Sigel

Sigel's stanza reads the sun as ever a joy in the hope of seafarers as they journey away over the fishes' bath, a kenning for the sea typical of Old English poetic diction, until the courser of the deep, their ship, bears them at last safely to land, a stanza that ties the sun's comfort specifically to the anxious, hopeful watch of sailors on open water rather than to sunlight or warmth in any general sense. This maritime framing gives Sigel a genuinely distinctive character among the poem's stanzas, closer in its narrow, situational focus to Rad's contrast between indoor ease and the hard road than to the more general admiration Ur or Is offer their own subjects, the sun read here through the specific lens of a voyage's anxiety and its relief rather than as a cosmic body in its own right.

Halsall's critical edition notes the kenning fishes' bath as a piece of genuine poetic craft consistent with the wider Old English tradition of compound, indirect naming found extensively in verse such as Beowulf, and reads Sigel's maritime focus as entirely fitting for a culture whose seafaring, both for trade and for the earlier migrations that had brought the Anglo-Saxons to Britain in the first place, made the safe sighting of land after open water a genuinely resonant image.

Sigel is the sixteenth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name and core reading a direct continuation of Sowilo, whose own name likewise means sun, both traditions naming the same celestial body though the surviving Anglo-Saxon stanza develops its own distinctly maritime framing that cannot be assumed to have belonged to the Elder Futhark's own, unrecorded understanding of the rune. Sowilo closes the second of the Elder Futhark's three aettir, a structural position Sigel's counterpart in the futhorc does not mirror in quite the same way, since the futhorc's extension to twenty nine runes for Anglo-Saxon use set aside the strict three aett division even while the row's first twenty four signs kept their inherited order intact.

R. I. Page's account notes Sigel among the runes whose Anglo-Saxon sound value, s, matches its Elder Futhark original without change, one of the more phonetically stable signs in the whole row, and closes this entry's account of the futhorc's middle eight rune section, Haegl through Sigel, before the poem turns to Tir and the row's third and final group of eight inherited runes. Page notes Sowilo's letterform, a zigzag stroke suggestive of a lightning bolt or a stylised ray, as another case of a shape later readers have connected to solar imagery, a reading the sun's own reliably intense presence in the stanza makes reasonably plausible without being confirmed.