Fehu, the first rune: cattle, wealth and strife

For a people of herders, the true measure of wealth walked on four legs. It is no surprise, then, that the first rune of the futhark, fehu, bears the name of cattle. The sign, a vertical stave with two slanting strokes pointing up to the right, represents the sound f and opens the row in all its versions, from the older alphabet to the Viking and Anglo-Saxon ones.

A word as old as Indo-European

The reconstructed Germanic name, fehu, has relatives in many languages. Latin pecus, flock, from which pecunia, money, derives, goes back to the same Indo-European root, as does Sanskrit paśu. In the Germanic languages the word survives in German Vieh, cattle, and in English fee, which today means a payment or charge. The shift from flock to money, in Latin as in Germanic, tells of an economy in which animals were currency.

In Old Norse the rune was called fé, in Old English feoh. In both cases the term had come to mean wealth in general, movable goods, gold and silver, not only herds. This broadening of sense is reflected in the medieval rune poems, which comment on the rune with moral verses.

What the poems say

The Old English Rune Poem opens with a positive image: “Feoh byþ frofur fira gehwylcum”, wealth is a comfort to every man. Immediately afterwards, however, it warns that each must share it generously if he wishes to win glory before the Lord. This is the outlook of a Christian society, in which a chieftain's generosity towards his men was an aristocratic virtue.

The Scandinavian poems are darker. The Norwegian one states that wealth causes strife among kinsmen, while the wolf grows up in the forest. The Icelandic one calls it “frænda róg”, the discord of kin, and adds two kennings, that is, poetic circumlocutions: fire of the sea and path of the serpent. Both allude to gold, which in Norse poetry gleams beneath the waves and lies under dragons.

Gold, dragons and curses

The link between wealth and strife runs through all of Norse literature. In the legend of the Volsungs, told in the Poetic Edda and in the saga of the same name, the treasure of the dwarf Andvari carries a curse that brings death to whoever holds it, from the dragon Fáfnir to the heroes who slay him. The “path of the serpent” in the Icelandic poem recalls precisely the dragon sleeping on its gold. Fehu, then, was not a rune of pure good fortune but an ambivalent sign.

In inscriptions the rune naturally appears as a letter, for example in personal names. In medieval Scandinavia, when runes were also used as abbreviations, the single sign could stand for the word itself, much as some typographical symbols do today. In the rune poems, moreover, the stanza on fehu always opens the composition, and its moral tone anticipates that of the stanzas that follow.

Modern divinatory readings make fehu a wish for prosperity, but this use is not documented in the ancient sources. The historical evidence gives us a more nuanced picture: wealth as a gift to be shared, as a cause of quarrels and as gold fought over by monsters. A realistic, almost stern vision, which says much about the mindset of those who carved these letters.