The Heroic Ideal

The Comitatus Group

"The chieftain of the comitatus, or small war band, is surrounded by noble warriors, his comites 'companions,' who have sworn to defend him with their lives. He, in turn, is unstintingly liberal in giving them gifts and weapons. . . . Their virtues were those of reckless and absolute personal courage, loyalty to one's chief; and on the chief's part, generosity and protection. The aim was glory--the fame of 'a good name' after death.

"In Old English heroic poetry, the chief was often called 'the gold-giver' . . . . [It] indicated the Germanic custom of taking the symbolic measure of a man's worth by the amount of gold he could win through valor. Thus, the chief, by his large-handed generosity, was asserting his confidence in his man's daring and courage in combats to come; and his follower, by accepting the chief's gift, was vowing an equally perfect fidelity. Tacitus* quite rightly emphasized the bloody-minded ferocity behind the comitatus oath, but it was still a noble bond between men and not very far from what we now call brotherly love."

*The Roman historian Tacitus described this heroic ideal in his treatise Germania, written in 98 A.D.

Revenge and the value of kinship

"Throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, as in some Latin countries today, a man's kin were his strongest support in everyday affairs. If a man was killed, it was the duty of his kinsmen, however remotely related, to avenge him in kind. Naturally, this system led to long-standing, self-propelling vendettas. They might lie dormant for a generation or two and then erupt in a new rash of slayings.

"While blood for blood was the most satisfying form of repaying the wrongs done one's kin, an equally respectable and more customary method was a money payment called the wer-gild 'man-payment.'  This could be accepted by the kindred of the slain man without loss of face because each man's life had a set money value according to his standing in society."

The value of fame

"A man's good name on others' lips--in Old English lof  'fame, praise,' or dom, loosely 'the good judgment of others,' related to the verb 'deem'--was the final goal of the heroic life. It is no accident that the last word of the poem should be lof-geornost 'most eager for fame.'"

"To achieve a place in such a world, a nobleman had to rely on his own personal strength, which is always an ambiguous force for others' good. . . . The Anglo-Saxons believed that life was a struggle against insuperable odds and that a man's wyrd or 'lot' would be what it would be. . . . . Even in early pagan days, they do not seem to have believed in a supernatural conception of Destiny. Wyrd originally meant simply 'what happens' . . . . Perhaps it was precisely because. . . life was potentially meaningless, that they looked to the heroic notion of personal fame to find the strength to resist wyrd. The Anglo-Saxons had an incomparable sense of the transience and pointlessness of mortal life. Only a man's name lived on, and then only in the mouths of others, usually the poets."

(The quotations above are excerpts from from the commentary in Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, by Howell D. Chickering, Jr.)