Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 168

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William Sayers
the kingroup, would have travelled on its behalf and demanded lodgings, and
would appear to have carried food vessels as a sign of legitimacy and for purposes
of compensation (Patterson 1994, 347-51), we may briefly entertain the fiction
of a viking taking service with an Irish chieftain or tribal king as enforcer and
winning an Irish nickname (aire échta) that was roughly the equivalent of the
regularly met ON/Icel. kappi. Still, while Þorbrandr’s putative later change in
function from Irish jural enforcer to Icelandic hosteller could be plausibly
explained, the single occurrence of the nickname is too slim a base for more than
speculation on a loan of Olr. aire échta into Old Norse-Icelandic as orrek.
The Irish socio-economic hierarchy is, however, where I would situate the
institution of hospitality that we find in the Landnámabók entries here under
consideradon. Early Irish society was, in Binchy’s classic phrasing, ‘tribal, rural,
hierarchical, and familiar,’ this last epithet glossed by Kelly as ‘a society in which
the family, not the individual, is the unit’ (Kelly 1988, 3). As a consequence the
petty kingdoms and lordships were characterized by close-meshed networks of
ranks and grades, and family, clan, political and other contractual ties. Land-ow-
nership and use in individual, family and joint legal arrangements, and cattle-rai-
sing were the foundation. Members of the community were broadly classified as
privileged (nemed) or not, and further as sóer ‘free’ or dóer ‘unfree, dependent,’
although a given land-user might be in both the latter two categories as a result
of specific tenancy circumstances. In addition to local and regional or ‘over’ kings,
and the grades of nobles, some of which were listed above, there were up to seven
classes of farmer in which status might also depend on age and relative autonomy
with respect to senior males in the immediate family. Independent of these
rankings and occupations as leader or farmer, there were ecclesiastics, lawyers,
leeches, historians, genealogists, craftsmen, entertainers and the like. Each of the
various ranks and grades had its appropriate honour-price, which was also a
measure of jural empowerment; for example, worth and capacity as surety were
dependent on socio-economic status. The rights and obligations of tribal law
generally did not extend beyond the physical limits of the small kingdoms unless
the political and economic leaders were in some form of alliance.
Despite this hierarchization, early Irish society was not rigid but intensely
competitive. Social mobility occurred in both directions, up and down the social
scale, and the ranks of the lesser nobility could even be entered by farmers and
their offspring who maintained their economic success over three generations.
Clientship, in the form of providing lesser men with land and livestock in return
for future renders, was a major feature of the pastoral economy, and was the
principal route to economic well-being. But there were other paths to rank and
prominence as well, including that of the briugu, translated as ‘hospitaller’ or
‘hosteller’. Of the ‘wealthy peasant who played the role of inn-keeper for
7 The term bríugu is identified by Mac Eoin (forthcoming in Celtica) as an archaic (and thus
pre-Christian) perfect participle active formation ‘he who has surpassed,’ derived from the root
*bhrgh- expressing ideas of height and force. Further examination of the role of the bríugu in