Perthro Rune Meaning: The Rune Nobody Can Translate
Every rune in this series so far has had a name that translates. Cattle. Hail. Ice. Yew. A god.
Perthro does not. Its reconstructed name, *perþō, corresponds to no known word in any Germanic language. Nobody has established what it meant, and the guesses have been circulating for well over a century without resolution.
That makes this the most honest post in the set, and probably the most interesting rune in the futhark.
What we actually have
One poem. The Old English rune poem gives the name as peorð and describes it like this: it is always play and laughter among confident people, where warriors sit together cheerfully in the beer-hall.
That's it. That is the entire body of evidence for what this rune meant.
There is no Norwegian or Icelandic poem, because Perthro did not survive into the Younger Futhark. And the one description we do have is about an activity in a room, not about an object with a name.
The theories
The leading reading is a dice cup or lot-box — a container from which marked pieces are shaken out. It fits the poem well, since gambling is the obvious reading of play and laughter among warriors drinking. It also fits the rune's shape, which can be seen as an open-sided vessel.
Others have proposed a gaming piece, a hearth, a pear tree, and a fruit-bearing branch. A further reading takes the word as relating to the womb, and therefore to birth, hidden things, and what has not yet emerged. Each has some argument behind it, and none commands agreement.
It is also entirely possible the word was already archaic when the futhark was assembled, and that the people using the rune did not know what it meant either.
Why the dice reading matters
There is one outside source that makes the lot-cup theory more than a guess about a shape.
Tacitus, writing in the first century, describes Germanic divination in his Germania. A branch is cut from a fruit-bearing tree and divided into slips. The slips are marked with signs. They are scattered at random on a white cloth. A priest or the head of the household then picks them up three at a time and interprets the marks.
Marked pieces, drawn blind, read for meaning. Whatever *perþō named, a rune connected to casting lots would sit comfortably in a culture that Roman observers described doing precisely that.
Worth noting Tacitus is describing practice a couple of centuries before our earliest runic inscriptions, and he never says the marks were runes. It is context, not proof.
What it means now
Modern rune work reads Perthro as fate, chance, mystery, and hidden things — what has not yet been revealed. Some readers treat it as the rune of divination itself.
There is a neat circularity here that is worth naming rather than hiding. The one rune whose meaning is genuinely unknown has been assigned the meaning the unknown. That is convenient, and it may well be a modern solution to a modern embarrassment rather than a recovered truth.
It is also, as readings go, not a bad one. A rune that has kept its secret for two thousand years has earned the association.
Wearing Perthro
Perthro suits people comfortable with not knowing — waiting on a result, standing at something genuinely uncertain, or simply drawn to the idea that not everything gets explained.
Most rune descriptions are more confident than the evidence supports. This one, unusually, can't be. That is the reason to like it.
Related reading: the complete guide to the Elder Futhark.
Browse the handcast pewter Perthro pendant →
Cast by hand in a one-person workshop, lead- and antimony-free, on waxed cotton cord.