Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 115

Betrothal and Women ’s Autonomy
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to make the arrangement’ (43). This is apparently a misinterpretation of the
following passage in Grágás:
En ef þeir vilja dvelja ráð fyrir henni, ok synja þeir tveim mgnnum þeim er jafnræði
þótti, þá skal hon ráða við hinn þriðja ef þat þykkir ok jafnræði, við ráð frænda síns
ngkkurs. {Grágás Ib, 29-30)
But if (her guardians) want to delay marriage for her and they refuse two men who
were thought an equal match for her, then she shall marry the third, if that too is
thought an equal match, given the consent of any one of her kinsmen.9
Staðarhólsbók adds: ‘Ekkja á svá að ráða eða mær tvítug eða eldri’ (Grágás II,
156) [A widow or an unmarried woman of twenty or over has the right to decide
in this way]. Jochens quotes this passage to support her argument about choice:
‘Thus, a devoted and determined couple might resist a father’s plans with the
support of another male relative’ (43), where the issue in the legal text is, rather,
suitability - here, the appropriate time to marry as well as the equality of the
match.10
Rather than invoking the notion of didacticism, we will do better to locate the
emphasis on female autonomy in the Islendingasögurm the nature of their literary
values. Jochens herself hints at this in her comment that:
... men’s relations with marginal women were accepted as normal but not memorable.
Since the mistress and her offspring were rarely important enough to enter the narrative
of the sagas of lcelanders, the genre exhibits a relatively placid sexual surface, portraying
most couples as enjoying calm, monogamous marriages that ensured the propertied
character of the institution (1995, 36).
It can be argued that the screening out of such embarrassing contemporary
realities as multiple sexual partners is the result less of idealism than of lack of
interest in the quotidian detail ofwomen’s lives.
Jochens elsewhere makes a significant connection between the presentation of
marriage in the Islendingasögur and the ‘image of strong, willful, domineering
women’ found in these sagas (1986, 35). Rather than agreeing with Jochens that
the emphasis on female autonomy in marriage derives from the didactic impulse
of clerical saga writers to promote the Christian doctrine of equality of marriage
partners, I suggest that it arises from a collision between the realism of the sagas
- their tendency to mirror the actuality of life in thirteenth-century Iceland - and
the literary model, inspired by heroic conventions such as those represented in
the poems of the poetic Edda, of the fiercely dominant, outspoken woman,
9 Here and elsewhere in this paper I have made use of an unpublished translation of the festarþáttr
by Peter Foote.
1(1 jochens’s misinterpretation is corrected in her book (1995, 27), where she refers to this passage
as an example of limited female self-determination in marriage.