Honor and Posthumous Reputation

This chapter focuses on four visible and concrete tools used during the Viking Age to shape the ideology of the population: feasts, gifts, skaldic poetry, and monumental burial mounds. These helped bring honor to the members of the social elite and ensure a good posthumous reputation for them. The chapter tackles how powerful men in Scandinavian society competed with each other to build the greatest hall and to organize the greatest feasts. The feasts were public events that created a common experience for the participants and were probably the most straightforward and fundamental way of materializing an ideology. The chapter describes three kinds of feasts: entrepreneur feasts, patron feasts, and diacritical feasts. Gifts in the Viking Age also signified wealth and was used as a marketing trick to acquire more friends and expand one's power base. Kings and chieftains valued giving the right types of gifts — jewelry, good horses, gold, rings, clothes, and weaponry — to the right people at the right time. The gift-giving process was publicly staged, and it was crucial to follow the rules of the game; otherwise, the purpose of the gift might be misinterpreted and the recipient could take offense. Highlighting the importance of honor and posthumous reputation in the Viking Age, kings and chieftains held it crucial to have poems composed about their achievements, so that they would be retold not only in the present, but from generation to generation. The chapter also elaborates the building of burial mounds.