Perþrō
The fourteenth Elder Futhark rune, transliterated p. Its name peorð appears nowhere else in Old English and has never been convincingly explained: it is the one rune name nobody has recovered.
At a glance
- Rune
- ᛈU+16C8
- Unicode name
- RUNIC LETTER PERTHO PEORTH P
- Alphabet
- Elder Futhark
- In use
- c. AD 150 – 800 (Roman Iron Age to the beginning of the Viking Age)
- Position
- 14, ætt 2
- Transliteration
- p
- Sound value
- /p/
- Name
- *perþrō: meaning unknownContested
Names
How the rune is called in each tradition, and how securely each name is recorded.
| Form | Language | Meaning | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| *perþrō | Proto-Germanic | meaning unknownThe reconstruction is a back-formation from the Old English poem. Nobody knows what the word meant. | Contested |
| peorð | Old English | unknown; the word occurs nowhere else in Old English | Attested |
An asterisk marks a reconstructed form: a word linguists have worked backwards to, not one that appears in any surviving source.
Etymology
This is the great unsolved problem of the Elder Futhark. Suggestions have included a dice-cup, a game piece, a pear tree, a hearth and a musical instrument, all of them driven by the Old English stanza's hall-and-laughter setting rather than by any linguistic evidence. None commands agreement.
Sound value
A /p/. The sound was rare in early Germanic, which is why this is one of the least frequent runes.
Historical use
Rare in the corpus, appearing chiefly in complete futhark rows rather than inside words. That scarcity is not accidental: /p/ was uncommon in early Germanic, so a scribe could go a long time without needing this rune, and the alphabet kept it mainly to preserve the sequence.
Rune-poem evidence
The medieval verse that records this rune's name. Original text plus our own translation.
Peorð byþ symble plega and hlehter wlancum on middum, ðær wigan sittaþ on beorsele bliþe ætsomne.Peorð is always play and laughter among the proud, where warriors sit together happily in the beer-hall.(our translation)
The stanza never says what a peorð is. The word is unknown outside this poem, which is why the rune's name is one of the standing unsolved problems in runology.
Attested in
Objects and monuments where this rune can actually be seen.
Thirteenth position on Kylver, ahead of eihwaz, and Kylver is the only row that does this. The Vadstena–Mariedamm die, the Grumpan bracteate, the Breza column and the Charnay fibula all reverse the pair, and modern charts follow them.
- The other early futhark rowsSweden, Bosnia and Burgundy · c. AD 500–600
The rows that put eihwaz first and this rune second. Kylver stands alone against them, and the modern order sides with them here.
Signatures follow the Scandinavian Runic-text Database so you can look each inscription up directly. Each name links to the object's own entry.
Modern meaning
How this rune is read in contemporary divination, which is a separate question from what it meant historically.
Upright
Modern practice usually reads perthro as the dice-cup: chance, hidden things, and what has not yet been revealed.
Reversed (modern practice calls this “merkstave”)
Secrets that should stay hidden, or an unlucky throw. A modern convention.
Where this comes from: The dice-cup reading is a 20th-century guess that became standard through repetition. It is a guess about a word nobody has been able to explain.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this rune that circulate widely and do not hold up.
Confident statements that perthro "means" a dice-cup, a womb, or a lot-casting vessel are all reading modern certainty into an unknown word.
The same rune in other alphabets
Runes descended from the same original character, so you can follow it through time.
The rest of ætt 2
Sources for this entry
Full references are on the sources page. If you think something here is wrong, our corrections policy explains how to say so.