The Elder Futhark was used to write, and every secure thing known about it comes from objects with letters cut into them.
Sixteenth in the row
Sowilo is the sixteenth character of the twenty-four character Elder Futhark, used in the earliest Germanic inscriptions from around the second century onward. It writes the letter s.
A character with more than one drawn form
The s character is one of those that varies visibly in shape across the corpus, appearing with different numbers of strokes and different angles on different objects. Runic writing was cut by hand, often by people who wrote rarely, and the tolerance for variation in letter form is much wider than a printed chart of the futhark suggests. Charts flatten that variation because they have to pick one form per character.
What survives
Short inscriptions on brooches, weapon fittings, combs, bracteates and stones make up most of the record, and many are personal names or maker's formulas. Contested readings are common in the longer texts.
The name
Sowilo is a reconstructed form, projected back from the names the medieval Old Norse and Old English rune poems give the characters of their own later rows. The word behind it means the sun, and the rune poems gloss their equivalent characters accordingly.
Later use
This character's twentieth-century political history belongs to a renamed version of it in a constructed modern row, and is recorded elsewhere in this atlas. It is not a fact about the inscriptional character described here.