Skaði and Freyja: Females of Power amongst the Aesir

Using Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir's Women in Old Norse Literature as a comparative spring board, we look back to previous and alternative perspectives on the role of female characters in medieval Icelandic literature, and make extrapolations and interpretations about what it meant to be a woman in medieval Icelandic society. The relevant texts often suggest more aptly the biased agendas of the 13th century ecclesiastical authors rather than as an accurate historical representation of medieval perspectives on gender.

2020

In this dissertation, I intend to draw out and describe the queer themes within the literature of Old Norse mythology using a queer theoretical framework to examine textual sources. I will examine the Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, Gesta Danorum, Heimskringla and some of the Icelandic Sagas as well as Grágás law code texts for comparison of themes. Using queer theory I will provide a re-interpretation of themes, characters and relationships within specific examples from these texts and demonstrate the “queerness” therein. Queer theory provides a means of refuting the cis-heteropatriarchal framework through which much of Old Norse literature is analysed and therefore works to prevent the erasure of queer individuals from historical sources. With this approach I am able to demonstrate distinct themes of queerness which relate to transformation of bodies through magic and shapeshifting, queer relationships and suppression of queerness by medieval Christian practices and the use of cross-dressing to embody non-normative roles and different gender expression. The queerness of individuals in the literature is characterised in Óðinn and Loki’s movement through gender, the relative acceptance of their defiance of norms and the actions they take. This is also seen for mortal characters in Old Norse mythology albeit with lesser acceptance by their peers and more risk in view of the Grágás law codes. These themes speak to the evident queerness in Old Norse myth and also point towards the possibility of a greater understanding and acceptance of the fluid nature of gender and sexuality in the Viking Age.

The Journal of American Folklore, 1999

In the medieval Icelandic family sagas, women as well as men gained and bestowed honor by performing verbally. While men's performances took place in the official, public realm, women promoted and defended the honor of the household in the domestic, private realm. With the introduction of writing, the boundary between public and private was more strictly enforced, and women's participation in the honor system became more restricted. THE MEDIEVAL ICELANDIC family sagas have frequently been cited by scholars for their portrayals of strong, independent women who fearlessly take up a sword to seek vengeance in blood feud, divorce their lackluster husbands at the drop of a hat, or speak their minds openly and eloquently in the pursuit of honor. Conventional and feminist research on gender in Old Norse literature and medieval Icelandic culture has typically focused on images of the "strong woman" in these texts and argues for or against the veracity of these striking female figures.' Recently, Icelandic literary scholar Helga Kress (1993) has cited the presence of the "strong woman" as evidence of an ancient female hegemony-an oral tradition-that was later eclipsed by the emerging Viking patriarchy and finally submerged by the Christian hierarchy. On the other hand, medieval Scandinavian historian Birgit Sawyer has argued that it is nearly impossible, because of the nature and lack of the sources, to answer the question of whether Scandinavian women had "higher status and greater freedom of action" in pre-Christian times than they did later (1993:212). Clearly this discussion is related to the long-standing debate about the sources themselves; the Icelandic family "sagas" (related to the verb segia, to "say" or "tell") were not recorded until the 13th century, although they relate events that took place during the so-called Saga Age (850-1050), during which Norwegian chieftains migrated with their families to Iceland and established a Commonwealth (or Freestate). These anonymous prose narratives (such as Njail's saga, Laxdcela saga, Egil's saga, and Gisla saga) give the impression that they are careful transcriptions of oral histories, local legends, and folklore by quoting verses said to

Interfaces, 2016

This article examines attitudes towards behaviour relating to women within Old Norse literature, focusing both on chivalric romances (translated and original, the riddarasögur) and the legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur), texts that were mostly written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The written chivalric romances arrived in Iceland from Norway and southern Europe, and thus they often exhibit different values from those found in the fornaldarsögur, which tend to reflect indigenous Nordic and heroic storytelling traditions. The article explores differences between the two traditions regarding male emotions and attitudes towards women, with an emphasis on texts in which women are abused. In particular, the article seeks to investigate the relationship between social status and gender roles in these texts, and whether a woman’s rank affects her role and status according to gender. It focuses particularly on romances (especially those featuring courtly love) and fornaldarsögur in which women are either idealised as goddesses, or mistreated and even sexually abused because of their gender. The article concludes by asking how far the contrasts within the texts reflect a Norse ‘emotional community,’ as compared with continental European values, and whether these textual differences reflect actual difference in the social expressions of emotional behaviour.

Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

ABSTRACT: Several Icelandic texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries depict female characters from the pre-Christian past. In both poetry and prose, these heathen women are often portrayed as recalling the old, pre-Christian religion or the magical practices associated with it. Within this literature, different genres correlate with strata of cultural memory that are associated with different periods in Norse history and pre-history. This link between genre and era is largely independent of the actual dates of composition of the texts or the historicity of the events they describe. An analysis of illustrative examples from this corpus reveals how the evaluation and representation of heathen women depend on how deeply in the past they are situated by the narratives that describe them.

In the Old Norse literature, the term ‘shieldmaiden’ (Skjaldmær in Icelandic) tends to be used with reference to a Viking woman warrior, who decided to take up arms in battles and whose temper is equal to the most ardent and brave men. The literary sources which narrate the deeds of these women are not completely historically reliable: hence, many scholars affirm that shieldmaidens never existed in the Viking medieval society. Nonetheless, Carol Clover sustains that “collective fantasy has much to tell us about the underlying tensions of the society that produced it” (Clover, 1986, p. 36). Therefore, the intrinsic value of this literary figure needs to be understood regardless of its actual existence. For Clover, the archetypal shieldmaiden has to embody two essential qualities: she has to be an unmarried young woman and she has to dress and arm herself like a man. The freedom that derives from the absence of marriage ties is indispensable for a maiden to become what she wants to be. Saxo Grammaticus, a medieval Danish historian, describes hundreds of shieldmaidens in his chronicle Gesta Danorum (The Deeds of the Danes) but he as well as many other medieval sources, also asserts that the women warriors’ emancipation ceases the moment they get married. Several legendary shieldmaidens inspired countless modern cultural products, from Richard Wagner’s character Brünnhilde in the three-act opera Die Walküre, to Lagertha, the female protagonist in the on-going TV series Vikings. Kathleen M. Self problematizes the issue of the woman warrior’s representation in contemporary media, claiming, “She usually has an exaggerated feminine form, her large breasts and hips contrasting with a small waist” (Self, 2014, p. 167). The modern icon of a shieldmaiden is a hyper-sexualized and erotic image which refuses to take into account Clover’s indispensable feature of masculinity.

New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the arrière-scène of saga literature; the nexus of skaldic poetry and saga narrative; medieval and post-medieval gender roles; and other manifestations of language, time, and place as preserved in Old Norse–Icelandic texts. This volume will be welcomed not only by the specialist and by scholars in adjacent fields but also by the avid general reader, drawn in ever-increasing number to the Icelandic sagas and their world. Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic

International Old Norse Conference at the University of Rzeszów Rzeszów, 12-13.03.2015.

American University, 2020

Utilizing skeletal remains from the Viking Age in Denmark, this dissertation seeks to uncover how gender influenced lived experiences and identity formation during this period. Historically, biases regarding the inherent abilities of individuals of either gender have heavily influenced analysis in this area. Bioarchaeology offers a unique perspective on this query as skeletons reflect an individual’s life experiences and are a relatively unbiased source of information about the past. As identity is performed through the manipulation of the human body, analyzing the evidence of those experiences can provide a window into the past. Through an analysis of Viking Age burials from across Denmark, I explore how gender impacted identity formation and lived experience at the time. I utilize a bioarchaeological approach to discuss how individuals were impacted by gendered expectations at the time. Through assessing activity patterns, trauma prevalence rates, and the general health of individuals in the sample, patterns of behavior that may shed light on lived experiences that impacted identity formation during the Viking Age may be established. By combining that analysis with a discussion of the funerary treatment of the deceased the interplay between the deceased’s lived experiences and the social status ascribed to them by the community who buried them can be assessed. The results show that the relationship between ascribed social status and lived experiences is complex and cannot be solely attributed to the influence of gender on individual or social identity. The combination of skeletal and archaeological data help to provide a more nuanced understanding of how gender historically impacted lived experience and identity formation than either analysis could provide on its own.

Cold counsel: women in Old Norse literature …, 2002