The word “honor” encompasses a system of values that signify a person’s “worth”, which in turn determines their value to society as a whole. ( Public domain ) Worth and weorð: Understanding Anglo-Saxon Honor and Gift-Giving The story of Beowulf helps us to understand the Anglo-Saxon warrior code and war culture. So how exactly did the Anglo-Saxons define honor? The term for “loyalty” does not fully define the Anglo-Saxon concept of honor, nor can it be fully understood as the antithesis of “shame”. There was however, no direct word for “honor” in the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, which would seem strange given it was such a crucial concept within their culture.

The Old English poem The Wanderer describes the importance of this relationship in the lamentations of a warrior who has lost his lord: The pivotal factor underlying all these facets of the warrior’s code was of course the relationship between a warrior (or “thane”) and his lord. This passage from Tacitus captures the central tenets of the Germanic warrior code that are evident in later Anglo-Saxon literature: extreme courage in battle, concern for the reputation of oneself and one’s lord, honor and loyalty, and acquisition of glory. A Literary Treasure: The Oldest Surviving English Poem - Beowulf and His Epic Battles.Medieval Chivalry Wasn’t Just Knights and Valor.“When the battlefield is reached it is a reproach for a chief to be surpassed in prowess a reproach for his retinue not to equal the prowess of its chief but to have left the field and survived one’s chief, this means lifelong infamy and shame: to protect and defend him, to devote one’s own feats even to his glorification, this is the gist of their allegiance: the chief fights for victory, but the retainers for the chief.” That is not to say that evidence of a non-literary nature does not exist - the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about Germanic warrior culture in his Germania around the turn of the 2nd century AD, revealing much about their notions of honor:

In fact, it is thanks to Anglo-Saxon literature - primarily epic poetry such as Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon and The Wanderer - that we have an understanding of how their warrior code and war culture looked, given the dearth of evidence from more “historical” sources from the period. The concept of honor was so pervasive in Anglo-Saxon society that it is impossible to pick up any piece of literature from the period without finding some mention of it. So what did the warrior code of the Anglo-Saxons look like, and how were their heroic predecessors different from the courtly knights who would come to take their place and eventually represent the notion of medieval warriorhood? Does the old world epic hero, the likes of Beowulf or Brythnoth, have any place in the modern world? Anglo-Saxon Honor in the Heroic Age Codes of honor that dictate how warriors are to conduct themselves have existed for centuries, and some have been carried into modernity and popularized: the chivalric code of medieval knights, or Bushido of the Japanese samurai are perhaps the most well-known.īefore the chivalry of the Norman knights came to England however, a much older system of honor and loyalty had been in place for centuries, brought over by Germanic settlers from the Anglo-Saxon tribes. This is particularly true when it comes to warriors and their actions both on and off the battlefield, and concepts of Anglo-Saxon honor are no different. Every culture and society on Earth, both past and present, has their own ideas of what makes a person honorable or worthy.

Chivalry code of honor