This rune is where the history of the futhark collides with the twentieth century, and evasion is not an option, because the shape is instantly recognisable for the wrong reason.
The rune
Sowilo is the sun, and there is nothing obscure about it. The Old English poem calls it a joy to seafarers when they cross the fishes' bath until the sea-horse brings them to land. The Icelandic poem calls it the shield of the clouds and the destroyer of ice. It appears throughout the runic corpus in ordinary words, because words containing an s need an s.
Its historical use carries no political content whatever. It was a letter.
What was added
Guido von List, working between 1902 and 1908, incorporated the character into his invented eighteen-rune Armanen row, renamed it Sig, victory, and read it as a lightning-bolt of triumphant will.
The renaming has no medieval warrant. The Younger Futhark name is sol, sun. Victory is List's.
The insignia
The doubled emblem of the Schutzstaffel was drawn by Walter Heck, a designer at the Bonn badge manufacturer Ferdinand Hoffstaetter, in the early 1930s, sources give 1929 and 1933. What he doubled was List's Sig, with List's meaning. The emblem says victory because an Austrian occultist had decided thirty years earlier that the character meant victory.
Display of it is restricted under German law today.
Holding two facts at once
Both of the following are true and neither cancels the other.
- The historical rune is an alphabetic character for the sound s, named after the sun, used by people who could have no relation to twentieth-century politics. Treating it as inherently a Nazi symbol concedes to appropriation exactly what appropriation wants.
- The reading that was appropriated (victory, the lightning-bolt, the will), is not the historical reading. It is List's, it was made in a volkisch milieu, and it was taken up because of what it had been made to mean.
Anyone reading Sowilo for victory rather than for the sun is, whether they know it or not, using the twentieth-century gloss.