“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.”