So, one thing that my ancestors spent a lot of time worrying about was how to rightly distribute things. Stealing was no good. We see from the stories that stealing has negative consequences for the person being stolen from (stealing Idunn’s apples resulted in the gods growing old) and negative consequences for the thief (as evidence by the problems resulting from old what’s their faces stealing from the dragon and getting cursed stuff).
Now don’t get me wrong, many of the gods’ exploits are fun because they are about tricking, about walking right up to the line of thievery and then finding some loophole that makes it okay.
But there’s also a lot of concern about giving things. Some of the giving of things makes sense, even to my modern mind. I give you sex, you give me the fabulous Brisingamen. I give you jewelry, you tell me about the end of the world. Trading, in other words.
But other times, it’s just the proper thing for a host to do. And the more powerful you are, the more necessity is placed on giving things away.
I feel like having a garden is helping me to understand why it’s good fortune to give things away–because a lot of stuff only has a short shelf life. Someone needs to use it or it starts to go bad.
See? Someone needs to use it or it starts to go bad.
And I suspect this is true on all levels. When you steal from the dragon, the thing you steal doesn’t necessarily have bad luck because it’s stolen. It has bad luck because it’s been horded and gone unused. It’s spoiled.
Having much means you have much you have a responsibility to make sure remains in use.
This, I think, is why there’s such stress put on kings giving things away–this constant reminder that, for the luck of the community to remain good, things have to remain in use.
If I thought about this too much when I didn’t have a garden, I’d think of it as a type of frugality. But I can give everything we picked from my garden away because I have the garden. I can go back out there today and get more. It doesn’t feel frugal at all. It feels like a luxury.
Which, again, is I’m sure why being able to give things away is a sign of status.
I’ve got more coming.
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I just got off the phone with my mother, and my youngest brother was over there yesterday to cook out with her. She told me that he used that nice grill utensil set that I got for Dad for Father’s Day maybe FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. He never used it, and he’s been gone for over half that time now. I pretty much said the same thing to her, that it’s too bad Dad didn’t ever enjoy it, ’saving it’ for a special time that never came.
I hear you on the garden thing. I am always so pleased to give people a bag of tomatoes or herbs, everybody wins: I can’t eat it all, and you can’t grow your own. But I’ve never grown zucchini, because so many other people do and can’t wait to give it away!
Your post reminded me a little of the original meaning of “Indian giving”, which white people got all confused and messed up. But from what I’ve read, it originally meant something like, I’m giving you this thing, to use for a while, and then this thing will want/need to move on, to help someone else out, and you should help it move on (not hold on to it). So the gift keeps on “giving” in a sense by continuing to move through the world, finding people that need it right then. Hoarding, I guess, is the opposite of that.