Sowilo
Hope of Seafarers
The sun rune: in the English poem a constant hope to seafarers until the ship carries them back to land.
Reconstructed from Old English sigel, Old Norse sól and Gothic sugil, and glossed by all three poems. The English gives it the warmest line in the row: the sun is ever a hope to seafarers as they are carried over the fishes' bath, until the courser of the deep brings them to land. The Norwegian calls the sun the light of the lands and bows to the holy doom. The Icelandic offers kennings: shield of the clouds, shining ray, destroyer of ice. In 1933 the graphic designer Walter Heck doubled an angular form of the rune, taken from Guido von List's invented Armanen row of 1908, and the SS adopted the pair as its insignia. The doubled sign is banned in Germany today.
Light
A fixed point to steer by. The sun in the English stanza is what a crew at sea keeps hoping for until the coast appears, and in the Icelandic it is the thing that destroys the ice.
Shadow
The same ray that destroys ice is the one that parches. And the shape no longer reaches a modern reader clean: doubled, it was the badge of the SS, and the association has not faded.
