Hávamál is well worth reading for anyone interested in ancient Scandinavian culture. It's short, concise and eye opening as to how people actually lived in Scandinavia during the Viking age. It's even funny at times, with advice on all sorts of things, including why we should be precise and on time when we go to parties.
After reading Hávamál, I was left with a clear sense of a lifestyle and economy that must have operated successfully in the past. In particular, I was struck by the importance of gifts and gift giving. It was clearly the main way of forging alliances between households. To stay on good terms with our neighbours we had to regularly offer gifts that should be neither too cheap nor too expensive.
Gift giving was essentially a system of credit that ensured that everyone was on good terms with everyone else. When dealing with strangers, barter must have been the norm. But this is not as extensively discussed as gift giving, indicating that most households were self sufficient, and only in need of outside help when undertaking larger projects.
This is interesting from an agorist viewpoint because ancient Scandinavians were essentially practicing agorists, the success of which relied heavily on gift giving. While we can trade through the use of barter, including the use of gold and silver coins, we need to form alliances in order to undertake larger projects.
In all of this, I was struck by the fact that my brother in law has in fact been engaging in this type of alliance building from the day I met him. He never fails to give me a gift on my birthday and for Christmas, never too expensive nor too cheap. He's a skilled artist, so he can produce a fine piece of art without much effort, and my wife and I now have several fine pieces hanging on our walls.
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| Art by Guilherme Castro |
The net effect of this is that my brother in law has built up a substantial amount of credit with me that I have recently decided to return. I'm determined to help him sell his art. I'm showing it off on Facebook, and I'm planning to make a fan-page as a blog. This is stuff I can do with little effort, in a similar way to how he can produce fine art without much work.
If successful, I will sell art for Guilherme in return for a gift every now and again. No money will ever flow between the two of us, and any money coming in will either be spent relatively soon or saved in gold or silver. In this way, we'll have a functioning agorist economy, hooked up to the "real" economy, to the benefit of both Guilherme and I.
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| Hávamál |
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