Sowilo ᛊ

Sowilo: sun

Icelandic rune poem:

Sól er skýja skjöldr, ok skínandi röðull, ok ísa aldrtregi

The sun is the shield of the clouds, and shining ray, and destroyer of ice.

The 24 runes of the Elder Futhark are grouped into 3 ætts of 8. The second or Heimdal’s ætt begins with the wintery runes of hagalaz (hail), naudhiz (need), and ísa (ice), but ends with the warmth of sowilo. It is a positive, confident, potent rune whose meaning was distorted into ‘victory’ modern times. In its later written form of ᛋ it became synonymous with Nazism. Old Norse peoples were more likely to invoke tiwaz for victory.

It is important to remember that runes were believed to interact. As a seidhkona explains to Adelais in Blood of Wolves, the third of the Rune Song trilogy, “bjarkan, the birch rune, whispers to us of the music of the wind through the branches of the sacred grove, for runes are a song as well as a mystery. All runes are connected, like all life; bjarkan needs the warmth of sowilo and the water of lœgr before it can be the rune of becoming.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

For introductions to other runes, there’s a pull-down menu under the ‘Norse Runes’ tab. More details about the Rune Song epic fantasy trilogy via my ‘books’ pages or on Amazon UK or Amazon.com. All books are published by Second Sky / Hachette and are available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.