Perthro
mystery•chance•fate
In the poems the rune is called: peorð (Old English) sound «p» ᛈ
Perthro comes when not everything can be known in advance.
The meaning
Perthro is the one rune whose meaning is lost. What has grown around that gap is the hidden, the risked, the thing that was always going to happen. A dice-cup tipped on its side, pouring out the lots, is what later readers made of its shape. It gathers where an outcome cannot be forced or foreseen, where all your planning runs out and something else takes over. This is the rune of the not-yet-known. It reminds you that some knowledge only arrives by taking the chance. A closed hand catches nothing, and the deepest turns of a life are rarely the ones you arranged.
A modern reading, grounded in the poems below.
Reversed
Reversed, Perthro is chance strained past its limit. A secret working quietly against you, luck leaned on too long, an answer demanded before its proper time. Sometimes the grip itself does the harm: nothing allowed to stay uncertain until the life is squeezed out of it. The mystery is not your enemy. Loosen your hand. Let the cup fall as it falls, and stop trying to read the lots before they land.
Reversed readings are a modern practice.
For you
What are you trying to control that belongs to chance?
The poems
Peorð byþ symble plega and hlehter
wlancum [on middum], ðar wigan sittaþ
on beorsele bliþe ætsomne.
Peorð is always play and laughter
among the proud, where warriors sit
in the beer-hall, happy together.
why the poem never names it
The poem never names the rune. Each stanza is a riddle whose answer is the name, and the name printed above it in every edition was put there by a later hand.
The letter p was one of the eight the Viking Age dropped, so the Norse poems are silent. The only old poem about the most mysterious rune in the futhark is the one that will not name it either.
where these texts come from
Text after Dickins 1915. Checked against Halsall 1981. Translated here from the originals.
Where it comes from
Beneath the world-tree sit three women at the well of fate: one for what has been, one for what is, one for what shall be. And from that well they water the roots and weave the threads of gods and mortals alike. Not even Odin could unpick their work. The wisest thing in the nine worlds still bows to what they spin. The cup that pours out the lots at their feet is what much later readers saw in Perthro. It is the rune of everything you were dealt but did not choose, and of the strange grace of playing that hand well.
Nobody knows what Peorð means. This is not a disputed meaning. There is no meaning. Dickins writes that the word is never found except as the name of the letter P, and that no stress can be laid on any of the suggested meanings. The stanza tells us it belongs in a hall, with drink and laughter and men sitting together, and that is all anyone has. We leave the name untranslated, because the hole in the middle of the sentence is the most honest thing on the page.
The letter itself is a puzzle. It was rare in the parent language and is missing from the earliest Northern inscriptions. On the Vadstena bracteate its slot is filled by b. In England it appears in manuscript alphabet lists and on coins, and never once in an actual inscription. A letter everyone kept copying and nobody ever used.
The gaming-piece reading comes from one place. W. Grimm proposed Icelandic peð, a pawn in chess, and that single nineteenth-century guess is the source of every dice-cup and lot-box on every modern rune site. Dickins notes that the leading historian of chess of the day thought little of it, and dismisses the other proposals in one sentence.