WEALTH AND GIFT-BESTOWAL AMONG THE ANCIENT SANDINVIANS One of the principles of the historical analysis is that each

period and civilization must be judged by its own standards, and we must not apply own values or inappropriate criteria to other ages. This is especially important when we are faced whit problems of historical psychology. In fact, this difficulty confronts historians and literary critics far more frequently than they suppose; and because they do not always recognize its importance, they are sometimes prevented from correctly understanding the people of a remote historical epoch and their actions. Do we not transpose to a medieval society ideas to which we are accustomed, but which perhaps are foreign to the social relationships of that period? Among such ideas, which must be treated whit great caution and circumspection, is that of private property; and it is one of particular significance. The extension of this idea to cover the ownership of land by ancient Germans and Scandinavians can hardly be considered appropriate at all event, one must take full account of the specific character of the relationships which pertained at that time, Land was not something which could be freely used and transferred _it belonged inalienably to its owners. It is a clearly seen in the Norwegian odal was retained by the ODALMEN. There were close and unbreakable ties between a family and its possession. Odal was conceived of a family possession from time immemorial, or from the time of heathen barrows (haugodal). Odal meant not only family estate, but also patrimony, birth place !fatherland, native land. It is very significant that Odal-possession, family homestead-garor, server as a model for the idea of cosmos. According to the Scandinavian cosmology, the world of human being was a Midgardr (Middle-yard); the outer world, the abode of giants, Utgardr (out-yard); and the burgh of the gods Asgardr. The pair of the cosmic conceptions, Mivgardr and Utgardr, was in conformity with another pair of notions, Innangards and Utgards (within and beyond the fence), which denoted two main parts of the estate. It is even more significant that the notions of Odal and ETHEL (a-s del, German edel) have a common origin. The categories of possession, nobility ant inherited qualities from the latter and vice versa. The possession of odal ennobled a man. Originally, a freeborn man and an odalman were synonyms. The hereditary possession of odal was an inborn quality of a free man.. So beneath relationships of a juridical and economic character there existed a definite social and psychological system of emotions and concepts. A man was closely and indissolubly linked with the land he cultivated; he saw in that land a prolongation of his own nature. And the fact that a man was thus personally linked with his possession found reflection in a a general awareness of the indivisibility of the world of men and the world of nature. But property relations were specific noto nly as regards land. Often enough, movable property in so-called archaic communities did not represent wealth in the modern understanding of the word neither was it a means of accumulating economic power. A most important aspect of property ownership in this connection was the question of the transfer. All property, apart from items essential to everyday existence, had to pass constantly from one owner to another. Wealth primarily fulfilled a social function in that transfer of possessions contributed to the acquisition

and increase of social prestige and respect, and sometimes the handing-over of property could involve greater prestige than is retention and accumulation. There accordingly existed in that community a complex and meticulously evolved ritual of transferring possessions. Ethnologists believe that the colossal part played in barbarian life by transfer and exchange cannot satisfactorily be explained merely by economic causes. The constant transference of items from one owner to another was a way of ensuring social contact between the exchanging parties: in the exchange of objects, and also of marriageable women between groups, definite, fixed human relationships were established and were given dramatic and emotional content. Hence the exchange of objects was value. What mattered was not the transferred object itself, but the persons who owned the object and the fact that they had chosen to transfer it. Exchanges and agreements among primitive peoples usually assumed the character of an gifts. Formally these gifts were voluntary; in a practice, they were strictly compulsory. One need only mention the potlatch system found among the Indians of the Pacific shores of North Americas: tribes and tribal groups meeting on festive occasions would exchange gifts and organize magnificent entertainments and feasts for the opposing side, doing everything in their power ti surpass it in their generosity and hospitality. In this process they were not deterred by the possibility of squandering all their reserves of food and possessions and did not trouble to consider how they should feed themselves thereafter. This rivalry in extravagance and disdain for wealth was not infrequently accompanied by the actual destruction of possessions. Ethnologists reckon that the institution of potlatch as observed among, other peoples was based on a concern for upholding and increasing tribal prestige. Gifts and hospitality could play their part in establishing friendly relations and a state of peace. But cordiality of this kind was not far removed from aggressiveness: at times the natives were not in the least endeavouring to please the recipients of their gifts and favours on the contrary, they spared no effort to humiliate them, to overcome them with their generosity. Hospitality was closely linked with rivalry and could easily turn into open hostility. Potlatch, indeed, was one of the ways in which leaders sought to oppose one another. It may strike the modern mind as curious and strange that they should have striven to hurt their rivals in such a peculiar manner: instead of destroying the latters food supplies, they preferred to hand over and even exhaust their own possessions! Underlying the peculiar variety of competition was the notion that a gift which was not compensated for by another of equal value would make the recipient dependent on the donor and that this dependence would humiliate and endanger his honour, freedom and even his life. By asserting his own prestige, the donor would triumph over rival. This was explained by the view that the objects bestowed were not regarded as inert and inanimate they were supposed to contain a part of the person who bestowed them. Consequently, a connection would be established between the donor and the recipient of a gift, and the latter would be put under an obligation to the former. In the eyes of these people an exchange of gifts thus possessed a magic power. It represented one of the means of social contact, together with marriages, mutual favours, sacrificial offering and

acts of worships _in all these rituals there was at the same time an exchange of relationships between tribes, families and individuals, or between human being and gods. An exchange of presents served as a means of maintaining regular contact between the component groups of a community. This intercourse though mutual visits and a system of a celebrations, invariably accompanied by gifts and festivities, assumed the firm of give and take. Wealth in an archaic community was significant not so much from the utilitarian point of view as from that of the amount of social prestige in involved. First and foremost it provided its owner with personal authority and influence. A leader could not demonstrate his wealth without distributing it; he bestowed the shadow of his name on the recipients of gifts, thereby extending the scope of his own power. The concept of the value of gifts was deeply affected by various phenomena of a magic, religious and ethical nature. The economic role of gift-giving in an archaic community was invested with rituals and myths. Are these observations applicable only to the primitive tribes studied by ethnologists, or can they to some degree also be extended to cover barbarian communities in the Europe of early medieval period and, in particular, Scandinavians? It is characteristic that M. Mauss begins his Essai sur le din with a quotation from Hvmal: A gift always looks for repayment (ey sr til gildis gigf) And above we find: Fanca ec mildan mann eda sv matargodan At ei vaeri biggia begit, Eda sis fir svgi, Et leid s laun ef baegi And again: Vin snom scal madr vinr vera Oc gialda giof vid giof

Statements of this kind could be accepted as general phrases and aphorism of worldlu wisdom such as abound in Hvaml and might not necessarily be interpreted in a strictly juridical sense, were it not that these maxims are repeated in Norwegian and Swedish regional laws, where they are quoted as representing standard legal practice. The principle or demanding equivalent compensation for a gift received es set out in the Norwegian Gulapingslov as follows: engi (giog) er lainad, nema iammikit kome egegn, sem gevet var. The word laun, used in Norwegian and Swedish laws and in Icelandic sagas and poetry, signified recompense, compensation for gift. The formula pronounce by a father at the ceremony of introducing into the family his illegitimate son (that is, of conferring upon him all the rights acquired by attleindinr the two alliterative expressions giald oc giof. The bestowal or gifts and their compensation (anti-gifts) are

here regarded as being closely interconnected. The corresponding directions contained in Swedish laws find a parallel, according to the opinion of K. von Amira, in the Lombard launegild. Evidence that the rule of obligatory compensation for a gift was observed in practice and men were indeed wary of accepting the possessions of the others without compensation, because they feared the prospect of becoming independent on the donor, may be found in Icelandic sagas. When important personages moved to Iceland, they refused to accept portions of land from the original in habitants without paying for them. Thus, the first discoverer of the island Ingolf Arnarson offered his kinswoman Steinunn the Old one of estates in his possession but she preferred to give him an embroidered mantle of English manifracture in exchange fit the land and expressed the wish that her new acquisition sould be treated as a purchase so it seemed to her loess dangerous in the event of a dissolution of their agreement. Many settles en Iceland thought it preferable to seize land by force rather than ti receive it from someone else as a gift. The motive governing the actions of the settler Halkel in this connection es indicative . On his arrival in Iceland, he spent the first winter with his kinsman Ketikbjorn. The latter offered him a part of his land. But Halkel thought it humiliating tom take land from him (Hallokatli ptti litimnnlight at piggia land at homun), and he challenged Grim to a duel because of the state. Grim accepted the challenge and fell in the contest, after which Halkel began living on his land, during the period when it was easy to acquire territory in Iceland from the original inhabitants. The same principle was valid when applied to movable property. When the Icelander Kjartans Olfsson received from the Norwegian kinf Olf Tryggvason a mantle from his shoulder, Kjartan had put himself well into the kings power. After some hesitation Kjartan accepted baptism on the kings insistence. He received became his retainer. It is scarcely possible to doubt that the practice of gift-bestowal current among the Scandinavians was essentially affected by the very same ideas as those which motivated the other primitive peoples of which ethnologists have written. The Danish scholar Vilhelm Grnbech, in his examination of the principle of gift-compensation among the Scandinavians of the pagan period, has advanced the theory that, in accordance with ideas held at that time, any gift laid the recipient open obligations towards the donor. Underlying the gratitude felt by anyone who accepted the gift was the realization that by so doing he might find himself inseparably linked with the donor. But a connection of this kind was not always desirable; it could involve humiliation for the recipiebnt, for, if a gift was not returned by a compensatory offering, the man who had conferred it. Thus, the practice of gift-bestowal, necessitating compensation possessed for the Scandinavians, as well as for other peoples, both a juridical and a socio-ethical connotation, and a demarcation line between these two aspects can be drawn only conditionally. After all, the same can be said of offering made to the gods, since here too the principle from which these emanated was that of do ut des. The link between the donor of wealth and its recipient is one of the leading motifs in the poetry of those retainers who served them in exchange for a distribution of gold, weapons and other

valuables. Such favours bound the latter to their overlord by inseverable bonds and imposed upon them the obligation of preserving their loyalty up to and including death. The craving for silver, which was so strong among the Scandinavians of the Viking period, would be incomprehensible if no account was taken of their religious beliefs. The Savandinavians disovered the existence of precious metals at a time when they could not yet use them for purposes of exchanges; in the North either objects were directly exchanged one for another, or else such possessions as cattle, homewoven cloth vadml and other goods served as exchange-itmes. For a long while precious metals and coins were chiefly used by the beginning to look upon gold and silver as forms of wealth capable of giving material expression to the good fortune and prosperity of a man and his family or tribe. A person who had accumulated a quantity of precious metal acquired, according to their way of thinking, a means of preserving and increasing his success and good luck. In this process the actual gold and silver, irrespective of who owner them, did not themselves contain these blessings _ they came it compromise an inherent part of the qualities of their owner; they, as it were, absorbed the prosperity of the person who owned them and of his ancestors, and they retained those qualities. For this reason the associates and retainers of chieftains sought to obtain gifts from the latter in the hope of thus acquiring a portion of the success and good luck which enriched their superiors. The unconcealed craving for precious objects and hard cash displayed by those who formed the immediate retinue of highly placed persons cannot be explained simply by their greed and desire to acquire wealth: it was connected with pagan modes of thought. Hence, the owner of valuables bestowed upon him did not transfer them to others, he did not attempt to use them for the purchase of other acquisitions _ land, for example- he looked for the most reliable method of retaining them in his possession. Historians and archaeologists have long been impressed by the extraordinary number of hoards containing precious metals, coins and other goods which have been found in the Scandinavian North and belong to the Viking period. According to one theory, the natives of this region used to hide their enemies. S. Bolin has even assumed that teasure troves, which have been dated with the help of the coins discovered en them, were dug especially frequently during periods of internecine strife and wars. This is entirely possible. But it is still not clear whether the owners of these hoards wished to hide their possessions in order to make use of them later, or whether they buried them to remain there in perpetuity. In the former case it is clear that they intented to conceal their wealth, in the latter something different is involved: the objects could more probably have been buried with a view to their being useful in another world after death. Let us turn to the evidence provided by the sagas. Skallagrim, Egils father, before he died took a chest containing silver to a marsh where he let it sink. Egil himself took precisely the same action with the two chest of silver which he put the serfs to death so that no one should ever be able to find this trove. In both instances a quantity of silver was hidden just before death. The wealthy and distinguished Norwegian, Ketilbjorn, after settling in Iceland, also hid his silver in the mountains, having slain the serfs who helped him to do so. The Viking leader from Jomsborg, Bi the Fat, fatally wounded ina a sea battle, found his enemies trying to board his ship. He leaped over the

side taking two cases of gold with him to the bottom of the sea. According to legend, Odin ordered that every warrior who fell in battle should appear before him in Valhalla together with the possessions he had with him on the funeral pyre or hidden in the ground. I know of no evidence that treasures were concealed for a given period and then dug up again. No reference to such a practice exists in either the sagas or runic inscriptions. There is every reason to assert that, in hiding their possessions in the ground, Sacandinavians normally thought to preserve them with a view to taking them with them to the next world, just as, in transferring to another world, they required the weapons, everyday objects, horses, dogs, servants and ships which were consigned to the burial mound together with the dead chieftain or other noble person. Precious metal, however, were not placed in the tomb; their purpose was a special one. Silver and gold hidden in ground remained at the perpetual posthumous disposal of their owner and his kin and was, as it were, the realization of their success and happiness, their personal family prosperity. Thus, from the very beginning money for the barbarians represented an object of value not as a source of wealth and material advantages but as a kind of transcendent treasure, a blessing of an immaterial character. It is in the highest degree symptomatic, of course, that it should have been silver and gold which were looked upon as the embodiment of such treasures, since they were the material valuables of those peoples from whom the barbarians took them. The views held by the pagans, which to their way of thinking were linked to the concept of precious metals, in facts marked a definite advance towards their assimilation of the idea of wealth, towards closer contacts with a civilization which was well acquainted with the normal everyday value of money. Nevertheless, the above observations, in our opinion, do make it easier to understand the specific character of that thirst for plunder and riches which took possession of the Scandinavians in the period of Viking expansion. During their raids on other countries the Vikings captured considerable quantities of valuables. The chieftains and nobility found themselves the owners of splendid weapons, decorations, magnificent garments, treasures, slaves, herds of cattle, ships. But as regards the accumulation of possessions and their conversion into the means of exploiting a dependent population, certain essential qualifications will have to be made here. The Vikings lavishly spent the wealth that came into their hands. The property then in the possession of the hereditary and military aristocracy enabled it to maintain its military power and social prestige at the requisite level. Generosity and hospitality counted as one of the most important positive characteristics of those who aspired to the highest positions in their society. In speaking og distinguished and influential persons, Scandinavian sources invariably state that they were noble, rich, friendly, open-handed in entertaining, endowed with generous natures. And here reference were made not merely to certain inborn qualities possessed by members of nobility (these were assumed to exist anyway) but to the way of life regarded as obligatory for its representatives, to their line of conduct, any deviation from which would have destroyed their reputation and authority. The expression leysa men ut med giofum (to send guests away with presents) is used in the sagas as a kind of terminus technicus. In the kingssagas it is noted as

something unheard-of and inadmissible that the song of the Norwegian King Eirik Blood-axe were tight-fisted, and this gave grounds for comparing them with the simple peasants. According to tradition, when a country was ruled by a successful king who was generous in the matter of feast and entertainments, then, naturally, peace reigned, cattle were bred, the land brought forth fine harvests and fish were caught in the sea. Such a king was called rsael favourable for the harvest, favouring abundance. Generosity here is regarded not only as a moral duty but also as a quality possessing certain magical and sacramental properties. A noble was obliged to organize rich feasts and to bestow presents on his guests. The memory of generous hofdinjar was transmitted from one generation to the next.