Women in Old Norse Literature

Bodies, Words, and Power

J. Friðriksdóttir

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137118066
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Old Norse texts offer different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women in diverse social and economic positions. This book analyzes female characters in medieval Icelandic saga literature, and demonstrates how they engaged with some of the most contested values of the period, revealing the anxieties of both the authors and audiences.

CHAPTER 1

WOMEN SPEAKING

Brennu-Njáls saga is a canonical text traditionally regarded as the pinnacle of Icelandic saga literature, a saga that explores in depth the causes and results of bloodfeud. The main female characters, the unswervingly loyal Bergþóra, the femme fatale Hallgerðr, and the inciter Hildigunnr, are among the most striking in Old Norse–Icelandic literature and have come to define popular perceptions of women and their attributes in Icelandic sagas. Judging from these characters, and the critical discourse that centers on them, it seems that goading others to violence and revenge is what women in the sagas do. Indeed the quasi-proverbial phrase kǫld eru kvenna ráð “cold are the counsels of women” appears after one famous incitement scene, an expression often regarded as capturing a key feature of the ideology of medieval Icelandic society.¹

The hvǫt “incitement speech”—women’s primary device of involving themselves in men’s affairs as depicted in a canonical group of Íslendingasögur and eddic poetry—has been scrutinized in detail by scholars.² We may wonder what is at stake for both parties, the inciter and the object of her speech: On the one hand, given the risks involved, that is, retaliation taken on their own kinsmen, or losing honor should the avenger be unsuccessful, why do women engage in the whetting process? Whose agency is at work, that of the inciter, or the recipient of her speech? Is the female inciter’s motivation always that of maintaining family reputation and performing a role expected or demanded of her, or can an independent female agenda be uncovered that potentially opens up space for using the incitement speech subversively and outside the traditional context?

In previous critical discussions about female characters in Old Norse–Icelandic literature, these questions have often been inextricably tied to whether or not the female inciter wields power by her goading. However, “power” as a fundamental concept, as it has been applied in modern scholarship, has gone largely undefined and unquestioned.³ Does power simply equal the aggressive imposition of one’s will? This understanding of the term, drawing a link between power and violence, seems to be the basis for most critics’ understanding of the female inciter as having agency, exemplified in Else Mundal’s words that the “impression of strong and independent women in Old Norse society depends very heavily on a literary motif, the goading scene.”⁴ This statement implies that if we conjecture that the female inciter existed in reality, women must have had some degree of power in the medieval period; simultaneously, it does not consider the possibility that women could be strong and independent in other contexts. However, this line of argument does not allow for other dimensions and forms of power, such as the ability to keep the community unified, harmonious, and prosperous rather than feuding and violent, and it eliminates from the debate ideologies other than the honor-based value system privileged in some, though not all, sagas. In fact, as I will discuss later, the word eggja “to incite” also occurs in a context where a woman urges her husband not to use weapons against someone but rather to act prudently and form an alliance with another man, thereby diminishing the likelihood of feud. Moreover, male characters who use (or attempt to use) methods other than blood vengeance to settle conflict, are often depicted positively.⁵ It seems appropriate, therefore, to look at the women who do so.

As mentioned in the introduction, the often narrow scope of texts considered in critical discussion of Old Norse women has produced skewed results. Because of the notion of power as an aggressive force, research on “powerful” women in Old Norse literature has tended to focus only on the sagas that contain many female inciters, in addition to individual goading scenes from lesser-known texts. Yet the conclusions drawn from these investigations are often represented as applying to female roles and images of women in “the sagas” as a whole.⁶ This methodology effectively ignores the many other representations of women, who, although not inciting vengeance or violence, I will argue, can be seen as active and carry agency. In the second part of the chapter, I shall look at a counterimage to the female inciter: wise women dispensing peaceful advice, employing their words to prevent rather than perpetuate feud, warfare, or violence. The pacific type of female character, pervasive in the fornaldarsögur but certainly to be found in the Íslendingasögur and other genres, has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The form of women’s speech found in these examples is socially sanctioned and positively coded in an unambiguous way; the female speaker here functions a useful mouthpiece for socially cohesive values also emphasized in wisdom poetry.

Disastrous Words

Whetting: The Pattern

There are a number of famous incitement scenes in the sagas, the most elaborate of which appears in Brennu-Njáls saga. In this episode, which has remained central in critical analysis, especially in several detailed studies from the 1980s and ‘90s, Hildigunnr, a woman of high social standing, urges her uncle, the chieftain Flosi, to avenge her husband Hǫskuldr Njálsson, a charge to which he angrily responds with the jibe “kǫld eru kvenna ráð” [cold are the counsels of women] but nevertheless, he acts on her words.⁷ Although the proverb is not as widespread as the common perception seems to be (according to Richard L. Harris, it appears only three times in the corpus of all saga literature), it memorably verbalizes many men’s reluctance to avenge and their negative attitude toward the women who incite them to take physical action.⁸ Rolf Heller identifies 51 women as inciters in the Íslendingasögur, arguing that they represent a literary motif borrowed from text to text; the exact number can be debated—Jochens and Miller have added new characters to Heller’s list—but inciters clearly appear frequently throughout the corpus.⁹ In this section, I seek to understand the female inciter not just in terms of the debate about her historicity or constructed and literary nature, but also in the context of power, which in its broadest definition can be defined as any imposition of one party’s will on another party, by any means conceivable, whether opposed or not.¹⁰

The hallmarks of the traditional whetting scene have been described and analyzed in detail by many scholars. Sometimes the words of the incitement are not reported—the saga author simply states that a certain character incited (eggja, hvetja, frýja) someone else—but the general pattern is as follows: someone offends a man by questioning his masculinity in some way, for example, by accusations of cowardice, lack of manliness, or passive homosexuality, by injuring him, or by killing a close relation.¹¹ This is often part of a power struggle for political domination of a particular region. The man whose duty it is to respond is, in his proud kinswoman’s view, slow to act. She emphatically insists on him taking up weapons by deploying one or more of the following strategies: lamenting the slain, producing a bloody token of the deceased, goading the man to violence, and shaming him by verbal utterances. These utterances may include reminding him of his kin obligation, accusing him of cowardice, comparing him to a woman, or threatening to take up weapons, and thus the male role, if he does not act. As Carol J. Clover has shown, many women choose a mealtime as the opportune moment to incite; this is the one occasion where they have direct and, most importantly, public access to the man in their own space within the household.¹² A representative example of the language used in incitement speeches can be found in Þórðar saga kakala, a samtíðarsaga written only a few years or decades after the turbulent events it relates took place in the mid-thirteenth century, but this formulaic speech could equally appear in an Íslendingasaga.¹³ Here, the aristocratic Steinvör, whose brother Þórðr is involved in warfare with another powerful magnate, incites her husband Hálfdan, a model of male passivity and reluctance, to help her brother:

“hefi ek hann ok sjaldan eggjat at ganga í stórmæli, en nú mun ek þat bert gera, at lítit mun verða okkart samþykki, ef þú veitir eigi Þórði, bróður mínum. Mun þá svá fara, sem minnr er at sköpuðu, at ek mun taka vápnin ok vita, ef nökkurir menn vili fylgja mér, en ek mun fá þér af hendi búrluklana.” Var Steinvör þá málóð um hríð, en Hálfdan þagði ok hlýddi til.¹⁴

[“I have rarely incited him to involve himself in grave affairs, but now I will make it plain that there will be no concord between us if you do not support my brother Þórðr. Otherwise the result might be, although it is against my nature, that I will take the weapons and see if anyone will follow me, but I will hand the keys to the pantry over to you.” Steinvör went on for a while, but Hálfdan remained silent and listened.]

As the term stórmæli “important or grave affairs” indicates, by this speech Steinvör indirectly involves herself in the male arena of politics, insisting that her husband support her brother Þórðr in his feuding. By Steinvör’s own admission, her speech is an incitement, but by declaring that she has rarely employed such methods before, the narrative suggests that whetting should only be employed for good reason. Steinvör—in the Brynhildian tradition—threatens her husband with divorce, and she also makes a serious accusation about his inadequate masculinity, stating that she will take over his role and give him the keys to the pantry.¹⁵ This evokes Þórr’s comic masquerade as Freyja in the eddic poem Þrymskviða, where he wears female clothing, her necklace, the Brísingamen, and has keys hanging from the waist, a female symbol representing the mistress’s authority innan stokks “in the domestic sphere.”¹⁶ The comment that Steinvör is málóð “ranting” evokes the phrase “láta ganga af kappi” [to press on forcefully], which appears in the same context of women encouraging men to act, and could indicate a heightened emotional state, and excessive, perhaps incoherent, speech.¹⁷ Finally, as the words “nú mun ek þat bert gera” [I will now make it known openly] imply, the incitement is often performed in front of an audience, where other household members are witnesses. This setting indicates that the woman deliberately makes the incitement a public matter because it has a different effect from speaking to the husband in private; if the man is to keep his honor following the incitement, he must take action.

This type of heightened speech or utterance can thus be seen as formal speech act that prompts men to react in a certain way. According to J. L. Austin’s definition, speech acts are words that are not a statement of facts, or the pronouncement of an opinion, but instead, they transform a state of being such as a person’s status, or the relationship between parties. A verbal utterance that is thereby an act: saying is doing.¹⁸ Speech acts that fulfill certain conditions involve the existence of a so-called illocutionary force behind the utterance that binds the speaker to it.¹⁹ Speakers must be qualified to perform the speech act (e.g., by virtue of their legitimate authority or social status), and second, the speech act must have been heard and understood by someone; if these conditions are not fulfilled it may be considered void. This understanding underpins Elaine Tennant’s definition of the performative as a culturally conditioned act that is understood as such if it follows conventions to a sufficient extent for members of the community to recognize it.²⁰ Thus by evoking the formulaic aspects of incitement speeches outlined here, in c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1.   Women Speaking
• 2.   Women and Magic
• 3.   Monstrous Women
• 4.   Royal and Aristocratic Women
• 5.   The Female Ruler
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index