Gyfu in the Old English Rune Poem

Gyfu's stanza reads generosity as bringing credit and honour that support a man's standing among his peers, and further as a source of real, practical help and subsistence to broken men who have nothing else to draw on, gift giving read here not as simple charity but as the social glue binding a lord to his followers and a fortunate man to his less fortunate neighbours, a value already anticipated in Feoh's own counsel that wealth must be freely given to win honour.

The stanza's two halves, honour gained by the giver and survival provided to the receiver, together sketch the whole economy of gift exchange that structured much of early medieval Germanic social life, where a lord's standing rested visibly on the generosity of his hall and a dependent's survival could rest just as directly on that same generosity reaching him. Halsall's critical edition notes that Gyfu's stanza, like Feoh's, belongs to the poem's more explicitly moral register, naming a virtue and its social consequences rather than simply describing an object, and the pairing of Feoh and Gyfu near the row's opening, wealth and its proper generous use, gives the poem's first several stanzas a loosely coherent concern with material goods and their right handling.