Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

virtually nothing, may have been as strict about the maintenance of their honour as
ever the Icelanders of the Free State. If, moreover, we are to judge the Germanic
lower classes by the examples of Sabas and Grendel, there may well have been
ideals of honour that we know nothing of at all, since not even in the Sagas of Icelanders
are the drop-outs human.
Obviously the socially acceptable combination in one man of the complementary
extremes, clemency and battle glory, designates a very capable individual, so capable
in fact that we can hardly imagine him today. Nonetheless present-day
Scandinavians can still see that honour is a concept which contains complementary
parts. It is a typical deconstruction which helps us to see this, namely when we want
to describe what happens when we defame someone. In Scandinavian languages
such an act is still a matter of depriving people of heder och ära, i.e., heiðr and eir,
an echo of the once complementary character of the honour which characterised the
good. The honour concept in the Sagas of the Icelanders is in other words a reflection
of, but also a development away from an older ideal of the good.
Friendship and Goodness
When the good, i.e., those who are both merciful and shining, meet, then moral
stability evolves and the relation between the good may become the reciprocal state
of friendship although there is still a difference in rank between the friends. In some
cases when the likes of Beowulf and Hroðgar are involved, a friendship between
nations is created, although we are given to understand that the friendship is not
going to last. Between Lupus and Venantius we can also talk of friendship. The
alleged time span between the first and the last pair of poems is in that case an
indication of the stability of the friendship.
In principle the scenes describing upper-class relationships in Beowulf, Maldon
or the Lupus poems are concerned with vertical relations in which the superior is
generous with material gifts and the inferior risks his life. In other words the goodness
contract need not develop into any reciprocal friendship, and goodness may well be
a stable vertical relation. These ideas about one’s position on the social scale are the
same ideas that guided Aud in her relationship to Vifil, and which her gender prevented
him from understanding.
The friendship that developed on Iceland during the Middle Ages is obviously
based on the contract idea of the good (Sigurðsson 1993), but it is a much more of
an institution with a reciprocal structure for special purposes than in the earlier poems,
where friendship was the far-reaching and balanced result of a series of activities
in a vertical or asymmetrical relationship.
Already in Hávamál (vv. 39–46) friendship is depicted more or less as a balanced
or reciprocal economic relation in which the two partners give and take goods of
exactly the same value. The stress on the material side of things and formal friendship
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