Philobiblon

p. 70

An analysis of the two dozen original Icelandic chivalric sagas reveals that, on the issue of consent at any rate, the authors pictured Europe as divided into two large sections, a northern area stretching roughly halfway down the European continent and including England and Ireland, and a southern area surrounding the Mediterranean’s northern and southern coastlines and also encompassing distant places such as India, which likewise was considered to be Christian. In the north the marriage of a woman was most often decided by her male kin, whereas in the south women were almost always asked about and frequently given full choice of their marriage partners. In the north women demurely accepted their male relatives’ decisions and only occasionally murmured about the suitor being too old or exhibited fear of their fathers.

p. 80

The most unexpected aspect of divorce in the sagas is the latitude given to personal incompatibility, a justification that accorded with the bishop’s permission to grant divorces in similar cases in the law. The discord can be described in vague terms (“they were not alike in temperament;” ) or caused by specific problems (“because of their disagreement”; “their relationship was not good). The blame is occasionally placed on both partners, but more often the husband is at fault. The wife leaves on her own, or is sent back to her father. Sometimes a wife has a sexual complaint, such as Unnr’s famous case of lack of consummation. In other cases no reasons are offered: the reader remains in the dark, for instance, as to why Rannveig left her husband. She adds insult to injury, throwing his clothes into the cesspool, forcing him, girded only in bedclothes, to seek help from a neighbor.

p. 83

After menopause, bereft of reproductive capabilities and perhaps losing sexual attractiveness, older women did not remarry—and often enjoyed their greatest independence as widows. Saga women were frequently admired for qualities normally associated with men. This “gender blurring” was most often expressed by the author, but women themselves also articulated such ideals. Words with a masculine semantic range—“valiant” (drengr) and “forceful” (sk?rungr), for example—characterized numerous men and a few admired women, mostly middle-aged or beyond. Older women no longer inspired fear and jealousy in men, but even the most impressive among these manly and forceful women exercised their authority best in the absence of their husbands. Thus, Þorbjqrg, described as “very forceful” (sk?rungr mikill), “was in charge of the district and made all the decisions when Vermundr [her husband] was not at home”

p. 84

Best known is Auðr/Unnr Ketilsdóttir, the daughter of a Norwegian chieftain and wife of a Norse king in Dublin. Little is known about her until both her husband and son were killed and she became responsible for a large household, including several granddaughters and a grandson. At that moment “she had a ship built secretly in a forest, and when it was completed she loaded it with valuables and prepared for a voyage. She took all her surviving kinsfolk with her. It is generallyagreed that it would be hard to find another example of a woman (kvennmaðr) escaping from such hazards with so much wealth and such a large retinue. From this it can be seen what a paragon amongst women she was.

p. 106

Tacitus praised Germanic mothers for nursing their babies (Germania, chap. 20), and until the advent of modern technology, it was the norm in all traditional societies for children to receive their first nourishment from lactating women. At some point during the late Middle Ages, however, Icelandic mothers came to regard their own milk as inferior. Rather than nursing their children, they gave them cows’ milk and even cream. Even more destructive of their health, children were fed meat and fish, prechewed and thinned with melted butter, from their third or fourth month. The results were disastrous, and Iceland suffered from unusually high infant mortality even by the standards of the seventeenth century, when foreign travelers first brought attention to the problem and identified malnutrition as the cause.

p. 114

According to Landndmab6k, the first generation of named settlers contained nearly six times as many men as women. Given this imbalance, it is remarkable that almost three-quarters of the men in this first cohort managed to establish families. Nearly two-thirds of these, however, were identified only by the name of the father and his children with no indication of whether he was a widower or of the children’s legal status. Who were these unknown women who produced the first generation of native Icelanders? One intriguing proposition is that they were Irish slaves whose names were suppressed because their ancestry was not worthy of comment and added little luster to the family. These Celtic women may have contributed their distinct genes to the Icelandic melting pot, with important biological consequences.

p. 130

Men used their leisure time—grouped according to an ascending scale of social importance—to be bored or lazy, to sleep while others worked, to engage in sports and games, to tell stories, to drink and jest, to indulge their grief by composing poetry or luxuriating in bed, and to participate in the politics of the island. Women shared only few of these activities and are often depicted as working while men played. Women are rarely seen socializing among themselves without working at the same time, and Þórðr’s statement likely did not hold true for society as a whole. Women, in fact, worked longer and harder than men, although because women were not central to the sagas’ focus on feuding and politics, the authors regularly diminished the role and status of females

p. 132

Although women spent less time in bed, they also slept more lightly and fretfully, awakening at the slightest provocation and frequently becoming aware of troubles before men. When a man comes secretly to a farm late at night and steals embers from the fire, only a woman is alert. When a hostile party quietly arrives during the night, a woman is the first to notice. As a wealthy widow, it is not proper for Þórelfr to go to the door herself when someone knocks late at night, but she is the first to hear. Asking a male servant to respond, she, characteristically, has trouble rousing him.

p. 157

Work was conditioned by the social status of both genders. The lower a woman’s position, the harder her work, which doubtless included, male tasks. It is perhaps no accident that the only recorded case of odor from perspiration due to physical work came from a female slave (Gí 6.27:85). In the everyday world of the sagas women were, in fact, involved in practically all outdoor tasks, including animal husbandry. Except for milking, animals were normally tended by men; cattle and sheep may have been relatively small in Iceland, but they could be strong and dangerous. Male shepherds were therefore normally in charge of the pastures, but an occasional shepherdess can be found. A very young girl (meystelpa) in charge of cattle belonging to two brothers, for example, was bullied by their neighbor. Women and young girls also helped men drive animals and herd them into pens. A woman supervised the task of channeling a stream under the house. The law specified as male tasks the pulling ashore (skipsdráttr) and launching (framdráttr) of a boat. All farmers from the neighborhood were to appear with their workmen (húskarlar), but one saga episode shows women from the shipowner’s farm pulling with the men.

p. 159

Saturday was variously referred to as “bath day” (laugardagr) or “laundry day” (þváttdagr). Hot water made it possible to wash clothes year round, thus facilitating the apparent custom of a wife presenting her husband and sons with clean shirts on Sunday morning. As suggested by this detail and confirmed by episodes depicting women washing linen out of doors, washing was a female task

p. 163 Until the middle of the fourteenth century, when a new fashion, perhaps inspired from men’s plate armor, created the inserted sleeve and replaced the older T-shaped style, sleeves were wide, and since they were rarely buttoned, they needed to be sewn close to the wrists to provide maximum warmth and freedom to work. This task was performed by women morning and night.

p. 164

Scarcity of grain meant that in Iceland, unlike in continental Europe, bread never became a staple. It was in fact so rare that people dreamt about it, and one man received the nickname “Butter-Ring” (sm j?rhringr) from his favorite food of bread and butter. Scarcity of grain and ovens made fiat bread the preferred form in most of the north, but even in this form it never became important in the Icelandic diet. Grain was instead diluted in gruel and porridge

p. 166  Heavily salted, butter could be kept for decades; large stores were accumulated, like gold, by wealthy landowners. By the time of the Reformation the bishopric in Hólar possessed a mountain of butter calculated to weigh twenty-five tons.

p. 167

Cooking followed techniques and employed utensils that changed little over time. A comparison between the kitchen equipment buried with the woman entombed in the Oseberg burial in Norway in August or September 834 and the house-hold recommendations of 1585 by the Swedish Count Per Brahe for his wife shows remarkable little change over a span of seven centuries.

p. 174

The female role in Icelandic material culture is highlighted by the importance and ubiquitous presence of homespun (vaðmdl) produced from sheep’s fleece. Clothing the entire population from cradle to grave and even occasionally protecting sick animals, homespun was also used for bedding, sails, wall-hangings, packs, and sacks of all kinds. Most impressive, it replaced silver as the standard commodity against which other products were evaluated within Iceland. As the country’s exclusive export, it procured necessities and luxuries only available abroad. The result, the unique system of “the homespun standard,” governed Icelandic economic life for centuries.

p. 183  One of the less apparent but important products was sails. Women’s role in supplying this fundamental prerequisite for the viking expeditions is vouchsafed by Óttarr the Black (svarti), an eleventh-century Icelandic skald who refers to “sails…spun by women.” A more tangible illustration is the “good long-ship sail” (langskipssegl gott) that Þórólfr brings the Norwegian king as a present from his father Skalla-Grímr. The Norwegian Speculum Regale recommends, as a matter of course, that large amounts of homespun (vaðmál) be stored on ships together with needles and thread for the reparation of sails. The spectacular Norwegian ship burials confirm these literary references to woolen sails.

p. 209

in a general medieval context, the Norse world was profoundly patriarchal. As my analysis of widows indicated, the human ideal that was most admired and to which both men and women aspired was more masculine than feminine. Carol Clover has suggested that the social binary of nordic society was not male/female, but a different sort of polarity: on one hand, a group of people consisting of most able-bodied men and a few outstanding women known for their exceptional mental strength and overpowering personalities, and, on the other, a kind of “rainbow coalition” of the rest of humanity, including most of the women, children, slaves, the old and disabled, and disenfranchised men. The few women found in the first group were identified in terms normally associated with men. Most of them were older women who had gained in material and social assets what they had lost in sexual attractiveness. Whereas the debility of old age might disqualify a man from the admired category, women were never expected to fight and age did not therefore affect their worth. Moreover, since exceptionality was measured in male terms, a capable woman was obviously most advantageously placed to demonstrate her worth in the absence of a husband. It is therefore not surprising that the narratives reveal a number of imposing women in the permanent stage of widowhood, between marriages, or in control of authority while their husbands were away.

p. 213

Tacitus was impressed by the dignity and equality ordinary women derived from Germanic marriage (Germania, chap. 18–19). His brief description of the sharing of property, brought as gifts by the bride and the groom from their respective families, provides the first glimpse into the commercial foundations of the Germanic marriage. His version corresponds well with the reports of Continental laws in the second half of the  first millennium and with the numerous details culled from Icelandic and Norwegian laws dating from the beginning of the next.

p. 216

The silent pagan bride, transferred  like property from father to husband, was replaced by the articulate Christian woman who by her own “yes-word” (jáyrði) was allowed to affirm her willingness to share her life with a man who already had consulted her, not just her father. Fathers of daughters may have appreciated this new female freedom, but it was not necessarily received with favor by the groom or his kinsmen, who were more preoccupied with the economic and political advantages offered by the bride and her family than with personal relations. One may further speculate that affective marriages—that is, marriages containing mutual marital affection—were encouraged when a woman had given her consent.

p. 217

With a weekly day of rest and numerous feast days, the Christian calendar clearly afforded more respite from work than the few seasonal celebrations of the pagan year. The medieval woman, nevertheless, worked as hard as her ancient sister, and she, too, went to bed exhausted by her labors. Her satisfaction, however, may have been less. Whereas the housewife in the ancient setting worked with the resources available on her farm to feed and clothe her family, the economic success of the new system of wool export entailed increased management, which most certainly fell under male control.