How we cite our quotes: (Page) Vintage Books, 1989
Quote #7
"Worse times are yet to come, my love. / The babes you comfort when they weep / Will soon by birthright have / All these gold rings! Ah, then, then / Your almost-brother love will cool; / The cousin smile must grind out lean / Where younger cousins rule." (116)
Hrothgar's orphaned nephew Hrothulf has a pretty heavy load to carry for a young man. He's lost his father (and therefore his chance at inheriting a kingdom), and now he has to sit at the table with the little kids in the meadhall. The familial tensions run pretty high in this family as Hrothulf babysits the kids that will one day be his sovereign lords. It's a raw deal, but he's not in a position to do anything about it. Yet.
Quote #8
"But satisfy the greed of the majority, and the rest will do you no harm. That's it. You've still got your fiction of consent. If the lowest of the workers start grumbling, claim that the power of the state stands above society, regulating it, moderating it, keeping it within the bounds of order—an impersonal and higher authority of justice. And what if the workers are beyond your reconciliation? Cry 'Law!' Cry 'Common good' and put on the pressure—arrest and execute a few." (118-119)
The anarchist Red Horse quickly finds the perfect place to instill his political theories, right into the impressionable and discontented mind of Hrothulf, Hrothgar's orphaned nephew. Everyone in the meadhall knows that Hrothulf is a problem waiting to happen, since Hrothgar is an old man, and his heirs are far too young to take over the kingdom. We're left to wonder whether or not Hrothulf will swallow Red Horse's Machiavellian hogwash and become a tyrant—or if he'll have a strong enough character to determine for himself what kind of leader he might be.
Quote #9
"The state is an organization of violence, a monopoly in what it is pleased to call legitimate violence. Revolution, my dear prince, is not the substitution of immoral for moral, or of illegitimate for legitimate violence; it is simply the pitting of power against power, where the issue is freedom for the winners and enslavement for the rest." (119)
Red Horse's Political Science 101 lecture series has a rapt audience of one: Hrothulf. The young man doesn't wholly buy into Red Horse's ideas about government, but the fact is, those ideas are out there. These ideas about governance are as brutal as the dragon's ideas about existence, and while some of it may be true, the lack of mercy we see in it makes it once again hard to determine who is kingly and who behaves like a monster.