Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

Earlier discussions of the Old English, Greek or Latin texts analysed in the following
chapter do not elaborate on the use of the term good. This is probably because
the use of the word is very restricted in these texts compared with the rune-stone
texts where good is a relatively frequent word. The discussion of good in The Sagas
of the Icelanders is negligible in comparison with the discussion of honour
(Meulengracht Sørensen 1993) and friendship (Sigurðsson 1993). The meaning of
the word should be commented upon on the basis of the analysis of honour and
friendship since, in the saga fragments discussed below, honour and friendship are
echoes of Late Iron Age usage of good and other qualitative concepts.
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Conclusion
It looks as if the hall that we recognise archaeologically was indeed the central room
of the upper stratum of the Late Iron Age society. It was the room in which they
created their ideals of power and personal qualities, their ideological think-tank,
from which they emerged to try to rule the rest of the people or to take part in their
own struggle for power against their rivals.
Although the idea of good may have brought forth characteristic behaviour
in many different Iron Age settings it seems natural that it should have existed
in the hall and prospered in a room so well suited for staging generosity and
eloquence. The point in combining the hall and the textual analysis of good
behaviour is thus first to draw attention to a concept that today we are perhaps
unconsciously somewhat reluctant to recognise and translate as good.
Lund’s splendid translation into Danish of Maldon (1991) is a subtle example
of this. In two out of six straightforward cases, Lund does not use god, i.e.,
good, to translate gód, despite the fact that it would have been quite reasonable
to do so in Danish. Secondly, we ought to discuss whether the relation
between the word and the hall can provide a sense that is otherwise split
among several related concepts later to become prominent in the early
Scandinavian Middle Ages.
Contrary to concepts like honour or covrage, which have undergone continuous
evolution up to our day, the meaning of the word good undergoes a major transformation
when Christianity was established, which makes it interesting from the point
of view of cultural history. We may not succeed in fully appreciating the most deviant
Christian and Pagan forms of goodness, but goodness is still worthwhile.