Sól

Sol's two stanzas both take the sun as their subject but frame its power rather differently: the Norwegian poem reads the sun as light of the world, a phrase carrying an unmistakably Christian resonance close to Ger and Hagall's own Christian framings elsewhere in the same poem, and closes by bowing to divine decree, submission to God's ordering of the world rather than any independent power attributed to the sun itself.

The Icelandic poem instead reads the sun through its own visible, active effect on the world, calling it shield of the clouds, a shining wheel and, most strikingly, destroyer of ice, an image that directly answers Isa's own harder Icelandic reading of ice as destruction of doomed men, the sun here cast as the very force that undoes winter's grip rather than as a passive light bowing to a higher power. This pairing across the two poems, ice as destroyer in one stanza and the sun as destroyer of that same ice a stanza later, gives the Icelandic poem's sequence a thematic coherence the Norwegian poem's more piecemeal Christian insertions do not build toward in the same way. Dickins' 1915 edition notes the shining wheel image as one of the more visually striking kennings in either poem, the sun's disc and its wheel like path across the sky captured in a single compact phrase.

Sol is the eleventh of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Sowilo, the Elder Futhark's own sixteenth rune, its name and core meaning of the sun carried forward closely even as its position in the row shifted from sixteenth to eleventh as the reduction closed gaps left by runes dropped elsewhere in the older sequence.

Barnes' handbook notes that Sol's sound value s remained one of the more stable consonant readings across the whole runic tradition, a sound genuinely load bearing enough in Old Norse, as in Old English and the older Germanic languages generally, that no runic tradition this survey has covered ever merged it into a neighbouring sign's coverage. Sol's letterform, a single diagonal stroke in the Younger Futhark, is notably simpler than the zigzag Sowilo carries in the Elder Futhark, again consistent with the general trend Ar's own account of the reduction noted toward simpler, faster carved shapes across the sixteen rune system as a whole, an economy of both sign count and individual letter shape working together. Barnes notes Sol's consistent core meaning across the Elder Futhark, the futhorc and the Younger Futhark alike as fitting for a celestial body every Germanic speaking culture observed identically, unlike a rune such as Peorth or Ior whose referent depended on local, culturally specific knowledge no longer fully recoverable.