Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

question. This is certainly a matter of significance by association rather than a matter
of proving a certain conceptual value, and we must satisfy ourselves with the impression
that the examples are sufficiently complex to give substance to our discussion.
The modern usage of good is, on the other hand, fairly clear and we are therefore
running the risk, pointed out by Jones in connection with the word honour (1959, pp.
3 f.), of being trapped in our anachronistic views upon the meaning of the word.
Likewise, and as pointed out by John Casey in his analysis of Pagan virtue (1990,
pp. 199 ff.), our mixture of Kantian and Christian ideas about the character of the
good, goodness and what good actions are, tends to prevent us from seeing the
qualities of Pagan virtues (cf. Casey 1990, pp. vi ff.).
If we depend on earlier historical research then the meaning of the word good
can, with the exception of the rune-stones, only be inferred from dictionaries or from
by-products of the analysis of the appellatives þegn and drængr. There is in other
words no research tradition to build on when it comes to selecting texts and so, also
for this reason, a specific choice is no better than one based on common sense and
texts are useful only in a general discussion.
The two Anglo-Saxon texts, Beowulf—mainly the first part—and the poem
about the Battle of Maldon, have been chosen because they cover the whole period,
c. 500 to 1000 AD, in a conscious literary form. Beowulf is in many ways a didactic
poem (cf. Outzen 1816; Lindqvist 1958, pp. 117 ff.; Haarder 1975, pp. 106 ff.)
and it draws upon the whole of the traditional and complex usage of good. Its usage
is so consistent that it is hard to imagine that it should be part of the redaction made
by the scribes who produced the manuscript around 1000 AD. This is attested not
least by the fact that the second part of the poem is a complement to the first part
reflecting a Christian attitude to the concept of goodness much more contemporary
with the manuscript as such than the first part. In Beowulf, good is an essential
concept used in two different ways that taken together reflect a development. It is
hardly reasonable to suggest that scops or scribes manipulated the whole text to
make it appear as that which indeed it seems to be, namely, two juxtaposed, chronologically
separated oral poems written down on parchment.
The poem about the Battle of Maldon also suggests a change in the approach to
the concept of Goodness. Here there are some structural similarities in the usage of
the word good, but the concept is deprived of much of the complexity that characterises
its usage in the first part of Beowulf. In this contemporary, within a generation
or two, description of a crisis for the good in connection with a lost battle c. 1000 AD,
we find an up-to-date view upon the concept that differs considerably from the ideal
in the first part of Beowulf even though its affinities with Pagan and martial rather
than Christian ideals are obvious.
Turning to the Italian poet Venantius Fortunatus, we find a substantial part of the
early Beowulfian ideal in his four poems about the Merovingian Duke Lupus, poems
which can be dated to the decades around 570 AD. Although they are a Late Classical
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