Perth
A Meaning Not Recovered
The rune whose name nobody can establish; its single English stanza describes play and laughter in the hall.
Peorð occurs once in Old English, in this stanza and nowhere else in the language, and the Younger Futhark had no p rune, so neither Norse poem can help. The stanza says peorð is always play and laughter among the proud, where warriors sit together in the beer-hall, and even that line is defective, with words supplied by its editors. Proposed meanings include a pear-tree, a wooden dice-box, a gaming piece and a woodwind; none has carried the field. The confident senses given in modern rune books, a womb, a cup of fate, the well of Wyrd, hidden things, belong to twentieth-century occultism and the trade that followed Ralph Blum's Book of Runes in 1982.
Light
What survives is a scene rather than a doctrine: men at leisure in a hall, a game in progress, laughter among them. Whatever the word meant, the poem places it among things done for pleasure.
Shadow
This is the blank in the record. Every confident meaning offered since has been supplied by somebody, and the certainty of a modern rune book here measures how far it has drifted from its sources.
