Fé

What survived the reduction

Fé is one of the least disturbed runes in the row. When the twenty-four-letter Elder Futhark was cut to sixteen, this letter kept its shape, its position and its sound value, and its name lost only a syllable.

It did pick up extra work. In the Younger Futhark the same rune covers both /f/ and /v/, because the script stopped distinguishing voiced from unvoiced consonants. A carver writing hafa, to have, and hafn, a harbour, used the same letter for two different sounds and left the reader to sort it out.

So the interest here is not the letter. It is what a Viking Age society did with the word.

Cattle becomes cash

Proto-Germanic fehu meant livestock, and in an economy without circulating coin, livestock was the measure of value. By the Viking Age that had changed.

The Norse economy was silver-based and weighed rather than counted. Hoards across Scandinavia contain hacksilver: arm-rings, ingots and coins deliberately cut into fragments so they could be weighed against a set of scales. Islamic dirhams travelled up the Volga in enormous numbers; the Spillings hoard on Gotland, buried around 870, holds over 14,000 coins, mostly Arabic.

Old Norse fé moved with the economy. It still means cattle, and it also means money outright, and the two senses sit in the word at once. Modern English fee comes down the same line, as does Norwegian fe and German Vieh.

Both rune poems are about the money sense, not the animal.

Discord among kinsmen

This is the phrase both Norse poems open with, and it is worth taking literally rather than as a moral.

Frænda róg, discord among kinsmen. Norse inheritance was partible: an estate divided among heirs rather than passing whole to an eldest son. The sagas are substantially about the consequences. Njáls saga runs on compensation payments and who owes what to whom; Egils saga has an extended and vicious inheritance dispute at its centre. Feud in Iceland was frequently, at root, an argument about property.

The Norwegian stanza then adds its second line: the wolf is reared in the forest. As often in that poem the connection is metrical rather than logical, róge rhyming with skóge. But the pairing has been read for a long time as pointing the same way — the thing that will destroy you is growing quietly somewhere you are not looking.

The Icelandic stanza drops the wolf and gives two kennings for gold instead: the fire of the flood-tide, and the path of the serpent. Both are standard skaldic circumlocutions and both point at dragon-guarded hoards, most obviously Fáfnir's in the Völsung material.

The Latin gloss

The Icelandic Rune Poem does something no other rune poem does, and it is easy to skip past.

Each stanza is followed by two words: a Latin gloss of the rune name, and an Old Norse poetic term for a ruler. Here it is aurum fylkir — gold, and fylkir, a leader of a host.

The sixteen stanzas use sixteen different words for prince: fylkir, vísi, þengill, oddviti, ræsir, konungr, hildingr, niflungr, jöfurr, allvaldr, siklingr, tiggi, buðlungr, mildingr, lofðungr, ynglingr. Skaldic poetry required a large stock of such heiti, and the poem appears to be teaching two things at once: the rune, and a piece of the poetic vocabulary a court poet had to have.

It tells you what the rune poems were for. These are schoolroom texts.

In Viking Age inscriptions

As a letter it is everywhere. The word fé itself appears in a number of runestone inscriptions concerning inheritance and payment, which is exactly where the poems say to expect it.

A specific case worth knowing is the class of runestones that record men who went abroad for money. Several Swedish stones commemorate members of the Ingvar expedition to the east, and a group in Uppland refers to danagæld, the tribute paid by England to buy off Norse armies. One stone at Yttergärde records that Ulf took geld in England three times, under three different leaders. That is a memorial where the wealth is the point of the monument.

In reading

Modern rune readers who work with the Younger Futhark almost always import the meanings from the Elder Futhark, and for Fé that import is close to lossless: it is the same rune with the same name.

What the two Norse poems add, if you take them seriously, is a considerably darker default. The Old English stanza on the Elder Futhark page says wealth is a comfort to everyone and then attaches a condition about sharing. Neither Norse poem offers comfort at all. Both open on families fighting.

Read through the Younger Futhark, Fé is therefore less about having resources and more about what having them exposes. It comes up on questions about inheritance, about money inside families, about a windfall that is going to have to be split. The useful question it asks is not whether the money arrives but who else has a claim on it.

There is no attested Viking Age practice of drawing runes for divination, and the sixteen-rune corpus is memorial, legal and commercial. Reading Fé this way is a modern activity done with an old vocabulary.