Peorth, the Poem's Most Disputed Stanza

Peorth's stanza describes a source of recreation and amusement among the great, where warriors sit blithely together in the beer hall, a social, hospitable image consistent with Cen's own earlier picture of the well lit hall, but the word peorth itself, unlike almost every other rune name in the poem, has no accepted Old English gloss at all, and this entry states that honestly rather than offering a confident translation the sources do not support.

Runologists have proposed several readings across more than a century of study, a dice cup or gaming piece being the most frequently repeated guess, tied loosely to the stanza's own setting of hall based amusement, though R. I. Page's survey treats even this reading as a plausible inference from context rather than a secure etymology, and no consensus translation of the bare word has emerged. Halsall's critical edition surveys the range of proposed readings without endorsing any single one as settled, treating Peorth as the clearest case in the whole poem of a rune whose original meaning has simply not survived, whatever concrete object or activity the Anglo-Saxon audience understood the word to name having been lost along with the wider oral and cultural context the poem's compiler could still assume his readers shared.