RUNIC LETTER SIGEL LONG-BRANCH-SOL S

Runic inscriptions from the Viking Age survive in two competing styles, and this code point records one of them: the long-branch form of the s-rune, known as sigel or sol. Long-branch runes, associated with Danish inscriptions, use full-height staves, while the short-twig variants favoured in Sweden and Norway abbreviate the same letters into smaller strokes. Unicode encodes the variants separately rather than unifying them, because an edition of a specific inscription must reproduce the shapes actually carved. The general category is Lo (letter, other), the class for scripts without case distinction, and U+16CB sits in the Runic block alongside the other futhark letters.