Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

cept is dissolved while flattering a socially inferior group. This made it possible for
the aristocracy to engage itself in other social activities, which could later be taken
over by the lower strata, or formalised in some way or another.
It may well be that the production of the Beowulf manuscript and the composition
of Maldon belong to a period in which the Late Iron Age concept of the good is sold
out as a fashion and made commonplace, by means of traditional poetry, as well as
a standard situation for honouring the goodness-contract, i.e., the battle. Venantius’
poems, on the other hand, seem to root the good in a more genuine context and
thereby conform to most of our interpretations although we may of course be the
victims of several minor misinterpretations. It is, however, essential that we see the
good being sold out of the aristocratic circle since it is an indication that the aristocracy
was actually formed during the Late Iron Age and that it brought forth its own
first raison d’être as its first social fruit, when it exported the ideal of the good as a
social quality downwards in the societal system, thereby strengthening its own dominant
position and the hierarchical structure of society. In my opinion the ability to do
so is the inauguration of the aristocracy.
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