Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

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UlfR ok þeR Ragnarr restu sten þannsi æftiR Fara, faður sinn . . . kristin mann, saR
hafði goða tro til Guðs. (VG 55).
Ulf and Ragnar they erected this stone after Fari their father . . . a Christian man. He
had the good faith in God.
There is little doubt that Öind was good in a Christian sense and that the goodness of
Fara’s Christian belief was confidence in God and not the pursuit of worldly success.
The peaceful if not meek disposition of Öind in spite of his being a þegn is also worth
noting. Here þegn is hardly an appellative for a man who is nothing more than a
member of the chieftain’s or king’s warrior retinue. Þegn is an appellative for a
relatively peaceful male ideal and there is a causal tie between his goodness as a
þegn and the goodness of his belief in God.
Birgit Sawyer discusses good in an article and suggests that it was used as a
marker of social status in connection with men who were important landowners
(Sawyer 1991, p.110). The correlation between good and the words drengr and
þegn is interpreted as a link between the social status and the title quality of these
words. Sawyer does not believe that the words refer to goodness of heart, competence
or skill, since texts using good are so uncommon that they cannot reasonably
be supposed to describe this phenomenon.
This argument is not entirely convincing since there is on the whole no indication
that rune-stone texts were ever meant to describe anything in a neutral way. The odd
usage of the word in connection with rune-stones seems, moreover, to be proved by
its restricted use in relation to women (Sawyer 1991, p. 110) and its strong correlation
with the appellatives and possible titles, drengr and þegn.
Sawyer, we may infer, takes Moltke’s point of view more or less for granted, but
with reference to Sawyer this way of favouring the social status of the word has been
commented upon by Þráinson (1994). He points out the purely spiritual meaning of
the word in Þorvalds þátur tasalda (Þráinson 1994, p. 36). In the short narrative the
Pagan Bárðr has been brought in front of King Olaf in Nidaros by the dugandi
drengr (the king’s capable young man) Þorvald tasalda and Þorvald’s friend the
dugandi and góðr (capable and good) Sigurðr. In this situation Bárðr tells the King
that he wants to become a Christian and the following happens:
Var þá Bárður skíður ok allir hans menn. Þá mælti Bárður: ‘Seg þú még, kóngur,
hvort ek er nú góður.’ Konungur kvað svo vera. (Íslendinga sögur 1987, p. 2321).
Bard and all his men were then christened. Then Bard spoke: You tell me King
whether I am now good. The King said that so it was.
Bard’s and our doubts thus set to an ironic rest, we may rejoice and notice that the
goodness of Siguðr and Barðr is combined in Öind, the father mentioned on the
rune-stone SM 37 quoted above. This means that goodness by christening, a mockery
of the Pagan ideal, spread as far as Småland. The quotation from Smålandslagen
is an example of the same phenomenon.