The Forgotten Duty – Men, Purpose, and Becoming Useful

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By D.W. Roach | Marauder Books

There is an uncomfortable question I have been thinking about lately.

What are we raising our boys to become?

  • Not what career should they choose
  • Not how much money should they make
  • Not which political opinions should they hold

What should they become?

For most of human history, that question was answered remarkably early. A boy growing up in Viking-Age Scandinavia did not need someone to explain that his existence carried responsibilities. He could see them outside his door.

  • There were fields that needed planting
  • Animals that needed feeding
  • Wood that needed cutting
  • Boats that needed repairing
  • A roof that would eventually leak
  • A winter that did not care whether anyone felt prepared for it

There were younger children who needed protecting and elders who could no longer perform the labor they once had. There was a household whose survival depended upon everyone contributing something. And eventually, there would probably be a family of his own. This does not mean Viking society was better than ours.

It wasn’t.

Life could be violent, unjust, short, and desperately hard. But there was one thing that world rarely allowed a man to forget:

He was needed.

I wonder whether we have underestimated how important that feeling is.

The Morning After the Saga

When we talk about Vikings, we inevitably talk about warriors. That distorts our understanding of their world. Imagine instead an ordinary morning somewhere in Scandinavia.

There is no raid, shield wall, or king demanding warriors to fight on his behalf.

A man wakes before sunrise because there is work to be done. Maybe he checks livestock. Perhaps a fence was damaged overnight. A tool needs repairing. Someone needs to take a boat across the fjord. Hay must be gathered before the weather changes.

His children are sleeping nearby.

His wife has her own work.

His parents may live within the same household or nearby.

Nothing particularly heroic happens that day. And yet nearly everything he does matters. That’s the Viking world we rarely put on television. The overwhelming majority of Scandinavian men were not spending every Tuesday pillaging England.

  • They were farmers
  • Craftsmen
  • Fishermen
  • Traders
  • Sailors
  • Fathers
  • Husbands
  • Neighbors

And sometimes warriors.

The axe leaning against the wall might split a man’s shield one year and firewood the next. That distinction matters. Because masculinity in the Norse world wasn’t simply about being dangerous. It was about being capable.

A Man Had Duties

The Norse concept of honor makes considerably more sense when viewed through this lens. Your reputation mattered because other people depended upon you. Could your word be trusted? Would you repay a debt? Would you support your relatives? Would you stand beside your neighbors? Could you provide hospitality when circumstances required it? Could you control yourself? Would you defend your household if someone threatened it? Were you useful when things went wrong?

These questions determined what sort of man other people believed you to be. The Hávamál, one of the great surviving collections of Old Norse wisdom, repeatedly returns to friendship, hospitality, caution, generosity, reputation, and good judgment.

Its world is surprisingly practical. One of its most famous observations tells us:

“Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself shall also die.”

But reputation remains. That is not merely Viking machismo. It is an acknowledgment that eventually everything a person possesses disappears. What remains is what others remember about how you lived.

Then Something Extraordinary Happened

Human beings became very good at civilization. We conquered many of the problems that once consumed our ancestors. Most of us no longer need to chop enough wood to survive winter. We turn a thermostat. We don’t defend the village. We call the police. We don’t hunt because otherwise our children starve. We visit a grocery store. We don’t construct our own houses, sew our own clothes, butcher our own livestock, or repair every tool we own.

These are enormous achievements.

I have no desire to surrender modern medicine, electricity, sanitation, education, or the rule of law so that we can pretend to be Vikings. But progress created an interesting problem.

We removed necessity faster than we replaced purpose.

And perhaps men have been particularly vulnerable to that change.

What Is a Young Man For?

Consider the life of a young man today. He can spend thousands of hours inside artificial worlds where he gains rank, acquires equipment, completes missions, defeats enemies, and receives constant measurements of progress. Then he turns the game off. And the real world tells him very little.

  • Get good grades. Maybe attend college
  • Find a job. Pay bills
  • Don’t cause trouble. Consume
  • Repeat

Some young men thrive in that environment. Others don’t. And increasingly, we should be willing to acknowledge that something is happening.

In the United States, women now significantly outnumber men in undergraduate education. Women have made tremendous educational gains over the last several generations—something worth celebrating. But the widening gap should also make us ask another question:

Where are the young men going?

I sometimes wonder whether we have become uncomfortable even articulating what a good man should be.

Masculinity Is Not the Enemy

There are forms of masculinity that deserve criticism.

  • Cruelty isn’t strength
  • Abusing women isn’t strength
  • Bullying weaker men isn’t strength
  • Being incapable of controlling anger isn’t strength
  • A man who terrorizes his family is not masculine – He is weak

But somewhere along the way, our language became sloppy. Masculinity itself became something we sometimes discuss almost apologetically. And that is a mistake. Because the qualities traditionally associated with good men remain desperately necessary.

  • Courage
  • Discipline
  • Physical capability
  • Competence
  • Restraint
  • Protectiveness
  • Responsibility
  • Perseverance

A willingness to endure discomfort for someone else’s benefit. None of those qualities threaten a healthy society. They sustain one.

The Scholar and the Warrior

We also need to reject another false choice. A man does not have to choose between being intellectual and being masculine. Our ancestors understood this better than popular culture sometimes suggests. The Norse admired warriors, certainly. But they also admired wisdom. Poetry mattered. Law mattered. Memory mattered. Storytelling mattered.

A chieftain who could fight but could not negotiate alliances, understand law, reward followers, manage resources, or judge character would not remain successful for long. Odin himself is an interesting reflection of this ideal. He is associated with war. But also wisdom. Poetry. Knowledge. He sacrifices for understanding. Whatever we make of the mythology, the combination is revealing.

The ideal man should not merely possess strong arms. He should possess a cultivated mind.

  • We need tradesmen and farmers
  • We need soldiers
  • We need fathers
  • We need engineers and teachers
  • We need writers and scientists
  • We need entrepreneurs
  • We need craftsmen
  • We need scholars

And sometimes the same man can be several of these things during one lifetime.

Purpose Is Not Found

Perhaps this is the greatest lesson our ancestors can offer us. We talk constantly today about finding your purpose. I wonder if that framing is wrong.bA Viking farmer probably didn’t wander into the mountains wondering what his purpose was. Purpose was waiting at home. Purpose was not discovered, it was accepted. And perhaps that distinction matters.

You don’t necessarily need some extraordinary destiny. You need responsibility.

  • Take responsibility for your body
  • Then your mind
  • Then your family
  • Then your craft
  • Then your community
  • Carry something
  • Build something
  • Teach someone
  • Protect someone
  • Become useful

Purpose has an interesting habit of appearing after responsibility arrives.

Build the Farm Anyway

There is another lesson hidden inside the Viking household that I think speaks powerfully to modern life. Everything they built was temporary, and they knew it.

A farmer could spend months preparing his fields only to watch the harvest fail. A ship built painstakingly through the winter might disappear beneath the waves on its first great voyage. A hall could burn. Disease could arrive without warning. War could take a father, a son, or a brother. Livestock could die, storms could destroy what had taken years to build, and no matter how prosperous the summer had been, winter always came.

And still they planted.

They repaired the roof knowing another storm would eventually tear at it. They built ships knowing the sea might take them. They raised children knowing how fragile life could be. They carved beautiful things from wood and bone even though those things would eventually decay. They gathered around fires and told stories about people who were already gone, passing their names to another generation that would someday be gone as well.

And still they built.

There is something profoundly human in that refusal to surrender to impermanence. Perhaps that is one of the quietest forms of courage our ancestors possessed. They did not build because they believed what they created would last forever. They built because it mattered now. The field still needed planting. The child still needed raising. The roof still needed repairing. The story still deserved telling.

We sometimes allow the temporary nature of life to become an argument against investing ourselves fully in it. Why build something when it may fail? Why take the risk? Why devote yourself to a family, a craft, a farm, a business, a book, or a dream when time will eventually take all of it?

Our ancestors lived with the answer every day.

You plant knowing the harvest might fail. You love knowing someday you will grieve. You raise children knowing they will eventually leave your protection. You create things knowing they may be forgotten. You build knowing that someday someone else will stand where you once stood.

That does not make the effort meaningless.

It is precisely what gives the effort meaning.

Nothing we build is permanent. Neither were the halls of the Viking Age. Neither were their ships, their kingdoms, their farms, nor the men and women who created them. Yet a thousand years later, we are still telling their stories.

  • So plant the field
  • Raise the children
  • Write the book
  • Repair the roof
  • Tell the story
  • Love people while they are here

You know eventually you will lose everything.

Build anyway.

We Need Men

That sentence shouldn’t be controversial.

We need men.

We need boys to grow into adults who believe their lives have meaning and that other people can depend upon them. We should expect something from them. Not dominance or mistargeted aggression. Not some caricature of masculinity assembled from social media clips. Something older.

  • Responsibility
  • Character
  • Competence
  • Wisdom
  • Courage
  • Kindness
  • Duty

We need men strong enough to protect but disciplined enough not to intimidate. Educated enough to question the world but humble enough to continue learning. Ambitious enough to build something but grounded enough to understand why they are building it.

  • Men who love their families
  • Men who mentor boys who have no one else
  • Men who create
  • Men who repair
  • Men who serve
  • Men who can stand their ground and are capable of violence

Good men.

The Fire Still Needs Tending

A thousand years ago, a Scandinavian man might have stepped outside his hall on a bitter winter morning and immediately understood what the day demanded of him. The animals needed feeding, the fire needed wood, and his children needed food. Perhaps the ice had to be broken so the livestock could drink, a fence had collapsed beneath the weight of snow, or a roof needed repairing before the next storm arrived. Whatever the task, someone had to do it. Someone had to keep the household alive until spring.

We live in a very different world today, and thankfully so. Few of us would willingly trade modern medicine, electricity, plentiful food, or the security of modern civilization for the hardships of life a thousand years ago. Yet human beings have not changed nearly as much as the world around us. We still need to know that someone needs us. We still need challenges worthy of overcoming, responsibilities worth carrying, and people who depend upon us. We still need purpose.

The modern world does not need us to recreate the Viking Age. It does not need more raiders, warriors, or men pretending that brutality was somehow a virtue. What we might recover from that older world is something far simpler and far more valuable: the belief that becoming a good man is itself a worthy ambition.

There should be nothing contradictory about a man possessing both strength and gentleness. A man can be capable of defending his family while being tender with his children. He can work with his hands and cultivate his mind. He can read poetry, study history, build a fence, repair an engine, comfort a grieving friend, and stand his ground when circumstances demand it. Knowledge and action do not have to exist separately, any more than courage and kindness do. Perhaps the best men have always understood that real strength is not measured simply by what a man is capable of doing, but by what he chooses to do with that capability.

Responsibility gives life weight. Duty gives it direction. Purpose often follows when we accept that our lives are not entirely our own—that there are families to care for, communities to strengthen, children to teach, promises to keep, and things worth building even though we know none of them will last forever.

The longhouse is gone. The winter is easier. The wolves, for the most part, remain beyond the walls. But the fundamental obligation has never entirely disappeared.

Somewhere, metaphorically or otherwise, the fire still needs tending.

And someone has to get up and tend it.

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