Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

the contract the socially dominant person fulfils his part of the goodness contract by
being generous and helpful in negotiations, thus developing his goodness and honour,
while in return the inferior party must perform dangerous and difficult tasks for his
benefactor. The risk is that the beneficiary will be killed, the chance that new gifts, in
effect honour, and later new obligations may be bestowed upon him, until he eventually
reaches the level at which people can be mutually generous, i.e., engaged in a
friendship fruitful for both. Such a state may be personal, but it can also spread out to
a friendship between peoples. Therefore the progression of the friendship between
Beowulf and Hroðgar, is the friendship between Danes and Geats. In his
epithalamium Venantius is also aware that this kind of friendship between leaders is a
friendship between nations, since when Athanagild gives his daughter Brunhild to
Sigibert, Venantius sees it as the unification of two kingdoms, but within the aristocracy
male friendship was probably much more important for the development of
friendship between peoples than marriage.
The capability of the individual to act in the name of the people is close to unlimited.
The modern reader may doubt that the individual is defending the cause of the
people rather than his own interests, but it is nonetheless characteristic of the first
poem to Lupus that it starts by comparing Lupus to three of the heroes of the Roman
republic, Cato, Scipio and Pompey, rather than heroic emperors. The good aristocrat,
the foremost being the king himself, bestows care upon everybody, hereby in all
probability honouring an ancient Germanic tradition when the king was elected by
the assembly of free men and represented the people (Thompson 1965).
To balance this obviously advantageous account of the good individual it must be
pointed out that for some heroes the contract seems harsh, e.g., when Byrhtnoth’s
men go forth to die or when the innocent Geat acts as a decoy for Grendel. The
notion of general development and social career is nonetheless very appearent in
Beowulf, but also in the rune-stone texts from Jutland and Västergötland. In these
texts it is as easy to be a good þegn as a good drengr, although the old skilled
warriors ought to be fewer than the young ones.
Career and development structure the whole of Beowulf (Part I) and it seems
essential to start the career with the unconditional contact between the old man and
the young man or child—Hroðgar and Beowulf or Lupus and Venantius, although
Venantius may not have observed how he was about to engage himself. The early
social meeting between two men inaugurates a social, gender-bound fatherhood,
which is a main ingredient in the idea of goodness. This openness and goodness as
the beginning of a fatherhood may also explain why women are not good in the
marked social sense of the Late Iron Age, and why rune-stone sons and especially
fathers are regularly considered good.
As an upper-class role-play goodness involves a combination of logocentric and
martial qualities paired with, or inspired by, generosity. In the initial generosity we see
a reflection of good as a male disposition and a willingness eventually to create a
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