Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

connections is marked and disproportional to the single line (v. 44, l. 2) in which we
are advised to meet friends with an open mind. Actually the very opening of this
section about friendship mocks some of the basic concepts of goodness, mildness
and generosity with food, by inferring that they are always tied to an ulterior motive.
However, in the original ideal they are genuine at the very beginning of the goodness
contract and at its successful conclusion:
158
Fannka ek mildan mann eða svá matar góðan,
at ei væri þiggia þegit eða síns féar
svági ... ... ... ... .... at leið sé laun, ef þægi.
(I found no man so mild nor so good with food that that which was offered him
was not taken, nor a man so ... [wasteful?] of his property that he became fed up
with compensation when (it was) given.—Hávamál v. 39)
Friendship as a convenient contract rather than reciprocal relationship is further developed
during the Middle Ages and it leads to several situations in which the formal
character of the concept brings people into insoluble predicaments equal to those
which are created by the demands upon a man’s honour (cf. Sigurðsson. 1993, pp.
153 ff.).
When honour was discussed above it became clear that it was from the beginning
a complementary concept among the upper-classes, and that on Iceland the
complementarity was subject to a pressure that sought to unify the concept. Likewise
friendship seems to have involved a reciprocal relationship between two good
men, with friendship as the end product. In Icelandic society, however, there is a
tendency to define a nucleus of the concept by constantly bringing it into correspondence
with a publicly accepted pattern of behaviour.
Hávamál should, therefore, be seen as the result of a philosophical position halfway
between the aristocratic and the egalitarian points of view. Its coverage can be
seen in Fig. 37.
Whether the different aspects of honour or friendship are chronological or social
is hardly the issue here since even today we understand the complementarity of the
concepts, and we know that the social periods in which their singularity or
complementarity differ are not consecutive or simply linked to a linear development
over a time span as short as a thousand years or so. We are also aware that the
solutions of Icelandic society which stress the communal and iterative definition of
honour and friendship are far from ideal today even though we can accept a good
deal of their egalitarian basis.