Runes · Freyr’s ætt
Gebo
Sound: g · The name: gift
- gift
- exchange
- partnership
What the old rune poems say
Only the Old English poem has a stanza for this rune, because it dropped out of the later Norse alphabet. It calls gyfu generosity, which ‘brings credit and honour’, and help and subsistence ‘to all broken men who are devoid of aught else’.
How it is read today
Modern rune readers read Gebo as the rune of the gift and of exchange between people. The modern books see in its crossed strokes two sides meeting, and speak of partnership and of giving and receiving in balance. Because the shape looks the same whichever way it falls, they give it no reversed meaning. All of this is modern.
Reversed
This rune looks the same turned round; modern books give it no reversed meaning.
As your rune of the day
Give something today without keeping count: time, attention, a kind word.
Accept a kindness today without rushing to repay it.
Reading runes as an oracle is modern, from Guido von List (1908) and Ralph Blum (1982); the people who carved them, Vikings included, used them for writing, names and charm words.