Gebo
Credit and Honour
A gift is also a claim: generosity buys standing, and binds giver and receiver in both directions.
Gebo reconstructs Proto-Germanic gebo; the attested Old English form is gyfu, a gift. The Younger Futhark dropped the g-rune, so neither Norse poem covers this letter and the Old English poem is the only medieval gloss it has. That stanza treats generosity as a public good: it brings credit and honour, which support a man's dignity, and it furnishes help and sustenance to all broken men who are devoid of anything else. Corroboration comes from outside the poems, in the ninth-century Alcuin manuscript at Vienna, whose Gothic letter names include geuua for the g-letter — giba, the Gothic word for gift, is the normalised reconstruction rather than what the manuscript writes.
Light
Generosity that is also standing. The gift creates obligation in both directions, and the poem is explicit that it owes sustenance to the man who has nothing else.
Shadow
A gift is a claim. What is given for credit and honour is not given freely, and the exile fed by another's generosity depends on that generosity continuing. Readings of partnership and love are twentieth-century.
