Rune 1 of 24 · first ætt · /f/
Fehu rune meaning
Fehu (ᚠ) is the first rune of the Elder Futhark. Its name is reconstructed as "cattle, wealth". The Old English rune poem calls wealth a comfort that every man must give away freely; the Icelandic poem calls it a source of discord among kinsmen. I read Fehu as a question about what you hold and what it costs you to hold it.
The name
Reconstructed
The Proto-Germanic form is reconstructed as *fehu, the word that became Old English feoh and Old Norse fé, both meaning cattle and, by extension, movable wealth. No rune names survive from the Elder Futhark period itself; the name comes from the later rune poems and the related Gothic letter name.
Status: reconstructed.
What the rune poems say
Attested
Translations: Bruce Dickins, Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples, 1915.
Old English rune poem (manuscript copy from the 10th century; the poem is likely older)
“Wealth is a comfort to all men; yet must every man bestow it freely, if he wish to gain honour in the sight of the Lord.”
Dickins 1915
Norwegian rune poem (17th-century copy of a lost 13th-century manuscript)
“Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen; the wolf lives in the forest.”
Dickins 1915
Icelandic rune poem (manuscripts from around 1500)
“Wealth: source of discord among kinsmen and fire of the sea and path of the serpent.”
Dickins 1915
All three poems agree on the word. Two of the three immediately attach a warning to it. The Old English poem's condition, that wealth must be given freely, is a Christian-era framing of an older Germanic ethic of gift and obligation that Hávamál also returns to repeatedly.
What is reconstructed, what is modern
- Reconstructed
The name "cattle, wealth"
Reconstructed from later languages.
- Attested
The poem images (comfort, discord, the serpent's path)
Attested in the three poems, the oldest surviving copy from the 10th century.
- Modern
Any divinatory meaning ("money is coming", "new beginnings")
Modern practice, not in the sources.
- Modern
Reading the rune differently upside down
Modern convention.
- Attested
- in a named, datable source
- Reconstructed
- a scholarly inference from later evidence
- Modern
- twentieth-century or later practice
- Mine
- the reader's own interpretation
How I read it
Mine
When Fehu lands in view I ask what the person is holding onto and what the holding costs. Wealth in the poems is never neutral: it comforts, it divides, it must move. In a reading about a job, a relationship, or a decision to leave, Fehu is usually about the thing you would have to give up to get what you asked about. That reading is mine, built on the poems, not dictated by them.
Your question
Ask the rune
If this is the question you are carrying, write it in your own words. The first reading is free.