Perthro (ᛈ) is the fourteenth rune of the Elder Futhark and stands for the sound p. It is the one rune whose name cannot be translated: the word survives only as a rune name. A single Old English verse links it with play and laughter in the hall. In modern rune reading Perthro is taken to mean chance, mystery and the unknown, and it is read as a maybe.
What does the Perthro rune mean?
The safest answer has two parts. Perthro is the letter p. And its name is a word that fell out of every Germanic language so thoroughly that only the label on this rune remains.
Modern rune reading, a 20th-century practice, has turned that gap into the meaning. Today Perthro stands for:
- Chance. The part of any outcome that is not in your hands.
- Mystery. Something hidden, or not yet revealed.
- The unknown. A question that cannot be settled by planning.
It is fitting, in a way. The rune of the unknown is the one we know least about.
The Perthro sign and its sound
Perthro is an upright line with a hook at the top and another at the bottom, both opening to the right. People compare it to a cup lying on its side, or to a squared-off letter C fastened to a post.
Its sound is p. The spellings in circulation include Perthro, Pertho, Perth and Peorth; the Old English manuscript form is Peorð.
The name Perthro and what the rune poem says
In her table of rune names, the runologist Tineke Looijenga prints the reconstructed form of this one with a question mark and translates the Old English name with nothing but "?". That is the scholarly position in two keystrokes.
The Scandinavian alphabet lost the p rune early, so the Norwegian and Icelandic poems have no verse for it. The only description is in the Old English rune poem. Bruce Dickins, translating it in 1915, did not attempt the word and left it standing: "Peorth is a source of recreation and amusement to the great, where warriors sit blithely together in the banqueting-hall."
Whatever a peorth was, then, it was something that made people laugh over their drinks. From this one clue come all the proposals: a game piece, a board game, a dice cup, a musical instrument, a dance. Each has had its supporters. None can be checked, because the verse works like a riddle whose answer was never written down.
The dice-cup idea is the one modern rune books have adopted, since it leads neatly to luck and fate. It is worth holding loosely. The poem gives us a feast hall and good humor. Fate, secrets and the "womb of destiny" that some books mention are not in it.
Perthro in a modern rune reading
These readings are modern and should be taken as such.
As a rune of the day, Perthro is taken as a suggestion to leave a little room for surprise.
In a three-rune cast:
- The situation. Part of the picture is hidden. You are deciding without all the facts, and so is everyone else.
- The challenge. The need to control what cannot be controlled. The task is to act on what you know and stay curious about the rest.
- The likely outcome. Something unplanned plays a part. It is a direction, not a verdict.
Asked a yes-or-no question, our tool reads Perthro as maybe.
One caution belongs with a rune about chance. It has nothing to say about games of chance: a rune is no guide to bets, lotteries or any other gamble.
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Is there a reversed Perthro?
Some books describe an upside-down Perthro as secrets or bad luck. Given that the upright meaning is already a guess, a reversed one is a guess about a guess. Our rune reading uses upright runes only.
Perthro in its ætt and neighboring runes
Perthro is the sixth rune of the second ætt, the middle group of eight.
It follows Eihwaz, the yew, and comes before Algiz, whose Old English name is nearly as hard to pin down. This stretch of the alphabet is where the record is thinnest: three runes in a row that the later Scandinavian alphabet dropped or renamed. The guide to the Elder Futhark runes explains how the names were recovered at all.