Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 113

Betrothal and Women ’s Autonomy
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Here the structure of formal negotiation is maintained, but turns on a
conversation, ostentatiously private, between suitor and woman. At the point
where the attention of a romance writer would become engaged — the develop-
ment of a relationship between two individuals - that of the saga writer is
deliberately withdrawn. The feelings of individuals affect the outcome, but
remain within a private sphere, unexplored by the narrative. It is, in fact, never
made clear whether Þorgerðr is powerfully sexually attracted to Óláfr, or overawed
by his flamboyant appearance and social skills, or merely reassured - given her
expressed concern about his dubious birth — that his descent from the king of
Ireland outweighs his illegitimacy. More overtly, the narrative returns to the
conventional formula in scenes of betrothal where a woman’s preference is
consulted: she ‘referred the decision to her father,’ returning the initiative to the
male negotiator.
The ambiguities of the scene leave the status of Þorgerðr’s decision, despite the
apparent autonomy conferred on her by her father, in some doubt. Her power to
disrupt the negotiations is emphasized; but the scene takes place in a context
where family — particularly male — honour is at stake. Óláfr has already warned
his father that he will be displeased if a proposal made on his behalf meets with
a rebuff (62, 64), a sensitivity presumably reflecting his concern about his irregular
origins. The focus of his dialogue with Þorgerðr is not primarily the woman’s
autonomy of choice, but the power of Óláfr’s personality alone, where official
negotiation has failed, to assert his true quality despite these qualms. This theme
has already been deployed in the hyperbolic account of Óláfr’s triumphant visit
to Ireland.
Jenny Jochens has investigated the status of women in marriage as reflected in
diverse Icelandic and Norwegian sources, legal, literary and historical, in an
attempt to trace a progression from a ‘pagan’ Germanic attitude to marriage,
fmancially based, under masculine control, and with no insistence on monogamy,
to a ‘Christian’ conception of marriage as sacrament, encompassing the doctrine
of mutual consent.8 Basing her argument on sources of roughly the same age, but
whose relation to the thirteenth-century society from which they emerged is
varying and often difficult to pin down, Jochens finds, paradoxically, that the
closest reflection of the attitude she calls ‘pagan’ is found in Sturlunga sagas
account of contemporary, Christian, Iceland:
Even the most casual reading of Sturlunga saga makes it clear that few prominent men
lived in monogamous marriage . . . A reading of Sturlunga saga leaves the impression
that extramarital affairs were so common that if the sentence of lesser outlawry
(fjorbaugsgarðr), which required all men who had fathered illegitimate children to be
JennyM.Jochens, Womenin OldNorse áWrty (Ithaca, NY, 1995), chapter2. Theearlierartides,
‘Themedieval Icelandicheroine: fact or fiction?’, Viator, 17(1986), 35-50 (p. 35), and ‘Consent
in marriage: Old Norse law, life, and literature’, Scandinavian Studies, 58/2 (1986), 142-76,
include more detailed references to sources.
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