Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 111

Betrothal and Women ’s Autonomy
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women asserting themselves outside the immediate context of marriage, either in
traditional fashion, as when Þorgerðr incites her sons to avenge the killing of
Kjartan (IF 5, 161-62), or by adopting roles usually assigned to men, as when
Guðrún pursues what amounts to a feud with Kjartan after his marriage to Hrefna
(140-51).
In the overwhelmingly male-dominated world of the Islendingasögur, the
theme of the arranging of marriages offers an opportunity, not so much of
representing female autonomy, but rather of exploring the responses ofwomen
to their subjection to the male power structure. For in spite of Laxdœla sagas
representations of dominant women, who apparently have their way in marrying
whom they choose and in subjugating husband and sons to their will, closer
examination shows that these acts of assertion have an overlay of irony, presented
against a background in which the arrangement of marriages is part of an official
framework and procedure dominated by men.
A feature of saga style which offers potential for irony is the way in which sexual
love, though evidently at work in saga narrative, is subordinated and excluded
from direct representation. This sharply distinguishes the sagas of Icelanders from
the European romances which some believe to have inspired the special interest
in love and marriage developed in the four poets’ sagas, Bjarnar saga Hítdœla-
kappa, Kormaks saga, Hallfreðar saga and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, eachofwhich
deals with a poet’s love for or betrothal to a woman who, in the event, marries
another man. Laxdœla saga shares its central theme with these sagas, but goes
beyond them in its active engagement of the woman — essentially passive in the
four poets’ sagas — with her predicament/’
The restraint of saga style in dealing with emotion and the inner life has often
been noted. In fact, saga prose is particularly discreet, even euphemistic, in dealing
with sexual relationships, avoiding not only the expression of emotion but also
the objective statement of facts so often cited as characteristic of the sagas. For
example, from Droplaugarsona saga\ ‘Bjprn fór jafnan á Desjarmýri til tals við
Þórdísi, konu Þorsteins’, from which it follows almost immediately that ‘Þórdís
fór kona eigi ein saman’ (ÍF 11, 151-52) [Bjprn constantly went to Desjarmýrr
to talk to Þorsteinn’s wife Þórdís... Þórdís became pregnant]. Bjprn Breiðvíkinga-
kappi’s visits to Þuríðr in Eyrbyggja saga are similarly recorded as ‘kvámur’ and
‘tal’ (IF 4, 55, 77). This reticence applies to betrothal and marriage as well as to
6 See Helga Kress: ‘hið sérstaka við Laxdcela sögu, og það sem skilur hana frá öðrum sögum sem
fjalla um ástamál, er að átökin fara ekki fram á milli tveggja karlmanna sem elska sömu konuna,
eins og t.a.m. í Gunnlaugs sögu, heldur milli elskendanna sjálfra’ (1993, 140). Of the four poets’
sagas dealing with frustrated love, Bjamar saga and Kormaks saga are generally believed to be of
early date, and may therefore have influenced Laxdœla saga (but see Bjarni Guðnason 1994);
the main narrative of Gunnlaugs saga is referred to in Egils saga, and therefore must also have
been known before the existing version was written. The frequent occurrence of the theme, and
the evidence of its reworking in surviving versions, suggests that the narrative was known before
the writing of Laxdœla saga even if the poets’ sagas themselves were not.
7 For an account of euphemistic language and ‘a prosopography, as it were, of lovemaking’, see
Jochens 1995, 68-71.