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11178 results in Anglo Saxon and medieval literature

Page 361 of 559

  • 5 - In his time were gode lawes: Romance and the English Legal Past

  • Robert Allen Rouse, University of British Columbia
  • Book:
    The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 September 2012
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 93-133

  • Summary

    ‘The law occupies a crucial role in the mythology and ideology of a people.’

    DURING the great rebellion of 1381 the tenants of St Alban's Abbey, led by one Walter Grindcobbe, petitioned the abbot to deliver to them charters held by the abbey that related the liberties of the vill. The abbot produced these charters, but as Stephen Justice has suggested, they seem to have lacked the confirmation of the freedoms that the rebels desired. These deficient charters were then burned, and the rebels demanded that the abbot produce one particular ‘ancient charter … with capital letters, one of gold and one of azure’. This charter, Thomas Walsingham tells us, was believed to confirm a series of liberties and privileges that had been granted to the townsfolk in the time of King Offa for their services in building the monastery. These privileges, they claimed, had once been enjoyed by the town, but had been slowly eroded over time by the abbot and the monks. The abbot, faced with pressure to produce the rumoured Anglo-Saxon charter, repeatedly denied its existence. Despite these denials the rebels would not accept that the charter did not exist, and eventually the abbot was forced to write out a new charter confirming King Offa's privileges.

  • 22 - The Trecento commentaries on Dante's Commedia

  • from VI - LATIN AND VERNACULAR IN ITALIAN LITERARY THEORY
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University, Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 590-611

  • Summary

    Copies of Inferno and Purgatorio were already circulating in northern Italy when Dante died in September 1321, and these lost early exemplars were the forerunners of hundreds of fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Commedia, complete and partial. Few vernacular texts achieved so rapid or widespread a diffusion anywhere in medieval Europe. But Dante's poem was not long allowed to go about unaccompanied. By 1322 commentators were working on Inferno; by the decade's end a commentary on the whole Commedia had appeared, and the first century of Dante criticism eventually yielded a vast crop of exegesis. It includes full-scale commentaries, in which theoretical prologues, proems to each canto and textual glosses are combined to form an organic whole; sets of individual glosses (chiose), either discontinuous or in connected prose; and a variety of paraphrases, summaries, introductions, biographies, and other prolegomena, frequently in verse, which flourished on the margins of commentary proper, especially in the 1320s. New material continues to come to light: a long-lost Neapolitan commentary on Inferno, of 1369–73, was published in 1998. Commentators wrote in Italian and Latin, all over Italy (Naples, Milan, Bologna, Venice, Verona, Pisa) and abroad (Germany). Even Dante's loved and hated native city paid tribute to the poem that so ruthlessly dissects it: Giovanni Boccaccio and Filippo Villani lectured and wrote on Inferno in Florence, while the Ottimo commento and the work ascribed to the ‘Anonimo Fiorentino’ almost certainly originated there.

  • 1 - Grammatica and literary theory

  • from I - THE LIBERAL ARTS AND THE ARTS OF LATIN TEXTUALITY
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University, Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 13-41

  • Summary

    No single medieval discipline embraced all that we call literary criticism or theory today, but the discipline closest to literary criticism – in the sense of the interpretation of a traditional literary canon and the description of literary language – was grammatica. The scope and cultural effects of grammatica are large topics, embracing literacy, linguistic theory, traditions of commentary and exegesis, and the development of a literary canon, but here we must limit the field to those aspects of grammatica that had a direct bearing on the practice of literary criticism and interpretation.

    Grammatica was traditionally defined as having two main methodological divisions and subject-areas: ‘the science of interpreting the poets and other writers and the systematic principles [ratio] for speaking and writing correctly’, that is, the methods for reading, interpreting and evaluating literary works, especially the canon of classical poets, and the rules or principles for speaking and writing according to normative Latin conventions. The literary division of the discipline, scientia interpretandi, was understood to have four main parts or methodological divisions – lectio, the principles for reading a text aloud from a manuscript, including the rules of prosody; enarratio, exposition of content and the principles for interpretation, including the analysis of figurative language; emendatio, the rules for establishing textual authenticity and linguistic correctness, and iudicium, criticism or evaluation of writings. In the linguistic division, the object of analysis was the language of classical literary texts, the auctores, not ordinary speech. From its beginnings, then, grammatica was a science of the text, embracing a systematic description of the authoritative textual language (Greek or Latin) and the methods for reading and interpreting an established literary canon.

  • 16 - Occitan grammars and the art of troubadour poetry

  • from V - VERNACULAR CRITICAL TRADITIONS: THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
  • Edited by Alastair Minnis, Ohio State University, Ian Johnson, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 May 2005, pp 472-495

  • Summary

    One of the most dazzling and influential vernacular literary traditions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is that of the troubadours. The troubadour lyric quickly developed its own sophisticated poetics that was in turn to have a great impact on the development of lyric poetry and love casuistry in the literary traditions and cultures of Italy, Spain, northern France, Germany and England: Dante, for example, devoted a good portion of his literary criticism to the troubadours and similarly expounded his literary theory in part at least on the basis of his reading of troubadour chansonniers. The troubadours composed in a language that today we call Occitan, though earlier in the twentieth century it was (somewhat erroneously) known as Provençal and in the Middle Ages it could be designated by a variety of terms, some reflecting dialect (e.g. Lemosi), others merely vernacularity (Romans). Occitan was spoken until the early twentieth century in roughly the southern half of present-day France, but in the Middle Ages it was also used as a literary language at least in the twelfth century at the culturally crucial court of Poitiers and at a variety of courts in Catalonia, other parts of northern Spain, and then, in the thirteenth century, in Italy. Occitan was therefore a literary language with an international following, a language that some foreigners learnt, again particularly in the thirteenth century, with the specific intention of composing poetry.

  • Foreword

  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp ix-x

  • Summary

    The idea for this book came to me during an afternoon's fishing. A fisherman confronts the alien realm of the sea rather as gods and men in Old Norse myth and legend confront creatures of the Other World. Often, such encounters also involve the Otherness of opposite gender. But although there is a great variety of cross-gender encounters with the Other World, each god has his own typical experience. Usually, only the Vanir marry giantesses, only Þórr fights them, only Óðinn seduces them. I decided to look into the nature of these stereotypes and consider what needs might have produced them in the heathen period, why they continued to be used after the conversion to Christianity, and to what extent individual poets were at liberty to adapt or contradict them.

    I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of Durham for supporting the periods of research leave when much of the book was drafted, and the trustees of the Dorothea Coke Memorial Fund and the English Studies Research Committee, University of Durham, who provided grants for its publication. I have been much helped by Caroline Palmer of Boydell and Brewer, and have had many fruitful discussions with my Socrates exchange partners, Ásdís Egilsdóttir, Maria Elena Ruggerini and Rudolph Simek. Other scholars who have helped me include Sean Burke, Margaret Clunies Ross, Margaret Cormack, Roberta Frank, Terry Gunnell, Joseph Harris, Elizabeth Jackson, Bob Layton, Else Mundal, Richard North, Teresa Paroli, Christopher Sanders, Stefán Karlsson, Gro Steinsland, Clive Tolley, Margrethe Watt and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. Eva Koch and Liz McKinnell provided the line-drawings, and Professor Watt gave me permission to use those by Eva Koch. I would like to express my warm thanks to all of them, and especially to Judy McKinnell and the rest of my family, who have been patient and supportive throughout the book's long gestation period.

    The failings of this book are mine. There has proved to be too little space to pursue my last question fully – but it may be no bad thing to leave some unanswered questions at the end of a book.

  • Afterword

  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 232-234

  • Summary

    There is no doubt that we had all heard the story in different ways, that it brought us different insights depending on our own life-experiences and central concerns.

    My first aim in this book has been to establish what is typical in the various patterns of cross-gender encounter between gods or men on one side and giantesses or prophetesses on the other. It is clear that different types of encounter were consistently associated with particular gods, and that gods and men usually represent the human, civilised and rational world, while giantesses are associated with chaos, wild nature or the irrational. Beyond that, ‘meaning’ is a shifting target, changing from one period to another and capable of being adapted or contradicted to fit the particular concerns of individual poets and saga writers.

    Most of the patterns I have considered may have either a god or a man as the male representative of This World, but the relationship between the god and the human being varies from one pattern to another. In those connected with the Vanir, the human protagonist is typically a ruler descended from the Vanir or the lover of a goddess who is one of the Vanir. The fullest versions of these patterns concern human rulers. The names Njõrðr ?‘Strength’, ‘Power’ and Freyr ‘Lord’ may be connected with political authority, and the Stentoften stone probably shows an ancestor being venerated as guarantor of crop fertility (see Chapter 4). These things may suggest that these gods originated as mythical ancestral kings, though probably at a very ancient period.

    Myths and legends associated with Þórr produce human protagonists of two different types. The older is undoubtedly the ‘Bear's Son’ hero. He shares Þórr's features of unique physical strength and ultimate selfsacrifice against overwhelming odds, and his parallel fights against a male and a female ogre. But he differs from Þórr in that he has animal (notably bear) characteristics himself, sometimes resembles the ogre against whom he fights, and is to some extent an outsider in the society he defends.

  • 9 - Þórr and the Bear's Son

  • from Part Three - The Æsir
  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 126-146

  • Summary

    Se wæs moncynnes mægenes strengest

    on þæm dæge þysses lifes,

    æþele ond eacen.

    ‘He was the mightiest in strength of living men at that time,

    noble and huge.’

    Beowulf 196–8a

    In Chapter 8 I outlined a pattern in which Þórr encounters one or more giantesses who represent a threat to human life, in particular that of the protagonist's close kinsman. These are examples of a story pattern whose common features are:

  • A supremely strong hero makes an expedition to fight a giant.

  • He has one or more companions, but they usually make no important contribution.

  • He and his companion(s) are badly received at their destination.

  • He is attacked by at least one giantess and at least one giant, who are related to each other, and destroys both; both fights include some wrestling.

    • Two other common features which do not emerge in the Geirrøðr myth are:

  • The ogress often tries to pierce the hero's flesh with her claws.

  • Later, the hero will perish, heroically facing overwhelming odds.

    • Turning to stories of this kind in which the hero is a human being rather than a god, one can distinguish two sub-types, which I shall call the ‘Þórr pattern’ and the ‘Bear's Son pattern’. The main features of the Þórr pattern are:

  • Þ1. The hero or his associate is tricked into making the visit.

  • Þ2. The hero is usually helped by a friendly giantess (occasionally a giant).

  • Þ3. The associate (or occasionally the hero) often has a sexual partner.

  • Þ4. They must cross a dangerous river which is a boundary between worlds.

  • Þ5. The fights against both ogres usually take place in their cave; the order of fights varies.

  • Þ6. The hero fights with his bare hands, or with very primitive weapons; he destroys the ogres by breaking their backs or skulls, or by fire.

Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
  • John McKinnell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005
  • A particular, recurring feature of Old Norse myths and legends is an encounter between creatures of This World [gods and human beings] and those of the Other [giants, giantesses, dwarves, prophetesses, monsters and the dead]. Concentrating on cross-gendered encounters, this book analyses these meetings, and the different motifs and situations they encompass, from the consultation of a prophetess by a king or god, to sexual liaisons and return from the dead. It considers the evidence for their pre-Christian origins, discusses how far individual poets and prose writers were free to modify them, and suggests that they survived in medieval Christian society because [like folk-tale] they provide a non-dogmatic way of resolving social and psychological problems connected with growing up, succession from one generation to the next, sexual relationships and bereavement.

  • 4 - The Vanir Patterns: Ritual Origins

  • from Part Two - The Vanir
  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 50-61

  • Summary

    Four of the patterns outlined in Chapter 1 are associated with the Vanir. They are those in which:

  • A god or hero has a troubled marriage with a giantess.

  • A goddess helps her lover to gain vital information from a giantess.

  • A prophetess makes hostile predictions or works magic against a god or a human aristocrat.

  • A prophetess predicts the glorious career and eventual death of a young man who is unwilling to listen to her.

    • In this Chapter I shall consider the evidence for the pre-Christian origins of these patterns.

    The earliest literary source for the worship of the Vanir is ch. 40 of Tacitus's Germania (AD 98), where he is describing seven northern Germanic tribes (including the Anglii – the first literary reference to the Angles, who were to give their name to the English). These peoples, he says, share a common worship of Nerthum, id est Terram matrem ‘Nerthus, that is, Mother Earth’, whose shrine is in a grove on an island. At a particular season, the goddess and her one male priest go on procession in a sacred waggon drawn by heifers. The period of the processions is a time of peace, when all iron objects are locked away. When she returns to her shrine, the idol of Nerthus and everything else associated with the processions is washed by slaves in a secluded lake, in which the slaves are then drowned.

    The name Nerthus corresponds to Njõrðr, the oldest of the Vanir, but some critics have questioned the value of this account, partly because Nerthus looks grammatically masculine and partly because the manuscripts (which all date from the fifteenth century or later) have many different readings of the name: Nerthum, Nertum, Neithum, Nehertum, Necthum, Herthum, Verthum. The usually accepted stemma has three families, and readings shared by the best manuscripts of any two of them are thought likely to be correct.

  • 2 - Methods

  • from Part One - Aims, Methods and Sources
  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 11-36

  • Summary

    1. The prehistoric mirage

    Die echtheit der nordischen mythologie anfechten wäre eben so viel als die echtheit oder selbständigkeit der nordischen sprache in zweifel ziehen.

    ‘To dispute the authenticity of Nordic mythology would amount to the same thing as questioning the authenticity or separate identity of the Norse language.’

    J. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie I, 9

    In his claim of ‘authenticity’ for Old Norse mythology, the pioneering nineteenth-century scholar Jacob Grimm states a profoundly held belief that Old Norse mythological sources can give an accurate picture of what Norse heathenism was really like. He then argues that all the pre-Christian Germanic peoples shared a common poetic, religious and mythological tradition that was grounded in the natural world. He seeks to prove the antiquity of this system by demonstrating linguistic links with other Indo- European languages. For example, the Old Norse god-name Týr has the same root as Sanskrit Dyaus, Greek Zeus and Latin Jovis and divus. Similarly, later scholars pointed out the correspondence between Old Norse Ymir, the primeval giant from whose body-parts the cosmos was created, and the Iranian Yima and Sanskrit Yama. These names are taken to mean ‘twin’ (cf. Latin geminus), and related to Tuisto, the first ancestor of the Germani in Tacitus's Germania, and to the myth told in Vafþrúðnismál 33, where a boy and girl grow together under Aurgelmir's arm, while one of his legs begets a six-headed giant on the other. Snorri states that Aurgelmir is identical with Ymir (Gylfaginning ch. 5), though we do not know whether this is based on a lost source, or is merely his own assumption.

    But these philological facts are hardly evidence for a common Indo- European religion. Since the Indo-European languages are related, it is not surprising that they share a root meaning ‘a divine being’. It does not follow that Dyaus, Zeus, Jovis and Týr are ‘the same god’, whatever that might mean. Admittedly, the Norse creation myth of Ymir shows some resemblance to some Iranian ones: in Gylfaginning ch. 6, Ymir is nourished by the milk of the cow Auðhumla, while the ancestor of all animals and plants in Zoroastrian mythology is the uniquely created bull.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • from Part One - Aims, Methods and Sources
  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    Omnia agentia necesse est agere propter finem.

    ‘Everything that is done must be done for some purpose.’

    Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.2, art. 2

    1. What was Old Norse mythological poetry for?

    Since most of this book will be concerned with Old Norse narrative on mythological and legendary subjects, I shall begin with a simplistic question: in the society of its composers and first audiences, what was such literature for?

    If the same question were posed about other literary genres in Old Norse, it would be possible to give some fairly convincing answers. Skaldic poetry was usually either a bargain between the poet and his lord, in which the poet sought to immortalise the lord's reputation in return for reward and preferment, or an attempt to secure the posthumous reputation of the poet himself. Early historical writing often seems concerned to consolidate the political power and self-image of the Icelandic aristocracy. Landnámabók justifies existing patterns of land-ownership and clarifies family relationships so that land-owning families could arrange religiously acceptable marriages. Family sagas served to enhance social cohesion while people worked together in a confined indoor space.4 Such answers may sometimes tell us only what is obvious, and they may be amplified or modified by further study, but they seem unlikely to be contradicted by it.

    The traditional answer to the same question as applied to Old Norse mythological poetry would be that it reflected the mythological system which was an essential part of pre-Christian Norse religion. Certainly, the author of Snorra Edda uses eddic and skaldic verse to provide a ‘true’ picture of the pre-Christian mythology that a successful skaldic poet needed to know.

    Unfortunately, this answer raises some problems.

  • It assumes that by Snorri's time there was a definable ‘canon’ of mythological poetry. This presupposes a clear generic division between mythological and legendary verse, and this is questionable (see Chapter 3). Such a ‘canon’ may in fact be a construct of the Christian period, perhaps influenced by the division of the Bible into Old and New Testaments.

  • Appendix: Summaries and Translations of Sources

  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 235-247

  • Summary

    Inntak úr söguþætti af Ásmundi flagðagæfu (‘Summary of a Saga- Episode about Ásmundur “Lucky with Hags”’)

    Ásmundur is the youngest of three brothers; his father despises him, but his mother defends him. His two brothers set off to visit the king, but turn back when they meet a giant. Later, all three brothers set out again; their father falls into the smithy fire while giving Ásmundur a rusty old helmet, mail-coat and shield. His mother gives Ásmundur a knife (sax); when he tries it out, it cuts through a rock easily, but the rock is his mother's lífsteinn, and she falls dead.

    The brothers meet the giant. His brothers flee, but Ásmundur wrestles with the giant and kills him. He takes the giant's dog, then joins the household of St Óláfur. The king sends him to collect tax from the heathen Þorgerður Höldatröll, who lives on an island in the north. When he arrives, Þorgerður is out hunting; her daughter Hlaðvör agrees to come with Ásmundur and convert to Christianity if he defeats her mother.

    Þorgerður refuses to pay the tax, but agrees to abandon the island if Ásmundur defeats her in three tests. The first two contests (walking on fire and resisting a sword blow on the bare foot) are drawn (because Ásmundur is helped by the sign of the cross). The third test is to swallow three red-hot nails. Þorgerður successfully swallows two, but Ásmundur marks the sign of the cross on the third, and it burns her and leaves her helpless. He returns to court with Hlaðvör; she is baptised and marries him, and the king sends people to settle the island.

    (The last part of this story is not relevant here; it is derived from Vǫlsa þáttr.)

    Djákninn á Myrká (‘The Deacon at Myrká’)

    The (unnamed) deacon at Myrká often visits Guðrún, a serving-maid at Bægisá. Just before Christmas he sets out as usual, during a thaw. He tries to cross a ‘bridge’ of ice across the river, but it breaks, and he is drowned.

  • 12 - The Helpful Giantess

  • from Part Three - The Æsir
  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 181-196

  • Summary

    ‘Behold thy mother!’

    John 19,27

    Chapters 8 to 11 focused on the giantess who is destroyed or exploited by the male protagonist. This chapter will consider the helpful giantess who actively helps the protagonist, and some of the meanings which may have been traditionally attached to her.

    1. The pseudo-mother

    In the oldest myths, the friendly giantess often treats the protagonist (usually a Þórr-figure) as if he were her son, although she is literally the mother of his half-brother or foster-brother. The relationship between Þórr and Gríðr appears in the oldest version of the Geirrøðr myth (Eilífr Goðrúnarson's Þórsdrápa), and must have been traditional by the late tenth century (see Chapters 8 and 10).

    Gríðr is the mother of Þórr's half-brother Viðarr. As both she and Þórr's actual mother Jõrð are giantess-concubines of Óðinn, she must be assumed to be motivated by a continuing love for Óðinn. Her most important service to Þórr is to lend him her pole, which he uses to save himself from being washed away (Þórsdrápa 4–11), possibly to destroy Gjálp and Greip (14), and in his fight with the surviving giants after Geirrøðr has been destroyed (20). It functions both as a symbol of the protagonist's virility and as a weapon, though in Þórsdrápa the first role seems more prominent. In Skáldskaparmál ch. 18 Gríðr also gives Þórr a belt of strength and a pair of iron gloves. The latter were probably traditional; they are also a gift from the giantess in Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar, and the game of throwing a red-hot ball which motivates them can also be found in Þorsteins þáttr bæjarmagns.

    The implication of Gríðr's relationship with Þórr seems to be that the protagonist needs to be given confidence; this is regarded as a female function, and specifically that of a mother, connected with nature and hence with giantesses. He needs it partly to face his male enemies, but mainly to deal with threats to his virility from alien women. Even today, feminists often ask why many women bring up their sons to behave chauvinistically towards other women.

  • 14 - The Dead Lover's Return

  • from Part Four - Encounters with the Dead
  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 218-231

  • Summary

    I'll do as much for my true love

    As any young woman may;

    I'll sit and mourn upon his grave

    A twelvemonth and a day.

    The Unquiet Grave, Hb2, Child IV, 475

    1. Gender and grief

    So far, I have considered stories of raising the dead that are typically based on a mother–son relationship. Only in Hervararkviða does a daughter raise her dead father, and this poem clearly uses deliberate gender reversal, perhaps partly to warn women not to usurp masculine roles. Norse daughters doubtless grieved as much for their fathers as sons did for their mothers; the scarcity of such tales therefore demands some explanation.

    Perhaps young women found it difficult to gain a hearing as poets. Most verses attributed to female skalds are by older women of high birth or magical abilities, such as Hildr Hrólfsdóttir, Queen Gunnhildr or Steinunn Refsdóttir, the antagonist of the missionary Þangbrandr. Occasionally, a young woman responds to a verse addressed to her by a would-be lover, as in Kormáks saga ch. 6. But even the longest sequence of early skaldic verse attributed to a woman, the Sendibítr of Jórunn skáldmær, runs to only five stanzas. Yet any poet, female or male, might be interested in female bereavement as a subject (see, for example, Guðrúnarkviða I), so it is unlikely that the scarcity of father–daughter encounters with the dead is due simply to young women failing to gain a hearing.

    Another explanation might be in terms of social need. Stories about calling up one's dead mother might often influence a young man who was already shouldering major responsibilities. If his own mother was alive, they would encourage him to heed her advice, and allow the family the benefit of her greater experience. If she was already dead, such tales might strengthen her son's authority by suggesting that he still enjoyed her magical help. Young women were unlikely to be in positions of such authority, so there would be less need for the community to devote imaginative attention to their personal grief.

  • 10 - Seducing the Giantess: Óðinn

  • from Part Three - The Æsir
  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 147-171

  • Summary

    Þat kann ec iþ sextánda, ef ec vil ins svinna mans

    hafa geð alt oc gaman:

    hugi ec hverfi hvítarmri kono

    oc sný ec hennar ǫllom sefa.

    ‘I know the sixteenth, when I want the clever young girl's

    complete love and sexual pleasure with her, I turn the

    thoughts of the white-armed woman, and alter her mind

    completely.’

    Hávamál 161

    The protagonist in myths of exploitation is usually Óðinn. In the quotation above, he boasts that he knows spells which enable him to win and keep a woman's love; but his own motivation is usually calculating rather than passionate. In the Gunnlǫð myth he wants to obtain the mead of poetry, but his usual aim is to beget a son who will be a defender of the gods, a just avenger, or the founder of a human dynasty.

    1. Óðinn's names

    ÓĐINN AS PROGENITOR

    Óðinn's role as progenitor or seducer is reflected in a few of his many names, most obviously in Alfǫðr ‘All-father’. This name probably was used during the heathen period (see, for example, Grímnismál 48,3), but doubtless arose as a borrowing from Christianity. Gylfaginning ch. 9 calls Óðinn the father of all gods and men – an exaggeration even in Snorra Edda, where he is not, for example, the father of the Vanir – and ch. 3 claims that Alfǫðr is immortal and has created human beings with immortal souls. Late sources show a tendency to inflate the number of Óðinn's divine sons, but other Óðinn names ending in -fǫðr suggest that pre-Christian poets took Alfǫðr to mean simply ‘patron of everyone’.

    Þrór (cf. þróask ‘to thrive, be fruitful’) probably originated as a name for Freyr. In Þjóðólfr's Ynglingatal 35,1–3 (c. 900), niðkvísl Þrós ‘the branch of Þrór's descent’ refers to the Norwegian branch of the Ynglingar, who are descended from the Vanir (see Chapter 5). Similarly, in Þula IV dd, 7 Þrór is a boar, Freyr's sacred animal.

  • 5 - Misalliance and the Summer King

  • from Part Two - The Vanir
  • John McKinnell, John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, UK.
  • Book:
    Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    15 May 2005, pp 62-80

  • Summary

    1. Misalliance

    Wed in haste, repent at leisure.

    English proverb

    One might have expected myths about the ‘sacred marriage’ between the fertility god and the earth-giantess to be celebrations of a joyful union, but in fact the fundamental hostility between gods and giants was so strong that they are usually misalliances. The myths of Njõrðr and his son Freyr have many features in common:

  • The protagonist is one of a dynasty that descends through the male line.

  • He is (wholly or partly) responsible for the death or threatened death of the giantess's father or brother.

  • He or his representative goes on an expedition to win the giantess (but in the myth of Njõrðr and Skaði this motif is reversed).

  • The protagonist and the giantess marry.

  • The marriage is unsuccessful, and the wife becomes hostile to the protagonist.

  • This hostility may lead to the death of the protagonist.

    • Njõrðr and Skaði

    Njõrðr often appears in eddic and skaldic verse, but rarely with Skaði. He may be referred to as her husband and as god of ships in the damaged text of Eyvindr skaldaspillir's Háleygjatal 3–4 (c. 970), but the actual statement here is that Skaði lived for a long time with Óðinn and bore him many children. If Eyvindr mentions Njõrðr at all, therefore, it is in the embarrassing role of cuckold. However, he later contradicts the family's descent from Óðinn, referring to Hákon Grjótgarðsson as Freys õttungr ‘Freyr's descendant’. This family, like the Ynglingar, seem originally to have claimed descent from the Vanir, and the Óðinn–Skaði union was perhaps invented in the later tenth century, when the aristocratic cult of Óðinn was popular. But the myth of an unhappy marriage between Njõrðr and Skaði probably already existed, for Þórðr Sjáreksson (lausavísa 3, eleventh century) also notes that she did not love him.

    The name Skaði (and Sca(n)dinavia and Skáney ‘Skåne’) may be related to Gothic skadus, Old English sceadu, Old Saxon scado, Old High German scato ‘shadow’.

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