Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Qupperneq 123

Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Qupperneq 123
121 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).
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