Feoh in the Old English Rune Poem

Feoh opens both the futhorc row and the Old English Rune Poem itself, the sole surviving Anglo-Saxon commentary on the runes' individual meanings, preserved through Humfrey Wanley's transcription and George Hickes' 1705 printing after the manuscript that held it, Cotton Otho B.x, was destroyed in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731, a transmission history that makes every modern reading of the poem dependent on that single early copy.

The Feoh stanza reads wealth as a genuine comfort to every man, yet immediately qualifies the blessing with a moral counsel: riches must be freely given away if a man hopes to win honour and standing before his lord, wealth valued in the poem's own logic for its circulation through a household and a following rather than for what a man keeps closed in a chest. This reading matches the rune's cognate in the Elder Futhark, Fehu, whose own name means cattle or moveable wealth, the two traditions preserving the same underlying association across the shift from a Scandinavian to an Anglo-Saxon runic culture. Maureen Halsall's critical edition of the poem treats Feoh's stanza as one of the more straightforwardly moralising in the whole sequence, its counsel about generosity a value repeated across a great deal of surviving Old English gnomic and heroic verse well beyond the rune poem alone.