22 – Gender

Judy Quinn

an investigation into gender in the social context of PRCN necessarily relies to a large extent on traces of supplanted traditions preserved in texts of later centuries. These textual traces suggest that one of the most radical changes brought about by the conversion to Christianity across scandinavia, as an exclusively male priesthood was progressively established by the church, was the consequent disempowerment of women in the public sphere of religious and social activity and the redefinition of male roles in line with Christian ideology. The traces relating to females include lexical evidence (such as the term hofgyðja, meaning ‘temple-priestess’),1 information about legal changes (such as prohibitions against women officiating in religious ceremonies or participating in certain secular entertainments such as the exchanging of erotic verses), saga descriptions of women performing prophecy and magic as well as ‘preaching’

the old religion, and gendered patterns within mythological sources associating female figures with particular kinds of knowledge (è29).

The overview of gender offered in this chapter will concentrate on the information that has been preserved in textual sources about what the feminine seemed to signify in pre-Christian mythology as well as what evidence survives that reveals something of the role played by women in PCRN. Much of the rest 1 The term hofgyðja is used as a soubriquet for the pre-Christian icelander Þuriðr hofgyðja, in *Landnámabók * ch. 321; it is also used to describe a powerful female combatant in the M text of Örvar-Odds saga ch. 180. see further the citations sub verbum in Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (aldís sigurðardóttir and others) for hofgyðja and gyðja and Ólafur Briem (1945: 47–50).

Judy Quinn, Reader in old Norse literature, University of Cambridge The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures, Volume ii, ed. by Jens Peter schjødt, John lindow, and anders andrén, PCRN-HS 2 (Turn hout: Brepols, 2020) pp. 509–527

BREPols

PUBlisHERs

10.1484/M.PCRN-EB.5.116949

510

• Judy Quinn*

of this volume is devoted to describing the elite warrior culture of Viking age scandinavia, about which our sources are both abundant and loquacious. Being the culture of a male elite necessarily means, however, that it is a culture that would not have necessarily equated directly with the beliefs and mores of the rest of the population, the 80 per cent or so accounted for by women and non-elite males.2 Even though we know less about the religious views and practices of the rest of the population, it is salutary to keep the frame of investigation wide enough to acknowledge how partial our view is, and the degree to which extant sources, and the scholarship that has developed around them, present an

‘unquestioningly androcentric view’ of the pre-Christian period, as Neil Price has recently described it (2015: 2).

in mythological, legendary, and historical texts from medieval scandinavia, there is a rich vein of material that suggests that both females and males in the pre-Christian period were able to assume, at least temporarily, appearances and practices identified with the other gender. Perspectives offered by recent theoretical work on third-gender and transgender identities have not been engaged with in the brief treatment of gender offered here, though there is no doubt that medieval scandinavian material offers considerable potential in this regard. one intriguing example is the hermaphroditic capacity of loki’s body, which was capable of fathering a wolf, serpent, and Hel (the goddess of death) with a giantess but which can also provide a womb fertilized by a stallion to produce a remarkable eight-legged foal. The semantic pairing, freyja and freyr, is also of interest in this regard since the siblings are the product of incest, a pattern that might suggest an understanding that inherited traits (or at least Vanir traits) could be concentrated in offspring of either gender and potentially transmitted by them (è40). it is striking as well that, over time, the fertility deity Nerthus (feminine) appears to have changed gender to Njǫrðr (masculine) (see è47) and that in addition to the gendered pairing of deities — æsir and ásynjur — several terms for gods are grammatically neuter, suggesting they are collective terms representing both female and male members. furthermore these terms — bǫnd, hǫpt, regin, and goð — are often used, especially in poetry, to refer to the divine forces that cause things to happen in the world of humans, suggesting that the veneration of deities is unlikely to have been limited solely to male gods, despite the pattern of placename evidence suggesting that most cult places were associated with them (see è5). and the earth itself seems to have been understood simultaneously as the dismembered body of the male giant ymir and the intact body of the female giant Jǫrð.

2 for a study of women in the Viking age more generally, see Jesch (1991).

22 – Gender

511

*Traces of the Past Gleaned from Accounts of the Conversion *

While the central role played by males in Christian institutions meant that opportunities would have opened up for once-pagan men to play a part in new social and cultural arenas, the conversion was not without awkwardness in regard to social expectations of what constituted manly behaviour. The evidence of later texts, in this case the law code, allows us to make inferences about preceding norms of masculinity. The medieval icelandic law code stipulated that antipathy to studying (presumably indoors, and for prolonged periods) on the part of young boys was not something for which they should be unduly punished. in setting out the responsibilities incumbent on a priest who took a boy into training, the law code stated:

Nv vill sveinn eigi nema oc leiþiz honum bok þa scal föra hann til annarra verka oc raþa honum sva til at hvartki verþi honum við illt ne við örkyml. ( Grágás 1a: 18) (if the boy will not learn and finds latin tedious, he is to be put to other work and chastised at that only in such a way that he suffers no illness or lasting injury.) (i, 34) This lack of insistence on literate education is less marked than the antipathy evidenced in an earlier germanic context, when the goths campaigned against their future regent Theodoric being given a Roman education, fearing that it would inhibit his manliness (Wormald 1977: 97–98). Behind this anxiety was presumably a normative association between masculine youth and outdoor, physical activity, but there may also have been a sense that the ideology of the new religion somehow feminized men.

Certainly charges of effeminacy seem to have been quick to the lips of those encountering Christian missionaries on campaign across the icelandic countryside, if the account of interaction, preserved as verse quotations within Kristni saga, is taken into account:

Þeir friðrekr byskup ok Þorvaldr fóru til þings, ok bað byskup Þorvald telja trú fyrir mǫnnum at lǫgbergi […]. Þá báðu þeir skáld níða þá Þorvald ok byskup. Þetta var þá kveðit:

Hefr bǫrn borit

byskup níu

þeira er allra

Þorvaldr faþir.

fyrir níð þat vá Þorvaldr tvá men. ( Kristni saga ch. 12)

512

• Judy Quinn*

(Bishop freiðrekr and Þorvaldr went to the assembly, and the bishop asked Þorvaldr to preach the faith to the people at the law-Rock […]. Then they [opponents to the conversion] asked poets to libel Þorvaldr and the bishop. This verse was uttered: The bishop has

borne nine children;

Þorvaldr’s father

of them all.

Because of the libel, Þorvaldr killed two men.) (pp. 37–38)

Kristni saga mentions a number of other poets who composed libellous verses against the missionaries, including Vetrliði and Þorvaldr veili, the latter referring to the missionary as ‘argr guðs vargr’ ( Kristni saga ch. 20) (unmanly wolf of god), the adjective argr or ragr characteristic of the pre-Christian tradition of accusations of effeminacy ( níð) against political or personal enemies (Meulengracht sørensen 1983; è21 on níð).3 While accusations of níð deployed against missionaries were probably just part of the armoury available to be used against any political opponent, it is tempting to speculate that the figure of the Christian missionary, in habit and the espousal of values, did not always accord with prevailing expectations of masculine behaviour in the public sphere.

Resistance to Christian ways was by no means confined to males, however, as the following account from Kristni saga reveals:

Þeir Þorvaldr ok byskup fóru í Vestfirðingafjórðung at boða trú. Þeir kómu í Hvamm um alþingi til Þórarins fylsennis, ok var hann þá á þingi, en friðgerðr kona hans var heima ok son þeira skeggi. Þorvaldr talaði þar trú fyrir mǫnnum, en friðgerðr var meðan í hofinu ok blótaði ok heyrði hvárt þeira orð annars; enn sveininn skeggi hló at þeim. Þá kvað Þorvaldr þetta:

fór ek með dóm inn dýra,

drengr hlýddi mér engi;

gátum háð at hreyti

hlautteins, goða sveini.

En við enga svinnu

aldin rýgr við skaldi,

þá kreppi guð gyþju,

gall of heiðnum stalla. ( Kristni saga 9–10)

3 The term vargr is elsewhere used of someone who is outlawed for committing murder: vargr í véum (‘wolf in the sanctuaries’, Vǫlsunga saga ch. 110 and Egils saga ch. 125). see also sub verbum in Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (aldís sigurðardóttir *et al. *) and Ney (2012).

22 – Gender

513

(They came to Hvammr during the althing, to the home of Þórarinn fylsenni, and he was then at the assembly, but his wife friðgerðr was at home with their son skeggi. Þorvaldr preached the faith to people there, but meanwhile friðgerðr was in the temple and sacrificed and each of them heard the other’s words, and the boy skeggi laughed at them. Then Þorvaldr uttered this verse:

i preached the precious faith,

no man paid heed to me;

we got scorn from the sprinkler

— priest’s son — of blood-dipped branch.

and without any sense,

old troll-wife against poet

— may god crush the priestess —

shrilled at the heathen altar.) (p. 36)

as siân grønlie notes, confrontations between Christian missionaries and pagan females seem likely to reflect the historical role women played in home-based cults during the pagan period (grønlie 2006b; grønlie 2006a: 60; steinsland 1988). Vápnfirðinga saga (ch. 5) preserves an account of a hofgyðja (temple-priestess) named steinvǫr who controlled the main temple and collected a temple-toll from all the local farmers; she came into conflict with a Christian named Þorleifr who refused to pay his taxes.

The wording of this report in Kristni saga indicates that when sacrifices were performed, they were accompanied by the recitation of ritual words, here performed by a woman. The apostrophe in Þorvaldr’s verse (‘priest’s son’) is telling, the conventional apostrophe of self-memorializing skaldic verses being a woman, whose estimation of reputation was intrinsic to an adventuring warrior’s fame (see frank 1990). With the shift to Christian culture, women were not only excluded from officiating at religious rituals but also pushed to the margins of the community which transmitted significant cultural information.

Their relegation is highlighted by the stipulation in the icelandic law code that the rite of baptism must be performed by a priest, or failing that a male who knows the rite, or failing that by a male who is instructed in the wording by a woman, or, in the very last resort, a woman herself:

Rett er at kona keni honom at skíra barn en eigi scolo konor skíra barn nema engi kostr se anar a. ( Grágás 2,5)

(it is permitted for a woman to teach a man to baptize a child but women themselves should not baptize children unless there is no other option.) While the church had the power to legislate about its official rituals, it seems that women continued nonetheless to be bearers of cultural history, judg-

514

• Judy Quinn*

ing by an aside in Íslendingabók, a history of the church in iceland commissioned by the bishops in the early twelfth century. Íslendingabók’s author, ari Þorgilsson, singles out a woman as being a particularly significant informant for his account: ‘Þóriðr snorradóttir goða es bæði vas margspǫk ok ólúgfróð’

( Íslendingabók ch. 4) (Þóríðr, daughter of snorri goði, who is both wise in many things and unmendaciously learned). The association of the guardianship of knowledge and beliefs from the heathen past with women is reinforced in the preface to Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar written in the late twelfth century by the monk oddr snorrason. While urging the telling of sagas about Christian kings to praise their works and glorify god, he discredits other stories then in circulation which were at odds with his Christian point of view:

ok betra er slict með gamni at heyra en stivp meðra saugvr, er hiarðar sveinar segia, er enge veit hvart satt er. er iafnan lata konungin minztan isinvm frasognum. ( Saga Óláfs Tryggvasonar in meiri ch. 4)

(and it is better to listen to these stories with delight than to stepmother sagas which shepherds tell, in which no-one knows what is true and which always place the king in a lesser position in their narratives.)

The two groups of people associated with transmitting this kind of narrative and perpetuating an unauthorized view of history, stepmothers and shepherds, are representatives of those sections of icelandic society which would have had least contact with literate Christian culture once the church had established itself in iceland. Women’s role as tradition bearers might also be behind another revealing aside in a late thirteenth-century manuscript, 2367 4to (known as the Poetic Edda): ‘Þat var trúa í fornescio, at menn væri endrbornir, enn þat er nú kǫlluð kerlingavilla’ (prose epilogue to Helgakviða Hundingsbana ii) (that was the belief in ancient times, that people were reincarnated, but that is nowadays thought of as old women’s nonsense), the compiler of the Poetic Edda says.4

in Kristni saga’s account of the political tussle that preceded the official adoption of Christianity on the island, the opponent who takes on another missionary, Þangbrandr, in a debate about the potency of their respective gods is also a woman. That woman is identified by the saga narrator as steinunn, mother of the poet Refr, who is elsewhere known as Hofgarða-Refr; his byname means ‘of the temple courts’, indicating the family’s deep religious affilia-tions. steinunn composed two stanzas which celebrated the willful destruction of the missionary’s ship by the god Þórr.

4 Translations of the Poetic Edda are my own.

22 – Gender

515

Þórr brá Þvinnils dýri

Þangbrands ór stað lǫngu,

hristi blakk ok beysti

brands ok laust við sandi.

Muna skíð á sjá síðan

sundfœrt atals grundar,

hregg því at hart nam leggja,

hǫnum kennt, í spǫ́nu.

Braut fyrir bjǫllu gæti

bǫnd meiddu val strandar,

mǫgfellandi mellu

mástalls vísund allan.

Hlífði ei Kristr þá er kneyfði

kólgu hrafn með stǫfnum,

lítt hygg ek at guð gætti

gylfa hreins it einu. ( *Kristni saga * 24)

(Þórr drew Þvinnill’s animal,

Þangbrandr’s long ship, from land,

shook the prow’s horse and hit it,

and hurled it against the sand.

on sea the ski of atall’s land

will not swim henceforth,

for a harsh tempest sent by him

has hewn it into splinters.

Before the bell’s keeper (bonds

destroyed the beach’s falcon)

the slayer of giantess-son

broke the ox of seagull’s place.

Christ was not watching, when

the wave-raven drank at the prows.

small guard i think god held

— if any — over gylfi’s reindeer.) (pp. 43–44)

These verses seem to have become a staple of the received textual account of the conversion, quoted in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta as well as in Njáls saga (though in the opposite order). The account in Njáls saga provides some background to the recitation of the verses, with steinunn seeking out the missionary during his mission to the western districts of iceland:

516

• Judy Quinn*

steinunn kom í mót honum, móðir skáld-Refs; hon boðaði Þangbrandi heiðni ok talði lengi fyir honum. ( Njáls saga ch. 265)

(steinunn, mother of Poet-Ref, came to see him. she tried to convert him to paganism and lectured him for a long time.)

While the staging of the encounter between a proselytzing pagan and a zealous missionary is staged differently across accounts, in Njáls saga ch. 101, steinunn has the last word. after contending that Þórr had challenged Christ to a duel in which the latter did not dare engage, she asked Þangbrandr if he knew who wrecked his ship — a rhetorical question to which her verses provide the tri-umphant answer ( Njáls saga ch. 265). other verses which call upon the god Þórr to repulse missionary incursions are recorded, and these may belong to a genre of hymns to the god that treat missionaries as akin to his usual giantess opponents, a parallel that underlines the association between men of god and a dangerous kind of femininity (lindow 1988a: 130–32).

There is yet more evidence from medieval texts of women in the pre-Christian scandinavian past officiating in pagan rituals. in a travelogue by the Norwegian poet sigvatr Þórðarson, the poet describes being barred from a house in the heathen hinterland by a woman who was conducting a sacrifice to elves: gakkat inn,’ kvað ekkja,

‘armi drengr, en lengra;

hræðumk ek við Óðins

— erum heiðin vér — reiði.’

Rýgr kvazk inni eiga

óþekk, sús mér hnekkði,

alfablót, sem ulfi

ótvín, í bœ sínum.

(‘Do not come any farther in, wretched fellow’, said the woman; ‘i fear the wrath of Óðinn; we are heathen.’ The disagreeable female, who drove me away like a wolf without hesitation, said they were holding a sacrifice to the elves inside her farm-house.)

sigvatr’s Austfararvísur (Verses about Easterly Journeys) were composed not long after the conversion. This verse is unusual in quoting the direct speech of someone the poet encounters on his travels. Whether this reveals the authenticity of the report or the poet’s artful technique is, of course, difficult to judge, but sigvatr’s depiction of a pagan woman conducting a sacrifice adds to the body of evidence that, in the pre-Christian period, women as well as men were involved in religious rituals. archaeological evidence of pre-Christian sites in

22 – Gender

517

figure 22.1. Reconstruction

of a possible vǫlva grave at

fyrkat (grave 4) in northern

Jylland. illustration: Þórhallur

Þráinsson in Price 2002: 153.

518

• Judy Quinn*

scandinavia where sacrifices were conducted is abundant, although such material remains may not necessarily preserve evidence of the gender of the agent or agents of sacrifice (but see sundqvist 2007: 56–78; è25 è31). Even if the tools of sacrifice might have been among the grave goods of someone who had performed ritual sacrifices during their lifetime, the gender of the owner might not necessarily have been correctly identified. as Price notes (2015: 7), grave-goods ‘have in the past been interpreted with consistent bias’ with regard to identifying the gender of the buried person, and this may have polarized (and narrowed) the picture we have of gender in the pre-Christian period.

This bias, Price argues (2015: 5), is also apparent in the identification of recent finds such as the seated figure from lejre ( figure è51.2); the dress and jewellery of the figure are characteristically those of a female and yet, despite that, the figure has been identified as Óðinn (Christensen 2009; see also Mitchell forthcoming). identifying the gender (and indeed purpose) of unearthed figurines from the pre-Christian period is difficult due to the lack of legible context, with our interpretation depending, in this case, on a particularly confusing mix of signs: a seat (or throne?) with stylized animal heads looping from the back of the chair to the chair’s arms, symmetrically perched birds on the sides of the chair, a cloak arranged to reveal ostentatious necklaces bedecking a seated, goggle-eyed figure in a dress, the figure’s mouth obscured by what may be a fold in the cloak or a headdress. in the catalogue for the 2014

Vikings exhibition (shown in Copenhagen, london, and Berlin), a magnified image of the tiny figure — it is less than 2 cm in any dimension — is accompanied by the caption ‘odin or völva figure, 800–1050’, and it is juxtaposed with an image of ornamented metal rods on the facing page with the caption

‘objects of this type have been interpreted as staffs used by Viking sorceresses’

(Williams and others 2014: 174–75, figs 14 and 15). The captions, presumably authored by Price who wrote this section of the catalogue, ‘Belief and Ritual’, accord with his interpretation of such grave finds as implements used in the practice of sorcery (Price 2002).

if such objects do indicate that these are the graves of practitioners of sorcery, it is not surprising that the vernacular term for those described in textual sources as prophesying the future through sorcery of one kind or another should have become attached to those buried in them. The vǫlva (pl. vǫlur) is a particularly interesting figure for our purposes because she is mentioned in accounts of the mythological as well as the (human) social world. Perhaps the best-known and most colourful account of a vǫlva in the social world is from Eiríks saga rauða, where an itinerant woman — described as a spákona (prophecy-woman) and named litil-vǫlva (little vǫlva) — is invited to a farm-

22 – Gender

519

stead in greenland to tell the fortunes of people from the district and to predict the annual harvest. she is said to perform her prophecy after eating a special meal of kid’s milk and animal hearts; she sat on a high seat furnished with a feather cushion and had various accoutrements related to her art, including an ornamented staff and a belt-purse containing charms. in addition, she needed women of the household to chant particular songs to enable the prophecy to be performed ( Eiríks saga rauða ch. 4) (è30). other descriptions of human vǫlur are found across a range of sagas — there is a survey in McKinnell (2005: 95–108) — with a pronounced fascination for the figure in the fornaldarsögur (Quinn 1998).

Vǫlur are also mentioned in kings’ sagas, and in the pre-Christian period they seem to have circulated at all levels of society, including within the households of political leaders. The association of women with prescience appears to have run deep in germanic culture, Tacitus describing it in his Germania and Histories relating the case of a particular woman, Veleda, who was accorded significant authority on account of her prophecies in negotiations between local leaders and Roman officials in the Rhineland in the first century ce. There may well be grounds for perceiving continuity between this early cultural association and later archaeological finds. The discovery of a staff in the high-status grave of a female from the late tenth century at fyrkat in Denmark has led to speculation that the buried woman might have been King Haraldr blátǫnn’s

‘court prophetess’ (Pentz and others 2009: 232; see also è26). Whether or not she had such a patron, her grave goods present a complex range of attributes: in addition to her staff, she was buried with exotic jewellery, a large number of hallucinogenic seeds, a copper cup and cooking spit, a box containing white lead, and a glass phial containing a compound of phosphorus, lead, and calcium. There is also a staff among the grave goods in the oseberg ship burial, possibly indicating that one of the women buried with it was also a vǫlva (ingstad 1993; gansum 2002). Christian prohibitions against heathen rituals specify a number of different practices, including galdrar (chants), gørningar (magic), and fjǫlkyngi (sorcery) ( Grágas ia 22),5 that even by the twelfth century had not been entirely suppressed according to the saga relating the life of Bishop Jón Ögmundsson (1052–1121) ( Jóns saga ins helga ch. 209; see also è21 and è20).6

5 see Mitchell (2011) for a detailed account of magic in this period. also (è26).

6 Dillmann (2006) provides a detailed survey of the evidence for sorcery and the social status of its practitioners.

520

• Judy Quinn*

There is one particular traditional practice involving both women and men that drew the ire of the bishop in the early twelfth century:

leikr sá var mǫnnum tíðr er ófagrligr er, at kveðask skyldu at, karlmaðr at konu, en kona at karlmanni, klækiligar vísur ok hæðiligar, ok óáheyriligar, en þat lét hann af takast ok bannaði með ǫllu at gera. ( Jóns saga ins helga 211) (There was a disagreeable entertainment at the time in which a man would address a woman, and a woman a man, reciting disgraceful verses which were unlistenable to, and [Bishop Jón] forbad them and had them banned.)

since no record exists of the words that were recited, it is not possible to know the content of the verses; presumably the offence to pious ears arose from the lewdness of the verses, which in itself might indicate something of the gulf between pre-Christian attitudes to sex and those dictated by the church. While such attitudes might not necessarily be regarded as religious, they nonetheless suggest a more playful and sanguine social response to sexual relations between females and males than prevailed after the conversion as well as the inclusion of both sexes in public entertainments.

The textual traces that have been surveyed above indicate in a necessarily speculative way — given the way the material surfaces mainly in the context of prohibition and denunciation — that women almost certainly played a more central role in religious practices before the conversion than they were permitted to play after it. Price has taken this speculation further, suggesting that ‘it seems that women may have in fact played *the * leading role in magical and cultic communications between Viking-age people and the invisible population of spirits and other beings with whom they believed they shared the world’ (2015: 5; see also Jochens 1996: 130–31; Näsström 2002a; Moen 2012). This conclusion chimes with simek’s observations regarding daily life in Roman iron age germanic areas, where it appears from the evidence of widespread veneration of matrones (è57) that belief in female deities was much more significant than that of male deities.

in the following section, where the focus will be on textual sources preserving ancient scandinavian mythology, it becomes apparent that female figures also played a significant role in the conceptualization of fate and aspects of the transition into and out of the state of being alive, in addition to bearing knowledge about the deep past and the distant future, even beyond the deaths of some of the main gods of the scandinavian pantheon, such as Óðinn and Þórr.

22 – Gender

521

*Traces of the Past in Mythological Texts *

Just as farmers and chieftains of the pre-Christian period appear to have sought out a human vǫlva to find out what the future held in store for them, so too the god Óðinn relied on the prophecies of vǫlur in order to find out his and others’

fates at Ragnarǫk, judging by the evidence of orally transmitted poetry with its roots in the pagan period. Vǫluspá presents the visions of a vǫlva recited at the insistence of Óðinn. The vǫlva of Vǫluspá has knowledge of the very distant past and of the creation of the world and people; according to the knowledgeable giantess of Hyndluljóð (an eddic poem preserved in the saga manuscript Flateyjarbók, gks 1005 fol.), few can see further into the future than Ragnarǫk, although the vǫlva of Vǫluspá can, and she describes in some detail the next cycle of the world’s re-emergence in the distant future.7 The vǫlva of Baldrs draumar is described as being roused from her grave by Óðinn, who seeks information from her about happenings in the world of the dead (where the arrival of Óðinn’s son Baldr is being eagerly anticipated) and the entail-ments of his death in the world of the living (where the strategy for avenging his death is forecast by the vǫlva).

as they are depicted in eddic poetry, vǫlur are both dead and revivable, their knowledge able to be extracted after the vǫlva is drawn into conversation either through necromancy (in the case of Baldrs draumar) or through bribery (in the case of Vǫluspá). That a vǫlva can be made biddable by the offer of jewellery — Vǫluspá st. 9 depicts Óðinn cajoling her into continued prophesying by offering her rings and necklaces — reinforces the sense that she enjoys a kind of life while dead, her well-appointed grave a locus of wealth as well as the seat of coveted knowledge. To some extent then, the figure of the vǫlva dissolves the distinction between the living and the dead and transcends mortality. While the detailed narrative accounts she provides represent a different kind of recollection from the quiz-answer repertoire of giants (judging from the wisdom contest presented in Vafþrúðnismál), the vǫlva appears to have gained her extensive knowledge from experience in different worlds: from Ásgarðr (she knows Óðinn’s secret, of having forfeited one of his eyes for a drink from a sacred well, Vǫluspá st. 28), from the world of the dead and from the world of the giants. although she is not identified as a giantess herself, the vǫlva of Vǫluspá explains that she was raised among giants long ago ( Vǫluspá st. 2).

over recent decades, much of the analysis of old Norse mythology has been based on the binary divisions favoured by structuralism (see especially Clunies 7 a detailed analysis of the vǫlva in eddic poetry can be found in Quinn (2002).

522

• Judy Quinn*

Ross 1994a): male/female, order/chaos, culture/nature, life/death, and so forth. While such analyses have been very productive and shed a great deal of light on various aspects of the mythology, they have certain shortcomings, especially in regard to the treatment of gender. in addition to the obvious ando-centrism that underlies the polarizations listed above, there is an inherent danger in the binary model of oversimplifying rather complex, dynamic material.

female figures in the mythology who are associated with death are also closely associated with life, for instance. The vǫlva, who seems to dwell in the world of the dead, nonetheless continues to exercise the power of speech, as though she were still alive. Valkyries – those who choose the slain – also seem to have been imagined as being capable of extending a warrior’s life by protecting him in battle, as well as, in some cases, marrying him instead of escorting him to Valhǫll (è60). The recent archaeological find of a fully armed female figurine in Hårby, Denmark, from around 800 (Williams and others 2014: 165, fig. 3; figure è60), probably functioned as a good-luck charm to be carried by a warrior into battle, the valkyrie a symbol of protection for the bearer against an ill-fated attack. While the valkyrie certainly also figured as a portent of imminent death in some poetic sources, this personification of the moment of death served as a lively vehicle for thinking about death in both lucky and unlucky situations.

The polysemous signification of such a figure in our sources should therefore encourage nuanced interpretation in order to better understand the mythology. another example of the close association between death and life can be found in the prose epilogue to Helgakviða Hundingsbana ii mentioned above, where valkyries and their chosen heroes seem to be connected to the phenomenon of reincarnation, the death of each valkyrie and hero couple apparently giving life to a new pairing. and in the Hildr myth, narrated in Skáldskaparmál and in Bragi Boddason’s ninth-century poem Ragnarsdrápa, the valkyrie-like Hildr resurrects warriors at the end of each day’s fighting, albeit to encourage them to fight the next day, and risk being killed, again.

on the subject of mortality, it is significant that across the mythology more broadly there is a cluster of female figures who are associated with delaying old age, temporarily avoiding death, with the magical healing of mortal wounds, as well as with resurrection and reincarnation — all of these powerful interventions in the time-bound cycle of life. Norns are present at the moment of birth to determine the course, and length, of people’s lives: setting each life in time (è59). Valkyries appear towards the end of a warrior’s life to judge the moment when he will die. Magic-workers, such as oddrún in the eddic poem Oddrúnargrátr (herself connected to the identity of a valkyrie through her sister Brynhildr, according to stanza 16 of the poem) know how to enable birth when

22 – Gender

523

maternal labour seems doomed; and runes to effect the same thing are taught by the valkyrie sigrdrífa in Sigrdrífumál (st. 9). Until she is distracted, the magic-worker gróa is able to chant spells that could dislodge a whetstone from Þórr’s skull ( Skáldskaparmál), a potentially life-saving, or at least life-enhancing, skill.

Vǫlur, as just mentioned, have minds and voices that appear not to die and therefore in some way transcend the barrier of mortality, and of life as a fixed temporal interval. and a female figure called gullveig (described in Vǫluspá st.

21) was speared and burnt by the Æsir, but despite repeated attempts to kill her she remained alive: ‘þrysvar brendo, þrysvar borna, opt, ósialdan, þó hon enn lifir’ (three times they burnt her, three times she was reborn, often, unseldom, though she still lives).

The goddess Hel presided over the world of the dead, a realm that is also associated with the goddess freyja. according to Grímnismál (st. 14), freyja and Óðinn share half of those killed in battle each day: ‘hálfan val hon kýss hverian dag, enn hálfan Óðinn á’ (half of the slain she chooses every day, while Óðinn has the other half ). While death is often gendered feminine in old Norse sources, it is portrayed as a complex, even volatile force, those animate beings representing it sometimes open to negotiation about when and if death will occur (Quinn 2006). in Ynglinga saga, freyja is said to live the longest of all the gods (ch. 10): ‘hon ein lifði þá eptir goðanna’ (she alone lived after the

[deaths] of the [other] gods). in addition, the goddess iðunn has the power to keep the gods youthful. iðunn’s power does not enable her to make the gods immortal — as is sometimes said — since Óðinn, Þórr, and freyr will all certainly die at Ragnarǫk; but second-generation gods survive into the renewed world, along with the resurrected Baldr. and in the interim, the gods stay young. in the skaldic poem Haustlǫng st. 9, iðunn is described as the ‘mey […]

þás ellilyf ása […] kunnni’ (girl who knew the old-age medicine of the gods) (p. 444). interestingly, Haustlǫng does not mention the apples on which the myth about iðunn told in Skáldskaparmál hinges, but even in the telling of the myth there, the power of rejuvenation appears to inhere in the person of iðunn rather than in her apples; indeed the etymology of her name may suggest rejuvenation (‘ever young’) (see de Vries 1962a: 283). When she is rescued from giants’ territory, she is turned, with or without her apples, into a nut — a symbol of future life — and it is her return which arrests the ageing process of the gods.

one of the most striking distinctions between male and female patterns of behaviour in old Norse mythology is the relationship of beings to time.

specifically, the knowledge of female beings appears to be, in some cases, less time-bound than the knowledge of male figures. The span of time that the

524

• Judy Quinn*

mythological female mind embodies is underlined by the names of the norns in Vǫluspá st. 20, Urðr, Verðandi, and skuld, which many scholars have noted seem to refer to what has happened, what is becoming, and what will happen (see however è59). Óðinn, on the masculine side, is, by contrast, very good at covering current affairs and seeking intelligence about the future: he invests resources into sourcing stories — through his roving reporters, the ravens whom he had trained to speak (according to Ynglinga saga) — and new technologies

— a disembodied answer-machine made by embalming the head of Mímir, for instance, which according to Ynglinga saga provided him with information from other Worlds (‘ok sagði þat honum mǫrg tíðendi ór ǫðrum heimum’) as well as about unspecified hidden things (‘ok sagði honum marga leynda hluti’).

according to * Sigrdrífumál* (st. 14), Mímr’s head spoke the first word, the true staves, in some primordial wisdom exchange (Heslop 2014; see also è42).

Two of the ásynjur, frigg and gefjun, are described by their peers in Lokasenna as knowing the fates of all the gods, though freyja points out that while frigg might know everything that will happen to everyone, she does not speak about it herself: ‘ørlǫg frigg hygg ec at ǫll viti, þótt hon siálfgi segi’

( Lokasenna st. 29). Prescience, then, seems to be regarded as an inherent quality of the female mind, but the disinclination to prophesy goes hand-in-hand with it in the case of the goddesses. indeed the suppression of revelations of future and past activities appears to be the modus operandi of frigg, who says in Lokasenna (st. 25):

ørlǫgum ycrom scylit aldregi

segia seggiom frá,

hvat iþ æsir tveir drýgðot í árdaga;

firriz æ forn rǫc firar. * *

(The stories of the gods’ lives – including what you’ve done long ago — should not be recounted: always avoid [revealing] ancient destinies.)

Even in the account given in the Prologue of Snorra Edda, a text which is almost entirely devoid of female figures of any kind, the association of women with prophecy is nonetheless remarked on: ‘fann hann spákonu þá er sibil hét, er vér kǫllum sif ’ (Þórr came across a prophetess called sibyl, whom we call sif )

— an equation that neatly ties old Norse mythology into the cultural patterns of the classical world. The Prologue also notes that ‘Óðinn hafði spádóm ok svá kona hans’ (Óðinn had the power of prophecy, and so did his wife, frigg), the order of precedence as one might expect from the Christian perspective of the genre. The Prologue presents a narrative so deeply influenced by Christian learning that masculine figures and masculine agency occupy pretty much the

22 – Gender

525

entire stage. While the frame stories of the other parts of the Edda are male-dominated — goddesses are present at the feast which opens the frame-story of Skáldskaparmál but they do not play a role — the myths recounted within Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál admit females and present more interaction between the genders. The liveliest source material, when it comes to interaction between genders, is eddic mythological poetry. There, in a poem like Lokasenna, we can observe how the social suppression of prophetic utterance by the ásynjur creates powerful tensions during the not entirely festive exchanges between the gods. in fact it is this unvoiced knowledge which creates traction in the relationship between the mythic present and the foreseen but only partially disclosed future over which their conversation ranges. Moreover the prescience of the ásynjur seems to be limited to the fates of the æsir, loki able to exploit a blind-spot in their knowledge when it comes to his own future actions (Quinn 2015).

one of the principal tensions in the mythology is the desirability of the ásynjur to giants and although the usual pattern is for the gods to outfox the giants in their kidnap attempts, sometimes the giants have their way: the giant fárbauti impregnates the goddess laufey to produce loki,8 a quintessential form of instability in the relationship between the two groups; and an unnamed giant impregnates gefjun, though their offspring play a more productive role, only emerging as oxen to create the island of sjælland. Týr too has a giant father, according to the eddic poem Hymiskviða, a result, it would seem, of his ásynja mother being seduced by his giant father. The giants’ desire for freyja prompts a number of mythological narratives, and when one giant throws the sun and the moon into the bargain, it must signal not just exaggerated predation but also a sense that freyja embodies powerful forces the gods must safeguard, as crucial as the heavenly bodies that determine diurnal rhythm.

it is interesting to compare the identifying attributes of some æsir and ásynjur, to try to tease out the degree to which their powers are integral to their

‘person’, for want of a better word; to look at how power of various kinds is vested in gendered bodies. While it seems iðunn’s apples might not in themselves have prevented ageing if iðunn herself were not present, other goddesses such as freyja and Rán have empowering possessions that they can lend out —

a flying coat and a net — without the absence of the object apparently diminishing them in any way.9 in this sense, they have an excess of effect; and they are 8 fárbauti is identified as a giant by snorri ( Gylfaginning 26) while laufey is counted among the ásynjur in a þula (pl. þulur) preserved in one of the manuscripts of Snorra Edda.

9 Rán’s net is mentioned in the prose preface to the eddic poem Reginsmál, while the borrowing of freyja’s flight-enabling garment forms part of the plot of *Þrymskviða. *

526

• Judy Quinn*

not, like Þórr, dependent on their marvellous possessions to fulfil their mythological role. as loki warns Þórr in Þrymskviða after the giant has stolen his hammer, the giants will move into Ásgarðr if he cannot get the hammer back from them ( Þrymskviða st. 18). a variation on this male pattern of dependence on an enabling object is the case of freyr’s sword, though the sword which he trades for assistance in wooing the giantess gerðr does not diminish his effectiveness as a fertility god; it does, however, underline his inevitable defenceless-ness against the giant onslaught at Ragnarǫk. Both Þórr’s hammer and freyr’s sword clearly express a deep anxiety about phallic dismemberment. The shadow of another kind of impotence seems to hang over the god Baldr, of whom it is said in Gylfaginning that none of his decisions can be fulfilled (‘en sú náttúra fylgir honum at engi má halfask dómr hans’). and Hœnir is shown to be chron-ically dependent on Mímir for verbal advice, unable to function independently ( Ynglinga saga ch. 13). Examples of giving away possessions for advantage in the constant tussle for power over giantkind that are closer to the bone are Týr’s loss of one hand, Heimdallr’s apparently detached hearing ( Vǫluspá st. 27), and Óðinn’s trading of one of his eyes in return for a drink of wisdom from Mímir’s well. The benefit in the last case may not be quantifiable, but the gesture demonstrates the lengths to which Óðinn went to procure advantage, even sacrificing his entire body by hanging from a tree ( Hávamál st. 138).

Both these extreme experiences paradoxically enhance Óðinn’s status, his tolerance of danger marked on his body forever by the facial disfigurement of having only one eye. Óðinn’s gendered behaviour in relation to knowledge acquisition is interesting: he is a quester after knowledge of the future, a harvester of prophecies, a high-paying consumer of knowledge drinks, but his knowledge is acquired through quests rather than being innate, like that of a number of female figures in the mythology (schjødt 2008; è42). it is of course difficult, in this respect, to separate out different kinds of knowledge or wisdom across all the mentions in the sources: knowledge of the future, which is particularly associated with the feminine, might be just one of the strands of intelligence Óðinn acquires, and our view of what the ‘hidden things’ are that Mímir is able to tell Óðinn is forever occluded.

it is telling, however, how crucial freyja is to Óðinn’s development of techniques for knowledge acquisition according to the account in Ynglinga saga.

There, in Chapter 4, freyja is said to have been the first to bring seiðr among the gods and to teach it to them. Óðinn is later described as knowing and practising seiðr, an íþrótt (accomplishment), through which he can predict the fates of men and future events. The nature of seiðr, learnt by Óðinn from freyja, apparently compromised masculinity and is said to have been associated with

22 – Gender

527

perversion and shame: ‘En þessi fjǫlkynngi, er framið er, fylgir svá mikil ergi, at eigi þótti karlmǫnnum skammlaust við at fara, ok var gyðjunum kennd sú íþrótt’ ( Ynglinga saga ch. 7) (But this sorcery is attended by such wickedness that manly men considered it shameful to practice it, and so it was taught to the priestesses) (p. 11). That is no deterrent for Óðinn: his forays into effeminate behaviour do not seem to diminish his potency — though he is taunted for them by both Þórr (in Hárbarðsljóð) and loki (in Lokasenna).

The marks of effeminate behaviour on loki’s body are more transient: though he bears a foal, he seems effortlessly to resume his original form afterwards, and the offspring he produces, the eight-legged horse sleipnir, is an entirely positive addition to æsir culture. Judging divine behaviour according to social mores is ultimately an inadequate way to account for the dynamics between the genders in old Norse mythology: while accusations of effeminacy on the part of gods or promiscuity on the part of goddesses may raise a titter as scandals are played out in poetic dramas, there was, it seems, no mythological consequence.10 When loki is eventually bound, it is not because of his shameful deviancy; and in his bound state awaiting Ragnarǫk — which after all is just temporary — he reverts to a markedly normative male role, attended in his defiance by his dutiful wife sigyn.

fertility, creativity, and value are characteristics of some mythological female bodies: freyja’s tears are not a salty fluid as others’ are, but consist of gold, while the spontaneously generated cow, auðhumla, who provided nourishment for ymir at the beginning of the world, also has the capacity to lick humans into existence ( Gylfaginning). Dismembered organs and fluids from male bodies, however, are capable of being exploited in their separated state, Kvasir’s blood becoming a profitable tonic for poets, and Mímir’s head (presumably with voice-box still attached) a valuable source of spoken knowledge for Óðinn (schjødt 2008). Whether Óðinn’s plucked-out eye augments the value of the waters of the well in which it is deposited is unclear. Physical integrity therefore seems to be a characteristic of the female mythological body (even vǫlur, long dead, are apparently whole), whereas disfigurement or loss —

or more particularly, chronic fear of loss — is characteristic of some of the main male bodies in the mythology.

10 Consequence in the form of temporary exile for unmanly behaviour does feature in saxo’s euhemerized account of Óðinns’s seduction of Rinda (in order to father a son to avenge the death of Balderus), within a context which is, however, marked by concern about political propriety ( Gesta Danorum 3.4.8).