Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 120

118
Alison Finlay
Now messages passed berween them, and there were some disagreements about the
financial arrangements, and so it turned out, strangely, that after this settlement was
made Kormákr was little pleased with it. . .
Grágás deals in detail with the payment of dowry and bride-price, and the
potential ability of the couple to support a family.16
(iv) The laws specify, at some length, circumstances in which betrothals might
be broken off, and penalties incurred if this happens without legal justification
(Grágás Ib, 31-36). The main grounds are sickness, lasting for a year or more, of
either party (30-31); legal charges involving outlawry or confiscation of property
(32—33); the invalidity of the betrothal if the woman is betrothed by someone
other than the correct legal administrator (34); physical defect, pregnancy or
sexual infidelity on the part of the woman (36). Although these grounds do not
encompass the betrothed man’s failure to return from abroad, the reason for
breaking of betrothals in Bjarnar saga and Gunnlaugs saga, this preoccupation
with the failure of betrothal recalls the central narrative of all the poets’ sagas
except Hallfreðar saga. The importance in these texts ofbetrothal and its failure
may reflect a specifically Icelandic narrative concern, since, as Jochens points out,
‘the nadve betrothal, a promise to marry in the future’ was foreign to the European
church, which ruled that a couple who had consented before witnesses to marry
were, in effect, married.17 The letter sent by the Archbishop in Þrándheimr to the
Icelandic bishops in 1189 insisting on women’s consent in marriage records, or
perhaps seeks to impose, this change:
En um fastnaðar mál, þegar maðr fastnar sér konu með jákvæði hennar sjálfrar, ok er
samþykkt af nálægð ok eigi af ókomnu, þá er þat fast svá sem fullr hjúskapr ef váttar
vitu (Diplomatarium Islandicum I, 287).
Concerning betrothal, as soon as a man engages a woman with her own approval, and
it is agreed with regard to the present and not the future in the presence ofwitnesses,
it is as binding as full matrimony.
(v) Divorce was possible, though as Jochens observes, the conditions and
procedures specified by law (Grágás Ib, 39-44) are less liberal than in the sagas.
The most striking departure from European marriage, though, is the specification
16 GrágásIb, 38-39. Grágás also refers to fmancial valuation ofa woman, in a passage about defects
(presumably physical) which would lower her worth: ‘En þa er heilt ef hon væri eigi verði at
verri, þó at hon væri ambátt at hon hefði óheilindi slíkt, eða aðrir ókostir eða andmarkar þeir er
hon væri eigi verði at verri’ (35) [It is a sound match if she would not fetch a lower price were
she a slave woman and had such ill-health, or because of other failings or defects would not
fetch a lower price]. The law only deals with defects in the female partner; this supportsjochens’s
claim that greater female autonomy is allowed in the sagas, where women protest against
marriages to men of lower status than they consider their due, than in the laws.
17 ‘The medieval Icelandic heroine’, 44; see also Women in Old Norse Society, 37.