Tag: Feud

Description:

A feature that occurs in honor-based societies, both historical and in the present day, in which honor is a kind of resource which is determined by reputation, actions (including speech), and public standing. Honor is diminished or increased through social interactions, mostly at the discretion of a person's peers. Feud was a fundamental aspect of medieval Icelandic society as it is depicted in the sagas. Feuding structures are also found in the mythological literature about the gods, jötnar ("giants," although this is a misconception but is also the most common translation), and heroic ancestors of the past. Feud appears as a bitterness between two social groups, usually families or broader kin-groups, and erupts in various kinds of insults and injuries exchanged. It has been analyzed in terms of an inversion of the act of gift-giving, a building block of many medieval societies, in which insults and injuries are "gifts" which demand repayment by the pressure of social custom and the honor produced and lost by such actions. Its most dramatic and well-known manifestation is the blood feud, in which feuding builds to the point of exchanged killings. In videogames which depict Vikings and Norse mythological subjects, especially as the main elements of their story and world, feud is sometimes also represented. This can also happen when a game is not depicting literal Vikings or Norse gods, but rather has a created culture or civilization which is aesthetically and culturally inspired and modeled on them, such as is the case with Skyrim's Nords. This also partially explains the prominence of the "revenge" motif in Viking popular entertainment media of all sorts, as the sworn revenge tale is an abstraction of the social structure of feud and its importance in the literature of the medieval North.

Tag Category: Motif

Items with this Tag: