The Culture of the Teutons

"This is a book I first came across as an undergraduate. It was published in Danish, but, of course, I read it in the translation which appeared in 1931. It’s a kind of introduction, on a massive scale, to early Germanic and old Norse culture – not specifically Icelandic culture, though many of its examples are taken from the Icelandic sagas. It’s an immensely stimulating book, even though quite a few of its ideas need to be revised in the light of more recent research. The author outlines three concepts that he says characterise ancient Germanic culture. These are frith, honour and luck. The word ‘frith’ is a reflection of Old Norse and Old English words meaning ‘peace’. He keeps the word ‘frith’ because peace is not exactly what is meant. What he means is a sense of co-consciousness, a strong feeling of identity with your family, your kin and the group to which you belong. I think what is characteristically Germanic is the tremendous sense of family feeling, of belonging to a group. You can hardly become an individual in this kind of society – or the only way you can become anything like an individual is by being very much part of the larger group. I suppose there is a potential paradox and irony in that. One thing about Grønbech is that he mixes an awful lot of things together, like poems recited by characters in the Icelandic sagas, most of which were written in the 13th century, though the characters to whom the poems are attributed may have lived considerably earlier than that, in the 9th or 10th centuries. Grønbech would treat these characters almost as real people, and wouldn’t take account of whether or not they might have been fictionally created by the writers of the later sagas. It’s debatable. Not in all cases, certainly, but recent scholarship has shown that these 13th century Icelandic sagas are by no means as historical as they purport to be. The sagas are prose narratives written in Iceland , mainly in the 13th century, and there are different theories about what sort of literature they are. Some people have emphasised that they were originally oral literature; some have stressed that they are predominantly written literature; but, in fact, they are a combination of both. The general view now is that they are works that obey their own laws rather than adhere strictly to historical tradition. There are many different kinds of sagas, but the ones best known outside Iceland are the so-called ‘Family Sagas’, which essentially deal with family feuds in Iceland during the Saga Age. That would be the century or so after Iceland was settled, the decades before and after 1000 AD. The 13th century sagas relate events from this period. Well, they are for the most part preserved in manuscripts rather later than the 13th century, but from studying different versions from different dates it’s usually possible to get an idea of what the original form was like. You can see some of the manuscripts in Copenhagen, but since Iceland became independent in 1944 a large number of the manuscripts have been returned to Iceland, so you should really go to the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík to see them there."