A free man, by definition, was a man who could fight to defend himself, his kin, and his king.
by Thomas Fleming
I want to begin with a few bits of basic information, subject to correction from the superior authorities on whom I am counting. Beowulf is http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=239” poem and whether or not the length and composition of Beowulf may have been influenced by reading or at least knowledge of the Aeneid.
Although the manuscript of Beowulf is generally dated to approximately 1000 AD, the ms. may well be a copy of a work composed much earlier, even before 800. Both internal evidence, apparently, and analogies with other epic poems would suggest that it is the most recent version of a traditional story, polished by generations of perhaps illiterate revisers, before reaching its present form. If there are, indeed, traces of other dialects, the analogy with Homer is useful.
The story of Beowulf concerns http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3151 peoples, primarily Geats, Danes, and Frisians. There is an undoubted historic core: Hygelac is referred to not only in the Liber Monstrorum, and his raid on the Frisians, dated to about 515, is noted by Bishop Gregory of Tours in his history of the Franks. Most students of history inevitably look at the past from a southern perspective, observing the torch of civilization as it passes from Egypt and the Middle East first to Greeks and Romans and then to the French and then, belatedly, to the English. Norman Conquest gives us opportunity to study microcosm of interaction between Germanic barbarians and Roman culture, though not quite so simple: AS’s had been strongly influenced by Latin Christianity and later by Norman culture, while Normans themselves were a Germanic-Nordic people who had only recently adopted French language, Roman Church, and what was left of Gallo Roman culture. In other words our gaze is fixed between latitudes 30 N to 40 N and then a bit beyond 50 N.
For this discussion we want to turn our perspective upside down or rather upside up and look down from north, shedding feeble polar light of 60 degrees + North upon history. While Greeks were creating and Romans extending civilization in the sunny Mediterranean, their distant IE cousins were eking out a savage and marginal existence in the frozen wastes of Scandinavia, where civilization is known, even today, only as a tall tale told by heroic searovers or Swedish tourists stuffed with cheap pizza, raw wine and burned garlic. (No offense meant to Steve Berg et al.)
Swedes, Geats, Jutes, Lombards, Burgundians, Goths were the northern brethren of the Germanic peoples who lived to the South. They had been living in Scandinavia since roughly 2000 BC during a mild period for Northern Europe, and as the first age of global warming came to an end (complete perhaps by 500 BC), many of the tribes began moving South and eventually took part in the great Germanic folk-migrations that overthrew the Roman Empire. An early hint of what was to come from Scandinavia was the migration of the Teutones and Cimbri, who left their homes and raided their way across Europe and into Italy, where they were stopped by Roman general Marius in 101 BC.
The Jutes and Angles and Saxons who began attacking Britain in the IV C came, roughly from Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, and northern Saxony. Hrolfe the Walker, the pirate and freebooter also known as Rollo, when Charles the Simple granted him the land to be called Normandy in 911, launched his raids from the territory of the Angles. William the Conqueror was the direct descendant, 6 generations later, of Rollo the Viking. Thus the three contestants for the throne of England in 1066 were all cousins: Anglo-Saxons (whose ancestors included Jutes from Jutland), Normans, and Norwegians (commanded by the most remarkable man of the age, Harald Hardrada). Obviously, there are serious differences among the 3 nations. By 1066 both Normans and Anglo-Saxons had gone a long way from their ancestral roots: They had accepted Christianity, were part of Catholic Europe, had developed more sophisticated agriculture, technology, and trade. Even 11th century Norway had developed the institutions of a national-state. Much of Norway was already Christianized even before Harald’s brother Olaf came to the throne and unwisely http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2888 the job. Still, it is hard to find a streak of Christian humility or kindness in Harald.
Nonetheless, despite the dangers inherent in extrapolation from later Vikings back to the Angles and Saxons, it is helpful to try to understand a little of primitive Scandinavia, from the time of the Anglo-Saxon raids down to the Viking period. First thing to take note of: very very cold. Climate change for worse had accomplished several things. The tall, blond, rugged Scandinavian type, though not universal, was probably the result in part of adaptation to climate. Conditions varied, of course, and there was good arable land in some parts of southern Scandinavia, but generally at a disadvantage. Fishing, herding played larger role than elsewhere. Thin population—often bled away by migrations—and rough conditions did not encourage large scale political units.
We have next-to no knowledge of Anglo-Saxon society on eve of invasions, but we know a little more about Vikings several hundred years later. At the top of the social order were kings, members of royal kindreds, though power did not pass automatically to eldest son or, failing sons, a daughter, either in Scandinavia or in AS England. The king was primarily warchief and thus a tough and resolute warrior was needed to protect the people. King much more loosely applied than among Goths and other tribes to the South—often claimed by members of royal clan. Under the king were jarls/earls, who enjoyed power and prestige over community or communities, and in Scandinavia were commissioned by the king to represent his government, much like the comites in Carolingian Francia. These nobles, powerful as they might be, lacked the divine sanction of kings who claimed descent from Woden.
“The basic unity in society…was no king or earl but a bondir, a free farmer, roughly equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon ceorl…” [H.R. Lloyn, The Vikings in Britain The bondir was no little man in our sense of the word. He was at his most typical the head of a household, a man of some property in land and especially in stock. He was a slave-owner. His symbols of rank were his axe and his spear. The mark of the freeman was the right to bear arms. He was oath-worthy and law-worthy… Sturdy and at times savage, independence was a characteristic of this breed, but…his very litigious and squabblesome nature found its outlet in what was essentially communal institutional life, in the folk-court, the local thing held at some traditional spot…”
Anglo-Saxon society developed under http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2109 influence, but it started from roughly the same place and was never fully detached from its foundations. The freemen and Earls were fiercely individualistic, self-assertive, quick to anger; also intensely familial and devoted to kin. Marriage far more egalitarian than among more developed peoples. Free contract between man and woman, dissolvable by either party. Scandinavia and AS societies were not the Playboy Club that Iceland has become, but they were freer and less restricted in their sexual mores and attitude toward women than, say, Mediterranean cultures. This is one more indication of how primitive they were and are.
In Beowulf, the most important social and legal fact to notice is the code of the Germanic warrior. A free man, by definition, was a man who could fight to defend himself, his kin, and his king. Blood revenge and what would later be called dueling were social and moral norms.
In modern times, English law has gone farthest in restricting the individual’s recourse to violence. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, if they were freemen, did not so much take the law into their own hands as exercise the law on their own authority. In avenging a death in the family, they were less interested in the motives and circumstances than in the fact. Blood once spilled cannot be recalled, as the furies say in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Even in a case of accidental homicide, where no negligence is involved, a man is still dead, and–as the legal maxim held–”Legis enim est qui inscienter peccet, scienter emendet”, that is a man should knowingly fix the harm he had done in ignorance.” In tort law, this principle endured into the 19th century.
For the Saxons, murder as well as accidental homicide were settled by payment of blood-money to the kindred. “Homicide appears in the Anglo-Saxon dooms as a matter for composition in the ordinary case of slaying in an open quarrel. There are additional public penalties in aggravated cases, as where a man is slain in the king’s presence or otherwise in breach of the king’s peace.” [Maitland and Pollock I.52
Wergeld, as our Saxon ancestors called it, is a custom of many nations, although none, perhaps, has elaborated it into a social system so successfully as the Germanic peoples. The monster Grendel, whom Beowulf kills, is an outlaw not so much because he kills the Danish king’s retainers as because his refusal to pay compensation puts him outside society.
“Although it may be assumed that the primitive Germans recognized only the fact of bloodshed, motivation and circumstance did come to play an important part. Of course the slayer’s kin could stick to the letter of the law of blood, but “one may almost say that the leading motive in heroic literature is precisely this difference of opinion between the people who hold that under any circumstance it is shameful to come to an agreement with the bana (slayer) of one’s lord or friend or kinsman, and the people who are willing under certain circumstances to come to such an agreement.” [Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn by R.W. Chambers with supplement by C. L. Wrenn, IIIrd Ed., Cambridge UP, 1963, 276-77. Liability also extended to one who loaned weapons or was present in a fray.
Much of what underlies the principle of blood-revenge is summed up in the phrase “collective responsibility.” In other words, an individual who killed or maimed or robbed someone was not the only person responsible. If a town rose up against the king, it was not just the guilty parties who suffered. In Medieval Tuscany, Florence in particular, wide networks of kinfolks were held collectively responsible for paying the fines of an offending member, and this gave the Florentine business classes the ability to expel entire noble kindreds. One of King Alfred’s successors made local communities responsible for paying the fines for unpunished criminals—which must have served as a powerful incentive to punish the guilty parties.
This is a very inadequate and amateurish introduction, which can be fleshed out in many directions, but I wanted to begin to show that in the heroic world of Beowulf, we shall not find many things to confirm our modern liberal prejudices in favor of equality, individualism, and universal moral rules.
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