Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

The established aristocracy is always a model for other groups in society and as
Simmel has pointed out there is a mutual dependency between the aristocratic and
the non-aristocratic group. One such dependency is the mutually maintained balance
which characterises a society’s concept of fashion.
Fashion is more than clothes, inasmuch as such things as life-style, ideology and
moral conviction, in short everything that signifies one social group in relation to
another group, in such a way that it may be imitated by the other group, is related
to this concept. It is thus typical of a fashion or a vogue phenomenon that it involves
the selling out of virtues which had hitherto been an exclusively aristocratic
privilege or a significant symbol of the aristocracy.
It seems that at the end of Scandinavian prehistory, perhaps as a result of the
meeting between the aristocracy and the Church, the good, especially the aspect
that had to do with honouring, as a cardinal and exclusive upper-class virtue, was
deliberately sold out and exploited as a fashion during a short period. The phenomenon
is exemplified by the Scandinavian rune-stone texts which signify the
selling out of a virtue. The selling out is indicated by the relatively large number of
good thanes, drengir, fathers and sons. The latter two are obviously a ridiculous
category in connection with the original concept, since its very essence was to
make possible the formation of groups rather than singling out fathers and sons,
despite the fact that fathers may naturally be good to their sons. But if they were,
this was not primarily a function of their family relation, but a function of their social
understanding.
Even Hávamál reflects the use of the concept of the good as a fashion. In the
poem the concept is no longer the backbone of outstanding human development
through action. On the contrary, the poems criticises the concept for being hardly
more than a formal basis for what was in the days of the composition of the poem in
the process of becoming the object of a normative measure-for-measure contract
with vey little relation to the characters or moral standards of the people involved.
The poems shows the concept to have been deprived of something of its quality and
we may conclude that the concept has become commonplace.
This means that to begin with goodness was used to form the aristocracy and in
this way a relatively large number of individuals were able to gain entrance to the
aristocracy and to define their social rank. Once the group had been formed, however,
the concept of the good underwent a process of devaluation. During this short
period it was used for flattering people of a lower social rank and thereby soon lost
its character as a symbol for the Beowulfian career. It was no longer an enlightening
guideline for formalised behaviour.
In this way the aristocracy as a state-bearing group managed to show the lower
strata in society that Beowulf was a hero, but also that from now on brutality and
violence must not be used as a means of becoming the good individual, except within
formal organisations like the army. By being used as a vogue phenomenon the con-
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