ᛋ sól

Line of descent

History

s descends from the Elder Futhark sowilo, a zigzag of three or more strokes. In the long-branch Younger Futhark it is usually ᛋ, a stave with a short angle at the top. The short-twig form ᛌ is a short vertical stroke set high, about half the height of a full rune.

Its sound is s. Old Norse had no separate z. The old Proto-Germanic z had become the sound written ʀ (see ýr), so s wrote only s. Doubled consonants were not normally written double in Viking Age runes, so s can stand for ss as well.

The name sól "sun" matches Old English sigel and the Gothic letter name sugil. The Norwegian poem calls the sun "the light of the lands" and then turns to a Christian line: "I bow to the holy judgement." The Icelandic poem has "shield of the clouds", "shining disc" and "the life-long grief of ice", and its Latin gloss is rota "wheel". The later copies of the Icelandic poem replace the last kenning with hverfandi hvel "turning wheel", which fits the gloss.

In the medieval alphabet both forms stayed in use for s, and the short-twig form was common in Norway. For the later letters c, x and z, see medieval runes.

In the rune poems

Original text from the public-domain editions named on each poem's page; translations are our own.

Where it is found

• Jelling stone 1 (DR 41): kunu sina 'his wife'
• Jelling stone 2 (DR 42): þausi 'this'
• Rök stone (Ög 136), short-twig: sakum 'I say'

On inscriptions described on this site

Sources

• Samnordisk runtextdatabas (Rundata), signa DR 41, DR 42, Ög 136
• Dickins (1915), notes to the Icelandic poem, stanza 11
• Wikipedia: Younger Futhark (checked 2026-10-26)