Our oldest tales speak to us of honor, and we speak of it still, 5,000 years later. In order to discuss emasculation one must discuss the social edifice of masculinity that is honor. This chapter will be limited to exploring the development, morphology and interplay of the general types of honor codes. Chapters 7 and 8 will deal with the social erosion and feminizing of honor throughout history.

The two sources I’m citing for this chapter are Beowulf translated by John McNamara and Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker, which effectively bracket the plight of the Western sense of honor in its Pagan/Christian form, and at the same time provide the most primal examples of manhood and honor surviving in Western literature.

-Beowulf, 710

Though Beowulf is one of the last epic poems it is perhaps the most primal. One can sense, upon reading the Iliad and the Odyssey alongside Beowulf that those much earlier epics drew from an oral tradition and a hero type very similar to Beowulf. Ironically, our first epic, Gilgamesh, is in many ways the tamest of these tales.

The Beowulf epic explains honor as recognition of ‘Behavior that’s Admired’. See the appendix article ‘Behavior That’s Admired’.

Taking admirable behavior as the root of the complex of masculine expectations that make for a man’s standing among men we will examine what appears to be the evolution of honor from this most primal of the epic poems.

Briefly, the troubled ascent of Man’s sense of honor fallows this trajectory, each step to be examined below.

1. Trophy

2. Economy

3. Autonomy

4. Society

5. Ethnicity

6. Hierarchy

Keep in mind that these six mutually supportive and antagonistic stages overlap, coexist, and are at their roots both symbolic and symptomatic of one man’s regard for another’s level of mastery, mastery defined as far more than a skill set, but a tactical view of the world.

-Beowulf, 983-985

Man’s first honor was to be the defender against and defeater of the predators of the wild, particularly the clawed beasts that had hunted emergent Man since before his predecessors came completely down from the trees. Hunters and warriors and even kings, up until the 19th Century have coveted trophies of their prowess such as Grendel’s hand, and have employed emblems depicting the lion and other clawed beasts. Ancient kings reserved the right to hunt predators as the ruling class reserved the right to hunt altogether. Alexander the Great, mightiest conqueror of the ancient world, was nearly killed hunting a lion in a garden after his first defeat of Darius—this being a universal kingship ritual.

As late as the early winter of 1878-79, in the Little Rockies, below Milk River, after crossing the Missouri at Johnson’s old woodyard, Liver-Eater Johnson—the man most responsible for taking the Rocky Mountain Littoral from its native warriors, who remains shunned by an emasculated America ever since—and his companions fought a small personal war against a handful of Blackfoot warriors, to avenge the killing of Old Bear Claw, a man legendary among Indians and Mountain Men for the making of his beautiful bear claw necklaces.

More than a decade after the emergence of a modern industrial America, savage men on its frontier waged pitiless battles for what amounted to Beowulf’s honor for sheering the bestial hand of Man’s primal nemesis. Before these men had fully enabled the bringing of civilization to the frontier they would be all but erased by civilized propagandists charged with steering the American narrative for the goal of domesticating a nation of cows and steers easily led up the meat chute of history.

Trophies would be raised by ancient Greeks on body strewn battlefields, be taken as scalps by Native Americans and men such as Liver-Eater Johnson, and finally be reduced to a doll of emasculation, both winner and loser of an amateur boxing match receiving a trophy in our own lifetime, where we stand at the nadir of Honor.

-Beowulf, 6-8

As is the Iliad, Beowulf is a subtly subversive work, which juxtaposes individual and collective honor, and subverts the royal claims and Christian beliefs of the patron who hired this nameless bard sprung from some pagan tradition, to lionize the God of distant Judea and his blessed kings on earth. While the composer names God by over 20 laudatory names in all the hues his bardic skill can summon, the tale of Beowulf continually makes the point that kingship and Christ are both feeble before the woes of the primal world and that in hard times, hard men with the old strengths and honors will rise to rescue or supplant the feeble kings of civilization.

Just as the bringing of claws, fangs, tusks, horns and antlers back to camp increased the standing and importance of the warrior, his haul of meat and hides nourished the community. From this earliest beginning hierarchy in the economic sense—with the hunter giving up his kill to be shared by the community, eventually evolving into potlatch traditions in advanced stone age societies—put the individual’s sense of trophy-based honor and his accrued social status in the form of hierarchal honor on parallel and converging tracks, sometimes clashing, sometimes working in symbiosis.

Many times the honor of the king and his herald, who could not defend their own house and must call upon a wilder type of man, are extolled in terms of their material wealth. Thus, Man’s sense of honor being vested in the hunt sows the seeds for its own destruction and emasculation with the very comforting produce of the hunt, with the conqueror king leaving ‘honor’ in the forms of collective spoils for his sons to use in the wielding of social power, even though they lack his qualities. In the end this is death by artifice, with the things that are the bi-products of Man’s worth becoming vested with the power to bestow worth.

Though the feeble king’s honors are sung to the rooftop the reader has the sense that even the man who had commissioned the anonymous bard to sing the praises of his office and his ancestors that held kingship before him, must have sat in his fire-lit hall bored with his own hollow part in the epic, eager to hear of the deeds of Beowulf. I see Beowulf as a work of subversive pagan genius, much as if Nancy Reagan had commissioned Hunter S. Thompson to write a novel of DEA heroics in the enforcement of Richard Nixon’s sacred drug war.

-Beowulf, 64-7

The striving alone in the wilderness as a youth by the primal warrior in a vision quest, lone hunt, or related ordeal is the building block of primal manhood upon which masculine societies depend. Beowulf’s own introductory boasts of strangling the sea monsters evokes a manhood ritual from his outsized heroic youth.

Societies, in which men find common cause, sometimes across tribal lines, like the modern boxing or MMA fraternities, are collective honor constructs built from the individual deed-based honors accrued by its autonomous members.

-Beowulf, 329-31

The Masonic order is a modern survival of such ancient manhood societies, as the Nordic company of heroes, with their current commercials sounding almost as if they could have been written by the author of The Way of Men. In Crow Killer, the authors come back again and again to the loose association of like-minded by autonomous Mountain Men and American Indians who gathered despite tribal animosities among the natives, and ethnic division among the Anglo and Latino Mountain Men. When banding together for trade they would elect a peace-keeper such as Johnson, and when for war, also elect such a man to lead temporarily.

In the Epic of Beowulf the various warriors find a common union in their advanced equipment—their mail, where the Mountain Men and Indians often permitted their interaction to focus on famed horses and weapons, which were sometimes regarded with talismanic intensity as still living individualized artifices, such as the feared Kentucky rifle ‘Old Kill-Devil’ of the Eastern frontiersmen from the previous era, Lewis Wetzel, which was buried with him for fear of its haunting properties.

-Beowulf, 463-4

The pride of the various ethnic groups of the Nordic peoples was fiercely held and respected and held in high regard by their enemies and allies alike. This sense of special racial fury, of honoring conquering ancestors and defying the world, continued in America, most militantly with the frontiersmen of the Appalachians such as Wetzel and Mountain Men of the Rockies such as Johnson, who believed in a kind of racial blood magic—and their enemies seemed to believe it too.

While the white farmer and soldier were despised by the Native American, the few psychopaths who set out to live a native life, were revered and feared and hunted as veritable Grendel’s themselves. Most Mountain Men and frontiersmen were slain by Indians warriors. A cult even formed around the hunting of Wetzel among the Shawnee and later of Johnson among the Crow, with warriors consigning themselves to live and hunt alone forever away from their family and tribe until they had brought the white devil down.

On three occasions the Mountain Men summoned Johnson or were summed by him, to lead genocidal war parties to avenge insult or deaths among their own race-bonded fraternity, Anglos and Latinos putting aside their differences and sometimes allying with Indian enemies of their enemy to wage hate-based war. This was seen as a spiritual undertaking attendant with some ritual and mirrored Johnson’s behavior in five private wars. Warriors around the world and throughout history have, when pressed—such as when Tecumseh united enemy tribes to fight a race war against the Whiteman—resorted to this primal equivalent of the nuclear option.

In everyday sense this may result in an honor-based pecking order focused on particular forms of mastery which a certain ethnic group or race hold to be uniquely theirs, such as black men insisting on their superiority as boxers and the curious attachment of white men to marksmanship, as indicated by this anecdote from my life below.

My brother Tango was home from the army, after 5 years with the 82nd Airborne, where he was the best marksman in his battalion. Finding out that I owned a carbine and that I had not fired it for five years, he took me to the firing range at Elkneck State Park near Aberdeen Proving Ground. I had never been a good shot, and when having beebee gun battles as boys usually opted for throwing rocks as I was more effective with a cast stone than an aimed Crossman 760. My brother aimed to rectify this deficiency in my masculine skill set.

He set up a paper plate and a bottle cap at the extreme end of the dug-out firing pit. The pit had railroad tie beams across the top at ten foot intervals. We fired into a dirt bank. I was to hit the plate, he the cap. He never missed the cap. I never hit the plate.

Then, deciding on standing instead of bracing while I shot, I unloosed a round before the hunters and military men with their larger weapons let fire. All of them stood dumfounded as sand fell from the beam halfway to the target, ten feet above what should have been my line of fire.

Tango shouted, “Was that you?”

“Afraid so,” I answered as every man turned to stare at me as if I had worn a devil’s suit to church.

He yanked the carbine from my grip and snarled, “What the fuck!”

I answered, “You know I’ve never been a good shot.”

He then punched me in the stomach and yelled, “For Christ’s sake bro—you’re white!”

Not bothered by the punch I quipped, “Wanna box?”

He then raised his hands in disgust, having secured the weapon, and looked to the other men as he seemed to beseech Odin himself, “And my knucklehead brother has the hard head of a black man and suggests I sprain my wrist on it again!”

“Sorry folks, continue. I’m taking my brother of undetermined race back to Baltimore!”

The next time we got together we boxed, and although I never laid a glove on him, he did, as predicted, sprain his wrist hitting me again and eventually ran out of gas and spit up cigarette tar on my new white shoes, not able to throw more than 400 punches, since becoming a smoker.

Just last year some three decades later, I was sparring with my young fighter Craig, a black man of Jamaican extraction, who was kindly taking it super easy on the old coach of his, when we accidentally clashed heads. I was concussed. His head was so hard and heavy it felt like the last time I was face planted onto asphalt during a stick fight.

Craig paused and said, “Are you alright James?”

I waved him on and he refused to come at me and said, “Are you alright James?”

I nodded ‘yes’ unable to speak, and stepped toward him like I would for an inquiring referee and waved him on.

He dropped his hands and shook his head, “You’re not alright.”

Angry that my legendary hard head was being called into question I punched him in the face and waded in. He chuckled, shrugged, and began to box, carrying me for the rest of that round. When the round was over he smiled questioningly and inquired, “What was that all about?”

“Damn it Craig, you are not going to get me to admit to being a softheaded white man!”

We had a good laugh on that point of racial honor that has often been bandied about boxing gyms.

A tribe may be made stronger and increase into a nation when its economic leaders, who perhaps sit upon piles of treasure, rule lands, and lay claim to honors attained by better men in earlier days, extend a portion of this wealth to a more able and more intrinsically honorable man who might then serve his own honorable cause and the greater good as well. This is essentially the story of civilization and shall be the focus of the next two chapters.

Let’s close with an example of how a man’s honor may accrue to his woman, as it still does occasionally in the rougher underbelly of our world when a woman who happens to be associated with one of the surviving honorable men is threatened.

The Piegan woman Waving Grass, having been saved by Liver-Eater Johnson, and having in her turn saved him, was living at a fort that housed a refuge for widowed Indian women, which she was as the widowed wife of a Cheyenne warrior. The widows were preyed upon by the soldiers and officers of the fort who cowered behind walls terrified of Indian warriors while civilians like Johnson took the fight to the enemy in the wild places.

A new officer was walked over to three ‘squaws’ and invited to selected which one would be his unpaid whore. Then the woman with the pistol, and rifle and horse, spoke unexpectedly in rough English and claimed, “I am the wife of Liver-Eater Johnson.”

And so a mere mention of a man renowned for primal honor, a man who was proven according to all six of Man’s honor codes, by a woman claiming association, sent two chiefs of a denatured hierarchal honor system scurrying for cover like mice scenting a cat.

But in the end, hierarchal notions of honor have nearly extinguished the more primal forms Therefore an understanding of these dynamics is key to understanding the means by which men might be able to recover their sense of honor from the vast grinding social machine that owns them.