The quality of a contest depends partly on the quality of the opponent — which this literature understands, and says in a way that is worth borrowing.
Start with a specific episode, because the general claim is easy to overstate and this one instance carries it.
In Njál’s Saga, Gunnar of Hlíðarendi is cornered at his farm and fights off a large party of attackers for a long time, alone, until his bowstring breaks. When he is finally killed, the man who led the attack — Gizur the White, who has every reason to be pleased — says that they have brought down a great chieftain, that it cost them, and that the defence will be remembered as long as anyone lives in Iceland.
That is the enemy, at the moment of winning, entering the dead man’s achievement into the record. The saga gives him the line and does not undercut it.
The pattern recurs. Worthy opponents in the sagas are described respectfully, and the texts draw a firm distinction between killing a man openly and within the accepted code, and killing him in a way that is shameful.
The Greek material makes the same move more famously, and I mention it as a comparison rather than as evidence about the north, since it belongs to a different literature: the Iliad gives Hector its most sympathetic portrait and ends not with a triumph but with Achilles and Priam weeping together.
The structural observation underneath is the portable one. Your achievement is partly made of your opponent. Beat someone weak and you have a weak victory; the value of what you did is not independent of what you did it against. That is what Gizur is acknowledging, and it is available without any of the rest of the honour system.
Which makes contempt for the opponent self-defeating in a way that is easy to state and hard to feel.
The research on rivalry finds that competing against a specific, known, respected rival produces higher effort and performance than competing against an anonymous field — the relationship itself adds something.4
That work is reasonably well done and the effect is not trivial. The same literature is clear that rivalry has a dark side: it raises effort and it also raises willingness to behave unethically, and the two go together more often than anyone would like.
So the honest version is: a respected rival raises your game, and rivalry as such also corrodes judgment. The distinction the literature draws — respect versus contempt — maps onto that reasonably well, and is not the same thing as caring less about winning.
Your achievement is partly made of who you did it against.
Honour codes of this kind specify a class of people entitled to honourable treatment, and the specification is the problem.
Drengskapr and its equivalents governed conduct between men of standing. They did not govern conduct toward thralls, toward the people on the receiving end of a raid, or toward anyone outside the circle of those who counted. The open killing within the code was an arrangement among peers — not fair in our sporting sense, but regulated — running alongside conduct toward non-peers that was regulated by nothing.
That is not an incidental blemish. Honour cultures characteristically combine elaborate courtesy inside the circle with very little restraint outside it, and reading only the courtesy gives a badly false picture of how those societies worked.
The modern extraction — respect your opponent because the contest is co-created — is defensible on its own terms, and it is not what the code was. What the code was is a membership rule.
Note — a membership rule
It governed conduct between men of standing and said nothing about thralls or the people on the receiving end of a raid. Honour cultures characteristically pair elaborate courtesy inside the circle with very little restraint outside it.
Most of this is a perception discipline rather than a moral one. Contempt is first of all inaccurate.
These essays draw on Old Norse and Old English literature — the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, and Beowulf — all of which were written down in Christian societies long after the pagan world they describe. Eddic and saga passages follow the translations named below; where a term or picture is contested, the essay says so rather than the list. Modern research is cited by author and publication.
The quality of a contest depends partly on the quality of the opponent, which makes contempt a measurement error before it is anything else — and a respected rival demonstrably raises the effort.
But rivalry also corrodes judgment, and the historical code was a membership rule: courtesy inside the circle, and very little outside it.