Gebo

The rune’s Proto-Germanic name is usually reconstructed as *gebō, “gift”. No early inscription spells the name out, so this is a reconstruction, but it rests on related names: the Old English rune name gyfu (“gift” or “generosity”), the form geofu in a Salzburg manuscript, and the Gothic letter name giba. The rune stands for a g sound, probably a soft, breathy g in the earliest period.

It is the seventh rune of the 24-rune Elder Futhark, used from roughly the second to the eighth century, and belongs to the first group of eight, called Freyr’s ætt today. Its shape, two crossing strokes like an X, shows no variation in the inscriptions. It is widely taken to come from the X of an Old Italic or the Latin alphabet; Tineke Looijenga has suggested the Latin letter chi in particular. The rune stands in its place in the oldest complete row, on the Kylver Stone from Gotland (about 400), and in the rows on the sixth-century Vadstena bracteates.

Some early objects use it in words of giving. The Seeland-II-C bracteate from Zealand, Denmark (about 500), has gibu auja in its text, usually read “I give luck” or “I give good fortune”, though the exact sense of auja is debated. On the Kragehul I spear shaft from Funen the sequence gagaga is cut as three bind runes, each an X with the strokes of the a rune added; scholars disagree whether it stands for g[ibu] a[uja], a gift to a god, or a cry or chant.

The Younger Futhark dropped the rune by the late eighth century, and the k rune (kaun) then served for g as well. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc gyfu stayed, but because Old English g often sounded like j, it could write either sound; a later rune, gār, was added to mark a hard g.

When the Austrian writer Guido von List published his “Armanen” rune row in 1908 (after a 1906 article), he based it on the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark, which lack a g rune, and added two of his own. One of them, the eighteenth, he called Gibor; its name may echo the Old English gyfu, but its shape is not the X of the old rune. It looks like the Wolfsangel, a medieval German heraldic sign for a wolf trap that had nothing to do with runes before List. List said the runes were revealed to him during a spell of blindness in 1902; the system is his own invention.

The völkisch nationalist movement took up List’s runes, and under Heinrich Himmler runic signs drawn from such systems were used on SS flags and uniforms until 1945. After the war Karl Spiesberger reworked List’s system and removed its racist elements. Heathen Heritage rejects any racist or extremist use of the runes.

Modern rune divination for a general public grew from Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition dated 1982 or 1983 in different listings), sold with the 24 runes and a blank stone Blum added; the meanings in it are Blum’s own.