Fé

Fe opens both surviving medieval commentaries on the Younger Futhark, the Norwegian Rune Poem, preserved in a seventeenth century copy of an manuscript now lost but generally dated on linguistic grounds to around the thirteenth century, and the Icelandic Rune Poem, recorded in fifteenth century manuscripts, two independent compositions that nonetheless open their sixteen stanza sequences on the same rune with broadly the same subject, wealth, before developing it in rather different directions. The Norwegian poem reads wealth through its social danger, a source of discord among kinsmen, a note of caution that recalls the Old English Feoh stanza's own concern with wealth rightly handled, while the Icelandic poem instead builds the image outward through a chain of kennings, gold called the fire of the sea and the serpent's path, drawing on the wider Old Norse legendary association of dragons as hoard guardians, most famously Fafnir in the Volsung cycle, a specifically Norse literary allusion the Old English tradition has no equivalent for.

Bruce Dickins' 1915 edition, the standard early English translation of both poems together, presents this kind of divergence as typical of the two texts' relationship generally, sharing rune names and a broadly similar subject for each stanza while developing the actual content along genuinely separate literary lines centuries apart in composition.

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.