Vilhelm Grønbech > Quotes

“Luck sets its stamp upon a man outwardly. Whence had the Northmen their
keenness of vision, which enabled them to apprize a man at a glance? At the
first meeting they would say either: he is a man promising luck and
honour (sæmligir and hamingjusamligr), one luck is to be expected
of(giptuvænligr), or: he bears the mark of unluck (úgiptubragð). Partly on the
strength of intuition, as we say — or, as the ancients put it, because the mind of
the beholder told him what to think of the stranger, — but partly on external
criteria; luck manifested itself openly in the newcomer's mien, gait, behaviour,
bearing, and not least in his well-nourished appearance, his health, his dress,
and his weapons. Only a family of wealth and speed is able to send its
youngling out in many-coloured clothes and with a splendid axe, an “heirloom”
of a weapon.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Words were dangerous. They could bite through luck and fix themselves in a man. They were not to be likened to sharp arrows which wounded, but might then be drawn out and flung to the ground. For they had life in them, they would creep about inside the victim, hollowing him out till there was no strength left in him, or they would change him and mould him according to their own nature.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“In order to understand the thoughts of foreign peoples, we must necessarily convert their self-revelation into our own terms, but our words are apt to carry such a weight of preconceived idea as to crush the fragile myth or philosophy in the very act of explanation. If we want to open up a real communication with our
fellow-man, we must take care to revalue our words before clapping them on his experience. As far as possible we must hold back our set formulæ until we have walked round the object he is confronted with and looked at it from every side. But analysis will not carry us all the way to intimacy. Culture is not a mass of beliefs and ideas, but a balanced harmony, and our comprehension depends on our ability to place every idea in its proper surroundings and to determine its bearings upon all the other ideas.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Frith is the state of things which exists between friends. And it means, first and foremost, reciprocal inviolability. However individual wills may clash in a conflict of kin against kin, however stubbornly individual heads may seek their own way according to their quota of wisdom, there can never be question of conflict save in the sense of thoughts and feelings working their way toward an equipoise in unity. We need have no doubt but that good kinsmen could disagree with fervour, but however the matter might stand, there could — should, must inevitably - be but one ending to it all; a settlement peaceable and making for peace — frith.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Each circle has its own honour, an heirloom, that must be preserved in the very state in which it is handed down, and maintained according to its nature. Honour is the patch of land on which I and mine were born, which we own, and on which we depend; such as it is, broad and rich, well stocked with cattle and corn, or poor and sandy, such is our Honour is a spiritual counterpart of earth and its possession, wherein all cows and sheep, all horses and weapons are represented, and that not as a number, or a value, but in their individuality.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Honour is identical with humanity. Without honour, one cannot be a living being;
losing honour, one loses the vital element that makes man a thinking and
feeling creature. The niding is empty, and haunted for ever by the all-embracing
dread that springs from emptiness. The despairing words of Cain have a
bitterness of their own in the Anglo-Saxon, steeped as they are in the Teuton's
horror of loneliness: “I dare not look for honour in the world, seeing I have
forfeited thy favour, thy love, thy peace.” He goes full of sorrow from his country,
and from now onward there is no happiness for him, being without honour and
goodwill (árleas). His emptiness means, in a modern phrase, that he has
nothing to live for. The pains he is to suffer will cut deeper than before, seeing
they are now all heaped up-in himself alone, and they will produce more
dangerous wounds,. since there is no medicine to be found against them. Thus
it is literally true, that no one can be a human being without being a kinsman, or
that kinsman means the same as human being; there is not a grain of metaphor
in the words. Frith and honour together constitute the soul. Of these two
constituents frith seems to lie deeper. Frith is the base of the soul, honour is all
the restless matter above it. But there is no separation between them. The force
of honour is the feeling of kinship, and the contents of frith is honour. So it is
natural that a wound to honour is felt on one hand as an inner decline, and on
the other as a paralysis of love. By the import of honour we learn to know the
character of the gladness which kinsmen felt when they sat together by the fire
warming themselves in frith.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“And there is but one passion that can let loose this accumulated force: his
passion for honour. For the Northman to be affected by this or that in what he
meets depends on something that has happened, something past, and
something ahead, an event which has happened to himself or his ancestors,
and an event which must be brought to pass for the betterment of himself and
his descendants. He does not live in the moment; he uses the moment to
reckon out: how can it serve him to the attainment of his end? He does not hate
a thing for its own sake, or on his own account; for if he can purchase a chance
of revenge by giving up his dislike, he tears his hate away, and where he can
gain a chance by enmity, the hate wells up again in undisguised power. This
does not mean that the Northman is temporarily beside himself when he is
seeking redress for his wrongs.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Outwardly, luck is dependent on the mutual love of kinsmen. With the flourishing
of frith go luck and well-being. And in the opposite case, when men cannot agree, all life sickens and fades, until everything is laid waste. This rule applies to all frith communities, not only the family, but also temporary connections in the sign of frith (and under any other sign no alliance was possible). When men united in any undertaking, fishing or other occupation, the result would depend upon the power of the individuals to maintain friendly and sincere relations with one another. In the Laxdoela Saga, we chance upon this piece of information: “Wise men held it of great weight that men should well agree when on the fishing grounds: for it was said that men had less luck with their catch if they came to quarrelling, and most therefore observed caution.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Instead of insisting that no quarrel shall be suffered to arise between one brother and another, they would simply acknowledge that no such quarrel ever could by any possibility arise. In other words, instead of a prohibition, we should have the recognition of an impossibility. The characters in the Icelandic sagas are in this position still —though we may feel that the cohesion of the clan is on the point of weakening. They have still, more or less unimpaired, the involuntary respect for all such interests as may affect the clan as a whole; an extreme of caution and foresight in regard to all such enterprise as cannot with certainty be regarded as unaffecting the interest of all its members.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Through innumerable kinships, natures are knit together this way and that, until the world hangs in a web of frith. So man draws souls into his circle. For the present age, the war-cry is: rule. Be master of the earth, subdue creation is the watch-word running through our time, and it looks as if this commandment sympathetically strikes the heart-note of our culture and ever sets the pace not only for its actions but also for its speculations. All hypotheses anent past ages
in the history of our race hinge on the assumption that man has made his way
through an everlasting battle, and that civilization is the outcome of man's
struggle for existence. But modern civilization with its cry for mastery and its
view of life as a continuous strife is too narrow a base for hypotheses to make
history intelligible. The evolutionary theory of an all-embracing struggle for food and survival is only an ætiological myth, as the ethnologists have it, a simple contrivance to explain modern European civilization by throwing our history, its competition and its exclusive interest in material progress back on the screen of the past. When ancient and primitive cultures are presented in the light of
modern economical problems, all the proportions and perspectives are
disturbed; some aspects are thrown into relief, other aspects are pushed into
the shade, without regard to the harmony inherent in the moral and intellectual
life of other peoples; and the view as a whole is far more falsified by such capricious playing of searchlights than by any wilful distorting of facts.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The power of frith is apparent, in the fact that it does not count as a virtue, something in excess of what is demanded, but as an everyday necessity, the most obvious of all, alike for high and low, heroic and unheroic characters. And the exceptions, therefore, show as something abhorrent, uncanny.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Clan-feeling is the base of all spiritual life, and the sole means of getting into touch with a larger world. The same power which makes the Germanic individual a kinsman prevents him from becoming a limited family being and
nothing more. The strength and depth of frith and honour mould the clans together in alliances, and call larger communities into existence. The thing community for judging and mediating, and the kingdom or state for common undertakings, are institutions necessitated by the nature of luck. He who has felt the strength and depth of these men's frith and honour will not be in danger of misjudging the family in his historical view; but then again, he will not be tempted to set it up as the unit in existence, as the secret that explains everything in the society and the life of our forefathers.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Only in the very extreme cases of our civilization can we find anything that covers the experiences of the ancients. For the innate depravity of shame lies in the fact that spiritual life was then dependent upon a certain number and a certain sort of ideas. Good breeding was a family treasure, possibly not differing greatly to our eyes as regards the different families, but in reality distinctively marked from earliest youth, stamped by traditions, determined by environment, and consequently not easily changed. Personality was far less mobile than now, and was far less capable of recuperation. If a kinsman lost an idea, he could not
make good the loss by taking up ideas from the other side; as he is bound to
the family circle in which he grew up, so he is dependent upon the soulconstituents fostered in him. The traditions and reminiscences of his people, the
enjoyment of ancient heirlooms and family property, the consciousness of
purpose, the pride of authority and good repute in the judgement of neighbours
found in his circle, make up his world, and there is no spiritual treasury outside
on which he can draw for his intellectual and moral life. A man nowadays may
be excluded from his family, whether this consist of father, mother, brothers and
sisters, or a whole section of society; and he need not perish on that account,
because no family, however large, can absorb the entire contents of a
reasonably well-equipped human being's soul. He has parts of himself placed
about here and there; even nature is in spiritual correspondence with him. But
man as a member of a clan has a void about him; it need not mean that his
kinsmen lack all wider interest, it does not mean that he is unable to feel himself
as member of a larger political and religious community; but these associations
are, in the first place, disproportionately weak, so that they cannot assert
themselves side by side with frith, and further, they are only participated in
through the medium of kinship or frith, so that they can have no independent
existence of their own. A man cast off from his kin cannot appeal to nature for
comfort, for its dominant attribute is hostility, save in the form where it faces him
as inspired by humankind, cultivated and inhabited; and in the broad, fair fields
it is only the land of his inheritance that meets him fully and entirely with friendly
feelings. It will also be found that in cases where a niding is saved to the world
by being received into a new circle, a family or a company of warriors, he does
not then proceed by degrees from his former state over to the new; he leaps
across a channel, and becomes a new man altogether.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“These Germanic peoples live and move in hordes, or tribes, or whatever we may call them. They have some sort of kings, and something in the nature of a general assembly, which all men capable of bearing arms attend. But we should be chary of supposing anything properly answering to a state institution as understood among civilized people The king has no real authority; the warriors obey him to-day, and tum their back on him defiantly to-morrow; one day. their kings may lead them forth on any reckless enterprise; the next, they may be scattering, despite his orders, and in defiance of all political prudence, to their separate homes. And in their assembly, the method of procedure is simply that he who can use the most persuasive words wins over all the rest The warriors clash their weapons, and the matter is decided. They are like children in regard to coaxing and gifts. but fickle and ungovernable in regard to anything like obligation. indisposed to recognize any definite rule and order.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The Germanic morality cannot be arranged in a hierarchy of good qualities. There is not the slightest approach among the Teutons to a system in which one virtue is vaulted above another like a series of heavens. Such an order of precedence presupposes centralisation; all men must be united under the same condemnation before they can be classified. Neither has the Germanic mind any conception of a common moral Gehenna. Strictly speaking, evil, nidinghood, has no reality at all, but must be interpreted as a negative, a total lack of human qualities. Nidinghood is the shadow every "honour" casts according to its nature. Therefore the boundary line between admiration and contempt stands sharply, without transition stages, without any neutral grey. And therefore the boundary lies differently for different people. What makes a man a niding, a criminal and a wretch, depends on what made him a man of honour.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“A high-born, high-minded man must show his nobility, not only in the way he deals with an injury, and in care for his behaviour, but also by taking up the affairs of others. A man in difficulties would turn confidently for help to the great man of his district. An Icelander who had lost his son, and 'could not see his way to take vengeance, or win his case at law, by himself, went to the headman of his district and said: "l want your help to gain my right in this matter", and he gave grounds for his demands as follows: "It touches your honour also, that men of violence should not have their will in these parts." The headman had then to take up the matter himself. If there was wizardry abroad, then the chieftain must "see to the matter", otherwise he could ill "hold his honour'. Nay more, apart from having to deal with living miscreants, a man who aspired to leadership over his fellows might be called upon to exorcise a ghost, on the ground that here was a task his honour required him to undertake. The man would be obliged to meet any claim so made on him, and that out of regard to his own weal or woe. An applicant for aid could, if needed, threaten to let himself be cut down where he stood, with consequent dishonour to the man whose door was closed against him.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The power to live comes from within, pouring out from a central spring in the little circle, and thence absorbing the world. In order to fill his place as a man, the Germanic individual must first of all be a kinsman. The morality, sense of right and sense of law that holds him in his place as member of a state
community, as one of a band of warriors, or of a religious society, is dependent upon his feelings as a kinsman; the greater his clannishness, the firmer will be his feeling of community, for his loyalty cannot be other than the sense of frith applied to a wider circle.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech

“In the Germanic idea, the moral estimate is always ready to rise to the surface; in fact, for the expression of goodness, piety, and uprightness, the Teutons have no better words than lucky (Anglo-Saxon sœlig, Gothic séls, and similar terms), which embrace the idea of wealth and health, happiness and wisdom.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“In our conception of men and animals we fasten on the outward bodily coherence and continuity, thus creating a mass of isolated individuals where primitive man sees manifestations of grand souls or ideas. In our world, the reality of man is determined by the circumscribed and isolated status of his body, and his soul is made up of the thoughts and feelings confined to his isolated brain. The solitariness of the human being is so strong in our culture and so prominent in our experience that we slur over all other facts, such as the spiritual influence of his presence, the power of his words and the inevitable concatenation of fate between individuals that makes a family, and often a still larger body of men, suffer for the imprudence and guilt of one sinner. To us, the
individual is the reality on the basis of which all practical and theoretical questions must be solved, and we look upon all the other facts as secondary, prepared to grapple with them as problems, and we go on tackling them, piling one solution upon the top of another, even when they prove insoluble. On the other hand, primitive culture gathers the whole mass of facts into the reality called man, and constructs a “soul” in which the power of words and spiritual emanation, the “suggestive” force and the touch of hands are included as well as form and features, in which the solidarity of the many is recognised as well as the responsibility of the individual.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had one great advantage; they felt themselves as citizens of the world. They were never strangers to their subject matter, and knew nothing of that shyness which the stranger always feels. They felt themselves at home throughout the inhabited world, at any rate, so long as they remained in their own country, or the lands immediately adjacent, in a bodily sense, and made all further journeyings in the spirit alone. They did not sit fumbling over their material, but went straight to the persons concerned, whether men of the immediate past or those of earliest ages; whether Romans or Greeks, French, English, Hindus, Chinese or Indians. The historian stepped forward without formality and took his hero cordially by the hand, spoke to him as friend to friend, or let us say, as one man of the world to another. There was never any fear, in those days, that differences of language, or of circumstances in a different age, might place obstacles in the way of a proper understanding. Men were inspired with faith in a common humanity, and by the certainty that if once the human element could be grasped, all the rest would work out of itself. All mankind were agreed as to what God was, what good and evil were; all were agreed in patriotism and citizenship, in love of parents and of children — in a word, agreed in all realities.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Without honour, life is impossible, not only worthless, but impossible to maintain. A man cannot live with shame; which in the old sense means far more than now, — the "can not" is equal to "is not able to". As the life is in the blood, so actually the life is in honour; if the wound be left open, and honour suffered to be constantly oozing out, then follows a pining away, a discomfort rising to despair, that is nothing but the beginning of the death struggle itself.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The authority in such a clan-society is of a peculiar sort, it is here, it is there, it is
everywhere, and it never sleeps. But there is no absolutely dominant power. The circle may perhaps have its leader in chief, but he cannot force anyone to his will. In Iceland, this lack of subordination appears in the crudest light. Iceland had men who gladly paid out of their own purse for the extravagances of their restless kinsmen, if only they could maintain peace and prevent futile bloodshed; but their peacemaking was an everlasting patchwork. There was no
power over those who did not seek the right. To take firm action against them was a thing even the most resolute of their kin could never do, for it was out of the question for the clan to disown its unruly members and leave them to the mercy of their enemies. When Chrodin, a man of noble stock, was chosen, for his cleverness and god-fearing ways, to be majordomo in Austria, he declined with these significant words: “I cannot bring about peace in Austria, chiefly
because all the great men in the country are my kinsmen. I cannot overawe them and cannot have any one executed. Nay, because of their very kinship they will rise up and act in defiance.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“By virtue of his dominance over nature, man can also combine souls, and engraft the essence of one upon another. Thus he inspires that which his hands have worked on, and equips his implements with qualities calculated to render them useful in their calling. When be fastens a bunch of feathers to his arrow, he gives its flight the accuracy of a bird, perhaps also something of a bird's
force in swooping on its prey; as surely as he gives himself a touch of birdnature by fastening feathers about his body. Or he may, in the strength of his artistic faculty, content himself with a presentment of nature. He chisels a serpent on his sword, lays “a blood-painted worm along the edge” so that it
“winds its tail about the neck of the sword”, and then lets the sword “bite”. Or be
may use another form of art, he can “sing” a certain nature into his weapon. He tempers it in the fire, forges it with art and craft, whets it, ornaments it, and “lays on it the word” that it shall be a serpent to bite, a fire to eat its way. So also he builds his ship with the experience of a shipbuilder, paints it, sets perhaps a beast at the prow, and commands that it shall tread sure-footed as a horse upon
the water. Naturally, the mere words are not enough, if there is no luck in them; they take effect only if the speaker can make them whole. How he contrives to accomplish this is a question too deep to enter into here, but as we learn to know him, we may perhaps seize upon one little secret after another.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The laws of Iceland allow of killing on the spot in return for attack or for a
blow, even though they may leave no mark on the skin.”
― Vilhelm Grönbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Honour at once brings up the thought of vengeance. It must be so; he who thinks of honour must say vengeance, not only because the two are always found together in the stories, but more because it is only through vengeance that we can see the depth and breadth of honour. Vengeance contains the illumination and the explanation of life; life as it is seen in the avenger is life at its truest and most beautiful, life in its innermost nature.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Primitive man has never been able to limit his needs to what is strictly necessary. His friendships among the souls are not confined to the creatures that are useful to his body or dangerous to his life. When we see how man in his poetry, his myths and legends creates an imaginative counterpart of his surroundings, how he arranges his ceremonial life, at times indeed his whole life, according to the heavens and their movement, how at his festivals he dramatizes the whole creation of his limited world through a long series of ritual scenes, we gain some idea how important it was to him to underpin his spiritual existence. His circle of friends spans from the high lights of heaven to the worm
burrowing in the soil; it includes not only the bug that may be good to eat, but also innocuous insects that never entered into his list of delicacies; it comprises not only the venomous snake, but also harmless crawling things that have no claim on his interest save from the fact of their belonging to his country.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“He [The Northman] has but one view of man; man asserting himself, maintaining his honour, as he calls it. All that moves within a man must be twisted round until it becomes
associated with honour, before he can grasp it; and all his passion is thrust back
and held, until it finds its way out in that one direction. His friendship of man and
love of woman never find expression for the sake of the feeling itself; they are
only felt consciously as a heightening of the lover's self-esteem and consequently as an increase of responsibility. This simplicity of character shows in his poetry, which is at heart nothing but lays and tales of great avengers, because revenge is the supreme act that concentrates his inner life and forces it
out in the light. His poems of vengeance are always intensely human, because
revenge to him is not an empty repetition of a wrong done, but a spiritual self-assertion, a manifestation of strength and value; and thus the anguish of an affront or the triumph of victory is able to open up the sealed depths of his mind and suffuse his words with passion and tenderness. But the limitation which creates the beauty and strength of Teuton poetry is revealed in the fact that only
those feelings and thoughts which make man an avenger and furthers the
attainment of revenge, are expressed; all else is overshadowed. Woman finds a
place in poetry only as a valkyrie or as inciting to strife; for the rest, she is
included among the ordinary inventory of life. Friendship, the highest thing on
earth among the Teutons, is only mentioned when friend joins hands with friend
in the strife for honour and restitution.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The sentence, that kinskip is identical with humanity, which at first sight seemed a helpful metaphor, has now revealed itself as nothing but the literal truth. All that we find in a human being bears the stamp of kinship. In mere externals, a man can find no place in the world save as a kinsman, as member of some family — only the nidings are free and solitary beings. And the very innermost core of a man, his conscience, his moral judgement, as well as his wisdom and prudence, his talents and will, have a certain family stamp. As soon as the man steps out of the frith and dissociates himself from the circle into which he was born, he has no morality, neither any consciousness of right, nor any guidance for his thoughts. Outside the family, or in the intervals between families, all is empty. Luck, or as we perhaps might say, vitality, is not a form of energy evenly distributed; it is associated with certain centres, and fills existence as emanations from these vital points, the families.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Without this intimate connection between man and the other natures about him neither he nor Middle-garth could exist. The myths tell us, if properly read, that man has created a habitable well-ordered world in the midst of chaos, and that to live and thrive he must for ever uphold his communion with every single soul and so constantly recreate the fixed order of the world. Primitive man never
thought of pointing triumphantly to an eternal order of things; he had the sense
of security, but only because he knew how the regularity of the world was brought about, and thus could say how it should be maintained.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“It is natural, then, that security should form the centre of meaning in the words which the Germanic people are most inclined to use of themselves, words such as sib and frith. Security, but with a distinct note of something active, something willing and acting, or something at least which is ever on the point of action. A word such as the Latin pax suggests first and foremost — if I am not in error — a laying down of arms, a state of equipoise due to the absence of disturbing elements; frith, on the other hand, indicates something armed, protection, defence — or else a power for peace which keeps men amicably inclined. Even when we find mention, in the Germanic, of "making peace", the fundamental idea is not that of removing disturbing elements and letting things settle down, but that of introducing a peace-power among the disputants.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2