ᚠ *fehu

Line of descent

History

f opens every rune-row that survives, and the name of the row, futhark, begins with it. Most scholars accept that the shape comes from the Latin capital F, with the two branches slanting upward instead of standing level. Runic carvers generally avoided horizontal strokes, which are hard to cut across the grain of wood.

The name *fehu is one of the best-supported reconstructions in the row. All three rune poems name the rune with the ordinary word for livestock and wealth (Old English feoh, Old Norse fé), and the Gothic letter f has a matching name. The word is related to Latin pecus "cattle", and in all the old Germanic languages it moved from "cattle" to "property" and "money". English fee goes back to the same Germanic word. In the poems the stanzas are about money, not animals. The Old English poem urges sharing it, and the Norwegian and Icelandic poems both call it "strife of kinsmen".

The sound was a voiceless fricative. In later Norse it was also voiced to [v] between vowels, so the Younger Futhark rune also wrote v.

On the Kylver stone only part of the f survives, but its place at the head of the row is clear. The Einang stone in Norway has it in the verb faihido "painted, wrote", in the phrase runo faihido "wrote the rune". It continued without a break into the Younger Futhark and the futhorc, and into the medieval runes.

In the rune poems

Original text from the public-domain editions named on each poem's page; translations are our own.

Where it is found

• Kylver stone (G 88), position 1, partly damaged
• Vadstena (Ög 178) and Mariedamm (Nä 10) bracteates, position 1
• Einang stone (N KJ63): [go]dagastiz runo faihido

On inscriptions described on this site

Sources

• Samnordisk runtextdatabas (Rundata), signa G 88, Ög 178, Nä 10, N KJ63
• Dickins (1915), notes to the Old English rune poem, l. 1
• Wikipedia, 'Elder Futhark' and 'Fehu' (checked 2026-10-26), for the Latin-derivation consensus and the Gothic name