Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 123

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Betrothal and Women 's Autonomy
ekki í móti’ (96) [he had no difficulty in getting permission from Ósvífr, and
Guðrún raised no objection].
It is noticeable that the instances of dominant female behaviour in the sagas
referred to by Jochens are almost always attributed to married women or widows;
it is also striking that in the quotation above (p. 112) she refers to only five
marriages, throughout the Islendingasögur, which are arranged against the expres-
sed will of the woman. So the arranging of marriages is only rarely used by saga
writers as a platform for the assertion of female will. Rather, the formal references
to the woman’s consent to a betrothal, and the conventional handing back of the
initiative to the male authority figure by even those women who later, as wives
and mothers, turn into monstrous defenders of family honour, only emphasize
that this is a concession to which the woman has no legal right; and offers the
opportunity, as in Laxdœla saga, to register her response to the situation in which
she is placed by masculine negotiation.
The central betrothal in Laxdœla saga is, of course, the one which never takes
place, between Guðrún and Kjartan, who are presented as the pre-eminent young
people of their generation, destined for each other by their own excellence and
the close friendship of their fathers. The saga’s structure is insistent in its reminders
of this absence. For instance, a sequence of premonitory dreams forms a preamble
to the section of the saga which deals with Guðrún’s four marriages and their ends,
but makes no reference to her relationship with Kjartan, which takes place after
the death of her second husband; so the account of their love, when it is duly
narrated, disrupts the expectations mapped out by the dream sequence. A similar
suggestion of disjunction between love and marriage comes at the end of the saga
where Guðrún’s son, Bolli, asks her which man she had loved best. She replies
with a comparison of her four husbands; only when pressed does she admit a
veiled reference to Kjartan, ‘Þeim var ek verst, er ek unna mest’ (228) [I was worst
to the one I love the most].24
The scene of the abortive betrothal between Kjartan and Guðrún thwarts not
only the expectations created by the saga’s account of their growing attraction and
their fitness for each other, but those suggested by the implied contrast with other
narratives of frustrated love to which Laxdœla saga alludes and on which it
elaborates. In his study of the four poets’ sagas, Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa,
Kormaks saga, Hallfreðar saga and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Bjarni Einarsson
coined the term ‘ástarsögur’ (Skáldasögur, 5). But rather than love stories, it is in
fact more accurate to call them narratives of frustrated betrothal, since in all except
Hallfreðar saga — which tells us baldly that ‘Hallfreðr vildi eigi kvænask’ (ÍF 8,
144) [Hallfreðr did not wish to marry] - the narrative turns on a betrothal which
Helga Kress also argues for the structural importance of the dream sequence, and its parallelism
with Guðrún’s final conversation with her son, which reinforce Guðrún’s positioning as the
central focus of the saga and reflect the conflict between her desire for autonomy and the passive
role to which she, as wife, is assigned (1993, 137-40).