Fehu

The rune’s name in Proto-Germanic is reconstructed as *fehu, a word for livestock or cattle and, by extension, movable wealth. No early inscription spells the name out, so it is a reconstruction, but a well-supported one: the Old English rune name feoh, the Old Norse fé and the Gothic letter name faihu (written fe in a ninth-century manuscript of Alcuin) all agree. The English word “fee” comes from the same root. The rune stands for the sound f.

Fehu opens the 24-rune row known as the Elder Futhark, used from roughly the second to the eighth century; the name “futhark” is made from its first six letters, f u þ a r k. The oldest complete row is cut on the Kylver Stone, a limestone slab from a grave at Stånga on Gotland, dated to about 375 to 470 and now in the Swedish History Museum. On it the f is only partly carved. The Vadstena bracteate, a gold pendant of about 500 found in Östergötland in 1774, gives the row in three groups of eight, beginning with f; the original was stolen from the museum in Stockholm in 1938 and has not been recovered. The Grumpan bracteate of about the same date also starts its row f u þ a r k.

The shape, an upright stave with two branches rising to the right, may come from a North Italic (Etruscan) letter, and the branches have been read as horns; both are suggestions rather than settled facts.

Fehu kept its place and sound in the later rows: as fé, “wealth”, first rune of the Younger Futhark (from about the ninth century), and as feoh in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc (about the fifth to eleventh century), where it could also stand for a v sound inside a word.

When the Austrian writer Guido von List published his “Armanen” rune row in 1908 (as a book, after a 1906 article), he built it on the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark plus two of his own. Its first rune is Fa, a form of the Younger Futhark fé. List claimed the runes had been revealed to him in 1902 during a period of blindness; the system is his own invention, not an old tradition.

The völkisch nationalist movement took up List’s runes, and under Heinrich Himmler runic signs drawn loosely from such systems were used on SS flags, uniforms and insignia until 1945. After the war Karl Spiesberger reworked the Armanen system and removed its racist elements, and it still influences writing on rune magic today. Heathen Heritage rejects any racist or extremist use of the runes.

Modern rune divination for a general public grew from Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition dated 1982 or 1983 in different listings), sold with a set of 24 rune stones and a blank stone Blum added. Fehu is among them, with meanings that are Blum’s own.