s system, and his row of eighteen is not the twenty-four of this site. The dates are on the tattoo page.