Feoh

The one tradition that starts kindly

Three rune poems describe this rune and only one of them begins well.

The Norwegian says wealth causes discord among kinsmen. The Icelandic repeats the phrase and adds two kennings for dragon-guarded gold. The Old English says feoh byþ frofur fira gehwylcum — wealth is a comfort to everyone.

Then it attaches the condition, and the condition is the stanza's real content. Sceal ðeah manna gehwylc miclun hyt dælan — yet each must share it out greatly. And the reason: gif he wile for drihtne domes hleotan, if he wants to be allotted honour before the Lord.

So England agrees with Scandinavia that wealth is a problem, and disagrees about the solution. The Norse poems say money divides families and leave it there. The English poem says money is good and becomes dangerous only if it stops moving.

Whose lord

Drihten is the word to watch. In Old English it means a lord in the ordinary secular sense — the leader of a warband, the man in the hall — and it also means the Lord, God.

The stanza works either way, and it is very likely meant to.

Read secularly, it describes the gift economy exactly: a lord distributes rings, weapons and land, and a man's standing depends on how freely he passes wealth on. Old English poetry calls a lord beaga brytta, ring-breaker, and goldwine, gold-friend. Hoarding is a failure of the role.

Read religiously, it is Christian almsgiving: treasure in heaven rather than on earth, judgement before God.

The Old English Rune Poem does this repeatedly. It is a Christian text working with heathen material, and rather than erasing the older sense it frequently finds a phrasing that carries both. The Ansuz rune becoming os, a mouth, is the same manoeuvre with a heavier hand.

Cattle, property, fee

Old English feoh covers livestock and movable property without distinguishing them, exactly as Proto-Germanic fehu did. The word appears throughout the Old English corpus in both senses: cattle in a will, and money in a law code.

Its descendants are worth tracing because they show what the word was doing. Modern English fee comes straight down this line, by way of the feudal sense of a holding. Fellow arrives from Old Norse félagi, a person you have laid your property together with — a business partner before it was a friend.

The Latin cognate pecu, a flock, gives pecunia, money, and then pecuniary. Two unrelated language families independently built their word for money out of their word for livestock, which tells you how universal the arrangement was.

This is the community's wealth

The Galloway Hoard, buried in Scotland around 900 and excavated in 2014, has changed what can be said about who used this rune and for what.

Five flattened silver arm-rings in the hoard carry scratched Anglo-Saxon runes, not Scandinavian ones. One reads EGGBRECT, the name Ecgbeorht. The longest and most interesting reads DIS IS ÆIGNA FEOH — this is the community's wealth, using a word for a religious community.

Two things follow. The first is that the rune's own name is being used here in its plain sense, on an object, to label property. That is about as direct a piece of evidence as the corpus offers for what feoh meant to the people writing it.

The second is that the hoard was long assumed, like most silver hoards of that date in Britain, to be Viking plunder. An Anglo-Saxon runic inscription claiming the silver for a monastic community makes that reading much harder to sustain, and it is a useful corrective to the habit of treating buried silver as automatically Norse and automatically stolen.

In reading

Feoh is resources in hand, and the English reading is the most usable of the three because it says what to do with them.

Upright it marks income, a payment, material footing under something that has been floating. It is the mundane, countable end of good fortune rather than the visionary end.

What the stanza adds is a test. Wealth in Feoh is meant to circulate, and the rune is uncomfortable in situations where something valuable has stopped moving — savings hoarded past any purpose, a skill not being used, generosity withheld. The question it asks is whether what you have is working.

Most modern rune practice takes its meanings from this poem rather than from the Norse ones, which is why the standard gloss of this rune is prosperity with a caveat rather than family conflict. That is worth knowing when comparing sets.