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Gender, Humor, and Power in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature
Abstract
Gender is one of the most fraught topics in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, and medieval authors made productive use of laughter and humor, inviting the audience to laugh with, or at, their characters, based on how good or unsuccessful they are at fulfilling ideal male or female roles.1 Sagas and eddic poetry are noted for brave heroes who die with a sarcastic remark on their lips, and formidable women who coldly laugh as they demand that someone be killed. These characters are likely to ref lect a society preoccupied by honor and the heroic ethic. In sagas inspired by romance, where women’s independence is the central theme, laughter becomes a weapon in the battle of the sexes, and instead of men laughing at other men, they join ranks to laugh at women. This article examines how the employment of laughter and humor, not only its comical but also its ludicrous and incongruous aspects, plays a fundamental role in the construction and representation of gender in Old Norse-Icelandic texts, and reinforces or interrogates existing models of masculinity and femininity.
This book is the first study to investigate both the relation between gender and violence in the Old Norse Poetic Edda and key family and contemporary sagas, and the interrelated nature of these genres. Beginning with an analysis of Eddaic attitudes to heroic violence and its gendered nature through the figures of Guòrún and Helgi, the study broadens out to the whole poetic compilation and how the past (and particularly the mythological past) inflects the heroic present. This paves the way for a consideration of the comparable relationship between the heroic poems themselves and later reworkings of them or allusions to them in the family and contemporary sagas. Accordingly, the study moves on to consider the use of Eddaic allusion in Gísla saga's meditation on violent masculinity and sexuality, assesses the impact of the Church on attitudes to revenge in family and contemporary sagas, and finally explores the scapegoating of women for male violence in the contemporary sagas. Although the Eddaic poems themselves present a complex and conflicting attitude to vengeance, revenge and other forms of violence are in later texts regularly associated with the past, often represented by Eddaic figures. Moreover, saga authors often attempt to construct a national narrative which shows moderation and peace-making as the only viable alternative to what is seen as the traditional destructive model of vengeance. Nevertheless, the picture the sagas present is far from uniform, rather being one of conflicting voices as the attractions of heroic violence for many prove difficult to resist. The book's thematic concentration on gender/sexuality and violence, and its generic concentration on Poetic Edda and later texts which rework or allude to it, enable a diverse but coherent exploration of both key and neglected Norse texts and the way in which their authors display a dual fascination with and rejection of heroic vengeance.
Among the texts translated from Anglo-Norman or French into Old Norse at the behest of Hákon IV Hákonarson (1217–63) were the Strengleikar, a group of lais including those attributed to Marie de France, and Möttuls saga (The Saga of the Cloak), the translation of Le lai du cort mantel, which also has an Icelandic rímurversion, Skikkjurímur.1 Both Strengleikar and Möttuls saga were translated in Bergen in the early to mid-thirteenth century as part of the king’s program of translating courtly literature.2 Hákon’s aim of centralizing political power in Norway, transforming old warrior-based, regional and autonomous power bases into a medieval European feudal state whose ideological center was the royal court, was underpinned by the promotion of European Arthurian literature in which a powerful king adjudicated honor and status in a world-famous court.3 In addition to the larger work of centralization, Hákon’s medium-term political tasks were: first, securing his claim to the Norwegian throne as the illegitimate and posthumous son of king Hákon Sverrison; second, achieving sole rule over Norway after years of power-sharing with his kinsman, jarl, later hertogi (duke) Skúli; third, assuring the succession; fourth and last, cementing important diplomatic links with other royal European houses. These included his immediate neighbors in Sweden and Denmark, but he also had contacts with England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Vatican, and, as discussed below, with Spain.4 Each of these four projects was guaranteed to some degree by the bodies of royal women: specifically those of his mother, his wife, and, to a lesser extent, his daughters-in-law and his daughter. The important female kindred of Hákon were: his mother, Inga of Varteigr; his wife, Margrét Skúladóttir, and his only legitimate daughter, Kristín Hákonardóttir. Other influential female figures in Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, the biography of the king, commissioned by his son Magnús, and composed by the Icelander Sturla Þórðarson in the 1260s, were Ingiríðr Skúladóttir, Margrét’s sister; Ragnhildr, Skúli’s wife and Hákon’s mother-in-law; and the Swedish granddaughter of king Eric the Saint, frú Kristín, wife of Hákon galinn, Skúli’s half-brother, who was the mother of Knútr Hákonarson.5
The Strengleikar collection includes two lais attributed to Marie de France which deal with Arthurian material: Geitarlauf and Januals ljóð, versions of the Anglo-Norman Chevrefueil and Lanval; both these lais feature adulterous queens: Isolt and Arthur’s unnamed queen. Möttuls saga is a chastity-test tale that attributes sexual misbehavior not only to Arthur’s queen, but to every lady—bar one—at the Arthurian court.6 Marianne Kalinke has suggested, following Cederschiöld, that Möttuls saga, which fails to recognize the names of some major Arthurian figures including Yvain and Perceval, is among the earliest of the texts translated for Hákon’s court.7 Whether or not this is the case, this group of stories imported from the sophisticated south raise three related questions. What might Hákon’s court, the likely original audience of the translations, have made of the accounts of the irredeemably sexually-compromised queen and court? How did the imported models chime with, or contrast with, available native literary, historical, and contemporary models of queenship? And what impact did the chivalric material have on the historiography written at the court of Hákon’s son, Magnús, who commissioned his father’s biography? These are the questions that this essay seeks to investigate, to try to flesh out the reception context of these lais in the Norwegian milieu.
As Janet Nelson has observed, in comparison with medieval kingship, medieval queenship was ill-defined.8 The role changed considerably between the early medieval period and the twelfth century, when the original poems were composed, and the thirteenth century when they arrived at Hákon’s court. Where Merovingian and early Anglo-Saxon queens had fulfilled distinct roles, often co-witnessing documents, offering advice to the king...
In their seminal work, Basic Color Terms, the linguist-anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay analyzed the color terms of close to one hundred of the world's languages, belonging to a variety of linguistic families and/or groups.1 They challenged the thesis of relativism in the encoding of color and advanced an alternative hypothesis, arguing that there was a universal inventory of eleven basic color terms, located in the color space where English speakers place the most typical examples of black, white, red, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, pink, and grey. Comparing the vocabularies of languages possessing fewer than these eleven categories, they demonstrated that basic color terms do not appear at random in the diachronic development of a language, but in an invariable seven-stage sequence illustrated below:
The scheme is to be interpreted as follows: all languages possess basic terms for the black and white foci; if a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red; if a language contains four terms, then the fourth term will be either yellow or green; if a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both yellow and green; if a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue; if a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown; and if a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these. Berlin and Kay concluded that "color lexicons with few terms tend to occur in association with relatively simple cultures and simple technologies, while color lexicons with many terms tend to occur in association with complex cultures and complex technologies (to the extent that complexity of culture and technology can be assessed objectively)."2
Old Norse-Icelandic has eight basic color terms (svartr, hvítr, rauðr, grœnn, gulr, blár, brúnn, and grár (gránn), making it an early stage VII language.3 For lack of data, it is, of course, impossible to assess precisely the evolutionary sequence of these terms, but it is noteworthy that an examination of Snorri Sturluson's use of color terms in Gylfaginning reveals not only a limination of color terms to include only a handful (svartr, hvítr, rauðr, grár, and grœnn),4 but also an introduction of color terms, beginning with black (svartr) and ending with green (grœnn) that matches the evolutionary sequence proposed by Berlin and Kay with the notable exception only of grár.5 Obviously, there is no way of knowing Snorri Sturluson's reasonings behind this order, but it is tempting to speculate that in some way he tried, through his use of color terminology, to give expression to what Berlin and Kay call "a relatively simple culture" and bring his readers close to seeing the world through the eyes of his and their pagan forebears, as these pagans described it in their myths and legends.6
According to Berlin and Kay's temporal-evolutionary order, grey (grár) would have been among the last terms added to the Old Norse-Icelandic basic color lexicon. This order is contradicted by Snorri Sturluson, and, indeed, Berlin and Kay's placement of grey, the only achromatic basic color term added from stage II onwards in their stage VII of language development, has been called into question. Stanley R. Witkowski and Cecil H. Brown note that "four of their seven error cases involved the premature appearance of gray" and comment that "[e]vidence adduced since then . . . shows, many more exceptional cases, so many, in fact, that gray is now considered a 'wild card' color . . . which can be encoded at any point after the early stages."7
It is the aim of this article to demonstrate through linguistic categorization the objects about which the hue adjective grár is used and to determine on the basis of its frequency in a selection of texts whether for Old Norse-Icelandic one should place grey in the later stages or assign it to the early stages as Siegfried Wyler did for Old English.8 Wyler points out that "'[g]rey' is, in...