Abstract
In medieval Icelandic secular prose, female characters function as literary vehicles to engage with some of the most contested values of the period, revealing the preoccupations, desires, and anxieties of its authors and audi-ences; chief among these concerns are women’s access to and employment of power, and men’s vulnerability. Old Norse sources offer their audiences many discrete and varied female images: women of various social and economic positions and racial origins. In this book, I analyze an extensive and diverse gallery of female images: elegant queens who keep their foolish husbands in check; wise, learned, and accomplished but haughty female rulers; scheming and disobedient princesses; and impoverished women who know a magic spell or two. We will also encounter man-eating stepmothers; benevolent stepmothers; monstrously ugly and hostile giantesses; princesses turned into hags by enchantment; resourceful widows; giantesses forsaken and left heartbroken by their human lovers; prophetesses who predict misfortune; neurotic housewives; and awe-inspiring female warriors.
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Notes
For a recent introduction to Old Norse myth and religion, see Christopher Abram, Myths of the Pagan North: The Gods of the Norsemen (London: Continuum, 2011).
For a vivid account of the skald-king relationship, see Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 1–4.
For a general introduction to kings’ sagas, see for example, Ármann Jakobsson, “Royal Biography,” in A Companion to Old Norse—Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 388–402.
Daniel Sävborg, Sagan om kärleken: Erotik, känslor och berättarkonst i norrön lit-teratur (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitetet, 2007), p. 148.
For a recent overview of the debate about sagas and the oral versus written tradition, see the introduction to Theodore M. Anderssons The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas (1180–1280) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). For an extended discussion of orality and literacy, see Gisli Sigurðsson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method, Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature 2, trans. Nicholas Jones (Cambridge, MA: The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, Harvard University, 2004). First published as Tulkun Ísїendingasagna i ijόsi munnlegrar hefðar: Tilgáta um aðferð, Rit 56 (Reykjavik: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, 2002). For an authoritative examination of blood feud, see for example, William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Vésteinn Ólason, “Family Sagas,” in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 111 [101–18].
The two foundational works on the fornaldarsögur are Mitchell, Heroic Sagas and Ballads; and Torfi H. Tulinius, The Matter of the North: The Rise of Literary Fiction in Thirteenth-Century Iceland, trans. Randi C. Eldevik (Odense: Odense University Press, 2002). First published as La Matière du Nord: sagas légendaires et fiction dans la littérature islandaise en prose du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1995).
For a comprehensive introduction to Norse Arthurian translations, with authoritative articles about philological and literary issues, see Marianne E. Kalinke, ed., The Arthur of the North. The Arthurian Legend in the Norse and Rus’ Realms (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011).
Jürg Glauser, “Romance (translated nddarasόgur),” in A Companion to Old Norse—Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 375 [372–87].
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 46–58. For applications of Bourdieus theories to Old Norse—Icelandic literature, see Torfi H. Tulinius, Skáldid/skriftinni (Reykjavίk: Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag/ReykjavíkurAkademían, 2004), pp. 129–65; Kevin J. Wanner, Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 30–73.
Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France and Scandinavia (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012).
Geraldine Barnes, “Romance in Iceland,” in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 269–70 [266–86]; Nicola McDonald, “A Polemical Introduction,” in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 1 [1–21].
For a similar pattern in scholarship on medieval English romance, see McDonald, “A Polemical Introduction” Two foundational studies of the ideological function of romance are Jürg Glauser, Isländische Märchensagas: studien zur Prosaliteratur im spätmittelalterlichen Island (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1983); and Henric Bagerius, Mandom och mödom. Sexualitet, homosocialitet och aristokratisk identitet pá det senmedeltida Island (Gothenburg: Göteborgs universitet, 2009).
Jenny M. Jochens, Old Norse Images of Women (Philadelpia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
Carol J. Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum 68 (1993): 363–87.
Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 1.
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie), ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1: 53.
Max Weber, Selections in Translation, ed. W. G. Runciman, trans. E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 38.
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), see especially pp. 212–30.
Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 113–14.
Carol J. Clover, “Hildigunnr’s Lament,” in Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature: New Approaches to Textual Analysis and Literary Criticism, ed. John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, and Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1986), pp. 141–83. Reprinted in Cold Counsel: Women in Old Norse Literature and Mythology, ed. Sarah M. Anderson with Karen Swenson (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 15–54.
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).
John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Reading “against the grain" is an approach, originally advanced by feminist literary theorists in the 1970s and ‘80s, which entails deconstructing the fundamental ideology, in this instance a patriarchal social organization, that the narrator or text presents as normative; see for example, Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
See for example, Agnethe Loth, “Preface,” in Late Medieval Icelandic Romances, 5 vols., Editiones Arnamagnæanæ B20 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1962), 1: vii.
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© 2013 Jóhanna Katrin Friðriksdóttir
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Friðriksdóttir, J.K. (2013). Introduction. In: Women in Old Norse Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137118066_1
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