Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

III. The Characteristics of the
Good
The Model Behaviour
The good is an itinerary on which the traveller, the individual, is bound to meet with
all kinds of difficulties, intentional ones, with the purpose of being on purpose, and
rational as well as surprising and emotional difficulties. All difficulties must be overcome
in order to reach the goal, i.e., a life governed by friendship in familial and
communal affiliation. Seen in this light, the good is linked to what Nussbaum considers
a classical and Aristotelian tradition of ethics (cf. 1992, p. 10, col. 4 f.). But the
mechanistic way in which a man like Beowulf travels and brings us along through the
necessary stages of goodness seems also to echo a kind of unreflected normative
code of honour and loyalty which Ceasar and Tacitus noted in the noble, but savage,
early German (Caesar, De Bello Gallico VI. 22. 2; Tacitus, Germania VIII–IX;
Thompson 1965, pp. 8 ff.).
In my opinion this kind of virtue made it worthwhile for the Romans in the century
around the birth of Christ to pick out some Germanic leaders and support them in
order to make them more Romanly civilised. The support made it possible for these
leaders to be generous and responsible, and in this way, the Romans inspired a new
Germanic virtue: that of being economically powerful and generous in a socially responsible
way. Eventually this kind of generosity created the form of loyalty and
goodness, which is evident in Beowulf.
The initial contact between Hroðgar and the child Beowulf is thus, on the one
hand, an example of an unconditional goodness related to Aristotelian ideas of ethical
reflection telling us that in principle, goodness needs an unconditional start in
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