What is the historical scoop with the "gifting cycle" with gods? I see "gifting cycles" as a concept occasionally brought up amongst Heathens. According to the Longship: "It is then your responsibility as a good, honorable Heathen to repay the gift — not to fulfill or cancel out the debt, but to “flip” it around so that the other person becomes indebted to you." That sounds unnecessarily convulted while thanking gods.
Unsurprisingly, yes, I have some problems with this. They are taking some pretty-common sense ideas like generosity being something that contributes to a good reputation, and reputation being more important in a pre-modern society; and turning them into the elevated governing principles of all interaction and exchange. Personally, I am not going to start rubbing it in my friends’ faces that they owe me if I give them a gift just because it’s my “responsibility as a good, honorable Heathen.”
Also like... everyone can see the mathematical problem here, right? It’s not just me? Giving a gift to someone who can’t reciprocate with greater value would, in this system, be a horrible, selfish, destructive act. If you keep going back and forth not only matching gifts but outdoing them so that a debt is imposed, this is going to quickly escalate out of control. Eventually someone is going to owe more than they have. YES, this is a thing that can happen, and could in Norse society. When it happens with aggressive acts, we call it a feud. It’s bad. It continues until either there’s some kind of outside intervention or all the fuel is burnt up (aka too many people are dead to continue). And even if the tit-for-tat exchanges are “nice” like gift-giving, it can only end the same way, by overloading the available resources.
A minor edit to a paragraph from the “Gifting Cycle” page:
The central mechanism of the [feuding] cycle is debt. Heathenry teaches that if a person [does you harm], then you become indebted them. It is then your responsibility as a good, honorable Heathen to repay the [violence] — not to fulfill or cancel out the debt, but to “flip” it around so that the other person becomes indebted to you. It is then their responsibility to repay you. In this way, the [feuding] cycle goes on indefinitely.
THIS IS AN ACTUAL ACCURATE DESCRIPTION OF THE FEUDING CYCLE. IT’S BAD. WE DO NOT WANT THIS. OUR ANCESTORS DID NOT WANT THIS. THEY CONTINUOUSLY TRIED AND FAILED TO FIND A WAY OUT. IT BEING TRUE DOES NOT MEAN WE ARE MEANT TO UPHOLD IT. IF THIS IS A FUNDAMENTAL FEATURE OF HEATHENRY, THEN I WANT OUT. I’m not saying that the Longship’s description of the gifting cycle is as bad as this but the point I’m trying to make is that what they’re pushing on that page is exactly as fundamental to heathenry as things that we rightfully reject.
Anyway. They’re (mostly) describing something that did actually exist in Old Norse society (and exists in our own society), but it was a feature with a high probability of turning dysfunctional, that they themselves knew was dysfunctional. This isn’t something a Norse person would admit to doing, and they would probably get defensive or even aggressive if you accused them of it, just as any modern person would. The ideal was (as it is now) a person who gives generously and expects nothing in return. Gifts and counter-gifts probably have as much to do with each person wanting to prove themselves not to be stingy as anything described above. Kings and high-ranking people in particular were basically required to give generously and ask for nothing in return; they did of course get something in return anyway in the form of loyalty and support, and getting to keep their position now that they’ve demonstrated that they’re using it to benefit their followers (and even often their enemies) but to actually come out and say that as The Longship encourages us to do would have been political suicide.
We even have a story satirizing it, Gjafa-Refs þáttr (’the tale of Gift-Refr’ or ‘Gift-Fox’). In the story, Gift-Refr trades up gifts from powerful people by compelling counter-gifts out of them while pretending not to want anything (like showing up to the cafeteria in middle school with some pretzel sticks, trading up for a Fruit-by-the-Foot, cashing that in for a pack of Oreos, and so on until you’ve got a shiny Charizard and a Razor scooter... also uhhh sorry if this is out of date) until he himself becomes a jarl. Note, again, his pretending not to want anything, or to only want something extremely meager in response to his gifts, is itself a major factor in motivating the gifts that are given to him.
I’ll remind you that this is not exclusive to pre-modern culture (you only have to watch like a minute to get the point):
We can contrast this with Hávamál, which also talks about giving and receiving gifts, but very differently:
52. Mikit eitt
skal-a manni gefa;
oft kaupir sér í litlu lof,
með halfum hleif
ok með höllu keri
fekk ek mér félaga.
‘One shouldn’t only give great things; often one gets oneself praise with little. With half a loaf of bread and a tilted cup I’ve gotten myself a companion/s.’
Notice also that Hávamál seems to always be talking to one person, not describing both ends of any interaction. It says you should give things, and if you get a gift you should give one in return, not because you’re indebted now, but because exchanging gifts (as well as laughter, and sharing your thoughts with each other (stanza 44)) is a good way to develop friendships.
So what the deal then? We have both examples of giving gifts specifically in order to impose a debt and giving simple gifts in order to build relationships. As is often the case, we should look at the different social contexts.
For one thing the gift : counter-gift thing isn’t done with necessities; it involves luxury goods, precious metal, or something else only accessible to people who are already living above the subsistence level. Presumably it did also happen among people of lesser means, especially through the socially-sanctioned compulsion to hospitality, and the Hávamál stanza could easily be described either way. Most often, it’s a king or other high-ranked person giving the clearly greater gift; it was status-affirming to give something great, so people at the top had to give the greatest things. This is depicted in typical Old Norse understated dramatics in Egils saga when Eiríkr bloodaxe gives an expensive axe inlaid with silver to Skalla-Grímr as if this makes up for all the terrible bullshit the kings of Norway have put the family through, but Skalla-Grímr finds it useless and throws it into the rafters of his house. The point is, Eiríkr is using the gift of the axe to affirm his position, and Skalla-Grímr is not positioned to actually formally reject it, but he sees it for the manipulative gesture it is. Note also that Eiríkr bloodaxe and Skalla-Grímr are far from being friends -- this gift exchange is managing hostilities, and Skalla-Grímr most certainly did not consider himself indebted. AGAIN we still have this. Boyfriend fucks something up in a relationship. He buys his girlfriend something expensive to make up for it. She either accepts it and he is forgiven, or rejects it because he isn’t worth it, or she pulls the real power move and accepts it but still tells him to take a hike. There are more arcane aspects to Norse gift-giving that we don’t understand, like why Flosi completely flies off the handle at Njáll’s gift of an unmanly cloak in Njáls saga, but by and large this gift-exchange stuff is still active in our culture, it just isn’t quite as totalizing and nuanced because we also, separately have a more complex variety of relations that aren’t mediated by gift-exchange.
Now, I haven’t mentioned gods at all yet. That’s because we don’t really know how they applied any of this to gods. We do know that they made sacrifices in hopes of receiving blessings for them, but we also have stories about people who were simply “friends” with the gods and while they also presumably made sacrifices they don’t seem to be formal exchanges. The overwhelming lesson about gift exchange among friends and family isn’t that you have to continuously bribe them into bribing you back for life, it’s that giving gifts is one of the nice and good things you should do because it’s nice and good. It seems reasonable to me that how you approach giving gifts to the gods would be a natural extension of what you consider to be the social context of your relationship with the gods. If they’re unapproachable like a violent king of medieval Norway then yeah, you’re probably going to try to use gifts to get on their good side and benefit as a result. If they’re your friends and family this is probably going to be conditioned more by thinking about them often and wanting to be close with them.
One last point I want to make. We know that giving gifts was important to Old Norse people and that they did it a lot. We can suspect one thing or the other about what their motivations were. I know that I personally have given gifts for a wide variety of reasons including “I want to do a nice thing for this person,” “I am obligated by some annoying Hallmark holiday,” and yes, “well they gave me something so unfortunately now I have to.” But if we’re gonna continue to push the line that heathenry is more orthopraxic than orthodoxic, i.e. that our actions are primary over our beliefs (and I’m not sure if The Longship does uphold that, but I do, even if I’m often critical of the ways that heathens articulate it) these motivations aren’t the important thing. A relationship based in reciprocity doesn’t actually even have to always be motivated by the same thing. Genuinely caring about someone’s happiness can develop out of a relationship that started with a basis in obligation, and (unfortunately or not) it can also happen the other way around.
Rather than describing a program of “the gifting cycle,” I’d rather that we have discussions about the meaning and power of reciprocity, of relations and networks of relations based in voluntary mutual responsibility. This isn’t uniquely heathen, of course, but we do have our own history and culture to draw on to help us frame it. Instead of recreating dysfunctional behaviors of our predecessors we honor them more by taking up the task of finding something better, while resurrecting and keeping alive their achievements. As I’ve said so often before, Norse society was full of internal contradictions, just like every society. Our task isn’t to recreate any kind of cohesive “system” (that didn’t really exist) but to take a position among these contradictions and act in accordance with what causes the most good, not what is best-attested.
