Wonderful reflections, Dan. Great storytelling, too. I recall that Hegel also talks about the need of the victor to have his victory recognized, this leading to the forgoing and supersession of the killing of his foe and to his taking him as a slave instead. Slavery is invented for the purpose meeting the Master's need for recogntion. The other possilby that you sketch I found interesting and was reminded by it of the way Giegerich presents the sacrifical slaughter and big-game hunting of primoridial times in his essay "Killings." There, too, the killing of the animal kindles a light in the hunter. Giegerich writes: "The dullness of animal existence had consisted in the fact that the reaction to whatever was encountered had to be more of less automatic (affective, instinctual), exclusively in the service of the biological purpose of securing and heightening life. Homo necans--the killing man--burst asunder this being bonded by naked biological interests through his blow with the axe or thrusting the spear.  For with this tremendous deed he logically broke through life's boundary to death, by which boundary the living organism is completely enclosed; he thus inflicted the experience of death upon himself, while still in life, and made this experience the basis of his own, no longer merely-biological life." In your tale you write: "The battle clung to him like a shadow: the staring into Sigurd’s burning eyes, the defiant cries, curses and blows, the severing of the head, the deafening silence of death and Sigurd’s final burning, distant stare." By this I was put in mind of the fofllowing from Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia": "Thus, the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way, an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss, and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification." See also: In the Object’s Shadow | Cairn.info Greg