Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

As an upper-class ideal good exists as a relation between people and to begin
with that relation is always asymmetric. The benefactor is the superior individual and
even if the beneficiary may in his turn, i.e., in another setting, fulfil the role of the
benefactor, there is no doubt that as long as people call each other good there is a
difference between them. If, however, both are good in such a way that there is no
need of pointing it out within a given social setting, then the preconditions for what
may eventually become a complementary pair have been established, and this kind
of pair is the emblem of the civilised society.
It is naturally difficult to stabilise the asymmetry and the complementarity as they
form the basis of the dynamics of society, and it is especially difficult to avoid their
transformation into polarisation and antagonism. The anecdote about Aud and Vifil
shows this as do the problems which Lupus ran into after Sigibert’s death, when his
loyalty to King Sigibert and Queen Brunhild stood out as a form of antagonism to
people like Ursio. This means that being good is the cause of class conflict as well as
of conflict between competing equals.
That goodness, according to the sources used here, stands out as an upper-class
phenomenon is no doubt the expression of a strong bias, but it is even more noteworthy
that women cannot be good while men and even artefacts can qualify as
intentionally good. This bias seems the more unreasonable as examples show that
women act like good men and that through their actions they promote goodness and
are capable of giving guidance, even to men, in the proper understanding of the
concept.
Queen Aud is mainstream Late Iron Age good when she acts as a leader for her
party and later as a queen in her fjord. Wealhtheow reminds the men of their duties
as good, and Hygd, who is not too mean to give presents, performs one of the main
tasks of the good ruler: that of being generous. Women are, however, peaceful rather
than good in their ideal role and as queens like Brunhild or her equivalent, the wife of
an important peasant like Olaf Feilan, who married Alfdis of Barra, they enter the
society of their husband at a fairly late stage in life when their role, far from being
childish, is already rather formal. This means that they lack the social origin of the
good from which Beowulf benefited when he went to Denmark to re-introduce himself
to Hroðgar, who knew Beowulf as a boy:
Ic hine cuðe cnichtwesende
(Beowulf v. 372).
‘I knew him well being a boy’, i.e., when Beowulf was a boy
That upper-class women have been uprooted also means that they have lost the
opportunity to repay whatever reward they may have received in their childhood,
and that it is difficult for them to start a relation with a man, or to engage a man, other
than their husband, in a goodness contract or relation by being unconditionally nice
to him.
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