Gripla - 20.12.2018, Qupperneq 220

GRIPLA220
on what the text ought to say. Can we know what the bishop should have
asked? I think we can. In canon law, if the consent of the two parties is
followed by sexual intercourse, the marriage becomes indissoluble. that
theory is also carried out in practice. Church court records from all over
western Europe demonstrate that canon law courts were typically unwill-
ing to dissolve consummated marriages, whether or not the parties clearly
had consented to the marriage. In other words, sexual intercourse counted
de jure as a presumption of consent in medieval canon law.58 thus we
actually know what Bishop Jón should have asked Þorleifur: did you have
sexual intercourse? Could the question, as it appears in the Bréfabók, carry
that sense? Could hafdæ have the same sense that the verb “to have” may
carry in modern English? Did the bishop ask Þorleifr whether he “had”
Þorgerðr in a sexual sense? no such sense of the verb hafa seems to be at-
tested in the standard dictionaries of old norse, most of which, however,
were compiled during the Victorian period, and thus they might not be
expected to include such “vulgarity.”59 I suspect a search of old norse
literature will turn up examples. a probable one is found in Skírnismál
35: “Hrímgrímnir heitir þurs, er þik hafa skal,” in Carolyne Larrington’s
translation: “Hrimgrimnir he’s called, the giant who’ll possess you.”60
for what it is worth (and perhaps it is worth something, given Bishop
Jón’s nationality), the English verb “to have” could certainly mean “to have
sexual intercourse with” in both old and Middle English. the online edi-
tion of the Oxford English Dictionary provides several medieval examples
(although this sense of the word was, unsurprisingly, not included when
the entry for the word “have” was originally published in 1901).61
Whatever we should make of that hafdæ, clearly the bishop had found
that Þorgerðr had not freely consented to the marriage, and most probably
58 Donahue, Law, Marriage, and Society, 43.
59 John Simpson, The Word Detective: A Life in Words from Serendipity to Selfie (London: Little,
Brown, 2016), 209–237, discusses how attitudes towards sexual vulgarity developed during
the long period when the three editions of Oxford English Dictionary were produced.
60 I am grateful to Professor richard north, university College London, who kindly pointed
out this parallel. Eddukvæði, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn ólason, íslenzk fornrit
(reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2014), 1.387; The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne
Larrington (oxford: oxford university Press, 2014), 62. See also Stephen a. Mitchell,
Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages (Philadelphia: university of Pennsylvania
Press, 2011), 53, who interprets the passage in Skírnismál similarly.
61 Oxford English Dictionary, oed.com, s.v. “have,” sense II 13 a.