Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 110

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Alison Finlay
grounds that he wears effeminate dress (ÍF 5, 94). While the ruse may reflect an
actual prohibition in early Icelandic law against cross-dressing for both sexes,' its
existence in the saga is less a reflecdon of historical reality than a witty reversal of
the conventional literary motif of a woman sewing a shirt for her husband, or the
man she plans to marry;3 4 here, it is used instead to secure the heroine’s freedom
from the married state. The counterpart to this manoeuvre is that Þórðr, at
Guðrún’s persuasion, goes on to divorce his wife, Auðr, on the apparently
fabricated grounds that she wears masculine dress.
The abandoned wife Auðr is not treated with much sympathy when she is
introduced to the saga; in the same chapter in which Guðrún is hyperbolically
described, of Auðr we are told that ‘ekki var hon væn kona néggrvilig. Þórðr unni
henni lítit; hafði hann mj<pk slœgzk til fjár . . .’ (IF 5, 87) [she was neither a
beautiful nor an accomplished woman, and Þórðr had little love for her. He had
married mainly for money]. Sympathy is with the ruthless but attractive couple,
Guðrún and Þórðr, and Auðr’s brothers are unable to raise support for a court
action against Þórðr.
However, both the saga and Þórðr himself are alive to the injustice of her
treatment, and sympathetic when she takes the law into her own hands, riding
by night to assault Þórðr as he lies in bed; the saga comments, ‘ok var hon þá at
vísu í brókum’ (97) [she was certainly wearing breeches then]. The sexual
ambiguity is reinforced when, in the dark, Þórðr sees that ‘maðr var kominn’ (98)
[a man had come in]; but, on realizing who his assailant is, he refuses to retaliate,
saying ‘hana slíkt hafa at gprt, sem hon átti’ (98) [she had had to do what she
did]. Despite the law’s express proscription — more emphatically stated for women
than for men - against transgressing the traditional boundaries of gender, Auðr’s
need to do so is explicitly sanctioned by the saga.
It is no accident that these two instances ofwomen appropriating traditionally
masculine modes of behaviour — founding dynasties and taking vengeance for
slights - occur in narratives about marriage and divorce. It might be argued that,
in a sense, all the actions ofwomen in the sagas occur in the context of marriage;
as Helga Kress has said, ‘The wife motif is one of the most common women’s
motifs in the Icelandic sagas, and the writer who wishes to describe women’s
experiences cannot escape from this’7 But Laxdœla saga does include instances of
3 In Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca, NY, 1995, 58, 198 n. 132), Jenny Jochens claims
inaccurately that the laws cite the wearing of dress inappropriate to gender as grounds for divorce.
In fact, it is named as an offence for which the penalty is JjQrbangsgarð or lesser outlawry: ‘Ef
kona klæðisk karlklæðum eða sker sér skaur eða fer með vápn fyrir breytni sakar, þat varðar
(jorbaugsgarð. Þat er stefnusk ok skal kveðja til búa fimm á þingi. Sá á spk er vill. Slíkt er mælt
um karla, ef þeir klæðask kvenna klæðnaði’ (Grágás Ib, 203-04). Quotations from Grágás
throughout this paper have been normalized.
4 See Gíslasaga(íF6,30), Kormakssaga(\F 8,264), Qrvar-Oddssaga(FornaldarsögurNorðurlanda
II, 238-43, 263).
3 Helga Kress, “‘You will find it all rather monotonous”; on literary tradition and the feminine
experience in Laxdtela sagd, 192.