Introduction
When in Rome, taking a walk on Via dei Fori Imperiali, before reaching the infamous Piazza Venezia, it is impossible not to notice a tall column standing at one of the edges of the Imperial Fori. The column was erected in the 2nd century AD to commemorate the victory of Emperor Trajan over the Dacians, the people of today’s Romania. With the conquest and forced colonization of Dacia, the Roman Empire reached its maximum extension and took control of some of the most conspicuous gold mines in Europe. It was the Dacian gold that paid for the elaborate monument to the victory, a 30-meter tall narrative of the conquest carved in exquisite marble for all of Rome to see.
In one of the friezes that decorate the column, it is possible to observe a scene that must have looked unfamiliar to the Roman eye: a group of legionaries accompanied by bare-chested warriors in wolf and bear skins. Archaeologists have recognized these as Germanic warriors, probably employed by Rome as auxiliary troops: the same tribes that would conquer the Western part of the Empire in the 5th century, creating the Latin-Germanic kingdoms that constitute the basis of European national identities.
Content
The bear-warriors, the berserkir, are among the most famous (and most abused) figures of Norse culture and mythology. These men, attested in both archaeology and literature, were said to be ferocious warriors able to reach animal-like battle-fury, during which they were unable to distinguish between allies and enemies. While it’s still debated whether this frenzy was metaphoric or literal, maybe self-induced through drugs or collective hysteria, there is no doubt that the result was a madness, a rage that made the berserkr immune to blade or fire, resembling a savage animal.
Battle-rage is a common element of the tribal hero in both Germanic and Celtic folklore; it seems to be precisely the element that distinguishes the hero, that sets him apart from the common men. And yet this frenzy is a gift and a curse that renders the hero alone in his super-humanity.
Two centuries after the first berserkers entered Norse literature through the work of Thórbiörn Hornklofi in the 9th century, the story of the most famous of the English heroes was copied in the early 11th-century manuscript that is now treasured in the British Library. Beowulf, the fighter of monsters and slayer of dragons, is a Swedish prince who travels to Denmark to free King Hrothgar from the scourge of the creature Grendel. His story, maybe carried by Danish settlers, maybe engraved in the myths and legends of the early Anglo-Saxons who conquered Roman-Brittonic England, is extant in an English manuscript studied, among others, by the prolific academic and writer J. R. R. Tolkien. Beowulf is a great prince and heroic figure, respected and admired by his own people and the Danes he saves from the monster Grendel; yet, as observed by Tolkien, there is very little in Beowulf that is strictly human. From his deeds to his description to his name, Beowulf the hero is closer to the monsters he fights than to his comrades, showing superhuman strength, unmovable cold-blood in the face of danger, and a mind sharper than his peer warriors.
He also presents some of the traits of the berserkr: he fights the monster Grendel bare-handed, managing to rip his arm off by simple strength of his hands. Even his name might be an allusion to the savage bear-warriors: Beowulf, in fact, could be a metaphor for “the bees-wolf” — the bear. Most of all, he is as yrre, angry, as the monster, engulfed in a similar battle-rage that takes him on the same linguistic level as Grendel.
Super-human strength, battle-fury, and the name of an animal: Beowulf shares some traits with the greatest Irish hero, Cù Chulainn, “the hound of Culain.” The demi-god hero of many Irish sagas is a young boy who single-handedly defends the kingdom of Ulster from the warriors sent by the queen-goddess Madb to steal a white bull; when in battle, Cù Chulainn transforms into a savage monster with fire in his eyes and smoke around his head, possessed by fury and rage. He too, like Beowulf, is more similar to wild animals than to a human warrior.
In Modern English, anger comes from a Norse word, angr, which originally meant grief. And grief is tied to anger. In Beowulf, the hero confronts the old king Hrothgar who is bitterly crying after Grendel’s mother devours one of his household warriors and childhood companions: «do not grieve, wise man! Better be it that each man avenges his friend than that he mourns much.»
Anger is the most feared emotion in European cultures, for it is extenuating, all-consuming. Its devastating potential makes it the mental state of the warrior-hero, but also a dangerous force that needs to be contained and channeled. This, arguably, is the emotional function of the feud, the Germanic habit that drives the sagas and that prescribes that a wronged individual or their close relatives might extort their own vengeance on the wrong-doer and their family as a way to “get even.” The sagas show how this custom may have fueled never-ending cycles of bloodshed that lasted generations, but the words that Beowulf directs to Hrothgar might be enlightening on the emotional function of vengeance as a controlled outlet for grief.
Anger and grief are thematically, if not semantically, linked in the narrative of another great European hero, Achilles son of Peleus. His story starts precisely with μήνις (menis), the divine rage; and his anger dominates the poem, as the scorned hero refuses to fight and lets the Greeks be slaughtered by the Trojans, bringing about the tragedies of Patroclus’ death first and Hector’s death later, and finally the fall of Troy, left without its mightiest protector. The Greeks, ever the cool-headed types, seemed to differentiate between many types of anger, each caused by specific causes. While menis is the anger of a scorned god, carrying ritual and divine connotations, αργη (argé), in the words of Aristotle, is the anger that follows a slight, a belittlement. It is a very socially aware feeling, as a slight needs to be intentional and carried out by someone we consider inferior or less dignified than us; in a society ruled by strict social hierarchies and a strong sense of pride and honor, this anger is righteous and the vengeance that follows justified and even required in order to re-establish the correct social order. This is the anger that simmers in Achilles, as he is voluntarily belittled and humiliated by Agamemnon, his superior in grade but not in honor. This anger can only be quenched by recognition of the superior status of Achilles; which is why the hero proudly refuses any other reconciliatory gift.
When his anger leads to Patroclus’ death, though, the poem -and the language- radically changes. Homer uses the construct δριμους χόλος (drimus cholos), a bitter grief, with drimus suggesting a visceral emotion — “like a lioness separated from her cubs.” In the choice of word for a visceral, all-consuming grief, the poem offers a keyhole to the Greek perception of wrath, thrown, together with grief, in the boiling cauldron of the irrational, of the instinctual. A reflection not only of a society that considered emotions the worst part of human nature, but perhaps also the reflection of a culture scared by visceral emotions because unequipped to manage them.
Conclusions
The fall of ingrained religious ethics — to which perhaps we shall devote a different space — has left us with no exemplary codes of conduct on how to acknowledge our anger, and very few narratives helping us recognize its function. Still owing much to the Mediterranean ethics founded by the Greeks, we are taught to suppress our anger, or to link it to an empty concept of (wounded) pride that causes more harm to us and to our relationships than it does good. While women are told “to not overreact” (a man can react, a woman can only overreact), men are led to believe anger is the only appropriate and masculine outlet for all sorts of emotions, while also suffering from a complete lack of instruments on how to read and digest it. In this regard, I fear, we share more with the proud and stoic heroes of the archaic Mediterranean society than with the berserkers of the Norse sagas, as our society struggles to provide young men (and women) with healthy outlets for anger, leaving them utterly unequipped to face anger and its inevitable counterpart, grief.
REFERENCES
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Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks. Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, University of Toronot Press, 2006.
A.Jorgensen, F. McCormack and J. Wilcox (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Emotions. Reading the heart in Old English language, literature and culture, Routledge, 2015.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf. A translation and commentary (ed. C. Tolkien), Harper Collins, 2014.
A.Pavlenko (ed.), Bilingual Minds. Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation, 2006.
