I was recently reading some Old Testament materials, and it occurred to me that the particular passage I was reading made a lot more sense in the context of the middle eastern requirement of hospitality. Later I was turning this over in my mind as a possible notion for an article, and remembered finding a very similar expectation of hospitality in the pages of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Then today I heard the story of the first act of Wagner’s opera The Valkyrie, in which again hospitality was a key issue. This was deeply embedded in the cultures of these people, and is an aspect of culture which is perhaps absent from our own (or at least very inconsistently applied) and so easily overlooked in our game worlds.
It is fairly easy to grasp why those in the middle east would put such a strong importance on the idea of hospitality to strangers. This is dry land, often desert land; a traveler without shelter and water could die of exposure within hours. Anyone forced to travel any distance is equally forced to depend on the kindness of those along the way to make a place for him. His life is in the hands of such strangers. Thus everyone is aware of the need to provide such a place for travelers, as they will almost certainly be in need of a place themselves at some time.
It became, to them, a sacred duty; the protection of your guest is more important than that of your own life. We have cases in which hosts defended their guests, men they had only met that day, against the abuses of others, even offering to sacrifice members of their own families rather than to surrender a guest. To fail to offer hospitality was a crime; to fail to protect the guest once hospitality was accepted was a horror.
In The Valkyrie, a German telling of a Norse myth, the lead character is fleeing from pursuit, and stops to seek shelter at a house, where he is invited in by the woman there. The lord of the house returns thereafter, and it is discovered that this is the very man who is pursuing the hero, fully intending to kill him. Yet the law of hospitality binds him, and he will not raise a finger against the man that night, as he is a guest in the house. Tomorrow, he will resume the pursuit, and kill him, but tonight he will guarantee safety.
Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric, is a Saxon nobleman in a land dominated by Normans. His Saxon tradition demands that his castle be a haven for all travelers. As the story opens, he is sharing his larder with a pair of Norman lords whose hope is to force a marriage with his niece and so claim his holdings for themselves; a despised Jewish moneylender; and a vagabond who happens, unbeknownst to him, to be his own son whom he has disowned. He grumbles and shows his displeasure at the presence of all these, but he feeds them and provides a place to stay, because he is bound by courtesy and hospitality to do so, and he will not be found wanting in this.
For those of the northlands, it is the inhospitable climate that threatens travelers; among the Saxons, it was wild beasts and bandits that posed the danger. In uncivilized places, civility is a necessity for survival.
Such obligatory hospitality is not the rule everywhere at all times. At least, it is not common today. There are some who will provide a resting place for complete strangers, but most will give directions to the hotel or the mission and consider that their good deed for the day. I certainly don’t recommend that anyone invite strangers into his home–ours is not a time or place in which such kindness is safe. Cedric had a house full of servants, and not a few soldiers, and he could easily consign his guests to rooms in a far wing isolated from his family by heavy oak doors. There may have been as many villains in those places and times as there are now and here, but it is doubtful whether any would abuse the hospitality of a host, or whether having done so they would escape alive. However, whether it is safe to invite people you don’t know to play games in your living room is not the point of this article; it’s really about whether hospitality is expected and offered in the worlds of your imagination.
My earliest group of Dungeons & Dragons™ player characters were created from the materials in the Players Handbook; a couple fighters, a thief, a fighter/magic-user, and a cleric were the core of the group, and others who popped in later were mostly of similar types. When they traveled they stayed at inns, paying for their accommodations as any of us would do. However, before the second group joined the game, the Unearthed Arcana rules had been integrated into my world. Cavaliers now existed, and Paladins were elevated to a noble status alongside them. The second group of players soon had a young cavalier among its members. In its first trip to the city, the cavalier immediately went to the palace to report to the prince of the city that he was present. Hospitality was immediately extended to him and all his companions, who now had free run of the castle (within reason and decorum), providing comfortable accommodations for no cost. From there, they responded to a request for assistance from a fortress on the edge of civilization, and again on arrival the cavalier was provided accommodations, and the offer extended to the entire party, saving them the problems of crowding into the local inn.
Each culture you create will have some notion of hospitality. Some will expect that it must be freely extended to all travelers. Others will recognize particular classes of people to whom such courtesy is due, while ignoring anyone outside those groups. For some, there may be categories of strangers–the native whom you don’t know receives hospitality, but the foreigner does not; or perhaps the foreigner does receive hospitality, as long as he’s not from a particular despised people. Others will have no rules at all, no expectations or obligations of hospitality, although it may have some hospitable people willing to share what they have with others. You might as easily have a people who keep to themselves, who share with their families and those they know but do not include strangers in their kindnesses.
This will of course have impact on many little things in the culture. If ordinary people regularly provide food and shelter for travelers, inns will only survive in places where travel is too heavy for local people to support. If hospitality is expected, many will travel relatively light, knowing that they need not take food for the entire journey, but only enough for when they must camp in the wilderness. If inns are expected to extend free room and board to one class of people, they will certainly charge another more steeply to cover the costs. Where people are more open about sharing what they have with strangers, abuse of such kindness will be seen as a very severe crime, and punishment will be swift and sure.
A year after my brother graduated from high school, he flew out to California (from New Jersey) to visit a friend, and then bicycled back. Each evening he would ask about a place to stay, and would usually find someone willing to let him spend the night somewhere reasonably sheltered. Interestingly, when he was west of the Mississippi this was frequently church buildings and other open public places, sometimes private homes or garages; but after he crossed the river he most commonly stayed in jail cells (not arrested, but provided as shelter courtesy of the local police who didn’t know where else to send him). Even in our culture, hospitality of this sort exists; it’s just more difficult to find.
It appears sure that the requirement of hospitality arises where it is not safe to stay outside. It may be just as sure that civilization quashes this. We don’t invite strangers to stay with us because we can send them to the mission, the motel, the campground. We are not afraid that someone traveling alone will die without our help, nor that we would face death were we similarly traveling alone. That there are places for people to stay safely lets us off the hook, as it were. We thus can predict that the availability of hospitality will appear in inverse proportion to the need. The degree to which a civilization provides options for keeping travelers safe from harm is the degree to which that civilization doesn’t expect its citizens to do so individually. Despite its presence in the middle of the desert, Las Vegas is not known as a place where the residents regularly provide food and shelter for travelers. They have hotels and restaurants for that.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
