Content area
Full text
OVER THE LAST CENTURY, few words in the Old Norse lexicon have stirred such debate as the terms Armgr and pegn.1 The substance of these dialectics revolves around the social, political, and military involvement of men called þegn or drengr-in general, which semantic components informed these terms and specifically whether these men constituted part of the Nordic comitetus, a term first used by Tacitus in Germania to describe the bond and reciprocal duties shared by retainers and their lord.2
Successful attempts to divide Arengr and pegn into discrete categories have been thwarted by a number of factors. Foremost, these terms appear frequently throughout the Viking Age and several hundred years subsequently in a variety of sources and contexts, namely runic inscriptions, poetry, sagas, and legal texts. The geographical and cultural span in which these terms occur is likewise daunting in ranging from England, to Iceland, to mainland Scandinavia. In some contexts, such as social rank in medieval England, the terms are synonymous, or nearly so,3 while in others, such as Viking-Age skaldic poetry, they are not obviously related. For these reasons the word drengr has been labeled "tricky and in a Bakhtinian sense probably highly 'contestable'" (Poole 51 n.11).
The goal of this paper is to examine the terms within the Viking Age and to present the semantic probabilities with precision as great as the evidence affords. The present study will endeavor to show the following: first, that the term drengr in East Norse runic inscriptions as well as in Viking-Age skaldic poetry connoted a "brave, youthful man." In the skaldic stanzas, the term was often associated with the comitatus and its connotations "warrior" and "king's man" may have developed through hyponymy with its primary meaning "man." second, that in both runic inscriptions and skaldic poetry, the term pegn connoted a "mature, settled manrThepqjnar (pi.) of the runic inscriptions, however, seem to have borne a sense of "honor" that is absent from the skaldic stanzas. Additionally, in skaldic verse, pegnar could collectively signify "people" or "king's subjects." Analysis of the terms drengr and pegn within both runic and skaldic corpora suggests that neither constituted formal comitatus in the Viking Age.
OVERVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP
Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Johan Fritzner described the...