Perthro

No early source spells out this rune’s name, and its meaning is unknown. On sound changes alone, scholars reconstruct a Proto-Germanic form such as *perþō, *perþaz or *perðu, always with a question mark. The only recorded names are the Old English peorð and the Gothic letter name written pertra in a ninth-century manuscript (Codex Vindobonensis 795), probably *pairþra. The two may be related, but neither word is understood. Suggestions include a pear tree or fruit tree, a gaming piece and a borrowing from a Celtic tree name; none is settled. The rune stands for the sound p.

The p sound was rare in early Germanic, and the rune is rare too. It is one of three runes missing from the oldest inscriptions, from about 175 to 400. Its first known appearance is in the complete rune row on the Kylver Stone from Gotland, of about 400. On the Vadstena bracteate, a gold pendant of about 500, the sign in the p place looks just like the b rune, and the order of some runes differs from Kylver. Looijenga (1997) has suggested that the p rune began as a variant of b. Its shape may also come from a North Italic letter related to Greek pi; both ideas are guesses.

In England the rune appears as peorð in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc. Dickins (1915) knew it only from manuscript lists and coins, such as the names Pada and Epa on Kentish coins of about 700; later writers also count St Cuthbert’s coffin (698). In Scandinavia it fell out of use around the sixth and seventh centuries. The Younger Futhark, complete by the late eighth century, has no p rune: the b rune wrote both b and p. A dotted b (ᛔ) for p came in with the medieval runes.

The rune lived on longest as a name in learned lists. The Swedish scholar Johannes Bureus recorded pir as the name for p in the runic alphabet of Dalarna, whose late form of the p rune was angular and trident-shaped.

Guido von List’s Armanen row of 1908, built on the sixteen runes of the Younger Futhark plus two of his own, has no p rune at all, so this rune played no part in that system or the völkisch use that grew from it. We found no record of a specific modern misuse of this rune.

It returned through modern divination. Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition dated 1983 in one listing, 1982 in others) includes it as “Perth” and gives it his own keyword, “Initiation”. Many popular books since then describe it as a dice cup or a rune of chance; that reading is modern and rests on the guesses described above.