Runes · Freyr’s ætt
Fehu
Sound: f · The name: cattle, wealth
- wealth
- sharing
- what you have earned
What the old rune poems say
The Old English Rune Poem says that wealth is a comfort to all men, ‘yet must every man bestow it freely’ if he is to gain honour in the sight of the Lord. The Norwegian and Icelandic poems are darker: wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen, and the Icelandic poem calls it ‘fire of the sea and path of the serpent’.
How it is read today
Modern rune readers take Fehu as the rune of what you have and what you do with it. The old name meant cattle, wealth you could count and drive from place to place, and the modern books build on that: income, possessions, the fruit of work. Many of them borrow the Old English poem’s turn and say that wealth does good only when it moves on. This is a reading of the 20th century, not a Viking teaching.
Reversed
Modern books read Fehu reversed as something lost, or held on to too tightly. That is a modern device; the old sources know nothing of reversed runes.
As your rune of the day
Look at one thing you have and think about whom else it could serve today.
What you have earned may give you a quiet pleasure today. Share a little of it, as the old poem advises.
Reading runes as an oracle is modern, from Guido von List (1908) and Ralph Blum (1982); the people who carved them, Vikings included, used them for writing, names and charm words.