Profiles in Virtue - Egil Skallagrimsson's Utter Shamelessness

"Yeah, I totally stole this sword, what are you going to do about it?"

It is said that, in the district of Sogn, in Norway, there lived a man named Ulf.  This man, who was of good stock, was known for his great good cheer, but toward evening became quarrelsome and difficult, so he became known as Kveldulf, that is, "evening-wolf."  Kveldulf married a woman named Salbjörg, who was kin to Ketill Trout, and had two sons, Thorolf and Grim.  Thorolf was a fair-featured man, well beloved by all, but Grim was remarkably ugly and even in his youth known as Bald Grim, that is, Skalla-Grim.  Thorolf served King Harald Fair-Hair, and when Harald killed him, Grim and Kveldulf fell to quarreling with the king.  The quarrel led to them departing Norway and moving to Borg, in Iceland.  Kveldulf died before they made land, and Grim followed his father's coffin to decide where to raise his hall.  In time, Grim had two sons of his own, Thorolf and Egill.  Thorolf was, like his uncle, fair of face, cheerful, and well-liked by all, while Egill was dark-haired, ugly, and bloody-minded.

And that is, in brief, Egill's Saga up to the point where Egill returns to Norway.  The story makes very clear that the feud between Egill's family and the kings of Norway was alive and well when he returned.  Thorolf, being the "face," makes peace with Harald's heirs and gets them a job as tax collectors, and that is where this particular story begins.  Tax collection was an easy way of acquiring wealth, but it was thankless work that involved traversing all of Norway, often in the dead of winter, because the king was less concerned with the welfare of his collectors than he was with their collection.  It was the perfect "peacemaking" job, in other words, to show that he trusted the sons of Grim, without making it pleasant for them.

Imagine, then, if you will, Egill's position.  He is traveling the country in mid-winter, collecting taxes, in the form of furs, in mid-winter.  He, and his trusted traveling companions, are forcing their way through the mountains of Norway, miserable and cold, and to cheer them up, he tells them that their next stop is going to be a rich landowner's house, and he'll give them warm clothes, food, drink, maybe a couple days of company, because they're the king's servants.  Things must be truly bad, because Egill is not known for being a cheerful man, but he jollies them along until they reach the hall in question.

They knocked on the door, and their host, Armod, welcomed them in, albeit grudgingly.  Egill's reputation as a troublesome man was by now well-established, he was leading a party of tax collectors, and he was an unexpected guest in the middle of winter.  Armod thought that he would solve a number of problems at once - at least delay paying taxes, do a favor to the king by ridding him of this troublemaker, and not get eaten out of house and home - by killing Egill and his companions, but Armod's wife and daughter arranged for Egill to find out beforehand.

Now, Egill was on the horns of a dilemma - even he would not willingly insult his host when the alternative was spending the night out in the snow, any trouble he caused would get back to the king, and they were outnumbered besides.  A younger Egill, or his father, might very well have accepted this and forced the issue, or found an escape route, but instead, Egill took a different route.  He drank, and drank, and drank, to the point that he seemed more drunk than he actually was.  Then he grabbed Armod in a spirit of inebriated brotherhood, buttonholed him back against the wall, and, as Armod frantically tried to extract himself from this drunken Icelandic oaf the king sent to collect his taxes... vomited square in Armod's face.

The disgusted landowner turned away and the planned ambush was foiled.  The next day, rested and with the situation changed, Egill attacked Armod, though he did not kill him, merely cut off his beard and gouged out an eye with his thumb.  Now, this was bound to cause trouble, but the odds of his walking away from it were much better than the night before had been.

This is where the discussion of virtue comes in.

Egill's Saga is full of contrasting pairs - Egill and his brother Thorolf, Skalla-Grim and his brother, where one of them is the dark-complected, ugly, suspicious one, and the other is the fair-complected, handsome one who embodies the ideals of the age.  In every case, though, the one who embodies the ideal winds up dying because of those ideals, where the one who is not above committing a disgraceful act to get himself out of a situation is the one who gets to continue reaping fame.  It isn't quite Falstaff; Egill isn't a coward, simply a realist.  This is a key point when discussing Norse virtue.  Much ink has been spilled over the rewards of dying young and glorious and fighting beside Odin, but as much as has been said there, Sigurd Fafnir-bane dies by treachery by a spear in his back, unarmed, the heroic-looking figure Gunnar in Njala dies halfway into the story, and in Egla the quickest way of telling if someone is leaving the story early is if they're young and handsome.  Instead, the story follows those who didn't die young and beautiful, but instead did what they had to do to continue.  Dying young and glorious isn't worth much when compared to dying old and clever, apparently.  Even Odin himself follows this pattern, always maneuvering for advantage and, without avoiding risk outright, seeking to minimize risk to himself by cleverness.  He doesn't assault the Jotnar attempting to capture the mead of poetry; he steals it.  He doesn't stand on his dignity and force Loki to recant in Lokasenna, he plays for time, knowing that Thor, much better at being a hammer, is on his way anyway.  It brings to mind Rommel's dictum that sweat saves blood; blood saves lives; brains save both.

Thus, while we hear a lot about courage, honesty, forthrightness, et cetera as virtues of the Viking Age, what we see as the virtue of these stories is cleverness, defined here as the ability to find a solution to the problem from the materials at hand.  Cleverness won't make you the most respected man at the Thing, but it will allow you to live another day, and tomorrow is another opportunity.