Fe is the first of the sixteen runes of the Younger Futhark, the reduced row that replaced the Elder Futhark's twenty four signs across Scandinavia beginning around the seventh or eighth century CE, a reduction moving in the opposite direction from the Old English futhorc's own expansion to twenty nine runes over the same general period, even though both developments responded to the same underlying pressure, spoken language changing faster than an inherited writing system could track without some kind of adjustment.
Fe descends directly from Fehu, the Elder Futhark's own opening rune, and keeps both its name and its sound value f essentially unchanged across the reduction, one of the more phonetically stable signs in the whole transition. Michael Barnes' handbook on runes notes that the Younger Futhark existed in two closely related letterform traditions, long branch runes, more common on formal Danish memorial inscriptions, and short twig runes, a simplified variant more common in everyday Norwegian and Swedish use, both sharing the same sixteen names and sounds while differing in the specific shape carved for several of the signs, Fe included. Barnes notes that runestone carvers across the whole Younger Futhark corpus used Fe with unusual frequency, since inscriptions commemorating a person's wealth, generosity or paid for memorial were among the most common reasons a family raised a stone at all.