In a Viking reenactment group on Facebook that I belong to, somebody asked an interesting question recently. “I know a guy who’d like to portray a Viking fool,” he said. “What do you people think about that?”
The response was unanimous (very much to my pleasure, since there’s precious little unanimity among Viking reenactors on anything). There’s no evidence for jesters in Viking culture, and the very idea is not one that fits with the Viking ethos.
I thought I’d meditate on the reasons tonight. It has to do with issues I’ve addressed before.
The Viking culture, steeped in its heathen virtues, set personal honor above all things. You could make jokes about your enemy all you wanted—as long as he wasn’t present. If you made a joke about him to his face, it meant you wanted a fight. No insult could be overlooked, if a man was to keep his social standing. “It was just a joke! Lighten up!” wouldn’t buy you any tolerance. A cutting word was no different from a blow.
Gradually, with the coming of Christianity, that changed. Honor culture lingered (the duel was still legal in places well into the 19th Century), but it came gradually to be accepted that a man did not demean himself if he admitted a fault (Canute the Great, only a second generation Christian, did penance for a man’s murder, which must have been hard for a fellow so close to Asa worship. I need to remember to examine that when he comes into the Erling books).
Along with willingness to admit a fault, willingness to be the subject of a joke gradually entered the culture. And so there came to into being the office of the Court Fool, a man who had legal right to make any kind of jokes he liked, about the most eminent people in the land. We’ve been taught in recent years to think of the Middle Ages as a time of unremitting repression and the absolute privilege of the nobility. And there was that element, but it was also recognized that the king needed to remember that he was but a man, with the same fallen flesh as the lowest serf. Christ’s “woes” pronounced against the rich were not wholly forgotten.
The true Christian view of the body, as C. S. Lewis notes in The Four Loves, has always been that it is neither contemptible nor divine, but something like an ass (donkey). A useful, stubborn, infuriating and comic beast, suitable for neither contempt nor adoration. And the jester was a constant reminder to the king that he, too, was St. Francis’ “Brother Ass.”
If there was no court jester, where did my imaginary friends Ole, Lena & Sven come from?
The role of the jester in the hall may have been filled by men engaged in flyting, though — that is, attempts to make fools of each other. It was apparently ritualized court entertainment among the Anglo-Saxons and Scots, though we famously have Loki’s flyting from the Norse sources.
Perhaps, but do we know of any instance in Norse culture where an actual flyting did not lead to violence? Even in the Lokasenna, the action proceeds to an attempt to kill Loki.
I’ve never joked around with a viking to a cordial end. They’re so testy.
Lars, your blog entry makes an interesting point that should be more widely known.
This plays well into the various debates over the past week or two, culminating in Bill Maher’s NYT op-ed calling for a moratorium on being offended. The bottom line is that our modern western culture leaves no room for humour. A victim mindset cannot laugh at one’s weakness, it must take offense at the weakness being pointed out. That offense leads to calling for sanctions against the one that pointed out the weakness which will somehow result in the improvement of the victim. It’s all vying for position. Any injection of humour into the process would diffuse the whole situation and cause entire bureaucracies to become redundant. The end result is a modern version of Viking Honor Society.
BTW – Dr. Boli touches on some of these issues in his History of the world post. He defines the three era’s of history as,
So paying weregeld was not an admission of fault? Sounds like Arab culture.
No, I don’t believe it was. It was merely a settlement for damages, as when John Wayne tells the saloon keeper he’ll pay for all the broken windows and chairs after a righteous fight. Again and again in the sagas, payment of damages doesn’t actually end the violence.
They had Irish jesters in “the Long Ships” novel which I thought was supposed to be pretty culturally accurate.
Though “The Long Ships” is fairly authentic, the Irish entertainers are the author’s invention. I know of no saga instance of such. In any case, I’m not sure those entertainers would rightly be called jesters. They were acrobats and (if I remember correctly) animal trainers. I don’t recall them insulting their hosts.
Your right. I don’t think there were insults.