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What von List Took for Sig, and What Was Done with It Afterwards

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What von List Took for Sig, and What Was Done with It Afterwards

The Armanen row was published by Guido von List in 1908. This character is the one where the difference between what he took and what he made matters most.

The character behind it

Sig corresponds to the Younger Futhark character whose Old Norse name was sol, meaning the sun. The medieval rune poems gloss it as the sun, the light of the world, and nothing more contentious than that. It is well attested in the Viking-age inscriptional record as the letter S.

What von List did with it

He renamed it. Where the historical character is named for the sun, von List named his Sig, from the German for victory, and read it accordingly. That is not a translation of the Norse name and not a variant attested anywhere in the medieval material. It is a substitution, and it is the substitution that gave the character its later career.

The afterlife

In 1933 a doubled form of this character was adopted as the emblem of the SS, and it remained in use as such through the National Socialist period. The symbol is prohibited or restricted in several European jurisdictions today on that account.

The atlas records this because the history is documented and because omitting it would misrepresent what the character is. The sun-rune of the rune poems and the Sig of the Armanen row are not the same object, and the second is what was adopted.

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