By popular request, today we’re going to talk about oaths. Oaths appear a lot in fantasy fiction – and even in historical fiction – and they are frequently done wrong. I remarked on this in part II of my “How it Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages” that, “characters are forever being asked to swear, without swearing by anything, which isn’t how oaths work.” To which I was posed by a few readers the understandable question, “wait, how do oaths work?” and “how are they getting it wrong?” Today, we’re going to lay that out.
(For those wondering, “Wait, weren’t we going to talk about the impact of range on arrows and armor penetration – yes, we were. I’m waiting on a few books to check a few things in my notes, so we’ll probably do that post next week. Don’t worry, it will happen.)
First, some caveats. This is really a discussion of oath-taking as it existed (and exists) around the Mediterranean and Europe. My understanding is that the basic principles are broadly cross-cultural, but I can’t claim the expertise in practices south of the Sahara or East of the Indus to make that claim with full confidence. I am mostly going to stick to what I know best: Greece, Rome and the European Middle Ages. Oath-taking in the pre-Islamic Near East seems to follow the same set of rules (note Bachvarova’s and Connolly’s articles in Horkos), but that is beyond my expertise, as is the Middle East post-Hijra.
Second, I should note that I’m drawing my definition of an oath from Alan Sommerstein’s excellent introduction in Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (2007), edited by A. Sommerstein and J. Fletcher – one of the real ‘go-to’ works on oath-taking in the ancient Mediterranean world. As I go, I’ll also use some medieval examples to hopefully convince you that the same basic principles apply to medieval oaths, especially the all-important oaths of fealty and homage.
(Pedantry note: now you may be saying, “wait, an introduction? Why use that?” As of when I last checked, there is no monograph (single author, single topic) treatment of oaths. Rather, Alan Sommerstein has co-authored a set of edited collections – Horkos (2007, with J. Fletcher), Oath and State (2013, with A. Bayliss) and Oaths and Swearing (2014, with I. Torrance). This can make Greek oaths a difficult topic to get a basic overview of, as opposed to a laundry list of the 101 ancient works you must read for examples. Discussions of Roman oaths are, if anything, even less welcoming to the beginner, because they intersect with the study of Roman law. I think the expectation has always been that the serious student of the classics would have read so many oaths in the process of learning Latin and Greek to develop a sort of instinct for the cultural institution. Nevertheless, Sommerstein’s introduction in Horkos presents my preferred definition of the structure of an oath.)
Alright – all of the quibbling out of the way: onward!
So what is an Oath? Is it the same as a Vow?
Ok, let’s start with definitions. In modern English, we often use oath and vow interchangeably, but they are not (usually) the same thing. Divine beings figure in both kinds of promises, but in different ways. In a vow, the god or gods in question are the recipients of the promise: you vow something to God (or a god). By contrast, an oath is made typically to a person and the role of the divine being in the whole affair is a bit more complex.
(Etymology digression: the word ‘oath’ comes to us by way of Old English āþ (pronounced ‘ath’ with a long ‘a’) and has close cousins in Dutch ‘Eed’ and German ‘Eid.’ The word vow comes from Latin (via Middle English, via French), from the word votum. A votum is specifically a gift to a god in exchange for some favor – the gift can be in the present tense or something promised in the future. By contrast, the Latin word for oath is ius (it has a few meanings) and to swear an oath is the verb iuro (thus the legal phrase ‘ius iurandum” – literally ‘the oath to be sworn’). This Latin distinction is preserved into the English usage, where ‘vow’ retains its Latin meaning, and the word ‘oath’ usurps the place of Latin ius (along with other words for specific kinds of oaths in Latin, e.g. sacramentum)).
In a vow, the participant promises something – either in the present or the future – to a god, typically in exchange for something. This is why we talk of an oath of fealty or homage (promises made to a human), but a monk’s vows. When a monk promises obedience, chastity and poverty, he is offering these things to God in exchange for grace, rather than to any mortal person. Those vows are not to the community (though it may be present), but to God (e.g. Benedict in his Rule notes that the vow “is done int he presence of God and his saints to impress on the novice that if he ever acts otherwise, he will surely be condemned by the one he mocks.” (RB 58.18)). Note that a physical thing given in a vow is called a votive (from that Latin root).
(More digressions: Why do we say ‘marriage vows‘ in English? Isn’t this a promise to another human being? I suspect this usage – functionally a ‘frozen’ phrase – derives from the assumption that the vows are, in fact, not a promise to your better half, but to God to maintain. After all, the Latin Church held – and the Catholic Church still holds – that a marriage cannot be dissolved by the consent of both parties (unlike oaths, from which a person may be released with the consent of the recipient). The act of divine ratification makes God a party to the marriage, and thus the promise is to him. Thus a vow, and not an oath.)
So again, a vow is a promise to a divinity or other higher power (you can make vows to heroes and saints, for instance), whereas an oath is a promise to another human, which is somehow enforced, witnessed or guaranteed by that higher power.
An example of this important distinction being handled in a very awkward manner is the ‘oath’ of the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones (delivered in S1E7, but taken, short a few words, verbatim from the books). The recruits call out to…someone… (they never name who, which as we’ll see, is a problem) to “hear my words and bear witness to my vow.” Except it’s not clear to me that this is a vow, so much as an oath. The supernatural being you are vowing something to does not bear witness because they are the primary participant – they don’t witness the gift, they receive it.
I strongly suspect that Martin is riffing off of here are the religious military orders of the Middle Ages (who did frequently take vows), but if this is a vow, it raises serious questions. It is absolutely possible to vow a certain future behavior – to essentially make yourself the gift – but who are they vowing to? The tree? It may well be ‘the Old Gods’ who are supposed to be both nameless and numerous (this is, forgive me, not how ancient paganism worked – am I going to have to write that post too?) and who witness things (such as the Pact, itself definitely an oath, through the trees), but if so, surely you would want to specify that. Societies that do votives – especially when there are many gods – are often quite concerned that gifts might go awry. You want to be very specific as to who, exactly, you are vowing something to.
This is all the more important given that (as in the books) the Night’s Watch oath may be sworn in a sept as well as to a Weirwood tree. It wouldn’t do to vow yourself to the wrong gods! More importantly, the interchangeability of the gods in question points very strongly to this being an oath. Gods tend to be very particular about the votives they will receive; one can imagine saying ‘swear by whatever gods you have here’ but not ‘vow yourself to whatever gods you have here.’ Who is to say the local gods take such gifts?
Moreover, while they pledge their lives, they aren’t receiving anything in return. Here I think the problem may be that we are so used to the theologically obvious request of Christian vows (salvation and the life after death) that it doesn’t occur to us that you would need to specify what you get for a vow. But the Old Gods don’t seem to be in a position to offer salvation. Votives to gods in polytheistic systems almost always follow the do ut des system (lit. “I give, that you might give”). Things are not offered just for the heck of it – something is sought in return. And if you want that thing, you need to say it. Jupiter is not going to try to figure it out on his own. If you are asking the Old Gods to protect you, or the wall, or mankind, you need to ask.
Note that the gift is clear, the requested favor is clear, and the recipient is clear. The one thing missing from a typical ancient vow formula would be for Pullo to clearly name himself as the vow-taker. It wouldn’t do for Forculus to rescue the wrong prisoner!
(Pliny the Elder puts it neatly declaring, “of course, either to sacrifice without prayer or to consult the gods without sacrifice is useless” (Nat. Hist 28.3). Prayer here (Latin: precatio) really means ‘asking for something’ – as in the sense of “I pray thee (or ‘prithee’) tell me what happened?” And to be clear, the connection of Christian religious practice to the do ut des formula of pre-Christian paganism is a complex theological question better addressed to a theologian or church historian.)
The scene makes more sense as an oath – the oath-takers are swearing to the rest of the Night’s Watch to keep these promises, with the Weirwood Trees (and through them, the Old Gods – although again, they should specify) acting as witnesses. As a vow, too much is up in the air and the idea that a military order would permit its members to vow themselves to this or that god at random is nonsense. For a vow, the recipient – the god – is paramount.
The Components of an Oath
Which brings us to the question how does an oath work? In most of modern life, we have drained much of the meaning out of the few oaths that we still take, in part because we tend to be very secular and so don’t regularly consider the religious aspects of the oaths – even for people who are themselves religious. Consider it this way: when someone lies in court on a TV show, we think, “ooh, he’s going to get in trouble with the law for perjury.” We do not generally think, “Ah yes, this man’s soul will burn in hell for all eternity, for he has (literally!) damned himself.” But that is the theological implication of a broken oath!
So when thinking about oaths, we want to think about them the way people in the past did: as things that work – that is they do something. In particular, we should understand these oaths as effective – by which I mean that the oath itself actually does something more than just the words alone. They trigger some actual, functional supernatural mechanisms. In essence, we want to treat these oaths as real in order to understand them.
So what is an oath? To borrow Richard Janko’s (The Iliad: A Commentary (1992), in turn quoted by Sommerstein) formulation, “to take an oath is in effect to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it is false.” Following Sommerstein, an oath has three key components:
First: A declaration, which may be either something about the present or past or a promise for the future.
Second: The specific powers greater than oneself who are invoked as witnesses and who will enforce the penalty if the oath is false. In Christian oaths, this is typically God, although it can also include saints. For the Greeks, Zeus Horkios (Zeus the Oath-Keeper) is the most common witness for oaths. This is almost never omitted, even when it is obvious.
Third: A curse, by the swearers, called down on themselves, should they be false. This third part is often omitted or left implied, where the cultural context makes it clear what the curse ought to be. Particularly, in Christian contexts, the curse is theologically obvious (damnation, delivered at judgment) and so is often omitted.
While some of these components (especially the last) may be implied in the form of an oath, all three are necessary for the oath to be effective – that is, for the oath to work.
A fantastic example of the basic formula comes from Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (656 – that’s a section, not a date), where the promise in question is the construction of a new monastery, which runs thusly (Anne Savage’s translation):
These are the witnesses that were there, who signed on Christ’s cross with their fingers and agreed with their tongues…”I, king Wulfhere, with these king’s eorls, war-leaders and thanes, witness of my gift, before archbishop Deusdedit, confirm with Christ’s cross”…they laid God’s curse, and the curse of all the saints and all God’s people on anyone who undid anything of what was done, so be it, say we all. Amen.” [Emphasis mine]
So we have the promise (building a monastery and respecting the donation of land to it), the specific power invoked as witness, both by name and through the connection to a specific object (the cross – I’ve omitted the oaths of all of Wulfhere’s subordinates, but each and every one of them assented ‘with Christ’s cross,’ which they are touching) and then the curse to be laid on anyone who should break the oath.
Of the Medieval oaths I’ve seen, this one is somewhat odd in that the penalty is spelled out. That’s much more common in ancient oaths where the range of possible penalties and curses was much wider. The Dikask’s oath (the oath sworn by Athenian jurors), as reconstructed by Max Frankel, also provides an example of the whole formula from the ancient world:
I will vote according to the laws and the votes of the Demos of the Athenians and the Council of the Five Hundred…I swear these things by Zeus, Apollo and Demeter, and may I have many good things if I swear well, but destruction for me and my family if I forswear.
Again, each of the three working components are clear: the promise being made (to judge fairly – I have shortened this part, it goes on a bit), the enforcing entity (Zeus, Apollo and Demeter) and the penalty for forswearing (in this case, a curse of destruction). The penalty here is appropriately ruinous, given that the jurors have themselves the power to ruin others (they might be judging cases with very serious crimes, after all).
How an Oath Works
With those components laid out, it may be fairly easy to see how the oath works, but let’s spell it out nonetheless. You swear an oath because your own word isn’t good enough, either because no one trusts you, or because the matter is so serious that the extra assurance is required.
That assurance comes from the presumption that the oath will be enforced by the divine third party. The god is called – literally – to witness the oath and to lay down the appropriate curses if the oath is violated. Knowing that horrible divine punishment awaits forswearing, the oath-taker, it is assumed, is less likely to make the oath. Interestingly, in the literature of classical antiquity, it was also fairly common for the gods to prevent the swearing of false oaths – characters would find themselves incapable of pronouncing the words or swearing the oath properly.
And that brings us to a second, crucial point – these are legalistic proceedings, in the sense that getting the details right matters a great detail. The god is going to enforce the oath based on its exact wording (what you said, not what you meant to say!), so the exact wording must be correct. It was very, very common to add that oaths were sworn ‘without guile or deceit’ or some such formulation, precisely to head off this potential trick (this is also, interestingly, true of ancient votives – a Roman or a Greek really could try to bargain with a god, “I’ll give X if you give Y, but only if I get by Z date, in ABC form.” – but that’s vows, and we’re talking oaths).
Thus for instance, runs an oath of homage from the Chronicle of the Death of Charles the Good from 1127:
“I promise on my faith that I will in future be faithful to count William, and will observe my homage to him completely against all persons in good faith and without deceit.”
Not all oaths are made in full, with the entire formal structure, of course. Short forms are made. In Greek, it was common to transform a statement into an oath by adding something like τὸν Δία (by Zeus!). Those sorts of phrases could serve to make a compact oath – e.g. μὰ τὸν Δία! (yes, [I swear] by Zeus!) as an answer to the question is essentially swearing to the answer – grammatically speaking, the verb of swearing is necessary, but left implied. We do the same thing, (“I’ll get up this hill, by God!”). And, I should note, exactly like in English, these forms became standard exclamations, as in Latin comedy, this is often hercule! (by Hercules!), edepol! (by Pollux!) or ecastor! (By Castor! – oddly only used by women). One wonders in these cases if Plautus chooses semi-divine heroes rather than full on gods to lessen the intensity of the exclamation (‘shoot!’ rather than ‘shit!’ as it were). Aristophanes, writing in Greek, has no such compunction, and uses ‘by Zeus!’ quite a bit, often quite frivolously.
Nevertheless, serious oaths are generally made in full, often in quite specific and formal language. Remember that an oath is essentially a contract, cosigned by a god – when you are dealing with that kind of power, you absolutely want to be sure you have dotted all of the ‘i’s and crossed all of the ‘t’s. Most pre-modern religions are very concerned with what we sometimes call ‘orthopraxy’ (‘right practice’ – compare orthodoxy, ‘right doctrine’). Intent doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting the exact form or the ritual precisely correct (for comparison, ancient paganisms tend to care almost exclusively about orthopraxy, whereas medieval Christianity balances concern between orthodoxy and orthopraxy (but with orthodoxy being the more important)).
Naming Names
So what goes wrong in pop-cultural depictions? Errors in the first part of the oath formula – the declaration (the thing you are swearing to) are fairly rare. It’s hard to accidentally write an oath-taking scene in which no one at least promises something.
So of course Benioff and Weiss manage to do it in Game of Thrones, in the knighting scene, S8E2. Jamie charges Brienne – in the name of various aspects of the Seven – to be brave and just and so on, but Brienne never actually speaks. She doesn’t actually promise anything, and no penalty is specified (although perhaps with the Faith of the Seven, like the Christian Church, the penalty is sufficiently obvious as to be left implied).
This is a truly baffling omission. I should note that Martin’s full oath of knighthood from the books resolves this problem, because the oath continues, with a demand that the knight-to-be swear “before the eyes of gods and men” (invoking a set of higher powers to enforce the oath) to do a various knightly thing, and the knight-to-be then has to assent to this. But that Benioff and Weiss saw the full text of that oath and decided to cut the part where Brienne actually swears something, suggests that while Martin may understand how an oath works, Benioff and Weiss most certainly do not.
The examples of oath-by-assent (where one person gives the formula and then the oath-taker merely agrees to it) that I’ve seen tend to deal with group oaths (the example from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles above includes this later in the passage), but we do it very often with modern oaths (witness oaths come to mind) and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. However, it seems strange given that only one person is taking the oath and that it is a very serious oath indeed. In such high-stakes situations, you generally make the person taking the oath repeat the formula. As an aside, the Roman’s soldier’s oath (the sacramentum) had to be administered individually, one by one, no matter how large the army, although soldiers after the first were allowed, essentially, to swear ‘ditto’ (Polybius 6.21.3). Still, one has to imagine it took all day (Polybius seems to imply that it did) – but, in matters of religion, if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes!
Still, other than this, oaths where no one actually manages to promise something fairly rare. Far more common is where characters fail to swear by any greater power, especially in contexts where specifying some such power would be really important.
Perhaps the ultimate bad example of this is the ‘swearing’ that Sarumon has the Wild Men perform in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Two Towers. The Dunlending declares “we will fight for you” to which Sarumon replies, “swear it!” Then the Dunelending man cuts his hand and declares “we will die, for Sarumon!” It looks cool, but as yourself: why is this Wild Man’s promise any more binding or trustworthy after he has lacerated his hand than before? What new force holds him to his promise?
This is actually a very important question, given that the religious situation here is questionable. Swearing by Eru Iluvatar or the Valar would be an odd choice, to say the least; swearing by Sauron would make more sense. In any case, for an oath to be effective – and remember, this is a situation where Sarumon needs the oath to be effective (or else why demand they ‘swear it’ at all?) – there needs to be a higher power enforcing the oath. Perhaps Sarumon, in his cynicism (or knowledge) knows that no higher power would enforce this oath, but surely the Wild Men do not know that and so Sarumon needs them to believe such a power exists.
Oath-taking formulas, especially formal oaths (and any diplomatic oath is a formal one) almost never drop the specification of the higher authority enforcing the oath, even in contexts where you would think it would be obvious. By way of example, consider these oaths in Old English (from the Textus Roffensis, translated by Chris Monk at the Rochester Cathedral Research Guild – a friendly reminder to medieval history aficionados that quite a lot of medieval texts still do not have critical editions or English translations), dating to the 10th century – the text is a series of boilerplate oaths for common situations (fealty, livestock disputes, theft, etc), each and every one of which begins with an invocation of the relevant deity (in this case, the Christian God):
In the Lord: the oath which [name of defendant or plaintiff] swore is pure and without falsehood.
In the name of Almighty God: you promised me that you sold it to me whole and clean, and in full awareness against an after-claim, for which [name of witness of transaction] was the witness for us both.
In the name of Almighty God: as I here stand for [names of parties to transaction] in true witness, unbidden and unbought, that I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears that which I declare on their behalf.
And so on. Perhaps the most interesting for our discussion is the oath of fealty which is the first listed in the text:
In the Lord, whose holiness is foremost: to [name of lord] I wish to be loyal and true, and to love all that he loves, and to shun all that he shuns according to God’s law and secular customs, and neither willingly nor intentionally to carry out either a word or deed which to him is hateful; I wish to live up to the regard with which he may hold me; and everything agreed between us I will carry out when I submit to him; and his will I have chosen.
You can see the same specificity in the standard American witness oath, which still includes ‘so help me God’ in most versions. Interestingly, it also typically includes the witness placing a hand on a holy book or object, which leads us to:
Objects in Oaths
We’re going to start with a bad example – y’all know I love Peter Jackson’s films, but he messed this scene up. Here’s the dialogue (transcribed by me):
Gollum: We swears to do what you wants. We swears.
Frodo: There’s no promise you can make that I can trust.
Gollum: We swears to serve the master of the precious. We will swear on…on…the precious! GOLLUM! GOLLUM!
Frodo: The Ring is treacherous, it will hold you to your word.
Frodo has confused swearing on something with swearing by something. Tolkien is more careful and the scene in the book is actually fantastic at demonstrating the distinction between swearing on something and swearing by something:
‘Smeagol,’ said Gollum suddenly and clearly, opening his eyes wide and starting at Frodo with a strange light. ‘Smeagol will swear on the Precious.’
Frodo drew himself up, and again Sam was startled by his words and his stern voice. ‘On the Precious? How dare you?’ he said. ‘Think! One Ring to rule them all and in the Darkness bind them. Would you commit your promise to that Smeagol? It will hold you. But it is more treacherous than you are. It may twist your words. Beware!’
Gollum cowered. ‘On the Precious, on the Precious!’ he repeated…’Smeagol will swear never, never to let Him have it. Never! Smeagol will save it. But he must swear on the Precious.’
‘No! not on it,’ said Frodo, looking down at him with stern pity. ‘All you wish is to see it and touch it, if you can, though you know it would drive you mad. Not on it. Swear by it, if you will.’ (TT, 265-6).
Ok, so what is going on? To swear by the Precious is to invoke the Ring itself as the higher power to maintain the oath (an oath, one might note, Gollum keeps – he does, in fact, die, trying to ‘save’ the ring in his own twisted way). This we may recognize from the previous section.
But evidently that is quite different from swearing on the Precious, which would require seeing and touching it. Peter Jackson has, unfortunately, missed this nuance (or it got cut for time – movies are a compressed medium). Gollum asks to swear on the precious and feels he has done so, but the thing he is swearing on never actually appears. Tolkien understands better – for Gollum to swear on the precious, Frodo must produce the Ring so that Gollum may see it, and Gollum must touch it while swearing his oath. This Frodo will not do, and so Gollum only swears by the Ring.
Tolkien is, in fact, tapping into historical practice here. An oath may be intensified by proximity to – or more often – physical contact with an object containing some measure of spiritual power, typically a symbol of representation of the supernatural beings who will enforce the oath. Through that object, those beings are made more immediately present. We can see an example of this from the Bayeux Tapestry:
Harold (Godwinson) makes his oath to William (of Normandy, i.e. William the Conqueror) while holding his hands to a pair of relics. We aren’t privy to the text of the oath, but one assumes that not only God but also the relevant saints were invoked as the keepers of Harold’s oath. You can see parallels to this in the oath from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle given above, where ‘all of the Saints’ are invoked to punish a perjurer. The Chronicle also takes care to record that the swearers did so in direct physical contact with a cross.
(Sidenote: Perjury does not mean simply ‘to lie in a court’ but very specifically – from the Latin – means to break an oath, Latin ius, you will recall. Thus to be periurus (someone who has gone ‘through’ their oath) is to be an oath-breaker.)
The Greeks did this as well. The Syracusans, for instance, had a ritual whereby powerful or politically dangerous men would go to the temple of Demeter and Persephone and – while holding the sacred torch of the goddesses and wearing the purple vestment that would normally adorn the statue – swear an oath not to harm the community (Plut. Dio 56.5 – on this, see Wareh, “Hierophantic Performances” in Horkos). It’s possible that the selection of these two goddesses is connected to the Eleusinian mysteries, but it seems equally probable that the focus is really on Persephone, who (as Queen of the Underworld) frequently figures in Greek curses. As with the relics, note that physical contact is important: they have to carry the torch and wear the vestment for the oath to ‘work’ as intended.
Of course we do this as well – in America, oaths tend to be sworn on holy texts. I want to stress that physical contact to an item of spiritual power is not necessary for an oath (it seems much more common in Christian oaths than in Greek or Roman ones, for what it is worth). But the holy object or place is understood to lend some of its own ‘power’ to the oath, intensifying it.
(Language digression: I should note that in modern usage, this distinction is sometimes complicated by oaths which offer specific collateral, a form of naming the curse. For instance the phrase, “I swear by my soul” is explicitly offering the latter as the collateral of the oath – this is effectively naming the curse (the loss of the soul, i.e. eternal damnation). The same is true for someone to swear ‘on their honor’ – their honor is the collateral, which is a fairly weak-sauce oath, all told, unless the person sets great store by it. In contrast, someone might swear “on my mother’s grave” which does not generally involve touching the grave (but almost always does involve a hand-to-heart gesture, in my experience). Oaths like this seem to me to be rare in societies where the oath is still viewed as effective, because if the oath is effective, it is important to be specific and careful with the formula.)
The Game of Thrones Night’s Watch oath we discussed above is odd in this respect. They’ve gone to a holy place (a Weirwood), but it is quite strange that they do not touch the tree. It may seem strange to us, but ancient and medieval religions alike placed a lot of importance on physical contact in these sorts of things (to the point that, for instance, the protection afforded by holding on to an altar could be maintained at distance by a rope tied around the altar, and voided if that rope broke, e.g. Plut. Solon 12.1). It wasn’t enough for the relic to be mentioned or simply be present, it had to be in contact with the oath-taker as they swore their oath to have its intensifying effect. This could just be a ritual difference for the religion of the Old Gods, but it does strike me as quite odd.
Conclusion
Alright, so I’ve explained how oaths work and why pop culture often gets them wrong. Why does that matter?
It goes to a statement I have made before: people in the past generally believed their own religion. One of the most common – and most dangerous – pitfalls I find myself helping my students to navigate around is this one: assuming that because we don’t believe a given religion, no one of any sense at the time could have either. This is of course, when you think about it, obviously untrue. Moreover, it reduces people in the past from complex intelligent humans with agency to dummies who just didn’t know their stupid religion was stupid (it wasn’t, they weren’t).
What many of these examples of bungled oaths show is a kid’s understanding of how swearing and vowing works – they are little more than ‘pinky-swears.’ But societies in the past where these rituals were common believed they were effective – meaning that the ritual of oath-taking made the promise so given more trustworthy, more binding, more dangerous to break. These were serious things that required serious, careful understanding. Serious oaths and vows – like taking monastic vows – would often be proceeded by days of religious fasting and contemplation, because this was serious stuff you were about to do (e.g. Rule of St. Benedict 58.6-16).
Draining all of that spiritual power away from serious, formal oaths treats that religious faith unseriously. Again, that’s not to say people in the past didn’t swear frivolous oaths – they did. They also broke oaths, although rarely so openly as we see in fiction. Much oath-breaking in the Middle Ages was justified by arguing that the other side of the oath (typically the liege-lord) had not kept up their end of the bargain (thus, for instance, the insistence of First Crusade accounts of the perfidy of the Byzantines – nearly all of the crusade leaders had sworn oaths to uphold Byzantine territory, which they had violated at Antioch. Making Alexios Komnenos out to be treacherous was necessary to release them of the duty to hand Antioch to him). In the ancient world, you might try to mend fences by consulting an oracle as to how to expiate the guilt of a broken oath (to be clear, you are mending fences with the offended god, not the mortal you made the agreement with).
But a formal oath, properly uttered and secured with appropriate sacredness, was a powerful, binding thing. These are people, after all, who thought the divine retribution on the other end of breaking that oath was very real. Even if we don’t believe that, we should take their faith seriously – if for no other reason than failing to do so often renders their behavior into nonsense.
Next week – hopefully the impact of range on arrows and armor penetration, library permitting. I won’t swear to it though.
Great post, and great blog. I’m thinking of of The oath of Feanor which drives the plot in Quenta Silmarillion
“Be he foe or friend, be he foul or clean,
brood of Morgoth or bright Vala,
Elda or Maia or Aftercomer,
Man yet unborn upon Middle-earth,
neither law, nor love, nor league of swords,
dread nor danger, not Doom itself,
shall defend him from Fëanor, and Fëanor’s kin,
whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh,
finding keepeth or afar casteth
a Silmaril. This swear we all:
death we will deal him ere Day’s ending,
woe unto world’s end! Our word hear thou,
Eru Allfather! To the everlasting
Darkness doom us if our deed faileth.
On the holy mountain hear in witness
and our vow remember, Manwë and Varda!”
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Oath_of_F%C3%ABanor
Yes! This one was on my pile-o-examples, but didn’t make it into the post (I had a LOT of examples). I love it – it gets the formula precisely right. They swear *by* Eru, on the holy mountain (used much like a relic), with both promise and curse made very clear. I didn’t include any oaths from Anglo-Saxon epic (like Beowulf) or the Norse Sagas, but they do swear quite a lot of them, and they follow the same rules as Greek oaths, in as far as I’ve seen.
Thanks for adding this – I hope everyone reading the post looks at it too.
I think it’s that Manwe and Varda live on the holy mountain, Taniquetil, not that Feanor and sons (in some disgrace) were anywhere near it. It’d be like an oath invoking “Zeus, who lives on Olympus”.
Yup, Feanor and sons are in the city Tirion at this point, which is built on the hill Tuna.
This line caught my attention: “It may well be ‘the Old Gods’ who are supposed to be both nameless and numerous (this is, forgive me, not how ancient paganism worked – am I going to have to write that post too?)” – Because the animistic tradition in Japan *did* have “numerous, nameless” gods; the standard epithet is 八百万の神 (yaoyorozu no kami), literally “eight million gods” but just generally signifying “a lot.” While a tradition of Buddhist vows is well-known, I started wondering if there was an equivalent to oaths as you describe them and whether it might in fact invoke the gods collectively.
What I found was that it looks like there was a formal, legalistic system of oath-swearing that went almost exactly as you’ve described here. It involved a written and signed document, sometimes stamped with blood using the signer’s thumb-print, and listing punishments from named Shinto divinities in case the oath was broken. (There was even supposedly a regional difference over whether the goddess Amaterasu was invoked.) In some cases there seems to have been special woodblock-printed “letterhead,” produced and kept at a local Shinto shrine, for these documents.
In modern pop culture, a lot of people seem to assume that the feudal structure in Japan was bound together by “honor” all on its own, but I feel like we see echoes of those oaths in e.g. this “summoning contract” from the Naruto manga: https://i.redd.it/7378nccx2mn01.jpg
I would argue on the point of the 八百万の神 being “nameless” that it is more akin to them being “unnameable”. They are presumed to have names, but their names are not necessarily known to humans. It would be like trying to name every grain of sand. To cite an anime that touches on this aspect, there’s Kamichuu, in which a middle school student becomes a Shinto goddess, and among other things has to figure out her own divine name and domain.
But as you point out, the Japanese traditionally didn’t swear by the infinite array of gods, but rather invoked specific ones. I think a lot of Western pop culture in particular fails to understand the concept of Japanese honor, that it too was bound by oaths and liege lords and was not at all nebulous (unlike face (mentsu), which is a much more fluid concept).
So even IF the Old Gods are supposed to be infinite, it’s unlikely all of their names would be unknown. And even if they were, they do have a collective name that they can be invoked by, so why wouldn’t that be used?
Their collective name is pretty clearly “the Old Gods”. It’s not a good name, and you could even argue that it’s technically a title, but the distinction between the two is kinda arbitrary if you get into the details. Plenty of mythic and legendary figures have names that are descriptions of their portfolio or narrative role; one Classical example is Deianira, wife of Heracles, whose name translates to something like “destroyer of her husband”. Either Deianira’s parents really wanted her to stay single, or she also qualifies as having a title rather than a name.
But you don’t see people in history swearing by “all the Olympian gods.” They swear by specific ones for specific tasks. The Night Watch shouldn’t be called on all of the Old Gods, but specific ones that relate to the specific task/duty they are undertaking.
They don’t really HAVE names or domains though. There are some theories that they actually refer to the weirwood trees, those who were sacrificed to the weirwoods, the children who live under/in them, or the green seers using them. So old girl worship is more akin to animism than Greek gods.
Divinities in animistic religions still have names, though. Roman families each had household gods with specific names. A member of the Juli would call on their specific household god to sanctify an oath, not “all of the gods.”
That isn’t animistic worship. Animism is the belief the things have spirits. So rocks and trees and rivers become gods, and ergo don’t always have names. Nature worship is animism, but a Roman household God is an entity in and of itself, and not the spirit of an object. And not for nothing, but the old gods probably do have names, but if the northerners ever knew them they’ve long since been forgotten. The old gods are also implied to be the gods of the children, and their names might also be unpronouncable to humans given that the children speak a language that sounds like flowing water, wind in the trees, and the like.
Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society discusses in some detail how the oath of homage and the oaths of fealty created the hierarchy of feudal society in Middle Ages France. Interestingly, homage (like marriage) was done only once between two theoretically equal free persons where the subordinate made an oath recognizing the other as his superior. Fealty, however, was often repeated as a reminder of the duties the subordinate owed the suzerain and especially when the duties changed as a person’s role in court changed..
It may have been Bloch who commented that the penalty for perjury was usually death so that the Lord could judge the oath breaker immediately. Thus many offenses we judge to be mere misdemeanors attracted the penalty of death if the offender foreswore themselves.
In regards to the oath scene with Saruman, perhaps the higher power involved was saruman himself. given that as one of the Istari he was a Maiar, or lesser ‘angelic’ being of the same sort as Sauron, and unlike Sauron Saruman had been, until two thousand years prior, one of the Ainur, the “gods” of middle earth. (though they were actually just agents of Eru Illuvitar, divine middlemen so to speak.)
alternately, perhaps it was meant to be sworn by Morgoth/Melkor, a Valar (greater angelic being) who had tried to set itself up in Eru’s place in the earliest ages of the world, and which was the being that most of Sauron’s minions actually worshiped. Morgoth was cast out into the void (a realm beyond both the physical universe and whatever plane that Eru illuvitar occupies) but the orcs, trolls, and men which he had swayed to his side, and which his follower sauron would later corrupt, still believed him to have power over the world. (and given that early in the world’s creation morgoth was said to have literally infused part of his evil and divine power into the very earth, might not be entirely unfounded.) Worship of Morgoth apparently involved a lot of blood sacrifice (up to and including human sacrifice, going by the Fall of Numenor) so the slicing of the hand might well have been meant as an offering of sorts as part of the oath.
that said, in the novel the Dunlendings fought for him because he’d spent a long time befriending them as a neighor and using his ability to use his words to sway people to make the dunlendings want to go to war and retake lands they had lost to Gondor and then to Rohan in generations past. oaths were not mentioned or implied, rather the relationship was presented as one of a more mundane nature, the result of a long interaction and bonds of trust forged over generations, with perhaps just a touch of the mercenary in that Saruman’s armories helped arm the Dunlendings to better fight the Rohirrim.
> In regards to the oath scene with Saruman, perhaps the higher power involved was saruman himself.
This option makes no sense to me. As I read the article, the idea of an oath is ‘if this guy breaks a promise, I probably don’t really have the power to DO anything about it, so instead lets call upon the gods to do it in my place’. In that way swearing on the fief or the person to whom you are swearing makes very little sense.
I think the swearing by Morgoth and the blood link you draw makes more sense.
This is a bit late, but it may make more sense if you let go of a purely Western point of view about oaths. Peter Jackson is a New Zealander, and his experience of oaths may have been influenced by Polynesian and SE Asian oaths. In some of those places, oaths still are a big deal in a way they no longer are in the West.
Various tribal groups in Indonesia have beliefs about their ancestors acting supernaturally through (shared) blood, and if we give Jackson the benefit of the doubt and assume he used that model the oath suddenly does make sense: by cutting their hands and spilling blood that comes from their fathers, the Dunlendings invoke the ancestors as guarantors of the oath – a pretty common thing in many parts of the world.
Oaths seems to be a way to call upon a god to do something, without first giving them anything. Did oaths usually come with sacrifices and with ways to check if they were accepted? I’m imagining Zeus saying “I don’t care if you do that or not; why should I bother checking and punishing you if you fail?”.
In my experience – and this is interesting – no! Oaths are usually assumed to be effective without any kind of sacrifice. I think this has to do with assumptions about how a god is likely to react to the insult of someone forswearing on them.
There are lead “curse tablets” which invoke the authority of some gods. And we have curse tablets in which the victim of a theft — a poor victim, often, because the items cited as often paltry — donates the stolen items to one goddess and then tells her to arise and reclaim them lest she be shamed for inability to do so.
This made me go back and check a web serial I follow (A Practical Guide to Evil) to see how it handled this, as it has a rather cool oath-giving scene.
Sure enough, when Catherine appoints Juniper her Marshal, they both invoke a god as part of the oath: Juniper, an orc, starts with “Under the gaze of That Which Lurks Below, I make these oaths,” while Catherine, a human from a good-aligned country, starts with “Gods be my witness, and strike me down should I break this solemn oath.”
(Catherine is on Team Evil, and not particularly pious or god-fearing, but she uses that formula because it’s the historical one her country used before it was conquered. So she’s not really invoking her personal belief that the Gods will strike her down, she’s declaring that she intends to make her country independent again.)
This is very interesting!
Your point about how people in historic times believed their own religion reminds me of one of Ludwig Thomas’ stories- he grew up at the end of 19th century in rural Bavaria, and wrote Lausbubengeschichten (similar to Tom Sawyer stories). The culture was very Roman Catholic, so one story is about him throwing a stone through the chapel’s window, damaging a religious figure the pastor had just newly bought. So the pastor has the whole school class assembled, brings the crucifix, and each boy must take an oath that they don’t know who threw the stone.
Ludwig crosses his finger behind his back (folk superstition to thwart the bolt from heaven/ divine retribution for a false oath) and lies, but is very afraid about it.
You’ve mentioned the series Rome: have you done/ will you do a look at what Rome got right and what it did wrong? I’ve read that while all historical events were wrong (dates, people being dead or alive at wrong time) the historical feeling of different morals was captured well (Honor, Love in marriage, slavery, family ties…). Do you agree?
Where do non-externally-bound promises, as used in modern America, fit into this paradigm? I’ve always assumed them to be descendants of oaths, but considering the emphasis you place here on an external force serving as the enforcer, I’m no longer so confident in that assumption.
(Generally, when I make a promise, the curse (either explicit or implied, depending on the context) is that, if I promise falsely, I lose some fraction of my ability to make credible promises. It’s a useful enough ability that it’s worth going far out of my way to keep a hold of; but there’s no third party directly invoked for enforcement. There’s just me and the person to whom I made the promise, with the latter having the option (but no obligation) to spread word of my promise-breaking should I in fact break it.)
Do you have a good sense of what historical relation, if any, those sorts of non-externally-enforced promises bear to the externally-enforced oaths discussed here?
If I understood correctly, then an oath is made because a mere personal promise is not enough. Like, if you are not known to just keep your promises, you are to invite supernatural retribution for all to see if you lie.
The USA are a strong state, where the government enforces contracts. In such a modern context, promises are either contracts to exchange something of value for something else or announcements of gifts (of goods, labour, whatever). Contracts can be enforced through the courts, including damages. False statements in contracts are even more serious, and can be criminal, and that verbal promise can absolutely tie you into a contract.
People can also reclaim damages based on adverse reliance under some conditions, if they genuinely believed they were going to receive a gift and took action as a result of that (simplified example: your neighbours promised you their old couch, which is much nicer than your couch. As a result of this you threw away your cough. After it’s been recycled, your neighbour reneges. You can now take the neighbour to small claims court for the value of the couch you threw away).
So the ultimate consequence in a modern society is being taken to court, civil court for breaking of fairly simple, mid-level-value promises/contracts and sometimes even criminal court for elaborate deceptions.
Expanding on this idea of the state replacing the gods in the practice of oath-taking:
Note that in testimony in court – the most formal and consequential of all oaths – the formula specifies the punishment (“under penalty of perjury”).
In one particularly illuminating example, California law prescribes two different forms for the oath of testimony:
One of them is the old, religious style: “Do you solemnly state (stuff), so help you God?” The second replaces the implicit Christian “God will damn me eternally” with the punishment of the state: “Do you solemnly state, under penalty of perjury, (stuff)?” Plus, of course, giving the court flexibility to choose whatever formula it thinks will be effective for the specific person.
It’s a perfect, crystal-clear equivalence: if you are swearing by God under pain of eternal damnation, you do not need to swear by the state under penalty of law, and vice versa.
And again with the belated proofreading corrections:
“is done int he presence of God -> “is done in the presence of God
photo caption: Is this is a vow, it implies -> If this is a vow, it implies
I strongly suspect that Martin is riffing off of -> I strongly suspect what Martin is riffing off of
matters a great detail -> matters a great deal
only if I get by Z date -> only if I get it by Z date
something fairly rare -> something are fairly rare
that Sarumon* has the Wild Men perform -> that Saruman has the Wild Men perform
to which Sarumon replies -> to which Saruman replies
“we will die, for Sarumon!” -> “we will die, for Saruman!”
where Sarumon needs the oath -> where Saruman needs the oath
Perhaps Sarumon, in his cynicism -> Perhaps Saruman, in his cynicism
and so Sarumon needs them -> and so Saruman needs them
eyes wide and starting at Frodo -> eyes wide and staring at Frodo
never, never to let Him have it -> never, never, to let Him have it (missing comma inserted)
would often be proceeded by days -> would often be preceded by days
*(I guess I could have just said “do a search-and-replace for this spelling”)
My single favourite medieval movie scene is the Santa Gadea oath from “El Cid”, with Charlton Heston. It perfectly nails the medieval attitude and the seriousness of oaths, which precious few modern films do. (You might be able to view it at https://youtu.be/EQORVXtvQIM at 3:37, or in Spanish at https://youtu.be/6RmESOlTJR0). The excommunication scene from “Beckett” is also a great window into an older mindset, too, though I don’t know how accurate the ritual elements may be.
In the United States, many oaths say “I swear (or affirm)…” because of religious proscriptions against some (perhaps all?) oaths. I always thought the distinction was silly, but now with all this context it makes more sense.
actually that’s an interpretation of Matthew 5:33-37:
Again you have heard that it was said to your ancestors, ‘Do not take a false oath, but make good to the Lord all that you vow.’ But I say to you, do not swear at all; not by heaven, for it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black. Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.
If I were to invent a reason for the vows of the Night’s Watch being so weird:
The Old Gods of the North do seem to be very different from historic polytheism. In particular, you get the sense that they are more likely to take from ill-worshipers than to give to faithful ones.* From this, we can assert that worship of said Old Gods is essentially an anonymous/collective divine protection racket. If you make the proper sacrifices, perform the proper rituals, and make the proper vows, the gods will show you mercy, but otherwise you’re SOL.
Given this assumption, the Night’s Watch making vows to follow these restrictions makes sense. They are offering significant aspects of their lives to the gods, in exchange for their mercy—and they are sacrificing so much because the Wall is such a dangerous place to live, and all the more so when the Night’s Watch was established.
When the Faith of the Seven came to Westeros and their worshipers refused to respect the Old Gods, the tradition of the Night’s Watch vows were presumably adapted to their faith in a crude fashion, and it could have been an established tradition before any septon stopped by to figure out whether or not it actually worked in the much more formal (and less one-way) theology of the Seven.
…but this thought matters not to the show or the books, where the vow is just left there as an Abrahamic artifact in a context where it makes little sense. This was basically just a spurt of worldbuilding inspired by this talk of vows.
*You could argue that this makes sense given the harsh lands of the North, but the Old Gods were once worshipped across Westeros. Maybe the “Old Gods were never a unified religion and grew harsher the further north you went, which fits with how the Free Folk seem to see the gods in an even crueler light…but that would be a step beyond the worldbuilding I’m doing in this post.
They still do that “each man gives his oath individually” thing in one way, at least for inprocessing for the US military. Each person who swears in is required to individually respond to the question of “what is the penalty for cowardice in the face of the enemy” with “the penalty for cowardice in the face of the enemy is death”. In one way, it’s a legalism that makes it certain that no one who goes through it can pretend he didn’t know, but in another, it is very much like an oath to the government and its, that one will not show cowardice in the face of the enemy, lest one receive the punishment of death… and it has, in many ways, the same sort of emotional resonance as an oath does, of telling your lizard-brain that no, seriously, this one is important and you need to pay attention.
Hello Mr Deveraux, I believe I can explain quite simply why the Night’s Watch apparently swear what is possibly an oath or a vow to nobody, witnessed by nobody.
(Yes, I am aware that I am nearly two years late and this is unlikely to be read)
First, the mechanical – The people of the Old Gods believe that it is *not possible* to lie before the face of a Weirwood tree, hence they are commonly the site of promises and oaths. The Old Gods here are the guarantor/witness, not the recipient (Except perhaps in a broader more cynical look at the purpose of nights watch as a whole.) The swearer is certainly not intending to swear TO them, given most recruits are from the south and swear at the Sept.
The vows are instead, to the Night’s Watch itself, as the text of the vows say – the weirwood is simply the old ways method of ensuring this – and while the men of the Watch may not take the religion of the old gods seriously, being mostly southerners, but they sure take that vow to them seriously.
Hopefully this makes sense and doesn’t fall too far from the mark to anyone more versed in AOSOIF/GOT than I
The reason it is not possible to forswear before them, incidentally is because settled followers of the religion more or less believe that they are where the Gods are always watching.
(As for the fact that real religions, even those with gods too numerous to count or name, always have at least SOME known god names, it is possible that this is simply because while the Old Gods are manifestly real, the way they are thought of/worshipped by each of their three main worship groups is different, and it seems very likely that the folk of the North are the least accurate. The children of the forest are pretty clear that THEY believe that the old gods ARE the collective existence of all Weirwood trees ever grown)
This blog has subscriptions, so we actually can get notified of new comments.
I wasn’t aware that any of the gods in ASoIaF were manifestly or unambiguously real.
It’s general enough knowledge to be taught to Stark children that when the Children of the Forest die they become part of a collective consciouness in the Weirwoods and that this collective consciousness is essentiall the Old Gods. Even the Starks don’t know all the details of it, and it’s likely that many worshippers know less, but in the general sense that people believe there is a supernatural consicousness that watches over the North (and formerly the whole continent) whose power is focused in or through the weirwoods, the Old Gods definitely exist.
It’s not clear how much this consciousness cares about worship and sacrifice or taking action for or against people, but since it does have at least some ability to communicate it’s wishes and to take action or cause others to take action it might well have directed worshippers to sacrifices it actually desired and rewarded some and punished others. It’s also possible that it’s mostly beyond mortal concerns and really only acts as a repository for souls and knowledge and it’s only those still living in the world who have a desire to use it’s knowledge to effect anything, in which case the entity ‘The Old Gods’ exists in a sense, but worship and sacrifice is entirely irrelevant, it’s only a passive tool for those who can telepathically connect to it.
It’s also possible that the Children of the Forest are effectively the Old Gods, being the ones who want sacrifice and take action for or against those who follow or oppose the Old Gods, however the ones doing that are not technically the actual god-like entity, rather individuals who use that entity and maintain it’s health, to the the extent that matter.
Is there any hard evidence that such a consciousness exists, rather than any activity being that of living greenseers like Bloodraven?
Is swearing on a body part a thing? Where I live, somepeople swear “by their hand”. Has that any historical basis??
I would assume that its similar to swearing on one’s soul, or heart, in that you are effectively putting the body part up as the ‘collateral’, such that if the oath is broken you lose the hand or at least the use of it.
Uhh I don’t really want to spoil stuff, but I don’t think the old gods are supposed to work like ancient paganism.
The Night’s Watch vows are…unique. The Night’s Watch isn’t a religious order, and doesn’t even really have any connection to religion at all. Even though they are called vows, in the book the line you quoted above doesn’t exist. D&D added that to the vows. And you are right – the consequence for disobeying the vows is so obvious it doesn’t need to be mentioned. You abandon the NW, you get your head cut off by the Starks. It’s the first scene of the show. 😛 In any event, in theory the NW was created as a military order to protect the seven kingdoms from the Others thousands of years ago and has survived to present day. The weirwoods aren’t actually necessarily religious objects, but they *were* an important part of the magic of the children, and the magic of the children created the Others. So what they’re doing is making a promise to guard the realm of mean, and the order was formed in cooperation with the Children. So they say it in front of the weirwood because the greenseers of the children literally watch them through the faces carved in the trees. They’re telling the other half of the treaty “yeah, we’re still here, we’re keeping up our end of the bargain”. Over time, however, the trees have become representative of the old gods and therefore associated with religion, and so when the Andals brought their religion over and the NW started having southerners come up they probably figured “well, two religions two religious places.”. There’s heavy foreshadowing that the NW has forgotten their purpose, and so the inclusion of a chapel for the seven is actually one more bit of evidence of that.
Anyway I’m enjoying your blog and it’s been a lot of help to me. Thanks!
Yeah, it’s worth pointing out that their oaths originate in a practical renewal of a promise to a physical group of people. The old gods aren’t really implied to be religious figures, and possibly so much that they may simply be a case of linguistic drift- the first men had been ‘swearing oaths’ to the ‘old gods’ but were, in practice, literally telling the tree people things. It may come off so weird because the Andals believed the things the first men were talking to were of a religious nature, and not just magic tree people.
It also explains why the curse would be left out- both the modern implication that the starks would cut your head off, but also the previous implication that going against the children ended very, very badly first time.
It’s also a world where, at least in the books, most of the gods are analogous with real-world gods, in that, if they do exist, they very slightly manipulate events. Except that the extremes of ‘oh dear this is bad’- the Stranger, the actual faces in the trees, and the many faced god (and quite probably the drowned god) are almost certainly one literal being, quite likely associated with the others, given it is a god of death. On the other end, the lord of light as a church might not be truly real, but the power behind it seems to have infested the remains of a world-ending flood-basalt eruption with literal demons, given the documented damage they do to adult dragons.
It’s also possibly worth noting that, as implied in that last sentence, it’s reasonable to assume that at least some of Game of Throne’s societies will be starting to fall into a full on end of days religious spiral, as their extreme weather isn’t entirely the product of an eratic orbit- the doom of valyria, a 500 mile wide flood-basalt erruption is big enough to kill every vertebrate larger than a cat, as soon as the atmospheric occulsion wears off (they even note the surprising hotness of the recent summer, and by the TV version, the winter is nowhere near their typical counterbalance. Based on reality, this may be survivable by roughly 5% of species, most of which would be small fish)
It’s funny that children still understand how oaths work. How does every kid know when a promise is serious? “Cross my heart and hope to die! Stick a needle in my eye!”
“I could give you my word as a Spaniard?”
“No good, I’ve known too many Spaniards”
…
“I swear by the soul of my father, Domingo Montoya, you will reach the top alive”
“Throw me the rope”
Those four sentences.a perfect example of what an oath should look like.
There’s a speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act 2, Scene 1) where Brutus tells the other conspirators not to swear an oath:
“But do not stain
The even virtue of our enterprise,
Nor th’insuppressive mettle of our spirits,
To think that or our cause or our performance
Did need an oath – when every drop of blood
That every Roman bears, and nobly bears,
Is guilty of a several bastardy
If he do break the smallest particle
Of any promise that hath passed from him.”
I like this speech, because it only makes sense if you have an understanding of oaths as effective. As a kid, I thought it seemed like Brutus was splitting hairs; why is swearing to something different from resolving to do it? But when I apply the understanding that there is practical substance to ancient oath-taking (as Shakespeare, giant classics nerd that he is, seems to have done) then Brutus’ insistence that no oath should be needed makes perfect sense, and shows well the great (perhaps excessive) value that Brutus places on personal honor.
I must quibble with the idea that oaths in courts under modern liberal democracies must necessarily be either Christian or entirely secular. I would argue that under the modern political society of liberal nationalism, the state and its paraphernalia–the constitution, the laws, the flag, the national symbols, the national genius that is invoked when people speak of “The People” as a single unit–are genuinely taken as numinous entities by most citizens, whether they admit to it or not. The fact that lying under oath may get one in trouble with the law is, itself, a theological consequence! This is especially true for a state like the American federal government, with its vast wealth, unsurpassed geopolitical power, and thousands of nuclear weapons. Nationalism is not like a religion–it IS a religion. You mentioned a connection between modern war memorials and Roman di manes, but I would argue that this connection is not at all metaphorical and the hypothetical Roman observer who would see it as a pious observance of the shades of ancestral war dead is entirely correct. Correspondingly, those Christians who see swearing oaths before the state and other nationalist observances as at least a little bit blasphemous are, by the standards of most Christian piety throughout history, also correct. “The rule of law” can only rule when the law itself has some sort of spiritual mojo beyond being words on a page enforced by people with guns, and the people bound by the law recognize it as having that mojo. But modern civic religion plays this weird double game where one must believe while pretending not to believe, one cannot say out loud “I swear by America” even if that is really what one is doing.
And on that note, “The Empire is Law, the Law is Sacred” on Imperial coins in Skyrim is in my estimation a very, very modern sentiment. Roman emperors put their names on coins along with their faces. Tiber Septim’s coins, by contrast, are dedicated not to himself, but to the state. Caesar’s coins, as Jesus put it, were Caesar’s, Tiber Septim and his coins both belong to the state.
I was under the impression that the scoring of the hand was to swear on the blood, a blood oath. The penalty for oath-breaking was implicitly that your life was forfeit should you break your faith. In this sense, you would put your hand on the holy item – the blood – and swear.
It’s funny how The Simpsons, of all places, actually got the components down pat.
“And by the sacred parchment I swear, that if I reveal the secrets of the Stonecutters, may my stomach become bloated and my head be plucked of all but three hairs.”
“Uh, I think he should have to take a different oath–”
“Everyone takes the same oath!”
You should look at Baldur’s Gate 3’s Oathbreaker Paladin, where breaking your Oaths means you get cool powers, a new undead-themed spell list and no obligations at the loss of your original spell list. At least in the DMG you had to serve an evil power or serve a dark purpose before you got your evil Oathbreaker powers.
The Dikask’s oath seems to be as much a vow as an oath. The juror expects good things in return if he takes on this job, because the gods love just and well-ordered cities, and by taking it on, he is offering them something they like.
The other day, I was reading the Mieruko-chan manga for the third or fourth time, as you do; it occurs to me that the whole fiasco with the shrine on the mountain fits the ow stuff pretty well.
Some background for the…probably all of you who have no idea what I’m talking about: Mieruko-chan (roughly translating to “The girl who can see”) is a manga about Miko Yotsuya, a high school girl who can see spirits. Her friend Hana can’t see spirits, but she attracts them like moths to a flame, which is bad since many of the spirits are bad in general and/or get violent if they realize Miko can see them.
(Spoilers follow, I guess?)
Anyways, for reasons I won’t get into, Hana and Miko go to a dilapidated shrine in the mountains, make an offering, and pray. Also, there’s a creepy spirit following Hana, as usual. Miko’s prayer is, in full: “Please do something about that creepy thing following Hana around. Please help, I’ll do anything to have that thing stop following her. Please lift this curse from Hana. Also help me out, while you’re at it.”
And then an even bigger, even creepier spirit comes out and eats that spirit. It then says something to Miko, but the only words she can make out are “Three times.” That spirit (or its smaller and slightly less creepy attendants) destroys a few more spirits when they realized Miko could see them and tried to attack her. She tries to go to the shrine again to offer the “god” there some tofu, but there are a few obstacles in the way, the most relevant being that her offering is rejected.
Eventually, Miko meets an old mystical lady who explains what’s going on. Basically, the thing at the shrine generally grants wishes, in exchange for an unclear price. Miko, not knowing that, made two requests, one of which was vague and open-ended. This unconventional deal caused a lot of problems for her—as in, resolving it takes two volumes (after about three volumes of Miko not really understanding what she had done). If only Miko had realized what she was asking for…and promising.
I don’t think we can take this instance as a statement about Japanese spiritual beliefs. For starters, the aforementioned old mystic explicitly says the thing on the mountain isn’t actually a god. But it’s still neat, and I think it seems relevant!
I disagree that the Dunlending promise to Saruman is an oath sworn by an unspecified power. Rather, I think that it’s a vow to Saruman, as part of his pretension to being a great power unto himself. All of these scenes before that emphasize his role as a father-creator to the uruk-hai in their spawning pits, and holding the power of life and death over his servants.
Saruman isn’t satisfied with the sort of agreement you’d make with a mortal king or princeling, and instead demands a vow. To lay out the quid pro quo of the Dunlending vow in your formal structure:
“We will fight for Saruman”l [in return for your aid in defeating our hated foes in Rohan].” This is an agreement to alliance with a peer, to wage war against a common foe.
“Swear it!” Saruman is no peer to them. He demands a vow, with the implicit requirement of not simply service, but sacrifice.
The Dunlending cuts his hand. He is willing to offer a sacrifice of his pain and blood for Sauman’s favor, to be part of his victory over their hated foe.
“We will die for Saruman [in exchange for you enacting our vengeance on our hated foes in Rohan].” This is now a vow: they will fight to the death in exchange for vengeance, and the token sacrifice of cutting his hand shows that this is no idle promise. He has gone from acting as a diplomat to swearing a vow like a supplicant.