Frith in the 21st Century

This is a paper I wrote back in 2007 that I have dusted off and published here for the heck of it.


FRITH IN THE 21ST CENTURY


Most inquiries into the term frith begin with the observation that although it is usually translated into modern English as meaning “peace”, peace does not adequately capture the true meaning of the frith. Winifred Hodge states:

The full meaning of frith encompasses peace but extends well beyond it, to cover a large portion of the most meaningful and essential foundations of human social life, especially as it is lived in more “traditional” societies.
On the Meaning of Frith
http://www.friggasweb.org/frith.html

Ann Groa Sheffield points out that:

Frith is usually translated as “peace”, but the English word fails to convey the full force and range of frith . Its meanings in Old Norse include “inviolability” and “sacredness”(Cleasby & Vigfusson), and it is cognate to other words in Germanic languages related to kinship, courtship and freedom.
Frey: God of the World, p.31 (2007)

Eric Wodening similarly seeks to flesh out the ancient meaning of frith by examining its linguistic roots:

The word frith derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-Euroepean *priyas, "one's own (as in one's own kindred or one's community)." From this root also derived many other words, such as Old English fréodom (our modern word freedom), frigian ("to love"), and Fréa ("lord," "the god FreyR"), each with underlying connotations of belonging to a greater whole, such as a household or a community or a tribe--any group of people a person could call "one's own”.

The Meaning of Frith
http://www.englatheod.org/frith.htm


Peace, love, and togetherness. Not exactly terms that are descriptive of the contemporary heathen community? Maybe we modern heathens are missing a real opportunity to take an old, old, Germanic concept and make it “our own”.
The most extensive exploration of frith is found in The Culture of the Teutons by Vilhelm Gronbech. Gronbech, a historian writing in the early part of the 20th century, starts his inquiry by cautioning against reading 20th century values into the Sagas and other primary sources he uses to explain frith. He argues that the culture of the Sagas is so far removed from our modern ways, that our ideas of peace, love, and friendship are of only limited use in understanding the behavior of the men and women of the Saga age. Frith, for Gronbech is the sum total of all the sentiments expressed in the quotations above, and it has a reflexive, almost taboo quality to it. It is the web of that binds kinsfolk together. It is “a power that makes them [kinfolk] “friends” towards one another” and “the love which knit these kinsman together”. Culture of the Teutons, Vol. 1, pp. 32-33.
Gronbech illustrates and attempts to explain the working of frith, and I think to bring home to the modern reader the “foreigness” of it by focusing on instances of revenge killings found in the Sagas. Although frith includes an absolute injunction against the killing of kin by kin (reciprocal inviolability) it also an absolute requirement of mutual aid and support when kinsfolk are imperiled. This duty to provide aid and support attached even if cases where a kinsman committed murder against someone outside the kin group. For Gronbech frith is the engine that drives the characters in the Sagas to engage in the conflicts which form the basis for most of the old tales. According to Gronbech:

When one has worked through the spiritual remains of our forefathers, one must, I think, infallibly emerge with a constraining veneration for this frith. The Northmen are ever telling of war and strife, quarrels and bickerings—dispute now over a kingdom, now an ox; now some piece of arrogance on the part of an individual, now a merciless combination of accidents by the hand of fate, lending men into a chaos of strife;--but we notice that even in the most violent turmoil of passion, all alike are ever amenable to one consideration; every single happening stands in some relation to frith.

Culture of the Teutons, Vol. I, p. 34

How can such a thing as frith then, which is responsible in the Sagas for seemingly pointless chaos and bloodshed, the destruction of whole families and even the murder of children be reconciled with peace and love, with sacred inviolability, and freedom? I would suggest that to find that answer we need to place the Sagas in an appropriate historical context. Groebech remarks that “The Germanic individual exists only as the representative, nay, as the personification of a whole”. (Id. at 31). The whole is the family/clan/tribe. The main economic unit was the family, and until the rise of feudal kingdoms and the church, the family would also have been the primary source of support and protection against violence and starvation. With limited opportunity for long distance travel, no postal service, no media, and with most of the day spent in the production and processing of food, it is easily conceivable that the people of the Saga age could go months on end without seeing or speaking to someone outside the kinship group. This is why the frith of the Sagas was primarily concerned with the maintenance of the family both internally, by strictly regulating the behavior of individuals within the unit, and externally, by defending it against outside threats. If the family unit was not absolutely protected then the individual would dissolve so to speak and because the family was in a sense what we consider society then it too would disappear. The whole would fail. In a small, small world, the frith that maintained the family created the necessary balance that made a life of security, abundance and joy possible. That violence was required to maintain equilibrium between the clans appears regrettable now, but was a fact of life at that stage of historical development in Western Europe.
Over time in the West and in most other areas of the world, the state came to take the place of the family and tribe in matters of collective security and the either the state or private corporations have taken over control of the economy. Although “the state” and “the corporation” are necessarily made up of individuals who live within the society, the whole has become greater than the sum of its parts. It is hard to imagine a relation of frith between the individual and the modern state or a modern corporation. Although one should feel secure knowing that the police would no doubt provide assistance if attacked in ones home or on the street, and know that the state would prosecute and punish the attacker, there are many instances when one could become a victim of the police or the state. There is no fundamental equality between the individual and the modern state, or the modern corporation and I think this differentiates the frith of old, and what we might identify its descendant in the modern era. I suspect as Winifred Hodge suggests in her article cited on page one, frith began to be subsumed into the relation between king and subject as royal power waxed in the post-heathen age. As the state began to replace the family as the real core of society, many relations associated with frith were transferred to the sovereign. Although there are distant echoes of ancient frith in the modern day relations between citizens of a republic and the state or an employee and the corporation, they don’t reflect the all encompassing wholeness that Gronbech associates with Saga frith. Instead, most individuals today are alienated from the state and the corporation.
Is there a role for frith in an age where most individuals live apart from their families, where there are no tribes and most live a more or less atomized existence? I suspect there is, but it is going to look and feel very differently from the frith of Gronbech and the Sagas, because human society has changed. What we learn from the frith of the Germanic tribes is that it only arises through the action of individuals. Frith cannot be imposed from without, but instead arises out of the working out of relationships between individuals. In this respect it is like Wyrd. To live in a state of frith with others requires one to act in such a way as to generate frith. Despite its association with clan warfare and revenge killings, the Germanic conception of frith really is the complete negation of the Hobbesian view of nature as a war of all against all. Frith contains within it a very deep recognition of the interdependence of individuals. This interdependence is expressed in the obligation frith imposes on the individual to act to aid and protect others and the expectation that another will come to his or her aid in times of need.
Frith really is a bundle of sentiments that makes one whole. Everybody wants peace, friendship, dignity (inviolability) love, joy, and security. Without these things we are broken and ill. These sentiments (and all the others that can be associated with frith) are different, but so interwoven that separating them out is difficult. Can one really be secure if one has no friends? Can one have love without joy, or peace without security? Can one have friendship with no love? To get these things though we need to be these things. Gronbech observes that:
Frith constitutes what we call the base of the soul. It is not a mighty feeling among other feelings in these people, but the very core of the soul, that gives birth to all thoughts and feelings, and provides them with the energy of life—or it is that center in the self where thoughts and feelings receive the stamp of their humanity, and are inspired with will and direction. It answers to what we in ourselves call the human. Humanity in them bears always the mark of kinship. Id. at 53.


What is at the base of our souls? What mark does our humanity bear? I would suggest that frith is still down there somewhere. In the same way that it is difficult for us in this age, to understand the old heathen’s tribal soul, I suspect it would be hard for the old heathen to understand the soul of modern women and men. What the old heathen would understand is living in an atmosphere of peace, joy and security and the desire to maintain that atmosphere. In our present state of historical development humanity cannot be defined in terms of tribal kinship. There are simply too many of us now and with advances in science we can be sure that all people are kin on one level or another. It makes no sense to limit frithful relations to an arbitrarily drawn innergarth. In a single day an average Westerner is liable to have contact with a more ethnically and socio-economically diverse group of people than someone in the Saga age would have in a lifetime. It is as necessary for us now to engender frith outside the clan as it was to do that inside the clan in the days before Egil. It is as unlikely now for us to have kinsman living next door or at the workplace as it was expected in the old days. To be whole, we must try to engender frith will all those we come in contact with. Any existential threat we face today comes not from a rival tribe, but primarily from irresponsible use of technology and misallocation of resources. The world has become small enough that we are all in the innergarth now, and our survival probably depends on us starting to really recognize that.