Gripla - 2022, Síða 106

GRIPLA104
coming courting, then as a married woman and head of the household, and
third, as the plaintiff in a divorce suit and consequently a divorcee. She also
gains a voice and increasingly figures in dialogue, primarily with Kormákr
and then in a critical mode, as his attentions and verses are bluntly rejected.
The saga offers no example of the casual conversations that might have
figured in Kormákr’s repeated visits. This is consistent with saga style;
the criterion for inclusion in the narrative is that dialogue must move the
narrative forward. And, indeed, all Steingerðr’s reactions are to events and
poems that occur in public, e.g., a street in Norway, and thus affect her
honor and standing. But there is never any final break with the poet. In
all of this, she enjoys the envy and notoriety of being celebrated for her
beauty and, via metonymical attributions, her domestic virtues – but little
else – in Kormákr’s verse, as it is committed to memory by the community
and circulates as entertainment. And it is she who rejects an extramarital
sexual relationship with Kormákr. Finally, even Kormákr acknowledges
her right to make up her own mind and live with whom she will. Little
of this is reflected in Kormákr’s verse, where only her muted responses
to the poet’s acts and words are noted. But to the end, like the reification
in poetry as the goddess of the hearth and hall, woman is susceptible to
commodification as in a lightly coerced marriage or kidnapping by pirates
for a more forced union. By the end of the saga, Steingerðr has achieved a
considerable degree of resigned autonomy and even cynicism, expressed in
a remark with clear sexual symbolism. Invited by her second husband to go
with Kormákr, who has bravely rescued her from pirates, she makes a tell-
ing remark, perhaps more from cynicism than principle: “Steingerðr kvazk
ekki skyldu kaupa um knífa” (Steingerðr said that she was not going to
exchange one knife for another).71 Since knives were personal possessions
in the medieval North, this is not a reference to who provides her with
room and board but rather a sexual allusion in which she figures herself
as a sheath. One knife is the same as another, in this continuation of the
weapon/penis equation. Kormákr immediately follows this remark with
his own summation of their mutual history. “Kormákr kvað ok ekki þess
mundu auðit verða; kvað illar vættir því snimma skirrt hafa eða óskǫp”72
(Kormak also said that that was in no way fated to come about; he said
71 Kormáks saga, ch. 26, 298.
72 Kormáks saga, ch. 26, 298.