What is the difference between fame and a good name?

Freyja: # On Fame and a Good Name You ask me a small question that is not small at all. The old poems knew this difference in their bones, and the men who wrote them down after the faith fell — Snorri in his hall, the unknown hand of the Codex Regius — they kept it, because it was the marrow of how my people understood a life. Hear first the verse that every Northman knew, from the Hávamál, the sayings that came down under Óðinn's name — stanza 77: > Cattle die, and kinsmen die,

and so one dies one's self;but a noble name will never die,if good renown one gets. pause Read it slowly. It does not say fame will never die. It says a noble name — and only if good renown one gets. There is a knife hidden in that little word if. The poem is not promising you immortality for being loud, or feared, or spoken of. It is promising you something only if the name you leave behind is worth the breath that carries it. The preface to Njáls saga — the one Dasent set down in his old translation — opens this door wider. He writes of my people that we believed "Goods perish, friends perish, a man himself perishes, but fame never dies to him that hath won it worthily." And then, sharper: "One thing I know that never dies, the judgment passed on every mortal man." The judgment passed on every mortal man. That is what a name is, when the flesh is gone and the gold is scattered and the hall has burned. It is the judgment. It is what the mouths of the living decide you were. So hear the difference, and hear it plain. Fame is only that people speak your name. It is noise. A murderer is famous. A coward who dies loudly is famous. A man who burns another man's steading in the night and boasts of it in the mead-hall has fame, of a kind — the Njála preface tells us plainly that to kill in daylight and name the deed was manslaughter and a man's business, but "to kill men at dead of night was also looked on as murder," and murder blackened the name forever. Fame without worth is a stain that outlasts you. It is judgment too — but the wrong kind. A good name is fame that has been earned worthily. It is the noble name of stanza 77. The Skáldskaparmál — Snorri's book of poetic terms, around page 96 in Brodeur's rendering — lists what the old tongue called the true epithets of a worthy man: Wise Man, Man of Thought, Wise in Speech, Sage in Counsel, Wealth Munificent, Not Slack, Endower, Illustrious One. Look at that list with open eyes. Wealth Munificent. Endower. Not Slack. These are not names for the man who took the most; they are names for the man who gave the most, who did not shirk, who counselled well, who spoke wisely. And on the facing page, Snorri sets the shadow-list against it — Niggard, Miser, Calculator, Wealth-Hiding, Gift-Tardy One. The tight-fisted man might be as rich as a king and as spoken-of as a king, but the tongue of the poets would flay him. His fame would be his ruin. This is what my people understood that yours has half-forgotten: the name is a verdict, not a headcount. It matters not how many mouths speak of you. It matters what they say, and whether the saying will still be true when the last of them is dust. And there is one thing more, and it is the hardest thing, and I will not spare you it. The Njála preface says of us that "over all man's life hung a blind, inexorable fate," and that "when his hour came, a man must meet his death." long-pause Fate we did not choose. The manner of meeting it — that, the preface says, "rested with a man himself, that, at least, was in his own power; there he might show his free will." This is where the good name is forged. Not in what happens to you — sickness, the sword, the wandering husband who does not return, the child taken — but in how you stand in it. The good name is what the living say of the way you bore what you could not choose. So the difference, seiðkona to seeker: Fame asks are you spoken of. A good name asks what is spoken, and would you be proud to hear it from the mouths of strangers a hundred winters after your bones are cold. One is the mirror the world holds up. The other is the judgment. And the judgment — as the old poem said and as I say now, standing in the echo of it — never dies. pause What name, then, are you shaping in the days you have left? Not the noise of it. The worth of it. Answer that only to yourself.

This conversation was had on Skalden — walk into the Norse world.