Fene

Also Known As: Hungarian; as an adjective “fierce, savage”, as a noun an eating sore; compounds include hidegfene, melegfene, rákfene, farkasfene and lépfene
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Hungarian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: The fene eats: it settles in skin, flesh or bone as a hard, painful swelling or an open sore and gnaws the body from that spot outward.
Role in Mythos: It is the sickness that Hungarian curses treat as a living thing, invited by name to devour an enemy or carry him off.
Relation to Humans: People met the fene as a wound that would not close and fought it with poultices, plant juices and some very rough kitchen remedies. They also called it down on one another so often that the word outlived the belief and is now only a mild oath.

Somebody drops a hammer on a foot in a Budapest workshop and says the word without thinking. A fene egye meg. Let the fene eat it. The speaker means nothing more than “damn”, and has no idea that the sentence is a small fossil, the only place where an old Hungarian sickness still behaves like a creature with a mouth.

The word is ancient. Its Finno-Ugric origin is generally accepted, and that is nearly the last thing about it anyone agrees on. In the oldest written Hungarian it turns up as a describing word, fierce or savage, and it kept particular company. Wolves were fene. So, in one early text, was a great dragon. One line of argument makes it a relative of the verb for sharpening, the wild animal with its teeth whetted and ready. Another holds that the beast it described simply fell out of the phrase over time and left the adjective standing alone as a noun, though the word’s early life on its own, and its habit of forming compounds, sits awkwardly with that.

By the time village healers were using it, fene was the name of a disease. More exactly it was the name of several. The hidegfene, the cold one, sat in the bone. The melegfene, the warm one, took the limbs. The rákfene, the crab, worked on the face. The farkasfene, the wolf, was a creeping rash, and the lépfene was a sickness of livestock, the one now called anthrax. Old dictionaries add a further string of them, dead, running, nesting and black. What they share is appetite. A description from 1798 speaks of a hard swelling that hurt badly; other accounts describe an open wound. Hungarian medical historians have tied the core of it to boils and carbuncles. Country people said it more simply. It eats the body.

A typical encounter was undramatic. A sore on a shin stopped healing and began to widen, hot and wet at the edges, and somebody’s grandmother was sent for. She came with crushed yarrow or grated horseradish for a poultice, sharp enough to sting the nose from across the room. If that failed there were stronger measures: a slice of raw meat bound over the place, so that the thing might feed on that instead, or grease scraped from a cart axle, or the black tar from the stem of a pipe, or the dried white dung of a dog. Nobody would call it a gentle pharmacy.

Was there ever a demon behind the name? This is where the record goes quiet. No tale gives the fene a face, a home, parents or a single adventure. It has no story at all. What it has is grammar. In the curses it is always the one doing something: it eats, it carries off, it is sent to a person the way a dog is set on a stranger. The Hungarian ethnographic encyclopedia of 1979 says plainly that these sayings are the only hint the fene was once pictured as a being that causes illness, and the Pallas encyclopedia of the 1890s made the same cautious guess, placing it among the evil spirits of sickness on the strength of the oaths alone. Hungarian scholars also note that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries a whole family of old disease names, the fene among them, passed into use as curse words. The neighbours on the site of an older belief are other sicknesses that speakers once addressed by name.

So its powers are those of a wasting disease given a will. It arrives unseen, picks a place on the body, and feeds there. It can be sent by a spoken wish, at least in the hope of the person wishing. It takes animals as readily as people.

Its limits are equally practical. It is never said to kill at a stroke; it works slowly, and slowness gave the healers time. It could be drawn off, starved, burned with sharp plants or bribed with meat. And it had no defence against familiarity. A terror spoken a hundred times a day wears smooth, and the fene has ended up as the sort of word a grandmother uses in front of children.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the fene in Hungarian folklore?

The fene is an old Hungarian name for an eating disease, a hard swelling or open sore that was said to gnaw the body. Curses such as “let the fene eat you” treat it as a living thing, which suggests it was once imagined as a spirit that causes sickness. No surviving tale describes it as a character.

Is the fene a demon?

The fene is a demon only by inference. Hungarian reference works say the curses in which it eats or carries people off are the one hint that it was once seen as a disease-causing being. It has no recorded appearance, home or story.

What does “egye meg a fene” mean?

The phrase means “let the fene eat it” and is used today as a mild oath, much like “damn it”. It began as a real curse wishing a devouring sickness on someone. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries several old Hungarian disease names became curse words in the same way.

What diseases were called fene?

Fene covered several ailments. The hidegfene was in the bone, the melegfene in the limbs, the rákfene on the face, the farkasfene was a creeping rash, and the lépfene was a livestock disease now called anthrax. Medical historians link the core meaning to boils and carbuncles.

How did people treat the fene?

Healers treated the fene with poultices and plant juices, including yarrow and horseradish. Rougher remedies included raw meat bound on the sore, cart-axle grease, pipe tar and white dog dung.