Maiden Warriors and Other Sons

Author(s): Carol J. Clover

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 35-49
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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 of English and Germanic Philology?January
Journal
? 1986 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

MAIDEN WARRIORS AND OTHER SONS

Carol J. Clover, University of California, Berkeley

Et ne hunc bellis sexum insudasse miretur, de talium fe

quis quaedam
minarum condicione et moribus modicae expe
compendio digressionis
diam. Fuere Danos feminae, quae formam suam in
quondam apud
virilem habitum convertentes omnia paene temporum momenta ad ex
colendam militiam conferebant, ne virtutis ?ervos luxuriae
contagione
hebetari paterentur. delicatum vivendi genus perosae corpus
Siquidem
ac labore durare solebant femineae levi
animumque patientia totamque
tatis mollitiem abdicantes muliebre virili uti saevitia
ingenium cogebant.
Sed et tanta cura rei militaris notitiam ut feminas exuisse
captabant,
vero, aut aut decora cor
quivis putaret. Praecipue quibus ingenii vigor
erat, id vitae genus incedere consueverant. Hae ergo,
porum proceritas
ac nativae condicionis immemores blanditiis ante
perinde rigoremque
ferentes, bella basiis intentabant non oscula delibantes
pro sanguinemque,
armorum quam amorum officia in
potius frequentabant manusque, quas
telas aptare debuerant, telorum exhibebant, ut iam non lecto,
obsequiis
sed leto studentes spiculis appeterent, quos mulcere specie potuissent.
?Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum1

1 ed. C. Knabe and Paul Herrmann, rev. Olrik and

Saxonis Gesta Danorum, J0rgen
H. Raeder Levin and Munksgaard, 1931), 7:6. Hereafter cited as Saxo.
(Copenhagen:
"In case anyone is marvelling that this sex should have sweated in warfare, let me di
gress briefly to explain the character and behavior of such females. There were once
women in Denmark who dressed themselves to look like men and spent almost every
minute cultivating soldiers' skills; they did not want the sinews of their valour to lose
tautness a dainty
and be infected by self-indulgence. Loathing style of living, they
would harden and mind with toil and endurance, to act with a virile
body spirits
ruthlessness. courted military so that you would have guessed
They celebrity earnestly
who had forceful or were
they had unsexed themselves. Those especially personalities
tall and elegant embarked on this way of life. And if they were of their true
forgetful
selves they put toughness before allure, aimed at conflicts instead of kisses, tasted
blood, not lips, sought the clash of arms rather than the arm's embrace, fitted to weap
ons hands which should have been weaving, desired not the couch but the kill, and
those they could have appeased with looks they attacked with lances" (Translation from
Saxo Grammaticus: of the Danes, tr. Peter Fisher and ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson
History
England: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979],
[Cambridge,
p. 212). Hereafter cited as Fisher. On this passage, and on Saxos shield maidens in
see H. N. Holmqvist-Larsen, i og omkring 7.
general, M0er, skjoldm0er og krigere: En studie
bog af Saxos Gesta Danorum (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1983), esp. Ch. 4
makes a strong case for Saxo's
("Skjoldm0digressionen"). Holmqvist-Larsen familiarity
with medieval traditions of amazones and viragines and his echoing of those traditions in
the representation of his own shield maidens. There are, however, fundamental differ
ences, from which we may conclude that Saxo's shield maidens are not derivative but
stand on their own traditional feet. As Holmqvist-Larsen puts it, Saxo "omtolker det
nordiske i lyset af det antikke" (p. 45).
36 Clover

Legends of militant women crop up here and there in Germanic liter

ature, above all Old Norse. Like their cousins the Greek amazons, the
"shield maidens" of the North have been consigned, by literary histo
rians, to the realm of literary fantasy. Creatures of the imagination
they may be, at least in the form they have come down to us (mostly in
the historically unreliable fornaldarsogur and the equivalent stories of
Saxo); but that should not mean, as for the most part it has meant in
Old Norse literary criticism, that they are therefore beyond discus
sion. On the contrary, a collective fantasy has much to tell us about the
underlying tensions of the society that produced it; and when the
subject is one such as women, which the "legitimate" sources treat only
scantily, the literary fantasy takes on a special importance. Medieval
literature is, after all, rich in transvestite traditions in both the reli
and the secular female monks, amazons,
gious spheres (e.g., viragines,
Joan of Arc),2 and one need not look very far or deep to see that the
shield maiden stories of the North share with other "women-on-top"
traditions (as Natalie Davis has termed them) an underlying concern
with the basic issue of where one sex stops and the other begins?not
only psychosexually, but also socially.3 In the case of a certain set of
shield-maiden stories we can go even further, for an analysis of their
causal logic first in a cross-cultural and then in a legal context leads us
beyond a insight into the Norse sense of sexual borders to a
general
specific insight into the particular role of certain women in the early
Scandinavian world of bloodfeud.

MAIDEN WARRIORS

The story-type I have in mind is that of the maiden warrior: "maiden"

because she is usually young and either repudiates or defers or enters
into and "warrior" because at least for a time she
reluctantly marriage,
dresses and arms herself as a man and enrolls in the martial life.4 The

2
See especially Vern L. Bullough, "Transvestites in the Middle Ages," American Jour
nal of Sociology, 79 (1974), 1381?94; John Anson, "The Female Transvestite in Early
Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif," Viator, 5 (1974), 1? 32; Max
Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963),
introduction and Ch. 3, and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
(Chicago: Aldine, 1969), Chs. 3?5.
3
Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1975), Ch. 5.
41 understand the maiden-warrior theme to be a subtype of the shield-maiden
theme. The latter term is used loosely in the literature to refer to any and all women
who take up the sword or associate themselves with warfare or behave in un
merely
feminine ways, however briefly and for whatever reason. Other of the shield
subtypes
maiden include the valkyrie, the avenging mother, and the maiden n. 12 below).
king (see
 Maiden Warriors and Other Sons 37

most dramatic of the maiden-warrior stories is that of Hervor, told in

Chapters 4 and 5 of Hervarar saga ok Hei?reks.5 Hervor is the only
child of Angantyr, who falls in battle before she is born. She is
brought up in her maternal grandfather's household and quickly
shows herself abler with bow, shield, and sword than with needlework.
After a stint as a mugger (dressed and armed as a man, she kills
for their money), she learns who her father was and deter
people
mines to seek out his grave on Samsey. "Bu Jd? at ?llu," she says (in
verse) to her mother, "sem {d? son mundir"; and under the name
"Hervar?r" she joins up with, and eventually becomes head of, a band
of vikings. They come one day to Samsey, and at sunset Hervor makes
her way on to the island, past a guardian, through the circle of flames,
to her father's barrow. She enters and initiates the famous daughter
father verse dialogue known as the "Waking of Angantyr." The bone
of contention is the sword Tyrfingr, which has gone to the grave with
Hervor steadfastly insists, in the face of her father's wrath,
Angantyr.
and prophecies of doom, that the sword is by rights
prevarications,
hers, but Angantyr refuses to hand it over, claiming, among other
that "no woman in the world would dare to hold it in her
things,
hand." In the end Hervor and armed with Tyrfingr re-enters
prevails,
the world of the living. She continues with her masculine adventures
one she settles down, marries, and has two
until, day, subsequently
sons, of whom one, Hei?rekr, is the saga's main character.

The interpretation of this plot likely to spring first to the modern

mind is a psychosexual one. Hervor is one of those women who wishes
she weren't, and she repudiates her femaleness on the ap
by taking
behavior, and name of the male?she over, in the
pearance, gives
of the tale, the needle for the sword. Symbolically seen, the
language

Bibliotheca
In Inger Boberg's Motif-Index of Early Icelandic Literature, Arnamagnaeana, 27
are listed under F565.1 "Amazons.
(Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966), examples
Woman warriors. Icelandic: For a recent, general discussion, focused on
'skjaldmaer'."
ballads, see Lise Praestgaard Andersen, Skjoldm0er: En kvindemyte (n.p.: Gyldendal,
historians have yet to
1982); and Holmqvist-Larsen, M0er, skjoldm0er og krigere. Literary
take into consideration the scanty but provocative archaeological evidence for military
women in the Germanic world. See especially Alfred Dieck, "Germanische Kriegerin
nen: Literarische Erw?hnungen und Moorleichenfunde," Arch?ologisches Korrespon
denzblatt, Hilda R. Ellis Davidson, The Viking Road to Byzantium (Lon
5 (1975), 93?96;
don: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), pp. 114?15.
ins vitra I The Saga of
51 have used the dual-language edition Saga Hei?reks konungs
theWise, tr. and ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons,
KingHeidrek
bases his text on the R redaction, in the lacuna from U and sup
i960). Tolkien filling
the end from U/203. References to other fornaldarsogur are to the edition of
plying
Gu?ni J?nsson, Fomaldar s?gur Nor?urlanda, 4 vols. (Reykjavik: Islendingasagna?t
cited as FSN. Translations are my own unless other
g?fan, 1954; rpt. 1959), hereafter
wise indicated.
 38 Clover

struggle with her dead father over the sword is a struggle for phallic
authority. Only when she comes to the point where she can have sons
of her own (in psychoanalytic terms the proper resolution of the phal
lic conflict) does she resign herself to femaleness. So neat an example
is Herv?r's story of what Freud termed the masculinity complex that
many readers will be tempted to let it stand there, as a crystalline
realization of a human universal.
But is it so clear-cut? If we keep in mind that Herv?r's story is not a
case history but a fictional projection, and that it stands not alone but
in a context of equivalent and linked plots, we may perceive her situa
in a
tion somewhat different light?a light more medieval than mod
ern, and more anthropological than psychoanalytic.
Hervarar saga ok Hei?reks is above all a narrative of genealogy
and inheritance. It tells, in the main, the story of five generations:
Arngrimr, who gets the sword Tyrfingr (depending on the version)
either through marriage to Sigrlami's or by
daughter slaying Sigrlami
and seizing sword and daughter; his son Angantyr, who inherits it
from Arngrimr; Hervor, who "inherits" it from her father Angantyr;
her son Hei?rekr, who inherits from Hervor; and finally his son Ang
antyr, who avenges his father's death and retrieves the sword from
his slayers.6 Tyrfingr is thus more than a sword, more than a phallic
symbol, and more than a device. It is the emblematic
literary binding
representation of the larger patrimony?not only treasures and lands,
but family name and ancestral spirit?that each must se
generation
cure for itself and pass on to the next. of course, is
By generation,
meant son or sons (or son- or at least in the
perhaps sons-in-law),
normal and preferable case. So it works in Hei?reks saga for four of
the five generations. It is in the third generation that the line breaks:

Arngrimr male

Angantyr male
Hervor female
Hei?rekr male

Angantyr male

The circumstances leading to this third-generation are

anomaly
clear enough. Herv?r's father Angantyr was killed shortly after his
6This
genealogy has been scrutinized by generations of scholars in an effort to pin
down its historical and relation to Continental and British sources. This
background
line of inquiry does not concern us here (for a selective see Tolkien's in
bibliography
troduction, pp. xxxvi?xxxviii) we may note that more than one critic has
though
concluded that Hervor Hei?reksdottir is the original figure and that our Hervor
(Angantyrsd?ttir) is a fictional back formation. See especially Kemp Malone, "Widsith
and the Hervarar saga," PMLA, 40 (1925), 769?813, esp. 776?79.
 Maiden Warriors and Other Sons 39

marriage, and his pregnant wife gave birth to their one and only child.
In the absence of brothers (and in the absence of paternal uncles, who
were also slain, with Angantyr, on Samsey), Hervor thus stands as the
sole survivor of her father's illustrious line. Herv?r's own son Hei?rekr
will also be illustrious, of course, as will his son Angantyr. For better or
worse, then, the generation of Angantyr Arngrimsson and the gen
eration of Hei?rekr must, if they are to be linked at all, be linked
through Hervor, the sole representative of the intermediate genera
tion. Herein lies the root explanation of Herv?r's masculinity. So
powerful is the principle of male inheritance that when it necessarily
passes through the female, she must become, in legend if not in life, a
a
functional son. The saga itself says as much. "Equip me as you would
son," she says to her mother as she readies herself to leave home in the
when she
quest for her father's grave. And the first thing she does
confronts her dead father on Samsey is to state her relationship and
her claim: "Vaki ]du,Angantyr, / vekr |)ik Hervor, / eingad?ttir / ykkr
Sv?fu; / seldu ?r / hvassan maeki, / {Dann er Sigrlama / sl?gu
haugi
the names of her dead uncles and ancestors, she
dvergar." Chanting
threatens to curse the entire line if she is not acknowledged as proper
heir. To Angantyr's that what she wants, the sword Tyr
protestation
fingr,
was taken by his slayers, she responds: "Segir ?>u eigi satt i... I
trau?r ertu / arf at veita / eingabarni," at which point the barrow opens
and the flames blaze up. For his part, Angantyr repeatedly calls
her daughter, even as he relinquishes the sword and grants her the
are the legacy of Arngrimr's
strength (afl) and bold spirit (eljun) that
sons: "Far vel, d?ttir, / flj?tt gaefa ek ?>?r / t?lf manna fj?r / ef p? trua
maettir, / afl ok allt it / {^at er synir Arngr?ms / at sik
eljun, go?a,
leif?u."
what genetic notions underlie this and other genealogical
Just
stories in early Scandinavian literature is not clear, but I have the im
pression that the idea of latent or recessive features, physical or char
was undeveloped; inherited qualities seem to manifest
acterological,
themselves in some degree in every generation. The qualities that
now bestows as the "legacy of Arngrim's sons," afl and eljun,
Angantyr
are emphatically "male" qualities. They may ultimately be "intended"
for Herv?r's future sons and their sons on down the line (as Angantyr
himself points out) but in the meantime they must assert themselves in
Hervor herself (as indeed they already have). As Hervor turns to leave
the barrow, she utters a final stanza in which she blesses her father
and refers to herself as "between worlds" ( "heizt {r?ttumst n? / heima ?
millum, / er mik umhverfis / eldar brunnu"). Indeed she is between
worlds: as the genetic conduit between the dead father and the un
40 Clover

born son, she bridges the worlds of male and female, living and dead,
past and future. Only when she becomes fully nubile and hence ready
to bear a male heir on whom the ancestral legacy will be unloaded, as
it were, can Hervor withdraw from the male sphere and return to
the female one. But until she is ready to produce another "son of
Arngrimr," she must function, in the genealogical breach, as a "son of
herself.7 It is a performance on which the heroic stature
Arngrimr"
of her future son Hei?rekr, and of his sons and their sons, quite liter
ally depends.8
Hervor may be the most elaborately drawn functional son in Norse
literature, but she is by no means the only one. A similar story is
out on the mythological level who Snorri tells it)
played by Ska?i, (as
upon the death of her father I>jazi, "took helmet, byrnie, and a com
plete set of weapons and went to to avenge her father"
?sgarOr
("Ska?i, d?ttir I>jaza jotuns, t?k hj?lm ok brynju ok oil herv?pn ok
ferr til ?sgarOs at hefna fo?ur sins").9 She settles for a husband,
Njor?r, but the marriage founders on the question of where to live.
Njor?r wants to be near the sea, while Ska?i "wanted to have the
homestead her father had owned, in the mountains at the place called
Prymheimr" ("Ska?i vill hafa busta? J^ann er ?tt haf?i fa?ir hennar. I>at
er ? fjollum nokkurum, par sem heitir I>rymheimr").10 Snorri does not
say in so many words that Ska?i is a sole heir, but such is clearly im
plied by the fact that the task of vengeance and the paternal inheri
tance both devolve on her.
More explicit is the case of I>ornbj?rg in Hr?lfs saga Gautrekssonar.11
The only child of King Eirekr of Sweden and his wife ( "f)au h?f?u ?tt
eina d?ttur barna, s? er I>ornbj?rg h?t"), she spends her girlhood
pursuing the martial arts. When her father objects to her masculine

71 have confined myself here to those examples in which the genealogical breach is
either explicit or
unambiguously implied.
8
Melissa Berman (Senior Thesis, Harvard University, 1977) makes the point that
Herv?r's narrative stint is very much like those of her male ancestors and progeny. "In
every generation of the story, the problem of the hero's to is
relationship society
out the repeating folk pattern of the fatherless hero's maturation,
brought through
which seems always to involve an to deal with normal
inability society, manifested by
violence, unnatural acts, pride, and often, supernatural wisdom. These elements play a
part in each of the four [main generational] units in HSH" (p. 42). It might also be
out in this connection that in medieval medical thought, children were com
pointed
monly believed, as Vern L. Bullough put it, "to resemble their fathers if the paternal
seeds were stronger, the mother if the maternal ones were." ("Medieval Medical and
Scientific Views of Women," Marriage in theMiddle Ages, Viator, 4 (1973), 497.
9Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, ed. Finnur Jonsson (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1931),
pp. 80?81 (here normalized).
10Edda Snorra
Sturlusonar, p. 30.
nFSNlV, esp. Chs. 4-5.
 Maiden Warriors and Other Sons 41

interests, she replies: "N? me? pv? at p? hefir eigi meir en eins manns
l?f til r?kisstj?rnar ok ek er n? {ritt einberni ok ? alian arf eftir })ik, m?
vera, at ek {rnrfi {Detta r?ki at verja fyrir konungum e?a konungsso
num, ef ek missi pin vi?" (Ch. 4). Her father provides her with men
and lands; and she adopts male dress and name (I>orbergr) and is
known as king. At this point in the story (as in several of the other
cases), the warrior-maiden or functional-son theme with the
merges
maiden-king (meykongr) theme?the haughty woman who swears not
to marry and defeats or kills her suitors.12 The next several
chapters
are given over to the efforts, finally successful, of the hero Hr?lfr
Gautreksson to bend I>ornbj?rg to his will.
One of Saxo's several shield maidens is Ladgerda, whom Ragnar
encounters on his visit to Norway shortly after the
Shaggy-Breeks
death of King Sivard.13 Like other well-born Norwegian women,
Ladgerda has assumed male dress for self-protection. Ragnar does
not hesitate to make use of the military services of these female war
riors in his quest for vengeance, and Ladgerda in particular proves "a
skilled female fighter, who bore a man's temper in a girl's body; with
locks flowing loose over her shoulders she would do battle in the fore
front of the most valiant warriors" ("perita bellandi femina, quae
virilem in virgine animum gerens, immisso humeris capillitio, prima
inter promptissimos dimicabat"). Smitten with her (not least because
she singlehandedly wins his war), Ragnar makes inquiries and learns
that she is of high birth?indeed, is the daughter and sole survivor of
the dead king. The rest of the story has to do with her resistance to his
wooing (again the maiden-king motif) and their eventual marriage
and divorce. Their son Fridleif becomes Earl of Norway and Orkney.
The Saxonian digression on amazons that heads this essay is
prompted by the figure of Alfhild, who turns to male dress and the
military life to avoid marrying an unwanted suitor. There is no ques
tion of a surrogate son here, for Alfhild's father is alive and she has
two brothers. Her daughter Gyrid, however (for like other women of
the maiden-king type, Alfhild does marry), finds herself at the end of
a family line. "All these wars and critical events had so much
depleted
the Danish royal family," Saxo writes, "that eventually men realised it
had been reduced to one woman, Gyrid, daughter of Alf and grand
child of Sigar" ("Talia rerum bellorumque discrimina adeo regiam

12 are collected
Examples and discussed in Erik Wahlgren, The Maiden King in Iceland
(Diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1938). See also Boberg, Motif-Index, T311.4: "Maiden queen
to fight instead of marrying. She usually scorns or even kills her suitors or sets
prefers
them difficult tasks."
13Saxo, Book 9, pp. 251?54; Fisher, pp. 279-83.
42 Clover

apud Danos gentem exhauserant, ut hanc ad solam Guritham, Alfi

filiam, vero redactam esse constaret.")14 The Danes
Sigari neptem, ap

point regents drawn from the populace, but when Gyrid saw that the
stock had dwindled to none but herself and there was no man
"royal
of equal rank for her to marry, she declared a self-imposed oath of
it preferable to forego a husband rather than
chastity, considering
select one from the rabble" ("Interea Alfi filia Guritha, cum regiam
ad se solam redactam animadverteret cui nu
stirpem neminemque,
beret, nobilitate haberet, votis voluntariam sibi cas
parem nuncupatis
timoniam indixit carere ex maritum as
concubituque quam plebe
ciscere satius
duxit").15 Gyrid's military Of
propensities Saxo says
until, years later, she dons male and enters a battle
nothing clothing
next to her son. This after-the-fact behavior might on first
glance
seem to qualify Gyrid as loyal mother rather than surrogate son; but if
we recall that Gyrid's mother too was a formidable warrior and that
the martial nature in general tends to be passed down in the female
line (witness Herv?r's granddaughter Hervor and Brynhildr's daugh
ter Aslaugr, both shield maidens in their own right),16 we can safely
assume that Gyrid was traditionally constituted as a maiden warrior
from the outset, Saxo's order of events
notwithstanding.

Finally is Brynhildr
there herself, whose story is too well known to
require summary here. Her case is, of course, greatly complicated by
her literary popularity, which has left us with differing versions of her
life and adventures. The picture that we get from the sources in gen
eral, and the V?lsunga saga harmonization in particular, is a contradic
tory one. She is on the one hand depicted as an independent woman
who lives in isolation, unencumbered by family of any kind; such a
would indeed seem fundamental to her story. She is on the
conception
other hand depicted as a woman with a number of relatives, including
a brother or brothers. According to Theodore M. Andersson, the for
mer Brynhildr is the original one; her family, he argues, is ersatz, cre
ated in a late "speculative attempt to domesticate her in the style of
other heroic stories" :

Germanic heroes and heroines appear in the context of their

regularly
families and are in a situation that compels
characteristically trapped
them to act or interests. Hildebrand must kill
against family obligations
his son. must kill his brother. Rosimund and Signy must con
Angantyr
trive the deaths of their husbands and Kriemhilt the death of her broth

14
Saxo, Book 7, p. 200; Fisher, p. 219.
15Saxo, Book 7, p. 202; Fisher, p. 222.
16See Hervarar Ch. 9 of Hei?rekr] var
saga ok Hei?reks, ("H?n [Hervor, daughter
skjaldmaer ok faeddist upp ?Englandi me? Fro?mari jarli") and P?ttr af Ragnars sonum,
Ch. 2.
 Maiden Warriors and Other Sons 43

ers. Gudrun must her sons Ham?ir and Sgrli to their deaths.
dispatch
Gunnarr must abandon his family to the bears and the wolves. Every
where the immediate social context of the family focuses the tragedy.
But Brynhild appears originally to have had no family. In Pidreks saga she
resides alone in a castle with her retainers. In the she is an
Nibelungenlied
on a remote island; the only of are
independent princess signs family
vague references to relatives in stanzas and and an adventitious
476 526
uncle to whom she entrusts her realm in stanza 523. In Icelandic litera
ture she does a a father BuSli, a brother Atli, a sister
acquire family:
Bekkhild, and a foster father Heimir. But here too she resides in a
apart,
tower or behind her flame wall, and the family looks like a late
magic
to domesticate her in the of other heroic
speculative attempt style
stories.17

If this is so, then we may posit that Brynhildr too was at some early
layer in her development construed as a warrior maiden like Ska?i or
Hervor or Eornbj?rg or Gyrid: the sole survivor who must function,
in the breach, as a son.
genealogical

"SWORN VIRGINS" IN ALBANIA

The system of self- or clan government that existed in Iceland (and in

early Germanic Europe in general) is a standard form of government
in stateless societies.18 Remarkably like the Icelandic case is that of
Albania, where until quite recent times, feud was the chief or only
mechanism for maintaining order.19 Observers tell of retaliatory kill
that go on for of successful and unsuc
ings generations; wergild
cessful; of a hypersensitivity to matters of honor and slights to per
sonal and family prestige; of whetting/lamenting women and their
of tokens of the dead man before his living relatives;
flaunting bloody
of male children raised from infancy with the imperative of revenge;
of and of "sworn who for various rea
burnings-in; virgins"?women
sons abandon the female role and assume the role of the male.

17Theodore M. Andersson, The Legend of Brynhild, Isl?ndica, 43 (Ithaca: Cornell

Univ. Press, 1980), p. 244.
18For a
legal-anthropological study of Icelandic feud, see William Ian Miller,
"Choosing the Avenger: Some Aspects of the Bloodfeud in Medieval Iceland and Eng
land," Law and History Review, 1 159-204.
(1983),
19On feud in Albania, see M. Edith Durham, Albania (London:
especially High
Edward Arnold, 1901); the same author's Some Tribal Origins, Laws, and Customs of the
Balkans (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928); Margaret Hasluck, The Unwritten Law
in Albania, ed. J. H. Hutton Univ.
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge Press, 1954); Ian
Whitaker, "Tribal Structure and National Politics in Albania, 1910?1950" in History and
Social Anthropology, ed. I. M. Lewis (London: Tavistock, 1968), pp. 253?93; the same
"
author's 'A Sack for Carrying :The Traditional Role of Women in Northern
Things'
Albanian Society," Anthropological Quarterly, 54 (1981), 146-56.
44 Clover

The existence, if not the exact social significance, of sworn virgins in

Albania is well attested.20 Dressed as men and often armed with rifles,
and eating and smoking with men in public places, they have caught
the curious eye of various travelers in various periods. Three related
reasons are given for their renunciation of femaleness. One has to do
with the rejection of an arranged marriage the young woman finds
unacceptable; only by renouncing the female role altogether can she
reject the marriage without bringing the respective families into feud.
The second reason has to do with inheritance and is attested in the
northern region of Mal?sia e Madje. Here a sonless man could prevail
on his (or, if he had two or more, the one of his choice) to
daughter
assume the male role for inheritance purposes. He could then "be
queath to her his house and land for her lifetime, after which it re
verted to the nearest male heir."21 The third reason has to do with the
obligations of bloodfeud. The role of women in Albanian feud was
normally passive: they could be insulted, seduced, abducted, even
murdered?but the business of revenge or seeking settlement always
fell, at least in principle, to the male; women were, at least in
theory
not in from violence. In fact, numer
though always practice, exempt
ous instances are recorded of women's and
seeking taking revenge,
often in quitegruesome forms. But such actions on the part of women
were not as
regarded only "illegal," but also, in some degree, as abnor
mal, and There was, however, one set of
embarrassing, insulting.22
circumstances in which a woman might play an active role in blood
feud. As Ian Whitaker puts it, "When all of her brothers had been
killed, she might herself assume the masculine role, abjure marriage,
and take on the duty of exacting revenge for her siblings."23 The
sworn then assumed male dress, and taken such an
virgin "having
oath she might not revert to her earlier female role, but would thence
forth be treated solely as a man, killing and being killed in the blood
feud and thereafter counting as a full life [as opposed to the usual
half] in the calculation of blood money."24 Just why women's lives were
calculated at half a wergild is unclear; itmay reflect either their rela
tive value in that society or, as Whitaker suggests, an understanding
that blood money might be claimed by two clans.25 In either case, a
woman's assumption of a full wergild would seem to be an assumption
of maleness on a fundamental level.

20This discussion of sworn virgins is based mainly on Whitaker, "'A Sack for Carry
ing Things'" (see also his bibliography), and Durham, Some Tribal Origins, pp. 194?95
21
Durham, Some Tribal Origins, p. 195.
22 See The Unwritten Law of Albania,
especially Hasluck, pp. 219?55.
23 "'A Sack for Carrying
Whitaker, Things,'" p. 151.
24 "'A Sack for Carrying
Whitaker, Things,'" p. 151.
25 '"A Sack for Carrying
Whitaker, Things,'" p. 150.
 Maiden Warriors and Other Sons 45

Let us pass over the first type of sworn virgin, the woman who re
jects marriage (although we cannot help noting her resemblance to
the maiden king), and turn instead to the woman who becomes a sur
rogate man for inheritance or feud purposes. What interests us here
is that the assumption of the male role is prompted, in both cases, by a
breach in the male line. Just how important the rule of father-son
inheritance was in Albania is suggested by the once-widespread prac
tice of levirate marriage there, whereby a man's widow was married by
her late husband's brother and also whereby the resulting children
might be credited to the dead brother, even though they be conceived
after his death.26 Better, to have a son who is not own,
evidently, your
or a son who is your than no son at all.
daughter,
An interesting question for our purposes, but unfortunately one to
which there appears to be no clear answer, is whether in reality these
sworn virgins keep to their vows or whether (like their Icelandic liter
ary sisters) they eventually marry and heirs of their own. In
produce
the case of the first category of male-women, the marriage-rejectors,
the potential of feud would seem to constitute a powerful deterrent to
eventual marriage (though even here at least one case of marriage has
been recorded).27 One might suppose that there would actually be an
incentive for the women to marry in the other two cases, for they
could then produce sons of their own and so restore the interrupted
line of inheritance, but on this the sources are, alas, We
point scanty.28
must content ourselves with the observation that there exists a Euro
in which, certain women under certain con
pean society traditionally,
ditions renounce the female role, and dress, arm, and them
comport
selves as men; and further, that a certain proportion of them do so
because they are brotherless and hence constrained to function as
sons in the central matters of the patrilineage: feud and inheritance.

ICELANDIC LAW! BAUGATAL

The earliest
Icelandic legal codex, Gr?g?s, contains two schedules of
compensation for slayings: Baugatal and V?gsl?Oi. Baugatal, probably
the older of the two, divides the kindred into four tiers depending on
their relationship to the slain person. The first tier is of the
composed
near kinsmen of the slain person (father, son, brother, etc.) who are

26Durham, Some Tribal Origins, p. 74; Whitaker, "\A Sack for Carrying Things,'"
p. 151.
27 Some Tribal Origins, p. 195.
Durham,
28Whitaker, ("'A Sack for Carrying Things,'" p. 151?52) argues that the oath of
was understood to be permanently (it was performed in the church),
virginity binding
though he mentions cases in which it was broken.
 46 Clover

required to pay (if they are the defendants) or collect (if they are the
plaintiffs) the main "ring" or lion's share of the wergild. Then comes
the next tier made up of less immediately related kinsmen with a
lesser share of the wergild, and so on. The extensive list, which ex
plores all possible permutations of payers and receivers, consists ex
clusively of men, with one exception:
S? er ok kona ein er ba??i skal baugi b ta ok taka efhon er einberni.
baug
En s? kona heitir En hon er d?ttir ins dau?a, enda s?
baugrygr. eigi
skap{)iggjandi til hofu?baugs en bcetendr lift, J)? skal hon taka J)rimerking
sem sonr, ef hon t?k at til pess er hon er
eigi full saetti v?gsb?tum gipt; enda
skulu fraendr taka. N? er hon d?ttir en er
?lengr veganda, engi skapbce
tendi til bcetendi til hofu?baugs, en vi?takendr s? til, \)? skal hon b ta
sem sonr til pess er hon k0mr ? vers hv?lu; en
primerkingi p? kastar hon
gjoldum ?kn? fraendum.29
(There is also one woman who is both to pay and to take a
wergild ring,
that she is an woman
given only child, and that is called
"ring lady." She who
takes is the of the dead man if no proper receiver of the main
daughter
ring otherwise exists but atonement payers are alive, and she takes the
three-mark
ring like a son, that she has not full settlement
given accepted
in for the and this until
she is married, but thereafter
compensation killing,
kinsmen take it. She who is the
pays of the killer if no proper
daughter
of the main
payer ring otherwise exists but receivers do, and then she is
to pay the three-mark like a son, and this until she enters a husband's bed
ring
and tosses the outlay into her kinsmen's
thereby lap.) Translation from
Laws Iceland: tr. Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, Richard
of Early Gr?g?s,
Perkins Univ. of Manitoba Press, italics.
(Winnipeg: 1980), p. 181; my

Not only is the daughter of a sonless, brotherless, and fatherless man

expected to fill the genealogical breach, but also she is expressly said
to do so as a son and even?since the clause specifically applies only to
the unmarried?as a "maiden." That the is of some
practice antiquity
in Scandinavia is suggested by the presence of similar statutes in the
early laws.30
Norwegian
Nowhere in Gr?g?s are the rules of bloodfeud out. In Ice
spelled
land, as elsewhere, these to the unwritten law. But insofar as a
belong
wergild list ranks an individual's kinsmen according to their degree of

29
Gr?g?s: Isl ndernes lovbog i fristatens tid, ed. Vilhj?lmur Finsen (Copenhagen:
Berling, 1852; rpt. Odense: Odense
Universitetsforlag, 1974), Vol. 1, pp. 200?01 (nor
malization and italics mine).
30 Law: "N? ver?r kona baugrygr,
Gulaping ver?r hon bae?i arfa o?als ok aura ok ?
engi ma?r undan henni at leysa . . . (32er eru baugrygjar tvaer d?ttir ok systir, |)aer skulu
baugum bceta ok sv? taka sem karlmenn, ok sv? eigu pxr boo ? jor?um jafnt sem
karlar. . . ." Law "N? er maer ein er baugrygr er kalla?r; hon skal bae?i
Frostaping
baugum bceta ok sv? taka, ef hon er einberni ok til arfs komin, \>3lt til
er hon setzk ?
br?Ost?l, \)? kastar hon gj?ldum aptr ?kn? fraendum, ok skal hon hv?rki s?Oan baugum
bceta n? taka. . . ." Text from Norges garnie love indtil 1387, ed. R. Keyser and P. A.
Munch (Oslo: C. Gr?ndahl, 1846), Vol. 1, pp. 92 and 184 respectively.
 Maiden Warriors and Other Sons 47

relatedness to the slain it may also be assumed to reflect, at

person,
least roughly, not only the schedule of inheritance but also the sched
ule of feud itself?the order, that is, in which the survivors are
obliged to take retaliatory action. If this is so, then the very law?or at
least one part of the law at one time?may be said to contemplate a
situation in which, in the absence of proper male heirs, a woman be
comes a surrogate son not only in the transaction of wergild, but also
in the matter of inheritance and also in the prosecution of feud.
Let me propose a hypothetical situation on the basis of Baugatal and
other parts of Gr?g?s, filling it out with familiars from the Icelandic
sagas. A man is killed in bloodfeud and leaves a daughter, whom we
will call V?gf?s, as sole heir (as outlined in Baugatal). Let us say that
V?gf?s accepts wergild for her slain father but later, because of some
further insult, ignores the settlement and seeks blood revenge.31 She
first tries to incite kinsmen to act on her behalf, but (as in Eyrbyggja
saga) they refuse to accept responsibility. Disgusted, she arms herself
and rides off with the intention of her own revenge; but she is
taking
foiled by a blizzard and returns home. She calms down, and there the
matter rests. In the meantime, as a woman of means?for she is now

the possessor of her father's patrimony and also his wergild?V?gf?s

has become an attractive marital candidate. In the absence of male

relatives who would her she makes her

ordinarily arrange marriage,
known to her kinsmen?who, under the circum
opinion remaining
stances, are inclined to defer to her wishes. For her part, she is aware
that to marry would mean that her father's wergild would become
forfeit to her kinsmen and his patrimony to a husband's con
subject
trol. Her property, that which makes her sought after, also makes her
which
choosy and even reluctant. She does finally marry, however?at
her special status ceases and she becomes, in the eye of the law
point
and the of the a woman like other women.32
eye public,
In this situation are found all the major themes of the maiden war
as heir; her pursuit
rior (and maiden king) tales: brotherless daughter

31 to serve as plain
saga (Ch. 38), women
to Eyrbyggja once had the
According right
tiffs in court cases, but as the result of a botched ca. 992, they (and males
performance
under sixteen) were thenceforth debarred in that capacity.
32 is more male
The idea that the virgin than female?the idea, that is, that inter
course constructs the female?has a certain As Saint Jerome put it,
patristic authority.
mulier servit et liberis, hanc habet ad virum differentiam, quam cor
"Quamdiu partui
Sin autem Christo magis voluerit servir? quam saeculo, mulier esse
pus ad animam.
cessabit, et dicetur vir" ("As long as woman is for birth and children, she is different
from man as body is from soul. But if she wishes to serve Christ more than the world,
then she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man"). As cited in Vern L. Bullough,
"Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women," Marriage in theMiddle Ages, ed. John
Leyerle, Viator, 4 (1974), 499; see also pp. 497?501.
48 Clover

of combat, in connection with revenge; her reluctance or

especially
refusal to marry (=maiden and her "disappearance" as a char
king);
acter once she does marry. Just when and where and how effectively
Baugatal, with its "daughter clause," obtained in Iceland we do not
know. Even when and where it did obtain, it cannot have affected very
many women, and it may not have affected them in just the ways I
have proposed here (it may be, for example, that I have underesti
mated the influence of the woman's remaining kinsmen over her
property and her marriage). But if the V?gf?s situation is even
roughly valid as a collective description of women who did serve or
might potentially serve as functional sons under the it
law, provides an
actual societal context for one conspicuous subtype of the shield
maiden
complex.

CONCLUSION

It is not without reason that the maiden warrior stories have been
classified as fantasy. They are for the most part found in "fictional"
sources; bear, in their of and
they patterned representation persons
events, the stigmata of folklore; and they are exaggerated to a greater
or lesser however, the "son" status of
degree. Baugatal, guarantees
certain women under the law, and
this piece of evidence, taken to
gether with the analogous examples from Albania, leads us to the
conclusion that while the tales may not be true as told, they are not
purely fictional, either. They are best understood as
imaginative
adumbrations of a social reality in which certain women, under cer
tain circumstances, became men for In other words:
legal purposes.
the maiden warrior tales spring from a feud society, like the Albanian
one, in which a brotherless daughter was constrained to function, in
the matters of the as a son.
patrilineage, surrogate
Whether such daughters also became masculine in dress and behav
ior is another question. It seems on the one hand inevitable that the
processes of legend would sooner or later conscript the woman who
was, like Hervor, genealogically sandwiched between heroic forebears
and heroic progeny: a female surrogate in the patrilineage would be
remembered as acting out the role, whether she actually did or not. On
the other hand, the lesson of the Albanian example is that the legal
role can be acted out on the social level?or perhaps that the legal role
implies the social role and is indistinguishable from it. Could this not
also have been the case in Iceland? The woman contemplated in the
woman who transacts and who,
Baugatal passage?the wergild by
 Maiden Warriors and Other Sons 49

extension, stands as heir and bloodfeud?is, after all, a

prosecutes
woman operating firmly within the male sphere. She may not be the
amazon of legend, but neither is she Helga the Fair. She is a woman,
as Hervor put it so neatly, between worlds. It is finally not so much her
as her "betweenness" that had such a grip on the popular
masculinity
imagination.
It should be noted that the surrogate son, the woman I have argued
is the historical prototype of the maiden warrior, does not herself
choose the male role, but is, by custom and circumstance, chosen for

it. This essay began with a discussion of the fantastic quality of the
maiden warrior tales, so it is fitting to close it by suggesting that the
real fantasy here is the dream of female autonomy. In the end these
tales tell us less about daughters than they do about sons, and less
about female volition than about the power, in Norse society, of the
to bend legend and life to its intention.
patrilineal principle