...these terms and specifically whether these men constituted part of the Nordic comitatus, term first used by Tacitus in Germania to describe the bond and reciprocal duties shared by retainers and their lord. (2)

Successful attempts to divide drengr and pegn into discrete categories have been thwarted by a number of factors. Foremost, these terms appear frequently throughout the Viking Age and several hundred years subsequently in a variety of sources and contexts, namely runic inscriptions, poetry, sagas, and legal texts. The geographical and cultural span in which these terms occur is likewise daunting in ranging from England, to Iceland, to mainland Scandinavia. In some contexts, such as social rank in medieval England, the terms are synonymous, or nearly so, (3) while in others, such as Viking-Age skaldic poetry, they are not obviously related. For these reasons the word drengr has been labeled "tricky and in a Bakhtinian sense probably highly 'contestable'" (Poole 51 n.11).

The goal of this paper is to examine the terms within the Viking Age and to present the semantic probabilities with precision as great as the evidence affords. The present study will endeavor to show the following: first, that the term drengr in East Norse runic inscriptions as well as in Viking-Age skaldic poetry connoted a "brave, youthful man." In the skaldic stanzas, the term was often associated with the comitatus and its connotations "warrior" and "king's man" may have developed through hyponymy with its primary meaning "man" Second, that in both runic inscriptions and skaldic poetry, the term pegn connoted a "mature, settled man. "The pegnar (pl.) of the runic inscriptions, however, seem to have borne a sense of "honor" that is absent from the skaldic stanzas. Additionally, in skaldic verse, pegnar could collectively signify "people" or "king's subjects." Analysis of the terms drengr and pegn within both runic and skaldic corpora suggests that neither constituted formal comitatus in the Viking Age.

OVERVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP

Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Johan Fritzner described the term drengr in very general terms as a "menneske der er som det bor vaere" [person who is as he should be]. (4) About thirty years later, Finnur Jonsson corroborated Fritzner's definition in specifying that the term could be used to describe a warrior, though it did not denote "warrior" (in Aakjaer 27). Svend Aakjaer (28) took issue with Finnur Jonsson in suggesting that East Norset pegnar and drengir (pl.) (5) were terms for royal attendants and those serving in a hird ("retinue"), a notion expounded upon by Hans Kuhn in 1944- and first challenged a year subsequently by K.M. Nielsen. The military involvement of pegnar and drengir has been debated ever since and remains tentative. Peter Foote and David Wilson agreed that drengr was sometimes used as a technical term, but that in general, it implied "an occupation ... but not a career" (106-8). John Lindow (106) rejected Aakjaer's hypothesis entirely and affirmed the more traditional idea that drengr simply meant "man" and added that pegnar and drengir together made up a free middle class of farmers. Echoing many of the arguments put forth by Erik Moltke in Runes and their Origin: Denmark and Elsewhere, Birgit Sawyer (l03-5) took issue with Lindow and Fritzner and contended that drengr designated a member of a retinue and that pegn denoted a man in the service of a superior. Sawyer's conclusions have been challenged by Judith Jesch (Ships), who finds no evidence that pegn and drengr were titles associated with the comitatus. Rather than define the terms absolutely, Jesch traces their development through the semantic environments in which they occur and discusses a range of connotations they may have borne.

The first definition of the word drengr was given during the first half of the thirteenth century by Snorri Sturluson in Snorra Edda. Snorri defines the drengir of his day as follows:

Drengir heita ungir menn bulausir, medan peir afla ser fjar eda ordstir, peir fardrengir, er milli landa fara, peir konungs drengir er hofoingjum pjona, peir ok drengir er pjona rikum monnum eda bondum; drengir heita vaskir menn ok batnandi. (Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 107) (Young men without an establishment [who are not householders] are called drengir while they acquire wealth or lame; those [are called] fardrengir who travel between countries, those [are called] the king's drengir who serve chieftains, those [are] also [called] drengir who serve powerful men or farmers. Brave and ambitious [upwardly mobile] men are called drengir.)

Although it has been argued that there is no significant difference between the drengir of the Viking-Age runic inscriptions and those of Old Icelandic literature (Strid 316), Icelandic prose authors, such as Snorri, write considerably later than the conclusion of the Viking Age, and it cannot be taken for granted that the drengir of their day were analogous to those of their ancestors'. (6) Subsequent definitions, proposed by scholars, have been based chiefly on etymologies, runic inscriptions, Anglo-Saxon sources, legal texts, and, more recently, skaldic verse. In the following, I will give a brief overview of each.

Etymologies

The etymologies of drengr and pegn do not seem to bear much on their usage during the Viking Age. In 1944, Hans Kuhn described drengr as "ein rein nordisches Wort ungewisser Etymologie" (112), and later Jan de Vries contended an origin from proto-Indo-European *dheregh- "to hold" (82-3). From there drengr may have taken on an intermediary sense of "stick" or "pole" and later "young man" (Aakjaer 19-20). (7) pegn, on the other hand, is well attested in other Germanic languages (e.g. Old English pegn "thane"). Svend Aakjaer (18) posited "child" as the original significance of pegn, pointing to its Ancient Greek cognates [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] "child" and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] "to give birth to"

Runic Inscriptions

Because of the pervasiveness of drengr and pegn in Danish and Swedish Viking-Age runic inscriptions, the lion's share of research on these terms has been geared toward this genre, a source, according to some scholars, of dubious value. Whether or not "the answer must lie within the inscriptions themselves" (Lindow 108) or "the runic inscriptions provide relatively little context for determining the shades of meaning of this word [drengr]" (Jesch, Ships 219), it has often been to these inscriptions that scholars have turned when assigning meaning to the terms in question. A more thorough treatment of the subject will be given below.

Anglo-Saxon Sources

It has been argued by analogy to pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon England, where the Old English word pegn (8) is well attested in historical documents as denoting a man in the service of a king, (9) that Old Norse pegnar were similarly men of high rank who fought for an overlord. Although the Old English word dreng also appears (though only twice) in pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon literature, most notably in The Battle of Maldon, it seems to have entered the Old English lexicon before the reign of Knutr the Great as an Old Norse loanword. (10) Post-conquest usage of the word dreng is more frequent and indicates a man of the lower nobility with duties of tenure and military service to a lord (Hollister 34-5). How Anglo-Saxon drengjar (11) came to occupy this social/military position is conjectural, and Svend Aakjaer (25) contended that once the Danes had conquered northern England, they replaced the Anglo-Saxon pegnas with Danish drengjar and that the latter title remained with men of this social class or rank.

The notion that Old Norse pegnar and drengir may have been analogous to contemporary Anglo-Saxonbegnas and drengjar is alluring because of the great influence Sveinn Forkbeard and Knutr the Great exerted in England. By 1013, after leading a series of invasions, Sveinn was recognized as king of England as a result of adding Anglo-Saxon territory to his Scandinavian hegemony. His son Knutr reigned from his seat in London (12) as king of Denmark (1019-35) and England (10106-35), as well as Norway (1028-34) and is known to have had both English and Scandinavian pegnar. However, the extent to which the military institutions of England and Knutr's homeland Denmark resembled each other is highly controversial although it is clear that there were substantial differences. (13)

Peter Foote and David Wilson (107) write that the privileged status of Anglo-Saxon drengjar and pegnas was peculiar to England and may originally reflect a distinction between new and experienced soldiers at the time when Danish leaders allocated newly-conquered lands. In her study of skaldic poetry, Judith Jesch sees "little or no overlap" with the usage of Old Englishibegn in Anglo-Saxon sources and Old Norse poetic use of pegn ("Skaldic Verse" 169).

Alluding to the high status of contemporary pegnas and knights in England, Birgit Sawyer (103) believes that pegnar and drengir similarly may have constimted an elite social class in Scandinavia. She further suggests that as with pegnas and knights in England, Scandinavian pegnar and drengir were not especially wealthy, though they belonged to a distinguished social group. According to Sawyer (103), the runic monuments in memory of pegnar and drengir support this interpretation since they are not conspicuously elaborate or imposing. Judith Jesch, however, argues the opposite: pegnar were wealthy landowners (Ships 227). As evidence, she points to five instances of Danish pegn monuments referred to as kuml, (14) indicating that the deceased had a family wealthy enough to raise a considerable monument and to be especially concerned about inheritance. Overall, the incidence of kuml raised to pegnar or drengir is very slight compared to those raised to family members without additional titles, making...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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