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“Frith is the state of things which exists between friends. And it means, first and foremost, reciprocal inviolability. However individual wills may clash in a conflict of kin against kin, however stubbornly individual heads may seek their own way according to their quota of wisdom, there can never be question of conflict save in the sense of thoughts and feelings working their way toward an equipoise in unity. We need have no doubt but that good kinsmen could disagree with fervour, but however the matter might stand, there could â€� should, must inevitably - be but one ending to it all; a settlement peaceable and making for peace â€� frith.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Honour is identical with humanity. Without honour, one cannot be a living being;
losing honour, one loses the vital element that makes man a thinking and
feeling creature. The niding is empty, and haunted for ever by the all-embracing
dread that springs from emptiness. The despairing words of Cain have a
bitterness of their own in the Anglo-Saxon, steeped as they are in the Teuton's
horror of loneliness: “I dare not look for honour in the world, seeing I have
forfeited thy favour, thy love, thy peace.� He goes full of sorrow from his country,
and from now onward there is no happiness for him, being without honour and
goodwill (árleas). His emptiness means, in a modern phrase, that he has
nothing to live for. The pains he is to suffer will cut deeper than before, seeing
they are now all heaped up-in himself alone, and they will produce more
dangerous wounds,. since there is no medicine to be found against them. Thus
it is literally true, that no one can be a human being without being a kinsman, or
that kinsman means the same as human being; there is not a grain of metaphor
in the words. Frith and honour together constitute the soul. Of these two
constituents frith seems to lie deeper. Frith is the base of the soul, honour is all
the restless matter above it. But there is no separation between them. The force
of honour is the feeling of kinship, and the contents of frith is honour. So it is
natural that a wound to honour is felt on one hand as an inner decline, and on
the other as a paralysis of love. By the import of honour we learn to know the
character of the gladness which kinsmen felt when they sat together by the fire
warming themselves in frith.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The power of frith is apparent, in the fact that it does not count as a virtue, something in excess of what is demanded, but as an everyday necessity, the most obvious of all, alike for high and low, heroic and unheroic characters. And the exceptions, therefore, show as something abhorrent, uncanny.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Humanity proper is made up of all the families and tribes with whom our people has intercourse, for companionship means constant mingling of frith, honour and luck; outside the pale the “strangersâ€� crowd, and the strangers are another sort of men, because their minds and ways are unknown. When they are called sorcerers the word only emphasises the fact that their doings are like the doings of demons and trolls, dark and capricious, admitting of no sure calculation. The only means of overcoming the wickedness of strangers is by annexing their luck and honour and mingling mind; by mingling minds the will and feeling in the two parties are adjusted, and henceforth their acts interlock instead of running at cross purposes. Between men there may be fighting, community may be suspended by enmity, but the struggle is human and carried on by the rules of honour; against strangers men have perpetual war, and the warfare must be adjusted to the fiendish ingenuity of the demons. Towards vermin or wild beasts men cannot feel responsibility or generosity.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“For partners in frith, vengeance is a duty; the law sanctions this duty as a right. The laws of Iceland allow of killing on the spot in return for attack or for a blow, even though they may leave no mark on the skin.”
― Vilhelm Grönbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Instead of insisting that no quarrel shall be suffered to arise between one brother and another, they would simply acknowledge that no such quarrel ever could by any possibility arise. In other words, instead of a prohibition, we should have the recognition of an impossibility. The characters in the Icelandic sagas are in this position still —though we may feel that the cohesion of the clan is on the point of weakening. They have still, more or less unimpaired, the involuntary respect for all such interests as may affect the clan as a whole; an extreme of caution and foresight in regard to all such enterprise as cannot with certainty be regarded as unaffecting the interest of all its members.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Frith is something that underlies all else, deeper than all inclination. It is not a matter of will, in the sense that those who share it again and again choose to set their kinship before all other feelings. It is rather the will itself. It is identical with the actual feeling of kinship, and not a thing deriving from that source.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“It is natural, then, that security should form the centre of meaning in the words which the Germanic people are most inclined to use of themselves, words such as sib and frith. Security, but with a distinct note of something active, something willing and acting, or something at least which is ever on the point of action. A word such as the Latin pax suggests first and foremost â€� if I am not in error â€� a laying down of arms, a state of equipoise due to the absence of disturbing elements; frith, on the other hand, indicates something armed, protection, defence â€� or else a power for peace which keeps men amicably inclined. Even when we find mention, in the Germanic, of "making peace", the fundamental idea is not that of removing disturbing elements and letting things settle down, but that of introducing a peace-power among the disputants.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Only in the very extreme cases of our civilization can we find anything that covers the experiences of the ancients. For the innate depravity of shame lies in the fact that spiritual life was then dependent upon a certain number and a certain sort of ideas. Good breeding was a family treasure, possibly not differing greatly to our eyes as regards the different families, but in reality distinctively marked from earliest youth, stamped by traditions, determined by environment, and consequently not easily changed. Personality was far less mobile than now, and was far less capable of recuperation. If a kinsman lost an idea, he could not
make good the loss by taking up ideas from the other side; as he is bound to
the family circle in which he grew up, so he is dependent upon the soulconstituents fostered in him. The traditions and reminiscences of his people, the
enjoyment of ancient heirlooms and family property, the consciousness of
purpose, the pride of authority and good repute in the judgement of neighbours
found in his circle, make up his world, and there is no spiritual treasury outside
on which he can draw for his intellectual and moral life. A man nowadays may
be excluded from his family, whether this consist of father, mother, brothers and
sisters, or a whole section of society; and he need not perish on that account,
because no family, however large, can absorb the entire contents of a
reasonably well-equipped human being's soul. He has parts of himself placed
about here and there; even nature is in spiritual correspondence with him. But
man as a member of a clan has a void about him; it need not mean that his
kinsmen lack all wider interest, it does not mean that he is unable to feel himself
as member of a larger political and religious community; but these associations
are, in the first place, disproportionately weak, so that they cannot assert
themselves side by side with frith, and further, they are only participated in
through the medium of kinship or frith, so that they can have no independent
existence of their own. A man cast off from his kin cannot appeal to nature for
comfort, for its dominant attribute is hostility, save in the form where it faces him
as inspired by humankind, cultivated and inhabited; and in the broad, fair fields
it is only the land of his inheritance that meets him fully and entirely with friendly
feelings. It will also be found that in cases where a niding is saved to the world
by being received into a new circle, a family or a company of warriors, he does
not then proceed by degrees from his former state over to the new; he leaps
across a channel, and becomes a new man altogether.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Outwardly, luck is dependent on the mutual love of kinsmen. With the flourishing
of frith go luck and well-being. And in the opposite case, when men cannot agree, all life sickens and fades, until everything is laid waste. This rule applies to all frith communities, not only the family, but also temporary connections in the sign of frith (and under any other sign no alliance was possible). When men united in any undertaking, fishing or other occupation, the result would depend upon the power of the individuals to maintain friendly and sincere relations with one another. In the Laxdoela Saga, we chance upon this piece of information: “Wise men held it of great weight that men should well agree when on the fishing grounds: for it was said that men had less luck with their catch if they came to quarrelling, and most therefore observed caution.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The sentence, that kinskip is identical with humanity, which at first sight seemed a helpful metaphor, has now revealed itself as nothing but the literal truth. All that we find in a human being bears the stamp of kinship. In mere externals, a man can find no place in the world save as a kinsman, as member of some family â€� only the nidings are free and solitary beings. And the very innermost core of a man, his conscience, his moral judgement, as well as his wisdom and prudence, his talents and will, have a certain family stamp. As soon as the man steps out of the frith and dissociates himself from the circle into which he was born, he has no morality, neither any consciousness of right, nor any guidance for his thoughts. Outside the family, or in the intervals between families, all is empty. Luck, or as we perhaps might say, vitality, is not a form of energy evenly distributed; it is associated with certain centres, and fills existence as emanations from these vital points, the families.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The power to live comes from within, pouring out from a central spring in the little circle, and thence absorbing the world. In order to fill his place as a man, the Germanic individual must first of all be a kinsman. The morality, sense of right and sense of law that holds him in his place as member of a state
community, as one of a band of warriors, or of a religious society, is dependent upon his feelings as a kinsman; the greater his clannishness, the firmer will be his feeling of community, for his loyalty cannot be other than the sense of frith applied to a wider circle.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech

“Clan-feeling is the base of all spiritual life, and the sole means of getting into touch with a larger world. The same power which makes the Germanic individual a kinsman prevents him from becoming a limited family being and
nothing more. The strength and depth of frith and honour mould the clans together in alliances, and call larger communities into existence. The thing community for judging and mediating, and the kingdom or state for common undertakings, are institutions necessitated by the nature of luck. He who has felt the strength and depth of these men's frith and honour will not be in danger of misjudging the family in his historical view; but then again, he will not be tempted to set it up as the unit in existence, as the secret that explains everything in the society and the life of our forefathers.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Through innumerable kinships, natures are knit together this way and that, until the world hangs in a web of frith. So man draws souls into his circle. For the present age, the war-cry is: rule. Be master of the earth, subdue creation is the watch-word running through our time, and it looks as if this commandment sympathetically strikes the heart-note of our culture and ever sets the pace not only for its actions but also for its speculations. All hypotheses anent past ages
in the history of our race hinge on the assumption that man has made his way
through an everlasting battle, and that civilization is the outcome of man's
struggle for existence. But modern civilization with its cry for mastery and its
view of life as a continuous strife is too narrow a base for hypotheses to make
history intelligible. The evolutionary theory of an all-embracing struggle for food and survival is only an ætiological myth, as the ethnologists have it, a simple contrivance to explain modern European civilization by throwing our history, its competition and its exclusive interest in material progress back on the screen of the past. When ancient and primitive cultures are presented in the light of
modern economical problems, all the proportions and perspectives are
disturbed; some aspects are thrown into relief, other aspects are pushed into
the shade, without regard to the harmony inherent in the moral and intellectual
life of other peoples; and the view as a whole is far more falsified by such capricious playing of searchlights than by any wilful distorting of facts.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Silflay hraka, u embleer rah!”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down