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Masculinity and Politics in Njáls Saga
Abstract
The subject of this study is how masculinity is problematized in Njáls Saga (ca. 1280), with the characters constantly accusing each other of not being manly. The author argues that the obsession of the saga characters with masculinity actually undermines the manly/unmanly-binary, since almost every character in the saga is subjected to ridicule about lack of manliness. While these allegations are often unfounded, sometimes they do have some foundation in reality; but even when the protagonists are indeed unmanly, they remain the most impressive characters in the saga. Thus it is possible to read the saga's treatment of gender as critical of the norms of a misogynist society, showing how the ideal of masculinity may become so exaggerated that it becomes uncompromising and oppressive and leads to failed marriages and to outpourings of an aggressive heroism that thrives on the uneasiness of males, who know that everything may be used against them.
A landmark new history of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, this volume is a comprehensive, up-to-date guide to a unique and celebrated body of medieval writing. Chapters by internationally recognized experts offer the latest in-depth analysis of every significant genre and group of texts in the corpus, including sagas and skaldic verse, romances and saints' lives, myths and histories, laws and learned literature. Together, they provide a scholarly, readable and accessible overview of the whole field. Innovatively organized by the chronology and geography of the texts' settings – which stretch from mythic history to medieval Iceland, from Vinland to Byzantium – they reveal the interconnectedness of diverse genres encompassing verse and prose, translations and original works, Christian and pre-Christian literature, fiction and non-fiction. This is the ideal volume for specialists, students and general readers who want a fresh and authoritative guide to the literature of medieval Iceland and Norway.
Social understandings of gender have been variable throughout history and depending on the cultural context in question. The active theorization around this concept that has been developed in recent decades has served to establish the idea of its historicity and its intersectional character, that is, its constitution from the interaction with other categories. In this article we will delve into the intersection between gender and physical disabilities based on evidence from the Viking Age with the aim of understanding how the presence of differential physical traits or functions affected the individual’s gender identity. Specifically, we will focus on analyzing masculinities, which will also make it possible to reconsider the image of a space and time dominated by the collective ideal of the Viking as a hypermasculine and brave man and make it more complex conceiving the existence of alternative identities
The Old Norse-Icelandic word mál, variously “measure, speech, poetry, case, matter,” is strategically called on at various points throughout Kormáks saga. Its diverse significations all bear on the life of the warrior-poet, who is himself characterized as precipitous by nature. He achieves in his poetry what eludes him in life and love: moderation (hóf), the midway point in measures of all kinds. Subject to comparisons with other males in the saga, mocked in his masculinity by an insolent servant, and cursed by a sorceress, he does not attain the body of his beloved Steingerðr but succeeds in recreating her in ideal form in skaldic poetry. Away from Iceland on Viking expeditions, he finds an equilibrium that was denied him in Icelandic society. The overall judgment of the Christian author is of a successful career in art yet one limited in life by an impulsive character, curse (this, too, a kind of mál), the judgement of others – in all, a pagan destiny. In significant ways Kormákr prefigures the Iceland of the thirteenth century.
Masculinities can be regarded as performative configurations of practices. The practices in which individuals engage define the concept of masculinity, and at the same time shape the male bodies performing them. Previous research has suggested that the use of physical violence – in the right manner – was an important way of enacting masculinity in medieval northern Europe. Acts of violence can leave identifiable marks on the body, and be detectable in human skeletal remains. This case study analysed individuals with weapon-related trauma, buried at the Dominican priory in Västerås, Sweden (thirteenth to sixteenth century AD). It focuses on ten males with injuries sustained around or shortly before the time of death, and the results are used to examine how masculinities were performed in activities associated with violence and battle, and how warrior masculinities were embodied. The text discusses battle-related activities, such as fighting, fleeing, being injured, healing and dying.
Henrich (2020) accounts for how the modern world was underpinned by a psychological-institutional coevolution set in motion by the Church’s Marriage and Family Practices (MFPs). Among these was the prohibition of polygyny, which had driven a zero-sum mindset of violence and risk-taking—to the detriment of social trust and self-regulation. Raffield et al. (2017a) use evolutionary theory to argue that the Viking Age was driven by how elite woman-hoarding had deprived low-status males of access to the mating market. Norse men in the Late Iron Age suffered a fate common throughout humanity’s agricultural period: to be relegated to lifelong bachelorhood. After the Viking Age, one Germanic tribe still resisted feudalism. With their 13th-century saga production, Icelanders use fiction to convince themselves to submit to European normalcy under the Norwegian king. The Christian authors aggrandize their Viking ancestors, but in a way that whitewashes Germanic sexual practices while promoting new MFPs. The European transitions to lifelong monogamy took centuries, as not only high-status males, but females too, are biased toward polygyny in many environments. This article shows how sagas commonly use their very narrative structure to convince men to restrict their bachelor phase to only a few years of wealth and status amassment—before they settle down and marry one woman for life. The social dysfunction that results from large numbers of men being unmarried had ingrained a deep cultural stain on prolonged bachelorhood, which is used as a thematic analogy to how kinship societies drive similar dysfunction.