Sigel and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Sowilo

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.