Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

that a common word such as good, used in widely different Scandinavian societies,
could be adopted by an institution that was barely formalised and perhaps not yet
recognised.
Jansson (1984, pp. 131 ff.) and Herschend (1994b, pp. 187 ff.) discuss the texts in
which the person commemorated is praised for his generosity with food. To Jansson
these texts stand as a symbol of the good peasant or master, i.e., a bóndi. In addition
to this kind of flattery good is also used as an epithet describing a manifested quality of
a man such as his seamanship, honour and bravery. Good seems thus to have been a
way of both pointing out the character of a person as well as the quality of his formal or
informal functions in society, and Jansson’s opinion has affinities with Moltke’s (1976,
pp. 162 ff.). Jansson links generosity with food and the mildness that goes together
with it to the very last lines of Beowulf, in which the dead king is praised for the same
qualities as the peasants in the Mälar Valley.
Herschend (1994b) compares these texts, where good is qualified in several ways,
such as being a matter of generosity with food, quality of speech, mildness, ability to
listen and to negotiate, with a set of stones where good is part of a general description.
He connects the former stones with one of two complementary sides of the Late Iron
Age idea of chieftainship and rulership, i.e., the peaceful negotiative side as opposed to
the generous and brave side, but he thinks of the usage of good in very broad terms as
just generally speaking ‘good’.
In a discussion of the meaning of the words drengr and þegn, primarily in scaldic
verse, Jesch (1993) demonstrates two different usages of the former, namely the eventual
change from a specific meaning (close follower of a warlord) to a more general one
(man; warrior). Furthermore, she sees differences between an East Norse and a West
Norse usage of both words (Jesch 1993, pp. 166 and 196 f.). In my opinion the East
Norse meaning of drengr would agree with the late West Norse usage.
Jesch mentions the connection with good, but does not elaborate upon expressions
like góðr drengr or góðr þegn. That is quite natural since the expressions are
commonplace stock-phrase prose. In the compressed format of the dróttkvætt
(Gade 1995, pp. 29 ff.) one gains very little from the word ‘good’ and generally
speaking it is a waste of a syllable.
In his discussion of the positive male ideal drengr, Meulengracht Sørensen (1993,
pp. 203 ff.) touches upon the use of the word good in the expression drengr góðr,
an expression that designates a man’s personality. Since drengr góðr may also be
used about women it is fairly obvious that in The Sagas of the Icelanders the expression
has developed into a normative ideal without designating a nobility that did not
exist on Iceland (cf. Jesch 1993, p. 166). The usage is meant to describe a person
who defends his or her own integrity without wronging others—a forceful, but disciplined
person (Meulengracht Sørensen 1993, pp. 203 & 205.). Meulengracht
Sørensen agrees, in other words, with Jónsson 1926. His interpretation is difficult to
reject, but it concerns only The Sagas of the Icelanders.
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