Fehu

Almost everything anyone claims to know about what an individual rune meant rests on three texts, and it is worth knowing how thin and how late they are.

The three rune poems

• The Old English Rune Poem, twenty-nine stanzas covering the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, probably tenth-century. Its manuscript, Cotton Otho B.x, burned in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731. The text survives only because George Hickes had printed it in 1705.
• The Norwegian Rune Poem, sixteen stanzas for the Younger Futhark, thirteenth-century, likewise surviving through early modern copies.
• The Icelandic Rune Poem, sixteen stanzas, fifteenth-century.

That is the entire near-contemporary evidence for rune meanings. Two of the three cover the sixteen-character Younger Futhark rather than the twenty-four of the Elder Futhark, so for eight Elder runes there is no rune-poem stanza at all, only the reconstructed name.

What they are actually for

They are mnemonic verses, alphabet poems, of a genre found across medieval Europe for the Latin and Hebrew alphabets too. Each stanza names a letter and says something memorable about the thing the letter is named after.

The Fehu stanza is a fair sample. The Old English poem says that wealth is a comfort to every man, but that a man must share it freely if he wishes to be judged well before the Lord. That is a proverb about generosity attached to a letter called cattle. It is not an oracle entry, and the Christian framing of the second half is not an intrusion into the poem, it is the poem.

What they are not

They do not describe drawing lots. They do not give reversed meanings. They do not assign runes to gods, elements or planets. Every correspondence of that kind in circulation today, and this atlas records those correspondences, because they are what practitioners use, was supplied later, mostly much later.

The rune poems are the floor. What is built above the floor is a modern structure, and the two should not be confused.

Before it was anything else, a rune was a letter, cut into wood, bone, metal or stone by someone who wanted to write something down.

First in the row

Fehu stands first in the Elder Futhark, the twenty-four character row used for the earliest Germanic inscriptions from roughly the second century onward. The row is named after its first six characters, f, u, th, a, r and k, in the same way the alphabet is named after alpha and beta, and Fehu is the f.

What it was cut on

The Elder Futhark corpus is small and consists mostly of short texts on portable objects: brooches, weapon fittings, combs, bracteates and a smaller number of stones. Many inscriptions are a personal name, a maker's formula, or a few words whose reading is disputed. This is not a literature. It is the scattered writing of a period from which almost nothing else survives in the vernacular.

The name and where it comes from

The name Fehu is a reconstruction. The medieval rune poems, written centuries later in Old Norse and Old English, give names for the characters of their own rows, and the Elder Futhark names are projected back from those with the help of comparative reconstruction. The word behind it means livestock and, by extension, movable wealth, and it is the ancestor of the modern English word fee.

Divination

Nothing in the inscriptional record shows runes being used to draw lots in the way modern rune sets are used. That practice is modern, and this atlas records it as such.