All the King’s Women: Polygyny and Politics in Europe, 900–1250 9789004434578, 9004434577

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All the King’s Women

The Northern World North Europe and the Baltic C.400–1700 ad Peoples, Economies and Cultures

Editors Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (Oslo) Piotr Gorecki (University of California at Riverside) Steve Murdoch (St. Andrews) Cordelia Heß (Greifswald) Anne Pedersen (National Museum of Denmark)

volume 88

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/nw

All the King’s Women Polygyny and Politics in Europe, 900–1250 By

Jan Rüdiger

Translated by

Tim Barnwell

leiden | boston

This volume was originally published as Der König und seine Frauen. Polygynie und politische Kultur in Europa (9.–13. Jahrhundert) by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, 2015. Cover illustration: Detail of ʻDronning Ragnhilds drøm’ by Erik Werenskiold (1855–1938), illustration from Snorre Sturlasön, Kongesagaer, transl. Gustav Storm, Kristiania 1899. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020028864

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1569-1462 ISBN 978-90-04-34951-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-43457-8 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations x Introduction 1 1 Libido and Satyriasis 1 2 Scholarship 6 3 ‘Polygyny’ 9 4 Structure 12 5 ‘Aspects’ of Polygyny 15 6 Objective 17 7 Postscript 2020 20 King Harald Fairhair’s Women: a Word on the Sources 22 1 “…And Then He Took Her to Bed” 22 2 “Concubine or Wife?” 27 3 On Sources 31 4 Scholarship on the Sagas 34 1 The Generative Aspect 42 1 Thorns, Pigs, and Two Dreams 42 2 Royal Blood 47 3 Danish Particularism: Polygyny in the Chronicles 52 4 Practices of the Valdemar Era 61 5 Dissenting Voices: Sven Aggesen and Saxo Grammaticus 65 6 The ‘Generative Aspect’ of Polygyny 74 7 Harald, the All-Father 77 8 The ‘Good’ Bastard King 82 9 The Mill Maid’s Tale 87 10 Suitability 91 11 Co-optative Kinship 93 12 Twofold Legitimacy: Sverrir of Norway 99 13 Married, Crowned, Unsuccessful 102 14 Low-Born and Successful 105 15 Polygyny as a Guarantor of Parity 109 16 Polygyny without Women? 111

vi

Contents

2 The Habitual Aspect 120 1 Models 120 2 Polygyny and Historiography: the Oddaverjar 122 3 A Song of Praise 129 4 “Very Susceptible to Love”: Jón Loptsson’s Women 136 5 A Lovers’ Saga? 141 6 Portrait of a Competitor 146 7 Were There Wives? 152 8 ‘Retrospective Marriage’ 155 9 A Vocable for the Ineffable: Elja 156 10 The Brother-in-Laws’ Confrontation 159 11 What Was at Stake I: Bishop Þorlák 165 12 What Was at Stake II: Jón Loptsson 169 13 Resource Polygyny 174 14 Women and Plunder 175 15 From Canterbury to Camelot 178 3 The Agonistic Aspect 187 1 Snorri Takes a Bath 187 2 Mannjafnað—“Comparison of Men” 188 3 Social Rhetoric: the Contest for Borghild í Dali 192 4 Women in Mannjafnað 195 5 Renegotiating Status Loss I: Saint Olav’s Lover 198 6 The Women’s Agon 202 4 The Expressive Aspect 206 1 Political Relations? 206 2 What Ælfgifu Means 210 3 Polygyny as a Semantic System 213 4 Domestic and Foreign Policy: Harald Hardrada’s Women 214 5 A Successful Takeover: Harald Hardrada and Þóra Þorbergsdóttir (1047) 219 6 The Near-Failure of a Party Formation: Eindriði Einarsson and Sigríð Erlingsdóttir (c.1023) 220 7 An ‘Unproductive’ Communication: Valdemar the Great and Helena Guttormsdatter (c.1200) 225 8 Renegotiating Status Loss II: the Bridal Journey of Óláf Haraldsson (c.1017) 227 9 A Woman in Reserve: the Icelander’s Booty and the Orkney Woman (c.980) 231

Contents

10 11 12 13 14 15

vii

A Family on the Rise: Sigurð Haraldsson’s Woman (c.1150) 232 A New Party: the Daughters of Saxi í Vík (from c.1095) 235 “And He Will Take Your Daughters...”: Magnús the Good and Margrét Þrándsdóttir (c.1040) 241 Danish Encounters 246 The Emperor’s Daughter and the Elbe Frontier: Erik Ejegod and Queen Bothild (c.1100) 251 The Cheese and the Anchor: Harald Hardrada’s Booty (1047) 256

5 The Performative Aspect 263 1 “Castles and Maidens” 263 2 Abishag at the Court of Hákon Hákonarson 264 3 Northern European Hierogamy? 270 4 Hákon Hlaðajarl 272 5 Death in the Pigsty 279 6 Jarl Hákon and His Patron Goddess 283 7 Perpetual Hierogamy 290 6 The Comparative View: Western Europe 295 1 In the Heartland of Medieval Studies 295 2 Scholarship 296 3 Sources 299 4 Figurations of Polygyny: Arthurian Literature 303 5 Strategies of Representation: Under the Spell of Monogamism 306 6 The Invisible Women 311 7 In Comparison: the Generative Aspect 317 8 In Comparison: the Habitual Aspect 319 9 In Comparison: the Agonistic Aspect 323 10 In Comparison: the Expressive Aspect 328 11 In Comparison: the Performative Aspect 331 12 Polygyny as Political Principle: Normandy 333 13 The Spoils of the Conqueror: Rollo and Poppa 338 14 Mother of the Nation: Gunnor 344 15 The Henchman’s Daughter: Herleve 348 7 The Comparative View: Southern Europe 353 1 “Unbearable Heat” 353 2 Concubinage at the Highest Level: James I and Aurembiaix of Urgell (1228) 354

viii 3 4 5 6

Contents

Ornamental Mediterraneanness: Christian Princes and Moorish Maids 363 Iberian Renunciation—Llibre dels Feits and Primera Crónica General (c.1250) 366 Ornamental Europeanness: Polygyny in Andalusia 371 Paritarian Polygyny—Autocratic Abstinence 375

Polygyny and Europe—By Way of a Conclusion 383 Appendix 394 Bibliography 395 Index 448

Acknowledgements This book is the English translation of Der König und seine Frauen. Polygynie und politische Kultur in Europa (9.–13. Jahrhundert), the outcome of the threeyear research project “Aristokratische Polygynie im Hochmittelalter im europäischen Vergleich” financed by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The Foundation granted research trips to Norway, Iceland, and Normandy, and generously supported the printing of the original edition. I would like to thank Professor Michael Borgolte, Chair of Medieval History at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1991 to 2016, for making it possible to carry out my postdoctoral habilitation as a research associate at the Institute for the Comparative History of Europe in the Middle Ages, for many stimulating discussions, and for relentless support. I am thankful to my Berlin colleagues for much advice and encouragement, to the Hilfsassistenten at my Basel Chair, Lynn Zimmermann and Lukas Pfeif­ fer, for their work on the index, to Marcella Mulder at Leiden who patiently nursed this book into existence, and to Tim Barnwell for his arduous translation work. For their advice and help during my years of research, I thank Martin Aurell (Poitiers), Else Mundal and Sverre Bagge (Bergen), and especially Barbara Crawford (St Andrews), who initiated the publication of the book in the ‘Northern World’ series. For their hospitality and enriching conversations, my thanks go to Parish Priest Geir Waage and the Snorrastofa in Reykholt, Suffragan Bishop Sigurður Sigurðarson † at Skálholt, the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Paris and its director Werner Paravicini, and Pierre Baudouin and the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines in Caen. The Nordisk Center for Middelalderstudier granted me and my family two wonderful gæsteforsker­ ophold at the University of Southern Denmark at Odense; my thanks go to all the people in Bøgene and Knoldene, especially to Kurt Villads Jensen (now Stockholm), Lars Bisgaard, Lars Boje Mortensen, and Karen Fogh Rasmussen. My special thanks go to Birgit and Peter Sawyer, who on the strength of a timid email from an unknown post-doctoral researcher invited me to Trondheim and over the following years gave me advice, help, räksmörgås, encouragement, and endlessly engaging conversations. Bibi also wrote the positive review of this manuscript for the Northern World editors. This book is dedicated to their memory. My wife Sabine has always been with me, and our children Jakob and Kathrine have grown up with this book. Tak for turen!

Abbreviations

The Individual Sagas of Heimskringla

Ys HsSv HsH HsG HsGr OsTr OsH MsG HsS OsK MsB Mss MsBHG Hss HsHb MsE

Ynglinga saga Hálfdanar saga svarta Haralds saga hárfagra Hákonar saga góða Haralds saga gráfeldar Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar Óláfs saga helga Magnúss saga góða Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar [=harðráða] Óláfs saga kyrra Magnúss saga berfœtts Magnússona saga Magnúss saga blinda ok Haralds gilla Haraldssona saga Hákonar saga herðibreiðs Magnúss saga Erlingssonar

Other Abbreviations

ANF Arkiv för nordisk Filologi AASS Acta Sanctorum ASC Anglo-Saxon Chronicle col. column DD Diplomatarium Danicum DmA Danmarks middelalderlige Annaler DI Diplomatarium Islandicum DN Diplomatarium Norvegicum EJ Encyclopaedia Judaica EMSc Medieval Scandinavia. An Encyclopedia GND Gesta Normannorum ducum GRA Gesta regum Anglorum HE Historia ecclesiastica HsHs Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar HZ Historische Zeitschrift

Abbreviations

ÍF Íslenzk fornrit KLNM Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder KnS Knýtlinga saga KSs Konungs skuggsjá LdM Lexikon des Mittelalters LThK Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica Mks Morkinskinna NgL Norges gamle Love indtil 1387 (N)HT (Norsk) Historisk Tidsskrift Os Orkneyinga saga PC Bibliographie der Troubadours PL Patrologia Latina RGA Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde S Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters s solidus, shilling s.v. sub verbo s.a. sub anno (S)HT (Svensk) Historisk Tidskrift Skj Finnur Jónsson, Den norsk-islandske Skjaldedigtning SM Scriptores minores historiae StS Sturlunga saga SvS Sverris saga ÞsH Þorláks saga biskups hins helga VSD Vitae sanctorum Danorum ZfG Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft ZhF Zeitschrift für historische Forschung

xi

Introduction 1

Libido and Satyriasis

At the end of the first century a.d., in a (not so) oblique criticism of the mores of the time, Cornelius Tacitus told his Roman readers that, in a faraway country on the northern edge of the world, the barbarian Germani adhered to strict morals and monogamy. For sure, some, particularly the wealthy and powerful, maintained several women. Yet they did this “non libidine sed ob nobilitatem.”1 Tacitus’s epigram contains the question that has guided and motivated the present study: what has polygyny to do with nobility? A millennium and a half later, in another work in which the North was a cipher for golden pasts and a bright future, Montesquieu took up Tacitus’s dictum and traced his lines through subsequent history. For him, it provided an obvious explanation for the political value of Merovingian polygamy. “Ces mariages étaient moins un témoignage d’incontinence qu’un attribut de dignité : c’eût été les blesser dans un endroit bien tendre que de leur faire perdre une telle prérogative.”2 But human progress was relentless, and by Montesquieu’s own times such mores did no more exist, at least in the temperate climates of civility. There were still harems “in lands where you need bars instead of laws,”3 but in Enlightenment Europe the passions had long been so harmonized, love’s access to the heart so cultivated, and the social code so complete “that our wives, reserving themselves for the pleasures of one, contribute to the amusement of all.”4 Another eventful century later, in Norway, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson faced the problem of reconciling the mood of the liberal narrative of progress with the national appeal to his country’s medieval heyday. This was particularly awkward as the end of royal polygyny coincided almost precisely with the end of 1 Germania c. 18: “… exceptis admodum paucis qui, non libidine sed ob nobilitatem, plurimis nuptiis ambiuntur.” Tacitus, of course, hardly creates a reliable picture of the society he ostensibly describes, but rather an “Otherland” which serves to admonish his imperial addressees, too little concerned with nobilitas in their libido for his liking. 2 De l’esprit des lois xviii, 24. 3 De l’esprit des lois xvi 8: “Dans ces pays, au lieu de préceptes, il faut des verrous.” 4 De l’esprit des lois xiii 11: “… nos pays du Nord, où leurs mœurs sont naturellement bonnes ; où toutes leurs passions sont calmes, peu actives, peu raffinées ; où l’amour a sur le cœur un empire si réglé, que la moindre police suffit pour les conduire ? Il est heureux de vivre dans ces climats … où les femmes, se réservant aux plaisirs d’un seul, servent encore à l’amusement de tous.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_002

2

Introduction

Norway’s independence: legitimate primogeniture was formalized as an exclusion criterion for the succession to the throne under Magnús the Law-Mender (r. 1263–80); only half a century later, Norway entered into a dynastic union with Sweden and then Denmark, which in the sixteenth century led to its incorporation into the latter. Like Montesquieu, Bjørnson solved the problem from a developmental perspective: early medieval polygamy turned into later medieval concubinage, and subsequent to further upward steps in the Reformation period and the development of the bourgeois age, mores became so pure that “no one who is not afflicted by satyriasis could wish that everything that has been gained for the health, spirit, and character of mankind as a result of the fact that women now generally follow the law of monogamy, should be abandoned once more by the human will to progress!”5 Besides diction, nothing substantial has changed in assessing polygyny in European history since Montesquieu and Bjørnson. While anthropologists ­discuss the statistical probability of the incidence of polygyny on the basis of variables like climatic zone, forms of cultivation, agricultural technology, and ­“levels of social complexity” and find it to be vastly prevalent in human societies over time and space,6 the distinctive prevalence of monogamy in the EuroMediterranean has become a standard component of histories of Europe and the West and in intercultural comparisons. According to the grand narrative, the continent has been characterized by the ever increasing spread of mon­ ogamy and its social corollaries since late Antiquity, and especially since the Middle Ages. It is perhaps not too bold a claim that monogamy is today regarded as one of the most decisive characteristics of ‘the West.’ Polygynous features, in so far as they are acknowledged at all, come with linguistic markers 5 Bjørnson, Engifte og mangegifte (1912–13), 88f.: “… men tror nogen, som ikke er besat af Satyriasis, at det, som er indvundet for Menneskehedens Helse, Aand og Karakter ved, at Kvinden i stor Almindelighed er blit tro mod Engiftets Lov, skulde Menneskehedens Fremgangsvilje atter opgi?” The lecture was first presented in 1887 in the Grundtvigian Folkehøjskole of Askov in Denmark, and the laureate repeated it several times in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. 6 Cf. White, “Re-Thinking Polygyny” (1988), and Bretschneider, Polygyny (1995), for studies based on the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (sccs) with 186 “societies,” most of them recent or contemporary but including Babylon, Israel in the late monarchic period, the city of Rome under Trajan, and Tenochtitlan at the time of the Spanish conquest. Of these, some 170 practised polygyny, sixteen were censed to be monogamous, and one was polyandrous. Even if we apply a few pinches of salt to both the sccs as a working tool and to individual ­assessments, the overall picture is still impressive enough. In his interpretation, Bretschneider rejects generalizing hypotheses based on variables such as gender-specific divisions of labour and forms of subsistence and calls for specific regional studies with a view to variation.

Introduction

3

such as ‘still,’ ‘yet,’ ‘even to this time’—their time are the Merovingian and perhaps ‘still’ the Carolingian periods; at all later periods they are residual, marginal, peripheral, and above all ‘no longer’ structurally relevant.7 Our own day and age may seem to many, in Bjørnson’s words, “afflicted by satyriasis.” Serial polygyny is much practised and heavily commented upon, with polyandry now on an (almost) equal footing alongside it, and perhaps for the first time in recorded history, society at large is happy to celebrate both, as witnessed in countless pop songs, novels, films, tv serials, sociology reports and newspaper analyses. Yet in most of its cultural representations, satyriasis is at an uncomfortable angle to some other central tenets of cultural self-­ imaging. However easily partners may switch in film, television, and life, for as long as they last, ‘couple’ relationships are supposed to be exclusive, and if they are not (which is often), we readily apply to them a near-feudal vocabulary of loyalty and betrayal. “I’ll be true to you, yes I will,” fidelis ero tibi, is the formula straight out of a twelfth-century charter as sung by the Hollies8 and countless others in a similar vein. Relationships may be flighty but love is forever, and you can only love one partner at a time. ‘Love’ is writ large across Western societies, even (or perhaps especially) at times when marriage as an institution seems to be on its way out, or to change beyond recognition. Over the last few decades, European law has abolished most elements of ‘marriage’ (durability, legal status of progeny, heterosexuality) but the end of monogamy has not so far entered the debate. On the contrary, it seems that the more Western societies are faced with outright polygamy—apparently a common practice in some immigrant communities, providing the public authorities and law courts with interesting challenges—the more they uphold and advocate monogamy, which can lead to intricate dilemmas of ‘political correctness.’9 The very 7 Parte pro toto: Goody, Development (1983); Goody, Geschichte der Familie (2002); Mitterauer, Warum Europa? (2003), Ch. 3; nuanced: Betzig, “Medieval Monogamy” (1995). For concubinage/polygyny before the period under investigation in this study cf. the classic WallaceHadrill, Long-Haired Kings (1962), esp. 185–204; Ewig, “Studien zur merowingischen Dynastie” (1974), 38–44; Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers (1983), 62–79; Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir (1995), 271–77; Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? (2002). 8 Yes I will (words and music by Gerry Goffin and Russ Titelman), 7″ single record Parlophone R5232, released 22 January 1965. 9 In 2004, the higher administrative court of Koblenz ruled in favour of the right to remain of the second wife of an Iraqi; it would be unreasonable to deny only her a resident permit while the first wife could stay (Az.: 10 A 11717/03). On the varying practices of Swedish authorities, see Elin Andersson, “Månggifte godkänns – ibland,” Svenska Dagbladet, 12 August 2007; for a compelling controversy, in which two opinion leaders from a similar emancipatory-­ liberal perspective argue for and against Islamic polygamy respectively, see “Er flerkoneri nogensinde i orden?,” Kristeligt Dagblad, 27 May 2007.

4

Introduction

v­ ehemence with which monogamy is reclaimed as a universal woman’s right— the right to “exclusive sexual intimacy” and to “creating something unique with a partner,” as a Human Rights report advising the Canadian Department of Justice has it—reveals its bipartisan importance as a fundamental element of what constitutes Us vs. Them.10 In this respect we are in complete agreement with Montesquieu and Bjørnson. Like many other identity markers, monogamous marriage—that “unique expression of a private bond and profound love between a couple, and a life dream shared by many in our culture” in the words of a recent New York State court ruling11—is a concept that takes the modern collective mind right back to the Middle Ages. Not only does consensual marriage seem a medieval invention, and quite justly so, but also ‘profound love,’ and indeed ‘the couple.’ The troubadours still warm our hearts, however much they are, in their popular shape, a creation of the nineteenth rather than the twelfth century, and even those who profess to shun the highly-flung ideas of highly-strung knights and damsels and prefer the ordinariness of real-life experience readily attribute to medieval men and women “the profound desire for a harmonious relationship in marriage.”12 So many popular novels and visual narratives echo the sentiment (or vice versa) that we may suspect a fair amount of ‘medievalist’ projection in this matter, as of course in many other, perhaps most subjects of ‘doing’ medieval history. Both the ‘romantic past’ and the ‘dark ages’ versions of medievalism, that is the notions that sublime eternal love beats all odds and that marital oppression and clerical suppression were commonplace, colour general ideas of our medieval ‘heritage’ of love and marriage and our way of coping with our own discursive discrepancies—acceptance and approval of contemporary polygyny/-andry in representation and practice versus acceptance and approval of the ideal of ‘the couple’—by way of discussing medieval history. Our view of the historical pluralities of relations between the sexes—which, under the overpowering impact of the principle of monogamy on Western history, is predicated by the binomy of marriage and concubinage—inevitably gets caught up in this tension. While Tacitus’s correlation of libido and nobili­ tas has not, on the whole, been particularly fruitful in scholarship, another

10

Cook and Kelly, Polygyny (2006), 10; see Rüdiger, “Polygyny and Monogamism” (2020), for a further discussion of monogamy and human rights. 11 Hernandez et al. v. Robles, 794 n.y.s.2d 579 (Sup. Ct., NY County 2005), 609, quoted in Cook and Kelly, Polygyny (2006), 11. 12 Otis-Cour, Lust und Liebe (2000), 187.

Introduction

5

­ ell-known ancient quotation appears to have had far greater influence: the w categorization of Athenian women according to their function as transmitted through Demosthenes.13 Concubinage is, more or less explicitly, ascribed to the sphere of libido, along with all heterosexual forms of relationship except the most solemn in any given situation, which was understood to be normative marriage. The reduction of Demosthenes’s triad to the binomial pair would be of decisive importance for the history of the Middle Ages. For Augustine, it was the difference “between a legitimate marriage, concluded for the purpose of producing children, and a pact of libidinous love.”14 For centuries, councils and canonists repeated Leo I’s injunction “aliud est uxor, aliud concubina,” so that the idea that one could only be either a “friend of marriage” or a “slave to lust”15 ultimately became essential to the Augustinian tradition of thought, which was so important for the literate section of medieval societies and therefore our sources. Concubinage is personal and tends to be reprehensible; marriage is social and tends to be commendable: this dichotomy determines the study of medieval relations between the sexes up to the present day. Without wishing to deny that libido, lust or love can be a major driving force for concubinage, this study proceeds from the following hypothesis: The fact that a substantial number of polygynous relationships are recorded in our sources, sometimes to considerable detail (such as the names of the participants), would seem to suggest that to the observers, the circumstances around such relationships could attain meanings beyond libidinal gratification and were regarded as matters of general interest. What other such ‘meanings’ might these relationships have, considering their number and variety in the sources and therefore in imagination and (probably) practice? What is the place of what Tacitus and Augustine call libido in the relationships of those who caught the public eye? And what, exactly, is libido for medieval elite men and women who knew they caught the public eye?

13

14 15

Demosthenes 59, 122 (“Against Neaira”): “Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines [παλλακαί] for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.” Demosthenes with an English translation, trans. DeWitt (1949). The evident polemical intent of the legal orator has not prevented his classification from largely shaping the perception of women’s life in ancient Athens (see most recently Hartmann, Heirat, Hetärentum und Konkubinat [2002]; for a critique, Davidson, Courtesans [1999], 96ff.)—and mutatis mutandis in the Middle Ages. Confessiones iv 2,2: “quid distaret inter coniugalis placiti modum, quod foederatum esset generandi gratia, et pactum libidinosi amoris.” A council text as an example: Tribur 895 (mgh Capit. 2, Nr. 252) c. 38. Confessiones iv 2,2: xv 25: “non amator coniugii sed libidinis seruus.”

6

Introduction

2 Scholarship Formulated as a paradox of sorts: concubinage has often been discussed, polygyny almost never. This book is concerned with the latter. The former has been a concept of Roman and then canon law and its various receptions since late antiquity, and it has been thoroughly and repeatedly studied over the centuries, first in terms of legal and ecclesiastical history, then from the perspective of social history, usually with reference to and dependent on the institute of marriage.16 However, the focus here is on the precepts of the different legal systems, and therefore to some extent on an ‘institutional’ view of concubinage, whether in terms of inheritance law, moral theology, or public order (the fact that the institution of concubinage is still a concept of the law codes of several European countries has certainly influenced historical research). So there is no shortage of either overviews or in-depth studies of medieval concubinage, particularly from the perspective of ecclesiastical writers, the church fathers, decretists, lawgivers, and judges.17 If this book makes relatively little use of this kind of material, it is because its subject is not the legal category of ‘concubinage’ but polygyny, a social phenomenon. While there are indeed instances of polygyny to which the term concubinatus is relevant—for instance when the term is used by an observer writing in Latin—, the reverse is not ­always true: not all cases of medieval polygyny should necessarily be termed concubinage. A number of attempts have been made in scholarship to move beyond the Roman legal and ecclesiastical term ‘concubinage’ and its Augustinian counterpart in order to get to the heart of the multiplicity of ties. Most famous, perhaps now rather infamous, is the idea that the early Germanic peoples knew a pre-Christian consensual marriage (Friedelehe) freely entered into, and dissolved, by two partners on the basis of personal preference (love). The Friedelehe, developed above all by early 20th-centuy German legal historians, was supposed to be an institute clearly differentiated both from the heavy Muntehe 16

17

Rather than listing a sequence of generally older legal historical titles, I refer to the very useful survey article by Becker, “Nichteheliche Lebensgemeinschaft” (1978), which offers abundant further references, as well as the pertinent keywords in the lexicons (rga, s.v. Kebse; Beischläferin; Nebenfrau; klnm, s.v. slegfred). See also Kottje, “Eherechtliche Bestimmungen” (1990). The definitive overview of Christian sexual teaching in the Middle Ages, in which the relevant evidence on the subject of “concubinage” is collected and discussed, is Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society (1987). Ines Weber, Ein Gesetz für Männer und Frauen. Die frühmittelalterliche Ehe zwischen Religion, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Ostfildern, 2008) was published only after this book had been completed.

Introduction

7

involving whole kin groups, property transfers, and a number of legal consequences, and from inconsequential concubinage. The hypothesis, so obviously prompted by the desire to endow the ‘original,’ pre-Christian Germans and their Germanic cognates with a “sittlich hochstehende” (morally superior) comradeship-like marriage form, has proved surprisingly long-lived in Western scholarship although it was soon criticized and has for long been definitively refuted.18 Meanwhile, research on the role of man–woman relations in medieval lay societies has been informed by an anthropological perspective since at least the 1970s. Proceeding from a concern with fundamental social structures and phenomena such as kinship, generational succession, and the transmission of property and memory, studies spanning the entire Middle Ages and occasionally beyond have brought some fundamental characteristics of Latin European kinship to light.19 These socio-anthropological and socio-biological studies are important for the present study as they help us to understand some essential premises for the phenomena considered here. However, their relevance for a genuinely historical perspective is sometimes limited by their accentuation of the general at the expense of the particular. The same applies to numerous studies of the last two decades which approach the issue from the perspective of women’s or gender history.20 Both the social practice of concubinage and the associated representations have been treated, ­sometimes comprehensively, in terms of “forms of life” and “images” of women (or men) respectively, with a focus sometimes more on the comparison of gender hierarchies across periods than their impact on particular political cultures.21

18

19

20 21

The main proponent of this thesis was Meyer in “Friedelehe und Mutterrecht” (1927) and elsewhere; on the history of research cf. Mikat, Dotierte Ehe (1978), and now Karras, “History of Marriage” (2006). For criticism, cf. in recent times Ebel, Konkubinat (1993); Ebel, “Friedelehe,” in rga 9 (1995), 598–600; Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? (2002). The thesis, considered refuted, appears in several newer, widespread accounts, such as Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest (1983), 41f.; Ennen, Frauen im Mittelalter (31987), 35f.; OtisCour, Lust und Liebe (2000), 120f. and elsewhere, and studies such as Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir (1995), 273. Alongside the titles mentioned above in note 7, mention should be made of Herlihy, M ­ edieval Households (1985), which has influenced numerous subsequent studies. Jörg Wettlaufer has lately presented himself as a proponent of sociobiological interpretations of medieval history; for discussion see below, Chapter 2. On the methodological premises and differences between the two approaches, see the programmatic introduction in Hausen and Wunder, eds, Frauengeschichte – Geschlechtergeschichte (1992), 9–18. The literature on the subject has meanwhile become unmanageable. Instead of an almost arbitrarily expandable list of individual titles, only a few surveys are mentioned here to illustrate the field (while relevant individual studies are discussed in the appropriate

8

Introduction

Nonetheless, the results (and premises) of gender history have played a crucial role for understanding the historicity of gender-related behaviours.22 Many studies in social and political history—even some of those inspired by the history of mentalities or historical anthropology—convey the impression that marriage is a serious matter, but any other form of relations between the sexes is not. The former is the “keystone of the social edifice,” “founding moment and foundation of the family,” “centre of the network of kinship relations” or even “a central life order encompassing all people … a truly total social phenomenon in the sense of Marcel Mauss.”23 Anything else is merely about “attractive young women” and “weak men” who “take concubines in step with their passions” in “fleeting sensual passion without consequences.”24 Even Georges Duby, that maître with a keen eye for all the various manifestations of lay aristocratic mentalité, and a social historian who has repeatedly engaged with the themes of “love” and “marriage,” places little emphasis on concubines in aristocratic society and always discusses them in relation to the most solemnized form of marriage.25 The same is true for research on “literary”26 sources on the topic, the study of high medieval (especially vernacular) epic, poetry, and narrative. Though the essential concern of both “courtly love” and many situations in epic poetry or tales of the merveilleux is the representation place): Klapisch-Zuber, Geschichte der Frauen, vol. 2 (1990/1993); Rossiaud, Dame Venus (1989); Karras, Common Women (1996); Otis-Cour, Lust und Liebe (2000). 22 From the particularly fertile area of the “rereading” of medieval literature, mention might here be made of: Gaunt, Gender and Genre (1995); Huchet, L’amour discourtois (1987), and—less indebted to gender studies than “literary anthropology”—Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies (1983). To my knowledge, there is no study of the phenomenon polygyny/ concubinage in a gender theory perspective. 23 Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest (1983), 19 (see Chapter 6); Goetz, Leben im Mittelalter (1986), 39; Goody, Geschichte der Familie (2002), 89; Borgolte, “Kulturelle Einheit” (2004), 4 (there in the genitive). 24 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society (1987), 297 (“… men of wealth often kept women of inferior social status as concubines, feeling that it was less scandalous and more convenient to retain attractive young women as companions than to marry them”); Firpo, “Concubinas reales” (1986), 338 (concerning the Castilian kings of the 13th/14th centuries): “hombres débiles sujetos a la voluntad de sus madres, sus barraganas o sus privados”; Aurell, Noces du comte (1995), 424, about the Occitan-Catalan 12th century (cf. Chapter 6); Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalter (1973), 70. 25 Cf. Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest (1983), 81: “… show that lawful marriage, in a society widely given to concubinage, was first and foremost a political weapon.” Duby retains a similar view in his last major work, Women of the Twelfth Century (1996), in which he devotes some thirty pages to concubinage. 26 “Literary” insofar as they are today considered primarily the object of literary scholarship. Their “historicity” is as little in question as the “literariness” of texts that are regarded as the domain of historical scholarship.

Introduction

9

of non-marital relationships, this fact is usually either not expanded upon as such, or set against the norm of permanent monogamy (usually understood as the “ecclesiastical model of marriage”), again at the expense of diversity.27 The most far-reaching research to date has been in Scandinavia. In the wake of numerous studies of medieval Iceland from a decidedly historical-anthropological perspective since the 1970s,28 the Icelandic frilla system has now come to be understood with reference to the specific (political) situation as a central element of aristocratic practice and representation.29 These approaches may help to inform a comparative view of other European regions. 3 ‘Polygyny’ This study includes the word ‘polygyny’ in its title and uses it a lot in the text. This requires a definition. ‘Polygyny’ means ‘to have many women.’ A widespread usage of the word is to understand polygyny (the sexual or legal relationship of a man with multiple women) and its counterpart polyandry (the relationship of a woman with multiple men) as two variants of the umbrella term polygamy.30 Poly‘gamy,’ properly speaking, is about multiple sexual 27

28

29

30

The most extreme cases of a rather naive reading (see Liebertz-Grün, ‘Amour courtois’ [1977]) are a thing of the past given recent trends in literary scholarship; cf. for example Gaunt and Kay, eds, Troubadours (1999). Still, even in more recent research, interpretations remain more or less explicitly linked with the patterns that have been widespread since the first major works by Erich Köhler (for instance, Trobadorlyrik [1962]). For a current panorama cf. Rieger, ed., Okzitanistik (2000). A recent study which proceeds from “literary” sources and directly touches the subject of this investigation is Ebel, Konkubinat (1993). Notably by Hastrup, Culture and History (1985); Hastrup, Island of Anthropology (1990); Hastrup, A Place Apart (1998); Byock, Medieval Iceland (1988); Miller, Bloodtaking (1990); see also Turner, “Anthropological Approach” (1971). For the history of research, see the prefatory chapter. Cf. Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, “Makt och kärlek” (1997); Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001); Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt (2000). Bandlien, Å finne den rette (2001) does not go as far; however, the expanded English version, Strategies of Passion. Love and Marriage in Medieval Iceland and Norway (Turnhout, 2005), was not used for this study. Holtan remains within a traditional legal history approach: Holtan, Ekteskap (1996); Holtan, “Frillelevnad” (1997). Peter Gerlitz, “Polygamie,” in LThK 8 (31999), 399f. From an anthropological perspective polygyny is, for example, defined as “for a man to be married to more than one wife simultaneously” (Bretschneider, Polygyny [1995], 11), which, in a transcultural comparative study of as many as 186 past and present societies, immediately entails a serious— albeit unrecognized—problem of definition regarding the word “married,” more serious

10

Introduction

­relationships (γάμος “sexual intercourse”). However, the term ‘polygamy’ is now normally used, not in this ‘narrow’ or ‘original’ sense (for which the term ‘polycoity’ has been coined) but according to the figurative meaning of γάμος as “multiple marriages.” In this sense, ‘polygyny’ would mean ‘for a man to be married to many women,’ which, in a medieval Christian context, would be an impossibility. But marriage, particularly ‘full marriage’ (the matrimonium iustum/legitimum of the juridical texts), is only one form of couple relationship and can exist alongside other forms, and may consequently be considered as a partial aspect of complex polygyny (or polyandry, although this only occurs as a form of representation in medieval Europe in exceptional cases). Moreover, the suitability of the concept of ‘marriage’ is one of the questions to be examined, and thus cannot be part of the premise. Therefore this study avoids the word “polygamy” and instead uses ‘polygyny’ throughout as a descriptive term: to refer to the socially conspicuous circumstance of a man being in a sexual relationship with multiple women. (Polygyny may be ‘serial’/‘successive’ or ‘simultaneous.’ The latter variant, which contradicts canonical positions more sharply, is of greater interest.) I hope the preceding pages have made it obvious why the most common term for non-marital relationships in the Middle Ages, ‘concubine, concubinage’ cannot serve as a descriptive term (as opposed to its narrower usage in the context of the sources that contain it).31 It is defined in relation to and as a deficiency of marriage, and can therefore not be used to describe situations that encompass both—and other—forms.32 Moreover, the concept is inextricably associated with its juridical anchoring in late Roman civil law, canon law, and in the later secular legislation of the Middle Ages, and it loses this specific value when used to label cases that lack this nuance. Finally, I propose no minimum characteristics or duration for a relationship  to be considered polygynous. The only criterion for the inclusion of a

31

32

­perhaps than the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Right’s article 16 on the universality of the “right to marry.” Clunies Ross, “Concubinage” (1985), 3–34, here 6. In a study with a similar subject matter to the present investigation, based on a different approach to the term ‘concubinage,’ Clunies Ross states: “[Polygyny] refers to a situation in which a man is permitted to have more than one wife on a fully legal basis, though it is rare for the several wives to share equal social status. … [Concubinage] is a type of polygyny available to certain groups of men within a community that overall practises monogamy.” The term “polygyny” lacks an agent noun like “concubine” for “concubinage.” Therefore, I make use of terms such as “concubine,” “co-wife” (analogous to the anthropologists’ term) on a case by case basis, and wherever possible the terms used by the particular source or simply “(his) woman,” “one of his women,” etc. As far as possible, the aim is not to interpret the categorial ambiguity of the sources through a modern term.

Introduction

11

­man–woman relationship is its social significance, its being perceived, reported, and recorded; therefore, by definition, every individualized relationship between a man and a woman to be found in a source, even if in extreme cases it might last only a few minutes, is ‘significant’ in the sense of this investigation because it acquired a certain social notoriety and duration. This also means that not every such sexual relationship need ‘actually’ have been sexual (sometimes we simply cannot tell) for it to be socially so. In the new edition of the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, s. v. “Nebenfrau” (‘co-wife’), Hermann Reichert proposes the following definition: “The term Nebenfrau refers to women in polygynous forms of marriage of societies in which the legal system permits a man to simultaneously form, alongside a principal marriage, one or more other bonds of lower legal status or marriages of equal rank. Polygyny therefore differs on the one hand from concubinage, that is, monogamous relationships with less regulation than matrimonium, particularly in divorce and inheritance law (cohabitation), and on the other hand from illegal or shifting short-term sexual relationships during a monogamous marriage.” Reichert goes on to acknowledge that “the extent of true polygyny is uncertain” as neither clerics nor chroniclers “distinguished clearly” between the different types of relationships.33 It may have become clear that the concept of polygyny proposed in this book differs from Reichert’s in all essential respects. I am going to argue that polygyny is not a form of marriage, but marriage can be a form of relationship within overall polygyny;34 concubinage is not a form of relationship, but a perceptual category that can be applied to very different types of bond depending on the context; legal status is irrelevant for the inclusion or exclusion of a case; also “short-term sexual relationships” are taken into account. Different relationships interrelate within a continuum of comparatives such as ‘longer or shorter,’ ‘more or less prestigious,’ ‘associated with higher or lower status,’ but there is no minimum (for we must always reckon with relationships that we know nothing of) and only a relational maximum (a woman is the most eminent at a certain point in time or in a particular situation). Whether the legal historians’ ‘full marriage’ occurs in a certain continuum, and whether it then

33 34

H[ermann] Reichert, “Nebenfrau,” in rga, vol. 11 (2002), 18–31, here 18. Bernhard Jussen, “Scheidung, Konkubinat, Polygynie,” in EdM, vol. 1 (2008), 166f., discusses this position with reference to my habilitation thesis and contrasts it with the view of polygyny advocated by Michael Borgolte, “Kulturelle Einheit” (2004), 4, as an “aspect … of the vast sphere of marriage law and practice.” Borgolte’s essay may have been influenced thematically by the present study, which was taking shape at his institute at that time, but is independent in terms of content (see the reference in ibid., 6f. n. 23).

12

Introduction

defines an absolute maximum (the uxor cannot be more than legitima), is part of the question, not a foregone conclusion. 4 Structure The first and larger part of this book (Chapters 1–5) is a study of polygyny in medieval Northern Europe between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries— or rather, of the narrative constitution of social order based on the representation of polygynous practices in 12th-/13th-century sources that purport to portray the tenth to thirteenth centuries. There is also a prefatory chapter called “A Word on the Sources.” In the original version of this book, which was published in a series of general comparative history of the European Middle Ages, this chapter aimed to introduce German-language readers, in their majority not conversant with Scandinavian history and Old Norse, to the sagas, to problems and tendencies of saga criticism, and other sources available. Scandinavian and Norse studies loom larger in Anglophone medieval studies (I owe my own introduction to them to my teacher, Jo Hunter, at the University of Sheffield), and as this translation now appears in the ‘Northern World’ series, I suppose that much of this chapter is somewhat redundant or may even seem rather ‘first-year’ to its readers. I have reduced it considerably, but not deleted it altogether because it contains some of the justification for my treatment of sources with which, I am sure, many readers of the present edition are much more familiar than the author. So I encourage readers to tackle the prefatory chapter at their own pace, to fast-forward or to skip pages at their own discretion. Chapters 1–5 contain the discussion of the five ‘aspects’ of polygyny by way of case studies drawn from Northern European history. These can become rather detailed at times, and I realize that the reader’s patience may be put to the test in places. I feel, however, that having made some rather sweeping statements on marriage and polygyny in the introduction, I need some indepth discussion of the sources to support those statements with evidence. I can only defend myself by pointing out that what is offered here is just a selection, which is perhaps small comfort. “The North” comprises the Scandinavian peninsula, the southern rims of the North and Baltic Seas, and the North Atlantic islands35 as well as parts of the British Isles. An alternative name for it might be ‘the Viking World,’ but I 35

The discussion on pan-Nordic commonalities and intra-Nordic differences cannot be addressed in more detail here; see the transdisciplinary collective study, Hastrup, ed., Den nordiske verden (1992), and countless other works.

Introduction

13

prefer the more sober geographical denomination, not least because ‘the Vikings,’ whoever they were, would have had good reason to include parts of present-day France, Spain, Russia and Ucraine in ‘their’ world. Given that Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla traces the unification of the Norwegian kingdom back to the Harald Fairhair’s relationship with a frilla (more about this in the prefatory chapter), the subject hardly requires further justification. References to polygyny are found in all relevant testimonies, beginning with Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum. The provisions of the various provincial laws, especially in the area of inheritance law, contain much information about the forms and consequences of heterosexual relationships, though their dependence on the views and interests of the legislators, as well as the fundamental problem of dating specific items and expressions of these laws, whose extant versions date from the late twelfth century or later, place a limit on what they can tell us about how the ‘rich men’ (and wo­ men) practised and above all imagined polygyny. The bulk of the material is found in the West Norse narrative works, the sagas,36 with an emphasis on the kings’ sagas and therefore on Norwegian history. The descriptions of polygynous relationships here are often sufficiently detailed to be analyzed as “thick” moments.37 Besides the sagas, there are the Latin histories, above all Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum,38 as well as the minor histories and annals, hagiography39 and scattered sources, all much used by the prolific Scandinavian and Anglo-American research on Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia. Chapters 6 and 7 contain the two “comparative views” of the West and the South by way of the North. “The West” is represented, grosso modo, by the region around the English Channel: Normandy, “le Grand Anjou,”40 and England. 36 37

38 39 40

For the sources and methodological foundations of this study, see below, “A Word on the Sources.” In the sense of the long since classical “thick description.” Cf. Geertz, “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), 3–30. The justified criticism of the fuzziness of Geertz’s concept of “social semiosis” (cf. Pecora, “Limits of Local Knowledge” [1989]) can be answered with a more careful distinction between significant and less significant events; cf. Hastrup, “Kultur som analytisk begreb” (1998). Cf. Friis-Jensen, Saxo Grammaticus (1981); Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980); SkovgaardPetersen, Da tidernes herre var nær (1987); Santini, Saxo Grammaticus (1992); Riis, Gesta Danorum (2006). Stephens, ed., Ett forn-svenskt legendarium (1847–74); Unger, ed., Heilagra manna søgur (1877); Wolf, ed., Heilagra meyja sǫgur (2003); cf. Gad, Helgener (1971); Carlquist, De forn­ svenska helgonlegenderna (1996). Barthélemy, “Note sur le ‘maritagium’” (1992), 10: besides Anjou in the narrow sense, this term includes the adjoining regions such as Maine, Vendômois, and Western Touraine— i.e. the southern part of the “Western region” of this study.

14

Introduction

The key question is whether the findings of the study on Northern European polygyny can help provide a more comprehensive understanding of the situation in the ‘West’ than is possible on the basis of the material available from the region itself. Beyond the vast Latin historiographical and documentary mater­ ial, the ‘West’ is famed for its vernacular literary production: the faux-Celtic lais, romans more or less characterized by the new behavioural standard of ‘courtly love,’ archaizing epics, and chansons de toile. Here we find questions of polygyny everywhere, in passing or prominently, from the two great imaginary kings, Arthur and Charlemagne,41 to the diverse adventures of the Knights of the Round Table. We encounter women from familiar or seemingly familiar environments—the pucelles of castles and entourages—as well as women who are more or less clearly marked out as otherworldly—the sarrasines and the fées. Unlike in the North, Western European testimonies for polygyny are often short, terse, incidental, and ‘fragmentary’ in the sense that they lack the context that would permit further interpretation. Such at best ‘significant details’42 or even insignificant findings can be combined to form a significant chain of facts, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense,43 so the Western European findings are here considered in light of the investigation of the ‘aspects’ of elite polygyny in Northern Europe. “The South” encompasses the northwest of the Mediterranean Basin, that is, Catalonia and Mediterranean Occitania; in the broader sense, it extends to the entire Iberian Peninsula with occasional glances overseas. The focal point is the Crown of Aragon, a region immediately adjacent to the Muslim-controlled part of the peninsula in constant contact with its trans-Pyrenean neighbours. A particularly striking example of princely concubinage serves as the starting point here: King James I (‘the Conqueror’) and Countess Aurembiaix of Urgell in 1228. In this last chapter, discussion of some generalizing hypotheses takes the place of systematic comparison so as to avoid the tediousness of repetition. It highlights the contrast between an earlier, ‘paritarian,’ aristocratic style with the ‘monarchical’ style chosen and cultivated by James I44 as well as the concept of the “grammar of mentality,”45 the symbolic idiom of the OccitanCatalan aristocracy based on the linguistic and practical polysemy of ‘woman’ and women. Iberian perspectives are on Castile (the story of the “Jewess 41 42 43 44 45

Cf. Boutet, “Bâtardise et sexualité” (1992). Cf. Ginzburg, Spurensicherungen (1988). Cf. Bourdieu, Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen (1974), 14. Cf. Rüdiger, “Mit Worten gestikulieren” (2000); Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001); Rüdiger, “Herrschaft und Stil” (2005). On the concept, see Rüdiger, “Das Morphem Frau” (2000); Rüdiger, “Orchards of Power” (2019).

Introduction

15

of Toledo,” probably the most well-known, though apocryphal, case of royal concubinage in the Middle Ages, does not fall into the period under investigation) and the polygynous practices of the aristocracy in al-Andalus, based on different religious and legal foundations but shaped by similar political contingencies. My discussions of the West and the South make no claim to comprehensiveness, as any reader familiar with English, French, or Spanish history will soon realize. Rather, they aim to suggest paths of further investigation drawn from the discussion of the North. The history of the Mediterranean, so rich and multifaceted, can here only be addressed through brief pointers. It must also largely do without Byzantium, which is unforgiveable for a work of European history. The ‘Byzantine Gaze’ does form the point of departure of the conclusion, which is small consolation. 5

‘Aspects’ of Polygyny

The hypothesis of this study is that, under certain circumstances, polygynous relationships can acquire socio-semantic meanings. What are the meanings, the ‘uses’ of polygyny? If we assume that these relationships were not (merely) a matter of powerful men experiencing a ‘moment of passion’ but that men and women with them (also) practised what we call, with a certain embarrassment, ‘politics’—then it might be a good idea to investigate these uses. To do so, I name five ‘aspects.’ The generative aspect (Chapter 1) is the increased likelihood of producing socially acceptable heirs, to whom material and immaterial succession can be transferred. Social anthropologists such as Jack Goody and many others46 have focused above all on this aspect. Goody emphasizes the radical changes brought about by the church’s teachings since late antiquity, which reached their most intense form at the beginning of the study’s focal point: endogamy (“incest”), adoption, sororal marriage, and concubinage were curtailed or permanently eliminated. Traces of these conflicts can be found in all regions under consideration; the focus will be on Norway and Denmark. That polygynous practices should offer great potential for the stylization of masculinity is all too immediately apparent to us.47 Indeed, we tend to take 46 See above, note 7. 47 Henry iii of Guelders, prince-bishop of Liège (s. 1247–85), boasted of fathering 14 children in 22 months (Fabritius, Geschichte des Hochstifts Lüttich (1792), 115, following the 17th-century chronicle of Servais Foullon, abbot of Sint-Truiden)—according to his opponents, who sought his deposition at the Council of Lyons.

16

Introduction

this for granted, without stopping to ask why or in what way polygyny can serve to increase status, and whose status is at issue. Lying in bed between two women, the Icelandic magnate Þorvald Snorrason acquires status in a different manner to Robert of Arbrissel or the insular saints Aldhelm and Scothíne in the same situation.48 It is therefore necessary to examine the habitus of individual aristocratic milieus in order to understand the operating principles of this habitual aspect (Chapter 2). Related to it is the agonistic aspect (Chapter 3), which works both gender ways: in the competition of several men over one woman, or one man’s agonistic choice from a group of women. Both deal with the Tacitean “non libidine sed ob nobilitatem” in their own way. The expressive aspect (Chapter 4), which has, to my knowledge, not previously been discussed as such, is particularly dependent on specific circumstances, on time, place, and participants. When a powerful man forms a relationship with one or more women in a way that is sufficiently conspicuous to be registered and commented upon, the participants—the man, the woman (or women), and their kinship and friendship groups—can make a number of statements. What is uncontested for ‘marriage’ (“marriage politics”) can equally apply to other relationships, even more so given the various situations and possibilities offered by plural bonds. This is about the ‘social semantics’ of polygyny. In the last aspect described here, called somewhat hesitantly the performative aspect (Chapter 5), “libido” and “nobilitas” meet again. In the literary imagination and (by all accounts) in concrete practice, the acquisition of land, possessions, and lordship often goes hand in hand with the acquisition of women with a particular relationship to the land, possession, or lordship in question. From raids on Anglo-Saxon nunneries to the beles sarrasines whom, according to the crusade epics, the victorious milites Christi took lor delis in,49 this motif runs throughout the European Middle Ages. In this context, it is also important to consider the possibilities offered by the practice of enslavement for converting a hypergynous situation into a hypogynous one.50 But symbolic appropriation also assumes less immediate forms, and in this mediatization,

48

49 50

On Þorvald Snorrason, see Chapter 2. On Robert of Arbrissel, see Dalarun, Erotik und Ent­ haltsamkeit (1987); on Aldhelm and Scothíne (and Western spiritual, ascetic marriage in general), cf. Reynolds, “Virgines subintroductae” (1968); Herbert, “Legend of St Scothíne” (2000–01). Chanson d’Antioche, v. 6413; see Chapter 5. On medieval slavery in general, see Verlinden, L’esclavage (1977); on the regions: Verlinden, Slavenhandel en economische ontwikkeling (1979); Heers, Esclaves et domestiques (1981); Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading” (1981); Karras, “Concubinage and Slavery” (1990), 141–62; Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei auf Island (1978); Iversen, Trelldommen (1997).

Introduction

17

examined by Jacques Le Goff among others,51 the woman cannot only signify but also in a certain sense be the land, the city, the spoils in their entirety. Here we are venturing into the realm of mentalités collectives with sources only giving very oblique hints, so we are well advised to move with caution and only draw conclusions by analogy with care. This aspect is discussed by way of a Norwegian case from the conversion period (around 1000). 6 Objective It might be a good idea to state what this study does not aim to be. It is not a history of women who lived in polygynous relationships. It is not they, their experiences, and lifeworlds that take centre stage. Much as we should like to get close to the individual experiences of the women concerned, it is only rarely that we get a glimpse of their lives and minds, and though that is true of medieval men too—we know a lot more about very many eighteenth-century women than about any medieval man—the women all but fade into intangibility. This is why this book, like other works on medieval history, has an inevitable male bias which can only to a limited extent be redressed by historiographical reflection. I am certain that women were as much actively involved in the socio-political games this study deals with as ‘their’ men, but I am very hard pressed to show it. So this book is less about women, men, and their relationships than about the way these relationships impinged on the society around them, ‘made a difference.’ This study is not about concubinage, or whatever name we might choose to attribute to the legal and social institution. Firstly, its focus is on ‘political culture,’ that is, on the groups that are today called ‘elites,’ although probably only their most stalwart propagandists would claim (as Ramon Llull did)52 that elites actually came into their positions through any kind of “election,” as the etymology would suggest. Polygynous and/or non-marital relationships among the vast majority of men and women therefore do not play a role in this book. Secondly, its premise is the doubt about the idea that extramarital—and by extension, marital—relations are ‘institutions’ that can be grasped in terms of legal history or the deductive models of social history. Insofar as the assessment of the mere existence of polygynous relationships remains outside its 51 52

Le Goff, “Krieger und erobernde Bürger” (1990); cf. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens (1991); Gravdal, “Chrétien de Troyes” (1992). Ramon Llull, Llibre de l’Orde de Cavalleria c. 1, on the etiology of chivalry as a meritocratic selection procedure in primitive society.

18

Introduction

scope, neither is it a social history of the aristocracy. Instead, it takes a good deal of its inspiration from Jacques Le Goff’s programmatic remark—still relevant half a century later—about the “new political history,” the call for a “political anthropology” of the Middle Ages, and the suggestion that “particular attention would be paid to the study of the various semiological systems belonging to the science of politics: vocabulary, rites, behavior, mental attitudes.”53 Aristocratic polygyny is here understood as one such system, and approached in its diversity beyond monistic explanations of pleasure and love, power and status. The study is conceived as a contribution to European history, but considers only three larger regions of the medieval West. This is not done with the (usually deceptive) expectation that the particular will somehow turn into the general. On the contrary, as Árpád von Klimó urged in 2005, “in the future, European history should be written by way of the precise and comprehensive analysis and presentations of some few problems, without any claim to completeness.”54 So this is a history of elite polygyny in the medieval West but not of ‘Elite Polygyny of the Medieval West.’ As I will argue in the conclusion, the medieval West has had its fair share of ‘centring’ these last twenty (or perhaps two hundred?) years, so it might not be amiss to try, in Hans Medick’s words, a “decentring comparison” which “does not brush aside individual ­cases, but always uses them as a reference point from which to ask the question of the similarities, commonalities, and differences of historical phenomena and their explanation.”55 The study is also ‘decentring’ in another sense. Two of the three main regions under discussion are on what is commonly considered the periphery of Latin Europe. The North, central to this study, belongs to “younger Europe” (J. Kłoczowski),56 the medieval expansion zone of Latin Christendom. The northwestern Mediterranean arc, a strongly Romanized zone of early Christian penetration, does not at first glance resemble the expansion zones of the North, but during the period covered here, this region on the ‘frontier’ of Dar al-Islām was also a zone in which Latinity was on the retreat and certain 53 54 55

Le Goff, “Is Politics still the Backbone” (1971), 11f. Von Klimó, Review of Mythen der Nationen (2005). Medick, “Entlegene Geschichte?” (1992), 174 and 176; the plea was included—in both ­cases with reference to Natalie Zemon Davis—in the editorial of the first issue of Historische Anthropologie (1, 1993, 4). Cf. Emeliantseva, “Historischer Vergleich” (2005). 56 Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa (1998). For Scandinavian historiographical debate, see Ingesman and Poulsen, eds., Danmark og Europa (2000); Ingesman and Lindkvist, “Norden och Europa” (2001); Staecker, ed., European Frontier (2004); Blomkvist, Discovery of the Baltic (2005).

Introduction

19

i­mpulses from the integrating centres, be they in Frankland or beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, created a lot of uneasiness. By contrast, the lands around the English Channel are clearly at the centre if not the centre of ‘the medieval West’ or ‘Latin Europe.’ This means, among other things, that literary Latin almost completely dominated the production of written sources available to us. Only towards the end of the period did a sectional vernacular literacy develop, but this happened arguably within a framework laid out by Latin genres, stylistics, and ideas of literary propriety. Frankland was, and remained, ‘Latin.’ Things were different on or beyond some of the fringes of (post-) Carolingia: in England before 1066, in Wales and Ireland, in Norway and Iceland, in Occitania and, mutatis mutandis, in the Iberian Peninsula. And the non-Latin written languages of Latin Europe are by no means makeshift attempts at the closest approximation a semiliterate population could muster to an encounter with the true yet only crudely understood grammatica, but an enormous additional cultural endeavour, in which solid Latin foundations were creatively applied to a linguistic situation for which they were not created. The mere existence of a relevant corpus of sources in a ‘vernacular’ (actually an alternative high-level language) already testifies to the desire of the particular culture to distance itself from the Frankish core of the continent which had so pronouncedly opted for Latin literacy alone. This is not necessarily a confrontational distancing; but it is a reflexive one.57 A study whose fundamental methodological concern is to set, against the uniformity of concubinatus suggested by Latin sources, the diversity of the practised and imagined varieties of European magnate polygyny, its frillur, soignants, amasias, and barraganas (with a glance at the ğawāri), will do well to consider the non-Latin testimonies of ‘Latin Europe.’ This study is predominantly concerned with narrative sources. The objective pursued is to make the individual case and its contextualization the ­starting point of any interpretation. While documentary sources on polygyny in the High Middle Ages are few and far between, this study also makes comparatively little use of the numerous available legal sources. On the one hand, this is because most previous studies on the theme of marriage/concubinage focus on legal and prescriptive material and I should like to try a different ­approach here. On the other hand, significant individual cases tend to be found in narrative sources, and generalization in tracts, legal books, and council

57

For further discussion, see Rüdiger, Did Charlemagne know (2011); Rüdiger and Foerster, “Aemulatio – Recusatio” (2014).

20

Introduction

­decrees.58 The latter tells us more about the pan-European; with luck, the former reveals things that appear quite different in Norway in the twelfth century than in France in the eleventh. Some of these sources have thus been little used in scholarly discussion, so introducing them here may also be useful in that respect. If the results of this study differ from other positions, this is probably due in no small part to the selection of sources.59 It does not deny the validity of earlier, diverging results; at most it raises the question of whether and to what extent seemingly contradictory findings are due to the difference in approach, or whether it might be indicated to modify some or other generalizing conception after all. The floor, as they say, is open. 7

Postscript 2020

I am glad to see Der König und seine Frauen published in English, and in the ‘Northern World’ series too. In a way it belongs here, since it now sides with many other studies of medieval Scandinavia and Northwestern Europe. In its 2015 German first edition, it was perhaps something of a loner. The translation process has not been a straightforward one. Readers will notice that this book bears the indelible imprint of Academic German (a quaint sociolect). This has to do with the genesis of the book. It started life as the habilitation thesis I submitted to the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in September 2006. Due to an eventful career, undertaking the revisions necessary to turn a Habilitationsschrift into a readable book was a drawn-out process. The book was finally published in November 2015. It was about time too. Meanwhile, the editors of the ‘Northern World’ series at Brill had accepted to publish an English version of the book. I am profoundly grateful to the series editors then and now as well as the staff at Brill who have made it happen. Tim Barnwell provided a faithful translation of the original. Reading it, it really came home to me how far apart the two academic languages are; the book seemed even to have become more ‘German’ in translation. So I undertook a revision. Two revisions really: one was syntactical and grammatical, chopping up hypotaxes and deleting phrase-initial subclauses by the dozen; the other 58 59

This generalizing distinction is, of course, of questionable validity (for the ‘narrative’ character of legal sources, see the following chapter). While individual cases abound in legal records, those are rare or non-existent for the period under discussion. In this sense, I would like to invoke a dictum of the Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup, who states in Culture and History (1985), 7: “I claim that my story tells the truth; and if this is not the whole truth, then it is at least one whole truth, about the early history of Iceland.”

Introduction

21

was stylistic, smoothing down what is perfectly acceptable in German but sounds intolerably heavy-going in English. No doubt a number of new mistakes of all kinds have crept into the text in the process, mistakes for which Tim Barnwell must not be held accountable. I hope the result is palatable for English readers. The book has not been revised or updated as to its content, and neither have the apparatus and bibliography, accounting as they do for the material I used when I wrote it more than a decade ago. I have only added references to some of my own more recent publications which develop further some of the points discussed here. Of course, there have been important new scholarly publications on all of the quite disparate topics touched upon in this book. To include them would have meant to rewrite it. I do hope that even in its original form,60 its essential points are still relevant (reviews will undoubtedly let me know if I am wrong). Norse personal names are usually given in standardized spelling based on Íslenzk fornrit usage but without the nominative ending if it makes the name look all too unfamiliar (Óláf not ‘Óláfr’). For places, unless there is an English convention I use modern names, preferring regional over nation-state forms. Unless otherwise stated, translations from sources or secondary literature are by the author. 60

This is also the form referred to in some recent Anglophone scholarship such as d’Avray, Papacy, Monarchy, and Marriage (2015); McDougall, Royal Bastards (2017); van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages (2019).

King Harald Fairhair’s Women: a Word on the Sources 1 “…And Then He Took Her to Bed” This is a story told in thirteenth-century Norway about a ninth-century king: King Harald sent his men to fetch a girl whose name was Gyða, daughter of King Eirík of Hǫrðaland—she was being fostered in Valdres with a rich farmer—whom he wished to take as his frilla, since she was a very beautiful girl and rather proud. But when the messengers got there, they delivered their message to the girl. She replied in the following manner, that she is not willing to sacrifice her virginity in order to take as her husband a king who had no more of a realm than a few districts to administer. “But it seems strange to me,” she says, “that there is no king who wants to take possession of Norway so as to be sole ruler over it, as King Gorm has in Denmark or Eirík at Uppsalir.” The messengers thought she was replying astonishingly haughtily, and put the question to her, what good this reply can do, saying that Harald is such a powerful king, that he can do as he pleases in this. But although she is responding to their mission otherwise than they would wish, they see no alternative to carrying her off, unless she would agree to it, and they prepare to depart. And when they are ready, people came to see them off. Then Gyða spoke to the messengers, told them to take this message to King Harald, that she will only agree to being his if he will first do this for her sake, subject the whole of Norway to himself and rule that realm as independently as King Eirík rules the realm of the Svíar or King Gorm Denmark. “For then it seems to me,” she says, “that he can be called a sovereign king.” The messengers now go back to King Harald and tell him these words of the girl, and say they think that she is remarkably bold and silly, and they think it fitting that the king should send a great army to fetch her in disgrace. Then King Harald replies that this girl had not said or done anything wrong, so as to merit punishment, saying she should be heartily thanked for what she had said. “She has drawn my attention to things,” he says, “which it now seems to me strange that I have not considered before.” And he went on: “I make this vow and I call to witness the god who created me and governs all things, that my hair shall never be cut or © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_003

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23

combed until I have gained the whole of Norway with its taxes and dues and government or die in the attempt.”1 This tale opens the saga of Harald Fairhair (Haralds saga ins hárfagra) in Heims­kringla, the history of the Norwegian kings, composed in the years around 1230 by the Icelandic magnate Snorri Sturluson. It comprises the third and fourth chapters of the 43 chapters of Harald’s saga. The preceding two chapters report how the ten-year-old Harald succeeded his father, the south Norwegian petty king Hálfdan the Black, just after the middle of the ninth century, and how he gradually expanded his sphere of control at the expense of neighbouring petty kings with the help of his maternal uncle. All this is still confined to the area around Harald’s local base; there is no mention of any ambition to rule “the whole of Norway” on Harald’s part. His failed attempt to gain a Westland girl is therefore a turning point in Norwegian history. It marks nothing less than the beginning of rikssamling, “the unification of the kingdom”: the start of the history of Norway. Over the following chapters of the saga, both Harald’s hair and the number of petty kingdoms subjected to him continue to grow. Finally, it comes down to the decisive battle at Hafsfjord near Stavanger in southwestern Norway, traditionally if uncertainly dated to 872. Only then does the king allow his hair to be cut, and subsequently goes down in history as Haraldr inn hárfagri, Harald the fair-haired. And he also brings another story to an end: King Harald had now become sole ruler of all Norway. Then he called to mind what that proud girl had said to him. He then sent men for her and had her brought to him and lay with her. These were their children: Álof was eldest, then was Hroerek, then Sigtrygg, Fróði and Þorgils.2 The young Norwegian nation, whose ʻre-ʼemergence after its secession from the Danish Crown in 1814 coincided so well with the advent of modern historiography, has made Snorri’s splendid narrative its own to a degree that is 1 HsH c. 3–4; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 55–56. The basic textual criticism remains Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, “Formáli,” in Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, vol. 1 (1941), lviii-lxxxi; a good introduction with further references is offered by Whaley, Heimskringla (1991); on its compilation, see also Louis-Jensen, “Heimskringla – et værk” (1997); on parallel sources, Kreutzer, “Bild Harald Schönhaars” (1994). If in the following I call the author of Heimskringla “Snorri” this is not meant to reflect on Jonna Louis-Jensen’s (and others’) doubts concerning his authorship; let us say, slightly disingeniously, that I use “Snorri” as shorthand for “the author(s) and/or compilators of Heimskringla.” 2 HsH c. 20; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 68.

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­ robably unparalleled in Europe. Even today, almost a century after the onset p of serious source criticism of the sagas in general and Heimskringla in particular, Snorri’s Book of Kings remains the first recourse when it comes to historical myths of medieval Norway.3 His compelling narrative has survived scholarly examination almost unscathed—or rather, professional historical knowledge based on a century of source criticism4 coexists with Snorri’s unscathed narrative in the sense that in the 21st century both are ‘true’ in a complementary, non-competitive way. As unifier of the kingdom, Harald rests under a ‘Viking’ memorial site of burial mounds and memorial stones near his royal court at Avaldsnes in the Westland, precisely the region which first caught his attention through his interest in Gyða, and whose conquest at the Battle of Hafsfjord has been regarded the keystone of the unification of the realm ever since Snorri. Harald Fairhair will always be the first king of Norway. It is therefore astonishing that Gyða Eiríksdóttir, the girl who gave Harald Fairhair the idea of uniting Norway, has not been chosen to be a heroine at his side by modern national history. She has not become a Queen Clotilde, a Thyra Danebod, or Libuše, and this is certainly not because the source base is shakier here. Causes of different sort must lie behind the refusal to grant young Gyða the transformation into a historical fact, a transformation granted to King Harald, his parents, and many other people in Haralds saga hárfagra. Instead, the patriotic national histories of the nineteenth century, which by and large retell the political history of the 10th–13th centuries by paraphrasing Heims­ kringla or a few other similar saga texts, in unison relegated the Gyða story to the realm of fiction. In his History of the Norwegian People, which reads much like a book of folk tales, Peter Andreas Munch, retelling the episode in detail, judges that it “has too romantic a character to be trusted.” One element only, Harald’s vow not to shave his hair before he reaches his goal, is, according to

3 Beginning with the Stiklestad festivals on St. Olav’s Day (29 July), held for the first time in 1954 and annually since 1961, a culture of summer open-air festivals has developed throughout Norway, which usually feature the performance of an episode from Heimskringla, dramatized and/or set to music. The significance of these festivals for the decentralized cultural landscape of Norway is considerably greater than comparable events in other European countries, and transcends the ‘event/tourism sector,’ as reflected, for instance, in the participation of the regional symphony orchestras and distinguished stage actors. See Stene, ed., Slag i slag (1995). 4 Among the more recent handbooks to be mentioned are the relevant volumes (2 and 3) of Aschehougs Norgeshistorie: Krag, Vikingtid og rikssamling (1995) and Helle, Under kirke og kongemakt (1995); from Samlaget’s Norsk historie: Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Norsk historie (1999); Krag, Norges historie (2000). They reflect the source-studies problematization discussed below.

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25

Munch, “perfect historical truth.”5 Similar distinctions between the ‘more’ and the ‘less reliable’ parts of Snorri’s history of kings, the latter always including the Gyða episode, also characterize the History of Norway, Described for the Norwegian People by the prominent textual critic Alexander Bugge (Gyða as legendary material) and the Life and History of the Norwegian People through the Ages by Haakon Shetelig (Gyða “means no more than the dreams in Half­ dan svartes saga”).6 However, even as a romantic myth, Gyða remained a pivotal figure. As a result of the great dissemination of Heimskringla, actively promoted by the state through educational and financial measures, she is, or used to be, known to practically every Norwegian. Once declared to be a ‘legend’ by professional historians, the story of the princess could be retold at will. For one, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the most venerated poet of the country, adopted the motif in his “commemorative speech on Harald Fairhair” on the occasion of a “feast to commemorate the fathers” at the student association of the University of Christiania in 1870: Imbued with the dreams of the father and mother, imbued with the myth of the whole line, he stretches out his hand to bright Gyda of the Northland spirit, its revelation; and he receives her lofty response: win me! The idea of the time shone around her head, the young warrior saw his life goal—and when it was achieved, there was also her endless love! The Northland spirit is strict, it imposes strict terms; but it can be won, it loves endlessly, it has loved Harald and his line endlessly.7 There is a considerable gap between Bjørnson’s ethereal Gyða, “revelation of the Northland spirit,” and Snorri’s Westland princess whom Harald wanted as a bedfellow. An all too literal reading of the passage was rather undesirable in the decades around 1900: it would simply not do to suggest that the venerated first “rikssamler” had been a young lecher. This made translating the original Norse text of Heimskringla into modern Norwegian difficult. Certain translators seem to have felt the need to tone down the original. For example, Didrik Arup Seip and Anne Holtsmark, two Norse scholars whose knowledge of the source language is beyond all doubt, saw fit to render the coarse phrase “ok lagði hana hjá sér” (“and laid her by his side”) as “og giftet seg med henne” (“and

5 Munch, Det norske folks historie vol. 1,1 (1852), 464f. For Munch, the latter detail appears to go with the practice of agonistic vow taking (heitstrenging); cf. Chapter 3. 6 Those which assured Harald’s mother of the future greatness of the royal line; see Chapter 1. 7 Bjørnson, Artikler og taler, vol. 1 (1912), 336.

26

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married her”)—in a translation first published in 1959 and repeatedly reprinted to this day.8 The uneasiness around the Gyða figure, the readiness to freely dismiss her as historically unsupported, as well as the obvious philological liberties that have been taken with her over time, all are focused on one word, the one that disqualified Gyða once and for all as a national ancestor: she was a frilla. The word is a medieval term often used in narrative and legal sources (var. friðla); it has a rare masculine counterpart friðill and belongs to the semantic field frið-, the sphere of “peace, friendship, alliance.” Middle High German has a frequent feminine equivalent, friedel.9 While the revival of the German term essentially failed in the nineteenth century, frille/-a became common again in modern Scandinavian and acquired a connotation of moral dubiousness which the bourgeois interpreters of the Middle Ages had to deal with. The mere fact that the first king to unify Norway obviously practised polygyny needed to be explained away somehow. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, lecturing on the subject of “monogamy and polygamy,” dealt with the problem in the following manner: Even in Harald Fairhair’s day powerful men could have several wives of equal status. After this came to an end, we find the son of a frille competing for the throne on equal terms with the son of a wife. Then this, too, became impossible; yet still in the sixteenth, even seventeenth centuries, we come across hosts, even pastors, who were not averse to lending their daughters to a travelling king or other great man. Then this, too, became impossible … but the customs in the last [the 18th] century and even the first years of our own [the 19th] century still permitted much, which would today [1887] throw society into turmoil. The progress is obvious.10 In this view, polygyny becomes an indicator of moral progress both in time and in space. Bjørnson compares Europe with backward cultures such as the USA and the Islamic world, which he views in terms of their slavery, which 8

9 10

Snorres kongesagaer (51998), 61; corresponding with Hagen/Joys, Vårt folks historie, vol. 1 (1962), 336. Likewise the translations of Schjøtt/Magerøy, Snorres kongesoger (1979), vol. 1, 61: “gifta seg med henne”; Johansen, Snorre (2002), 17: “de giftet seg.” The recent English translation by Finlay and Foulkes quoted above has “and lay with her.” For an important earlier medieval example, cf. Gregory of Tours, Historiae iii, 22: “suoque eam copulavit stratu.” Most famously perhaps in Walther von der Vogelweide’s song Under der linden, Cf. Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 150ff. Bjørnson, “Engifte og mangegifte” (lecture, first given in 1887), 88; reference has already been made to this lecture in the Introduction.

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“­inevitably” entails polygyny (“it is needless to discuss which society has come further, theirs or ours”). Within the liberal progressist narrative, the Middle Ages, especially their earlier, ‘darker’ part, become a necessary Other;11 but through this alterity it also receives its own dignity. What was permissible for a pre-Christian ‘noble pagan’ like Harald Fairhair was no longer possible in the Christian Middle Ages; but then the greatest kings of the Norwegian ‘time of greatness’ (storhetstid), Sverrir (r. 1177–1202) and Hákon iv (r. 1217–63), were sons of frillur, and even Saint Olav (r. 1015–28/30), the missionary king who completed the unification of the realm and whose cult was developed in Lutheran Norway to become a state-supporting historical myth,12 left Magnus, his son with a frilla, as heir to the throne. So even this virtually semi-polygynous stage could not easily be explained away in the national civilization process. The promiscuity of the powerful, which Bjørnson carefully placed within ­Norway’s “Danish period” (dansketiden 1537–1814), is thus fitted twice over into a narrative with a positive tendency which leads right up to the present and future. 2

“Concubine or Wife?”

Meanwhile, it still was expedient to translate Harald Fairhair’s relationship with Gyða Eiríksdóttir into a ‘marriage’ at least to some reading audiences. The fact that Gyða was not Harald’s only woman, however, could not be glossed over by either Snorri or his modern translators. Immediately following the passage quoted above, in which the king “lay with” (translated as “married”) Gyða, Snorri lists their four children and goes on to say: “King Harald had many wives and many children” (Haraldr konungr átti margar konur ok mǫrg bǫrn). Besides Gyða, he “obtained a woman called Ragnhild, daughter of King Eirík of Jutland” (hann fekk þeirar konu, er Ragnhildr hét, dóttir Eiríks konungs af Jótlandi). Besides, Harald “also had” (enn átti hann…) two further women, daughters of inland petty kings. So far, things still might be taken to point at simultaneous polygyny, and therefore to be just on the inside of the borderline of decency. But then Snorri goes on to claim: 11 12

See Oexle, “Das entzweite Mittelalter” (1992), and specifically on the current situation in Scandinavia, Münster-Swendsen, “Moderniteten i middelalderen” (2003). The opening up of the state church to new forms of the ‘cult’ of Olav, whose reactivation had initially faced rural/liberal opposition within the union with Sweden, began hesitantly at the start of the twentieth century and reached its highpoint in the anniversary celebration in 1930. Cf. Kolsrud, ed., Nidaros og Stiklestad (1937); Imsen, ed., Ecclesia Ni­ drosiensis (2003).

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They say that when King Harald obtained Ragnhild ríka he put away his nine wives [or: nine of his wives]. Hornklofi [Þórbjǫrn ‘Horn-Cleaver,’ a contemporary skald] alludes to this: Hafnaði Holmrýgjum ok Hǫrða meyjum, hverri enni heinversku ok Hǫlga ættar konungr enn kynstóri, es tók konuna dǫnsku.

He would not have Hólmrygir or Hǫrðar women, any from Heiðmǫrk or Hǫlgi’s kindred, when the king of high birth chose a Danish bride.13

What the skald is suggesting is a kind of harem of young women (meyjar) from all parts of Harald’s sphere of influence, including Rogaland and Hordaland on the west coast, eastern inland Hedmark, and the North beyond the Polar Circle. At this stage, we are not concerned with the political resonances of this catalogue (“Hǫlgi’s kindred” will be discussed in Chapter 5) but only with the suggestion that Harald had been maintaining a kind of polygynous household of representatives whose uneasy balance was upset the moment he reached out for a woman with a really important father. The emphasis on Ragnhild’s epithet in ríka “the Mighty” suggests a good reason to discard the Norwegian women: Abandoning intra-Norwegian polygyny in an attempt to establish familial ties with the powerful Danish royal family14 is a step forward for Harald. It comes at a cost, though Hornklofi does not spell out the reason why Harald “abandons” all the others in favour of Ragnhild. To the modern mind, the reason was obvious: Harald was climbing one step up towards civilization. Theodor ­Fontane, in his nineteenth-century ballad Harald Harfager, romanticizes Ragnhild’s answer to Harald’s proposal: “King Harald is Lord over Norway, over Norway’s women too / But your custom in Drammen is not the 13

14

HsH c. 21, stanza 47: Svá segja menn, at þá er Haraldr knungr fekk Ragnhildar ríku, at hann léti þá af níu konum sínum. Þess getr Hornklofi: (…); Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 69, though I replace their ‘married’ with ‘obtained.’ A prose translation of the verse might read: “The king of famous kin forsook the girls from the skerries of Rogaland and those of Hordaland, all those from Hedmark and Hålogaland [present-day Nord­ land fylke] too, when he took the Danish woman.” The verb hafna “give up, discard, turn away from” is also used in contexts of conversion or apostasy, so “forsake” is not too heavy a rendering. We do not know whether a King Eirík existed in Jutland, but given the lack of sources this is not sufficient to argue that he did not; see Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, “Formáli,” in Heims­ kringla, vol. 1 (1941), 118 note 2. Within the frame of the stanza discussed here, he exists.

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custom in Roskilde.”15 And of course, at the end she “has his whole heart.” The ninth-century skald is less explicit but makes it clear that Ragnhild, the Jutish princess, is in a position to demand terms which put her at a distance from the king’s previous women, as other prized brides have before her.16 However, this distance is relational rather than conceptual. Neither the ninth-century Hornklofi nor the thirteenth-century Snorri have a vocabulary to mark the difference. It is all about “having” or “getting” women, but not about “marrying” them (or not).17 How, then, does the relationship between Harald Fairhair and Gyða Eiríksdóttir fit into this background? Terminologically, it is seemingly ambiguous: Harald wishes to make Gyða his frilla (vildi taka til frillu sér), while in her reply to Harald’s messengers Gyða talks of the conditions under which she would be willing to consent to become his “own-woman” (játa at gerask eiginkona hans). The term eiginkona is related to the expression eiga konu “to have a wife/woman” used by Snorri in the story quoted above, and in modern scholarship it is frequently taken to signify formal marriage.18 But this is precisely not the situation with Harald and Gyða. Sagas and legal texts leave no doubt that in that case Harald should have had his messengers speak not with Gyða, but with her father, and he certainly should not have been able to return at a later date to collect and “lie with” her. All hallmarks of formal marriage—parental consent, material transactions, bridal homecoming and wedding feast—are blatantly

15 Fontane, Gedichte 1898 (1998), 98: “König Harald ist Herr über Norweg, über Norwegs Frauen auch / Aber euer Brauch in Drammen ist nicht in Roskilde Brauch.” Of course, Roskilde is not in Jutland; Fontane obviously has the Skjǫldung kings and their Lejre attachments in mind. 16 Cf. Gregory of Tours, Historiae iv, 28 (Chilperich’s marriage to the Visigothic princess Galswintha): promittens … se alias relicturum, tantum condignam sibi regis quo prolem mereretur accipere. 17 The verb eiga “to have, possess” (3rd person sg. pret. ind. átti) often appears in contexts interpreted by modern research in the sense of matrimonium legitimum, that is, in an isogamous relationship including transfer of goods (thus “to take a wife”). The same goes for the verb fá “get” (3rd person sg. pret. ind. fekk). Both take the genitive complement: hann fekk þeirar konu “He had/got of/from that woman [goods or similar].” For the discussion of this construction, see Chapter 1, note 106—the Old Norse word kona is just as ambiguous as its modern German equivalent Frau or French femme (“woman”/“wife”); the Norwegian translation cited exploits the fact that the modern meaning of kone is narrowed down to “wife” and again translates more towards ‘marriage,’ seemingly in line with the source. Cf. the discussion of the medieval vocabulary and its modern translations in the case of Jón Loptsson, Chapter 2. 18 Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 67.

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absent.19 So is this then a case of a woman being abducted? Quite apart from the fact that the much-cited Raubehe (marriage by abduction) as a legal concept has rightly been questioned in recent research,20 in the narrative world of the thirteenth century, to which the Heimskringla belongs, such an approach was in no way compatible with any form of solemn bond between man and woman. The textual and terminological ambiguities cannot, in fact, be resolved. With the available material, it is futile to try to ascertain whether Harald entered into a marriage or some other form of bond with Gyða, whether or not he was ‘married’ to his “nine” women in the same manner as he would later be with Ragnhild the Mighty. Perhaps there is no point in asking whether any woman ‘was’ a “concubine or wife.”21 In fact, the moment a man enters into relationships with more than one woman in a socially significant way, these women too form relationships to each other. These relationships sum up to a continuum within which there may be markers of order: Some kinds of relationship may count as ‘higher-status,’ ‘more eminent’ than others. This continuum is an important point. It has a relative maximum value, namely the relationship which at any one time is held to be a maximum. All other relationships are for the time being of lesser value. There is no minimum (that is, a relationship with no possibility of an inferior form beyond it): Although some of the relationships to be discussed in the following chapters may appear very ‘low-status’ indeed, it must be remembered that many relationships have probably not been recorded, which in turn means that all the relationships which have been recorded (and of which only a fraction has come down to us due to losses of sources) are already a selection. They contain a surplus of “social energy”22 and therefore narrative dignity: they were regarded as digna ferendi or, as the Old Norse has it, sǫgulegir, worth reporting. This means that we cannot set out from an extratextual absolute, a yardstick to be applied, such as would lie behind the question, ‘Is Gyða (or Ragnhild) a full-fledged, genuine wife?’ This question would postulate what in fact needs to 19 20 21

22

For a legal-historical perspective, see Carlsson, ‘Jag giver dig min dotter’ (1965–72); for an approach anchored in social history, see Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995), 17–64. See the literature review in Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 72–77. This claim is not intended to dispute the justification of Andrea Esmyol’s study of the same (Geliebte oder Ehefrau? 2002), as she coins the phrase to—rightly—refute the older conceptions of a Friedelehe, ‘free’ marriage, as a third legal form. My doubts lie on a different level, namely of whether the categorial dichotomy can be sustained; in no way does this mean a return to the third category. On the term see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), 1–20.

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be examined: whether there was a concept like ‘wife’ (or ‘being married’) in this society. Without this methodical caveat, we risk to conflate, for instance, Ragnhild in Haralds saga hárfagra with the Novgorod princess Elizabeth, the ‘wife’ of King Harald Hardrada in his saga, both with Gisla, the uxor of the first Norman duke Rollo in Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and all of them with the many legales coniuges of the various prescriptive texts. What the present study instead aims at is both less ambitious and more rewarding: It aims to understand how, in a given situation and context, the relationships between Harald Fairhair (or another man) and his different women with their different backgrounds, networks, careers and fortunes were perceived, commented upon, and reported by their contemporaries or subsequent narrators—which is the nearest we can get to: “by society.” 3

On Sources

The following overview will appear patchy and superficial to many readers trained in Old Norse or medieval Scandinavian studies, but it may be of some use to readers more conversant with other parts of the medieval world.23 Readers may therefore feel free to skip the following two sections on sources and scholarship. Neither archeological findings nor works of visual art or other material culture, fundamental though they are for the study of most questions of the social history of the medieval North, including women’s history, can independently provide information on polygyny.24 So we have to make do with texts. Written sources are a problem because they are comparatively late and their pre­ servation and (probably) production is uneven. High medieval documentary sources are rare for Northern Europe (the oldest known Scandinavian charter dates from 1082, the surviving fragments of the oldest original from 1135), and so are legal sources. Besides the handful of early municipal laws, which can

23 24

For a concise overview of the sources for the Scandinavian Middle Ages, see Sawyer/Sawyer, Medieval Scandinavia (1993), 1–26; with regard to women’s history, see Jochens, “Old Norse Sources” (1990). Still, archeology provides valuable correctives or possible evidence for a view heavily shaped by textual sources. For instance, a study on women’s part in Viking-era trade interpreted the significantly greater number of finds of keys and locks as confirming women’s control over the management of the house and farm; cf. Stalsberg, “Women as Actors” (1991), 75–83, with reference to Petersen, Vikingetidens redskaber (1951). On the methodological question, see Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005), 33ff.

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largely be disregarded here,25 there are the so-called provincial laws and— towards the end of the thirteenth century—the Norwegian territorial law of King Magnús lagabœtir “the Law-Mender.” Transmitted in more or less comprehensive traditions are the three Danish provincial laws of Jutland, Zealand, and Scania, the four laws of the Norwegian legal districts Gula (Westland), Frosta (Trøndelag and Northland), Borg (“Viken,” the area around the Oslo­ fjord) and the inland Eidsivating, and several provincial laws from the area of what would later be Sweden. For Iceland, there are the two legal codes issued by King Magnús the Law-Mender shortly after the island was subordinated to the Norwegian Crown (the Járnsíða, which was replaced by the Jónsbók shortly afterwards), as well as the collection of Icelandic law from before 1262/64, preserved in two quite different redactions, which has been known since the sixteenth century under the quaint name of Grágás (“Grey Goose”). However, no laws are known to have been written down before around 1220 (the Older Law of Western Götaland and a Latin version of the Scanian Law by Archbishop Andreas Sunesen). Any assumptions concerning the age of some or all parts of these laws ultimately remain doubtful. To give just one example, the Icelandic Grágás collection has been viewed as either the tradition of original preChristian legal situations dating centuries back, or a response to current changes and challenges in late thirteenth-century Iceland immediately before its subordination to the Norwegian king. In some respects, both positions are likely to be right to some extent, for transmitting and reshaping a text (or set of laws) while updating it are not mutually exclusive activities. The laws in their current form are neither immediate sources for hypothetical earlier (pre13th century) societies nor simply a mirror of late 13th-century concerns. They must be approached as contributions to social negotiations, in which ideas of the past might be used as arguments. This includes taking into account their literary character, meaning not only the philological analysis of rhetorical, formulaic, and lexematic orientation, but also their reading as ‘narratives.’26 What this might involve can be best illustrated initially with reference to the “narrative” sources proper, the sagas, which are at the centre of much of what follows.

25 26

See the study by Riis, which is primarily based on municipal laws: “Hochzeit” (1998). See Lönnroth, “Ättesamhällets textvärld, ca. 800–1300,” in Lönnroth and Delblanc, eds., Den svenska litteraturen, vol. 1 (1987), 33–56, on the influence of poetic language on the development of juridical phraseology. On Norway, see Rindal, “Dei norske mellomalderlovene” (1995), 7–20; Røsstad, Á tveim tungum (1997). On the legal historical content, Sjöholm argues for the strongly ‘European’ rather than autochthonous character of the provincial laws: Sveriges medeltidslagar (1988).

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Saga means simply “speech.”27 The verb is segja “say”; hann segir sǫgu means “he is reporting something,” hafa sǫgur af einum “having news of someone, recounting something you have heard about someone.”28 The sagas, indeed, refer to themselves with the same word: “—and here ends this saga” is the typical explicit, the phrase hann er ór sǫgunni “he is out of the tale” regularly signposts the last appearance of a character, and Snorri Sturluson begins the prologue of Heimskringla with the sentence: “In this book I have had old stories (fornar frásagnir) written about those rulers who have held power in the Northern lands and have spoken the Scandinavian language, as I have heard them told by learned men…” He proceeds to name his other sources: genealogies and writings based on old poems and narrative songs (sǫguljóð) that the people had for entertainment. There has been some commentary dealing with this “saga entertainment” (sagnaskemtan);29 we may take the word with its slightly jocular nuance in the sense of the Horatian delectare or, more contemporary, Gervasius of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, suggesting a similar disposition to leave the didactics implicit. Crucially, the sagas, even when they are written, understand themselves as the result of speech acts and these speech acts are understood as traditional. Things ancient (Snorri uses the adjective forn “old, former”) were chronicled in fornum kvæðum “ancient songs,”30 and in sǫguljóð “narrative songs” or “songs of historical content.” History is to speak of former times (sögufræði “narrative learning,” is the modern Icelandic term for the academic discipline of History). Of course, we need not take at face value the written saga’s proclamation of oral-traditional authenticity, but it is of some consequence that these written versions were supposed to be understood as part of a discourse sustained over centuries and intended to be continued in the future. This insistence on an oral style, well suited to actual oral performance, distinguishes what could otherwise claim to be good Isidorian rerum gestarum narratio, the narrative of what happened, from Latin European history.

27 28 29 30

On the term and its application in a cultural analysis, see Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 191–238. See Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 33–36. Cf. Clover, Medieval Saga (1982); Clover and Lindow, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (1985); Jónas Kristjánsson, Eddas und Sagas (1994); Clunies Ross, ed., Old Icelandic Literature (2000); McTurk, Companion (2005). The word kvæði, denoting a longer stanzaic text using defined language with narrative content, is related to the Germanic *kweþan, “to speak”; see Nielsen, Dansk etymologisk ordbog (1966), s.v. iii. kvæde.

34 4

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Scholarship on the Sagas

Labelling and classifying medieval texts has become a quagmire. I will try to steer clear of it by simply repeating the most traditional labels, with the sole aim of supplying readers unfamiliar with Norse philology with some rough idea of what we are dealing with. Traditionally, then, within the multitude of written narratives from a period of several centuries which are lumped ­together as ‘sagas’ we distinguish the kings’ sagas (the history of Norway and, to a lesser extent, Denmark as well as that of some non-royal princely houses, such as the earls of Orkney), the sagas of the Icelanders (or ‘family sagas,’ concerning the first generations of settlers on the North Atlantic islands from 870 to about 1030), contemporary sagas (samtíðarsǫgur, concerning Iceland from the 12th to the mid-13th centuries, and thus roughly contemporaneous with the production of their written form), among them the bishop’s sagas (vitae of Icelandic bishops of the same period). Less obviously concerned with the history of particular regions and periods are the legendary sagas (fornaldarsǫgur, with heroes like Sigurð the Dragonslayer or Ragnar Lóðbrok), chivalric sagas (which adopt Western European material), and fairy-tale or fancy sagas that chronicle adventures in a wonderland dressed up as Southern Europe and the Mediterranean world. We note that hagiography, both lives of local saints such as Icelandic bishops and vitae adopted from the common Christian tradition such as St Margaret’s, were also considered sǫgur; there is some evidence to suggest that their Norse versions became models for the textualization of the other material. Their recipients thoroughly registered the different claims to veracity attached to various forms of narrative (the Norwegian king Sverrir found “lying sagas” the most entertaining, but had a Life written about himself which he would certainly have refused to describe as a lygisaga).31 “And although we do not know how true they are,” Snorri cautiously says in the prologue to Heims­ kringla, “we know of cases where learned men of old have taken such things to be true.”32 Along with his elegant, detached style, his authorial grasp of his material, and not least his position as a key actor in the political game of the NorwegianIcelandic world, Snorri’s show of what we call source criticism ensures that Heimskringla is still today considered a masterpiece of Nordic ­historiography. 31 32

See Jürg Glauser, “Lygisaga,” in EMSc, 398; on Sverris saga Bagge, From Gang Leader to the Lord’s Anointed (1996); Krag, Sverre (2005). Heimskringla—Prologus: “En þótt vér vitim eigi sannendi á því, þá vitum vér dœmi til, at gamlir frœðimenn hafi slíkt fyrir satt haft.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 3. Snorri goes on to list a chain of tradition by name; from his first written text witness, it goes back to the late tenth century through just one intermediary.

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Modern historians have never stopped mining Snorri for ‘factually reliable information’ even in times when the sagas of the Icelanders were read less for their event-historical information than their portrayal of society, ‘the people’ of the Viking Age, or even the entire Germanic early period.33 This view, which stressed (or chose to believe in) the largely oral-traditional character of the Icelandic sagas, found itself in turn challenged in the 1930s by the so-called ‘Icelandic school,’ which claimed that the saga authors were men of letters who knew their craft and who, using information from, among other sources, oral tradition, produced texts which ought to be approached as pieces of literature with all the tools of trade of philology. The debate whether the sagas (especially the sagas of Icelanders) should be understood as unadulterated transcriptions of centuries-old, traditional oral narratives or as masterful products of high medieval poets came to be known in terms of ‘free prose’ versus ‘book prose’ theory, although there probably never was a single researcher who would have completely denied either the changes worked on the tradition by writing or the presence of traditional motifs in thirteenth-century artistic saga prose. The possibility of extracting information about the religion, social forms, or worldview of the pre-Christian period from the sagas was now principally under question; the 1960s brought a series of very ‘Christian’ interpretations of saga literature or individual sagas.34 Since the 1970s, historical readings oriented towards mentalité and influenced by social and cultural anthropology and orality studies35 have to some extent set aside the ‘free prose/book prose’ opposition and reestablished the sagas as historical sources.36 Saga literature is again studied for its information about society at the time of its writing in the high Middle Ages, as well as the earlier centuries to which it refers (presupposing a relatively low level of historical change); to some, even the pre-Christian period seems to be within reach again.37 33 34 35 36 37

For the following discussion, see Mundal, Sagadebatt (1977); Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 291–327; Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995), 171–82; Helle, “Historiske sagakritikken” (2001); Bagge, “Mellom kildekritikk” (2002). Lönnroth, “Två kulturerna” (1964); Andersson, Icelandic Family Saga (1967); Hermann Pálsson, “Ethik der Hrafnkelssaga” (1974); Hermann Pálsson, “Icelandic Sagas” (1974). Vital impetus was provided by Turner, “Anthropological Approach” (1971), and SteblinKamenskij, Мир саги (1971), translated into English as The Saga Mind (1973). Internationally successful works that reflect this tendency include Hastrup, Culture and History (1985); Byock, Medieval Iceland (1988); Miller, Bloodtaking (1990). For the early Middle Ages, see Bagge, Society and Politics (1991); for the Viking Age and early Middle Ages, Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995); on method, Vésteinn Ólason, Dialogues (1998); Bagge, “Mellom kildekritikk” (2002); Gisli Sigurðsson, Medieval Ice­ landic Saga (2004); a good overview of more recent research is offered by McTurk, Com­ panion (2005).

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However, this confidence still reaches its limits when it comes to the history of events before about the middle of the eleventh century. Since the pioneering publications of the brothers Curt and Lauritz Weibull in the early twentieth century, the ‘source-critical’ direction in saga research has also affected trust in the reliability of the kings’ sagas in matters of political history. Since the 1980s, Claus Krag, relying predominantly on analysis of skaldic verse (whose extremely constrained language makes it relatively unsusceptible to revisions to the tradition, a trait which was already valued by the high medieval saga writers for this reason), has suggested a series of reinterpretations of the 10th and 11th centuries in Norway at variance with the story in Snorri and other kings’ sagas. One of Krag’s central points is that the Norwegian kings’ claim to be descended from Harald Fairhair (and the associated interpretation of Norwegian kingship running “in the genes” of Harald’s line)38 was in fact probably unfounded. Neither Óláf Tryggvason (r. 995–1000) nor Óláf Haraldsson (Saint Olav, r. 1015–28/30) and his half-brother Harald harðráði (“Hard-Ruler” r. 1046–66), from whom the kings of the later eleventh and the twelfth centuries were actually descended, were themselves descendants of Harald Fairhair—who in later Latin and Norse historiography was elevated to the mythical progenitor of the kingdom, but about whom, with the exception of some significant battles, almost nothing can be said with any confidence.39 Krag’s views, initially controversial, have become established;40 recent attempts to reclaim the reliability of the saga narratives now seem to focus less on event-historical detail than the “overall picture” of the political circumstances depicted in them.41 According to Sverre Bagge’s influential 1991 study, the politics and power games depicted in Heimskringla is one of conflicts between individuals and groups of individuals—and not between “classes,” institutions, or conflicting political ideas, issues which had been in the focus of interest for much of the 20th century.42 This view moves the focus away from the traditional interest in the emergence of statehood, primarily concerned with quasi-constitutional issues such as the supposed antagonism between the monarchy and the magnates, and also from Marxist scholarship’s search for early class conflict. However, this reading of the world of Heimskringla as an

38 39 40

See Óláf Haraldsson’s elaborate legitimistic inaugral address, OsH c. 35. Krag, “Norge som odel i Harald Hårfagres ætt” (1989), 288–301. He has been entrusted with writing the relevant volumes/chapters in both the new Aschehougs Norgeshistorie (1995) and the Cambridge History of Scandinavia (vol. 1., ed. Helle [2003], 184–201). 41 Dørum, “Det norske riket” (2001); Bagge, “Mellom kildekritikk” (2002). 42 Bagge, Society and Politics (1991).

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essentially faithful depiction of the real world and—tied up with this—Bagge’s explicit disinterest in the question of Snorri Sturluson’s own political position and possible agenda has in turn been called into question.43 This debate is also important for the present study, for although a somewhat different concept of ‘text’ will be applied to the problem of the relationship between literature and reality, it is no less important whether Snorri wrote a dispassionate account of political triumphs and failures, a collection of exemplars for future politicians (as Bagge thinks), or a history coloured by the agenda of an author whose partisan statements were wholly contained in the narrative—the history of a kingdom, moreover, in which he directly participated and whose imminent expansion to his own Icelandic homeland he appears quite critical of.44 Considering the sagas’ characteristic dearth of explicit authorial engagement, their almost total withdrawal of the narrator’s voice, the view that an authorial statement is implicitly contained in the narrative would seem to appear a safe hypothesis. It is not surprising that some of the most fundamental methodological debates about the path “from reality to literature and back”45 have hinged on the sagas of Icelanders, as diplomatic and archaeological material which could be consulted as a ‘corrective’ is scarcer there than in Norway. However, they are also pertinent to the Norwegian kings’ sagas. From an anthropological standpoint, it has been proposed that the sagas be understood as “totemic artifacts” in a Levi-Straussian sense, by means of which all experience could be organized as an integrated whole.46 For a historian’s taste, this approach, while certainly useful for understanding the characteristics of saga literature, carries a certain lack of interest in historical change and suggests an interpretation of medieval Iceland as a ‘cold’ society. (My professional feeling would be that Iceland was no more or less susceptible to social, economic and political change than any other part of the medieval world, even if the sources it has produced are fairly spectacular in comparison.) More ‘open’ and therefore promising are the proposals developed by Preben Meulengracht Sørensen in several publications.47 Meulengracht Sørensen starts from the fundamental assumption that 43 44 45 46 47

Cf. Sawyer, “Sverre Bagge om ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’” (2003), 191–97; Bagge, “Snorre og ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’” (2003), 285–96. For instance, von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999). Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), the chapter “Fra virkelighed til litteratur og tilbage igen,” 30ff. Durrenberger, “Icelandic Family Sagas” (1991); cf. Durrenberger, Dynamics (1992). Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og samfund (1977); as well as several summary overviews of his view, most recently: Meulengracht Sørensen and Else Roesdahl, “Viking Culture,” in Helle, ed., History of Scandinavia, vol. 1 (2003), 21–146.

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the sagas contain a “complete universe of meaning” and their culture can be analyzed accordingly. The subject of analysis, however, can never be the historical reality outside them. The sagas already provide the context to their own text, to which no later observer can add anything more.48 To a historian, this would at first seem to appear a sobering prospect indeed. But to study “the process itself rather than what is being processed,”49 that is, the way the medieval North Atlantic developed its stories about themselves, is in fact a fine alternative to histories of events. After all, the existence of the sagas is in itself a historical fact (indeed, one of the outstanding facts of the Norse Atlantic) and all evidence for them—their number, distribution, and the volume of allusions and references made to them over centuries of practice—suggests they were of great importance for many people in the high (and probably also the early) Middle Ages. To say that life has irrevocably become text is therefore not (only) a trite rehash of the central tenet of the ‘linguistic turn,’ but refers to a specific, striking peculiarity of the ‘saga world’:50 its tendency to discuss in terms of narratability precisely those moments which are most dramatic, placed at the centre of the narrative, and most important for social existence, for ‘honour.’ Meulengracht Sørensen gives as an example the death of the brothers Þórð and Snorri Þorvaldssynir in March 1232 as told in Sturlunga saga, one of the ‘contemporary sagas’ composed during the lifetime of many of their actors. The brothers deliberately travel so close to the dwelling of an enemy that he is practically obliged to offer battle and kill them. The brothers justify their conduct at the beginning of the fighting scene by explaining “that otherwise there would have been little to tell.”51 In fact, the entire episode is unmistakably in the style of the ‘great’ Icelandic sagas, “which reinforce a ­culture by reproducing it, but at 48

“The family sagas contain a complete universe of meaning, a culture that can be analyzed in great depth since it only exists in the form of texts. On the other hand, due to the lack of contextual materials [!], this project cannot be undertaken as a description of historical reality. One could say that the sagas are all-inclusive in that they supply both text and context. The culture or history that the scholar wishes to describe has already been written and rewritten to such an extent that there are no longer any roads to reality outside the actual sagas. It is simply not possible to add anything new to the description of the world contained in the family sagas themselves.” Meulengracht Sørensen, “Methodological Considerations” (1992), 27f.; more clearly: Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 17f. 49 Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 18. 50 Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), based on the original, synonymous title of Steblin-Kamenskij, Мир саги (1971). 51 StS i, 352: “at þá væri lítit til frásagnir”; cf. Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 329.

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the same time place this same culture at a distance, as something lost, by reporting it as the past … they create their own reality; but they create it as a historical interpretation and not as fiction.”52 Within the framework of a ‘contemporary saga’ that relates contemporary history of the 1230s, the two brothers—and their opponents—act according to a pattern of behaviour which they (and the writer of Sturlunga saga, and we) know and recognize from the sagas of Icelanders. Living sögulegt involves the readers/listeners of the saga, who in turn will relate the brothers’ fight to ever new audiences (including us); the seemingly ‘unnecessary’ suicidal fight becomes plausible, even mandatory, within the saga just as much as by the process of its being told. It is impossible to ascertain whether two men named Þórð and Snorri, living in Iceland at the beginning of the thirteenth century, actually resolved to seek a death based on a literary pattern. But other similarly preserved cases make this at least probable.53 The historian is thus dealing here with a culture in which a central concern is the desire that “acts may become text” (verk … at sǫgum verða)54—that is, historiographical narrative.55 From the historical standpoint, however, it is just as well to be wary of the tendency towards harmonization contained in the view of the sagas as a specific form of social self-narrative. It is not enough to say that ‘the Scandinavians’ told a story about themselves in ‘the sagas.’56 Particular stories obey particular interests and modes of perception that are not necessarily representative of the whole.57 Not ‘the Scandinavians’ or ‘the Norwegian kings’ took frillur like Gyða Eiríksdóttir, but rather one or several author(s) or narrative milieu(x) furnished the character of one king with a particular script.58 To use Peter Foote 52 53 54 55 56

57

58

Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 27. See Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og samfund (1977), 153–69. Ynglingatal by Þjóðólf of Kvinesdal, in Ys c. 27, stanza 20, v. 9–12. The sagas differ from other literary genres driven by the desire for posthumous fame, such as the Western European epic, through their socially inclusive tone aimed at widespread dissemination in everyday situations. Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cul­ tures (1973), 412–53, 448. Tending toward such unifying is Durrenberger, Dynamics (1992); against an excessive harmonization of ‘the’ sagas: Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Ritunartími Íslendingasagna (1965), 17. In this respect, the early ‘historical-anthropological’ positions are often clearer than those of the 1990s, in which the overwhelming influence of the ‘cultural turn’ occasionally leads to extratextual interests being obscured; cf. for example, Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og samfund (1977) as compared to Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993). The current slump in the historical-materialist conception of history should not tempt us to regard the methodological problems of the knowableness of the lived world beyond the text as grounds for disregarding it. On the concept of ‘scripts,’ see Algazi, “Kulturkult” (2000).

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and David Wilson’s words, it is not permissible to write a social history of early Scandinavia “simply by lifting chunks out of the sagas.”59 The prerequisite for a successful historical reading of the sagas is respecting the integrity of the narrative. For the present study, this means that while we cannot hope to get down to the ‘real-life’ experiences of the men and women involved, we can at least observe the processes of how ‘society,’ that is, the very milieux in which such relationships would have been formed in real life, made sense of them. This is more than we can do for most parts of medieval Europe. The Scandinavian material has the advantage that what is being described—including polygynous relationships—is, so to speak, from the outset endowed with considerable social relevance, and that the semantizations presumably formed and conveyed in and through them occur in close proximity to the linguistic and lived world of the milieu described. Therefore, in the matter of Harald Fairhair and Gyða the point at issue is not the ‘historical’ tenth-century King Harald. But neither is it just the mindset of one or two thirteenth-century writers. The story of Harald and Gyða is a high medieval story of some currency, related to the daily lives of contemporaries and reflecting their relationship to their own past and the value they granted it. In this respect, the tales of frillur and other women have perhaps not been taken seriously enough. Not only have many of them been all too often brushed aside as “little romantic stories”60 or as narrative flotsam incorporated into social or moral stories even when the sagas obviously concern great matters (the creation of Norwegian high kingship as a result of a frilla’s challenge). Quite apart from the question whether or not a ninth-century chieftain called Harald ever wanted to sleep with a ninth-century chieftain’s daughter called Gyða, even the most recent research generally neglects to raise the issue of why thirteenth-century writers and audiences put so much store by claiming that he did. Haraldur Bessason, who has recently commented upon the Gyða episode, persuasively set out the parallels to the myth of the fertility god Frey’s courtship of the giantess Gerð, a common theme which Snorri himself treated not only in his poetry, the so-called Snorra Edda, but also briefly in the Heimskring­ la.61 His studies of motif, and above all the question he poses—of whether Snorri here uses a fairytale narrative that goes back to pre-Christian myth, or the myth was constructed on the model of the folktale—are undoubtedly important. But beyond the motif study, the historian’s question would have to be 59 60 61

Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement (1970), xxv. Bagge, “Kvinner i politikken” (1989), 23, concerning Hss c. 18. Bessason, “King Haraldur Finehair’s Wooing” (1997).

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what it means that Snorri is creating a parallel between his unifying king and a pagan god.62 And beyond this question, which is ultimately directed at authorial intention, a historical interpretation must take into account that according to twentieth-century scholarship on orality63 it is quite likely that the story of Harald and Gyða—which is in other authors besides Snorri, and thus had a certain currency64—may also be factually ‘true,’ that is, that at some point in the ninth century a man and a woman like them actually entered into a relationship that so impressed their contemporaries that the story was retold through eight generations. Besides the versions available to us in their literalizations, we must always reckon with various other oral versions, continually ‘updated’ and perhaps varying to degrees, which probably circulated at the same time but about whose form and specific content we can say practically nothing. The written sagas are all we have, but we must not assume that they are all there ever was. Judging by the space and emphasis tales about sexual relationships take in the sagas, we may even suspect that these tales were among the more widely related issues covered by the sagas. At any rate, we may be somewhat confident that the study of Norse representations of polygyny is not solely a study of historiography but that these stories may have shaped the everyday lives of many people in both imagination and practice. So, the story of Harald and Gyða may supply us with some leading questions for the following chapters: What does it mean for Norway’s first unifying king to have many women? What does his epithet kynstór “great in kin” point to? Why does Gyða make her consent conditional on Harald successfully imitating the rulers in Jelling and Uppsala? And why does Harald react to the condition in such a striking manner? What is Snorri telling his audience by supplying details about the girl’s father and foster father? And what is meant by Gyða’s challenge that Harald first “place all of Norway under himself”? 62 63 64

Cf. the corresponding discussion of the stylization of Queen Sigríð the Haughty as ‘Guðrún’ in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, in Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 19–22; a similar stylization of Ása, grandmother of Harald Fairhair, in Ys c. 48. In place of a literature survey, cf. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982); Schäfer, “Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit” (2003), 148–87. The different versions of the episode are examined by Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 65–69.

Chapter 1

The Generative Aspect 1

Thorns, Pigs, and Two Dreams

Shortly before Harald Fairhair’s birth, so Snorri tells us, his mother Ragnhild had a dream: She thought she was there in her herb garden and that she took a thorn from her shift. And as she held it, it grew so that it became a great shoot, so that one end reached the ground and was soon firmly rooted, and the other end reached high up into the air. And next the tree seemed so huge that she could hardly see up over it. It was also astonishingly thick. The lower part of the tree was red as blood, while the stem above was bright green and the branches white as snow. There were also many large twigs on the tree, some high up, some lower down. The branches of the tree were so huge that they seemed to her to spread across all Norway and much further still.1 There is no explicit dream interpretation, and neither would it be particularly necessary: Norway’s royal history, as a “root of Harald,” sprang from the body of the mother of the unifying king, bloody at first, then flourishing, and four hundred years later at the time when the Heimskringla was written, venerable and ramified. However, the fact that this vision is in the Heimskringla requires comment. The image of the ‘family tree,’ conceptions and visual representations of the sequence of human generations in botanical imagery, is certainly established throughout the entire Euro-Mediterranean: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him” (Is 11:1–2). Moreover, particularly since the twelfth century, Christ’s lineage, whether as the “root of Jesse” and its etymologizing Marian interpretation (virga~virgo de radice Iesse) or as the male line according to the Gospels,2 has become a recurrent subject of textual and pictorial production, with a huge potential for not only dogmatic but also

1 HsSv c. 7; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 51 [in Chapter 6]. 2 Mt 1:1–17; Lk 3:23–38; cf. U[rsula] Nilgen, “Genealogie Christi,” in LdM, vol. 4, cols. 1221f.; U[rsula] Nilgen, “Wurzel Jesse,” in LdM, vol. 9, cols. 382.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_004

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secular-­political legitimation. There was room for kings David and Solomon, archetypes of medieval monarchs, in this generational sequence. In the Northern kingdoms, however, this sequence was less straightforward than the contemporary image of the “root of Jesse” suggested. The traditional principle was that anyone descended from a king could claim the royal title (konungsnafn).3 The number of potential claimants to the throne tended to grow ever larger over time, and which of them actually managed to gain and defend the royal title depended on very different circumstances over time and place. In the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, the principle solidified over the course of the Middle Ages into “elective monarchy,” a mixed system combining traditional ceremonies (homage at the regional things, inaugural tour) with sharp negotiations between the magnates. In the case of undisputed successions this could at least ensure the reconciliation of interests and the establishment of limits on royal authority, but it could also be open-ended in situations with several eligible candidates for succession. By contrast, Norway became a hereditary monarchy in the mid-thirteenth century, complete with a precise order of succession down to the thirteenth position, pushed through by Hákon iv Hákonarson (r. 1217–1263) and finally institutionalized with lasting effect by his successor.4 Snorri Sturluson penned his description of Ragnhild’s dream in a context where the ruling king—with whom Snorri had a complicated relationship—supported the introduction of hereditary monarchy in place of the traditional succession by “royal blood.” Besides biblical lineages, Ragnhild’s dream is evidently modelled on the historiographical tradition of rulers’ mothers’ dreams. Ultimately, it goes back to the dream of Cyrus’s grandfather about his mother in Herodotus. The most famous medieval variant—with which Snorri and his audience were undoubtedly familiar—was the dream of William the Conqueror’s mother.5 There is an obvious intention here to construct a parallel between Harald Fairhair and 3 Latin: nomen regium, nomen regis, nuncupationes regum, aliquem regem appellare; (Sweden 14th c.) konungs nampn giwa; cf. Hoffmann, Königserhebung (1976), 179ff. 4 The national law of Magnús lagabœtir ‘the Law-Mender’ (NgL, vol. 2, 26, cited from Landrecht des Königs Magnus Hakonarson [1941]), Christian law §5: “sa skal konungr vera ifir Noregs konungs riki, sem Noregs konungs son er skilgetin, hinn ællzti einn” (the oldest legitimate son of the king of Norway). 5 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique, v. 33,723–34; Wace, Roman de Rou, v. 2861–65: “Ke un arbre de mun cors isseit, Que vers le ciel amunt creisseit; De l’umbre ki entur alout Tute Normendie aümbroit …” (A tree sprung out from my body and reached the sky, and it cast a shadow that covered all Normandy …). Similarly in relation to Ida of Boulogne, the mother of Godfrey of Bouillon; cf. Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 298. We will return to William and his mother in Chapter 6.

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that other great Norseman to win a kingdom. But Snorri adds a surprising postscript to Ragnhild’s dream: King Hálfdan [Ragnhild’s husband, Harald’s father] never dreamed. He thought this was strange and consulted a man called Þorleif spaki (the Wise) and asked for advice as to what could be done about it. Þorleif told him what he did if he wanted to find out about something, that he went to sleep in a pigsty, and then he never failed to have a dream. And the king did this, and this dream appeared to him: It seemed to him that he had the finest hair of anyone, and his hair fell all in locks, some as long as down to the ground, some to halfway up his calves, some to his knee, some to his hip or halfway up his side, some to no lower than his neck, and some were no more than sprouting up from his head like little horns, and his locks were of all kinds of colours, but one lock surpassed them all in beauty and brightness and size. He told Þorleif of this dream, and Þorleif interpreted it thus, that great progeny would come from him, and they would rule lands with great, though not all with equally great, glory, but one of his line would be ­greatest and highest of all, and it is accepted as true that this lock symbolised King Óláf the Saint.6 The dream is flawless, surpassing Ragnhild’s, for it individualizes the descendants of the king and even accommodates the agnostic principle so dear to Nordic culture. And even though it is dreamt by a pagan, the portent of Saint Olav, cornerstone of high medieval Norwegian royal theology, ensures that it is ironclad in religious terms—even the word used for the portent, jarteign, is the term customarily used for Christian miracles. It is the circumstances in which Hálfdan the Black has the dream which make it so dazzling. For the king, blind to the future, “who never dreamed,” first resorts to a less than innocuous wise man (Þorleif appears later, once more in connection with magic, albeit on the ‘good’ side, and his kin defined itself through a certain distance from Harald Fairhair’s line) and then takes refuge in a pigsty. Beside and beyond notions of pagan magic, the biblical association of pigs as unclean animals take the stage: not least the Gadarene pigs from the Gospel narratives into which Jesus banished the unclean spirits from the possessed man, whereupon the pigs became frenzied, hurled themselves into the water, and drowned.7 The king spending the night searching for prescience in a pigsty: Snorri slyly subverts the effect of 6 HsSv c. 7; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 52. 7 Mt 8:28ff.; Mk 5:1ff.; Lk 8:26ff.

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the royal dream vision. A vision of the future inspired by such creatures is certainly not one to be trusted. And since this vision of the future forecasts what, according to the common knowledge of the thirteenth century, has actually occurred, the pigsty casts a shadow over the entirety of Norwegian royal history. Snorri is a master of indirect commentary; judgements on the people described in the Heimskringla are very rare, mostly appearing as short epilogical summaries after their deaths (and often presented as the opinions of others: “many people said that…”). One such epilogue appears after the dream. Seemingly unconnected with the preceding and subsequent passages, which deal with Harald’s birth, Hálfdan is praised as a great and just legislator (vizkumaðr mikill ok sannenda) who adhered to his own laws and ensured that “arrogance might not overpower the law” (at eigi mætti ofsi steypa lǫgunum). Indeed, with the introduction of penalty tariffs he was credited with laying the foundations for Norwegian territorial law as valid in the thirteenth century.8 It is probably safe to assume that Snorri’s contemporary audience more or less consciously made the mental connection with the kingship of their own day, notable as it was for its legislative activity. However, the precise nature of this connection is, as ever with Snorri, not clear. All that is clear is that he adds a fairly particular twist to what would otherwise have been a genealogical dream sequence of a rather conventional type. One of Snorri’s touches is that the mother makes an important, perhaps the more important, contribution. It is she who, like the mother of William the Conqueror, has the dream vision with the thorn, claiming legitimacy through the pan-European idiom it was bound in, and wholly without pigs and pagan magic. Concerning Harald’s childhood, Snorri also explicitly says: “His mother loved him greatly, but his father not so much” (móðir hans unni honum mikit, en faðir hans minna). This statement should not, of course, be read as evidence of his parents’ actual affective dispositions toward him. Rather, it supports the tendency, developed through textual strategies, to ascribe at least equal rank to Harald’s maternal as to his paternal heritage. The king’s wife Ragnhild is, as Snorri specifies immediately before her dream, the granddaughter of the powerful Jutish ruler Klakk-Harald—Rimbert’s Harald ‘Klak’ baptized by Louis the Pious in Ingelheim in 826—and consequently the niece of Þyri Danmerkar bót (Thyra Danebod), wife of Gorm the Elder and mother of Harald Bluetooth, who according to the great runestone in Jelling, “subjected all Denmark and

8 Cf. HsGr c. 11.—Hálfdan dies just two chapters later trying to cross a frozen fjord during a thaw.

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Norway and made the Danes Christian.”9 The kings of Jelling, their runestones, and their status as progenitors of the Danish royal power were well established by Snorri’s time; a little earlier, the Danish chroniclers Saxo Grammaticus and Sven Aggesen had provided what would be, until the late twentieth century, the authoritative version of the story of Thyra, builder of the Danevirke, and Harald Bluetooth, the unifier of Denmark. Snorri writes the history of the Norwegian kings as an unrelenting competition with the Danish kings (into the twelfth century, Harald Fairhair’s successors had to contest with Danish ambitions in the north, sometimes with force), and consequently here and elsewhere he provides for the necessary dynastic ties to the royal Danish house— among which the aforementioned Jutish princess, Ragnhild, for whose sake Harald Fairhair repudiated Gyða and the others. The theme of maternal heritage goes beyond the figure of Ragnhild and the concrete aim of establishing dynastic ties. According to Snorri, it was thanks to his mother’s initiative that Harald’s father, Hálfdan the Black, was able to take over the petty kingdom inherited through her line, which he then could use as a base to reclaim his paternal heritage. What Snorri is saying by way of Harald Fairhair’s mother and grandmother is this: The king’s mother imparts ‘love,’ preserving and defending the heir while the king is still young and helpless, as well as providing useful relations and numinous blessings. In the world of Heimskringla an important argumentative role is played by the muchdescribed ‘king’s luck’ (sæll) which is essentially mediated by the male line. Indeed, the expectation that this luck was heritable virtually underpins the rationale behind the principle of the inheritance of the royal title in the male line. A king must provide that combination of prosperity and security which, in Heimskringla and elsewhere, is denoted by the phrase ár ok friðr, “good harvest and peace”; he must prove that he is ársæll, ‘season-blessed.’ Ensuring a good harvest and peace was part of his very essence, and his continued kingship guaranteed the continuation of this favourable economic situation.10 9

10

On the various reports about Ragnhild’s ancestry, see Krag, Norges historie (2000), 215; on recent criticism of the traditional view of the Jelling dynasty, see Sawyer and Sawyer, “A Gormless History?” (2003). Our concern here, however, is with the received version of medieval historiography. Cf. Hoffmann, Die heiligen Könige (1975), 90; Røthe, “Odinskriger” (1999). It is not necessary to attribute the idea entirely to Old Testament standards, although the view also shapes the Latin-speaking chronicles and hagiography of the North (cf. Ælnoth, Vita Cnutonis, in aass Jul. 10, c. 32, and, depending on Ælnoth, Chronicon Roskildense, in sm, vol. 1, 1–33, c. 11) and is encountered throughout Europe until the late Middle Ages (see Erkens, “Heißer Sommer” [2003], 29–46). On the question of sacral kingship in the North, see Chapter 5.

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Even Harald Fairhair’s father, Hálfdan the Black, is for Snorri self-evidently “the most season-blessed [ársælstr] of all kings”; indeed the powerful in his kingdom were convinced that even his corpse would bring their lands ‘good seasons’ (þótti þat vera árvænt þeim), and agreed to dismember the dead king for regional distribution. This pre-Christian prefiguration of a cult of relics, like Snorri’s earlier insinuations of the demonic, make such deferential praise for the ruler appear somewhat suspect. Now Harald Fairhair’s role as unifying king was so well established by around 1200 that it must have seemed difficult to openly question his father’s royal virtue. Individual writers’, writings’, and recipients’ attitudes towards kingship can therefore be assessed, among other things, by the characteristics of their rendering of Harald’s and his ancestors’ stories.11 The charm of Snorri’s royal history to a great extent lies in the fact that, by various means, he underpins a tradition that was already largely established by his ‘trademark’ ambiguity. Harald’s parents are one of the many examples of this. There is a certain sinister irony in the report by Sturla Þórðarson (Snorri’s nephew and principal opponent) that King Hákon Hákonarson, the king who ordered Snorri’s murder in 1239, had the vernacular kings’ sagas read aloud to him when following the Latin text of the saints’ lives became too exhausting. Bringing the royal descent line into question could have fatal consequences. 2

Royal Blood

The tree Ragnhild dreamt about had a trunk: her son Harald. The unanimous resolution of medieval Norway to view the Fairhaired as an obligatory principal ancestor of every later king is probably unique in Europe. All other kingdoms endured occasional changes of dynasty, and, unless the change from one regnum or house to another was generally regarded as unproblematic or even beneficial, it was to some extent legitimized through narratives connecting the dynasties or heroic tales of the overthrow of the previous line. Even the other Scandinavian monarchies—which were similarly determined by the practice that the new king should be sought from the throng of descendants of earlier kings in the male line (the “Geblütsrecht” dear to German legal historians)— were content with less far-reaching appeals. While the Swedish monarchy did not consolidate from an alliance between two rival lines, and, so far as we 11

This reserved attitude is particularly pronounced in the ‘Icelandic sagas.’ In this case, it should be noted that the Icelander Snorri is the only one who reported Hálfdan’s ritual dismemberment (and therefore probably invented it); see Heimskringla, vol. 1 (1941), 93 note 2.

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know, completely dispensed with genealogical consistency until the thirteenth century, the Danish royal title was disputed only within a—genealogically speaking—very small circle, whose members could all easily be traced back to Sven Estridsen (r. 1047–74/76). Sven was, as expressed in his metronym ‘Astrid’s-son,’ the grandson of Cnut the Great on his mother’s side, whereas his father was ‘merely’ a follower and favourite of the same king. Sven’s right to rule was justified in chronicles and annals through his virtues and/or his victories over the Norwegian kings Magnus and Harald, son and brother of Saint Olav and sometime rulers of Norway. No Danish text we know of construed a line of descent from, say, Harald Bluetooth or one of the many heroic/pagan early Danish kings for him. In Norway this was invariably the case.12 Where only putative descent from a single scion matters, where—to retain the imagery of Ragnhild’s dream—every branch of the mighty boughs that go back to Harald Fairhair is endowed with the same claims, there was no place for competing valences. The Norwegians of the thirteenth century could have repeated the famous words of Gregory of Tours: “irrespective of their mother’s birth, all children born to a king count as the king’s sons.”13 Norway is therefore a very suitable field for the observation of high medieval polygyny. This does not, of course, mean that in reality, there were more cases of (aristocratic) polygyny than elsewhere, merely that the chances of such cases entering the record are far higher where the polygynous relationships of the powerful are of central political importance. Indeed, the extent to which the history of the Norwegian monarchy is shaped by polygyny is surprising. According to Jenny Jochens’s reckoning,14 in the period 1130–1240, forty-six men claimed the Norwegian ‘royal name’ with reference to their royal origin: this at a time when an ‘illegitimate’ candidate had very bleak prospects of being accepted in most of the kingdoms of Latin Europe. Frequently, groups of (half-) brothers shared the rule of Norway to 12

Sven was the son of Ulf Jarl/comes and Astrid/Estrid, the daughter of Cnut the Great. Her name fluctuates, but dominates the metronym: Annales Ryenses: “Suen Estraethson”; Annales Lundenses: “Swen filius Æstrith”; Annales Ripenses: “Suen Estrithson, filiu[s] Ulff comitis Anglie de sorore Gamælæknut”; as well as “Sweno Magnus,” often in the tradition of the Benedictine vita Saint Cnut by Ælnoth. In the Knýtlinga saga, the Norse history of the Danish kings from the mid-13th century, however, “Sveinn Úlfsson” is used throughout, perhaps as part of the saga’s wider attempts at a particular consistent conservative style. The use of the mother’s rather than the usual father’s name is rare, but not unheard of; it seems to be preferred if maternal line is particularly illustrious—which is undoubtedly the case here. 13 Historiae v, 20: “praetermissis nunc generibus feminarum, regis vocitantur liberi, qui de regibus fuerant procreati”; History of the Franks, ed. Thorpe (1974), 286. 14 Jochens, Politics of Reproduction (1987), 340.

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some degree for a time, more or less harmoniously, or various regional assemblies put forward competing candidates, resulting in conflicts, usually carried out with armed force or at least the threat of it. In these circumstances, elevating a candidate to the kingship (konungstekja) mostly indicated a challenge to competitors rather than sealing an actual success. Scarcely half of them, twentyfour, enforced their claims at least locally and/or intermittently, and only two established themselves permanently throughout the kingdom: Sverrir (r. 1177– 1202) and Hákon iv Hákonarson (r. 1217–63). According to Jochens’s count, of the forty-six pretenders, no more than twelve or thirteen were from ‘legitimate marriages,’ and of the twenty-four successful pretenders, only five: the two most successful, Sverrir and Hákon iv, were not among them. Of those five, four used their ‘legitimate’ birth as an additional argument to strengthen their otherwise somewhat weaker claims: three stemmed from a king only in the female line; the fourth was the halfbrother of a king. In all, of the twenty-four Norwegian kings of this period, only one, Ingi krókrygg (‘the Hunchback,’ r. 1136–61), was the son of a king through a ‘legitimate marriage.’15 Nearly three-quarters of all pretenders and fourth-fifths of those who prevailed were the product of serial or simultaneous polygyny. An overview of these relationships is available elsewhere;16 many of them will be discussed in the course of the following chapters. In purely quantitative terms, it is obvious that the kings’ sagas’ remarkably detailed manner of writing about frillur has to do with precisely this political relevance. It would certainly be inadequate to interpret this as some sort of cultural ‘delay’ in the reception of new attitudes shaped by the Italian and Western European reformers, as even Jochens does implicitly.17 Norse rulers had ample occasion to familiarize themselves with all the latest in Church law and the pastoral of mores. The Norwegian insistence on legitimating kingship in terms of Harald’s expansive tree rather than an agnatic descent line is sustained political practice.

15

We might speculate whether this contributed to his kingship being one of the more successful of the period, despite his disability—as a two-year-old, he had been carried into battle by a warrior, and tied so tightly to his back that his bone growth was irreparably damaged. His depiction in the histories and sagas suggests that he demonstrated unusual political acumen and—more importantly—an outstanding talent for earning his followers’ loyalty. Sheer talent may well have compensated for his disability, and there is no indication that the ‘legitimacy’ of his birth was used as an argument. 16 On this, see Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 63–71. 17 Jochens, Politics of Reproduction (1987), 332: “The peoples of Scandinavia … maintained the older reproductive pattern longer than did the rest of Europe.”

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Of course Northern European royal polygyny was noted and commented upon by high medieval contemporaries. Through recourse to Einhard and Gregory of Tours they could establish a diachronic comparison, allowing them to explain the situation in the North as a barbaric delay according to the Eusebian-Orosian dilatatio model. About 1194, Roger of Hoveden, commenting on the Norwegian war of parties between King Sverrir and his numerous challengers, explained that it was the custom in Norway “to the present day” that all those whose royal paternity was generally known could equally claim the kingship, “the illegitimate son of a slave woman alongside the legitimate son of a freewoman.” That was why there was endless war until in each case one was victorious and the others dead.18 One hundred and twenty years earlier, Adam of Bremen made a similar observation about Cnut the Great’s sons through his concubines, who “according to the barbarian custom,” inherited as much from their father’s three kingdoms as their half-brother, whose sister would become the wife of Emperor Henry iii.19 Even Adam’s Sven Estridsen, king of Danes, in other respects an endearing neophyte who eagerly accepted all the ‘teachings’ of archbishop Adalbert, turned a deaf ear as soon as it came to gluttony and women, “vices which are natural for these peoples.”20 The cultural-diffusionist undertone thus sounds in unison—and therefore should not be trusted. It appears too obvious to accept the models of Adam of Bremen and Roger of Hoveden, wholly congruent on this issue, and to assume a ‘polygynous early period,’ more or less correlating with pagan culture, slowly petering out during the two first centuries of Norse Christianity. Progressism is one of the most compelling ‘master narratives’ in European history. Where the bourgeois age celebrated the moral progress of the human race in general and Scandinavia in particular (thus the Nobel laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson quoted in the preceding chapter), recent decades have been pleased to juxtapose, under the banner of sexual libertinism, an uninhibited and sensual Viking Age with the “strictly pietistic self-negating life” of the Christian Middle Ages, 18

19 20

Roger of Hoveden, Gesta regis Henrici secundi, vol. 3, 270: “Est etiam sciendum, quod consuetudo regni Norweiæ est usque ad hodiernum diem, quod omnis qui alicuius regis Norweiæ dinoscitur esse filius, licet sit spurius, et de ancilla genitus, tantum sibi ius vendicat in regnum Norweiæ, quantum filius regis coniugati, et de libera genitus. Et ideo fiunt inter eos prælia indesinenter, donec unus illorum vincatur et interficiatur.” Cf. Storm, “Kong Sverres fædrene herkomst” (1904). Adam of Bremen ii, 74: “ut mos est barbaris.” Adam of Bremen iii, 21: “omnia, quae de scripturis ab illo proferebantur, subtiliter notans retinensque memoriter, excepto quod de gula et mulieribus, quae vitia naturalia sunt illis gentibus, persuaderi non potuit.” Similarly ‘barbarizing’ are Ælnoth c. 1 and Dudo of SaintQuentin i, 1.

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“negating everything luxurious, colourful, and sexual.”21 If the latter, as a prevailing consensus has it, is marked by chastity, monogamy, and sensual suppression and oppression, then the former must be characterized by the opposite. The dissolute are invariably the ‘Other’—and, at least nowadays, they are happy to hear it. But even if the positive/negative values have been exchanged, the equation remains. And precisely because some main tenets of today’s identity debates are at issue here (women’s rights, sexual permissiveness, civic selfregulation versus external control, organised religion, the West versus the rest), when faced with the apparent evidence of this cultural antinomy it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Viking Age sources are extremely poor on questions of sexual norms and practices. The consistent image of polygyny as more common and, crucially, more central in the pre-Christian period in, for instance, the sagas or Saxo Grammaticus, is in the first instance only suitable as evidence for the perception and representation of the pagan past in the high Middle Ages, and by no means direct evidence of the period prior to the eleventh century. What is more, precise information about the capacity of ‘illegitimate’ sons to succeed mostly refers to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Strictly speaking it would be possible, on the basis of available evidence, to claim that frillur’s sons first gained the capacity to become king in the Christian period, perhaps under the influence of the reception of biblical or historical (Merovingian, Carolingian) models. I am making this point for the sake of the argument. The assertion would be as difficult to prove (or disprove) as its counterpart, the one about early and/or pagan polygyny. We simply cannot know for sure. In any case, it should not be assumed that the open polygyny practised by rulers and the competence of the offspring of such relationships, observable for us only in the Christian era, was necessarily a residual trait from the pagan past. It may have existed in the Viking Age (I think it is probable, although there is only scanty evidence), but it certainly existed in the Christian Middle Ages, eleventh to thirteenth centuries (with ample evidence). Furthermore, even if polygyny already existed in the ninth century (which is possible, indeed probable given its apparently universal appeal), this in itself 21

One example of these public debates: in 1995, the young choreographer Øyvind Jørgensen, cited above, staged the dance theatre piece “Brytningstid” (“Time of Upheaval”). The piece was commissioned by the foundation “Kyrkja i Noreg 1000 år,” which organized the jubilee of the Christianization for the state church. But after its premiere at the theatre­festival in Bergen and the fierce controversy which followed, it was excluded from the official jubilee programme. Besides the S&M costumes of the Æsir, the half-meterlong plush phallus of the fertility god Frøy was judged to be particularly offensive. The controversy is documented in Losnedahl, “Brytningstid” (2001), here 66.

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would not explain its continuous existence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. After all, this was a field undergoing significant change elsewhere in Latin Europe. In the post-Carolingian world and England, successors amongst the secular elite in the twelfth century were generally ‘legitimate,’ and a particular form of monogamous sexual relationship (matrimonium legitimum, ‘marriage’) was considered an essential element/constituent of ‘legitimate’ birth. Exceptions to the rule were rare and faced difficulties, even when the principle incurred high political costs: England would have had a quieter period if Henry I’s “bastard son”22 Robert of Gloucester had been able to succeed his father in 1135, rather than the decade-and-a-half-long struggle over the dead king’s throne between the daughter and nephew (‘Empress’ Matilda and Stephen of Blois). This cultural choice—the change from the time of Gregory of Tours to the Western European high Middle Ages—requires explanation just as much as the differing choice made, for instance, in Norway. The trouble is that we are so used to the ‘European monogamy’ model that we hardly notice that this was in no way a natural or even obvious change. All too rarely does the term ‘legitimate birth,’ with which we try to explain successful succession, invite scrutiny: how and why is a certain birth “legitimate”?23 With Adam of Bremen, Roger of Hoveden, and Snorri Sturluson, some medieval observers have already had their say, discussing answers that vary over time and space. In the following, the focus is on the ‘generative’ aspects of polygyny, that is, the view of the conception and birth of heirs. 3

Danish Particularism: Polygyny in the Chronicles

There was clearly an awareness in the North of the peculiarity of its own view of what qualified a person to rule in comparison with the rest of Europe. Yet one of the characteristics of the sagas as a genre is their tendency to pay as little attention as possible to the existence of other ways of life—which has the strange effect that one always sees the heroes travel through the non-Nordic parts of Europe in a way that recalls the self-assured ignorance of European travellers in the modern colonial era—so like so many others, this sociocultural difference is left uncommented. Incidental evidence for an awareness of 22 23

Thus Jäschke, Anglonormannen (1981), 181. His mother is not clearly identified, but it seems plausible to view her as part of the Norman landed aristocracy in Oxfordshire; cf. Crouch, “Robert of Gloucester’s Mother” (1999), and below, Chapter 6. For more detailed reflections, see in Rüdiger, “Ægteskab” (2010), and Rüdiger, “Married Couples” (2012).

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this difference is rare, such as when it was noted in the legendary genealogy of William the Conqueror, whose line led back through Rollo/Hrólf to a companion of Harald Fairhair, that William bore the epithet ‘the Bastard’24—only the Franks could come up with such an oddity. The situation appears different in the Latin texts. The Norwegian tradition is hardly suitable for comparison in this instance, however, as there are only two short Latin works of history—the Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium of Theodoric the Monk (c.1180) and the fragmentary Historia Norwegiae (13th c.) alongside the rich output in Norse.25 Latin historiography is far more extensive and diverse for Denmark, for which, in turn, we have only one major Norse source: Knýtlinga saga, composed around the middle of the thirteenth century though probably not in Denmark. The Danish historiographers were thus already compelled by the language they used to face the tradition and current debates around the word concubina. The choice of language and of stylistic register (Norse/Latin, saga/historia) is important but of course it is anything but a simple reflection of different degrees of learning let alone linguistic competence. The Norwegian and Icelandic authors were highly educated clerics, often trained in the intellectual centres of Western Europe, and there is ample evidence to show that monasteries and bishoprics of the Province of Nidaros were hotspots of Norse literacy. Likewise the Danish tradition shows that the local preference for Latin, in contrast to the Norse prevailing in the North Atlantic, was certainly not synonymous with a greater acceptance of the concomitant positions from the Romano-clerical tradition and specially its latest trends. This may be shown through a survey of the relevant chronicles, annals, histories, and hagiography. The majority—and, taking into account the textual dependencies, the ‘mainstream’—of known texts affect what I would describe as a nonchalant attitude. As with the sagas, this is by no means synonymous with ignorance; it can be assumed that the concept of illegitimacy based on the form of parental relationship was well known as a potential problem. Already in the Roskilde Chronicle, the earliest surviving Danish historiographical source (c.1140), polygyny is handled as borderline offensive. The succession arrangements of Cnut the Great († 1035), for example, presented a challenge: Cnut’s ‘legitimate’ son from his relationship with Queen Emma, Harthacnut, took over the kingship in Denmark, while his two ‘illegitimate’ sons from his relationship with the English magnate’s daughter Ælfgifu of Northampton, Harald and Sven, 24 25

HsH c. 24 (with the loanword bastarðr). Both texts are edited in: Monumenta historica Norvegiæ (1880); the latter now also in: Historia Norwegie (2003).

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r­ eceived England and Norway respectively. Adam of Bremen, in his History of the Church of Hamburg, is indignant: “After his [Cnut’s] death his sons succeeded him in the realm as he had determined—Harold in England, Sven in Norway, Harthacnut in Denmark. Since the last-named was the son of Queen Emma, it was his sister [Gunhild] whom Caesar Henry [iii] later received in marriage. As for the others, Sven and Harold had been born of a concubina; but they, as is the custom with the barbarians, were then allotted an equal share of the patrimony with Cnut’s legitimate children.”26 The Roskilde Chronicle, which generally relies heavily on Adam, adopts this account with a significant omission: “After the death of Cnut, the rule passed to his three sons: Sven, whom he had from Alvia [Ælfgifu], ruled in Norway, Harald, another of Alvia’s sons, in England, and Harthacnut, the son of Emma, in Denmark.”27 A straightforward three-part succession, then, with no mention of whose mother was, or was not, a concubina. The chronicler, though writing in Denmark, even skips the opportunity to praise the Danish heir, who in Adam has the imperial connection and ‘legitimate’ birth in his favour, at the expense of his brothers. Naming the mothers points at a distinction without making it explicit (Emma is not even given the title of queen), even though the source offered every possibility of doing so. Neither can this omission be explained away as a possible Danish indignation at Adam’s remark about the “barbaric custom,” given that the chronicler could simply have erased this comment. Shortly thereafter, however, ‘illegitimacy’ is needlessly foregrounded: When the son of Saint Óláf Haraldsson, Magnús “the Good” (r. 1035–47), won Norway and Cnut’s son Sven and his mother, Cnut’s ‘concubine’ Ælfgifu, had to leave the country, the Roskilde Chronicle does adopt Adam’s epithet, calling Magnús

26

27

Adam of Bremen ii, 74: “Post cuius mortem, ut ipse disposuit, succedunt in regnum filii eius, Haroldus in Angliam, Suein in Nortmanniam, Hardechnud in Daniam. Iste cum ­esset filius reginae, sororem habuit eam, quam cesar Heinricus in coniugium postea recepit. Ceterum Suein et Harold a concubina geniti erant; qui, ut mos est barbaris, aequam tunc inter liberos Chnud sortiti sunt partem hereditatis.” History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, ed. Tschan (2002), 107. Tschan translates concubina as “concubine,” as does Werner Trillmich in the German 1961 Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gedenkausgabe standard translation. Chronicon Roskildense, in sm, vol. 1, 1–33, c. 9: “Post mortem uero Kanuti tres filii eius regnare ceperunt; Sven, quem habuit de Aluia, regnauit in Normannia, Haroldus in Anglia, eciam filius Aluie, Hartha Knut in Dania, filius Ymme” [Emma]—as in Adam, Nor(t) mannia here denotes Norway. Unlike his brothers, Sven did not actually bear the royal title; his mother exercised a kind of representative rule in Norway, which collapsed immediately after his death.

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“the son of Saint Olav by a concubine.”28 It might be tempting to think that the reference to Magnús’ birth de concubina was adopted here with pejorative intent: after all, Sven Estridsen, hero of the Roskilde Chronicle, would later have to prevail against this very Magnús.29 But to take the epithet as a slur a persona is difficult to reconcile with another passage where the Roskilde Chronicle describes the “martyrdom” of Olav Haraldsson at the Battle of Stiklestad 1030: “His son Magnús succeeded him as ruler, who was born of a concubine; still a boy, he was magnanimous and beautiful in appearance.”30 In the context of an appreciation of Saint Olav as proselytizer of Norway and the worker of numerous miracles through relics, disparagement is clearly not the intention. It looks as though Magnús’s illegitimate birth did not matter either way. That his explicit (and stylistically unnecessary) designation as the son of a concubine might even be meant as praise would indeed correspond to the rhetorical logic of this passage, but cannot be asserted just on the basis of this one example.31 Ultimately, Sven Estridsen, who took over the Danish kingship after the death by accident of his rival Magnús in 1047, is the true ‘good’ king, gloriosus rex Danorum, of the Roskilde Chronicle: promotor of the diocese, patron of Bishop Sven Nordmand revered by the chronicler, who probably was a canon at the cathedral church.32 Now Sven is a king whose polygyny always needs to be addressed, as five of his sons, each from different mothers, succeeded him 28

29

30

31

32

Chronicon Roskildense, in sm, vol. 1, 1–33, c. 9: “Interea Suen obiit in Norwegia, frater Harthe Knut; tunc Normanni elegerunt Magnum, filium sancti Olaui a concubina.”— Adam of Bremen ii, 77: “tunc Nortmanni elegerunt Magnum, qui erat filius Olaph martyris a concubina.” Adam can be ascribed a similar motive here, as the veracissimus rex Sven Estridsen, with whom he claimed to have had long conversations (i, 26; 28; 48, ii, 61 and elsewhere), enjoys a sympathetic portrayal in the Gesta pontificum. Adam also uses the concubina motif elsewhere as a means of denigrating (e.g. the sons of Olof Skötkonung in Sweden, ii, 59); he has little interest in and respect for Saint Olav, perhaps because England played a far greater part in his early cult than Bremen (ii, 61). Chronicon Roskildense c. 7: “Qui dum regnum suum primus Christiane fidei subiugasset totum, a paucis in bello percussus gloriosam martyrii coronam est adeptus. Cuius corpus a fidelibus Throndemis [Nidaros, the present-day city of Trondheim, in the region of Þrándheim/Trøndelag] humatur, multis hodie miraculis illustratur. Cui filius in regnum successit, nomine Magnus, qui ex concubina erat genitus, etate puer, magnanimus, forma speciosus.” We must consider the possibility that the relative clause “qui ex concubina erat genitus” was interpolated, but to my mind this seems unlikely. The passage is the identical in all the manuscripts collated by Gertz, the oldest of which dates back to the late 13th century; Olav’s status as a saint also gradually became ever more unassailable, especially after the foundation of the archbishopric of Nidaros (1152/53), shortly after the Roskilde Chronicle was written, while the political expediency vilifying his son gradually disappeared. Cf. Gelting, ed., Roskildekrøniken (1979), 69ff.

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on the throne one after the other, and their respective lines would be struggling over succession for over a hundred years. Moreover, one of those sons is Cnut (iv, r. 1080–86; the second to succeed Sven as king), who, pursued by his opponents and killed in Odense Cathedral, was, with the aid of considerable royal and episcopal involvement, made a saint a few years after his death. Although the Danish saint-king never achieved the popularity or impact of his obvious role model, Olav in Norway, the fact that the first Danish saint was a concubine’s son was nonetheless a potentially sensitive subject. Adam of Bremen, who completed his work a little before Cnut’s, did not yet have that problem. For him, Sven Estridsen—by and large a positive figure—is a prominent example for the sexual attitudes which must be condemned: incest and concubinage. According to Adam, it was only under the pressure of Rome that Sven Estridsen yielded to Archbishop Adalbert’s previously unsuccessful exhortations, and dissolved his marriage with a consanguinea from Sweden, “still the king would not give ear to the admonitions of the priests. Soon after he had put aside his cousin he took to himself other wives and concubines, and again still others.”33 Adam expanded his comments de mulieribus into an exemplum on the king’s punishment for his misconduct that would develop a certain narrative life of its own in several later Danish historical works,34 and that, topical though it seems, cannot be totally dismissed out of hand as event-historical evidence: One of his concubines, Thore, poisoned the “legitimate queen” Gude; Thore’s son Magnus, sent by his father to Rome to be consecrated as king, died on the way; Thore never bore another son.35 Short as it is, the story contains some interesting points. First of all, the great number of concubines is emphasized once again. Sven, the organizer of the Danish dioceses, is emulating Solomon (elsewhere this is explicit), in both good and evil. At the same time, it precludes every possible mitigating circumstance in Sven’s favour. The late Roman canonical norm, according to which it did not matter whether a man had a concubine or a wife as long as he ­contented 33

Adam of Bremen iii, 12: “nec tamen rex sacerdotum admonitionibus aurem prebuit, sed mox ut consobrinam a se dimisit, alias itemque alias uxores et concubinas assumpsit.”— Consobrina must be understood here in the sense of a terminus technicus: “cognate related to a degree declared to be forbidden.” History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, ed. Tschan (2002), 107. 34 Cf. Annales Lundenses (compiled in their extant form in the late 13th century), s.a. 1053; Danish compilation of the Annales Ryenses (early 14th cent.), s.a. 1074, in dma, 54 and 193. 35 Adam of Bremen, schol. 72: “Nec tamen illi malo defuit ultio, quia una ex concubinis, legitimam Gude reginam veneno extinxit. Cumque rex Suein filium Thore, Magnum vocabulo, Romam transmitteret, ut ibi consecraretur ad regnum, infelix puer in via defunctus est, post quem mater impia non suscepit alium filium.”

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himself with just one woman, emphasized monogamy but not necessarily marriage. Repeated over again by early medieval synods and church laws, it was still a standard prescript in Adam’s day (it also found its way into Gratian’s Decretum).36 But the little story of Thore and Gude showed that Sven had by no means “contented himself” with one woman at a time. Indeed, the name of this son of a “concubine,” Magnus, suggests that from birth he was considered capable of becoming king. The name had been in use since the eleventh century, first in the Norwegian, then in the Danish royal house, occasionally in explicit connection to Charles “the Great,” and Sven Estridsen himself is sometimes (especially by Ælnoth) called Swenomagnus. Adam’s story, in which a king-to-be named after Charlemagne makes for papal Rome, confirms this in its own way—even if we are wary to accept the idea of an actual plan for a consecration in Rome (in fact, the first Danish sacral coronation ceremony took place only in 1170), even a papal blessing would have gone a long way.37 The women’s names, Þóra and Gyða, were also very common contemporary names.38 As nothing is known of Sven Estridsen having a “legitimate queen” (with the exception of the repudiated consobrina mentioned by Adam), the eminence which Adam claimed for Guthe may have rested more on her current position at the royal court than on any categorial difference—in other words, hearsay from the king’s household. This makes the plot reported by Adam all 36

I. Toletanum (c.400 ad), c. 17: “Si quis habens uxorem fidelis concubinam habeat, non communicet: ceterum is qui non habet uxorem et pro uxore concubinam habet, a communione non repellatur, tantum ut unius mulieris, aut uxoris aut concubinae, ut ei placuerit, sit coniunctione contentus.” Mansi iii 1001, cf. Caselli, “Concubina pro uxore” (1964– 65); cf. the almost identical Decretum Gratiani D 34,4. 37 Hoffmann, Königserhebung (1976), 29f., accepts Adam’s account, including the purpose of the journey to Rome, and sees it as Sven Estridsen’s attempt to designate a successor during his lifetime to the detriment of all his other sons. The plan failed with Magnus’s death, whereupon Sven instead committed the magnates of the kingdom to choosing his sons one by one, thus at least restricting the blood right a little. I have reservations about relying on Adam alone as evidence for such a far-reaching political project: Magnus’s journey is treated too casually and is too closely tied up with the theme of retribution for the poisoner-mother. Moreover, it is not quite clear why Sven would resort to a journey to Rome for an anointing ceremony, which, while practised in a few other kingdoms, was entirely foreign in a Danish context and unlikely to make much of an impression on a domestic audience, rather than keeping with custom and, say, having the designated son ‘chosen’ at a thing, perhaps with the assistance of a local bishop. The story perhaps makes more sense if read as non-factual, as Adam’s comment on God’s work upon the son of the royal concubine. 38 Both designate important frillur and mothers of kings: the Gyða Eiríksdóttir cited in the preceding liminary chapter; Harald Fairhair’s old mistress Þóra Mostrarstǫng; Magnús Barelegs’ mother Þóra Jónsdóttir (see Chapter 2); Jarl Hákon’s last faithful follower Þóra of Rimul (see Chapter 5), and others.

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the more plausible. Certainly, the Bremen canon could have drawn the story of the murder of a more successful rival from Gregory of Tours or another source; yet given that Adam repeatedly refers to the king as his direct informant, the basic content of the scholium with its convincing onomastic colouring is credible as a rare insight into the agonistic atmosphere between the king’s women. When one of Sven Estridsen’s sons, Cnut, subsequently became a saint,39 his father’s mulierum incontinentia (as Adam had put it) became the focus of interest in a completely new way—after all, the prevailing view of the time was that the new saint king would be disqualified from most church offices due to his concubine mother. The monk Ælnoth, who had come from Canterbury to the new Benedictine monastery at Odense,40 founded by monks from Evesham, made a virtue of necessity in his vita of the saint, written around 1120: “Sven Estridsen is synonymous with David, the strongest of the kings and the most eloquent of the prophets.” Not only did he strike down his enemies wherever they rose against God, and bring happiness and peace to his kingdom, “he also yielded to the enticing charm of debauchery, and begat numerous offspring, who would rightfully succeed him in the rule; some he had learn theology, others he sent to various places to be educated by nobles.”41 For Ælnoth (who does not use Adam), Cnut’s father Sven Estridsen, Adam’s ‘Solomon,’ is therefore David and Ælnoth’s ‘Solomon’ is Saint Cnut himself— but a different Solomon to the polygynous temple builder of the Bible: the new king “thought through his past deeds and mistakes and the misdeeds of his youth”—for which there were certainly enough opportunities in the course of an education by eleventh-century nobiles—and “had heard and understood that those who desire to belong to Christ must be ready to crucify the flesh with its sins and desires.”42 He demonstrated this not only through ­inconspicuous

39

40 41

42

“Martyred” in 1086, elevated in 1095, first passio written around the same time, probably canonized in 1099, translated in 1100 with the ensuing new cathedral constructed in Odense; cf. Kaarsted, ed., Odense bys historie, vol. 1 (1982); Meulengracht Sørensen, “Om Ælnoth og hans bog” (1984), 115–39; Christensen, Middelalderbyen Odense (1988). Founded for this purpose in 1098/99, the cathedral chapter was erected around 1117; see Johannsen and Johannsen, Sct. Knuds Kirke (2001), 8–35. Ælnoth c. 3 (in: aass Jul. 10, col. 0130ff.): “Inter igitur praemissa pietatis studia, Sueno Magnus, veluti regum quondam fortissimus, ut et vatum facundissimus David … luxui illecebrosi appetitus admodum cedens, numerosae prolis sobolem in regni sibi iura successuram emisit; quosdamque divinae scientiae studiis apposuit, quosdam suis in locis singulis educando nobilibus delegavit.” Ælnoth c. 9: “actus et ignorantias pristinas ac delicta iuventutis suae solerti examinatione discutiens … audierat enim et audiens intellexerat, … ut qui Christi esse desiderant, carnem cum vitiis et concupiscentiis crucifigere non perhorrescunt” (cf. Gal 5:24).

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fasting—even at banquets, he secretly drank only water instead of mead and wine and discreetly let the best food pass by him—and clandestine scourging by two court bishops. He also “kept away from the immorality that many kings fall victim to, even King Solomon, who long ago was blamed for his sons’ loss of ten-twelfths of the kingdom.” Cnut’s marriage to the Flemish count’s daughter Adela “of the imperial family, brought with great deference from the western shores” (the counts of Flanders were held to be descended from the Carolingians following a hypergynous act of bravado by their ninth-century ancestor Baldwin i) marked the first dynastic bond of a Danish ruler to the continental West and may have given him an unprecedented reputation and support. As Ælnoth implies, he had a good reason “to be content with his marriage to her and to avoid the unchaste embrace of concubines.”43 Were the further temptations of the regum lascivia really rendered obsolete by the Carolingian woman? The parallel to Snorri’s description of King Harald Fairhair, who repudiated his numerous Norwegian women after his union with the Danish princess, comes to mind. Like Harald, politically Cnut had good reason to treat his wife from the south well. Ælnoth’s Cnut, in his commendable monogamous up-market marriage to Ethela, id est nobilis (“Adele, meaning ‘the noble one’”) is a saint— a Josephite marriage is not necessary; under the circumstances, monogyny is already chastity enough. Ælnoth almost seems to speak out against a certain public indignation at this restriction of the royal seed. It was no small risk that Cnut was taking if he did indeed restrict himself in this way. According to the testimony of William of Malmesbury, a rumour circulated that William the Conqueror, who likewise concentrated on his privileged relationship with the daughter of a Flemish count, “was unable to do anything with women.”44 Like the Conqueror, King Cnut was well advised to give priority to the Flanders connection as he in turn prepared to invade England in 1085. Contrary to the Conqueror, however, this 43

44

Ælnoth c. 8: “Regum quamplurium, sed et ipsius Salomonis devitans lasciviam, ob quam eius quondam posteri bis quinis regni partibus ablatis, vix duabus irato Domino principari merebantur; imperatorii generis, nobilissimam sibi coniugem, sapientium consilio, elegit; quam insigni honorificientia ex occidentalibus oris adductam, secundum nominis eius aestimationem, quae Ethela, id est nobilis, dicebatur, nobilem nobiliter excipiens, impudicis concubinarum despectis amplexibus, solius eius connubio, Iesu Christo teste angelisque eius, contentus est.” William of Malmesbury, gra iii, 273: “precipue in prima adolescentia castitatem suspexit, in tantum ut publice sereretur nichil illum in femina posse.” Then with Matilda of Flanders “ita se egit ut pluribus annis nullius probri suspitione notaretur.” William and Ælnoth’s works and the kings they describe are more or less contemporary, and both were English. There is therefore no reason why one must ‘depend’ on the other: rather, both narrate from within the same political and cultural milieu.

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did not bring him any dynastic success. After his death on the run from the opposition which, for reasons that remain unclear, became overwhelming following the abandoned English campaign, Adela returned to Flanders with her son, who bore the telling name of Charles. In 1119, Charles became count of Flanders and, in 1127, a saint by virtue of his ‘martyrdom’ famously recounted by Galbert of Bruges. In Denmark, however, the kingship passed to Cnut’s brothers, the remaining sons of Sven Estridsen from his “unchaste embraces with concubines.” Unlike Harald Fairhair, King Cnut had failed as the founder of a lineage. It is remarkable how terse and derogatory the treatment of the saintly king is in the Danish sources. The Roskilde Chronicle, which grants him less space than any of Sven’s other four sons, only reports that Cnut introduced a “new and scandalous” levy—apparently a poll tax—and therefore suffered martyred in Odense.45 The Danish king lists and annals mention his death at most, sometimes not even this, never his sanctity, and certainly not his wife or son.46 Certainly, the success of S. Canutus rex was hampered by the fact that he belonged to Odense, a see which was politically sidelined shortly after his canonization, and moreover did not himself become the forebear of a line of kings. The other ‘political’ Saint Cnut of Denmark, S. Canutus dux, Cnut Lavard († 1131), father of King Valdemar i (r. 1157–82) who would be so successful politically and dynastically, fared better. With his cult centre in Ringsted on the island of Zealand, which was becoming the centre of gravity of the kingdom, he was the patron saint of ecclesiastical-royal coronation ceremonies, and his church would be the burial place of kings for almost two centuries. Yet if the holy King Cnut’s ‘failure’ is associated with his lack of a dynastic successor, it can be seen in the context of the general attitude of the Danish sources to an abundance of offspring, which in terms of polygynous practices can be characterized as a kind of staged disinterest.

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Chronicon Roskildense c. 10: “Quo [Harald, Sven’s eldest son] mortuo frater eius Kanutus in regnum levatus est. Hic cum populum quadam nova lege et inaudita ad tributum, quod nostrates ‘nefgjald’ [‘nose tax’] vocant, coegit, a Iucia in Fiuniam fugatus Othinse in ecclesia sancti Albani martyrizatus est.” A minimal reference to the “many miracles” at his grave follows. Cf. the six genealogies in sm, vol. 1, 145–94, as well as the nine annals covering Cnut’s era (collected in dma). Only the so-called Annales Dani-Suecani, probably compiled in Östergötland around 1500, mention Cnut’s marriage to Adela and three children: Charles, Cecilia, and Ingeborg, with the latter connected with the jarl of Sweden Birger Jarl (†1266) and his son, King Magnus Ladulås (r. 1275–90), through a dubious and temporally quite impossible genealogy.

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Practices of the Valdemar Era

There has already been mention of the Roskilde Chronicle’s telling omissions from Adam of Bremen’s account, passing up the occasion to label Cnut the Great’s successors in Norway and England as the sons of a concubine. The ­Danish king lists (series regum, kongetal) engage in similar practices. A late thirteenth-century king list, whose main concern was the glorification of the ‘martyr’-king Erik Plovpenning, murdered in Slesvig in 1250 by his brother Abel, comments on the sons of Cnut the Great that “although from different relationships” (licet diversis hymeneis) he made them his “twin heirs” (geminos heredes): the intended antithesis is obvious.47 Another king list, probably drafted in the first half of the thirteenth century, does indeed distinguish the Danish heir as the son of the uxor and the sons who inherited England and Norway as concubina geniti, however, the division of the empire described immediately afterwards is given without comment.48 A list from the later thirteenth or early fourteenth century adds: “His sons succeeded him … as their father had intended during his lifetime.”49 No opprobrium seems to be intended or indeed attached. There is a parallel development in the Danish provincial laws, which were fixed in writing in the early thirteenth century, described by Thyra Nors in her study on the ‘illegitimate’ children of high status women as a compromise between the regional custom of not differentiating between offspring and the canonical categorization, recently exacerbated by the stipulation in the Liber Extra (1234) about illegitimate children’s incapacity to inherit. Various regional 47

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SM, vol. 1, 187; only the Danish heir Harthacnut is mentioned by name, so we do not know which of the three sons is omitted. That hymeneus (“bridal”), biblically unattested and missing from DuCange, is to be interpreted here as “legitimate” in the narrower sense can be ruled out, for a little later, it says of the sons of Valdemar ii in a syntactically similar and terminologically very precise phrase: “hic quatuor habuit filios legitimos, diversis tamen coniugibus” (namely the Bohemian princess Dagmar and the Portuguese princess Berengaria). The canonical terminology—here, coniugium—was thus perfectly usable, and its neglect in certain situations should be regarded as a conscious choice: the first passage therefore means “from different kinds of sexual unions.” sm, vol. 1, 160–66, here 164: “Kanutus victor existens ipsam Immam duxit uxorem genuitque ex ea filium Hartheknut. Suein et Haroldus a concubina geniti fuerant. Post mortem eius succedunt in regnum eius filii eius, Haroldus in Angliam, Suein in Normanniam, Harthecnut in Daniam.”—The next Danish king, Magnus the Good, is also again here “filiu[s] sancti Olaf a concubina.” sm, vol. 1, 167–74, here 169f.: “Cui successerunt filii eius, Harthecnut in Dacia, Harald in Anglia, Swen in Noruegia, sicut pater vivens disposuit.” The ‘legitimate’ son’s connection to emperor Henry iii through marriage, as well as the name of the concubine, Alviva, had previously also been specified here, among other things.

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laws reacted to these new trends by replacing the traditional unchallenged capacity of illegitimate children to inherit with a father’s testamentary right and an unaffected hereditary right on the maternal side.50 At the same time, sons of concubines were being excluded from the royal  succession: since Valdemar i (1157), no further ‘illegitimate’ sons (that is, sons  not stemming from an at least isogynous relationship) became kings. However—unlike in Norway a century later—this exclusion was never formulated in legal terms, but was achieved through practice. This was encouraged by the fact that there was always at least one suitable ‘legitimate’ successor available on the six occasions when a king died during the Valdemar period; the long-term success of the new practice, however, did not appear secured for a long time. Certainly the oldest known son of Valdemar i, Christopher († 1171), son of a concubine named Tove,51 apparently made no attempt to challenge his ten-year-younger half-brother Cnut from his father’s relationship with the Minsk prince’s daughter Sophia, for the designation. Instead we see him as a faithful member of the royal court, leader of several military campaigns against the Polabian Slavs, and finally jarl/duke of southern Jutland: a ‘magnate.’52 The 50

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Nors, “Illegitimate Children” (1996); see also klnm, s.v. Oäkta barn. The Danish kingdom consisted of three legal regions: Scania, Zealand (with the smaller islands), and Jutland, which received written laws in the vernacular between c.1200 (Scania) and 1241 (King’s Law for Jutland). Thus KnS c. 109. Nors, “Illegitimate Children” (1996), 22, casts doubt on this tradition and points out Christopher’s striking proximity to prominent members of the Zealand Hvide magnate house, including Archbishop Absalon. To me, this does not seem sufficient reason to regard the mother as a Hvide, given the abundance of evidence for the sons of royal concubines being raised by allied aristocrats (see above for Sven Estridsen’s children in Ælnoth). However, this cannot be excluded, for as Nors demonstrates for Denmark with several examples, and as becomes clear for other parts of Europe in this study, royal ‘concubinages’ with aristocratic women were by no means rare. KnS c. 122: “Valdamarr konungr gaf Kristófóró syni sínum ríki á Jótlandi; hafði hann hertogadóm í Heiðabœ ok þat ríki, sem þar fylgir; hann var ríkr maðr.” When Knýtlinga saga was composed in the mid-thirteenth century, southern Jutland/Slesvig was established as a ‘princely fief’ (fyrstelen) usually entrusted to the first in the royal succession (the saga uses the word ríki “regnum, independent sphere of control”). Ríkr maðr “mighty man” is the saga term for the uppermost group of influential men who deal with kings on equal terms.—Christopher is also mentioned by Saxo, who talks extensively about his role in the Rügen campaigns, but says nothing about his mother, as well as in a dozen annals and chronicles. In one version of the Annales Sorani (dma, 19), his mother is named without comment—but as Helena, probably being confused with Valdemar ii’s concubine (cf. Nors, “Illegitimate Children” [1996], 22)—elsewhere, in a late compilation based on the Annales Ryenses (c.1300 at the earliest; dma, 308), we find the addendum “Valdemari filius nothus.” Christopher died in 1173, three years after Cnut’s solemn coronation as co-regent and successor as part of the canonization ceremonies for Cnut Lavard in Ringsted 1170.

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name Kristófórus, at that time uncommon in Denmark, suggests that Valdemar, then a young contender for the disputed royal title, saw his position strengthened by the birth of a son and wished to reinforce this with the onomastic reference to his own Russian/Greek kinship.53 Valdemar’s son from his marriage to Sophia, born six years after he had achieved sole rule, was named Cnut, presumably with the intention of making the name of Valdemar’s two saintly relatives (his father Cnut Lavard and his great-uncle Cnut iv) the Leitname of the new dynasty in the making. However, not all Danish kings’ sons accepted their exclusion from kingship by the victorious party so lightly. A grandson of Niels (Nicholas, r. 1104–34), the last of Sven Estridsen’s five sons to become king,54 the sometime king Cnut Magnussen left behind two sons through concubines when he was killed in 1157. One of them, also called Niels, was an overseer of important royal possessions in East Jutland, so he had obviously not pressed too hard, and Valdemar found it expedient to be on good terms with him. He made his name with his piety and was venerated locally as a saint after his death in 1180, a popular cult that remained alive until the nineteenth century.55 How far the notion of sacral kingship resonates in this never-sanctioned “grassroot cult” we can only speculate; however, the illegitimately born saint can hardly have constituted a danger to the ruling line. The situation was different with King Cnut Magnussen’s other son, Valdemar,56 who studied in Paris and who, as bishop-elect of Slesvig, appears at first sight as the typical instance of giving a church career to a ‘younger son’ excluded from the paternal inheritance. But given that magnates with a solid level of church education were not rare in 53

Valdemar (~Vladimir) was the son of a daughter of Mstislav of Novgorod/Kiev and Cnut Lavard, born after his murder in 1131. 54 He was proclaimed king in 1146 and killed on 9 August 1157 at a reconciliation feast of three ruling kings (the famous ‘Bloodfeast of Roskilde,’ reported by Saxo, Helmold of Bosau, and others), apparently at the instigation of King Sven Grathe. The third king, Valdemar, escaped with serious injuries, gathered his army, and marched on King Sven, who died in a battle in Jutland two months later, making Valdemar sole ruler; see Malmros, “Blodgildet i Roskilde” (1979), 43–66. Although the major accounts of the bloodfeast side with Valdemar, it is tempting to see Valdemar as the actual mastermind behind the plot, though this can hardly be supported by the sources. 55 His vita and miracula are collected in: vsd, 397–407; on his cult, see Paludan, “Sejlivede græsrodshelgener” (1987). A few years later, the new, present-day Aarhus Cathedral was built over his grave and the old 11th-century cathedral abandoned, a process that has only one parallel in Northern Europe, in association with Saint Cnut’s burial place in Odense. 56 Born 1158, died 1236; his name refers to his father’s temporary alliance with King Valdemar, which also prompted King Valdemar’s marriage to Sophia—this not only reinforced kinship ties with Russia, but also had domestic political value as Sophia was King Cnut Magnussen’s the half-sister; cf. Saxo xiv, 14,1f.

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twelfth-century ­Denmark we ought to be cautious about hastily equating ecclesiastical education and rank with exclusion from the secular.57 In fact, after the death of Christopher, his own son by a frilla, King Valdemar i entrusted his nephew Valdemar with the administration of the duchy in South Jutland, to which the king’s second son by Sophia, also called Valdemar, was intended to succeed. In other words, Valdemar was given secular rule of the same area whose bishop he was to be. However, the combination of possibility and limitation must have become unbearable for the bishop-elect, and when the handover of the duchy to the grown Valdemar (the later King Valdemar ii, “the Victorious,” r. 1202–41) was due, Bishop Valdemar reached for the kingship and challenged Cnut vi (r. 1182–1202), who had already been designated eldest legitimate son of Valdemar i at the canonization ceremony at Ringsted in 1170. The attempt failed, Bishop Valdemar was captured, and only released a decade and a half later after repeated (albeit markedly discrete) papal intervention. After his controversial election to the archbishopric of Bremen, in the 1220s he became involved in the Holsten coalition which brought about the end of Danish rule in Nordalbingia, and, after having been sequestered at various Cistercian monasteries, died in 1236.58 Bishop Valdemar was Denmark’s last ‘illegitimate’ pretender to the throne. However, it remained customary to grant the sons of concubines influence with the king or near-princely positions until well into the thirteenth century. In 1216, King Valdemar ii named the concubine’s son domicellus Niels count of North Halland (the northernmost region of the Danish kingdom on the Scandinavian mainland, thus in a sense the counterpart to South Jutland/Slesvig), 57

58

For example, Hoffmann, Königserhebung (1976), 28f., who equates the report concerning the theological education of some of Sven Estridsen’s sons with early exclusion from the royal succession. In doing so, I suspect that Hoffmann overestimates Sven Estridsen’s ability to manipulate custom and the right of magnate gatherings to ‘elect’ a king, as well as the facticity of the episode, which should be read in the context of the intended hagiographic effect. Furthermore, we might wonder what kind of “theological” training was even available to future priests around 1050/70. It is difficult to think of anything more than a stay in Bremen, as attested for some bishops of the Nordic ecclesiastical province. However, according to Adam’s reports, the atmosphere there was not much different from the court of a secular prince. This was certainly different in Paris around 1170, at least; but even in the thirteenth century, a corresponding intention on the part of the Scandinavian magnates cannot be observed. For a detailed biographical overview, see Hans Olrik, “Valdemar (Knudsen),” in Dansk biografisk lexikon (1887–1905), vol. 18, 193–97, with a remarkably harsh characterization of the pretender as “the most demonic figure in our history … the evil apostate, a nightmare in the midst of Denmark’s happiest time” (197)—a characterization which is to be understood from the national perspective of the time after 1864. Revisions in Radtke, “Sliaswig (Schleswig, Haithabu)” (1992), 114–16.

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and his son from his marriage with a Schwerin count’s daughter succeeded him in this office after his early death in 1218. After the Danish crusade to Estonia (1219) another of Valdemar’s sons, whom he had from his relationship with the Swedish jarl’s daughter Helena,59 received the title of duke in Estonia and large estates in Harjumaa at the age of fifteen. These, however, were lost a few years later to the Sword Brethren. He subsequently appears as duke of Blekinge and even retained this title after unsuccessfully rebelling against Valdemar ii’s successor Erik Plovpenning along with his younger, legitimate brothers Abel and Christopher. His later exchange of Blekinge for the island of Lolland was also no diminution. Valdemar ii’s sons from the union with Berengaria of Portugal, who became kings one after another in 1241, 1250, and 1252 respectively, clearly saw themselves bound to preserve the rank their father had given their ‘illegitimate’ brother. Moreover, he had extensive land holdings in Denmark and Sweden, most likely through maternal inheritance and paternal endowment; he was married to a daughter of the Pomeranian duke Swantopolk. He died in 1260; his grave is in the abbey church of Ringsted, centre of the Cnut Lavard cult and burial place of the Valdemarian dynasty, together with his son who was assigned the dukedom in South Halland, next to six kings and their queens. Without doubt, this concubine’s son was at the centre of the stirps regia.60 5

Dissenting Voices: Sven Aggesen and Saxo Grammaticus

This practice was certainly not unique in thirteenth-century Latin Europe— let us recall the sons of Emperor Frederick ii—but neither was it common. What is striking is the nonchalance that dominates the chronicles. The overwhelming lack of comment on polygynous paternity is not ‘barbaric’ ignorance but a cultural choice. For there are also a few dissonant voices; yet these come from the ‘great’ minds of their time, who are more likely to be noticed in international historical scholarship today than the many smaller chronicles, annals, and genealogies that may be considered the ‘mainstream’ of their time in terms 59

60

For more detail on this relationship, see below, Chapter 4. The choice of the name Cnut for the son from a relationship with a frilla close to the mighty Zealand Hvide ‘house’ (magnate clan grouping) indicates that the still unmarried Valdemar considered the succession of this son to be a possibility. The so-called Tabula Ringstadiensis, a sheet of parchment with a detailed description of the layout of the royal tombs, produced in the second half of the fourteemth century (edited with facsimile in SM, vol. 2, 82–86), calls him “Kanutus dux Lalandie, filius regis Waldemari ii,” the same description as is provided for his two half-brothers from Valdemar’s marriages to Dagmar and Berengaria, who were buried alongside him.

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of transmission, adoption by other scribes, and geographic distribution. In order to keep comparison as rigorous as possible, I will keep to historiography, and not stray into sources such as the juridical writings of the canonist and archbishop of Lund, Andreas Sunesen, who, in his Latin ‘paraphrase’ of Scanian law also addressed issues de filiis concubinarum.61 The first ‘great dissenter’ is Sven Aggesen (~1140–90?). He came from a powerful Jutlandic magnate group which produced, among others, the first two archbishops of Lund. His closer kin relations are, however, more obscure. He lived in the entourage of King Valdemar i, for whom he edited, among other things, the “Law of the Retainers” (Lex castrensis/Vederlov). His other important work is the Brevis historia regum Dacie (c.1190). Like all twelfth-century Danish histories, it begins with the legendary kings of a pre-Christian Golden Age and continues the narrative to the present day.62 With him, we encounter an almost mocking reading of Sven Estridsen, the gloriosus rex of the other chronicles: “The rustics called him ‘the father of kings’ because he was a most prolific begetter of numerous sons, five of whom wore the shining diadem of kingship in succession.”63 Still, these sons included Saint Cnut, whom Sven felt obliged to defend against the accusation (spelled out with relish) that he had fallen victim to a rebellion due to his severity, cruelty, and the “unbearable yoke” of his measures. Yet Sven Aggesen's explanation for Cnut's downfall (a series of tactical miscalculations in the run-up to the embarrassing miscarriage of the English campaign) does not make Cnut look much better. Of the saintly king’s self-denial expressed through his strict monogamy, which was so important to the hagiographer Ælnoth (a model that was undoubtedly available to Sven), there is no mention. The other is Saxo Grammaticus, to whose huge Gesta Danorum Sven Aggesen refers in a much-cited passage by way of apology for his own summary treatment of the subject.64 Saxo’s comprehensive, craftfully stylized and highly complex composition fundamentally refuses any treatment of individual passages, as they immediately lose some of their meaning in isolation, so 61 62 63

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See Nors, “Anders Sunesen” (1998). Cf. Inge Skovgaard-Petersen, “Chronicles 1. Denmark,” in EMSc, 80f., with references, and especially Breengaard, Muren om Israels hus (1982). Sven Aggesen, Brevis historia c. 10 (in: sm, Bd. 1, 94–143, Version x): “Hunc ‘Regum Patrem’ turba nominavit agrestis, eo quod numerosa filiorum prole uberrimus extiterit. Inter quos successive quinque regio fulserunt diademate.” The Works of Sven Aggesen, trans. Christiansen (1992), 65. Sven Aggesen, Brevis historia c. 10: “Quorum gesta superfluum duxi plene recolere, ne crebrius idem repetitum fastisium pareret legentibus, cum … contubernalis meus Saxo elegantiori stilo omnium gesta prolixius exponere decreverit.”

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that a theme such as ‘women in Saxo’ would always need to be treated in a ­book-length study; in fact, Birgit Sawyer (then Strand) has written that book.65 For this reason, it is difficult to compare the accounts of kings’ sons in other historical works with Saxo. To give just one example: Saxo does, of course, treat the succession to Cnut the Great († 1035), and specifies who the mothers of the three successors were. However, Saxo integrates the English magnate’s ­daughter Ælfgifu (dismissed as concubina in Adam but not the Roskilde Chronicle) into his narrative in a unique manner: He makes her the beautiful lover of the young Olav Haraldsson (the later Norwegian royal saint), who fought with Cnut in England before claiming the rule of Norway.66 King Cnut requires her handover, whereupon Olav Haraldsson terminates their association and retires to Norway in anger. This is rhetorical flourish, deftly recalling Agamemnon’s and Achilles’ quarrel over Briseis in the Iliad, but not ‘just rhetorical flourish.’ Saxo does not write for his countrymen, or at least not for many of them; he is concerned with giving his country the historiographical ennoblement which, in his view, it deserves, and to make it known to the elite of Latin Christendom. When considering his women, as elsewhere, Saxo must be understood as a tendentious translation of local practice into international high-style patterns of reception. Saxo provides Sven Estridsen, the ‘father of kings,’ with a lengthy character reference, the first part of which reads as follows: The repressed Danish captaincy now unfurled the billowing sails of success. He was famous among men for his generosity, renowned for his munificence, excellent in every feature of philanthropy, for he also made it his closest concern to build and adorn holy churches and brought a motherland still inexperienced in sacred rites to a more refined practice of religion. He spoiled this splendid conduct only by his excessive lust. By plucking the chastity of many respectable girls, he fathered a large number of sons on mistresses [ex pellicibus], but got none through marriage [ex matrimonio]. From these liaisons came Harald and Gorm, Omund and Sven. To them were added Ubbe, Olaf, Niels, Bjørn, and Benedikt, all greatly resembling their father and taking very little after their mothers. A similar mean alliance produced [Saint] Cnut and Erik [‘Ejegod,’ 1095– 1103, who died in Cyprus on crusade], the noblest jewels of their land. A daughter, Sigrid, to whom I must return in a later section was born to a 65 The foundational study of the topic remains Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980). 66 Saxo x, 14,5: “Alwivam ab Olavo adamatam Kanutus eximia matrone specie delectatus stupro petiit. Igitur Olavus, sive quia concubine facibus spoliatus …” See below, Chapter 4.

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concubine [pellice] in the same way, and afterwards came to be the wife of Godeskalk the Wend. Because the king’s mind at length recoiled from the allurements of promiscuity and an unrestrained indulgence in love-making, he decided to check his inclinations by seeking a chaste marriage bed. He aimed to make amends [ut … redimeret] for his involvement with all those paramours through the permitted institution of wedlock, the regulation of a single union, and not to squander his royal virility in future with bedfellows of that kind; therefore, in his desire for legitimate offspring [legitima prole], he took Gyða.67 Saxo’s passage, so obviously aimed at Adam of Bremen’s report, oozes with irony. The master of oblique commentary, whose seemingly straightforward homage to Danish history and its climax in the Valdemar era (Saxo’s own) has fooled generations of nationally-minded readers and translators and for a long time gave Saxo himself the reputation of a royal wheedler, is giving us, at first glance, a textbook prince: a bold king who, after fierce battles against the Norwegian kings Magnús and Harald, gets the kingdom back on track, and whom one almost wishes to forgive the youthful ardor of his loins (which the dutiful churchman Saxo, however, does not fail to rebuke), for in time he recalls his duty: a monogamous Christian marriage with legitimate children. This is the prince as we know him from influential works of the present; a prince such as that painted by Georges Duby or James Brundage. One almost wishes this ideal ‘jeune’ might have had his change of heart coincide with his assumption of power. 67 Saxo xi, 7,1f.: “… Danie gubernaculum plena prosperitatis vela solvebat. Hic quum liberalitate illustris, beneficentia celeber cunctisque humanitatis partibus perfectissimus haberetur, etiam sacrarum edium condendarum ornandarumque curam intentissime edidit rudemque adhuc sacrorum patriam ad cultiorem religionis usum perduxit. Verum hunc morem candorem sola libidinis intemperantia maculabat. Complurium namque illustrium puellarum castitate delibata ut nullum ex mantrmonio, ita complures ex pellicibus filios sustulit. E quibus fuere cum Gormone Haraldus, cum Suenone Omundus. His accessere Ubbo et Olavus, Nicolaus, Biorno atque Benedictus, paterno quam maxime, materno minimum sanguini respondentes. Consimilis copulo obscuritas Kanutum et Ericum, maxima patrie ornamenta, progenuit. Sed et filia Siritha, que postmodum Guthscalco Sclavico coniunx accessit, in sequentibus referenda pellice pariter orta proditur. [7,2] Tandem rex animum suum ab illecebris luxurie et immoderato veneris usu retractum genialis thori castitate cohibere constituit. Ut ergo multorum pellicatuum experientiam licenti nuptiarum usu uniusque matrimonii lege redimeret nec talibus ulterius cubiculis maiestatis sue vigorem absumeret, Gutham, Suetico rege genitam, (…) legitime prolis … collegit.” Gesta Danorum, trans. Fisher, vol. 2 (2015), 801, 803.

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As stated above, this is precisely what another king did: Valdemar i ‘the Great,’ the king whose triumphs Saxo ostentatiously extols. He also had at least one son through an early relationship with a frilla (Christopher, later Jarl of South Jutland), but instead chose his children from the marriage which paved his way to power, described by Saxo as sealing his alliance with Cnut Magnussen as his successors.68 As shown, his children, Kings Cnut vi and Valdemar ii, during whose lifetime Saxo wrote, behaved in the same way—or, to put it more carefully, the sources only say that these kings were ‘officially’ serially (as opposed to simultaneously) polygynous, without explicitly excluding the other possibility. It must therefore have been clear to contemporaries that Saxo’s Sven Estridsen is a parallel vita. But it has a serious flaw: in the end, the candidate for the unum matrimonium is, as Adam had already complained and Saxo had underlined through rhetorical ornamentation, the king’s blood relative, and the purpose of making good on a chapter of his life is completely missed: “He may have resolved to make a sacred marriage, but in fact he only covered up his perfidy. Hardly had he escaped the one crime, he plunged into the other.”69 Out of the frying pan into fire, then—for (and this again is a typical instance of the uncertainty into which the lay world had been plunged by the reformist radical tightening of incest rules) even an isogamous marriage among the royal house did not help: coitum pro matrimonio habuit, he desired a marriage, but only got illicit sex. Moreover, he was sternly rebuked by the clergy. With Saxo, it is initially the local bishops of Lund and Roskilde, who then appeal to Archbishop Adalbert in second instance. In response to Adalbert’s admonition, Sven says that he will answer such impudence with the sword (seque ferro correptionis insolentiam repressurum edixit)—a threat that prompts the archbishop to relocate his seat from Hamburg to the safer Bremen. It is striking how Saxo subtly transforms Adam’s model point by point for his purposes. In Adam, Sven first marries his Swedish blood relative, repudiates her under pressure from the churchmen (in the final instance, the pressure comes from the pope and not, as in Saxo, from the coaxing of Sven’s episcopal friends in Denmark), and then, “like Solomon,” takes numerous concubines. With the relocation of the archiepiscopal see dated two centuries later for this purpose—Adam places it in 858 (i, 27)—Saxo adds in passing a further episode in his series of exempla on the theme of ‘Danish courage versus Saxon-“Teutonic” cowardice.’ But 68 Saxo xiv, 14,1: “concordiam connubii affinitate componendam” (namely between Valdemar and Cnut Magnussen, whose half-sister Sophia he married). 69 Saxo xiv, 14,1: “Ita [ut] dum ad coniugalia sacra celebranda animum induxit, eorum nomine flagitium coloravit, dumque ab uno se crimine retrahit, in aliud repente provoluit.”

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ultimately—and this is Saxo’s real point—Sven and the reader come to the conclusion: “Yet it is more tolerable that he seek ties with foreign blood than with his relatives, although of course both kinds of love must be condemned as unchastity.”70 It is difficult to imagine a lamer rebuke of kingly polygyny. With a glance back to the beginning of Saxo’s section on Sven Estridsen, we now see who is designated through the apparently clear conceptual opposition pellices (negative) ↔ matrimonium (positive): on the one hand, virgin magnate’s daughters; on the other, an incestuous foreigner. Matrimonium, so we must conclude, can be the greater sin. We wonder which aspect of the king’s intemperantia libidinis was actually a blemish in Saxo’s eyes. For if the royal libido only unfolds in a socially acceptable manner, for instance under the indulgent eye of the first wife and without curtailing the rights of her or other relatives (as had seemingly occurred with Sven’s indiscriminate approach), then the “noble queen” can be a second Livia, her husband an Augustus or Alexander.71 Thus even in Saxo, the high-flyer cleric, any identification of polygyny and illegitimacy, conspicuously absent from the majority of Danish sources, is at best ambiguous. Saxo was well acquainted with the relevant canonical debates and tendencies of his time and closely associated with leading canonists in the North,72 and it was not unusual for him to exploit that argumentative potential. Saxo reports of the ‘Augustus’ Erik Ejegod († 1103) that his first son was said to be from a concubina, the second from his matrimonium, and the third was

70 Saxo xiv, 14,1: “Sed tolerabilius quod alieni sanguinis quam quod sue propinquitatis copulam usurpavit, quamquam uterque huiusce veneris usus impudicitie crimini sit obnoxius.” 71 With Saxo (xii, 3,5), the king’s splendour is also tarnished by “the force of his desire.” His numerous mistresses, chosen from the immediate environment, were treated with special care by Queen Bothild and occasionally even adorned and groomed. Saxo attaches a longer accolade of Bothild’s singularis moderatio, constructed antithetically. Possible models include, besides Suetonius’s Livia (Aug. 71), the slightly more remote wife of Scipio, Aemilianus, in Valerius Maximus (6,7,1); another of Saxo’s favorite authors is Justinus, whose Alexander (xii, 3) evidently provided the template for Erik’s pellicum cubicula; cf. Christiansen, ed., Danorum regum heroumque, vol. 1, 268. In Abbot William of Æbelholt’s genealogy, she is labelled as “Botilde regina de nobilissima Danorum prosapia orta” (SM i 180). Nors, “Ægteskab” (1998) is probably right to doubt that Bothild (who is seen as belonging to the so-called Thrugot house, a grouping with possessions focused on Jutland and Scania, based on onomastic grounds and details from Saxo and Knýtlinga saga; see Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt [2000], 162f.) was so strikingly set apart from the other puellae through coniugalis copula. 72 On the theology of Andreas Sunesen see Bysted, “Anders Sunesens Hexaëmeron” (1998), 53–74; on cultural contact with regard to the forms of social organization, see Paludan, Familia og familie (1995); for criticism Gelting, “Det komparative perspektiv” (1999).

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adulterio ortus, born from a forbidden union.73 The careful qualitative classification merits consideration, because this triad would be formally consistent with the traditional canonical provision, according to which the (still) unmarried man living in concubinage does not sin.74 But Saxo thwarts any possible ‘whitewash’ serial interpretation through his portrayal of a king undeniably engaged in simultaneous polygyny with his queen patient to the point of complicity. At this point of Saxo’s history, half a century before the succession revolution of Valdemar i, there is still no hint that the son from the legitimate marriage might be privileged over the firstborn son. When king Erik and Queen Bothild set out for the Holy Land, the concubine’s son Harald (‘Kesja,’ c.1082– 1135) becomes regent on account of his prestantior etas, while the legitimate Cnut is entrusted to the mighty Hvide kin group for his upbringing, and Erik, “of less illustrious origin,” entrusted to less influential people—his origin, like the socialization determined for him, is a matter of a gradual, non-categorial distinction: he is, in a sense, a secondary resource.75 Harald’s reign—his parents never returned from the crusade—was short and unpopular, but while the king, soon overthrown due to his harsh administration, is indeed a rex iniquus with Saxo, he is certainly not a contemptible one, and by no means afflicted by a taint of birth. By contrast, Erik is: When he demands his share of the paternal inheritance, he is told by Harald the concubine’s son that one born of adulterium has no claim to inheritance.76 As a legal principle, this is ‘erroneous’ given that, as 73 Saxo xii, 3,6: “Fuere Erico filii Haraldus, Kanutus et Ericus, sed primus concubina, secundus matrimonio, tertius adulterio ortus proditur …” (alongside several daughters ex concubinatu).—This scale should not be read as factual, indeed, it cannot even be regarded as evidence of the king’s women being divided into three classes; Saxo’s reasons for establishing this triad will be discussed below. In the more contemporary Roskilde Chronicle (c. 12) Harald, Erik, and another son are listed as “filios tres ex concubinis.” 74 Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt (2000), 129ff., in contrast, assumes that Saxo wishes to disparage Harald, the concubine’s son, as illegitimate, but neglects the classification mentioned. 75 Saxo xii, 6,5: “Ericum autem, obscuriore loco natum, hebetiore quoque cura complexus minoris potentie tutoribus applicavit.”—Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt (2000), 129, suspects that these “less powerful educators” were actually the Bodil family of southern Zealand, which was no less important than the Hvides, but in Saxo’s own time was not distinguished by the same proximity to the throne. This would nuance the findings on the intentions of the historical King Erik Ejegod, but does not alter Saxo’s means of expression. 76 Saxo xiii, 4,2: “Qui quum debitam sibi paterne rei portionem expeteret, ab Haraldo fratre repellitur, negante adulterio ortum ad hereditatis communionem pertingere.”—Peter Zeeberg translates this as “at uægte børn ikke kunne få del i arven” although it is clear that the problem is not “illegitimate” birth, but being born out of a forbidden relationship

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noted, even in the twelfth century the father could give his ‘illegitimate’ sons a portion of the inheritance, and there is no question of exclusion on principle even in Saxo’s time, let alone when the story was set. It is therefore all the more interesting as an argument. Saxo chooses the concubine’s son to advocate the ‘legitimate/illegitimate’ categorization championed by the most radical voices in his own time, but thwarts it over and over again in the Gesta Danorum, creating a twofold irony: It never seems to enter the mind of Saxo’s Harald that by arguing about adulterium and exclusion from inheritance, he could be talking about his own rights—or rather, in Harald’s conceptual world the boundary does not run between the matrimonium and all the ‘illegitimate’ others, but instead separates the reputable, be they matrimonium or concubinatus, from the rest. The other man sees things differently, and the fraternal conflict that flares up—Erik devastates and plunders Harald’s property—is only settled by the intervention of the third, legitimate brother, who summons the antagonists to his residence in Slesvig, rebukes them, and then divides the paternal inheritance himself. Unfortunately, it is unclear if these divisions were equal, that is, whether Cnut (and therefore Saxo) wished to state, contra Harald, that concubinage and adulterium were of equal rank.77 However, it is clear that both were entitled to a portion of the inheritance. The full effect of the episode is only apparent in its wider context. After all, the legitimate son and mediator is Cnut Lavard, ‘martyr’ from 1131, later saint (adulterium). Given that Harald is significantly older than the legitimate son Knud, adulterium may relate to the violation of the king’s marriage; but the logic of the argument rather suggests that it is the king who has violated the marriage of another. Cf. Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980), 87. 77 Saxo xiii, 4,2: “Presentes deinde fraterne coarguens, curiosa animi inspectione equissimam inter eos patrimonii partitionem peregit, Ericoque ac Haraldo in paterna bona eundum iudicavit.”—While “equissimam partitionem” is to be understood as a “completely equitable division,” Gertz’s conjecture would refer to the equality of shares and thus of status. This is evidently based on the interpretation provided by the 14th-century Compendium Saxonis: “facta inter eos patrimonii equali particione” (SM, vol. 1, 396); if nothing else, this is evidence that the medieval recipients understood equality of shares. However, in my view, this interpretation is prohibited both by Saxo’s general tendency to treat the potential injury to another man as reprehensible, rather than nonmarital relationships per se (cf. Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980)), and more specifically by the depiction of the figures of Harald and Erik.—Knýtlinga saga (c. 95), likewise often based on Saxo, dispenses with this episode and only has the brothers’ struggle, now for power in the kingdom, begin two years after Cnut Lavard’s death, underlining the constructed character of Saxo’s episode. The liturgical texts from the circle of the Cnut Lavard’s cult in Ringsted, which likely date from around 1170 (in vsd, vol. 1, 169–247), do not indicate any awareness of the episode.

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and foremost ancestor of the Valdemars. Saxo’s Cnut here would seem to anticipate the policy of the Valdemars: restriction of kingship to legitimate sons against all opposition, important functions and princely fiefs to all other sons. But the point is that of the three brothers, Cnut Lavard, the son from a legitimate marriage, was the only one who never became king. His older brother, Harald the concubine’s son, enjoyed his brief regency around 1102/03, stepping aside for Niels, his father’s brother, on the news of his parents’ death in the Levant. Much later, in 1134, he was once more elevated as co-king by King Niels, largely to reduce tensions after Niels’s son and designated successor Magnus had instigated the murder of Cnut Lavard. The third brother, Erik, the one who according to Saxo was born out of adultery and raised by “insignificant people,” making a bid for kingship, then defeated Niels and Magnus, had his half-brother Harald—who according to Saxo once had tried to defraud him of his inheritance—and some of his sons murdered, and ruled alone for several years (1134–37). Although the ‘Valdemarian’ reading, according to which the marital union led to a saint and a series of triumphant royal figures, is in the foreground, the counter-reading persists alongside it: With regard to the kingship, the inheritance of the adulterio ortus Erik ultimately turns out to be the greatest, and in the end the gradation of the sons’ origins was precisely reversed through political vicissitudes. The practice outlined here does not permit the a persona argument of a correlation between ‘illegitimate’ birth and character flaws. As far as I can see, that kind of argument occurs just once in the Danish sources, in Saxo’s description of the struggle for the Norwegian throne around 1150, where Ingi—as mentioned above, he was the only son of a king from a legitimate marriage to rise to the royal dignity in around a century—“excelled [his halfbrothers] both by birth and by nature.”78 In Saxo’s own country, however, neither he nor anyone else makes use of this argument, even if it would have been as politically obvious and factually accurate as in the case of Sven ‘Grathe’ (r. 1146–57), son of the adulterio ortus Erik discussed above, principal opponent of Valdemar i in the struggle for the kingship, and instigator of the ‘Bloodfeast of Roskilde’ in 1157, a sensational slaughter of the invited guests, to which, among others, the third pretender fell victim. Of the instigator Sven, who was eventually defeated by Valdemar i, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines reports that he

78 Saxo xiv, 29,7. The “iusto matrimonio ortus” is juxtaposed with the sons of a Norwegian and an Irish pellex—whereby not only ‘illegitimate,’ but also unfree birth is discreetly ­indicated—who are distinguished from the spotless Ingi by avaritia and luxuria. Unfortunately, Saxo continues, Ingi was a cripple.

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was the filius ancillae,79 and the biblical subtext supplements this account with the call to shun him, “for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman.”80 What was known to the Burgundian Cistercian a century or so later could also have been taken up by a Danish chronicler; there would have been reason enough in this case to portray the rival of the saint’s son Valdemar as a regicide of ignominious birth, like his own father. Not to do so, and to miss these—and other—opportunities is a collective cultural choice. It may bear some similarity to other expressions of what Klaus von See has termed “a Nordic sense of cultural particularity (nordisches Sonderbewusstsein)” along with such traits as the mythographic reinvention of the pagan-prehistoric past, the Norse linguistic and literary culture, the culturalspatial blueprints opposing Norðrlǫnd to ‘the rest,’ the antiquarianist interest in former burial customs, and, of course, the political constitution as separate kingdoms and ecclesiastical provinces, which in turn were strengthened by cultural self-assertion.81 Saxo’s, Sven Aggesen’s, or Snorri Sturluson’s ways of dealing with elite polygyny are a part of these ongoing ‘negotiations.’82 6

The ‘Generative Aspect’ of Polygyny

British ethnologist Jack Goody, in his enormously influential interpretation of the development of marriage and the family in the Euro-Mediterranean since late antiquity, regards “the Church” as the actor whose inexorable penetration into all areas of society, from kingship to the “fundamental units of production and reproduction,” was responsible for the striking breakaway of Mediterranean and (correspondingly later) Northern Europe from a general pattern that the ancient Mediterranean world had still shared with many non-European cultures. Goody regards four changes to be crucial, together massively reducing the chances of producing offspring who were entitled to inherit: (i) the 79 80 81 82

mgh ss 23, 831 (44–45), 841 (12); similar to Albert of Stade. Helmold calls him the son of a concubina named Thunna. Gal 4:30 (on Gn 21:10): “eice ancillam et filium eius, non enim heres erit filius ancillae cum filio liberae.” The kings and archbishops of the Valdemar period give the opposite impression. On the particularistic Nordic cultural schemes around 1200, cf. Pesch, Brunaöld (1996), von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999); my own view in Rüdiger and Foerster, “Aemulatio” (2014). On the concept of ‘negotiation’ in the cultural-anthropological sense, cf. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (1988); Knudsen, “Feltarbejde” (1989), Hastrup, Kulturanalyse (1989).

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gradual prohibition of endogamy, which reached its sharpest, ultimately ­impracticable form in the Latin church’s incest regulations of the 11th–13th centuries; (ii) the prohibition of the levirate (that is, the obligation to marry the widowed wife of a close relative), which had been obligatory or customary in many ancient Mediterranean cultures; (iii) the end of the institution of adoption, which had been fundamental for the Roman culture of pietas; and (iv) the restriction and depreciation of concubinage—and one could add, a fortiori, other varieties of polygyny.83 Taken together, these restrictions significantly reduce a man’s chances of a legitimate heir, although what matters in practice is less the actual average duration of a ‘lineage’ in a given ­population— Philippe Contamine gives six generations as a benchmark84—than the perceived risk of being left without heirs. Furthermore, it is not necessary to accept Goody’s much criticized view of ‘the Church’ and its active interest in ­reducing numbers of heirs (expecting increased willingness to bequeath possessions to the ‘main morte’). Even if Goody equips his actors with too much purposive rationality and collective change with too much consistency, the phenomenon he describes is no less important for that. It is also obvious that a man can, in principle, produce more offspring through the practice of polygyny than without it. This ‘generative aspect’ of polygynous practice and representation appears indeed so self-evident that it must be insisted that we are not dealing here with an anthropological constant, but historical phenomena.85 Producing offspring is not a self-explanatory aim of human behaviour, though biological anthropology tends to view it as just that. The historian’s question runs somewhere along the lines of: Why should a man in a given society want to father as many descendants as possible? And what are the desirable circumstances for their conception? The first answer, not expressed but nonetheless suggested by Goody—a kind of quasi (anti-)Malthusian strategy for the proliferation of heirs—is not so self-explanatory either. As Roger of Hoveden quite rightly remarked about Norwegian kingship, the large and theoretically uncontrollable number of potential pretenders with legitimate blood claims was dysfunctional in terms of regulated succession. In the case of Denmark, it can be observed that the kings of the Valdemar period did all they could to regulate the right of succession in the sense Goody ascribes to “the Church,” and thereby to curb the violent 83 Goody, Development (1983), 45ff. 84 Contamine, ed., Noblesse (1976), 33, in relation to the high to late Middle Ages in Western Europe. 85 See the discussion of sociobiological interpretive approaches to polygyny in Chapter 2.

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­factional struggles which had run riot in the decades before Valdemar i rose to power in 1157, and which had at times become critical.86 The remaining ‘right’ of the extramarital sons, that is, the endowments which it appeared politically appropriate to give them, was still extensive enough to bring the unity of the thirteenth-century Danish kingdom into question as the portions assigned to them—South Jutland, North Halland, Estonia, Lolland and Falster—­developed into ‘princely fiefs’ (fyrstelen). For a time, it seemed as though parts of the kingdom were on their way to territorialization, which only the duchy of South Jutland (Slesvig) would then undergo completely.87 And while the other regions given to illegitimate or younger legitimate sons did ultimately revert to the Crown, these ‘princely fiefs’ existed throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in some instances for generations, and formed serious centres of power, sometimes dangerous to the Crown.88 Undoubtedly, an impressive crowd of sons could be an important resource for pretenders who had yet to establish their claim against their rivals in war (Sven Estridsen’s ‘fourteen’ or ‘twelve’ sons, all born out of marriage).89 And this was a notion shared by their rivals, as demonstrated by Harald’s half-­ brother Erik, who mercilessly hunted down his nephews in 1135. But handling this resource was anything but unproblematic, both in royal circles and—­ apparently—in wider circles, where the issue was not the realm, but riches. Again and again the sagas relate conflicts over inheritance between half-­ brothers or other groups of close relatives, implicitly or explicitly commenting on such disputes as consequences of polygyny, and in doing so attest that the people engaged in this culture were very aware of the problem. A wealth of sons could be useful and important. Northern Europeans shared this conviction with all other Europeans, because they knew that Abraham, threatened by childlessness through his uxor Sara, had impregnated the ancilla Hagar, and that Jacob had added two maids to his two wives, even though he was already blessed with sons without them (Gn 16:1ff.; 29:31ff.)—a flock only just surpassed by Sven Estridsen. But they also knew that Abraham’s son through his maid, Ishmael, as the progenitor of the ‘Ishmaelites,’ marked the beginning of the great enmity between Christendom and its Saracen opponents: “a man with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against 86 87 88 89

Between 1132 and 1135 alone, six of the eight Danish bishops were murdered or died in the fighting, not even mentioning the secular magnates. Cf. Hoffmann, Königserhebung (1976), 118ff.; Windmann, Schleswig als Territorium (1954); Albrectsen, Herredømmet over Sønderjylland (1981); Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins, ed. Klose, vol. 4,2: Hoffmann, Spätmittelalter (1990). See most recently, Sawyer, “Civil Wars” (2003); Fagerland, Krigføring (2006). Sven Estridsen: William of Malmesbury, gra iii, 261; Knýtlinga saga c. 23: “Sveinn konungr átti mǫrg frillubǫrn”; Harald Kesja: Chronicon Roskildense c. 17.

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him.”90 They also knew the history of Israel—a history with many similarities to the Scandinavian sagas, not only in terms of content but also narrative and style—where even and especially the most powerful kings with many women could plunge into ruin: “Absalom, Absalom!” 7

Harald, the All-Father

Jacob, the Old Testament writers, Snorri Sturluson, and Jack Goody are all in agreement that it was important to have sons, for several good reasons. What would the social knowledge about these ‘trees,’ their trunks and branches have looked like in medieval Northern Europe? Old Norse literature as we know it begins with lists of ancestors (áttvísi “lineage knowledge,” mannfrœði “learning about men”). The first historical work, the Libellus Islandorum/Íslendingabók, was produced around 1120 by Ari Þor­ gilsson (1068–1148), who was given the byname hinn Fróði “the scholar” by immediate posterity. It recounts the settlement of Iceland in the ninth and tenth centuries, the introduction of Christianity, and the first bishops. The protagonists are situated genealogically, usually by specifying one to six ancestors or other eminent relatives as required. The book concludes with the author’s own genealogy (langfeðgatal “enumeration of the father-son sequence” < feðgar m. pl. “father and sons”), where he presents himself as the thirty-seventh descendant of a line that begins with Yngvi tyrkjakonungr (“king of the Turks,” i.e. Trojans) and the Ynglings, the prehistoric-legendary dynasty in Uppsala. Further genealogies and a list of kings were included in the first version of the work though later omitted, as Ari explains in the preface. Enough of them remains, however, to tell the reader that Ari’s thirteenth ancestor was the greatgreat-great-grandfather of King Harald Fairhair, or Ari believed him to be, or Ari wanted others to believe him to be: the Icelandic landowners and their heirs claimed a stake in the royal tree, or shrubbery, of descent. The more or less contemporary Landnámabók (“Book of Settlements”), which records the names of more than 3,500 individuals and almost 1,500 farms on Iceland, continues this self-positioning of the settler aristocracy in time and space. The bishops’ sagas, then the Icelandic sagas, and (with the narrative focus on N ­ orway) the kings’

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Gn 16:12: “manus eius contra omnes et manus omnium contra eum.” Cf. the typological interpretation in Gal 4:21–31, where Hagar and Ishmael are equated with the Old Covenant (“Sina enim mons est in Arabia”) and the earthly, enslaved Jerusalem, while Sarah and Isaac are equated with the New Covenant: “Hierusalem libera est quae est mater nostra.” Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae ix, 2,57.

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sagas contain hundreds more people similarly ‘related’ to King Harald Fairhair. Harald’s abundance of children—and his polygyny, which made it possible— is therefore the prerequisite for this whole culture of the narrative construction of elite parity based on familial ties. It is precisely Harald Fairhair’s position as a lynchpin between the fornǫld, the ‘prehistory’ in which men become gods and giants become men, and the incipient story of Norway/Iceland, which makes him a convenient principal ancestor for an almost unlimited number of lineages. With a couple of dozen children named just in those sources known to us,91 he surpasses even the most generatively potent Danish kings. Yet his virility is not only decisive for the royal house but for the entire elite. While only agnates could contend for the royal title (which meant that every contender had to graft himself upon some branch or twig of Harald’s ‘stem’), there were also the cognates. “King Harald gave most of his daughters within the country to his jarls as wives, and from them are descended great family lines (kynkvíslir ‘kin branches’),” Snorri Sturluson says in 1230, continuing the botanical imaginary.92 What is more, Snorri offers an explicit commentary on the familial organization of the kingdom: “King Harald then summoned a large assembly in the east of the country and called the people of Upplǫnd to it. Then he gave all his sons the title of king, and made it law that members of his family should each receive the kingdom from his father, but a jarldom any that was descended from his line through females.”93 Norway’s earliest constitution? Given that Snorri surpasses even Saxo as a master of authorial ambiguity, we must also consider the context of this arrangement: Harald is growing old, his sons are getting restless and have already gone as far as killing some of Harald’s followers in the regions. The distribution 91 92 93

They overlap in part, but some only appear in one or some of the texts, suggesting that we only know a fraction of the total number known in the Middle Ages. A thorough investigation, albeit focused on the factual background, is offered in Heber, Harald hårfagre (1934). HsH c. 42: “Haraldr konungr gipti flestar dœtr sínar innan lands jǫrlum sínum, ok eru þaðan komnar miklar kynkvíslir.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 86. Similarly in the other known kings’ sagas. HsH c. 33: “Haraldr konungr stefndi þá þing fjǫlmennt … Þá gaf hann sonum sínum ǫllum konunganǫfn ok setti þat í lǫgum, at hans ættmanna skyldi hverr taka konungdóm eptir sinn fóður, en jarldóm sá, er kvensift [var. ór kvenkné] var af hans ætt kominn.” Heims­ kringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 78. In Snorri’s time, jarl was used to denote the second in the kingdom and was replaced shortly thereafter by the Saxon loanword hertógr, which Snorri already uses for those fulfilling this role, such Harald Fairhair’s paternal friend Guthorm. Therefore, we should not think of the word jarl here as an official title, like that of the Danish jarl/dux of southern Jutland, but as a regional ruler who stands in a slightly asymmetrical alliance relationship with the king: a “magnate.”

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of regional power to the sons following the title settlement therefore appears a little bit helpless on Harald’s part, particularly as several conflicts immediately break out between the sons. This implicitly critical stance towards the Norwegian model of succession of Snorri’s day, rejected by Roger of Hoveden from a similar perspective, makes the construction yet more succinct: Snorri provides the justification for the high medieval state of the Norwegian polity, projected onto the foremost ancestor. Henceforth, all power in the country will emanate from Harald’s pedigree. But unlike the biblical antecedents, and also unlike contemporary high medieval kingships—the Capetian monarchy, which operated strictly agnatically, or the Danish, which had just reoriented around the same model—the bloodline is not a radix or generatio, but a treetop with a practically unlimited number of kynkvíslir. Add to this the fact that at various points the saga emphasizes that Harald always had his children raised by their respective maternal relatives,94 and the image of the Norwegian polity as portrayed by Snorri is that of a kingdom ruled by means of uxorilocal polygyny, in which the title of king moved between the male descendants of the kingdom’s founder by agonistic decision, while the rights of the regional potentates were secured by their cognatic affiliation to the stirps regia. The consequence is a paritarian political culture in which the precise extent of its members’ claims remains virtually undefined—for the immediate outbreak of fraternal conflict in the very same chapter makes a mockery of the original distribution of the regions to Harald’s individual sons. Permanent conflict, ‘feud’ and ‘revenge,’95 inevitably follow, making for a model of an ‘acephalous’ society whose essential characteristics are a fundamental preference for parity over hierarchy and, consequently, a constitutive significance of the agonistic principle with simultaneous self-regulation of the agon by the totality of those participating in it through cultural processes. This is a society in the comparative.96 94 95

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HsH cc. 21; 37. Especially Byock, Medieval Iceland (1988), and Miller, Bloodtaking (1990); from a socialanthropological perspective, see the contributions of Hastrup, Culture and History (1985), and Durrenberger, Dynamics (1992), although in my view the latter is problematic in ­places. Cf. for Western Europe: Barthélemy, “Les comtes” (1995); Barthélemy, La mutation de l’an mil (1997); Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik (1997); White, Feuding and Peace-Making (2005). ‘Parity’ does not, of course, mean equality, just as the rejection of ‘hierarchy’ does not mean egalitarianism. Rather, it means the refusal to allow social differences of an economic, habitual, or other nature to become categorial rather than merely gradual differences. Cf. Rüdiger, “Mit Worten gestikulieren” (2000); Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 223–334.

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Norway is perhaps less obviously acephalous than the model case of kingless Iceland. But the contrast between the Icelandic ‘free state’ and the supposedly increasingly monarchical mainland Norway, often invoked in saga literature and more or less tacitly accepted as such by scholarship, is easily overstated. After all, like the other North Atlantic islands and parts of the British Isles, Iceland was as much a part of Nóregsveldi as the mainland—more so perhaps than southeastern Norway along the Skagerrak coast, which until the eleventh century tended towards Danaveldi—and, as the example of the historian Ari the Learned above shows, Icelanders also claimed their stakes in the royal line. Moreover, the primacy that Norwegian kings exercised on the mainland was far more relational than categorial, perhaps with the exception of the short and ultimately failed attempt at sacralization around 1160. Of course, the sagas which paint this picture not only reproduced it but also contributed to its perpetuation; but that they continued doing so successfully until the mid-thirteenth century suggests that this was in accordance with received opinion and most major stakeholders’ interest. Polygyny is essential for this system of fundamental parity—albeit nuanced by the distinction between agnates and cognates—within the crown of Harald’s family tree.97 It is not just that additional royal sons enliven and complicate the picture; the political system itself is based on the fact that the possibility of connecting oneself to Harald’s line is open to all those participating in power. This happens through a regional diffusion of a virtually unlimited number of women, with whom ‘Harald’ is then claimed to have fathered the ancestors of the respective lines. Harald Heber, discussing the facticity of Harald Fairhair in the sagas, claimed that at every royal farmstead there “lived a woman who was at his [Harald’s] disposal.”98 This may or may not be true for the actual King Harald in the ninth century (it is idle to speculate), but it is certainly true for ‘Harald’ the polygynous founding father as depicted by the kings’ sagas and presented as a role model to their own time, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The example of Gyða, whose story was told in the preceding chapter, will serve to illustrate the point. Gyða and Harald Fairhair had a daughter and four 97

Much as in the Danish case, the vernacular texts are even more offensive in their depiction of royal polygyny than the parallel Latin passages. Ágrip c. 2: Harald “átti sunu tvítján ok með mǫrgum konum” (had twenty sons, with many women); the more or less contemporaneous Historia Norwegiae (c. 16), affirms the number, but leaves out the comment about Harald’s many women. Snorri (HsH c. 21) leaves both numbers open-ended: “Harald had many wives and many children.” 98 Heber, Harald hårfagre (1934), 86: “… har der residert en kvinne som har stått til hans disposisjon.”

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sons, whose subsequent fate Snorri describes quite unevenly. First the sons: Hrœrek lived in his father’s entourage (the hirð) alongside his half-brothers, but had his own income from possessions in Westland. By contrast, Sigtrygg, Fróði, and Þorgils possessed lands in the Norwegian Eastland; the latter two were even given warships by their father, and after raiding along the British coasts they became the first Norse lords of Dublin before Fróði fell victim to poison, and Þorgils to Irish treachery in battle.99 Most revealing is the life of the daughter Álof with the byname árbót, “Season’s Blessing.”100 She plays a role in the two most delicate conflict settlements of Harald’s saga. The first concerns the jarls of Møre, the coastal region around present-day Ålesund which controlled the maritime route (the norðveg). King Harald entrusted her to his “most beloved friend” Rǫgnvald, who had had the honour of cutting the king’s hair after Harald’s triumph and giving him his new byname “Fairhair.”101 He held this important region as jarl until two of Harald’s restive sons, “who thought that the jarls were of lesser birth than themselves,”102 undertook one of the commando raid expeditions so typical of the sagas, which ended successfully, with their astonished opponent taken by surprise in his wooden residence, trapped, and burned together with all those present, in this case sixty followers. One of the two sons then appropriates three of his victim’s longships and goes campaigning, the other occupies Rǫgnvald’s estates. Unless he wishes to ruin his reputation and his understanding with the great men in his sphere of influence, King Harald has no choice but to immediately start a punitive expedition in turn. Faced with Harald’s superior power, his son capitulates, and Harald “sends” him to another part of the country: an impotent simulation of authority, which leaves the problem of mannbœt, penance or atonement for the homicide, unresolved. The new settlement, as reported by Snorri and therefore likely to be considered plausible at his time, reinstates the previous rights of the son of the slain jarl of Møre and, moreover, sees the king’s daughter Álof ‘Season’s Blessing’ 99

HsH c. 33. Harald also ‘disposed’ of other sons in this manner; we can see Snorri here partially adopting the argumentation which Dudo of Saint-Quentin (i, 1) introduced into the tradition, and which continues to influence research to this day, that the Viking campaigns had served to remove the most restless elements from the resource-poor countries of their origin. 100 HsH c. 29; the compound from ár “(course of the) year” and bót “recovery, healing; also: penance” is reminiscent of the agrarian aspect of sacred kinship (the set phrase ár ok fríðr “[good harvest] year and peace” sums up ‘good’ kingship), in which the princess—or the hypothetical narrative figure who became Harald and Gyða’s daughter during the textualizations of the saga—had a share. 101 HsH c. 24: “inn mesti ástvinir.” 102 HsH c. 29: “ok þótti þeim jarlar vera smábornari en þeir váru.”

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surrendered to him.103 It is astonishing that this match could be regarded as adequate compensation for the most serious violence conceivable, but King Harald’s power is evidently portrayed as great enough to enforce this settlement. Álof’s daughter from this relationship, Bergljót, is later given to the son of Harald’s most powerful rival, Hákon Grjótgarðsson Hlaðajarl.104 The jarls based in Hlaðir (a promontory controlling the mouth of the Nidelv and the entrance to Trondheim Fjord, today Lade in the metropolitan area of Trondheim) were the most powerful men in the rich Trøndelag region; only by making an arrangement with them was the petty king Harald, who probably came from the area west of Oslofjord, able to expand aggressively into Westland and the interior. The balance of power between the jarls of Lade and Harald Fairhair’s successors remained the principal theme of saga history until relations deteriorated in the early eleventh century. So through Gyða’s daughter and granddaughter, the two most important lines of jarls were tied to the royal house and, according to Snorri, established in their rights “with force of law” (í lǫgum). 8

The ‘Good’ Bastard King

This way of integrating practically all the powerful of the country into the royal house goes far beyond what historiography did in other parts of Europe for princely houses which vied with the royal line by looking back to a royal ancestor of their own, as did, for example, the counts of Flanders and Barcelona with their almost identical Carolingian legends. The difference is that there was no pretension to kingship tied up with this constructed claim to equal rank. It is 103 HsH c. 29: “ok gipti honum Álofu, dóttur sína, er kǫlluð var árbót.” The verb gipta < gipt “gift” does not correspond to gefa “give”(although it belongs to the same lexematic field, of course). It is often taken to mean “to marry (someone to someone),” which I think is to move too fast. All that is clear is that it means a contractual transfer with the consent of all the men involved. Far from the world of the Roman and medieval consensus facit ma­ trimonium, there is no mention of the girl’s consent. Cf. Jochens, “Consent in Marriage” (1986), 142–76; Jochens, “Með jákvæði hennar sjálfrar” (1993); Schulman, “Make Me a Match” (1997), 296–321, and generally Sawyer, Kvinnor och familj (21998), with further literature. 104 HsH c. 37: “Sigurðr jarl fekk Bergljótar …” The verb fá “get” + the name of the woman in the genitive is, like gipta discussed in the preceding note, often supposed to denote full marriage or Muntehe in research. Genitive objects are extremely rarely in Old Norse; it is conceivable that this fixed and in this sense frequent construction works by way of an implicit accusative object: “Jarl Sigurð gets Bergljót’s [possessions, dowry, etc.]”; see the discussion of Harald Fairhair “getting Ragnhild’s” above.

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different in Norway, where in the place of a defined stirps regia there was a circle of candidates that was practically open to every newcomer, given the practically endless number of Harald’s women. The royal potential of every imaginable pretender is further underlined with origin stories such as that of Hákon Aðalsteinsfóstri (“Æthelstan’s foster son,” also inn Góði “the Good,” r. probably around 934–61), who received both his socialization and religious preferences in England, and who would make the first hesitant attempts to introduce the Christian cult. Snorri recounts: When King Harald [Fairhair] was nearly seventy, he got a son by a woman called Þóra Morstrstǫng (Pole of Moster). Her family was from Moster [an island in the Hardangerfjord, north of present-day Stavanger]. She came of good kin, she was related to Hǫrða-Kári [the preeminent magnate in neighbouring Hordaland]. She was the finest of women and most beautiful. She was said to be the king’s handmaid. At that time there were many in the king’s service who were of good family, both men and women.105 Follows the story of the premature birth of the child on the ship of Sigurð Hlaðajarl as Þóra tries to reach the king in time. The jarl, Harald’s great rival, pours water over the king’s son (ausa vatni, a pagan baptismal custom in the sagas, which has provoked much speculation in the history of religion but which may be no more than another device for the reclamation of pagan ancestors as naturaliter Christiani) and name him after his own father, Hákon Hlaðajarl. Snorri emphasizes this point. “King Harald had the boy be with his mother, and they were at the king’s residences [in Moster] while the boy was young.”106 Snorri’s remark that it was not rare for the king’s servants to be wellborn does not (and perhaps should not) alter the fact that the later King Hákon the Good was the child of a bondswoman, however well-born and “beautiful”: a Sirpa or Bilha or even a Hagar, a filius ancillae. Hákon ended the short and unpleasant rule of the violent and fratricidal Eirík “Bloodaxe” in collaboration with the regional powers, and was the first king to accept Christianity. He was not the only ‘good’ king of unfree ancestry: Snorri describes the birth of King Magnús ‘the Good’ (r. 1035–47), whose father 105 HsH c. 37: “Þá er Haraldr konungr var nær sjaurœðum, gat hann son við konu þeiri, er Þóra er nefnd Morstrstǫng. Hon var æzkuð ór Morstr. Hon átti góða frændr, hon var í frændsemistǫlu við Hǫrða-Kára. Hon var kvinna vænst ok in friðasta. Hon var kǫlluð konungs ambátt. Váru þá margir þeir konungi lýðskyldir, er vel váru ættbornir, bæði karlar ok konur.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 83. 106 HsH c. 37: “Haraldr konungr lét sveininn fylgja móður sinni, ok váru þau at konungsbúum, meðan sveininn var ungr.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 83.

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Saint Olav is the only ruling figure to outshine Harald Fairhair, in almost identical terms: There was a woman called Álfhild, who was referred to as the king’s maid. She was, however, descended from good families. She was the most beautiful of women. She was in the king’s household. And that spring it came about that Álfhild was with child, and people in the king’s confidence knew that he must be the father of the child.107 With the minor variation that this “maid” (ambótt “bondswoman”) did not belong to a royal farmstead, but accompanied the royal retinue on its travels—it later becomes clear that Álfhild was owned by the king’s wife Ástríð (herself the daughter of a frilla of the Swedish lord Olof Skötkonung)—the whole sequence of the episode is repeated. In this case it is the skald Sigvat, one of the king’s most trusted followers, who stands as godparent for the emergency baptism when no one dares wake Olav after the midnight birth. The boy survives, and Sigvat must counter the king’s charges, including the choice of baptismal name: The king said: “Why did you have the boy called Magnús? That is not the name of any in our family.” Sigvat replies: “I called him after King Karla-Magnús. I knew that he was the best man in the world.” Then the king said: “You are a very lucky man, Sigvat. It is not surprising when luck goes with wisdom. The opposite is unusual, which can sometimes happen, that such luck is found in unwise people, so that unwise undertakings turn out fortunately.” The king was then very pleased.108 107 OsH c. 122: “Álfhildr hét kona, er kǫlluð var konungs ambótt. Hon var þó af góðum ættum komin. Hon var kvinna fríðust. Hon var með hirð Óláfs konungs. En þat vár varð þat til tíðenda, at Álfhildr var með barni, en þat vissu trúnaðarmenn konungs, at hann myndi vera faðir barns þess.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 2 (2014), 140.—William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum (pl 179, col. 1663ff.), describes her as a nobleborn Englishwoman Elfidis, who is captured and abducted by Norwegians and passes through the hands of several owners before she becomes the mother of the future King Magnus; the episode ends with a miracle of Saint Aldhelm. This report from a century after events has the advantage of both onomastic and lived-world plausibility and also brings together Snorri’s two seemingly contradictory claims that the girl’s name was “king’s handmaid” and yet she was also “of good origin.” 108 OsH c. 122: “Konungr mælti: ‘Hví léztu sveininn Magnús heita? Ekki er þat várt ættnafn.’ Sigvatr svarar: ‘Ek hét hann eptir Karla-Magnúsi konungi. Þann vissa ek mann beztan í

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Snorri could not express it more clearly. From birth, the bondswoman’s son is followed by the luck expressed by bearing the name of the most powerful ruler in Western history, a promise that the adult Magnús fulfills by recovering the land lost by his holy father and, moreover, gaining control of Denmark, the kingdom whose ruler, Cnut the Great, had been responsible for his father’s fall. No Norwegian king had more right to be considered imperator than the first Magnús, the maid’s son. That this political sponsorship is mediated not by paternal decision, but by Sigvat the skald, endows it with a validity beyond the sphere of familial ambition. After all, as custodians of the numinous made tangible through words, skalds were in a sense charged with providing earthly contingency with a general interpretation. In fact, the Norway of the sagas affirmed the ‘Merovingian’ view, according to which paternal blood was sufficient to impart the capacity for kingship— contrary to biblical precept as well as to contemporary practice in nearby Denmark. On the other hand, it complied with the rules for royal succession enacted in 1260 by Hákon Hákonarson, the Norwegian king ruling at the time when Heimskringla was set down in writing, and who was himself the son of a frilla. These stipulated that in the first instance the firstborn legitimate son would be entitled to inherit, then grandsons in the male line, and finally illegitimate sons.109 In the case of the succession to Saint Olav († 1030), there were no children from the Swedish princess Ástríð110 and therefore no grandsons either. No further order of precedence such as primogeniture was to make the heimi.’ Þá mælti konungr: ‘Gæfumaðr ertu mikill, Sigvatr. Er þat eigi undarligt, at gæfa fylgi vizku. Hitt er kynligt, sem stundum kann verða, at sú gæfa fylgir óvizkum mǫnnum, at óvitrlig ráð snúask til hamingju.’ Var þá konungr allglaðr.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 2 (2014), 139.—The words gæfa and hamingja, translated here as “luck,” are widely debated. Contra the interpretation of the term as an adoption of the RomanLatin European fortuna, I agree with Foote, “Concept” (1973), who asserts an original, “secular” character of a ‘gift’ for luck (which is the etymological root of gæfa), which may—but not necessarily—have been based on pre-Christian ideas. See the more detailed discussion in Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 206ff. 109 Bagge et al., eds., Norske middelalderdokumenter (1973), no. 106; cf. Krag, Norges historie (2000), 247f. In the national law issued by Hákon’s son and successor Magnús the LawMender, as part of the exhaustive general provisions for candidature, the entitled son was put in 13th place in accordance with the general inheritance regulations of Gulathing’s Law, with the qualification skilgetinn “lawfully received,” explicitly assumed for the first twelve ranks, left unmentioned. While the succession of ‘bastards’ became impracticable at the end of the thirteenth century, it was still formally preserved with reference to national custom. 110 OsH c. 92 uses the word brullaup “wedding” and describes the negotiations for dowry and morning gift; the relationship is thus presented as the highest-ranking imaginable. See below, Chapter 4.

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decision, but rather the agon, which was won by Magnús the bondswoman’s son. In the same way, Hákon the Good prevailed against Harald Fairhair’s many other sons, even Eirík ‘Bloodaxe,’ son of Ragnhild ‘the Mighty’ and co-ruler during his father’s final years, who must have looked like the obvious front runner to any high medieval audience familiar with succession in Denmark or England. In Heimskringla, however, all this does not outweigh his political shortcomings: His brothers and the magnates started “reckoning up the troubles that they had been subject to at the hands of his brother Eirík. Eirík’s unpopularity grew ever more as everyone became fonder of King Hákon and became more confident in speaking their minds.”111 The victory of the consensus-oriented Hákon, the first Christian and founder of the law, almost a Norwegian Numa Pompilius, who “wished everyone well and offered to return the farmers their patrimonies which King Harald had taken from them,” over Eirík, “a big man and handsome, strong and a very valiant man, a great warrior and blessed with victory, an impetuous man in temper, fierce, unsociable and reserved,”112 is a prime example of Snorri’s advocacy of a “farmer-friendly politics, tied to the regions.”113 Once again, the ‘good’ king is also the son of a bondswoman; in contrast, Eirík Bloodaxe, banished to Northumbria by Hákon, is—at least according to Snorri—the son from Harald’s union with the Jutish princess Ragnhild, for whose sake he sent away his many women from his own country. It is difficult to imagine a clearer commentary on the ‘monarchic’ style of rule, as practised by the Valdemars in Denmark and with which Snorri’s own king, Hákon Hákonarson, was experimenting. Contemporary tendencies are discreetly turned on their head, general precepts— right up to the opposition of Isaac/Ishmael anchored in both Old and New Testaments—are declared irrelevant through silence. The same can be said of monogamy and matrimonium. If anything, unimpeded royal polygyny appears to be a prerequisite for ‘good’ rule.

111 HsG c. 2: “ok margir aðrir, er upp tǫlðu harma sína, þá er hlotit hǫfðu af Eiríki, bróður hans. Eiríks óvinsæld óx æ því meirr sem allir menn gerðu sér kærra við Hákon konung ok heldr hǫfðu sér traust at mæla sem þótti.” 112 HsG c. 1: “vildi hverjum manni gott ok bauð aptr at gefa bóndum óðǫl sín, þau er Haraldr konungr hafði af þeim tekit”; HsH c. 43: “mikill maðr ok fríðr, sterkr ok hreystimaðr mikill, mermaðr mikill ok sigrsæll, ákafamaðr í skapi, grimmr, óþýðr ok fálátr.”—The creation of the Gulathing and Frostathing laws; Hákon’s Christianity: HsG cc. 11; 13.—On Hákon the Good, see Bagge, “Hero” (2004), 185–210, on the significance of óðal—patrimony, inalienable part of property—for the integrity of the free farmers, cf. Gurevič Weltbild (1978); Gurevič, “Semantics” (1992). 113 Von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999), 367.

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The series of kings to come out of polygynous relationships may be continued at length. Óláf, “whom some call ‘the Quiet’ and many, ‘Farmer Óláf’” (r. 1066–93), who is credited with fixing the organization of the Norwegian bishoprics, constructing the large stone church over Saint Olav’s grave in Nidaros, and introducing novel table manners and clothing conventions, married a princess—Ingrid, one of Sven Estridsen’s many daughters—and in the next sentence fathers a son with a Þóra Jónsdóttir, about whom nothing more is said, not even about her origin, although the early biblical patronym is surprising.114 The son is also called Magnús and grows up in his father’s retinue; as King Magnús ‘Barelegs’ (r. 1093–1103), he will be the last king to be unchallenged for most of his reign for almost a century and a half, and thus one of the ‘great’ rulers in the kings’ sagas. 9

The Mill Maid’s Tale

The casual manner in which King Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders’ (r. 1157–62) was conceived by King Sigurð, one of three brothers who were sharing the rule around 1150, is related in Heimskringla as follows: King Sigurð was riding round attending banquets east in Vík with his following and rode past a farm owned by a powerful man that was called Símun. And as the king was riding through the farm, then could be heard from inside one of the buildings such beautiful singing that he was quite enchanted with it, and rode up to the building and saw inside that there was a woman standing there at a hand-mill singing to it amazingly

114 OsK c. 5: “Óláfr Nóregskonungr fekk Ingiríðar, dóttur Sveins Danakonungs … Óláfr Haraldsson, er sumir kǫlluðu Óláf kyrra, en margir Óláf bónda, hann gat son við Þóru Jóansdóttur.” Before the middle of the 12th century, biblical or saints’ names appear only rarely; Jón remains the most common. Cf. Lind, Norsk-isländska dopnamn (1905–31), 1931; Einar Olafur Sveinsson, “Nafngiftir Oddaverja” (1936); Gunnes, “Utenlandsk navneskikk” (1983); Villarsen Meldgaard, “Navneskifte” (2000). In Morkinskinna, Þóra’s father is called Árni (a common Nordic name), so it is possible to hypothesize that the name Jón was introduced retrospectively in Heimskringla under the influence of Þóra’s famous greatgrandson Jón Loptsson, Icelandic chief and Snorri’s foster father (see below, Chapter 2). The two Jóns in the Heimskringla who could plausibly be Þóra’s father in terms of chronology, including a member of the powerful Arnmœðlingar family clan in Inntrøndelag, are provided with such detailed information about their children and grandchildren that it is not possible to attribute Þóra to either of them as well.

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b­ eautifully as she was grinding. The king dismounted from his horse and went inside to the woman and lay with her.115 Even this relationship, hardly the most ceremonious or long-lived, might (and did) produce a ‘legitimate’ ruler who succeeded in eliminating the hitherto remarkably successful King Ingi, the only legitimate king’s son to rule in over a hundred years. The offhand rape of a defenceless slave woman is so distasteful to present-day sensibilities that our instinct would be to refuse to view it as a ‘relationship’ and hence to include it in the present study. But the story of Hákon Sigurðsson’s conception goes on. It allows us to examine one consequence of polygyny-based kingship that goes beyond the sheer multiplication of the number of possible pretenders. What happens when a (presumably) satisfied King Sigurð leaves with his entourage? And as he rode away, then Farmer Símun realised what the king had been up to there. But she was called Þóra and she was Farmer Símun’s servant woman. Afterwards Símun had her taken care of. And later on this woman gave birth to a child, and this boy was named Hákon and was said to be King Sigurð’s son. Hákon was brought up there with Símun Þorbergsson and his wife Gunnhild. Also brought up there were her and Símun’s sons Ǫnund and Andreas, and they were very fond of Hákon, so that nothing could part them but death.116 Símun Þorbergsson, the yeoman of southeastern Norway, immediately recognizes the good fortune that has landed in his lap without any involvement on his part—or rather, has landed in a lap belonging to him. We can certainly speculate whether in political reality Sigurð’s stop at this farm would have been quite so incidental. The king was “travelling [the region] being feasted” (hann reið at veizlum), meaning he was reaffirming his royal power in the 115 Hss c. 18: “Sigurðr konungr reið at veizlum í Vík austr með hirð sína ok reið um bý þann, er ríkr maðr átti, er Símun hét. En er konungr reið gögnum býinn, þá heyrði í hús nǫkkut kveðandi svá fagra, at honum fannsk um mikit, ok reið til hússins ok sá þar inn, at þar stóð kona ein við kvern ok kvað við forkunnar fagrt, er hon mól. Konungr sté af hestinum ok gekk inn til konunnar ok lagðisk með henni.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 200. 116 Hss c. 18: “En er hann fór í brot, þá vissi Símun bóndi, hvat ørendi konungr hafði þannug. En hon hét Þóra ok var verkakona Símunar bónda. Síðan lét Símun varðveita kost hennar. En eptir þat ól sú kona barn, ok var sá sveinn nefndr Hákon ok kallaðr sonr Sigurðar konungs. Fœddisk Hákon þar upp með Símuni Þorbergssyni ok Gunnhildi, konu hans. Fœddusk þar ok upp synir þeira Símunar, Qnundr ok Andréás, ok unnusk þeir Hákon mikit, svá at þá skilði ekki nema hel.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 200.

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r­ egion through his presence. A female slave, such as would be bought “for the bed,”117 and, moreover, of the kind that according to the general consensus was most exposed to attacks of every kind,118 could be a ready part of their owner’s hospitality. In Jómsvíkinga saga, the Funen magnate Pálnatóki succeeded in having “a woman appointed to wait on” Harald Bluetooth, whom he was feasting; the son conceived at the occasion, the future King Sven Forkbeard, was raised with the host and subsequently ensures his meteoric rise.119 It is quite possible that “good-looking girls” were kept especially for such occasions, as William of Malmesbury suggests for tenth-century England.120

117 The frequently cited reference is the Icelandic territorial law, the Grágás, ia §112: “A man is entitled to buy a slave woman (ambátt) for the bed (til karnaðar < kǫr “bed” + abstract suffix -nað-, so “what has to do with the bed, ‘bedding’”) at 12 ounces even without permission.” Cf. H[ermann] Reichert, “Nebenfrau,” in rga, vol. 9 (2002), 28; Karras, Slavery and Society (1988), esp. 214. In terminology and severity, the passage is a hapax, yet implicitly or explicitly, the association is repeatedly established in the laws and sagas. 118 The working woman (as Snorri terms her: virkakona) is ipso facto unprotected, especially if she works away from the household, for example in the fields or in a separate building. In the chivalric adventures, in the pastourelles and the learned courtly literature of Andreas Capellanus or Ralph of Coggeshall, the shepherdess is the easy and (not always) willing prey of the aventurier; in the leges, sexual assault on them is assessed differently than an attack on an unfree woman working indoors, who the Lex Frisionum (xiii §1) names bortmagad and whose hallmark is that she “nec mulgere nec molere solet.” In Eddic poetry, the latter, the mill slave, is repeatedly presented as particularly degraded and particularly exposed to male access; cf. Grottasǫng, where King Fróði turns two giantesses into mill slaves, or Helgakvíða Hundingsbana i, where “kissing the maids at the mill” (“á kvernum kystir þyjar,” stanza 35) is considered characteristic of the overbearing idler. Cf. Obermeier, “Ancilla” (1996), 132ff.; von Olberg, “Aspekte” (1990), 233; Karras, Slavery and Society (1988), esp. 79ff. on evidence for the distinction between housemaids and working maids in the Scandinavian provincial laws. For illicit intercourse with the latter, the perpetrator only pays a half fine (Gulathing Law §198, Frostathing Law ii §21). 119 Jómsvíkinga saga c. 3. The story takes a different course here, as the king explicitly denies his paternity, which leads to a struggle—and ultimately the saga has to explain this war between father and son, which already appears as a decisive phase of the Christianization of Denmark in Adam of Bremen (ii, 27f.). Both narratives agree, however, that the foster father makes his fortune with the young king. 120 William of Malmesbury, gra ii, 139 (to ~894): after a shepherd’s daughter, “eleganti spetie puella,” had the customary premonitory dream (her belly shone like the moon, illuminating all England), the villica of the royal estate brings her into the house. Travelling through, Edward, son of King Alfred the Great, is “seized by ‘love’ at the sight of the virgin, demanded a night with her” (uisae uirginis amore captus noctem petiit). The son is Æthel­ stan (r. 924–39). We are not dealing here with the factual content of the circumstances of the king’s conception but with a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman royal history narrating about the 9th/10th centuries, much like the sagas. Like Harald Fairhair and William, Æthel­stan is anything but a ‘weak’ king.

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Whether deliberately or coincidentally, Símun realizes that with a little luck and some patience he may in future find himself close to a king. Hence his sudden concern for the material comfort of the bondswoman, as well as the care with which he selects the boy’s name, and, crucially, the attention paid to the solidity of local testimony that King Sigurð was indeed the father. Most important is the close affective attachment to his household, especially the two presumably older foster brothers, who would constitute the core of the future pretender’s faction (flokk)—assuming this ever happened, which must have appeared very likely given the situation in twelfth-century Norway. And so it turned out. We encounter the boy again following the death of his father—Sigurð fell in battle against the followers of his half-brother Ingi—in the vicinity of the third of the king’s quarrelling half-brothers, Eystein, who recognized him as his nephew, whether out of conviction, calculation, or both. After Eystein had fallen and Ingi was the last remaining king, the ten-year-old Hákon “was accepted as leader of the troop that had previously followed King Eysteinn, and the men of this troop gave him the title of king.”121 From the beginning, his two foster brothers, farmer Símun’s sons, were key figures in the campaign, which, after several embarrassing defeats, was ultimately unexpectedly successful, as a result of the fortunes of war that so often decided these power struggles. A chance encounter, or rather a chance conception of a child, brought about a tangle of bonds from which, we may hope, Þóra the mill maid who came to be a king’s mother herself would have profited in terms of improvements to her conditions of life. For a while things looked bright for farmer Símun and his household: “King Hákon then subjected the whole land to himself and appointed his own men to all the stewardships and likewise the market towns.”122 But one of his foster brothers did not live to see the day, the other profited from it only briefly: at just sixteen, King Hákon fell in battle with the opposing party which after a few problems had succeeded in launching a new claimant. The surviving foster brother and the members of his party were

121 HsHb c. 1: “var tekinn til hǫfðingja yfir flokk þann, er áðr hafði fylgt Eysteinni konungi, ok gáfu flokksmenn honum konungsnafn.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 215. 122 HsHb c. 19: “Hákon konungr lagði þá land allt undir sik ok skipaði allar sýslur sínum mǫnnum ok svá kaupstaði.”—Sýsla (derived from the homonymous verb, meaning “to perform, execute”) means both a royal commission, an office, and a specific region; thus what is meant is that Hákon entrusted his people with supervision of royal possessions in the country along with the corresponding revenues and the market levies.

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again relegated to guerrillas, made a few futile efforts, before disappearing into exile in Denmark or Götaland. We hear nothing more of Símun, nor of Þóra.123 It is worth relating the short career of King Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders’ here, to illustrate the opportunities and interests that could be connected with proximity to a scion of Harald Fairhair’s tree. Obviously, everything hinged on the condition that those concerned knew or could believe that they were actually dealing with a royal scion. Not all were so immediately and clearly recognized as Magnús had been, who had the good luck to be born aboard his father’s vessel with a skald handy to discuss—and preserve for posterity—the naming and future of the boy “Magnús” with King Olav the very next day. King Sigurð, at least, does not seem to have minded whether he was leaving a child with Símun (who, for his part, clearly took the initiative and launched his pupil when the time came). Eight years later, when the boy appeared with his alleged uncle, there was only the living tradition and the testimony of those around him—in other words, not really anything that could withstand critical scrutiny, even if in this case independent testimony could conceivably have been provided by former followers of King Sigurð who remembered the visit to Símun. Yet even they could only prove the plausibility and not the substance of the claim. ‘No one can know who his father is.’ For some, this offered chances. 10 Suitability This state of affairs ought to have driven the Norwegians to despair, and forced them to think of ever new measures to turn plausibility into certainty. The “fear” (Georges Duby) of Western European aristocrats of the intrusion of false blood into a family line is commonly regarded as a reason why the lay world found itself in agreement with the mistrust of misogynistic churchmen with regard to the “surveillance” of wives and daughters.124 Now, as we have seen, the idea of the form of the line of descent was fundamentally different in Northern Europe; however, the problem of paternity was similar in both models. 123 We might therefore question whether Monika Obermeier’s optimism about the opportunities for advancement for unfree women is justified (“Ancilla” (1996), 135: “Thus sexual contact with the lords was certainly always desirable for the maids”).—Incidentally, Símun’s wife had supported her foster son in her own way by consulting a soothsayer about the most favorable time for war; Snorri, however, reports this with his customary restraint when discussing supernatural events (HsHb c. 16). 124 Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal (1986), 64; cf. Duby, Ritter, Frau und Priester (1985); Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999); Casagrande, “Die beaufsichtigte Frau” (1993).

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It is therefore surprising how stoically the Norway of the kings’ sagas dealt with the problem. In the saga of Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders,’ nobody, not even his opponents, expresses any doubt over the legitimacy of his claim; and the same is true in most such cases. However, questions were sometimes asked. For instance, Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar reports the following concerning the birth of the great unifying king Hákon iv (and it should be remembered that the saga was written immediately after his death in 1263 at the behest of his son and successor by the excellently informed Sturla Þórðarson, who obviously had access to the royal diplomatarium): When King Hákon Sverrisson [r. 1202–04] came from the east from the Götaelv, he resided in Borg [Sarpsborg in Østfold] that autumn for a period. There was a good and faithful woman [goð kona ok trulynd] with him at that time called Inga. She was of good stock, related to Auðun of Borg, and she had many excellent relatives in that district, called Varteigingers or Varteig’s folk. Inga lived in the king’s house and shared his bed [ok samreckti Hakoni konungi], so Hákon the Mad [a cousin of the king] and several of the king’s other close followers knew about it. The summer after Ingi Bárðsson [another cousin] was chosen as king, Inga lived in a place in Borg district called Falkensborg, where a priest named Þrónd celebrated Mass. There Inga gave birth to a boy. But the priest Þrónd knew that King Hákon Sverrisson was the boy’s father. He baptized the boy and gave him the name Hákon, and he did this secretly, so no one dealt with him except his two sons and his wife. The priest Þrónd quietly raised the boy himself. There was a man named Erlend in Huseby. He was a kinsman of King Sverrir [r. 1177–1202] from the line of Guthorm Greybeard. The priest Þrónd went to Erlend and they discussed boy’s future.125 Openness and a series of witnesses with good names: the Varteigings took all conceivable precautions to clear the way for their future claimant. It helped that Inga was by no means a slavewoman, but of good origin, that is, locally respected, well-rooted, cleverly interrelated. Nonetheless, her relationship with the overwintering king had to be as open as possible, so that not only Inga’s own family but also influential men in the royal entourage would be able to testify to it. Apparently, this was no problem for anyone involved. If King Hákon Sverrisson had not succumbed to an illness a few weeks after his time with Inga, the son would probably have grown up in all honour with 125 HsHs cc. 1–3.

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the Varteigings. Misfortune now demanded other measures, and a priest who guaranteed integrity, secrecy, and discretion, took the king’s son and in the first instance concealed him from possible harassment by friend or foe. The priest Þrónd must have spent a long time deciding which magnates he might turn to in order to secure the boy’s path to power. As the saga goes on, things still just turn out well for Inga and little Hákon, aided by, among other things, a healthy mistrust of the bishop of Hamar and an early thaw, and, after a tense moment of hesitation, the current king and party leader accepted them. But even many years later, at a time when Hákon had long held power, the episode was still not wholly over. In 1219, in the course of the complicated agreement of his party with the followers of Jarl Skúli Bárðsson, who was himself toying with the idea of taking the kingship, doubts were expressed about the story of Hákon Sverrisson and Inga—and therefore the legitimacy of her son’s rule. The king offered an ordeal. He could not, of course, subject himself to it, given that he—like everyone—was not in a position to make a truthful statement about his own father. Only one person could do so: Inga. She offered to undergo a truth test, did so, passed gloriously, of course,126 the agreement came about, and her son remained sole king. Our astonished shudders at this process, which more than most aspects of the medieval world reveals to us the limits of empathy when it came to experiencing and feeling bodily pain,127 find little consolation in the thought that it was not for nothing. 11

Co-optative Kinship

The effect of a successful ordeal, however, was by no means predictable. Shortly after 1130, one such judgement (skírsla, actually “purification”) was arranged in Denmark to confirm the royal birth of the contender Sigurð ‘the Bad’ (or ‘the Bad Deacon,’ slembidjákn, r. 1135–39), who was biding his time abroad. The form of this judgment is unknown to us, but it was reinforced by the testimony of five bishops and—perhaps more relevant to some—a skaldic verse. None of this helped him: “Harald’s [the reigning king’s] friends said that this had been 126 In the provincial laws, the iron test was intended as a supplementary or alternative form of evidence, where the usual oath of cleansing, reinforced by oaths of exoneration, did not suffice. See, for example, Schonisches Kirchenrecht §§ 5; 7, and more generally Bartlett, Trial (1986). The episode takes place in 1219, so at a time when trial by ordeal had been rejected by the church in Latin Europe and was geneally in decline; it entered into Hákon iv’s semiofficial life-saga in the 1260s. 127 Cf. Georges Duby, “Réflections sur la douleur physique au Moyen Age,” in Duby, Mâle moyen âge (21990), 203–09.

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a deceit and lie of the Danes.”128 In another situation of the same kind, a possible ordeal again became superfluous, when in 1142 the presumptive king’s son Eystein, arriving from the British Isles with his mother, after disembarking and exchanging messengers, agreed a tripartite division of the kingdom with his two much younger half-brothers Ingi and Sigurð, who were ruling the country: “For what King Harald [gillikrist, the father of the three] had said about paternity was believed.”129 It would be naive to believe that the purported words of the father, long since deprived of his life and kingdom, would have induced the two child kings to agree there and then to relinquishing a third of their domain to the lost and refound ‘older brother.’ More likely, after careful deliberation, after exchanging offers and threats, and considering the respective forces, it may have appeared opportune to co-opt the newcomer. Afterwards, any further doubts about the biological paternity would have appeared irrelevant to everyone involved. Eystein’s rapid success was not an isolated case in a special political situation. This is indicated by the importance of the theme of ættleiðing, “introduction into the family group,” in the sagas and some twenty Scandinavian provincial laws. As socio-historical sources, the latter are no less problematic than the former, since what can be said about both their time of creation and the status of individual textualizations is rarely secure and often contradictory. Even the four mainland Norwegian laws vary considerably.130 Moreover, the tradition for the two southeastern laws is fragmentary. The Westland Gulathing Law and the Trøndelag Frostathing Law are complete, albeit preserved in late redactions. Snorri attributes these laws to King Hákon the Good, thus placing them in the tenth century, a dating which seems hard to believe. King Magnús the 128 MsBHG c. 13, citing a stanza from Ívar Ingimundarson’s Sigurðarbǫlk. Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 183.—Sigurð’s unusual epithet refers to the fact that he had already received minor orders when he ‘discovered’ his origins and began his career as a royal claimant. The precedent of Harald gilli, who arrived from Ireland and underwent the truth test to validate his claim, in his case with red-hot plowshares, likewise experienced mixed success, even though the test took place in Norway in full view of his rivals. See below, Chapter 4. 129 Hss c. 13 (ms. F): “Var því trúat af faðerni hans, er Haralds konungr hafði til sagt.” 130 These are: the Gulathing (for the Westland between Jæren and Stadland) with its thing site in Guli at the mouth of Sognefjord; the Frostathing (for Trøndelag/Þrándheim and the coastal regions Møre and Hålogaland) with its thing site on the small peninsula Frosta in Trondheimsfjord; the Borgarthing (for Viken, the regions around Oslofjord) with its thing site in today’s Sarpsborg; the Eidsivating (for the interior) with its thing place in Eid south of Mossjø, where in 1814 the liberal opposition to the Swedish annexation of Norway gathered and proclaimed the liberal “Eidsvoll Constitution,” which is considered the beginning of modern Norwegian statehood.

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Law-Mender (r. 1263–80), who among other things instigated a revised version of the Frostathing Law, described the older layers in it as “the laws of Saint King Olav”131 from the early eleventh century in an attempt to move the royal right to legislate back in time. According to method (or perhaps even preference), researchers now date larger or smaller sections earlier or later within this period, and while linguistic/stylistic examination is probably the most sensible approach to the question of the stability of what are assumed to be particular oral traditions, even this is no guarantee against the possibility that the ­thirteenth-century writers or scribes occasionally employed archaic linguistic forms to ennoble innovations—just as the contemporary saga writers composed new skaldic stanzas in antiquated Norse and mingled them with ‘genuine’ traditions.132 In my view, it is advisable to understand the laws in terms of the ‘saga age,’ in the dual sense that the term has with regard to the sagas: they provide the sum of the past as relevant to the present that their authors around 1200 wished to convey (“authors” meaning not individuals but the consensual or controversial ‘textual community’ of scribe/narrator and reader/listener133). In these terms, the laws—undoubtedly texts formulated with care and the ­participation of many influential people—are among the most important ‘selftestimonials’ of this society, and their parallel testimony to the saga reports concerning the integration of ‘brothers’ arriving from outside as a result of polygynous practice is highly welcome. The ninth section of the Frostathing Law, devoted to inheritance and guardianship, contains the introductory chapter Um ættleiðing, cited here in full: A man is fully legitimated if his father brings him into the kindred [leiðir í ætt] with the consent of those who are the nearest heirs to the one who brings him into the kindred. The father shall give a feast with as much ale as can be brewed from three sald [a measure of capacity] of malt; and he shall butcher a three-year-old ox and flay the skin off the right hind leg above the knee joint and make it into a shoe. Then the father shall order the one who is to be legitimated to put that shoe on; at the same time he shall have on his knees the sons who are still minors, but those who are of 131 Prologue to the Frostathing Law (in NgL, vol. 1, 119–258, here 121): “lǫg ins helga Olafs konungs.” 132 Cf. von See, Altnordische Rechtswörter (1964); Robberstad, Rettssoga, vol. 1 (1971); Sjöholm, Gesetze als Quellen (1977); Sjöholm, Sveriges Medeltidslagar (1988); Venås, “Kvinne og mann” (1989); Rindal, “Dei norske mellomalderlovene” (1995); Røsstad, Á tveim tungum (1997); Helle, “Lov og rett” (1999). 133 On the term, see Stock, Implications (1983), esp. 522; on its use, see Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), esp. 188ff.

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age shall [also] put on the shoe. If he has no sons who are legal heirs, the men who stand nearest to the inheritance shall put on the shoe, and they shall lead the man [who is] to be legitimated to the knees of the father and his wife. Women may testify for a man on the same terms as men as to the completeness of his legitimation, as may the shoe which the men have put on, if it is preserved. [sic] A thrallborn son shall be brought into the kindred by the one who gave him his freedom; and let it be given by the father or by a brother or by the man who is nearest the heir, whether he be young or old; and let them give their consent who are the nearest to the one who wishes to bring a man into the kindred. The son of a free woman [frjálsrar konu son] shall be legitimated in the same way as the son of a bondwoman [sem þýjar]. And after this manner shall the free-born agnatic kinsmen [bauggildismenn] bring a man into the kindred, if there is no father or brother.134 Two principles pervade the slightly casuistic prose of the provision: the consensus of those affected and the freedom of the decision-makers. If the father (or brother, etc.) desires it, and those who are “closest to the heir,” meaning those whose prospective inheritance is diminished by the admission of an 134 Frostathing Law (in NgL, vol. 1, 119–258), ix §1: “Sá er ættleiðingr at fullu er faðer leiðir í ætt sun sinn oc þeir menn iáta et þá ero þess manns arfar næster er sun sinn leiðir í ætt. Þriggia sállda öl scal gera, oc höggva uxa þrevetran oc flá ax heming af eftra foti hinum hœgra fyrir ofan hœkilinn, oc gera scó or. Þar scal Faðer láta ættleiðing stíga í, oc hafa sunu sína þá í faðmi ser er í ómegð ero. En þeir sculo synir hans í þann scó stíga er fulltíða ero. En ef hann á sunu enga arfgenga, þá sculo þeir menn í þann scó stíga er þá ero arfi hans næstir, en þann mann scal leiða á reca scaut oc rygia. Jamt sculo conor bera vitni þeim manni sem carlmadr [!] til ættleiðingar at fullu, oc scór sá er þeir stigu í ef hann er hirðr. Þann þýborenn sun scal í ætt leiða er honum er frelsi gefit, oc gefr annartveggia faðir eða bróðir, eða hvegi maðr er arfi hans er næstr, hvárt sem sá er ungr eða gamall. Oc iáta þeir menn er arfi ero þá næstir þeirra manna er þá vilia mann í ætt leiða. En iamt scal friálsrar kono sun sem þýjar í ætt leiða. Svá sculo aller bauggilldismenn ættbornir leiða mann í ætt sem faðir eða bróðir ef þeir ero eigi til.”—The term bauggildismenn (“men who owe [golden arm-] rings”) denotes the extent of mutual liability as regulated by law, in the case of a crime to be settled by wergild, usually manslaughter; it loosely corresponds to thirddegree relatives in the ‘Germanic’ reckoning of contemporary church law.—Ætt, a word distantly related with eiga “to own,” is mostly rendered as “kin (group)” or Sippe in the terms of the Freiburg and Münster kinship studies (Karl Schmid, Gerd Tellenbach), denoting all lateral relatives as opposed to Geschlecht/‘lineage,’ which refers to an agnatic blood line. In modern Scandinavian academic usage slægt/släkt/slekt, borrowed from Saxon in the Middle Ages, corresponds to ‘lineage’ and æt(t)/ätt to ‘kin’ (cf. the widespread term ættesamfund/ättesamhälle ‘[pre-state] kin society’). The extensive debate was summarized most recently from a legal-historical perspective by Hansen, “Concept of Kinship” (2005).

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extra heir, agree, then there are no barriers to the ættleiðing of a ‘son.’ The son of a free woman is explicitly placed on the same level as that of a slave; it is unclear how far the free/unfree dichotomy was still operative on an everyday level in the thirteenth century,135 but within the narrative system of the law the dichotomy is important: No distinction is to be made between the children of high-status frillur and those of peasant women. The Gulathing Law (§52), which dictates the same procedure for the ætt­ leiðing, is yet more laborious in the ceremony with the shoe, and even prescribes a formula to be spoken by the father, with alliterative parallelisms clearly intended to suggest anciency. Eligible sons are also further differentiated: besides the “slave’s son” there are the “corner son” (hornungr) and the “bush son” (hrísungr). The former is defined as the “the son of a free woman [whom his father has] not bought with mund but to whose bed he has gone without concealment”; the bush son is “the son of a free woman but begotten in secret.”136 As will be discussed (Chapter 2), the distinction between open and secret actions can indeed be considerable for the participants; for the offspring, however, there are no consequences in the lawbook: bush son, corner son, and slave’s son, “they enter into all rights.”137 Indeed, the entire ninth section of the Frostathing Law opens with the maxim: “A son shall inherit from his father when nature takes its proper course, the one who is taken into the kindred as well as the one who is born to freedom and family.”138 It should be noted that the complicated and curious ceremony with the shoe, which I take to be an archaizing fabrication by the editors of the law (the ceremony, not the legal act as such), comes from a time when the propensity for free, consensus-based negotiations between the affected parties was being 135 Iversen, Trelldommen (1997); Karras, Slavery and Society (1988); Krag, Norges historie (2000), 212; Eljas Orrman, “The Condition of the Rural Population,” in Helle, ed., Cambridge History of Scandinavia, vol. 1 (2003), 589–610, with further references. By the time this text was edited, the term frjálsi, here glossed as “free,” had already acquired the narrower meaning, ‘not taxable by the king,’ that is, ‘noble.’ 136 Gulathing Law (in: NgL, vol. 1, 1–110), §104: “Sa heiter hornongr er frialsar kono sunr er, oc eigi golldenn mundr við, oc genget i liose i hvilu hennar. En sa heitir risungr er frialsar kono sunr er oc getenn a laun.” The Earliest Norwegian Laws, trans. Larson (1935), 104. 137 Gulathing Law (in: NgL, vol. 1, 1–110), §104: “þeir koma til allz rettar,” namely seventh in succession (erfðaskipan); likewise, no distinction is made for the ættleiðing (§52). The Earliest Norwegian Laws, trans. Larson (1935), 104. 138 Frostathing Law viii §1: “Sonr scal taca arf eptir föður sinn ef at scöpum ferr, oc svá ætt­ leiðingr sem ættborenn.” The Earliest Norwegian Laws, trans. Larson (1935), 324.—Cf. Sawyer, “Son ska taka arv etter far sin” (1999), 56–79. “When nature [skapan ‘work of creation’] takes its proper course” meant: when the father dies before the son; otherwise the father inherits from the (childless) son. Again, any distinction based on the mother’s status is ruled out.

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put on the defensive by juridical ‘encadrement.’139 The formal regulation of entry into a lineage, which after all only boils down to freedom for every member of a family group to take the initiative if he can ensure the consent of those concerned or enforce his will, is one such legalistic ‘framing.’ Practically, the ætt’s freedom to decide on the admission of new ‘sons’ and ‘brothers’ remains unchanged. The ætt is in fact an interest group governed by rules of co-­optation expressed in kinship terms.140 The sagas present the same picture as the laws: impressive sons of frillur or slave women appear in all genres, in the prehistoric and Icelandic sagas as well as in the kings’ histories. While they have to struggle for their place alongside their brethren from more respectable relationships, they often receive special narrative attention for it. One of many examples is the remarkable figure of Þorkel krafli (‘Scratcher’)141 in the Icelandic Vatnsdœla saga, written down around 1260/80. The powerful Þorgrím has a son with his frilla Néreið, who had apparently been captured in Orkney. He was exposed and left to die at the instigation of Þorgrím’s wife/woman (kona), but saved and raised by Þorgrím’s brothers. However, for many years Þorgrím simply refuses to recognize his paternity. The narrative now skips forward to a moment when the boy is around twelve years old. There is a sociable gathering, the boys play and the adults are negotiating a delicate matter: who will be the next holder of the local goðorð, a prestigious position conferring precedence at the thing.142 At this point a silent understanding begins between father and son. The young Þorkel stares relentlessly at Þorgrím, or rather something that he has with him, namely an ornate ax, an attractive piece from Byzantium. Silence is one of the most succinct, even dramatic forms of expression in all the sagas, and inevitably (sometimes only after years) leads to peripety of some sort. Þorgrím is well aware of this and decides to go along with the escalation: “What are you goggling at, slavewoman’s son?”—knowing full well that he is almost the only man in the world who can speak such words without danger of death. The boy remains silent and continues to stare. So Þorgrím puts his cards on the table: “What will you do, Scratcher, for me to give you the ax, for I see you like it very much—and for 139 Referring to the concept of encadrement (féodal, paroissial, etc.), the ‘framing’ and systematization of society through closer forms of representation of social relationships. 140 For criticism of the conception of ætt/kin as a structurally fundamental, biologically/ genealogically fixed formation in relation to property, law, and feud, political action, see Hansen, Ætten (1999), 23–55. 141 From krafla “to stir, to move weakly”; the epithet refers to Þorkel’s characteristic nose scratching. 142 See Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999).

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me to recognize my kinship with you?” Now Þorkel can break his silence; he bids his father keep talking. And he names the price: the death of his competitor for goðorð. “It seems to me that then you would bring yourself into the house of Vatnsdœlir.” During another round of negotiations, the boy jostles the opposing candidate, provokes and receives an insult—“slavewoman’s son!”—and kills him with the ornate ax. The scene becomes yet more unappetizing as it goes almost unpunished: the deceased leaves behind only children, so no one will initiate the blood vengeance which is due, and a settlement is reached through the payment of compensation, the least honourable solution in the sagas. And Þorgrím, now goði, publicly declares: “He has now, so to speak, admitted himself into our kin—and now I will also recognize you as my son.”143 The blackmail of a perplexed child is not quite as brutal as it appears to modern readers at first glance. By conspicuously staring at the ax, the boy Þorkel had already made his availability sufficiently clear at the outset. This shows that to him the quid pro quo is, and must be, worth any price: the “slavewoman’s son” must first show that it is worth accepting him into the family. Once he has proved this, there is no need for a ceremony with ox-hide shoes for his admission, indeed no further words are needed: “Now he has admitted himself into the kindred.” 12

Twofold Legitimacy: Sverrir of Norway

What this Icelandic story relates about a single family also holds true for the Norwegian royal kindred, which accepted the newcomer Eystein, questioned Hákon Hákonarson, and rejected Harald gilli. Eystein, accompanied by his Gaelic mother, came from Scotland, landed in Norway, and made it very clear to the two ruling brothers what the consequences of refusing to co-opt him would be—he too “led himself into the kindred.” The most famous—and ­successful—of the Norwegian kings to come from the Western Isles and claim their right of succession, invoking the ubiquity of the royal seed, is Sverrir (born around 1150/55, r. 1177–1202), perhaps the most important, certainly the most interesting ruler figure of the Norwegian Middle Ages.144 In his case, we 143 Vatnsdœla saga c. 42: “Þorgrímr spurði, hví ambáttarsonr sjá stirði svá á hann. … ‘Hvat villtu til vinna, Krafla, at ek gefa þér øxina, því at ek sé, at þér lízk allvel á hana, ok hitt, at ek ganga við frændsemi þinni?’ … ‘… þykki mér þú þá sjálfr fœra þik í Vatnsdœla kyn.’ … ‘… hefir hann nú næsta sagt sik í Vatnsdœla kyn, ok mun ek ganga við faðerni þínu.’” 144 Cf. Koht, Kong Sverre (1942); Koht, “Korleis vart kong Sverre son til Sigurd Munn?” (1961– 62), 293–302; Gathorne-Hardy, King Sverre (1956); Torkelsen, “Sverre som løgner” (1983),

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are in the fortunate position of not being dependent on the thirteenth-century sagas that tell of bygone kings; like that other great “outsider,” Caesar, he narrates his own life in the third person, as a mixture of the fortunes of war and plain good luck.145 This lends the story an unprecedented level of ‘officiality’ about his beginnings (in fact, scholars often speak—quite accurately—of ‘propaganda’); that the story is so similar to the reports concerning the background of royal “outsiders” related in Heimskringla and elsewhere, indirectly attests to the latters’ representativeness. Now how did Sverrir start out? He was “said to be” the son of Unás, a combmaker from western Norway, and his wife Gunnhild. At the age of five, he came to his father’s brother, the bishop of the Faroe Islands, who “set him to booklearning and consecrated him, so that he became a priest.” This education was already a first stroke of luck: it later enabled Sverrir to always have the right premonitory dream at the right time, including one which, at a critical moment as the dispirited leader of a group of desperados, prompted him to risk reaching for the kingship—not only reliving the Book of 1 Samuel, but having dreams about it and providing commentary on them. Even before his career started, however, God revealed his legitimacy. This came directly from the “pope in Rome”—bypassing the local clergy, which is easy to understand in the self-portrayal of a king whose reign was characterized by the confrontation with two reforming archbishops—who, acting as the confessor of his pilgrim mother Gunnhild, bound her to no longer conceal the “truth” about the birth of her son. It turned out that Sverrir’s father was ‘actually’ King Sigurð—the same who had impregnated the enchanting singing mill slave, which fittingly made Sverrir brother of King Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders,’ who in 1162 had lost against the ruling Magnús Erlingsson, and whose flokk had been unable to present a suitable pretender since. It was also fitting that Sverrir lacked priestly humility and had already picked a number of serious quarrels; a handful of

419–48; Magnús Stefánsson, “Kong Sverre” (1984), 287–307; Ármann Jakobsson, Í leit að konungi (1997); Krag, Sverre (2005). 145 Unlike the Roman, the Norwegian did not write himself—or let us say that his ‘Hirtius’ received full recognition as an author: “This book was first written by Abbot Karl Jónsson, and King Sverrir controlled the work and decided what to put in it” (“en yfir sat sialfr Sverrir konungr oc reð fyrir hvat rita scylldi,” SvS, Prologue). According to the prologue, the later parts of the saga are based on witness reports rather than direct authorship. The Heimskringla and other thirteenth-century kings’ sagas end with the year 1177, thus providing the prehistory to the Sverris saga.—On the idea of the outsider, see Meier, Caesar (1982).

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urgent dreams did the rest, and “Sverrir travelled to Norway to see what he could do.”146 The issue here is not Sverrir’s subsequent laborious rise to become sole ­ruler, made possible through his ecclesiastical contacts, his marriage ties with the powerful Jarl Birger Brosa in Götaland, and a series of ominous vicissitudes. Even so, it is striking that nobody seriously challenged Sverrir’s royal parentage throughout his career. The leaderless opposition, roving in the wooded ­badlands—the later famous Birkibeinar, named after their shoes made from tree bark—were more than willing to be convinced; at one point, they forced the hesitant Sverrir to assume leadership with threats of violence. The reigning king, Magnús Erlingsson (r. 1161–84), and the real power behind him, his father Erling ‘the Crooked’ (skakki), had by that time established their claim in a different, innovative manner. Magnús, who was not the son of a king and only related to the royal house through the maternal line (his mother Kristín was the daughter of King Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer, r. 1103–30), had been crowned king in an ecclesiastical ceremony in 1162 or 1163, as the result of a deal between his father’s party and the new archbishop, Eystein of Nidaros, with the support of the papal cardinal legate Stephen of Orvieto (and thus of Alexander iii), dispatched especially for the occasion. This was the first Northern European coronation (the Danish ceremony in Ringsted followed in 1170) and clearly made a virtue of necessity, by establishing a legitimacy of a new kind for Magnús’s kingship, which was untenable in terms of his origins.147 The succession law (in fact, nýmæli: ‘novella,’ new law), which was henceforth to regulate claims to the throne, was based on the principles of primogeniture and legitimate birth (sá skal konungr vera at Nóregi, er skilgetinn er Nóregskonungs sunr),148 and thus in principle precluded multiple rule, division of the realm, and pretenders. ­Furthermore, it pruned the crown of Harald Fairhair’s tree down to a single royal scion. Under this law, Sverrir’s claim—like those of the three unsuccessful pretenders who preceded him—was groundless, which may explain why King Magnús’s side never demanded that Sverrir’s paternity be proved.

146 SvS c. 6: “Sværir bio nu ferþ sina til Noregs at sia hvat i vill geraz.” 147 Cf. Tobiassen, “Tronfølgelov og privilegiebrev” (1964), 191–273; Gunnes, Erkebiskop Øystein (1996); Bagge, “Borgerkrig og statsutvikling” (1986), 145–97; Bagge, “Den heroiske tid” (2003). 148 In NgL, vol. 1, §1: “The king in Norway should be the son of a Norwegian king, born in a suitable marriage [more literally, ‘duly begotten’].” Where there are no sons or none suitable, the law provides for a complicated voting procedure that gives greatest weight to the bishops and representatives of the regions.

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The struggles over the kingship can certainly be recounted as a history of conflicting ideas about kingship: “From gang leader to the Lord’s anointed.”149 Some of the protagonists supplied theoretical reflection: Archbishop Eystein, Erling, the king’s exceptionally skilful father, and King Sverrir himself, whose ‘Speech against the Bishops’150 and biblical dreams testify to a remarkable interest in political theology. In these terms, Sverrir’s victory also meant the defeat of the ecclesiastically legitimated monarchy that had been formed in 1162/63, a step ‘backwards’ from a diffusionist perspective. Sverrir and his successors once again took the royal name in the traditional circumstances.151 13

Married, Crowned, Unsuccessful

We might also say: in circumstances considered traditional by contemporaries. For the vernacular historiographical activity in the decades around 1200, which makes Norway (and Iceland) unique in Europe and to which we owe most of our knowledge, must also be seen against the background of these challenges. From this point of view, it is interesting to watch Snorri handle the new form of legitimacy of 1163. Its supporters, King Magnús and his father Erling, are among those that have been interpreted as ‘positive’ figures in Snorri’s view.152 However, the failed attempt to restructure the monarchy is completely out of line with most of Heimskringla, where selecting a king is exclusively a matter for local powers, and in which every king and royal candidate enjoys formally equal treatment and churchmen do not differ from secular figures in their speech or bearing. Snorri’s commentary on the new birthright is therefore a masterpiece of ambiguity. In the run-up to the coronation ceremony he has Erling the Crooked, the party’s leader and mastermind, make the following speech to the archbishop:

149 Bagge, From Gang Leader to the Lord’s Anointed (1996). 150 Edited by Holtsmark (1931); cf. Gunnes, Kongens ære (1971). Even if the king’s contribution to the manuscript, of which only one version survives, cannot be identified, we can presuppose a certain engagement and familiarity with canon law on the part of the king, who had once been educated for the clergy. 151 Sverrir also had himself crowned in 1194, but the circumstances could not have been more different from the coronation of Magnús Erlingsson in 1162/63: the archbishop refused to perform the coronation, the bishop of Oslo only did so under threats of death, and the escalating conflict with the church culminated in excommunication and interdiction by Innocent iii. 152 Von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999), 367.

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“If Magnús has not been taken as king in accordance with what has been the ancient custom [forn siðr] in this country, then you can use your power to give him a crown, in accordance with what God’s laws are for anointing a king to power. And though I am not a king nor descended from a kingly line, yet most kings in our memory have not been as well acquainted with the statutes and laws of the land as I. For King Magnús’s mother is a legitimate [skilfengin] daughter of a king and queen. Magnús is also son of a queen and son of a lawfully wedded wife [eiginkonu sonr]. So if you are willing to grant him consecration as king, then no one will afterwards be able to deprive him of the kingdom lawfully. William the Bastard was not a king’s son, and he was consecrated and crowned king over England, and since then the kingdom has remained in his family in England and all of them have been crowned. Sven Úlfsson [=Estridsen] in Denmark was not a king’s son, and yet he was crowned king there and afterwards his sons and one after another of that family has been crowned king. There is now an archbishop’s see here in this country. That is a great glory and honour for our country. Let us enhance it further with good things, let us have a crowned king no less than English people or Danes.”153 With a remarkable serenity Snorri here declares two fundamental elements of medieval royal power, the church’s right to perform a coronation and the biblical foundation of this kingship, to be virtually irrelevant. For there is a context to the speech: Archbishop Eystein has unilaterally increased the taxes owed to the church by farmers in Trøndelag (the usual heartland for general protest movements against overly harsh rule in the sagas). Erling inquires whether this is supported by the “Law of Saint Olav” (to whom the original church law is 153 MsE c. 21: “Ef Magnús er eigi svá til konungs tekinn sem forn siðr er til hér í landi, þá meguð þér af yðru valdi gefa honum kórónu, sem Guðs lǫg eru til at smyrja konung til veldis. En þótt ek sjá eigi konungr eða af konungaætt kominn, þá hafa þeir konungar nú verit flestir í váru minni, er eigi vissu jafnvel sem ek til laga eða landsréttar. En móðir Magnúss konungs er konungs dóttir ok dróttningar skilfengin. Magnús er ok dróttningar sonr ok eiginkonu sonr. En ef þér vilið gefa honum konungsvígslu, þá má engi hann taka síðan af konungdóminum at réttu. Eigi var Vilhjálmr bastarðr konungs sonr, ok var hann vígðr ok kórónaðr til konungs yfir Englandi, ok hefir síðan haldizk konungdómr í hans ætt á Englandi ok allir verit kórónaðir. Eigi var Sveinn Úlfsson í Danmǫrk konungs sonr, ok var hann þó þar kórónaðr konungr ok síðan synir hans ok hverr eptir annan þeira frænda kórónaðr konungr. Nú er hér í landi erkistóll. Er þat mikill vegr ok tígn lands várs. Aukum vér nú enn með góðum hlutum, hǫfum konung kórónaðan eigi síðr en enskir menn eða Danir.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 248–49.

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a­ ttributed). The archbishop replies that the farmers would have agreed to whatever the law of Saint Olav says, and it is certainly not forbidden to extend God’s due. Erling does not refrain from a few biting remarks about what to the saga audience must have appeared an incredible insult against the royal saint by the new archbishop, in whose cathedral, moreover, Olav was buried. Nonetheless, he indicates that he is prepared to tolerate the increase of church income if the archbishop concedes to the coronation. Eystein replies now that if his tax increase was unjust, far worse is Erling’s “breach of the law that he is king over the land that is not the son of a king. There are neither laws nor precedents in this country to justify this.”154 Both are, of course, already moving towards the quid pro quo, which is then endorsed by the legate and the other bishops. According to the logic of the text, however, the new royal law was thus equivalent to the previous ‘arbitrary’ duty increase: both are outrageous, unprecedented, and sweep aside both custom and King Olav’s law. Ironically, it is precisely the archbishop who—­ ostensibly—sets himself up as the advocate of the traditional royal law. But the audience realize that he uses the ‘right’ arguments only for haggling, and feels the gap between right and wrong, old and new, all the more forcefully.155 Erling’s speech works similarly. Snorri’s Erling never misses an opportunity to emphasize the—conventional—royal unworthiness of his son Magnús (“though I am not … descended from a kingly line …”), and contrast the forn siðr, the “ancient custom” with the archbishop’s arbitrariness (“… from his own authority …”). While this would have been a spectacular slip by the historical Erling, it is a tour de force by Snorri’s Erling. The arguments actually used for the coronation (David, unction, royal consecration) are thus tainted by the violation of traditional law; the legitimate birth of the prospective king and his mother stand out in their irrelevance: when has a king’s mother’s origin ever mattered? Snorri reaches the pinnacle of irony with his two foreign examples to be emulated: William “the Bastard,” who is hardly an example of a “legitimate son of a queen” and whose hereditary claim to England was as weak as any. And Sven Estridsen may indeed have been the legitimate son of a queen (Estrid, daughter of Cnut the Great) and a jarl, and therefore was a suitable example, all his sons and other successors, blunderingly named by ‘Erling,’ were not. In 154 MsE c. 21: “hin lagabrotin, er sá er konungr yfir landi, er eigi er konungs sonr. Eru þar hvártki til þess lǫg né dœmi hér í landi.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 248. 155 The fact that it is Erling, portrayed as a legal expert in comparison to the ancient kings, who twists the law the most, works in a similar way.

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short, ‘Erling’s speech must make the audience think that if the aim is for Norway to imitate the strongest rulers of England and Denmark, then the country would have to pursue the opposite course. This form of kingship, blessed by the church and inherited by a legitimate son, is thus not only illegal but also ineffective. When ‘Erling’ then goes on to claim that such a kingship could no longer be contested lawfully, at réttu, the travesty is complete. For, after all, the audience knew who would soon overthrow Magnús and Erling: King Sverrir, the frilla’s son from the Faroe Islands. In the debate, polygynous kingship is elevated to the status of true legitimate rule. The impotence of Erling’s double reference to ‘legitimate birth’ (skilfenginn “fathered lawfully, properly” and eiginkonu sonr “son of a married woman”),156 in turn, highlights the old system, raised by analogy to the rank of the sacrosanct ‘Law of Saint Olav,’ as an indispensable part of the political order. One of its tenets is the functional equality of the king’s daughter and wife Kristín, Magnús’s mother, with Álfhild, the “the king’s handmaid of good family” and mother of Saint Olav’s son Magnús the Good, and even with the singing mill slave, mother of Hákon Broad Shoulders: the son of a king is the son of a king.157 14

Low-Born and Successful

What is more: Some of the most illustrious figures in the sagas are carefully constructed not just as the sons of frillur, but of slave women. One we have met is Þorkel ‘Scratcher,’ the captive’s son with the ax. He later surpasses his highborn brothers in possessions and prestige, becomes a goði himself, and leads the life of a naturaliter Christianus before actually accepting Christianity in his old age.158 Better known is Óláf pái (“Peacock,” on account of his fondness for 156 Skil-, from the verb skilja “divorce, separate,” belongs in the semantic field “measure out, allocate” and is therefore a legal term: “to give each his share,” that is, “rule correctly.” Eiginkona “own-woman” and the corresponding term kaupa konu “to buy a woman” means the correct transfer of ownership (bride price, morning gift) in the course of a consensual attachment. 157 Else Ebel’s attempt to distinguish an earlier epoch in the Icelandic and king’s sagas, in which concubines were usually spoils of war, from a later one in which they were “taken from among the farmer’s daughters” (Konkubinat [1993], 64; 72) is, in my view, a little too neat. As far as the content of the sagas is concerned, both kinds of relationships occur at the same period, and as far as their time of origin is concerned, we are faced with the uncertainty of establishing a sufficiently precise chronology for the dating of entire narratives (as opposed to versions in individual manuscripts). 158 Cf. Lönnroth, “Noble Heathen” (1969).

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opulent clothes), the son of an Irish slave girl bought by his father Hǫskuld at a trading place on his way home to Iceland—Laxdœla saga vividly describes the market, the selection, the haggling, and the girl’s scanty clothing.159 In this case, the ‘deaf-mute,’ haughty, silent slave, who, after arriving in Iceland, receives her own small farm in the face of Hǫskuld’s wife’s fierce disapproval, later proves to be the daughter of an Irish king, and her son Óláf becomes a chieftain so glorious that it is not unreasonable to ask whether he and the tragedies that arise from his perfection do not demonstrate the problem of excellence in a paritarian society: “He’s of even better family on his mother’s side than his father’s, which by itself would be more than good enough for us.”160 Again and again any idea that being the son of a slave woman might represent a blemish is thwarted—though the word could indeed be intended and interpreted as an insult, as tunguníð (“verbal níð, libel”), as the story of Þorkel ‘Scratcher’ shows. The remarkable thing is not that in high medieval Scandinavia it was considered undesirable to have an unfree (or, stated more cautiously, little-respected) parent, and offensive when this was claimed about someone. What is remarkable is that all the written sources tend to approach this issue by repeatedly proclaiming the legal, political, and temperamental equality of all ‘births,’ whether of a slave or princess—and then go yet further and show that slaves can be princesses and their sons may look better than their brothers of proper birth. There is an originality here which sets apart the ‘generative aspect’ of Northern European polygyny, beyond the general social purpose of propagating offspring. The stories of slave women’s sons born to rule are not indicative of a particular predilection for children of slaves as preferred heirs—an important phenomenon in the medieval Mediterranean, for instance among the Mamlūks, with obvious advantages, such as the lack of cognates and the successor’s social dependence on their predecessor. In the practices reported by the sagas and attested by external sources, there is as little evidence of a 159 Laxdœla saga c. 12. 160 Laxdœla saga c. 23 (the words of his future father-in-law, Egil Skallagrímsson, himself an experienced saga ‘hero’): “Er hann miklu betr borinn í móðurkyn en fóðurætt, og væri oss þat þó fullbóðit.” Cf. Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 257f. Sagas of the Icelanders (2005), 313.—It would be a mistake to dismiss the many women and young men who are temporarily enslaved in the sagas as a mere ‘motif.’ In the life of a Þorkel ‘Scratcher’ or Óláf Peacock and their mothers, being seized and enslaved was real possibility in the early and (to a lesser extent) even in the high Middle Ages. Insofar as Þorkel and Óláf (and Joseph, Apollonius, Charikleia, Nicolette, and Cinderella) are a ‘motif,’ we must ask how and why they appear in their narratives. The sagas show a real concern to present events as being plausible in the lived world.

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g­ eneral preference for the ‘lower’ born as there is of the opposite. As argued, the frequent images of excellent sons of slavewomen have, first and foremost, the aim of foiling the social opprobrium that potentially clung to them. There is hardly a better example of this than the views of Rǫgnvald, jarl of Møre, Harald Fairhair’s “dearest friend,” concerning his different sons. He had two sons from a relationship with a magnate’s daughter, and he “also had sons by frillur,” three altogether. Of the five, two would become the founder figures of new Norse settlements, namely the well-born Hrólf/Rollo, the first Norman prince, and the frilla’s son Einar. When no son succeeds in enforcing Rǫgnvald’s claim to Orkney, which is in a state of ‘frontier’ lawlessness, the following dialogue unfolds: But when Jarl Rǫgnvald heard about this, he was displeased with Hallað’s [one son of a frilla] behaviour, saying that his sons would turn out different from their forefathers. Then Einarr [another son of a frilla]: replied: “I have had little esteem from you. I have little affection to leave behind. I will go west to the Islands if you will give me some troops. I will promise you this, which will be a very great source of pleasure to you, that I shall not return to Norway.” Rǫgnvald says it pleased him well that he would not return. “For I have little hope that you will be a credit to your family, for all your mother’s family is slave-born.”161 The moral is clear: of all his sons, only the slave’s son takes up the challenge contained in the father’s blanket insult. Naturally he succeeds—with a single longship he secures possession of Orkney for his kindred for three centuries to come—and what is more, on this occasion he obtains his nickname, ‘TorfEinar’: “He was called Torf-Einarr because he had turf cut and used it for firewood, for there was no forest in Orkney.”162 So the frilla’s son not only c­ onquered

161 HsH c. 27: “Rǫgnvaldr jarl … sagði, at synir hans myndi verða ólíkir forellri sínu. Þá svaraði Einarr: ‘Ek hefi lítinn metnað af þér. Á ek við litla ást at skiljask. Mun ek fara vestr til eyja, ef þú vill fá mér styrk nǫkkurn. Mun ek því heita þér, er þér mun allmikill fagnaðr á vera, at ek mun eigi aptr koma til Nóregs.’ Rǫgnvaldr segir, at þat líkaði honum vel, at hann kvæmi eigi aptr – ‘því at mér er lítils ván, at frændum þínum sé sœmð at þér, því at móðurætt þín ǫll er þrælborin.’” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 74– 75. The scene is very similar in Orkneyinga saga, c. 6. 162 HsH c. 27: “Hann var fyrir því kallaðr Torf-Einarr, at hann lét skera torf ok hafði þat fyrir eldivið, því at engi var skógr í Orkneyjum.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 75. Similarly, Os c. 7.—Turf was widely used as a building material in the North Atlantic islands; see Guðmundur Óli Ólafsson, Torfbærinn (1982).

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the islands but also opened them up for permanent settlement, and in this respect surpassed every Norwegian king, albeit on a small North Atlantic scale. Why this insistence? Certainly not only to legitimize the polygynous free choice of great men, which might as well invoke Jacob and the twelve tribes of the People of God, Briseis and Cassandra: “quod decuit reges, cur mihi turpe putem?”163 And yet the king’s daughter Cassandra, raped and made a slave and concubine following the fall of Troy, would be relevant to the everyday reality of women’s lives in a world of raids and plundering expeditions. Any woman who was hertekin, “captured by the army,” who fell into the power of a man, was in a similar position to Melkorka, the Irish king’s daughter, who was seized and sold as a fifteen-year-old girl, and whose new owner Hǫskuld, as Laxdœla saga makes clear, slept with her that same evening, even before he had given her clean clothes164 (she is the ‘mute’ future mother of Óláf ‘Peacock,’ mentioned above), or Eðla, the daughter of an Polabian Slavic chief, whom the Swedish ruler Olof Skötkonung “had captured during the war, and for this reason she was called the king’s handmaid.”165 A consequence of this ever-present possibility and danger, together with the clear refusal in all sources to have the servile status perpetuated per ventrem, was that unfree ‘status’ did not solidify, either in practice or representation. Slavery was a risk, a stage of life experienced by everyone from the later conversion king Óláf Tryggvason downwards. This, in turn, has the consequence that the approximation of the terms “slave” (ambátt etc.) and “concubine” (frilla etc.) that can often be seen in the sources, does not indicate that Norse poly­ gyny simply resulted from the powerful’s right to sexually exploit their slaves166 nor any contempt for ‘free’ frillur and the convergence of their social position with that of the unfree.167 The sagas repeatedly designate women who become mothers of kings as “the ‘king’s handmaid’ even though she came from a good family.”168 This is neither an attempt to gloss over the low birth of a ‘good’ king, 163 Ovid, Amores ii 8, v. 16. 164 Laxdœla saga c. 12: “Þat sama kveld rekkði Hǫskuldr hjá henni.” 165 OsH c. 88: “Óláfr Svíakonungr Eiríksson átti fyrst friðlu, er Eðla hét, dóttir jarls af Vinðlandi [Wendland, the usual designation in the sagas for the southern Baltic Sea countries between Kiel Fjord and Vistula Lagoon]. Hon hafði fyrir þat verit hertekin ok kǫlluð konungs ambótt.”—In Adam of Bremen (ii, 59, iii, 15), she is Óláf’s concubina and mother of the “bad” King Emund, who toyed with turning Swedish church allegiance away from Hamburg-Bremen. See below, Chapter 4. 166 For instance, Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), 132f. 167 This is the argument in Karras, “Concubinage and Slavery” (1990). 168 The only exception I know of in the Scandinavian sources is Saxo—perhaps reflecting the changes to the royal order of succession in the Valdemar era—who argues for the congruence of a slavish birth and nature. (iii, 6,20: Amleth discloses the unfree origin of the

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nor to dismiss a wealthy frilla as a near-slave. Rather, both are true. A woman of good family could all too easily become the slave a powerful man through plundering campaigns, have his children as a concubine, and then once again be held in honour by her family.169 There is no contradiction between two assertions, discussed controversially in scholarship, ‘concubines were respectable and not socially stigmatized’ and ‘concubines were slaves or similar’: both hold true at once. By contrast, the final proposition—‘slaves were respectable and not socially stigmatized’—is clearly absurd and an oxymoron. By definition, ‘slaves’ are those who are less respectable than the others. Consequently, all general statements about ‘the concubines,’ their status, and their dignity must founder. Irrespective of origin, status, and function, it is purely a question of the person and their qualities. Guaranteeing this is the true purpose of establishing parity between kings’ daughters, war booty women, and mill maids. 15

Polygyny as a Guarantor of Parity

To avoid any misunderstanding straight away: parity is not equality. They are are fundamentally different ideas; indeed, parity is the prerequisite for the development of inequality. A social formation based on the agonistic principle, on comparison and competition, and thus organized comparatively, needs a common basis, the yardstick by which the dissimilarity of its members can be measured. Only if there is no a priori hierarchy can all achieve different degrees of excellence under the same conditions: without the Round Table, there is no Arthurian kingdom; without the peer group in which not even the king

queen, whose mother had been captured and enslaved, “ne potius servili more quam genere esse videretur”). 169 As happens, for example, in Vatnsdœla saga to Nereið, mother of Þorkel ‘Scratcher.’ It is clear that her son counts on his mother’s background when he—successfully—seeks affiliation with his Orkney relatives, at which the local jarl pays for her freedom and sends valuable women’s clothing to Iceland—without anyone appearing to harbour any resentment over past injustice. (See below, Chapter 4). Ástríð, the mother of Óláf Tryggvason, experiences a similar fate in Heimskringla, while Álfhild, “king’s handmaid” and Olav’s former frilla, like many Merovingian concubines five centuries earlier, found her place of honour through her son as the mother of the king, and only with great difficulty and following the exhortations of the skald Sigvat, was Olav’s childless ‘first wife,’ the Swedish princess, persuaded to relinquish her seniority in the seating order: “Your circumstances have, however, greatly improved by God’s will!” (“þér þótt þinn hagr stórum, / þat vildi Guð, batni,” MsG cc. 7–9).

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stands above the others, there is no way of knowing which knight performs all the quests better than all the others, and earns the siege perilous. Now the principle of the same starting opportunities underlies every competition, in sports and otherwise, and the rise of chivalry is in itself a case in point.170 However, the situation is different in saga Scandinavia. Chivalry—to remain with this example—constitutes a paritarian group of a strongly agonistic character distinguished from the great majority of men (and all women), achieving a common basis internally through an ever-starker demarcation from all outsiders, at least discursively. The Round Table only has a limited number of places. But this clearly does not apply to the Northern Europe of the sagas—which may be considered to be at least as ‘real’ as the Western Europe of knightly culture in terms of its reflection of the tangible, lived practice of Northern Europe. Here we have no adoubements, no categorial disqualifications, not even in-group terms such as miles or chevalier, no inside and outside; everyone has their share of a gradual system, and his actual place, as measured by what we somewhat awkwardly term ‘honour,’ is literally dependent on new vicissitudes, on actions and reactions from day to day. In this system, the sons of magnates become figures of fun and the sons of slaves kings and heroes, while other sons of magnates become heroes and many slaves remain slaves. For of course we should not take the system to be as socially ‘open’ as it likes to present itself, and in doing so has for two centuries provided European modernity with the basis of the expectation that the light of democratic freedom in Europe comes from the North.171 Nonetheless, one thing is rendered impossible: the idea of an aristocracy originally founded on merit but then perpetuated by birthright, the continuada honor anciana, as Ramon Llull puts it.172 “Ancient” and “continuing” honour does not exist in the North, a region where aristocratic wealth and status depended less on the yields of good farmland as it did in the more landlocked parts of Latin Europe and more on successful long-range maritime accumulation and distribution of goods. Perhaps 170 Cf. Bloch, La société féodale (1939–40); Duby, Guerriers et paysans (1973); Contamine, ed., Noblesse (1976); Keen, Chivalry (1984); Aurell, Noblesse en Occident (1996); Fleckenstein, Rittertum (2002); Morsel, Aristocratie (2004). 171 The locus classicus is Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, xvi, 11; xvii, 5. The evidence for the figure of thought lies in the actual historical product of eight hundred years of change, namely modern Scandinavia, which does indeed look like a good approximation of these dreams. 172 Ramon Llull, Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria c. 2.—I have argued elsewhere, with regards to Tolosan Occitania, that even in Western Europe, an aristocracy based on parity had to reject the concept of knighthood, and so becomes a ‘special case’: Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 354ff.

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t­ halassocratic polities are necessarily more prone to sustained paritarian ‘allin’ competition than land-based aristocracies.173 In the agonistic society of saga-era Scandinavia, no one has credit to squander or debts to settle. 16

Polygyny without Women?

So far, the discussion in this book has focused almost exclusively on men, which may by now be slightly surprising to some readers. Medieval women’s history has, over the last two to three decaes, moved steadily towards the centre of medieval history at large, undoubtedly benefiting from the wider social climate and the corresponding expansion of scholarly opportunities, in Scandinavia perhaps even more so than elsewhere. Yet perhaps as a result of these same circumstances, it cannot really break free of the defensiveness which the objective of (re)granting women their place in history entails. Numerous studies and increasingly also syntheses deal with women’s legal ‘status,’ their chances and opportunities, room for manoeuvre, economic significance, and political influence, in short, their place in a society which frequently appears to be the ‘male society’ par excellence.174 Besides the necessary readjustment of perspective, this has resulted in major shifts in the overall picture, for instance, by highlighting the overriding importance of textile exports—the result of female labour—for the Icelandic trade balance and the relatively minor signi­ ficance of the surplus from the plunder and redistribution economy—obtained by men.175 Overall, women have won their place in the Northern European Middle Ages, yet there is still a rhetoric of precariousness about this place. In a way, the evidence for women who did not content themselves with ‘room for manoeuvre,’ ‘female spaces’ or ‘opportunities’ granted them by a thoroughly male (‘patriarchal’) society is stronger than even modern ­scholarship will allow. Some of the emblematic figures of the Norse world fly in the face 173 For further discussion of thalassocracy as a social and political system, see Rüdiger, “Medieval Maritime Polities” (2017). 174 Ólafía Einarsdóttir, “Staða kvenna” (1984); Agnes Arnórsdóttir, Kvinner og “krigsmenn” (1990); Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (1991); Lövkrona, ed., Kvinnospår i medeltiden (1992); Helga Kress, Máttugar meyjar (1993); Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995); Jochens, Images of Women (1996); Sawyer, Kvinnor och familj (21998); Øye, “Kvinner” (22001); for a critical appraisal, see Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005). 175 Andersen, “Kvindearbejde i vikingetid?” (1983); Damsholt, “Icelandic Women” (1984); Anna Sigurðardóttir, Vinna kvenna á Íslandi (1985); Stalsberg, “Women as Actors” (1991); Helgi Þorláksson, Vaðmál og verðlag (1991); Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995), 141–60.

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of traditional womens’ history, for instance, the shieldmaiden (skjaldmær) or maiden-king (meykóngr), young girls who, like or on behalf of their brothers, go into battle, lead warships, and (particularly in the later sagas) rule entire countries,176 as well as the much-discussed ‘whetter,’ the saga figure of the woman who, at the critical point in a conflict, thwarts the possibility of an amicable settlement—which the men involved may even be inclining towards— and provokes an escalation through sharp satire and exhortation (eggjan, from egg “edge, blade”). Traditional womens’ history, assuming that women must essentially occupy inferior positions in a ‘patriarchal society,’ had to tackle the evidence: Did shieldmaidens exist? Is ‘the whetter’ a misogynistic literary construct or the literarization of a role that was available for women in real-life questions of honour and feud?177 The controversy, which—again due to great sociopolitical topicality—has become a basic element of academic teaching in Norway,178 must be regarded as unsolved in the long term and probably fundamentally unsolvable. The reason for this may be that the question is flawed. When discussing whether ‘women’ had a certain social or even literary function in ‘men’s’ society, this already presupposes the fundamental dichotomy modelled on the two biological sexes, which our present associates with the terms ‘men’ and ‘women,’ and that what we can postulate for the European Middle Ages (and other epochs of Euro-Mediterranean history) can also be applied to medieval 176 The term is attested, among others, in the Annales Ryenses (dma, 156) where Hethe, the legendary founder of Hethæby/Slesvig, heads a crowd of 300 “virgines quae skalmøær dicte sunt.” Cf. Wahlgren, Maiden King (1938); Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980); Præstgaard Andersen, Skjoldmøer (1982); Holmqvist-Larsen, Møer (1983); Clover, “Maiden Warriors” (1986); Kalinke, Bridal-Quest Romance (1990); Sawyer, “Sköldmön” (1998). Familiar from nineteenth- and twentieth-century national mythology, the ‘valkyrie’ (valkyrja), companion of Odin, may ultimately go back to a pre-Christian numinous female figure (we have no way of knowing). In her modern form, however, she is borrowed from the ‘Eddic’ scholarly antiquarianism of the thirteenth century. 177 The former view, earlier already put forward by Heller, Literarische Darstellung (1958), is now most notably advocated by Jenny Jochens (first argued in: “Icelandic Heroine” (1986); summarized in: Images of Women [1996], 170–204) who assumes that the agitator was real in the earlier, “Germanic” period, but had become a literary construction by the Middle Ages, and served as an “excuse for male failure to provide peace” (203). The opposing view is represented above all by Else Mundal (for instance, “Position of Women” [1994]; cf. Mundal’s review of Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995), in Maal og Minne 2 [1997]: 207–21), who argues that the contribution of women in certain positions to conflict management is not only well documented, but also plausible from a socio-anthropological, comparative perspective. On the debate, see Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005), 37ff. 178 See the article by Ingvild Øye, “Starke Frauen?” in the obligatory handbook: Blom and Sogner, eds., Med kjønnsperspektiv (22001), 77f.

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Scandinavia. Despite sharpening awareness of the social construction of ‘gender,’ modern gender studies, by and large (though of course not always, nor even necessarily), still have the tendency to be conflated with womens’ studies: a woman (gender) is usually identified with one born with the biological characteristics of a woman (sex), and the same applies to men. If scholarship pays particular attention to points of ‘hybridity’ and ‘transgression’ (such as the shieldmaidens), these nonetheless tend to prove the very rule that defines them as deviant or subversive. It is precisely this which motivates the debate about ‘strong women,’ of shieldmaidens and whetters of saga-period Scandinavia: Are we dealing with women who had an unusually large scope for action in social fields usually reserved for men, or is it a question of male anxiety being projected onto discursively constituted female figures? Formulated in terms of European history: do the ‘strong women’ of Scandinavia represent a special case, testifying to a freedom to act, even in male domains such as war and rule, that was unparalleled elsewhere in Europe, or just an original literary expression of the usual situation, Lilith figures created by supporters of expansionary ideology of clerical provenance? Probably the most far-reaching proposal for resolving this false opposition was made by the American Germanist Carol Clover in 1993.179 According to Clover, early Scandinavian culture knew a gender hierarchy that differed fundamentally both from that of today and that of the “Christian Middle Ages.”180 The opposition that modern Norse studies try to describe in terms of ‘manly/unmanly’ is in fact detached from the biological body and in principle operates at the level of social relations, in a way that goes far beyond the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender.’181 The decisive criterion before any other means of attribution—including biological sex—centres on the semantic field around the verb mega “to be able.” The key question is the possibility of ­acting in ­accordance with one’s own will, separating a group that included 179 Clover, “Regardless of Sex” (1993); similarly, Auður Magnúsdóttir’s paper on “Manly Women and Asexual Virgins in the Middle Ages” at the second Icelandic Historians’ ­Conference in Reykjavík in 2002. For the following, see in more detail, Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005). 180 Clover, “Regardless of Sex” (1993), 364, with a variation of Laqueur’s ‘one-sex’ model. There is no need to go into Clover’s stance on the source value of the sagas for the preChristian period here, as her observations remain pertinent even if they are only considered relevant to the period when they were set down in writing, the high Middle Ages. 181 The irrelevance of the male or female body for ascribing the fundamental category could explain the surprising lack of interest in its display, as is so characteristic of virtually all other manifestations of the Euro-Mediterranean culture; cf. Jochens, “Male Gaze” (1991); Helga Kress, “Gægur er þér í augum” (1991), where male interest is, however, understood as differentiated according to the social level of women.

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most (healthy) men and some women, from the other group, a “rainbow coalition” of most women, children, the unfree and old, handicapped or otherwise (maybe only temporarily) impeded men. Certainly, the groups’ characteristics are typically connoted as either male or female; crucially, however, no biological boundary can prevent a woman from belonging to “the able” or protect a man from the constant possibility of falling into powerlessness, which means being grouped together with the elderly, childish, and most women. Therefore, day by day it was necessary to demonstrate to those around that one counted for something. Standing out was a goal and necessity: the core concept for a person who tended to stand out is skǫrungr, derived from the verb skara ( fram), “to stand out”—linguistically, though not culturally, a parallel formation to “eminent.” Masculinity—or rather what we tend to equate with it, that is, skǫrungskap and its variants—meant constant pressure to act in a way that would leave no one in doubt that one possessed this very quality.182 This hypothesis is of the utmost importance for the ‘generative aspect’ of polygyny. If the merciless meritocratic principle that underlies the agonistic character of saga society applies to women as well as men—or, more accur­ ately, to some women, those who are on the side of the megnir, the “able and powerful”—then it is understandable why the sources are so emphatic about the parity of bedmates and potential mothers of kings and others: it is only under conditions of parity that the inequality of the women can be expressed, and the perfection of their characters as gauged by others (“people thought she was …”) be reliably assessed. Now, if the central social dichotomy runs at an angle to the boundary of biological sex, then it is quite possible to sire a child whose biological parents are, of course, a man and a woman but who nonetheless belong to the same ‘gender’ category socially. It could involve the child of a normal woman, belonging to the weak party, and an unusually weak man—in modern language we are tempted to say an ‘effeminate’ man, although this really misses the point. The worst, lethal insults—those which can push a man into the conceptual field of 182 Clover, “Regardless of Sex” (1993), 381: “… it may be just that ever-present possibility that gives Norse maleness its desperate edge.” Mention should be made here of the numerous forms of defamation through more or less explicit allusions to the opponent’s alleged ‘soft,’ cowardly, hesitant, and/or feminine behaviour (including homosexual and bestial acts), of which the best-known is the níð, well-documented in the laws—a defamation that inevitably triggers the most severe confrontation possible. See Meulengracht Sørensen, Norrønt nid (1980), who speaks of a “militant masculine ethic” (25), but also Carol Clover’s reservations about Meulengracht Sørensen’s view in her study cited above.—Cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae xi 2, 22: “Virago vocata, quia virum agit, hoc est opera virilia facit et masculini vigoris est.”

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ergi (“incapacity, weakness,” but more than that: “one who cannot master his own destiny”)183—are aimed at something akin to passive homosexuality. The implication of the offence, however, goes far beyond homosexual invective in other societies precisely because of the social definition of the central dicho­ tomy, which is largely detached from biological sex. It surpasses ancient Greece, where the sexual practices regarded as respectable were likewise largely determined socially, not biologically, for the boundary of biological sex is not permeable in both directions, but merely allows the growing kalokagathoí to switch from the passive to the active side, almost as an exception to the rule.184 It even surpasses the obsession of Roman culture with losing the position of dominus through certain sexual practices (or merely the rumour of them).185 For even there, the threat of falling into the abyss is not constantly present in the same way as within the overwrought competition of the saga-era sœmdarmenn (“men of honour”).186 On the other hand, in certain cases a child could have parents who both, father and mother, belong to the ‘strong,’ the active side, the ‘gender’ of megnir as it were. The child’s mother may be among the women who merit the designation skǫrungr mikill “one who is wholly outstanding” (grammatically masculine even if applied to a woman) and thus ranked in the same class as King Harald Fairhair or Norway’s first archbishop.187 Behind this insistence 183 184 185 186

See Meulengracht Sørensen, Norrønt nid (1980), 18ff. Cf. Winkler, Eros (1994); Davidson, Kurtisanen (1999). See Veyne, “Homosexualität” (1984). It is only against this background that frequently cited passages become comprehensible as something else than just barbarian incomprehension. Kristni saga includes the story of the missionary activity of the itinerant bishop Fríðrek (c. 4), travelling around Iceland preaching in the company of his friend and early convert Þórvald. One day a satirical verse begins to circulate: “Nine children the bishop has borne, and Þórvald is the father of all of them” (“Hefr bǫrn borit / byskup níu / þeira’s allra / Þórvaldr faðir”). Þórvald immediately kills two men for merely singing the song in public, and it does not help that the bishop plays down the issue, saying that he may indeed have “borne” the children to baptism as their godfather. Þórvald’s anger is not macho outrage at the attempt to deny his male sexuality, but the dutiful reaction to the implicit claim that, by association, he had been contaminated by the traits of the churchman, who in appearance and habitus, unarmed and wearing a long dress, may well have invited qualification as blauð/passive. In other words, if Þórvald had not immediately proven he was still ‘active’ through several homicides with serious legal consequences, the insult would have appeared justified. 187 The noun skǫrungr denotes an outstanding/eminent person (mikill “great” is an intensifying adjective). However, it only exists in the masculine, even when used for a (biological) woman and, with its semantics of excellence, is one of the pieces of linguistic evidence for the distinguishing of gender on social grounds. Modern translators struggle in vain with the aporia of gender attribution, though some play the ‘feminine’ side up towards

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is the notion of inheritance and predisposition which can be read from the Nordic sources: firstly, that the character of a person was determined by their parental heritage, and, secondly, that the paternal and the maternal share were equal188—in line with the (generally more cautious) Hippocratic view and of course rather similar to our own views on genetics, but in contrast to Aristotelian views about the relative or even absolute dominance of the paternal side that increasingly dominated ideas in other parts of Latin Europe.189 If this is the case, then the criteria for choosing a future parent were surely fundamentally different from those that made a woman desirable in other parts of Europe. Two conditions—the capacity of potential children to inherit in principle and the ideas about the maternal contribution to their character— disqualified the Nordic counterparts of the pretty but insipid puellulae of other countries from such an important task. These ideas probably account for why the image of the desirable woman in Northern texts deviates so strangely from the ancient, medieval Western European, and modern norms, why women’s beauty and appearance were treated so summarily—the sober adjective frið (sýnum) “beautiful (-looking)” suffices for women,190 while male beauty is often dwelt on and detailed in much the way that feminist scholarship has theorized as typical of the ‘male gaze’ towards women—and why, in particular, ­female nudity and exposure seemingly did not exert any erotically stimulating effect.191

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healthy harmlessness and obliterate the powerful and frightening side of such a character. See the discussion and evidence in Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005), 41–45. Cf. Mundal, “Kvinnebiletet” (1982); Mundal, “Forholdet” (1988). There is only isolated and relatively late (for example, in the late 13th-century Njáls saga, which is unusual in many respects) evidence for the view that socialization, for instance being raised by unworthy foster parents, may have influenced character in later life. Cf. Claude Thomasset, “Von der Natur der Frau,” in Klapisch-Zuber, Geschichte der Frauen, vol. 2 (1993), 55–83; G[undolf] Keil, “Zeugung: ii. Medizinisch,” LdM, vol. 9, col. 592ff., with further literature. The ‘vessel’ conception was supported by Wisdom 7:1f.: “in the womb of a mother I was molded into flesh, within the period of ten months, compacted with blood, from the seed of a man and the pleasure of marriage” (“ex semine hominis et delectamento somni conveniente”). In view of Gn 29:17: “Rahel decora facie et venusto aspectu” (the last two words correspond precisely with the typical saga expression frið sýnum) this could be understood as the necessary minimum signal for successful insemination. Practically the only case of male scopophilia in the sagas is about the love poet Kormák spotting the daughter of the house, who is standing behind a door and watching the feast Kormák is attending. He can only see her forehead and ankles, which inspires him to some stirring verses about Steinvǫr mjóbeina (“slim-ankles”). Since Kormáks saga involves an instance of the so-called skald sagas, which deal with the lives of poets, we do not even have to think of a conscious travesty based on contemporary elements of Western

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This is not to say that the sight of a woman could not inflame male lust without calculation and selection for the purpose of achieving an ideal cross. It is merely to say that, in European terms, the erotic stimuli are strikingly eccentric. That a saga woman such as Salbjörg Káradóttir, daughter of a berserker and herself a “great leader” (skǫrungr mikill), who appears at the beginning of Egils saga, should self-evidently be an attractive sexual partner does not seem immediately comprehensible to us. And yet her son Grím—considered a werewolf—and even her grandson, Egil, excelled in almost superhuman ways, far exceeding the average in both good and evil; that Egil could write poetry at the age of three and perform his first murder aged seven is hyperbole, but it is not absurd within the framework of an anthropology which assumes that the essence of a person matures and, assuming he survives, decays, but does not change.192 Egil’s daughter Þórgerð, the great-great-granddaughter of the berserker and, like her great-grandmother Salbjörg, labelled skǫrungr mikill,193 will marry Óláf ‘Peacock,’ the son of Hǫskuld and the slave he bought while travelling, the Irish princess Melkorka; their son Kjartan is the saga man of maximum honour, ultimately too good for this world. His perfection is the calculable sum of his eighth, sixteenth, and thirty-second parts—not for nothing is the Norse word for genealogy, mannfrœði “learning about men,” really “anthropology.” Time and again, similar considerations determine rulers’ choice of partner in the kings’ sagas, and it is likely that the social practices of the countries in which these stories were produced and consumed were shaped by similar ideas. The ideal, so to speak, was for a great man or woman to have mixed-sex but same-gender parents. In this light, we can make sense of the sagas’ baffling inconsistency in their handling of the trials to establish the paternity of newly arrived pretenders. When, in 1142, Eystein Haraldsson was acknowledged as the son of a king

European courtoisie—in this case, Aucassin et Nicolete—to minimize the representativeness of this eroticism. The only naked woman in the entirety of saga literature is a dead body ready to be prepared for the funeral, which spreads fear and terror as a revenant (Eyrbyggja saga c. 50). Jochens, “Male Gaze” (1991); on the theory see Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989). 192 Cf. Durrenberger, “Icelandic Family Sagas” (1991), 15: “It is significant to the unfolding of the structure of a saga that we know precisely who is in it and what their characteristics are. The openings and other formulaic phrases provide this information … What happens to a person or what he or she does is immanent in the person, an aspect of the person.” 193 Laxdœla saga c. 24; in Magnusson and Pálsson’s translation (1969), 100: “an exceptional woman”; in Beck’s (1997), 63: “daß sie außerordentlich tatkräftig war” (she was exceedingly energetic).

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without any further evidence and admitted to the ruling collective of three half-brothers, he had proved through his bold and successful landing and ­subsequent extortion of the opposition that he was equal to the agon. Although he had brought along his Gaelic mother, this no longer mattered. It was a different matter for Hákon Hákonarson in 1217. At that point, the kingship was not only contested between two parties, but even within his own party there were strong tendencies to make another pretender king. Hákon’s mother’s trial by iron to establish his true paternity—an ordeal that Hákon offered at a critical moment in the negotiations—came a little late in his career. But what if the ordeal did not concern the father, but the mother? At a time, the Birkibeinar party had to select one of several equally feasible kings. How could it be proved that Hákon was very well qualified? Inga (and most probably her important relatives as well) was ready to play her part; the same could be said about her as what Njáls saga says about the no less formidable female figure Hildigunn: “She was a very hard and implacable woman and of uttermost perfection when it mattered.”194 She underwent and passed the kettle ordeal, thus proving her son’s capacity to rule. Women who wanted or had to distinguish themselves had as much of a share in the relentless agon as men. And with women, too, the competition would be distorted by the introduction of unequal starting conditions, such as the concept skilgetinn/‘legitimate,’ the idea of defectus natalis. Such concepts 194 Brennu-Njáls saga c. 95: “Hon var allra kvenna grimmust ok skaphǫrðust ok drengr mikill, þar sem vel skyldi vera.” Translations into modern languages fall short, so commentary is required. The original has a superlative elative (“the …st of all women”) formed from two adjectives: grim “wrathful; cruel, hard, wild” and skapharð “of hard nature [skap, character].” A third attribute follows; they are all connected by the additive copula ok, although Norse has a contrastive copula en, which would have been equally possible. The third attribute is substantive and grammatically masculine: drengr mikill. This is the concept of nobility par excellence; similar to skǫrungr, it is grammatically masculine and applies most frequently, but not exclusively, to men. That is to say, it also reflects the bipolarity ‘powerful/powerless’ mentioned above. Compare Andreas Heusler’s helplessly benign translation in volume 4 of the Sammlung Thule (Jena 1914, 208): “Sie war von unversöhnlicher und trotziger Gesinnung wie wenige und ein guter Kerl, da wo Anlaß dazu war” (she was of an implacable and defiant disposition like few others, and a good fellow where there was occasion for it). Rolf Heller’s Hildigunn is less staid: “Ihr Charakter war geprägt von Härte und Trotzigkeit, sie konnte sich aber auch hochherzig zeigen, wo es darauf ankam” (Her character was marked by severity and truculence, but she could also show herself to be magnanimous where it mattered) (Isländersagas, vol. 2 [1982]). Heller cannot reproduce the additive sequence and introduces a “but … also” where the original has ok. This is no reflection on Heller but on the society he was writing for. Perhaps the modern mind cannot think of Hildigunn’s characteristics as compatible, without trivializing at least one of them beyond recognition—not for a woman, anyway.

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(and headstart) suited some, but not others; the outcome was conflicts such as those described in this chapter. Polygyny ensured comparatively great social dynamism, often at considerable social cost: an ‘open’ competitive system for the control of resources, ‘honour,’ and scope for action. Was it different among the wives and sons of Charlemagne, or around the sons of the Liudolfings?

Chapter 2

The Habitual Aspect 1 Models In Jerusalem, after he came from Hebron, David took more concubines and wives; and more sons and daughters were born to David. … Solomon clung to these in love. Among his wives were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines. … Rehoboam loved Maacah daughter of Absalom more than all his other wives and concubines; he took eighteen wives and sixty concubines, and became the father of twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters.1 David, Solomon, Rehoboam: three kings of Israel, models of earthly rule in both good and evil, may suffice as evidence that the idea that polygyny could be related to social status was not alien to the European Middle Ages. The following chapter focuses on this ‘habitual aspect’ of polygyny, the one concerned with ‘habitus.’2 It is about men’s and women’s public image for the purpose of acquiring added social value, much like decorative shields and fine garments, the number of oars on the longboat (a carefully monitored yardstick in the sagas), table manners, language mastery, or skill demonstrating a king’s luck. There can be no doubt about the biblical-Christian foundation of kingship in the sagas, despite all the scholarly efforts, now largely abandoned, to uncover the pre-Christian, ancient Germanic ‘elements’ beneath the Christian superimposition.3 If anything, the importance of the Old Testament for the kings’ sagas is still underestimated. Indeed, one could ask whether the sagas’ 1 David : 2 Sm 5:13: “accepit ergo adhuc concubinas et uxores de Hierusalem postquam venerat de Hebron / natique sunt David et alii filii et filiae.” Cf. 2 Sm 3:2ff. (his wives and children in Hebron); 1 Chr 3:1ff. (enumeration of David’s descendants). Solomon: 3 Kgs 11:2f.: “His itaque copulatus est Salomon ardentissimo amore / fueruntque ei uxores quasi reginae septingentae et concubinae trecentae.” Rehoboam: 2 Chr 11:21: “Amavit autem Roboam Maacha filiam Absalom super omnes uxores suas et concubinas / nam uxores decem et octo duxerat concubinasque sexaginta / et genuit viginti octo filios et sexaginta filias.” 2 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “Der Habitus als Vermittlung zwischen Struktur und Praxis,” in Bourdieu, Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen (1974), 125–58, here 143: “Habitus might be defined as a system of internalized patterns which allows the production of all the typical thoughts, perceptions, and attitudes of a culture—and only these.” 3 See most recently Ármann Jakobsson, Í leit að konungi (1997).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_005

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classical laconic style with its radical departure from ornamentation and pathos, which—again in contrast to the earlier view—does not represent an echo of the ‘original’ oral narrative form but rather the result of a gradual stylistic pruning in the decades after 1200,4 reflects the style of those other Books of Kings relating the history of a chosen people in a time before the new covenant. So what needs to be explained is not the fact that every polygynous king is (also) to be thought of as David and Solomon, but how the various modes of expression exploit this association. For this reason, I will not introduce any arguments from sociobiology and biological anthropology, although this has been attempted in medieval history in recent years and also explicitly called for in relation to the subject of polygyny.5 Jörg Wettlaufer formulated the thesis: “Power and polygyny and their interaction thus in effect appear to form an anthropological constant.”6 Whilst the “interaction” between power and polygyny can indeed be a field, it certainly does not represent a “constant” in itself—for this, a certain correlation would have to be asserted, such as a proportionality between power and polygyny. If we assume that Wettlaufer means proportionality in the sense that the degree of polygyny (number of relationships, etc.) grows in direct proportion to social power and that this relation is to be called an “anthropological constant,” we might, on the one hand, invoke such abstinent celebrities as Pompey the Great and Mithridates vi. of Pontus, Simeon Stylites, Innocent iii, and Louis ix of France (to name some arbitrary examples) and ask how many qualifications both the hypothesis and the concept of ‘power’ can bear. If, on the other hand, one excludes these questions and accepts that only some versions of ‘power’ are under discussion (which do not include that exercised by a fifth-century stylite), then, thus qualified, the hypothesis can be plausibly demonstrated, but loses its historical epistemological value: An anthropological constant, if it really is a constant (and not just a frequent phenomenon), may be 4 This view was first advocated by Sigurður Nordal, “Formáli,” in Borgfirðinga sögur, ed. Sigur­ ður Nordal (1938); cf. Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 73–78; Jørgensen, “Sagalitteratur” (2002). It can be undertaken as far as syntactic analysis, see Schach, “Phrase” (1989). 5 Wettlaufer, Herrenrecht (1999); Wettlaufer, “Male Power Display” (2000); qualifying, Wett­ laufer, “Von der Gruppe zum Individuum” (2002), 25–51. Cf. Devereux, Ethnopsychoanalyse (1978); Betzig, “Despotism” (1982); Betzig, “Roman Polygyny” (1992); Betzig, “Roman Monogamy” (1992); Betzig, “Medieval Monogamy” (1995); Thornhill, “Evolutionsbiologie und historische Wissenschaften” (1992); Herlihy, “Biology and History” (1995). 6 Wettlaufer, Herrenrecht (1999), 324 and 335: “an anthropological constant, namely the relationship between power and polygyny […], which can be revealed not only with the aid of comparative cultural studies, but also on the basis of people’s physiological adaptations.”

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­acknowledged for the sake of epistemology, but, being an invariant, has nothing more to offer in terms of historical analysis. In this sense, “a cultural studies which takes into account the biological foundations of human behaviour,” as Wettlaufer calls for,7 sounds good but is self-contradictory. If the kind of power exercised by a great Icelandic landowner, a Norwegian bandit chief, a Frankish king, and an ancient Israelite ‘judge’ is linked by an “anthropological constant” to polygamous practices, then that is a case of Occam’s Razor: A constant, which must be present in all elements of the discussion in order to be a constant, can be disregarded. Historical analysis will rather focus on what according to Marc Bloch constitutes its main contribution: the “perception of differences,” the study of the “‘originality’ of different societies.”8 In this sense, the interesting thing is not to establish that a potentate in the Norse Middle Ages was also an alpha male and a King Solomon, but rather in what specific manner he wanted and had to be such. ‘Status’ is a word that says much and explains nothing. The precise status-enhancing effect of having many women can vary greatly. Quite apart from the fact that perhaps the most important issue is who the women are (on this, see Chapters 3–5), a potentate’s polygynous behaviour in itself is not always and equally relevant to status. Even more than in the ‘generative aspect,’ a ‘thick’ analysis is necessary to get beyond the catchword. Instead of a string of cases, the following chapter therefore considers the relations of a single man, the Icelandic chieftain Jón Loptsson (1124–97). 2

Polygyny and Historiography: the Oddaverjar

The farmstead of Oddi is situated in southern Iceland, the largest contiguous agricultural area of the island,9 near the coast, about forty kilometres as the crow flies south of the bishop’s seat Skálholt. The Oddaverjar (“men of Oddi”) were among the winners in the gradual concentration of power through alliances and accumulation that characterized Iceland from the eleventh century on. In the course of the twelfth century they acquired almost complete control of the Rangá thing district, the southeastern part of southern Iceland, making

7 Wettlaufer, Herrenrecht (1999), 336. 8 Bloch, “Histoire comparée” (1928/1963), 27. 9 On the ecological conditions in the early and high Middle Ages, see Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), 25–62.

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themselves unassailable through alliances with other powerful groups.10 In the course of this transition “from chieftaincies to principalities (frá goðorðum til ríkja),” as Jón Viðar Sigurðsson has characterized the ‘long’ twelfth century,11 the Oddaverjar secured their ríki—now defined territorially, with new forms of obligation for its inhabitants—as one of six such spheres of power on Iceland. However, in the last phase of Icelandic acephaly after around 1200 they lost their position among the leading actors whose conflicts led to Iceland’s subordination to the Norwegian Crown in 1262/64.12 Possession of the Oddi farm was a cornerstone of the power of the family association from which it took its name. Oddi was one of the leading farms in terms of agricultural value.13 It was situated close to the site of the quarter spring assemblies14 and controlled the route from western Iceland and the central meeting place Þingvellir through southern Iceland along the south coast to the east, to which there was no alternative due to the glaciated ­mountain

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There is greater uncertainty about Iceland’s early political structure today than in the past, since the information provided by the late sources on the political constitution of the island during the first two to three centuries can no longer be accepted so unreservedly. This applies above all to the widely admired acephalous division of the island into ‘quarters,’ each with a precisely determined number of regional assemblies (várþing) and chieftaincies (goðorð), preeminent positions equipped with legal competences and a pagancultic basis, which could be bought and sold. While the juridical precision of the system now appears more as an ex-post construct, its functional core elements—the transferability of goðorð and their non-territorial character as well as the theoretical possibility of the clientele of one goði, the thingmen, offering their support to another goði—are plausible. Conversely, the general outlines of Iceland’s political history are largely established from the introduction of church organization in the late eleventh century onwards, and documented in detail from the late eleventh century. Cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999). Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Frá goðorðum til ríkja (1989). On the political history generally, see Líndal, ed., Saga Íslands, vols. 1–4 (1974–89); on the Oddaverjar, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Frá goðorðum til ríkja (1989), 56; Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 13ff. and passim; Helgi Þorláksson, Gamlar götur (1989), 18f. Only a handful of other farms besides Oddi, including the see of Skálholt and the famous Reykholt in the Westland, Snorri Sturluson’s favoured residence, attained a value of 120c (hundrað vaðmála, a long hundred [120] cubits of loden cloth, the most important Icelandic product, which was used as a basis for general calculations of value). Cf. the numbers for various farms and their interpretation as the power base of the competing families in Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 111ff., based on Lárusson, Icelandic Land Registers (1967). Várþing, the regional gatherings that preceded the althing at midsummer. On the significance of the location of ancestral seats near thing sites in the process of consolidation, see Jakob Benediktsson, “Landnám og upphaf allsherjarríkis,” in Sigurður Líndal, ed., Saga Íslands, vol. 1 (1974), 153–96.

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ranges and lava deserts in the interior.15 Oddi was, moreover, a stað, a farm with a church and control over the tithes due to it.16 Towards the end of the twelfth century, this last point was to become a stumbling block for a conflict in which, for once, a non-royal magnate and his polygyny are extensively described. The Oddaverjar definitely had royal pretensions. Sæmund Sigfússon ‘the Learned’ (1056–1133), who was considered by the saga writers of the thirteenth century to be the first of the Oddaverjar,17 apparently had such good relations with the Norwegian king Magnús ‘Barelegs’ (berfœtt, r. 1093–1103) that he succeeded in acquiring the daughter of a royal frilla named Þóra as a wife for his son Lopt. Among Magnús’s numerous progeny were five later kings; this daughter too is probably historical even though she is not mentioned in the kings’ sagas, not least because she bears the name of the king’s mother, Þóra Jónsdóttir. We later come across the Oddaverjar son, Lopt, in a respectable position in Norway, and according to Heimskringla, Lopt’s son was also raised there in a priest’s household with the king’s daughter Þóra.18 With this Jón Loptsson, who has been labelled “the uncrowned king of Iceland,”19 the Oddaverjar were to reach the height of their power. The pretensions of his grandfather Sæmund ‘the Learned’ may in fact have started the development of Icelandic historiography. It was not the clerical education he had received in France (one of the first Icelanders to do so)20 that 15

16

17 18 19 20

On the ‘strategic’ importance of control over the routes, see Helgi Þorláksson, Gamlar götur (1989). Journeys were undertaken through the interior, with its scree and lava plains, but they are recounted with a shuddering respect in the sagas, which on the whole are hardly lacking in daring expeditions. In practice, the church’s lord had control over three of the four portions of the tithe introduced in the 1080s—the shares for the bishop, the priest, the church building, and the poor. Cf. Gunnar Karlsson, “Völd og auður á 13. öld” (1980); Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 105ff.; Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), 326ff. See Úlfar Bragason, “Um ættartölur” (1993). MsBHG cc. 9–11. The son’s foster father, the priest Andréas, plays a leading role in the miraculous rescue of a Byzantine relic of the holy cross during a Wendish attack on the city of Konghelle on the Götaelv. Einar Olafur Sveinsson, “Nafngiftir Oddaverja” (1936), 190: “ókrýndur konungur Íslendinga”; similarly Halldór Hermansson, Sæmund Sigfússon (1932). The term Frakkland is usually translated as “France,” and in this case a West Frankish educational institution is probably meant. However, translations of Old Norse texts are often too quick to identify the country names Frakkland “Frank-land” and Saxland “Saxon-land” with the west and east Frankish kingdoms, or even France and Germany. The two Norse counterparts to Francia and Saxonia may indeed have this nuance, particularly as postOttonian East Frankish rulers are occasionally referred to as keisari í Saxland or similar, and the motivation for extending the term from the respective northernmost ethnic groups to the political formation is understandable. But since the Continental interior plays almost no role in Norse literature, the geographical distinction between Frakkland

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gained him his epithet, hinn fróði. Rather, the epithet points to a special interest in the Norwegian-Icelandic past and present, to knowledge and experience in ancestor lists and tales of colonization. Sæmund, as far as we know, was the first Icelander—indeed probably the first Northern European—to author a history. It is known only through excerpts transmitted indirectly, and it is not even certain what language it was composed in (probably Latin), yet Sæmund’s reputation as an authority among his successors, buttressed by his political prestige (he was, among other things, closely involved in the introduction of tithing), allowed him to grow into an almost supernatural figure, one who could even outwit the evil powers with his knowledge. Even the historical Sæmund must have appeared impressive enough in his own day. His marriage connections with a whole series of Norwegian kings was surely an essential component of his eminence, for to make contact with a Norwegian king and then return safe and unharmed, even honoured, is ranked as one of the great deeds in many Icelandic sagas, a deed many lesser men would shy away from. Sæmund had reason enough to exploit his success with King Magnús, and it is perhaps not exaggerating to assume that his engagement with Norwegian royal history had the primary purpose of writing himself and his descendants into this very history—to the detriment of his Icelandic competitors. This may have already have contained a reference to Harald Fairhair’s purported law of succession, ubiquitous in the surviving kings’ sagas, according to which “the descendants of the sons [should be] kings, the descendants of the daughters, jarls” (thus including his grandchildren); it has even been suggested that Sæmund was the first to construct the genealogical continuity of Harald Fairhair’s line as such.21 To play the Norwegian card was always risky in Iceland, whose foundation myth was the exodus of those freemen who did not want to submit to royal authority; but we know that as the ‘Commonwealth’ entered its final phase in the thirteenth century, several of the leading actors (including Snorri Sturluson, with fatal consequences) dared to play this and Saxland is wholly unclear. While Saxony as far as Brunswiek/Braunschweig is part of the saga world and the western coastal regions of France (Poitou, Normandy, etc.) are always Frakkland, it is never clear which term was associated with, say, the Rhineland or other central Frankish regions.—The Oddaverja annáll, a 16th-century compilation, in its entry for 1077 specifies Paris as the place of Sæmund’s studies. While the tradition behind the entry may be considerably older, it is nonetheless probably only conjecture. Cf. Diana Edwards Whaley, “Sæmundr Sigfússon inn fróði,” in EMSc, 636f., with further literature. 21 Krag, Norges historie (2000), 215. Thus Harald’s historical offspring would not have ruled for more than three generations before losing the kingship around 970. Consequently, neither Óláf Tryggvason nor Saint Olav and his half-brother Harald Hardrada, from whom all later kings were descended (or claimed to be), were in fact Harald Fairhair’s descendants.

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game. In Sæmund’s time, there was little danger that the Norwegian kings might put their claims over Iceland into practical effect, so Sæmund may have felt the benefits outweighed the risks—correctly, as subsequent events proved. Lopt, the husband of the king’s daughter, was also a prest,22 and judging by his upbringing his grandson Jón was destined for the same training. Given the importance of the church at Oddi for the material basis of Oddaverjar power, the practical benefit was obvious. Throughout the twelfth century clerical education and even entry into the lower orders was by no means tinged with that tendency towards exclusion which characterized the situation of aristocratic sons ‘destined for the church’ in Frankland. The intellectual milieu in Oddi in this period appears to have surpassed the two cathedral schools at Hólar and Skálholt as well as the six small monasteries. Besides several later bishops, one famous pupil at the school later established under Lopt’s brother Eyjólf (also a “priest”) would be Snorri Sturluson; the boy had been taken as foster son by Jón Loptsson as a result of a complicated conflict settlement, so Oddi can be assumed to be formative for the worldview of the Heimskringla author. It is certainly true that the earlier attribution to Sæmund of the two great ‘Edda’ poems— the mythological-didactic Prose Edda, which is today regarded as the work of Snorri, and the ‘Elder Edda’ or ‘Poetic Edda,’ initially known as Sæmundar Edda, with its songs of gods and heroes—is not strictly tenable. Nonetheless, it is quite possible that the amalgam of traditional historical knowledge and mythological set pieces with imported language, writing, and style that paved the way for saga and eddic literature do in fact ultimately go back to Sæmund.23 Sæmund’s grandson Jón, born during his lifetime, continued the familial pretension from the outset. His mother, the daughter of King Magnús’s frilla, was named after the king’s mother, Þóra Jónsdóttir (who had in turn been a frilla of Óláf the Quiet), so the son was named after the grandfather of the king on the mother’s side, that is, his great-great-grandfather. In his highly detailed study on the naming patterns of the Oddaverjar, Einar Ólafur Sveinsson overlooks this connection.24 Though he does note this house’s striking preference for “foreign” names compared to competing groups and mention Jón as the first such onomastic import, he does not address the ‘ancestral’ motivation for this preference, which in his day would have been understood as an attempt to graft Jón onto at least an offside branch of Harald Fairhair’s tree. The Oddaverjar did not take the final step of giving the son of the king’s daughter a royal 22 23 24

MsBHG c. 9; we should not look for too much canonical precision in the term. See Halldór Hermansson, Sæmundur Sigfússon (1932). Einar Olafur Sveinsson, “Nafngiftir Oddaverja” (1936).

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name, a number of which might have been considered: Harald (like Jón the name of a great-grandfather), Óláf (great-grandfather), or Magnús (the child’s grandfather). Later generations of the Oddaverjar were not so reticent: among the numerous children of Jón’s son Sæmund (named after his learned ancestor), there were royal names like Harald and Hálfdan (Harald Fairhair’s father), the queenly name Ragnhild (Harald Fairhair’s mother), ‘Christian’ names (Pál/Paulus, Andréas, Margrét), but also one Solveig—referring to the wife of the priest Andréas of Konghelle, the Norwegian foster mother of her grandfather Jón Loptsson. There are also references to great Europeans among Sæmund Jónsson’s sons and grandchildren: Filippus (the apostle or Philip Augustus?), the Anglo-Norman Vilhjálm (perhaps mediated by some of the bishops of Orkney who bore this name, and with whom Sæmund maintained close relations), Kristófórus and Rikiza (from the Danish royal house), and finally even a Karlamagnús († 1310). By that time, however, the former greatness of the Oddaverjar was no more. Thus for Jón Loptsson, grafted through birth and name to the Norwegian dynasty (which, perhaps, first entered into historiography for this purpose), much depended on whether there was a willingness to recognize him in Norway. It appears that the Oddaverjar encountered some difficulties in this matter. Born around 1124, educated as a boy in Konghelle by the priestly couple Andréas and Solveig, and eyewitness to the devastation of the city by the Pomeranians in 1135, he may have had occasion to make and maintain the necessary contacts, especially as his father also resided in Norway at the same time (and presumably not only on this occasion, which was noted by the kings’ sagas on account of the Wendish raid). Nevertheless, Jón was nearly forty before he finally succeeded in receiving formal recognition by a king. In the interim, eight pretenders had claimed the kingship, generally in competition with one another, so it is surprising—and perhaps throws a revealing light on the relative importance of Icelandic chiefs within the Norwegian-Atlantic orbit—that none of them wished to take up the standing offer of connecting themselves to the Oddaverjar line. The Oddaverjar ultimately found success in 1163, in the exceptional circumstances of the run-up to the coronation of Magnús Erlingsson by the Archbishop of Nidaros, assisted by the legate Stephen of Orvieto. Snorri records: But when summer came he [King Magnús] sailed north to Bjǫrgyn. There was at the time a very large number of people there. The legate Stephanus was there from the city of Rome and archbishop Eysteinn and other native bishops. There also was bishop Brand, who had now been consecrated bishop for Iceland. There also was King Magnús Barelegs’ ­grandson

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Jón Loptsson. King Magnús [Erlingsson] and other kinsmen of Jón’s had now acknowledged his kinship to them.25 There is no mention of a ceremony with a shoe made from the hide of an oxen, or anything similar, but the presence and assent of other relatives suggests that the co-optation of Jón (taka við frændsemi hans “to accept his kinship”) was a formal act. Jarl Erling, ruling the country for his seven-year-old son Magnús, found himself in a particularly difficult position. Two years earlier, he had prevailed against Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders’ (son of the singing mill maid) and had successfully secured his rule since then; the problem was that his son only stemmed from the royal lineage in the female line—and we have seen in the preceding chapter that this indeed was a problem. Additional legitimacy was thus required. As discussed above, in the summer of 1163, he concluded negotiations with Archbishop Eystein, arranging for the church’s approval and coronation of Magnús as well as the introduction of the succession criterion of legitimate birth. As Snorri makes clear with literary finesse, the construction was not only revolutionary and illegal, but also politically highly risky—after all, Erling was betting entirely on the support of an archbishopric that had only been established ten years earlier, as well as one of a number of competing popes. The king’s father thus had reason enough to secure all available support, and the Oddaverjar seized the opportunity to finally have their king’s daughter’s son accepted by the ruling king. It is of course conceivable that in doing so the new regime merely confirmed an ættleiðing long since undertaken by one or more of its predecessors. The wording, however, suggests rather a first-time admission; furthermore, with Jón Loptsson as Snorri’s foster father and one of the first sources for Heimskringla, it seems unlikely that an important event such as acceptance into the royal kindred at an earlier date would have been overlooked. Incidentally, it is notable that through the redefinition of kingship negotiated here, Jón himself comes close to being qualified as king for the first time: previously out of the question, being descended from Magnús Barelegs only in the female line, now only his mother’s illegitimate birth distinguished him from the reigning King Magnús Erlingsson. The Oddaverjar did not exploit 25

MsE c. 21: “En er sumraði, helt hann [Erling skakki] norðr til Bjǫrgynjar. Var þar þá allmikit fjǫlmenni. Þar var þá Stephánús légátús af Rúmaborg ok Eysteinn erkibyskup ok aðrir byskupar innlenzkir. Þar var ok Brandr byskup, er þá var vígðr til Íslands. Þar var ok Jón Loptsson, dóttursonr Magnúss konungs berfœtts. Þá hafði Magnús konungr ok aðrir frændr Jóns tekit við frændsemi hans.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 247.

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these legal grey areas; Jón Loptsson’s ‘royalty’ was employed solely in an Icelandic context. 3

A Song of Praise

The strophic “List of Norwegian Kings” (Nóregs konungatal), composed between 1184 and 1197 at the instigation and in praise of Jón Loptsson, conveys an impression of the atmosphere of pretension to lofty status current in­ Oddi.26 In content a work of genealogy as encountered in the Íslendingabók and later in the sagas, and in form a lengthy skaldic praise poem in the kviðuháttr metre (83 stanzas of eight verses), it proclaims Jón Loptsson, and hence any future Oddaverjars,’ royal descent. The source material was ready for exploitation at Oddi, in the genealogical work of Jón’s grandfather Sæmund the Learned.27 The influence of Jón’s great panegyric would soon extend beyond Iceland and Norway: the sagas of the Danish kings, namely Skjǫldunga saga (known to us only in a Latin paraphrase), which has occasionally also been considered a product of the Oddi school,28 and the somewhat later Knýtlinga saga along with its auxiliary texts (Jómsvíkinga saga and others) are based on the structure and information of Nóregs Konungatal; this is even true for the Latin history of Sven Aggesen.29 So the message of Nóregs konungatal, if not the actual wording, must have been known almost immediately in large parts of Northern Europe. It is worth looking more closely at the song, which would typically have been (partially?) recited in situations of heightened sociability— at things, winter festivals, and feasts. It forms part of the backdrop to Jón Loptsson’s love story. After two prefatory stanzas with a regional take on the general prescripts of poetics (“one must first row away from the whale but then charge before it is finished; now this is how I have thought to set my words of praise”), the royal line begins with Hálfdan the Black, father of Harald Fairhair, who appears here 26

27 28 29

Nóregs Konungatal is transmitted in the mid-14th-century composite manuscript Flateyjarbók, together with three other poems and 13 sagas, largely concerned with the Norwegian kings; the authoritative edition is Finnur Jónsson, Skjaldedigtning (1912–15), vol. 1 (diplomatic) and vol. 2 (normalized). Nóregs konungatal, Skj i, 575–90, stanza 40, v. 4–8: “intak svá ævi þeira sem Sæmundr sagði enn fróði” (I have reported their eras just as Sæmund the Learned said). Thus Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Sagnaritun Oddaverja (1937); cf. Bjarni Guðnason, Um Skjöldungasögu (1963), esp. 150–80. See Eric Christiansen, “The Lost Genealogies,” in Works of Sven Aggesen, ed. Eric Christiansen (1992), 26f.

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as the progenitor of the royal tree: “The ruler, who gave gifts, had many children who won honours. Therefore the kin of each ruler since is traced to Harald the fair-haired.”30 He is also provided with an almost Abrahamic reign of 73 years. Over the following sixty stanzas the succession of kings, supplemented by some prominent battles, is recounted in a manner which in all essential elements corresponds to Heimskringla and the other prose histories of the early thirteenth century. For Magnús Barelegs, Jón’s grandfather, particular emphasis is placed on the large number of his “children who won honours.”31 His daughter Þóra (Jón’s mother) is not yet named at this stage, but the praise of Magnús’s five sons who became kings—“that more outstanding brothers have hardly been born on earth”32—served to drive home the point. From this stanza, there is some veiled emphasis on decline, dishonour, and atrocities,33 suggesting that the pride of the lineage now passes to another line, the Oddaverjar. Accordingly, only a single king receives a flawless report, namely Magnús Erlingsson, the king in whose name Jarl Erling had recognized kinship with Oddaverjar in 1163. There is no hint of any problem about his claim to the throne based on the maternal line: “The people of the country gave Kristín’s son the royal title after the death of [King] Ingi.”34 King Magnús is named four times; twice with the circumlocution “son of Kristín,” stressing the legitimacy of this other royal descendant through the female line. The potential difficulty arising from the fact that King Sverrir, who was ruling at the time of Nóregs konungatal’s composition, had taken the land and life of this Magnús is avoided through unswerving adherence to the agonistic principle: Magnús ruled for twenty-three years (and was therefore good), then Sverrir came and beat him (so was therefore better).

30

31

32 33 34

Stanza 8: “átti gramr, sás gjafar veitti, barna mart, þaus biðu þroska; því kømr hvers til Haralds síðan Skjǫldungs kyn ens Skarar-fagra.” Translations of Konungatal are from Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, ed. Gade, vol. 2 (2009), with “reached maturity” changed to “won honours.” Stanza 48: “Frák berfœttr bǫrn at ætti Magnús mǫrg, þaus metorð hǫfðu; vǫru þess þengils synir fremðar fljóts fimm konungar” (“Of Magnús Barelegs, it must be reported that he had many children who won honours; of the sons of this prince who were showered in glory, five became kings”). Otherwise, all we are told about King Magnús is the length of his reign and his death on a military campaign in Ireland, with a significant reference to his son Eystein, whom he—allegedly—sired there. Stanza 50, v. 5–8: “… hafi varla fremri brœðr á fold komit.” Stanza 58, v. 1–4: “Nú es, heldr svát halla tekr, ævilok jǫfra at telja” (“Now the end of these princes must be reported, which brought great loss of honour”). Stanza 68, v. 4–8: “gaf landsfolk ept liðinn Inga konungs nafn Kristínar bur.”

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“Now it is evident that battle-generous Sverrir alone rules the entire realm which the kin of Harald Hálfdansson possessed.”35 The circle is thus completed, and in his last eleven stanzas the poem pans to the Oddaverjar. I give these stanzas in full, partly to provide an impression of the language and style of high-level oratory in the banqueting hall, but also to show the construction of the genealogical argument. I would especially like to use this occasion to draw attention to the comparative character of all epithets, of the constant appeal to concepts such as “outstanding,” “surpassing others,” “winning the comparison,” which convey a sense of the ceaseless agon in which an aristocrat such as Jón Loptsson had to triumph throughout their whole life—indeed “several times a day,” as it says in verse 81.36 73

Þó skalk enn þokkum fleira Yet I shall still tell somewhat more frá Berfœtts bǫrnum segja, about the children of [King Magnús] ǫðlings þess, es aldrigi Barelegs, of that lord, who never eld né járn óttazk hafði. feared fire nor iron.

74

Hét dǫglings dóttir Þóra ; The daughter of the ruler was called sú vas gipt gǫfgum manni, Þóra; she was married to a noble man. allra helzt, sús Jóan fœddi, The sister of princes who gave birth to vas sonsæl systir jǫfra. Jón was above all son-blessed.

75

Kom ráðvǫnd ræsis dóttir The counsel-heeding daughter of til næfrlands nykra borgar, the ruler came to the land of the gǫfuglynd góðrar tíðar roof-shingle [Iceland] of the water-­ allra helzt Íslendingum. monsters’ stronghold, noble-minded, at a good time above all for the Icelanders.

76

Þvít hugrakkr henni fylgði Because the upright only son of the einka sonr jǫfra systur, sovereigns’ sister, the proud-hearted hjarta prúðr, sás hefir allra, friend of the people who possesses ýta vinr, orðlof fira. all men’s words of praise, accompanied her.

35

Stanza. 72: “Nú ’s þat sýnt, at Sverrir ræðr ógnar ǫrr einn fyr ríki, øllu því, es átt hefir Haralds kyn Hálfdans sonar.” “...dǫgum optar fremsk”, literally “he advances himself more often than there are days.”

36

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77

Þat ’s ok víst at Jóans verða It is also certain that the metorð mest Mistar runna, honours of Jón, the faithfuleinarðlynds, þars eigusk við minded one, are the greatest of merkismenn mǫlum skipta. the shrubs of Mist [warriors], where noteworthy men have dealings with each other arbitrating cases.

78

Nú vill kapp við konungs frænda Now no outstanding man ­ afreksmaðr engi deila ;  wishes to try his courage against giptudrjúgr sem glíkligt es, the king’s kinsman. The popular verðr vinsæll vella deilir. [actually: “friend-gifted”: one who knows how to win friends] distributor of pure gold ­becomes lasting in good luck, as is likely.

79

Þótti ǫrr ok ósvikall His father seemed liberal faðir hans flestum mǫnnum ; [literally: quick, swift] and honest vissi Loptr und leið skýja to most men. Lopt had no óvin sinn engi fœddan. enemy born beneath the flame of the clouds.

80

En Sæmundr sína vissi But Sæmund, Sigfúss’s son, Sigfús sonr snilli jafnan, always showed his prowess, faðir Lopts, sás firum þótti Lopt’s father, who seemed to hǫfuðsmaðr við hluti alla. people a leader [literally: “head-man”] in all respects.

81 Þat hefr ætt Oddaverja That descendant of princes jǫfra kyn alla prýdda has graced the entire family of dóttursonr sá dǫgum optar the Oddaverjar, the ­daughter’s fremsk margnýtr Magnús son of King Magnús [= Jón], who konungs. excels, much-bountiful, more often than there are days. 82

Nefnðak áðr nær þrjátøgu Earlier I mentioned almost tígna menn, tíri gœdda, thirty­distinguished men, þrætulaust en þeir eru endowed with glory and Jóans ættar allir jǫfrar. honour [i.e. whose existence meant an increase in glory and honour], and all those princes are indisputably of Jón’s family.

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Nú biðk Krist, at konungs spjalli, Now I ask Christ that the ­ hafi þat alt, es œskir sér, confidant of the king should giptudrjúgr af goði sjǫlfum have all that which he wishes allan aldr ok unaðs njóti. for himself; may the fortunegifted enjoy the favour of God himself all his life.37

In style and diction, this song of praise is fairly typical of its kind. It is a prestige product; to possess such a drápa already represented a major part of the habitus of one of the greats. The skald Sighvat was reported to have openly declared to King Óláf Haraldsson: “mátt eiga eitt skáld” (one must have a skald!),38 playing on the fact that the ‘ethics of action’ require action to be seen and perceived, preferably over long distances and periods. “He was considered …,” “he was praised for …,” “many said that he was …” are the usual expressions through which the sagas speak of human excellence. Abelard’s famous dictum about Christ’s executioners not having sinned because they knew no better would have made even less sense in this conceptual world than elsewhere in twelfthcentury Europe. The character of a man is not only proved in his deeds, but is only in his deeds—or, more precisely, in the manner in which his deeds are rated by general judgement, for some are granted fame for a deed which would cost another all standing; it depends on the personal history and situation and illustrates the variable, daily changing ‘market value’ of the individual men and women who participate in the ceaseless agon. The communicability of acts and words thus becomes a central concern for all. How to ensure that not only direct witnesses of a great deed or a happy turn of phrase were left with an improved opinion of the performer, but that the tale spread—perhaps from Greenland to Novgorod? How to maintain control over the form of the tale, and ensure that the message fulfills its purpose? Here is one of the reasons for the eminent role of skaldic poetry, the highly formalized language, its essentially unaltered form, and undiminished ­appreciation over four centuries.39 It was literally worth its weight in gold, and to see the skald, richly rewarded for a song, as a salaried poet is to ­misunderstand

37 Skj i, 575–90, translation in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, ed. Gade, vol. 2 (2009), stanza 82 my own. 38 Skj i, 265; in OsH c. 43, stanza 34 (there in the variant “máttu eiga eitt skáld”—“you need a skald”). 39 Cf. Von See, “Skop und Skald” (1964); von See, Skaldendichtung (1980/1999); Frank, Old Norse Court Poetry (1978); Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og samfund (1977); Kuhn, Dróttkvætt (1983); Clover and Lindow, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (1985); Gade, “Dróttkvætt Poetry” (1995); Clunies Ross, Poetry and Poetics (2005).

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the value of both the song and the gold. Beyond any material value of the gold (which skalds appreciated as well as any other participant in the medieval redistribution economy), a little of the giver’s fortune (gæfa, hamingja) stuck to the gold that was passed on; the song, in turn, was able to recoup this fortune, or at least make it durable.40 This is what actually lies behind the maxim “one must have a skald”: without songs of praise, the great are as helpless as they are without gold. And just like the gold, its quantity, and the circumstances of its acquisition and its distribution (“gold-squanderer” is a common kenning for “ruler”), the songs can ­become the focus of agonistic attention. The indignation of the king who discovers that a skald from his retinue had made a song in praise of a competitor is not only rooted in the suspicion of disloyalty, an ever-present fear for the powerful within a system of open competition. It is rather as if the skald had given away his lord’s gold: broken open his reserves of fortune. The skald Sneglu-Halli, faced with this accusation in the eleventh century, had to assure King Harald Hardrada that the song praising his rival Harold Godwinson was inferior and contained two dozen formal errors.41 This did not simply mean a second-rate performance (and by implication, a second-rate honour); it means that the skald claims to have sabotaged the numinous power of the words. All these facets of the added value are somehow in Nóregs konungatal. On some level the form and style of the song increase the chances of the final prayer being realized: “May Jón Loptsson, the fortune-gifted, enjoy the favour of God himself all his life”. What is more, they were in themselves already part of its fulfillment. Message, source, and testimony were also, on a different level, self-evident. I once again refer to the famous prologue of Heimskringla, where Snorri emphasizes several times that poetry is a first-rate historical source, “if spoken properly and carefully transmitted.”42 The kings’ sagas with their hundreds of skaldic stanzas (there are 178 instances in the Heimskringla’s saga of Saint Olav alone) are the best testimony to this practice. If Jón Loptsson therefore desired a genealogical song of praise, one of several conceivable motives might be the desire for a testimonial statement. The penultimate stanza states outright: here are about thirty men who were called kings, each more glorious than the last, all indisputably from Jón’s line. The adjective used here for “indisputable,”

40 Cf. Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 204–09. 41 In Sneglu-Halla þáttr, contained in some versions of Harald Hardrada’s saga; see Von See, “Skop und Skald” (1964), 8. 42 Heimskringla, Prologue: “ef þau eru rétt kveðin ok skynsamliga upp tekin.”

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þrætulaus (literally “objection-less”)43 has a juridical resonance: in the sagas, the noun þræta is the kind of dispute that breaks out on the basis of a ­perceived violation of rights, and would be resolved either through mediation, formal litigation before the thing, or (mostly) through an escalation of acts of violence with unforeseeable consequences. The corresponding verb at þræta in this sense means on the one hand “to argue” but above all “to deny, dispute.”44 The poem, therefore, is to make all its claims ‘in-disputable’: from now on, no one will venture to deny that Jón Loptsson is actually of the same line as all the kings. One can sense (and we also know from Heimskringla) how great this doubt actually was. The poem is unusual because of the role it ascribes to a woman. Nordic songs of praise are usually only about men; women appear as mythological decoration or are collectively invoked as choruses (witnesses or victims) of the great acts depicted. But here Þóra, daughter of King Magnús and an unknown frilla, is the first individual to be named and eulogized in the concluding Icelandic part of Nóregs konungatal. The “renowned man” who marries her is named only five verses later. The names are consistently ordered in terms of the royal line: first Þóra, then her son Jón, then (going back along the male line) her husband Lopt and his father Sæmund. All the fame of the Oddaverjar rests in their being “wholly adorned by the royal line” grafted onto it; that is, in Þóra and the scion Jón growing out of her. It is certainly no coincidence that the eulogy for Þóra—“of all she was son-blessed (sonsæl), who bore Jón”—has an unmistakable resonance with Gabriel’s “Hail, Mary.” By interweaving classical praise of rulers through comparison (“his fame exceeds the fame of all other famous people,” and so on) with the motif of blessed birth into an inextricable strand, the finale of Konungatal proclaims that it is no accident that the Oddaverjar are what they are. If there is now no one among the prominent men of Iceland (who are called merkismenn “noteworthy men,” with an echo of “standard-bearer,” or afreksmenn “men who have performed outstanding feats”) who wishes to enter into competition with Jón, then this is precisely because he is konungs frændi “the king’s kinsman.” This certainly hints at the very concrete support which the Oddaverjar hope to have found in Norway—it is even hinted that Jón Loptsson is in regular contact with King Sverrir on an equal basis.45 (This was a false hope, as would show in the 43 44 45

Here in the adverbial position with the adverb suffix -t. Cf. Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. þræta: “þrætt mun vera í móti ef eigi vitu vitni áðr” (“this will probably be contested if there are no other witnesses”). One of the epithets attributed to him is konungs spjalli: “advisor, confidant of the king,” with an emphasis on eloquence; spjalli is the agent noun for the verb spjalla, a poetic word for “speak,” related to the Anglo-Saxon spell “narrative, story” (god-spell, Norse guðspjall “gospel”).

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rash Orkney policy which was going to cost the Oddaverjar the king’s favour.)46 Above all, it explains the political fortune of the family as a necessary ­consequence of genealogy: a chieftain from Harald Fairhair’s stock cannot do otherwise than tower over the best in the paritarian Icelandic polity, which was then on the brink of disintegrating into a number of regional principalities. Half a century after his death, Sturla Þórðarson—a member of a competing family group—wrote that Jón Loptsson was “the greatest chief Iceland ever had, and the one with the strongest relatives.”47 The Oddaverjar are therefore more than ‘just’ an example of the habitual meaning of polygyny. An event which was probably not unique in itself— the marriage of the son of an Icelandic magnate to the daughter of a royal ­concubine—took on fundamental importance at a centre of the emerging Nordic historical reflection: indeed, these magnates’ interest in the history is to a great extent founded in this event. 4

“Very Susceptible to Love”: Jón Loptsson’s Women

Descent from the concubine’s daughter was not the only way the Oddaverjar employed polygyny to support their chiefly habitus. Jón Loptsson had at least eight children through at least five women. There can be little doubt that he practised simultaneous polygyny. His relationship with one of the women, Ragnheið Þórhallsdóttir (more on her below), lasted from his youth into old age, and his first son Pál was born in 1155, scarcely a year after Jón’s first and only son from his relationship with a certain Halldóra Brandsdóttir (he was given the family name Sæmund, after his grandfather). This Sæmund Jónsson (1154–1222), who assumed leadership of the Oddaverjar after his father, had at least four women and eleven children, while his half-brother Orm—another of Jón’s sons with his longstanding frilla Ragnheið, who was a farm owner and goði of vital importance for the family power—three women and six children. None of the women of either of Jón’s sons was a ‘wife.’ For Jón himself, the situation is—apparently—different: one woman, the mother of the successful son Sæmund, is highlighted. “Jón had a woman who was called Halldóra and was the daughter of Brand,” reports the vita of Bishop Þorlák, which describes him in detail, “her son was Sæmund.”48 There is nothing particular about Halldóra or the vocabulary used to describe her—kona is the customary word for 46 See Helgi Þorláksson, “Snorri Sturluson og Oddaverjar” (1979), 63ff. 47 StS i, 51: “er mestr höfðingi ok vinsælastr hefir verit á Íslandi.” 48 ÞsH c. 22: “Konu átti hann sér er Halldóra hét ok var Brandsdóttir. Sonr þeirs var Sæ­ mundr.” The passage is commented upon at length below.

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“woman” in the sense of “female adult” and has in itself no special significance such as uxor—; however, many scholars have singled her out to have been Jón’s one (and only) ‘wife.’ There are two arguments in favour of that view, both of them problematic. One is the later eminence of the son, which is then e­ xplained by the fact that he was Jón’s only ‘legitimate son.’ This is a circular argument; I will return to it later. There is also a linguistic argument: the view that the phrase “to own a woman” (eiga konu) is a kind of terminus technicus in light of the vocabulary eiginkona “own woman,” hence “wife,” known from the law books. This argument presupposes that the Norse expression is always and only used as a translation of uxor in its canonical sense. Undeniably, it may be, but not necessarily so. In this case, one typical marker of ‘marriage,’ namely social rank, is notably absent: Halldóra is not a nobody (she has a father with a name), but neither is she on a different level from Jón’s other women. Jón maintained relationships with a number of other women during his ‘marriage’ with Halldóra, and although the details are sparse, all these women, including Halldóra (her father Brand’s family of origin is unknown), are from the same milieu of free farmers. Jón’s relationships were all hypogynous. We are better informed about the background of the women of the next generation. In all traceable cases, they are daughters of farmers from the Rangá thing district, the zone that the Oddaverjar had brought under their control. Auður Magnúsdóttir, the only researcher to have investigated the political significance of Icelandic concubinage,49 takes the fundamental ­difference ­between married and other women for granted (the title of her work is Frillor och fruar), and sees Halldóra as Jón’s (sole) “spouse” and Sæmund and Solveig as their only “legitimate” children. As a possible reason for Jón ‘marrying’ a woman while his sons only had frillur, she mentions the intensified reception of ecclesiastical sexual and matrimonial morality towards the end of the twelfth century: multiple relationships without marriage remained ­tolerable, but a marriage alongside other relationships, such as Jón Loptsson could still live, was no longer acceptable. (In fact, canonical injunctions were by no means intended to promote marriage at the expense of other forms of relationship, but rather the requirement of monogamy: “Either uxor or ­concubina, just

49

Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), on the Oddaverjar esp. 47–59, provides a detailed examination of the individual woman; see also the overview in Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 90–93. The most important source are the family trees (ættskrár) in Sturlunga saga, the compilation of several individual sagas about domestic Icelandic conflicts between about 1180 and 1260 (ed. Jón Jóhannesson et al. [1946]; trans. Kålund, Sturlunga saga [1904] (Danish) and now Boyer, La saga des Sturlungar [2005]; the German edition by Baetke, Geschichten vom Sturlungengeschlecht [21967] only contains excerpts). On methodology, see Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, “Kvennamál Oddaverja” (2001).

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not two—and certainly no more!” But of course Gratian was not necessarily spelled out verbatim to the believers in the faranway province of ­Nidaros, nor indeed anywhere; we will return to the subject shortly.)50 In general, Auður Magnúsdóttir observes a tendency towards isogamy in the ‘marriages’ of ­Icelandic chiefs, while stressing the alliance aspect of such relationships. The fact that frilla relations were so common and so generally accepted moreover allowed the magnates, according to Auður Magnúsdóttir, to form “vertical alliances” with the free farmers of their increasingly regionally organized spheres of influence. These relationships were also consensual and public. These observations, which have already entered the textbooks,51 are sound, and Auður Magnúsdóttir elaborates the political value of frilla relationships through numerous concrete examples. What is less clear, in my view, is that we can sharply distinguish ‘marriages’ from frilla relationships, or can take for granted that all contemporaries would have made such a distinction. The practice of hypogyny and, at most, isogyny52 may incidentally have scuppered a masterly coup by the Oddaverjar. Around 1200, Jón Loptsson’s son, Sæmund, was in intensive negotiations to ‘marry’ Langlíf, daughter of Jarl Harald Maddaðarson of Orkney, and probably still a minor at the time.53 According to Sturlunga saga, the match did not materialize because the Odda­ verjar and the jarl could not agree over where the wedding would take place— which sounds a little like a pr ‘out’ for breaking off negotiations that had stalled or were no longer of interest to at least one of the parties due to changed circumstances, although certainly the sticking point itself was also of some significance given the importance of place and respective distances in the staging of important events.

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Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 54 and 56; Decretum Gratiani, D 34.5, cited after Caselli, “Concubina pro uxore” (1964–65), 178f.: “Christiano, non dicam plurimas, sed nec duas simul habere licitum est, nisi unam tantum, aut uxorem aut certe loco uxoris, si coniux deest, concubinam.” Cf. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society (1987), 245ff.; 297ff. See Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), the chapter “The Social Effects of Concubinage,” 132–34. “Hypogyny” is a relationship in which the woman has a lower status than the man (whatever ‘status’ may be in a given situation, e.g. social status); “isogyny” means equal status. The “hypergyny” in which a man receives a woman of higher social origin from a higherranking man, incurring obligations in the process, possibly even “a debt that can never be repaid,” as the medievalist Josep Enric Ruiz Domènec (L’estructura feudal (1985), 51) expresses it, would seem to be typical of the Latin European elites in the High Middle Ages. Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 57; Helgi Þorláksson, “Snorri Sturluson og Oddaverjar” (1979), 65. The link with Orkney existed for decades; Sæmund’s half-brother Pál Jónsson, later bishop, was brought up in Jarlshof.

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At any rate, the Oddaverjar seem to have overstretched themselves on this occasion. The family tradition reflected in Orkneyinga saga, set down in ­writing at about that time,54 had it that the jarls of Orkney went back via TurfEinar (discussed in the preceding chapter) to Rǫgnvald, jarl of Møre, Harald Fairhair’s most faithful friend. Now “Harald Fairhair’s succession law” said that his sons begat candidates for the throne, his daughters produced lines of jarls. The ­Oddaverjar, who saw themselves as descendants of Harald Fairhair in the feminine line through the frilla’s daughter Þóra, therefore had reason to consider themselves jarlsworthy, and an alliance with the Orkney jarls may have been regarded as isogynous (that is, contracted between a man and a woman of equal rank). This need not have been the view taken in Orkney—there is, after all, the possibility that “Harald Fairhair’s succession law” is a historiographical invention by the Oddi milieu. Negotiations conducted on these premises were likely to run dry at some point. Considered in this light, the consequence of successfully grafting the Oddaverjar onto the royal line was that there was no alternative to polygyny with women from their own sphere of power. The habitual meaning of the frillur for the Oddaverjar was, therefore—besides the purely ‘Solomonic’ variety—that under the prevailing circumstances the desire to win in the internal Icelandic agon was best announced by the demonstrative renunciation of an isogynous alliance: the marriage connection with Orkney would have entailed Sæmund relinquishing his claim to the top position. For the Oddaverjar, this was too great a cost for the Orkney alliance, even though on a ‘pragmatic’ level this might have provided them the necessary edge to assert themselves in the internal Icelandic competition. This interpretation runs counter to several opinions of twentieth-century research. In the 1930s, the influential Icelandic historian Einar Ólafur Sveinsson named the Oddaverjar as a particularly vivid example of how concubinage and its consequences could “pull down” certain chiefly lineages.55 Mingling with women of unknown (read: lower) origin “drained the power out of the line,” whereupon the next two generations also lost the primacy of the family in Iceland.56 Halldór Hermansson saw a marked contrast between Jón 54 55 56

It is even possible to locate this textualization in Oddi; cf. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Sagnaritun Oddaverja (1937); Simek and Pálsson, Lexikon der altnordischen Literatur (1987), s.v. Oddi. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Sturlungaöld (1940), 68: “Ekki er ólíklegt að frillulífi með þeim afleiðingum, sem það gat haft hafi orðið til að draga sumar ættkvíslir niður (t. d. Oddaverja).” Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Sagnaritun Oddaverja (1937), 10: “Sæmundur … átti börn með ýmsum konum og flestum ókunnrar ættar, og er ekki annað líklegra en sú blöndun hafi dregið afl úr ættstofni þeirra.”

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L­ optsson’s excellence as a politician and his “flaws” as a private man, while the “­private life” of his son Sæmund revealed “the same indecisiveness” as his politics.57 In the mid-sixties, Egill Jónasson Stardal, in his monograph on Jón Loptsson and his descendants, still referred to Sæmund Jónsson’s “frillur’s sons of different breeding” who were no longer able, by their own strength, to fly the family flag in the way their fathers had done, and particularly deplored the failure of the marriage negotiations between Sæmund and Jarl Harald Maddaðarson: “A marriage bond with a lineage as great as the jarls of Orkney would have conferred a new glory on the Oddaverjar, and perhaps even yielded Sæmund energetic descendants. His numerous illegitimate offspring, on the other hand, obviously sucked the strength and unanimity out of the family.”58 And even in 1988, in his reassessment of the Oddaverjar Jón Thor Haraldsson had occasion to devote a whole chapter to the theme of “Degeneracy, Concubinage,” in which he did reject the older position—“in my view these claims do not have the slightest foundation in the sources.”59 Yet rather than justifying this in theoretical-methodological terms, he sought to establish defensively by means of prosopographical sketches of the individual sons of frillur that despite their birth they were in no way inferior to the married Oddaverjar in skill and assertiveness. Today, it is all too easy to point out how bound to their own time these judgements were, and to mock their longevity. Maybe the view advocated in this study, according to which the Oddaverjar’s “concubinage” was, on the contrary, of fundamental importance for its prestige and the stylization of its power, is for its part conditioned by an era marked by the ‘end of marriage’ and of near-compulsory promiscuity. We may hope that it nevertheless does justice to the Middle Ages in a decisive respect: as discussed above (Chapter 1), the social origin of the woman plays a subordinate role in terms of the prospects of worthy offspring to the woman’s personal qualities, which were considered inheritable. For Sæmund Jónsson, the jarl’s daughter was by no means a greater guarantee of “energetic descendants” than a farmer’s daughter simply because 57

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Halldór Hermannsson, Sæmund Sigfússon (1932), 15; 21: “If Jón thus towered above his contemporaries as chieftain and citizen of the commonwealth, in his private life he shared the failings of his family and his times … His [Sæmund Jónsson’s] private life reflects the same irresolution.” Egill Jónasson Stardal, Jón Loftsson (1967), 83; 92: “… af frillum, sem ólu honum misjafnlega velheppnaða syni, er ekki gætu í krafti ætternis valdið ættarmerkinu með sömu reisn og feður þeirra og skorti þrótt til þess að gera það af eigin metnaði. … Mágsemdir við svo stóra ætt, sem Orkneyjajarla var, hefði varpað nýjum ljóma á Oddaverja og ef til vill fært Sæmundi tápmikla afkomendur. En hin mörgu óskilgetnu afkvæmi Sæmundar hafa að líkindum dregið úr þrótti og einingu ættarinnar.” Jón Thor Haraldsson, Ósigur Oddaverja (1988), the chapter “Úrkynjun, frillulífi,” 35–39.

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of her rank; accordingly, he was not neglecting the future of his house through his preference for the latter. Since we know nothing about almost any of the Oddaverjar women, we are not able to assess the role played by the ‘generative aspect’ in the choice of partner, beyond political and tactical considerations. And the same holds true for that theme which is today handled like a hot iron in histories of medieval couple relationships: love. 5

A Lovers’ Saga?

We only know the story of one of the Oddaverjar’s frillur, Jón Loptsson’s longtime consort Ragnheið Þórhallsdóttir (around 1130–after 1180). It is one of the best-known stories of the Icelandic Middle Ages in general. It is contained in the younger vita of the holy Bishop Þorlák Þórhallsson of Skálholt (Þorláks saga biskups hins helga B), which has a long excursus about his confrontation with Jón Loptsson, the “Story of the Oddaverjar” (Oddaverja þáttr).60 Undoubtedly, part of its appeal lies in the fact that the story speaks directly to modern sensibilities. It would be a good romance novel too: we have a woman, a man, and their young love which endures into old age (hǫfðu þau elskazt frá barnœsku “they had loved each other from childhood”) at the intersection of church reform, aristocratic ambition, male friendship and violence, self-sacrifice and perseverance, along with some dramatic and burlesque scenes. For all the wealth of information in the Norse narrative sources about polygynous relationships, both the individualization as well as the contextualization of the relationship of Jón Loptsson and Ragnheið Þórhallsdóttir in Oddaverja þáttr remain unparalleled. Bits and pieces of the lives of frillur crop up frequently in other ‘contemporary sagas,’ but only incidentally, for instance in the Íslendinga saga’s report how in May 1235, while guests at a farm, the friends Maga-Bjǫrn and Þorkel Eyvindsson, in the skáli, the hall-like longhouse, “lay together in the

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Þáttr refers to shorter saga-like narratives, recounting just one or a small number of episodes, rather than the tangled, decades-long narratives of most sagas. The edition of the bishops’ sagas by Jón Helgason, Byskupa sögur, vol. 2 (1976), has now been superseded by that of Ásdís Egilsdóttir, Biskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002). Overall, the episode comprises Chapters 21–28 of the Þorláks saga B (= Biskupa sögur vol. 2, ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir [2002], 164– 81), containing two longer subepisodes which, while not dealing with Jón and Ragnheið directly, are nonetheless part of the same narrative context. Their story spans eight and a half pages in the edition.—Among others, see Egill Jónasson Stardal, Jón Loftsson (1967), 50–59; Sigurður Sigurðarson, Þorlákur helgi (1993), 96–104; Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 48–52; it can even be found in a handbook of European history: Borgolte, Europa entdeckt seine Vielfalt (2002), 216.

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same bedstead; Bjǫrn’s frilla Jóreið Konálsdóttir lay between them.”61 The issue here is not erotic generosity among friends on the road, it is not about Jóreið at all; the scene is described only because at this moment the men’s enemies break into the house, seize them, take them outside the house, and kill them without further ado. The uncanny composure of the losers is reported with the usual laconic acknowledgments (“Þórarin killed Björn, and he held himself well and said little”),62 but how the woman experienced the event and what happened to her is not even hinted at. The episode is sadly plausible in the lived world, but no ‘story’ will come out of it. It is different with Jón and Ragnheið. Their story is embedded as an interpolation into the more recent redaction of the vita of the holy Bishop Þorlák Þórhallsson (bishop of Skálholt 1176–93, canonized by order of the Althing in 1199). Its terminus ante quem is the middle of the thirteenth century, so its value as a report of events is, at least in this respect, quite unproblematic, as some contemporary witnesses were definitely still available at the time of writing, not least Snorri Sturluson († 1241). The question of the internal source value of Oddaverja þáttr has been raised in recent times, particularly by Ármann Jakobsson and Ásdís Egilsdóttir, its most recent editors, who assume that Bishop Pál Jónsson—the son of Jón and Ragnheið and successor of the holy Þorlák to the seat of Skálholt 1195–1211— was a significant influence.63 However, for the question of the habitual aspect of polygyny this is not a limitation, and if anything a simplification, considering that, as Stefanie Würth (now Gropper) has observed, the application of the methods and insights of ‘New Historicism’ to the sagas is often so difficult because their allocation to a writer, time, or place is often not possible in principle, in light of the ‘variant’ character of these texts.64 The question of defectus natalis of an incumbent bishop of the Roman Church around 1200 would be enough of a ‘discourse’ governing one text, if, as Würth proposes, the task is not to establish “that discourses are present in the literature, but analyze how these discourses are incorporated into the literature.”65 The story is quickly told. Jón was the chief’s son, while Ragnheið, probably a few years younger,66 was the daughter of an Oddaverjar client who had fallen 61 StS i, 383: “en þeir Björn lágu í innanverðum skála báðir í einni hvílu, en Jóreiðr Konálsdóttir, frilla Bjarnar, lá í milli þeira.” 62 StS i, 384: “Þórarinn vá at Birni, ok varð hann vel við ok mælti fátt.” 63 Ármann Jakobsson and Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Er Oddaverjaþætti treystandi?” (1999); Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Formáli,” in Biskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002), esp. xxxi-lii. 64 Würth, “New Historicism” (1999), with reference to Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante (1989). 65 Würth, “New Historicism” (1999), 197; emphasis in the original. 66 According to Snorri Sturluson (Heimskringla, MsBHG c.9), Jón was born in 1124, Þorlák in 1133; Jón and Ragnheið’s first known son was born in 1155. The likely period for Ragnheið’s birth is therefore quite wide—between 1125 and 1135 would be plausible.

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on hard times, so that Ragnheið and her brother had been raised at Oddi. Jón and Ragnheið “loved each other from childhood.” After a presumably decadeslong, possibly off-on relationship, a problem arose when Ragnheið’s brother Þorlák returned from studying in Paris and Lincoln, probably brought by the Oddaverjar to the episcopal seat of southern Iceland, and in cooperation with the archbishops of Nidaros, Eystein (1161–1188) and Eirík (1189–1205), took over the campaign against the Icelandic proprietary church system, which on the archiepiscopal side was conflated with other violations of church law, including bigamy and adultery. In the course of a long, bitter controversy with the bishop, in around 1180 Jón had to agree to separate from Ragnheið. After Þorlák’s death in 1193, one of their sons took up the Skálholt bishopric and pursued the canonization of his uncle and predecessor. How does the Oddaverja þáttr tell this story? Jón Loptsson is introduced in the second chapter of the narrative. The first chapter concerns the beginning of Bishop Þorlák’s campaign against the proprietary church system in the Icelandic Eastland. A farmer named Sigurð Ormsson, who possessed a stað (a farm with a parish church), had agreed to have his new church building consecrated while Þorlák was on his visitation journey, and, backed by archiepiscopal epistles, the bishop took the opportunity to demand that the power to dispose of the church and its tithes be transferred to the see of Skálholt. The dialogue that now unfolds, much like a prologue, already contains the theme of the later major confrontation with Jón Loptsson: The bishop said that the provisions of the apostles themselves give him power over all God’s property, without exception. “The holy Christian fathers and the popes, successors of the apostles, have determined the same and established it in canon law for all Christians. Now the pope has also instructed Archbishop Eystein to introduce this in Norway, too, and great progress has already been made there. And it is neither justifiable nor tolerable that this poor country is not under the same law, as applies elsewhere.” Sigurð replied: “Norwegians or foreigners cannot take away our rights.” The bishop answered: “The exception claimed by uneducated men here, reserving the right to dispose of the property which earlier had been given to God, was unlawful from the outset and cannot stand. And if the bishops enforce this in a lawful manner, those who persist with their insubordination will hardly be among the flock who can hope for God’s aid. And all those who stubbornly keep hold of the tithes or the property of a saint will be excommunicated after a legal warning

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if they are not prepared to reach an agreement and desist from their injustice.”67 To appropriate the vocabulary of the New Historicism: what occurs here is the ‘negotiation’ between the speech of the bishop, which is obviously literally based on canonical models, and that of the farmer, which, brief as it is, bears all the hallmarks of saga speech. The language itself becomes an object of negotiation, when the bishop, as he strikes his blow, constructs a very unusual gerundive in Old Norse: þeir eru bannsetjandi as an echo of excommunicandi sunt.68 The style of the bishop’s speech is reminiscent throughout of the syntactic idiosyncrasies of the preserved Norse letters of the archbishops of Nidaros to Icelandic recipients (one of which is addressed to Bishop Þorlák and Jón Loptsson, among others);69 if such constructions are not wholly unheard of in early Norse prose, they are nonetheless very conspicuous in the mouth of a saga character. But the bishop becomes such a figure, with the words of the epistles of the chancery in Nidaros literally placed into his mouth, as he ‘speaks’ them in his dispute with the farmer. With the exception of the diction and content of the bishop’s words, the conflict is reported as the typical beginning of a longer legal dispute between saga figures. It is precisely for this reason that the logical consequence of the canonical threat (and, textually, of the hagiographical topos of the urgent 67

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ÞsH B c. 21: “Byskup sagði at skipan sjálfra postolanna gaf honum vald yfir ǫllum Guðs eignum fyrir útan alla grein. ‘Heilagir feðr kristninnar ok páfarnir, postolanna eptirkomendr, hafa þetta sama boðit ok skipat í kirkjunnar lögum um alla kristnina. Svá ok hefir nú páfinn boðit Eysteini erkibyskupi at flytja þessa sama ørendi í Nóregi, ok þat hefir þar fram gengit. Er þat ok eigi rétt eða þolanligt at þetta it fátœka land standi eigi undir einum lögum ok þar.’ Sigurðr svaraði at—‘norrœnir menn eða útlendir megu eigi játta undan oss vátum réttendum.’ Þá svaraði byskup: ‘Sá skildagi sem ófróðir men hafa hér gǫrvan at skilja sér vald yfir þeim hlutum sem þeir hafa áðr Guði gefit er af sjálfum lǫgunum ómáttuligr ok á eigi at haldask, ok þar sem þetta mál verðr lǫgliga kært af byskupum eru þeir menn eigi í þeira manna tǫlu sem hjálpar eigu ván af Guði, síðan þeir haldask í þeiri þrjózku, ok hverir sem tíundir eða heilagra manna eignir halda með þrái, þeir eru bannsetjandi eptir lǫgligar áminningar ef þeir vilja eige sættask ok af láta sínum rangendum.’” On the proprietary churches, see Magnús Stefánsson, Staðir og staðamál (2000). The adaptations of Latin models, namely the vitae/‘sagas of holy men,’ display such stylistic and grammatical autonomy, that the construction here, otherwise almost unknown in Norse prose, cannot simply be explained as the translators’ fidelity to the original; rather the stylization of the bishop’s speech (which invokes the Fathers and canonists) must be understood as a, probably conscious, imitation of “foreign” models in terms of both grammar and content. di i, no. 54; see similarly, no. 38.

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e­ xhortation of an impenitent sinner), the conversion of the farmer Sigurð, comes as a ‘non-event.’ Being the saga character that he is, he does not fall to the ground weeping in repentance, and also does not blanch when faced with the horrors of hellfire as detailed in the archbishop’s letters. No: “It was already late in the day, and the farmer saw that nothing would come of the church consecration if he did not abandon his position.”70 In other words: in the narrative logic of the saga, Sigurð submits to the bishop’s blackmail threat to simply not perform the consecration, and thus seriously damage the reputation of this “man of some importance and great worldly fame, rich and with excellent family ties,”71 in the face the local crowd that had presumably gathered for the occasion. This is not something he can afford, and so he is now ready to pay: Sigurð transfers the right of disposition over the church to the bishop (máldagi) and takes it back as “in fief” (í lén), the ceremony can proceed, the bishop departs to repeat his success in a number of further farm churches in the Eastland. But within the logic of the saga, the effect of Þorlák’s threatening posture falls flat. A ‘proper’ saga conflict starts small: with abusive or mocking words, readily clothed in somewhat convoluted subjunctive sentences, and frequently spoken by representatives of the actual protagonists, their sons at play, say, or their servants across a field boundary. The escalation towards the threat of ­submitting a matter to the thing (considered the ultima ratio and compelling the other side to commit all their forces: either one appears at the judicial gathering with dozens, perhaps hundreds of followers, or arms oneself and carries out a deadly act of violence, accepting the counterattack) can sometimes last for years. Bishop Þorlák, on the other hand, immediately deploys the apostles, the church fathers, the pope, the archbishop, and excommunication—and the war of nerves lasting just a few hours is sufficient to change Sigurð’s mind.72 The text of the bishop, transferred from the sphere of church law (as it was familiar to the Icelanders in content and form through the pastoral letters from Nidaros and Þorlák’s visitation journeys) to the sphere of the saga, appears out of place, ‘false’; it contradicts the narrative expectations created by the saga style of the Oddaverja þáttr. Even on the content level, the swift resolution of the conflict seems almost disappointing, viewed in comparison with the numerous ‘investiture struggles’ 70 71 72

ÞsH B c. 21: “Leið þá á daginn svá at bóndi sá at kirkjuvígslan myndi engi verða nema hann léti af sínu máli.” ÞsH B c. 21: “Sigurðr Ormsson, mikilsháttar maðr af veraldar metnaði, auðigr ok ættstórr.” This does not, of course, mean that a historical Sigurð Ormsson—that is, the owner of the staðir—was actually defeated so easily, or that fear of ecclesiastical chastisement was such a small factor in his deliberations. The issue here is the narrative logic of Oddaverja þáttr.

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of the European eleventh and twelfth centuries. The principles invoked here are not small-scale either: On the one hand, the bishop essentially declares that ‘Iceland cannot expect to be exempt from a rule that applies to all other Christian countries: first, Christianity is universal, and second, Iceland is poor’—on the other hand, Sigurð Ormsson insists: ‘no foreigner breaks our law.’ Note the Norwegian emphasis: canonically, the spiritual leader of the church province of Nidaros, Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson is by no means more ‘Norwegian’ than ‘Icelandic,’ but he is here placed in proximity to all the kings since Óláf Tryggvason who in saga historiography sought to subject Iceland. As a result, in his own vita Bishop Þorlák comes across as a “foreign” agent who has designs on the rights and assets73 of honourable Icelandic men and who does not even know how to escalate a conflict properly. Perhaps he had simply not yet found the right opponent. 6

Portrait of a Competitor

Nonetheless, Þorlák was successful. After the first victorious confrontation and a second similar takeover of a church, which is reported only summarily (“it happened in much the same way”),74 the bishop prevailed through his entire visitation journey in the southern Eastland, with only two exceptions, which still existed at the time the report was drawn up. Now Þorlák set off towards his episcopal see of Skálholt—and as every Icelander who had followed the story up to that point knew, on the way from Eastland along the south coast he had to travel through the Rangá thing district and pass Oddi: At that time, Jón Loptsson commanded Oddi; he was the most powerful chieftain in Iceland. He held the office of goðorð. He was well-versed in the clerical arts; these he had learned from his ancestors. He had been consecrated as a deacon, a great preacher of the Holy Church. He also attached great value to furnishing the churches of which he was the patron with the best of everything. He mastered to perfection most of those

73

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How great a share of the material basis of the chiefs’ power in Iceland was formed by the church levies remains disputed, but if nothing else their regularity made them a significant part of the chief’s income—all the more so, when all the staðir of an entire region were held by one family, as in the case of the Oddaverjar. Cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 193; summarizing the economic basis, 101–19; Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), 252–91. ÞsH B c. 21: “fór ok mjǫk á einn hátt.”

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skills [íþróttir] which were customary for men at that time. He was an ambitious man, intent on pre-eminence as few others have been, for he would not bend before anyone or relinquish anything he had taken.75 So it was an aristocrat accustomed to wielding both swords equally, “according to the custom of the land and ancient tradition,” who would next confront the bishop. Within the framework of Þorlák’s reformist campaign, Jón Loptsson, who disposed of virtually all the patronages within his sphere of power, occupied as it were the position of the greatest ‘Simoniac’ of them all. Considered in this light, it is astonishing which shade of the figure of this adversary the narrative emphasizes above all others. Jón is consecrated; he is learned; he is an outstanding preacher (“great orator of the Holy Church”)—in short, he is not only a model layman, like Adam of Bremen’s Abodrite prince Godeskalk, who turned around at church to preach fiery sermons to his countrymen,76 but he is alomost a cleric himself. He takes his duty of care for the churches he controls very seriously, meaning that he conscientiously appoints and feeds the priests and maintains the church buildings. Nothing can be said against him in terms of his person or the performance of his duties. Indeed, it is remarkable how much eulogical effort the vita expends to make the greatest worldly adversary of the holy bishop appear as ‘clerical’ as possible. Jón the churchman is a mirror image of Jón the chief. Origin, talent, and ambition are the leitmotifs of both his ecclesiastical and secular excellence. His mastery of formal clerical training corresponds to the remark that he had almost completely mastered the skills customary among the men of his time. These “skills” (íþróttir, sg. íþrótt) are something of a catalogue of the qualifications indispensable for the recognition of aristocratic eminence. In its common version, which has been transmitted with minor variations in various sorts of texts, the catalogue is composed in the form of a ‘loose stanza’ (lausa­ vísa) in the prestigious skaldic meter dróttkvætt (courtly metre, governed by very strict rules regarding staff and internal rhyme, and the number of syllables and verses). A version in Orkneyinga saga (possibly edited in Oddi) reads:

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ÞsH B c. 22: “Í þann tíma réð Jón Loptsson fyrir Odda, sá er þá var mestr hǫfðingi á Íslandi. Hann var goðorðsmaðr. Hann var inn vísasti maðr á klerkligar listir, þær sem hann hafði numit af sínum forellrum. Hann var djákn at vígslu, raddmaðr mikill í heilagri kirkju. Lagði hann ok mikinn hug á at þær kirkjur væri sem bezt setnar er hann hafði forræði yfir at ǫllum hlutum. Fullr var hann af flestum íþróttum þeim er mǫnnum váru tíðar í þann tíma. Metnaðarmaðr var hann svá mikill ok kappsamr at varla varð meiri, því at hann vildi fyrir øngum vægja eða af því láta sem hann tók upp.” Adam of Bremen iii, 20.

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Tafl emk ǫrr at efla,  I am quick at playing board games; íþróttir kannk níu,  I have nine skills; týnik trauðla rúnum,  I forget runes slowly; tíð er mér bók ok smíðir,  the book is a preoccupation with me skríða kannk á skíðum,  I am able to glide on skis; skýtk ok rœ’k, svát nýtir,  I shoot and I row so that it makes a difference; hvárt tveggja kannk hyggja, I am able to understand both: harpslǫtt ok bragþǫttu.  harp-playing and poems.77 Although the number of these ‘fine arts’ (nine, like the Muses) looks suspicious, the content, while undoubtedly belonging to a series which stretches from kalokagathós to gentiluomo and ‘gentleman,’ is quite independent. Above all, the emphasis placed on the practical/martial skills is striking: shooting and rowing are not residual practices of a ‘leisured class’ but everyday life for the Norseman í víking. While skiing plays no part on the Atlantic islands, it does in Norway, primary point of reference for the Atlantic Norse culture. The desperate winter passage of the Birkibeinar guerrillas around King Sverrir from Värmland to the Trøndelag, depicted with extraordinary intensity in his saga, is just one example of political enterprises that really did depend on the mastery of skis. Smithying also belongs to this sphere, for notwithstanding the cultural subtext here—Sigurð and Völund the fornǫld heroes, as well as verse-‘forging/ smithing,’ an activity which the Middle Ages envisioned much more materially than we do—the ability to repair a weapon or a ship can also be vitally important. Each íþrótt/“art” held great agonistic potential, as highlighted by the numerous saga narratives on the sociability of winter life in and around the halls of the great men. In board games the analogy to combat and victory is drawn explicitly (besides local games such as hnefatafl, which was presumably similar to checkers, according to archaeological findings chess was already common in the twelfth century); in the case of instrumental music and poetry, the competitive character is implicit.78 77

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Os c. 58; trans. Jesch in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, ed. Gade, vol. 2 (2009), 576–77. A literal translation which smoothes out the convoluted syntax—thus immediately doing a disservice to one of the “arts” mentioned—might read as follows: “I am strong at tafl-play; I know nine skills; I rarely forget runes; I am accustomed to books and blacksmithing; I can ski; I shoot and row, and well; I believe I understand both string music and the art of poetry [the latter in the form of a kenning: ‘the knowledge of the legendary first skald Bragi’].” Many sagas and þættir contain scenes in which the protagonists find themselves improvising skaldic verses, sometimes even competitively, before a large and/or illustrious audience. By contrast, harp playing occurs very rarely (we do not even know if Skaldic

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“Runes” and “books,” that is, traditional contemporary literacy, is another of the nine “arts.” By 1200, runes were traditional but by no means antiquarian. There are thousands of later medieval and early modern wooden runic inscriptions of widely different contents: business letters or appointments, proofs of ownership, writing exercises, songs, dawdles, charms and spells, mostly in Norse but also in Latin (with the occasional Hebrew thrown in) for many centuries after the practice of putting up rune stones had ceased.79 For a short while around 1200, runes even competed with the Latin script for use on parchment. Runes, like letters, had more numinous uses too. In the thirteenthcentury sagas, the heroes occasionally use white magic (seið) with the aid of runic incantations, and even minor slips could have fatal consequences.80 This is part of the “invention” of a separate autochthonous prehistory, and moreover always associated with saga characters from the pre-Christian era; still, it is conceivable that an aristocrat of the time would have been able to cultivate the ability to use ‘their’ old alphabet in the same way as a Claudian emperor did the Etruscan. There was great interest in runic inscriptions; in the geographical introduction to his Gesta Danorum, one of the very few things Saxo has to say about the easternmost Danish region, Blekinge, is that there was a mountain there strewn with strange characters that no one had yet succeeded in deciphering, although Valdemar i sent scribes specifically to make copies.81 It should be noted that all these abilities are acquired. Unlike the Roman bona or the Occitan bons aips cortés of Jón’s own day,82 which assume a connection between natural talent and favourable circumstances for their development, the íþróttir are exclusively cultural skills, in principle open to anyone. Yet these alone do not make a man, let alone the “most powerful chief” (mestr

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­ oetry was recited with instrumental accompaniment) and may here reflect continental p or insular Celtic influence. See, more generally, Düwel, Runenkunde (32001), 153ff.; on scripts in Norway: Hagland, “Skrift i mellomalderen” (1998); Hagland, Literacy (2005). The runes found on wood in Bergen harbour are edited in: Norges innskrifter, ed. Kjeldeskriftfondet (1980–90). For instance, in Egils saga c. 72, where the eponymous hero, who is skilled in runes, heals a girl who is bed-ridden due to a poorly-written spell, by making a flawless runic staff. Saxo praef. 2,5: “rupes mirandis literarum notis interstincta”; on the afterlife and reliving of the antiquarian interest in the Blekinge rock in the 19th century, see Kjær, “Risse und Runen” (1994). The Occitan expression is common in the troubadours, e.g. in Raimbaut de Vaqueiràs (fl. 1180–1205), quite close to Jón Loptsson in time and habitus: “Et ai de totz bos aips cor e saber, E qand ren faill, fatz o per non poder” (And for all good qualities I have the predisposition [‘heart’] and the skills [‘knowledge’], and if I err, it’s due to powerlessness) (Savis e fols, humils et orgoillos, pc 392,28, The Poems of the Troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, ed. Linskill (1964), v. 7–8). Jón Loptsson would have responded that aristocractic demeanour could by definition not be hindered by “non poder”: one who becomes úmagi (without power) is no longer an aristocrat.

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hǫfðingi), as Jón Loptsson is in this story. Above all, he needs the disposition to want to put his skills to use, and conspicuously so, whenever and wherever possible and at the slightest provocation—“many times a day,” says Nóregs Konungatal of him. There are two words in the saga to denote this disposition: “He was such a great metnaðarmaðr and so kappsamr that there could scarcely have been one greater.” The first epithet is a composite of the nouns -maðr “man” and metnað “valuation, assessment; reputation, honour; pride, ambition; magnificence, ostentation.” The second is a composite adjective for kapp “zeal, energy; vigour, belligerence, exuberance; dispute, contention.”83 We might translate the composites as “valuation-man” and “contention-man” respectively. A modern gloss such as ‘a competitive type’ seems too pale to do justice to this blending of ostentation, evaluation and honour, and contemporaneous terms such as superbia introduce a moral and negative tinge which is quite beside the point. Metnað is an abstract noun which is formed with the suffix -nað (it loosely corresponds to “-ness”) to the primary lexeme met-, to which the verb meta, “to determine (a price); to assess, gauge, evaluate, weigh up (according to the value),” related to Dutch ‘meten’/German ‘messen’ and the English noun ‘met’ “weight (for scales).”84 Etymologically, kapp corresponds to Danish and Low Saxon ‘kamp’/German ‘Kampf’ (struggle, conflict); like the Old English cempa, a kappi is a “fighter, duelist.” In Norse, kapp extended its use from the field of war, attack, or battle, and specialized in the sphere of competition: k­ appdr­ykkja is a drinking contest at a banquet, kappróð a boat race, kappmæli a verbal dispute, a quarrel; several striking scenes in the sagas describe how an unresolved question of status between two parties is negotiated after the parties cautiously approach one another and finally resolve the issue—one way or the other— through a kappsund, a swimming race between the protagonists.85 Both terms share the idea of the measurable, of matching oneself against others. “In the society of the sagas, social status is something that a person has at their disposal as a share of a common sum,” Preben Meulengracht Sørensen comments, “if one obtains more, this entails a loss for others.”86 ‘Honour’ has no given content such as integrity, fortitude, or reliability, which might be 83 Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. metnaðr; kapp. 84 Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. meta; met. 85 For example, the first encounter between the hero of Laxdœla saga (c. 40), Kjartan Óláfsson—son of Óláf Peacock and grandson of the enslaved Irish princess Melkorka— and King Óláf Tryggvason at Trondheimsfjord. 86 Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 251, commenting on a quarrel over the division of a stranded whale in Laxdœla saga (c. 29), where the formulation “eigi láta sinn

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drawn upon to contend with rivals and opponents even under adverse circumstances if necessary; it is exclusively relational. If drawn upon, it diminishes, therefore it must always increase—for example by way of having oneself and one’s kin praised in Nóregs Konungatal and to make good on every single challenge, “many times a day” if needs be.87 Here, perhaps, is the driving force of that political culture, which Sverre Bagge describes in his influential study on the kings’ sagas, and whose “Machiavellian” traits, the unconditional concentration on success by all available means, he described as unique in the high Middle Ages.88 The equanimity with which the sagas shrug off deeds that may look to us like the height of infamy, but which earn the perpetrators nothing but a points win and no further comment, often appears strange to modern readers, including (and especially) those familiar with medieval history. The nocturnal encirclement and torching of the opposing farmstead with all those sleeping inside (brenna) is a drastic but not unfair occurrence. When two men, attacked by five others, point out that the struggle is going to be uneven, the prospective winner replies that he has no intention of losing his advantage. This suggests that ‘honour’ does not actually exist in certain good deeds or the avoidance of certain evil ones, but is rather a matter of triumph or defeat—that a metnaðarmaðr mikill like Jón Loptsson, literally a “great measurement-man,” cannot do otherwise than triumph day after day. Indeed, even the quality that we would call “ambition” is itself suitable for an agon: “He was such an ambitious man, intent on selfmeasuring like few others.”

hlut” (“let go of one’s share”) does not merely refer to the whale meat that was so important for winter provisioning, but also figuratively to the concomitant loss of honour. 87 The other lexeme covering the sphere of “honour,” sœmd, has a distinctly tangible aspect and means honours, accolades, and sometimes the gifts that go with them; the related sómi primarily refers to something that brings someone ‘honour’: “þat er sómi hans” (that is honourable for him); “sómafǫr” (a journey that brings honour).—Cf. Helgi Þorláksson, ed., Sæmdarmenn (2002). 88 Bagge, Society and Politics (1991), esp. 85ff., sees the nexus between ‘honour’ and the “political game” the other way around: although ‘honour’ does dictate a certain response in particular situations, the range of possible reactions is so extensive that a tactical, resultsoriented action is both possible and, indeed, the norm. Conversely, I would assume that the exclusive commitment to the comparative, competitive ethos constrains men—and some women—to act in a tactical, results-oriented manner in order to be superior in ­every contingent conflict situation. Political success is not the goal, rather the medium of political action that is effectively ‘aimless,’ insofar as the primary motivation is to avoid losses.

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Were There Wives?

The first facet of Jón’s character sketch in Oddaverja þáttr are his women. No other sphere of action of this “greatest of all chieftains” is apparently regarded as so instructive. And if we assume, in view of Carol Clover’s thesis about the gender binomies of old Norse culture governed by ‘ability, empowerment’ (mega), that it was the ever-present possibility of falling into the “soft,” predominantly feminine category of (most) women, children, the poor, and the elderly, by showing signs of ‘impotence’ (úmagi) which gave Nordic masculitity its desperate edge, then the subsequent passage becomes a necessary conclusion to the preceding one: Jón had a woman called Halldóra, Brand’s daughter. Sæmund was their son. Jón was very susceptible to women’s love, for he had many other sons with different women: Þorstein and Halldór, Sigurð and Einar. Pál, who would later be bishop, and Orm, who later settled in Breiðabólstað, were his sons with Ragnheið Þórhallsdóttir, sister of Bishop Þorlák. She and Jón had loved each other since childhood; but she also had children with several other men. When Þorlák came to Iceland with the episcopal dignity [1177], Pál and Orm, the sons of Jón and Ragnheið, were already adults. Pál lived in Ytri-Skarð and Orm in Breiðabólstað [two strategically important farms in the Rangá thing district]. Jón long had Ragnheið with him at Oddi.89 Not quite “… maidens without number” like Solomon in Song of Songs, but an impressive record nonetheless: two women mentioned by name, and in between a series of “different” women and, it can be assumed, still others who are left unmentioned in the absence of notable male descendants. Three more of Jón’s women are known;90 they are invariably—just as the frillur of the next generations of the Oddaverjar, about whom more is known—daughters of 89

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C. 22: “Konu átti hann sér er Halldóra hét ok var Brandsdóttir. Sonr þeirs var Sæmundr. Jón var mjǫk fenginn fyrir kvenna ást, því at hann átti marga sonu aðra með ýmsum konum, Þorstein ok Halldór, Sigurð ok Einar. En Páll er síðan varð byskup ok Ormr er síðan bjó á Breiðabólstað váru synir þeira Ragnheiðar Þórhallsdóttur, systur Þorláks byskups. Hǫfðu þau Jón elskazk frá barnœsku; þó átti hon við fleirum mǫnnum bǫrn. Váru þeir þá frumvaxti Páll ok Ormr, synir þeira Jóns ok Ragnheiðar, er Þorlákr byskup kom til Íslands með byskupstign. Bjó Páll í Ytra-Skarði en Ormr á Breiðabólstað. Lǫngum helt Jón Ragnheiði heima í Odda.” They are named in Sturlunga saga; see Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 48ff.

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farmstead owners in the region, with whom the magnates in this way concluded “vertical alliances,” as observed by Auður Magnúsdóttir in her study on the political importance of non-marital relationships in Iceland. How then do these alliances differ in form or status from a ‘marriage’? Do they at all? It should not be assumed that a more “horizontal” (isogynous) relationship must be categorially different from a “vertical” (hypogynous) one. An alliance between groups of more or less equal importance was more carefully negotiated than the union of a chief with a farmer’s daughter; however, the notion that in the one case it was a legally normative transaction, accompanied by a considerable transfer of property and other gifts, along with the appropriate provisions (i.e. ‘lay marriage’), and in the other a more informal and circumstance-dependent relationship which merely concerned the man, woman, and sexual interest, is not convincing. Source terms such as lausabryllaup “loose wedding” for such a less substantial bond91 led earlier Germanic scholars to the idea of ‘Friedelehe’ as a “free” consensual relationship halfway between formal marriage (Muntehe) and concubinage: entered into by two individuals instead of two kin groups, carrying no transfer of goods, and dissolved by mutual consent.92 This tripartite model has now been abandoned for lack of evidence to support the idea of ‘Friedelehe,’ but only to be supplanted by a binary model of full marriage on one side and ‘loose’ forms of all kinds on the other.93 This model, however, presupposes that the ‘Augustinian distinction’ (“wife or concubine?”) was common to all societies and milieus. When one looks at it, this is a sweeping assumption to make. For one, it is unclear in how far (semi-)oral societies embrace categorial modes of thought at all. Besides, in societies which make no fixed record of events (such as modern registrar’s offices or their Roman or late medieval functional counterparts) it is difficult, even if there was such a thing as a ‘wedding’ as distinct from all other forms of entering into a relationship, for this event to petrify into legal status (‘marriage’) for any length of time. Living memory is not only fallible, it is also flexible and adaptable. In fact, fixed legal status may not even be in the interest of all parties involved as it is, by its very nature, inflexible and thus tends to curtail freedom of manoeuvring. Sometimes it might be expedient to be able to ‘forget’ that a man and a woman had ever been ‘married.’ The lack of a vernacular vocabulary for sexual status, as commented upon in the preliminary chapter and discussed below, is quite indicative of this. So even granted that 91 92 93

Cf. Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 168ff. The leading exponent of this view was Meyer, “Friedelehe und Mutterrecht” (1927), 198– 286; Meyer, “Ehe und Eheauffassung bei den Germanen,” vol. 1 (1940), 1–51. For Norway, a recent monograph for this view is Holtan, Ekteskap (1996).

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some man–woman relationship were probably entered into with much ado (feasting, guests, gifts) and some with nothing much, bryllaup need not be a singular, once-and-for-all event—unless, of course, monogamy is enforced, as it tended to be in some but by no means all thirteenth-century legal texts. The prevailing state of affairs seems to have been that, just as with many other attributions (fides, honor, nobilitas), male-female relationships were rather about ‘more-than’ than ‘either-or.’ Let us see how the Oddaverjar handled it. A man like Snorri Sturluson could make his political fortune with isogamy94 and he certainly valued the women who brought him lucrative farms or titles more than some of his other women. However, contrary to the common belief, the accompanying transfer of more important goods is not a criterion for distinguishing a ‘(full) marriage’/Muntehe from a frilla relationship/concubinage. Jón and Ragnheið’s son Orm, for example, had as frilla a woman named Þóra, sister of a man named Kolskegg, whose epithet “the rich” (auðgi, referring to material prosperity) already suggests that there was not much verticality about this match. In fact, Kolskegg held a goðorð which would fall into the inheritance of his sister and sole heiress, and thus to the expected Oddaverjar children from her relationship with Orm Jónsson—and this may have been attractive to the chieftain’s son and bishop’s nephew, however appealing Þóra may also have been. (Women could indeed hold a goðorð, but not exercise the associated competences in person, especially appearance before a legal assembly.) In practice this meant that even during Kolskegg’s lifetime Orm could dispose of his goðorð and possessions,95 which he had obviously secured for the Oddaverjar just as reliably through the frilla tie as would have been possible through any more formal ‘marriage.’ Kolskegg, prosperous but without heir, undoubtedly found himself under massive pressure until he was prepared to become the client of the overbearing Oddaverjar—Snorri Sturluson treated the families of his ‘wives’ with considerably more respect.96 But, again, this is a relational gradation, not a categorial distinction. 94

Originally not very wealthy, Snorri Sturluson owed his later position as Iceland’s most powerful chief to two ‘marriages’: with the first he acquired the farm Borg and the leading role in the western district Borgarfjörður, with the second Breiðabólstaður (the farm owned by Jón and Ragnheið’s son Orm in Oddaverja þáttr) and a comparable position in the old Oddaverjar sphere of influence in the south. On Snorri’s alliances and the Sturlungs, see Jóhannesson, Old Icelandic Commonwealth (1974), 226–56; on Snorri’s frillur, see Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 87ff. 95 StS i, 243; cf. Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 55. 96 If we are right to assume, on linguistic grounds, that Snorri is the author of Egils saga (especially Hallberg, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar [1962]), then we might see this as an attempt to register his marriage connection with Egil’s ancestors at Borg in a dignified manner.

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Jón Loptsson’s kona Halldóra is the first to be listed in the passage cited above, along with her son Sæmund. Nothing is known of her origin and connections besides her father’s name, Brand. There is no evidence that Jón’s ‘marriage’ was any sort of “horizontal alliance.” On the contrary, the fact that we know nothing about Halldóra’s family is more of an indication that—in the Icelanders’ eyes, who frequently enjoyed pedigrees several generations long, even for minor saga characters—there was nothing to know. 8

‘Retrospective Marriage’

There is only one thing that distinguishes Halldóra from Jón’s other women: her son Sæmund. He became head of the Oddaverjar after Jón’s death in 1197, and remained so for a quarter of a century. This is usually interpreted as follows: as Jón’s sole ‘legitimate son’ Sæmund succeeded his father in office and dignities, while the remaining sons were well looked after with estates and (in the case of Pál Jónsson) the bishopric of Skálholt. Sæmund, on the other hand, never married and consequently left behind only ‘illegitimate’ sons. No obvious successor emerged from among them, and the position of the Oddaverjar crumbled. However, this argument rests on two assumptions, both of which are questionable: namely that a categorial distinction was made between marriage and non-marriage, and that the sons from the one form were, in principle, more entitled to inherit than others. The investigation of legal and narrative sources in the preceding chapter has shown that the latter is not true; and, as stated, there is no indication of the former in the text. On the contrary: ­Sæmund’s mother had no notable family. What if we reverse the line of argument? There was no clear successor to be found among Sæmund Jónsson’s sons after his death in 1222. Sturlunga saga reports that the farmers in the Rangá thing district wanted Sæmund’s son Hálfdan as chief, “but he was not an ambitious man, and preferred to stay out of others’ affairs.”97 Such a personal or rather character-motivated renunciation was not an isolated incident, as Jón Viðar Sigurðsson has shown:98 some chose to drop out of the agon. Jón’s grandson apparently was not, or at least not felt to be, adequately endowed with the competitive ardour that had made his grandfather the “great self-measurer.” On the other hand, a generation earlier Jón’s son Sæmund was apparently thoroughly in possession of these qualities— even to a degree that could be politically counterproductive, considering the 97 StS i, 345. 98 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 99f.

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story about the marriage to the daughter of the jarl of Orkney, Harald Maddaðarson (a “horizontal alliance” in the eyes of the Oddaverjar, though not necessarily from the Orcadian perspective): Sæmund had presumed to “measure” himself as the jarl’s equal. On the other hand, there is no doubt that within Iceland Sæmund’s predominance among the Oddaverjar and his dominant position in their sphere of power (ríki) was generally accepted. I would suggest that it was only Sæmund’s ambition and success that helped his mother to eminence among Jón’s wives, ‘after the fact’ as it were, and led to Oddaverja þáttr (which, according to Finnur Jónsson, was edited around the time of Sæmund Jónsson’s death)99 singling her out before the others with both her own and her father’s names. Sæmund’s subsequent leading role was not based on a notion of ‘legitimacy’, and his mother Halldóra was no different from Jón’s other women. It is the other way round: Halldóra owes her eminent position in the saga, and possibly in real life (we do not know anything more about her), to her son’s leading role. She found herself in a similar situation to the Ottoman sultan valide, the Umayyad or Abbasid umm walad, or indeed Bathsheba, who after David’s death had to raise their son Solomon to the throne at any cost so that she could take her place next to him on the throne of the king’s mother.100 None of Sæmund’s sons ever distinguished themselves from the others in this manner, and so none of their mothers were retrospectively promoted to Sæmund’s ‘wife.’101 9

A Vocable for the Ineffable: Elja

If medieval Northern Europe practised polygyny with women of gradually (but not categorially) dissimilar status, could this be verbalized in a linguistic universe permeated by the Pauline requirement of monogamy and the Augustinian distinction of uxor/concubina? There is one term for a sexual partner which has so far defied lexical clarification: the feminine noun elja. It appears in several sagas, and it is also highlighted in the second part of Snorri Sturluson’s poetics (the so-called Snorra Edda or Prose Edda), the Skáldskaparmál (“Discussion of the Art of Poetry”). Snorri’s definition reads: 99

The debate over a possible later dating is outlined by Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Formáli,” in Bi­ skupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002), xviiif. 100 3 Kgs 2:19: “positus quoque est thronus matri regis quae sedit ad dexteram eius.” Cf. Häusl, Abischag und Batscheba (1993). 101 On this model of ‘retrospective marriage’ in more detail, see Rüdiger, “Married Couples” (2012).

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Women who share the same man are known as eljur.102 In his collection of poetic periphrases (kenningar) of mythological figures, Snorri uses the word several times in precisely this symmetrical way: Jǫrð, the earth, to whom Odin is married in the mythological poetry of the high Middle Ages (cf. Chapter 5), can be described, among others, as brúð (bride) Óðins or as elja Friggjar ok Rindar ok Gunnlaðar. Of these three mythical women, Frigg is Juno to Odin’s Jupiter, while Rind and Gunnlǫð are two giantesses with whom he had affairs. In this flock, the personified earth is just one of many. But conversely Frigg can be referred to as elja Jarðar. From a lexical point of view, the relationships of the chief god to his various bedfellows is symmetrical, although mythologically there are considerable differences between one of the Æsir, the giantesses who have fallen victim to Odin’s cunning, and the fertilized earth. In ‘Augustinian’ parlance, we would tend to say that Frigg is Odin’s ‘wife’—the law books’ term for her would be aðalkona “first” or “main woman”103—while Earth and the giantesses are his ‘concubines’/frillur. In Snorri, though, all four are each others’ eljur. In Christian religious literature elja is used in connection with polygyny among the patriarchs, but is also applied to New Testament situations; an interesting amplification of Leviticus 18:18 (the prohibition on lying with two sisters) in the Norwegian compilation Stjórn (shortly before 1300) lists, among the women included in the prohibition, the elja of the sister, not mentioned in the Vulgate.104 “Co-wife” might be a good translation of the word.105 102 Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, ed. Guðni Jónsson (1959) c. 84: “Þær konur heita eljur, er einn mann eigu.” (-ur is the ending in the nominative plural feminine for singular -a.) It belongs to the common Indo-European word that is present in, among others, Latin alia “another (woman),” altera “the second (woman),” and modern Scandinavian eller “or.” 103 A compound of aðal-, a cognate of Old English æðele, and kona “woman,” the word is used in contexts of serial or simultaneous polygyny in the early 13th-century Older Law of West Götaland (Ærfþær bolkær “Inheritance Rules” 5; 8; Äldre Västgötalagen [1965], 17), the Law of East Götaland, and the three Danish laws of Jutland, Zealand, and Scania. See Rüdiger, “Married Couples” (2012), 100f., for details and discussion. 104 Lv 18:18: “sororem uxoris tuae in pelicatum illius non accipies”; Stjórn, 320: “systur konu þinnar skaltu eigi taka eða elju hennar” (“you shall not take the sister of your wife or her elja”). The addition of elja might be construed as a contamination or mistranslation (pelicatus “concubinage” rendered as pellex “concubine”), but this would seem to be an unnecessarily complicated interpretation given the syntactic clarity of both sentences. It rather looks like an intentional amplification in order to clarify the issue. 105 See the discussion of the term and the instances of it in Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 148ff., who translates elja as “Nebenfrau,” as did Andreas Heusler in Die Saga vom weisen Njál (1914), 125. “Nebenfrau,” however, would seem to suggests that there is a “Hauptfrau,” which is not what Snorri is saying, so the English word “co-wife” as used in anthropology

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Possibly the most famous occurrence of the word is in Njáls saga, edited around 1280. In an emergency that cries out for revenge, Hróðný, mother of one of Njál’s sons (described as laungetinn “fathered in secret,” a term used in some legal texts to denote the children who qualify for the ættleiðing process), hurries to the sleeping area of Njál, the head of the house, who is sleeping there with the mistress of the house, Bergþóra. Throughout the whole extensive saga, Bergþóra is the ideal-typical ‘wife and companion,’ very much a ‘main woman’; she has brought her own property to the marriage, and she remains with Njál until the bitter end in the flames of their farm. And yet Hróðný, trying to incite Njál to avenge their son, cries: “Get up, out of bed, from my elja!”106 The essential meaning of the passage is perfectly clear: Hróðný thinks that Njál’s commitment to her in this emergency situation takes precedence over the claims of the co-wife. The term is only problematic once we see Bergþóra as fundamentally different from Hróðný, as ‘the wife’ versus ‘the c­ oncubine.’ Then the word elja, used by the concubine for the wife, would be a faux pas, an insult. This is hardly likely: even given the drama of the situation—a woman who must prompt a man to act is ultima ratio—Hróðný, who stands to gain or lose a lot, would have been ill-advised to use just this moment for an u ­ ncalled-for slur of Bergþóra.107 We may therefore understand elja as a descriptive term, reflecting a situation not unlike Jón Loptsson’s (or Odin’s, in Snorri): even where there are considerable differences between a man’s women—as with Njál—they are nonetheless all of them each others’ eljur. No opprobrium is attached to any of them, only different fortunes. It is indicative for this lack of opprobrium that is the best solution, as long as “wife” is not taken to denote “married woman,” which again would not square with Snorri. Ebel also calls attention to the related Old High German ella, Middle Low Saxon elle “Nebenbuhlerin, Konkubine.” 106 Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson (1954), c. 153: “Statt þú upp ór binginum frá elju minni …” 107 It would hardly be expedient for Hróðný to sabotage her cry for help by insulting Njál’s ‘wife.’ Nevertheless, the important older dictionaries for Old Norse prefer accepting such jarring inconsistencies to abandoning the monogamous ideal. The definition by Fritzner, s.v. elja, “Kvinde der gaar en Ægtehustru for nær ved at leve i Kjærlighedsforstaaelse med hendes Ægtemand eller være hans frille” is nonsensical in this context, since, as shown, elja is not in every case only used for “women who offend a wife by having a love affair with her husband or being his frilla” but also for the ‘wife’ (who can hardly offend the frillur). Cleasby and Vigfússon, Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874), s.v. elja, adhere to the ‘canonical’ binomial and are thus forced to abandon the best textual witness: “it is wrongly used” in Njáls saga. The new Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog (1995–2004), s.v. elja, by contrast, provides the definition: “rivalinde, kvinde der deles om mand med anden kvinde, medhustru,” i.e. in the sense proposed in the present discussion. The emphasis on the “rival” is reinforced by the approximation to the aemula of the Vulgate (1 Sm 1:6 and elsewhere).

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the son of Jón Loptsson and Ragnheið eventually becomes a bishop (Pál Jónsson, 1195–1211) and that his saga placidly recounts the story of his parents without a thought about defectus natalis.108 Jón knew as well as the next man, or better, that there were different ways of living with a woman, involving degrees of status, formality, ceremony, and possibly everyday markers like living quarters or supply with finery. Only he did not move between the notional opposites of ‘marriage’ and ‘non-marriage’ but between ‘hidden’ and ‘not hidden.’109 Ragnheið lived openly with Jón at his farm in Oddi, and his kona Halldóra did likewise—alongside all the other eljur. 10

The Brother-in-Laws’ Confrontation

The first encounter between the chieftain and his bishop took place at the frontier. A storm had devastated two churches in Höfðabrekka, the ­easternmost outpost of the Oddaverjar sphere of influence just before the impassable Mýrdalssand lava sand desert.110 Jón had a new church built and wanted it consecrated by the passing Bishop Þorlák, a situation similar to the bishop’s earlier conflict with the farmer Sigurð. It is quite possible that Jón still saw in Þorlák a kind of client: a man whose parents had found shelter in Oddi when they had fallen on hard times, who had grown up there with his sisters, who had come into contact with secular and religious learning, and who had proved so promising that the Oddaverjar had paid for his studies in Paris and Lincoln. They had also succeeded in securing him the succession of the highly respected Bishop Klœng (1152–75) at Skálholt, achieving a double coup: not only would their pupil succeed the bishop who had just erected the great new wooden cathedral—an accomplishment that mutatis mutandis was not inferior to other great cathedral-building projects of the twelfth century, considering the necessary resources and expertise involved—but it would be the first time that the bishop in Skálholt was not a member of the rival group, the Haukdœlir. Founded in 1056, Iceland’s first bishopric was essentially the creation of the first bishop, Ísleif Gizurarson from the Haukdœlir lineage, who was educated 108 Páls saga byskups, in Byskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002), 295–332, where in c. 1 his parents are named and characterized. 109 The term laungetinn does not simply translate illegitimus (“un-legally-come-about”) but literally means “conceived in secret.” 110 The site lies at the eastern entrance of the narrow strip of coastland between the sea and the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, so in terms of Icelandic topography it bears a certain resemblance to a mountain pass or an isthmus. On the boundaries of the Oddaverjar ríki, see Helgi Þorláksson, Gamlar götur (1989), 129–38; Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 65f.

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in Saxony and had been consecrated by Archbishop Adalbert, thereby establishing Hamburg’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Iceland. He was succeeded by four bishops from the same house (to which the bishopric was also to revert after Þorlák and his nephew Pál Jónsson). Þorlák must have been an impressive figure for the Oddaverjar to gamble on him, rather than one of their own sons. It helped, of course, that together with Bishop Klœng he had established Iceland’s first Augustinian monastery at Þykkvibœr in the Oddaverjar sphere of influence and become its abbot. His designation by his friend and predecessor in the episcopal office must by then have been a foregone conclusion. But these points merely show how far in advance his succession had been prepared. He also attained consecration from the archbishop in Nidaros, apparently without problems. Jón was therefore hardly up to the surprise of encountering not the successful Oddi pupil Þorlák, brother of his long-standing frilla, but a young Thomas Becket. We cannot know how consciously the bishop, whose stay in Lincoln approximately coincided with Becket’s rise to chancellor, whose elevation to archbishop of Canterbury he could observe from Iceland, and whose martyrdom he learned about when he was abbot and bishop designatus, made that role his own. The similarity in origin and career may have impressed Þorlák, and there is every reason to believe that the new bishop’s act was really determined by the ideas of libertas ecclesiae absorbed in Western Europe, which the dedicated Icelander embraced at the same time as his own metropolitan, Eystein in Nidaros. Eystein’s support, if not commissioning, may have greatly strengthened the self-confidence of Þorlák’s appearance which had given him the first surprise successes in matters of ecclesiastical authority. Did Jón Loptsson—who undoubtedly saw himself as the patron of not only the churches, but also the bishop himself—expect Þorlák to pursue the same course of action against him? In any case, the collision took place abruptly, in public: In the morning the bishop was preparing for the consecration of the church; Jón and the men who were in his council went to the bishop, and there was talk of who should hold the patronage of the church. The lord bishop asked in accordance with the law, whether Jón had heard the archbishop’s message about church property. Jón answered: “I can hear the archbishop’s message, but I do not ­intend to heed it. I do not believe that his intentions are better or more prudent than those of my ancestors, Sæmund the Learned and his sons. Moreover, I do not wish to condemn the bishops we had earlier in this country, who were content with the custom of the land that laymen c­ ontrolled the

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churches which their ancestors had given to God, reserving their regulation to themselves and their descendants.”111 The bishop replied “the same as before and more besides”:112 Canon law overrides national custom. His predecessors were excused because they had not been commanded by their superiors to enforce the law; but excommunication now awaits any who still claim the tithe despite the injunction. Jón replied: “You are free to excommunicate who you want, but I would never voluntarily put what is mine in your power, my church or anything else—the things which are mine to dispose of.”113 A public act of communication appears to have completely failed. A church consecration festival with a great feast (veglig veizla) had been arranged, so everyone knew that the words spoken on this occasion would matter. Moreover, Jón had arrived at the remote farm with an unusually extensive entourage (ok margir mikilsháttar menn “with many great men of great importance”) to await the bishop and his “travelling companions” (fǫruneytir). Clearly he was going to press matters, turning up as he was only on the morning, when the bishop was, so to speak, already putting on his chasuble. The encounter was swift and massive. As with Sigurð Ormsson before, the bishop ignored the customary course of controlled escalation and threatened not only the failure of the planned church consecration, but also excommunication (bannsetning) in the first round. The parley thus reached an impasse. An agreement was reached on another issue, addressing Jón’s desire to reduce the number of priests’ and deacons’ livings in an area partially devastated by lava outflow. “But in the more important matter, each held to their own view, and it was already late in the day.” Bishop Þorlák acted as he had often done so before, exploiting his secular opponents’ 111 C. 22: “Um morgininn bjósk byskup til kirkjuvígslu, en Jón ok þeir menn sem í ráði váru með honum gengu til byskups, ok var talat um hverr kirkjumáldagi skyldi vera. Herra byskup spurði svá sem fylgjandi réttendum hvárt Jón hefði heyrðan erkibyskups boðskap um kirknaeignir. Jón svaraði: ‘Heyra má ek erkibyskups boðskap, en ráðinn em ek í at halda hann at øngu, ok eigi hygg ek at hann vili betr né viti en mínir forellrar, Sæmundr inn fróði ok synir hans. Mun ek ok eigi fyrirdœma framferðir byskupa várra hér í landi er sœmðu þann landssið at leikmenn réðu þeim kirkjum er þeira forellrar gáfu Guði ok skilðu sér vald yfir ok sínu afkvæmi.’” 112 C. 22: “Byskup svaraði slíkum skynsemdum sem fyrr váru lesnar ok mǫrgum ǫðrum …” 113 C. 22: “Jón svaraði: ‘Þér megið kalla þann bannsettan sem þér vilið, en aldregi mun ek í yðvart vald já minni eign undan mér, minni kirkju eða meiri, þeiri sem ek hefi vald yfir.’”

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prestige by simply neglecting to act until they relented. This time things went differently: “Those who appeared as friends of both asked the bishop to abandon his position, and all those present also expressed their support for the old abuse.”114 At that moment, Jón’s posse seemed to pay off. The bishop found himself isolated and unable to withstand the pressure—a pressure that seems so unanimous that we must wonder whether the whole process up to that point had perhaps been orchestrated by Jón. If the chieftain had staged the encounter with the aim of halting the bishop’s libertas campaign once and for all before it reached his own ríki, we must acknowledge his excellent stage management. With a small but impressive entourage to be presented to the bishop only at the very last moment, then to raise the issue which he knows that Þorlák cannot but react sem fylgjandi réttendum, in accordance with (Church) law—and not, say, by delaying or manoeuvring—and then risk the confrontation with the Icelandic Thomas Becket, knowing full well that in the role of King Henry he need not fear either a defeat or a martyrdom because of the isolation of his opponent—such a course of events at Höfðabrekka should have brought the desired triumph. In this matter, at least, Jón’s plan was a success: “On this day, the bishop consecrated the church and sang Mass, although by no means willingly.”115 Jón’s victory had far-reaching consequences, as, predictably, after this no other layman wanted to relinquish his patronage over a church to the bishop, “and thus this matter was settled for the rest of Bishop Þorlák’s days”116 and only revived a century later. Þorlák, however, hit the victor with a parting shot that may ultimately have hit him harder than yielding in the issue of patronage would have done. When Bishop Þorlák saw that he would not be able to assert his position, these words spurted out (spruttu) from his mouth: “While it may be unbearable, if one considers the issue justly and ­equitably, that you invoke the custom of the land to take the possessions of the church from the bishops and for yourself. Still more unbearable is that the bishops even fail to take away your whore women, whom you 114 C. 22: “En um ina fyrri grein helt hvárr á sínu máli, ok leið mjǫk á daginn. En þeir sem létusk vera beggja vinir báðu byskup leggja af sínu máli, ok ǫll alþýða dró þat sama sakir forns óvana.” 115 C. 22: “Þenna dag vígði byskup kirkju ok sǫng messu, þótt þar yrði eigi hans vili framgengr.” 116 C. 22: “… ok því fell niðr sú kæra um hans daga.”

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retain against all customs of the land. It may be that you get away with the greater issue when you succeed in the smaller, even though you ­desire evil!”117 Why this sudden change of subject, why does the bishop suddenly begin talking, or spurting, about polygyny? To the medievalist reader, accustomed to the libelli de lite, the connection between simony and Nicolaism may be immediately apparent, although the latter is not actually mentioned here—Jón Loptsson was not a priest, and anyway priests continued to marry in Iceland far into the thirteenth century, without any signs of a campaign against it (the abstinent Þorlák was the sole exception among the bishops of Skálholt in this respect). However, Þorlák had the intellectual-rhetorical connection between church freedom and prostitution at his disposal in the “Archbishop’s message,” an epistle from Archbishop Eystein of 1173 (so before Þorlák’s episcopate) to the two Icelandic bishoprics, which Jón proclaimed with a flourish that he had heard, but would ignore. With a generous use of hellfire imagery, this pastoral letter castigates the sins prevalent on the island: besides murder and manslaughter, “it has reached my ears that there are men here … who have abandoned their women (konur) and taken whore women (hórkonur) instead. Some have both with them in the same house at once, and live such a loose life that all Christians fall into sin.”118 Seven years later—roughly at the time of Bishop Þorlák’s confrontation with Jón Loptsson—the archbishop sent a similar, even more sharply worded letter to Iceland. What made it particularly aggressive was the fact that unlike the letter of 1173, which had been directed at the two bishops and “all other excellent men and the whole people,”119 it was solely aimed at Bishop Þorlák and five named chiefs, among them Jón Loptsson and Orm, his son with Ragnheið.120 The targets of the archiepiscopal attacks, explicitly named s­ everal 117 C. 22: “Ok er Þorlákr byskup sá þat at hann myndi eigi at sinni fram koma sínu máli þá spruttu þessi orð af munni honum: ‘Þó at óþolanligt sé, ef fyrir rétta dómendr kemr, at þú dragir kirkjunnar forráð undir þik eptir landssið ok undan byskupum, þá er miklu óþolanligra þat er byskupar fá eigi frá þér tekit hórkonur þínar, þær sem þú heldr móti ǫllum landssið. Kann vera at þú ráðir inu meira ef þú ráðir inu minna, þó at þú vilir verr.’” 118 di i, no. 38 (around 1173): “Mier er þat til eyrna komit. at hier sitia sumer þeir menn er … hafa konur sinar latit. ok horkonur under þær tekit. sumer hafa hvarartveggiu. jnan hus [med] sier og lifa so ogæzsku life. er alla kristna menn dregur til synda.” 119 di i, no. 38: “Ey[steinn] erkibiskup. sender kvediu. biskupum aa Jslande og so ollum odrum agætis monnum. og allri alþydu.” 120 di i, no. 54 (um 1180). Jón and Orm are first and third in the list of worldly addressees. A Sturlung and two Haukdœlir are named alongside them, also top-tier aristocrats.

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times in the letter, are Jón Loptsson and his counterpart in the neighbouring Árnes thing district, Gizur Hallsson.121 Seven copies of the letter survive in Iceland alone,122 testifying to a wide and sustained dissemination. It addresses the subjects of homicide and the peace of the church on the one hand, and fornication and whoring on the other—and, as far as the exhortations against seizing women are concerned, the coincidence of both issues. Archbishop Eystein’s attack on Jón Loptsson and the other chief is decidedly severe: You are aware, Jón and Gizur, that there is an unavoidable matter we must settle with you, for both your sake and ours. … Of all things, you seem to us the most lacking with respect to the impure life of men and their dealings with women (kvennafar). I hardly need to explain to you the significance of the commandments from God’s own mouth. And the greatest shame is that you, the noblest men, live like cattle, not recognizing marriage (hjúskap), the holy bond that no one can break. … But if the chiefs have such a lifestyle on their conscience, they are in no position to rebuke the people, and so the custom of the place deteriorates for all, to a greater or lesser extent.123 By this time, archiepiscopal Nidaros had long been a centre of intensive liturgical, canonical, and hagiographical text production, specializing in the translation and adaptation of the Latin European clerical culture to the conditions of an ecclesiastical province which stretched from Oslofjord to Greenland.124 The scribe engaged in translating the elements of the Latin pastoral model into the vernacular is here faced with the problem of finding a word for matrimonium/coniugium. His choice: hjúskap. It was, along with its etymological cognates (hjónaband and others), a common choice; from a reformist point of view, however, it was problematic in that it is derived from hjú/hjón “house, 121 Cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 177. The episcopal seat of Skálholt is within the Árnes thing. 122 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Formáli,” in Biskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002). xxxiv. 123 di i, no. 54, here 262f.: “Kvnnigt er yckur. Jon. og gizsurr. at naudsynia mal rædum vier vit ydur. bæde ydvart og vortt. … En of engan hlut synest oss meira aa fatt. helldur en vm ohreinlife manna hier. og kvenna far. er eigi þarf fyri yckur at skyra vm. hversv stadfest bodord. er. af gvdz sialfs mynne bodit. En þier hafit þat med suivirding firrzt ener agætustu menn. lifit bufiar life. rekit eigi hiuskap. ne þat helga samband er eigi ma slitna. … En med þvi at hofdinngiar hafa slika ohæfv j sinne samviskv. og af þvi treystazt þeir eigi hirtingar ord at hafa fyri alþydv. þa er þar komit at allra rad hallast j einn stad. ens meira. og hins minna.” 124 Cf. Mortensen and Mundal, “Erkebispesetet i Nidaros” (2003).

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household, servants” (+ collective suffix -skap “-ship”), highlighting the economic aspect of the relationship, the shared economy. But this is not what the archbishop had in mind, so it was necessary for him to explain that marriage was not just “householdship” but a sacred and indissoluble union—rarely is it so clear, right down to the wording, how revolutionary twelfth-century ecclesiastical teaching on marriage was (and not only in Iceland). It is not easy to bring a concept into a society that cannot even verbalize it: hjúskap just is not a matter of two people, a couple; there are more men and women to a house. The drastic comparison of Jón and Gizur to cattle, grounded in the New Testament but effortlessly clear to the Icelanders, only piles on to the essential fact: once they had seen the letter, Jón and Gizur must—and the Oddaverja þáttr has Jón explicitly confirm this—consider themselves publicly challenged. The archbishop’s letter touches upon the area of sexual defamation (ragmæli), the consequences of which could be lethal. In Örvar-Odds saga, written down around the mid-thirteenth century, an extremely aggressive agon with competitive drinking and the exchange of poetic abuse culminates in the insult: “But you lie at home dithering, with nothing but greed in your head, unable to decide between the calf and the maid!”125 (The abuse aims less at bestiality than at not being master of one’s decisions and desires.) Whether spontaneously or studied, by publicly taking up the archbishop’s fierce attacks on Jón Loptsson at the celebration of the church’s consecration, in places even repeating them word for word,126 Þorlák in his exuberance escalated the conflict, already fierce, into something unprecedented. 11

What Was at Stake i: Bishop Þorlák

Why did Þorlák challenge Jón in this manner? And why did Jón have to respond to this challenge so strongly? Instead of hypothesizing about individual motivations of the two people involved (about, say, Þorlák’s ‘absolute conviction’ or Jón’s ‘special affection’ for Ragnheið), this is a matter of explaining the social roles in which the two act, and the constraints they are subject to. Þorlák’s position appears simple. He is bishop of the Roman Church, subordinate to the archbishop of Nidaros, and advocating against the proprietary church system and the appropriation of tithing by laymen in particular is 125 Örvar-Odds saga c. 27: “en þú hallaðist / heima á milli / kynmálasamr / kálfs ok þýjar.” 126 Like the 1180 letter, his speech ends with the opposition meiri/minni “more/less”; the word hórkona “whore-woman” (~meretrix?), otherwise virtually unknown in the sagas, is found in the letter of 1173.

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v­ irtually part of his calling. Crucially, the archbishop is pursuing a similarly harsh ecclesiopolitical course in Norway: his conflict with the new king Sverrir is so acute that he is forced into exile shortly after Þorlák’s clash with Jón Loptsson. According to Oddaverja þáttr, “everyone in this country [Iceland] also thought they could imitate what the people in Norway had recently done.”127 Newly appointed, Þorlák may have wished to follow Nidaros’s guidelines with particular zeal, yet not even this was necessary to make the imposition on him at the church consecrations appear intolerable to him, given his understanding of office. This may all be true, but it is overly institutional. Þorlák Þórhallsson ultimately came from the same milieu as his adversary—in this case literally, after all, they grew up in the same house, at about the same age (Jón was six years older). For Þorlák, the son of impoverished parents “of good family” (we have no details), who were unable to maintain their economic independence and thus self-determination (sjálfræði), this meant being socialized at a court where the competitive ethos was lived relentlessly to the extreme—“several times a day”—but as a dependent client of the Oddaverjar, he himself could never be one of the “enabled/capable ones” who participated in this, in principle, paritarian agon. To exaggerate the issue with reference to Carol Clover’s gender binary: Þorlák must have experienced himself as not completely ‘male.’ Returning from abroad to find both his sisters as frillur—a reprehensible situation from a canonical point of view—was perhaps one of the most powerful experiences in this vein. Up to this point his vita is quite explicit; what it does not say is that as an Icelandic man, Þorlák also had cause for indignation: he was presented with a fait accompli, no one had consulted him, and there was nothing he could do, given that Ragnheið’s man was the chieftain himself. In Egils saga one adversary in a legal dispute says, “She has been taken as frilla, and [that] without the consent of her relatives,” thereby hoping to prove the dishonourable nature of the relationship.128 Þorlák could not perform his duty as a brother. It was almost as if the woman had been abducted, and if only a fraction of the tales which would shortly after make up the written saga literature were known in Oddi, he would remember dozens of wretched figures who lost their wives, sisters, and daughters to the trickery of some passing adventurer or a giant’s threats. Around the same time, he found an ‘out’ of his client relationship with the Oddaverjar. Newly qualified as one of the few clerici in the diocese, he 127 “… þóttusk allir hér á landi mega þar eptir gera sem menn gerðu fyrir í Nóregi.” 128 Egils saga c. 32: “… en síðan tekin frillutaki, ok ekki at frændaráði …”

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came into the ‘house’ of Bishop Klœng Þorsteinsson. A closeness developed between the churchmen that would scarcely have been possible between the foster child of the Oddaverjar and the Haukdœling otherwise. Although still within the Oddaverjar’s sphere of influence, as the first abbot of the new Augustinian monastery of Þykkvibœr, in 1168 Þorlák found himself in a completely new position of independence. At the same time, his relationship with Oddi remained so good that he there found the support he needed to become Klœng’s successor. As bishop of Skálholt, he now ranked highly enough to attract attention at the great stock exchanges at which rank and reputation were ­negotiated—above all at the gatherings of the thing—if he knew how to get it. As bishop of Skálholt he also entered into another competition, which he had to win at any cost: that with his predecessor. Just as sons in the sagas are always judged against their fathers and forefathers, the greater their ancestors had been, the more pressure they were under to succeed—this generational escalation is clear enough in the praise song Nóregs Konungatal, and it should perhaps come as no surprise that some, such as Sæmund the Learned’s great-great-grandson Hálfdan, ‘withdrew’ and stopped taking an interest in the ­affairs of others, to widespread indignation. A similar ethos must have prevailed among church leaders, especially given that Þorlák was the first man to hold office in Skálholt who was not a descendant of the founding bishop Ísleif. In many ways, Þorlák’s position was not unlike the church equivalent of ætt­ leiðing, and he was the one from the brink who was admitted into the family and expected to prove his mettle. The pressure to succeed was only increased by the fact that he could not rely on the benefit of doubt. And, worst of all, his predecessor had actually accomplished an ‘epic’ feat: the newly constructed cathedral, begun in 1153. Its dimensions have been established archaeologically, and its form extrapolated by analogy:129 Klœng’s cathedral may have been the largest wooden church ever built. With a length of 50 metres, it was many times larger than all known stave churches, surpassing a number of Danish cathedrals of its day (Odense, Aarhus) and reaching the dimensions of the very ambitious cathedrals of Slesvig and Roskilde. In the whole of Northern Europe, it was probably surpassed only by the archiepiscopal churches of Bremen and

129 Kristján Eldjárn et al., Skálholt (1988); Guðmundur Óli Ólafsson, Skálholt (1989); Hörður Ágústsson, Skálholt. Kirkjur (1990). The excavation campaign in 2002–2007 concerns the churchyard area, which formerly lay to the south of the cathedral, with the episcopal seat, rather than the church building itself.

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Lund, which each boasted a length of around 85 metres.130 Crucially, Skálholt achieved the dimensions of Nidaros, the archiepiscopal cathedral of the new church province that had been established the same year Klœng began his new construction. What that meant must have been clear to all—if we take the testimony of Laxdœla saga seriously, according to which an Icelandic chieftain who had received permission to export large quantities of lumber from the Norwegian king was observed one morning before work began, high up in the beams of the large new church under construction in Nidaros, measuring the main and transverse beams. When challenged by the king, he admitted that he wished to build his church in Iceland to the same scale. The king pressed him to remove a cubit from each, whereupon the Icelander replied that if the king would like to take back his wood, he was man enough to get more elsewhere, but he would not have his construction plans interfered with.131 What the chieftain and king did in the Icelandic sagas, Bishop Klœng did to Archbishop Eystein—who was able to tolerate this, not least because his own cathedral building, which in turn challenged Lincoln and Canterbury in size and form (and probably in the personnel of its masons’ guild as well), was still in a completely different class.132 How was Þorlák to demonstrate enough kappsemd—competitiveness, such as the magnates were guilty of displaying—to surpass Klœng? His ideas may have run along these lines: Klœng had built a church of (expensive imported) wood, which could hardly be more magnificent—he, Þorlák, would restore the church of God to its proper size out of living stones (2 Pt 2:5). In Norway, Archbishop Eystein, with the friendly cooperation of King Magnús and the true ruler, Jarl Erling, had already made good progress in asserting the libertas ecclesiae (that this would only be temporary, and an insurgent named Sverrir would inflict devastating blows on the archbishop shortly thereafter, was not yet apparent in 1175); here was an opportunity to do for the entire diocese what 130 Johannsen and Johannsen, Danmarks kirker. Odense amt (1995–96); Johannsen and Johannsen, Sct. Knuds Kirke (2001); Michelsen and Fine Licht, Danmarks kirker. Århus amt (1968–72); Moltke and Møller, Danmarks kirker. Københavns amt (1951); Ellger, Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt Schleswig, vol. 2 (1966); Nawrocki, “Der Schleswiger Dom in romanischer Zeit” (1987); Dietsch, St. Petri zu Bremen (1978); Cinthio, Lunds domkyrka (1957). 131 Laxdœla saga c. 74. Although the story ends badly, with the ship sinking off Iceland together with its cargo and crew, the king’s anger remains powerless. And regardless of how the episode is to be interpreted within the saga itself, it shows that the agonistic potential of church building was present in high medieval Iceland. 132 Cf. Fischer, Domkirken i Trondheim (1965); Ekroll, ed., Nidaros domkirke og Erkebispegården (1995).

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Klœng had done for one building: to set new standards for Iceland, as Norway had. Above all, there was undoubtedly the overriding model of the Canterbury saint, who had proved that a churchman coming from a position of dependency could not only speak with his secular lord as an equal, but with God behind him, as a superior. Þorlák’s whole life story is a reprise of Thomas Becket’s to such an extent that we might be tempted to dismiss the Icelandic vita as derivative. But I suspect something much more interesting is happening. It is not Þorlák’s vita but his life which is ‘derivative,’ closely modelled on the example of the country to which Þorlák owed his education and Eystein in Nidaros his architectural ideas. England’s significance as the primary, perhaps only extra-Nordic cultural point of reference (besides Byzantium, admired from afar) was still unbroken in the Angevin period. And so Þorlák discovered that the faithful implementation of official ecclesiastical policy and scrupulous adherence to the English model offered him a chance to restage the agon, which had been breathlessly followed by the whole of Christendom ten years earlier, in Iceland. 12

What Was at Stake ii: Jón Loptsson

For Jón, the matter was less complicated. His role was clear from the outset: he simply had to always and everywhere be the best. There were many opportunities to continually demonstrate this, as we have seen: in rowing and swimming, through board games, in making and understanding verses, in combat, naturally, in taking goods (here, the episcopal demand concerning the tithe was galling twofold) as well as distributing them (“gold-squanderer,” Nóregs konungatal calls him—as well as a ‘true’ king), in entertaining and providing (“the Oddaverjar and the Haukdœlir have long been known for always hosting the best feasts”),133 in producing memories of noteworthy words and deeds (in this, Oddi is still considered unequalled eight centuries later)—and, among many other things, in women too. It is by no means the case that the sheer number of women whom Jón “placed under himself” (to borrow the phrase his foster child Snorri uses in relation to his ancestor Harald Fairhair) already constituted the competitive performance, as proponents of sociobiological interpretations and anthropological constants (“mating success”) might be inclined to assume. In a society which valued even abstinence as a highly commendable achievement in the 133 StS i, 483: “Hefir þat lengi kynríkt verit með Haukdœlum og Oddaverjum, at þeir hafa inar beztu veizlur haldit.”

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battle of the chiefs—Kjartan Óláfsson impressed all Iceland by being the first to rigorously fast, “so that there was now something else in which Kjartan surpassed all other men”134—Jón could also have scored as an uncompromising monogamist. Sexual virility and willingness to parade it was not in itself a positive thing; quite the reverse, it carried the risk of uncontrollability. At best, figures who unthinkingly yield to their passions go uncommented, if the object of their desire can be subjected without consequences—such as King Sigurð and the mill maid or Hǫskuld, who buys “a slave for the bed” on his journey home. In the worst case, the result of uncontrolled sexuality is the same as any kind of uncontrolled action, a chain of consequences that leave its author’s general standing, ‘honour,’ considerably ruffled, even if they survive—so, for instance, Bjǫrgólf in Egils saga, who is assigned a charming farmer’s daughter as his drinking partner (drekka tvímenning), an event which first flusters him and then—because he applies unusual pressure to satisfy his desire—unsettles the whole saga world.135 Once Jón had decided to be considered “very susceptible to women’s love” (mjǫk fenginn fyrir kvenna ást), however, there was no question of giving up— like King Sven Estridsen, who “ruled Denmark vigorously for many years and had children with many women”136 or like Jón’s relative Magnús Erlingsson, the ruling Norwegian king: “cheerful and joking, a very friendly man and great man of women (kvinnamaðr mikill).”137 Or, like the Swedish magnates considered by Adam of Bremen, with close attention to the social implications: “Only in their sexual relations with women do they know no bounds; a man according to his means has two or three or more wives at one time, rich men and princes an unlimited number.”138 In fact, the sheer demonstration of economic (and not sexual) potency is an important part of the habitual function of polygyny: who can afford to feed extra mouths, to enjoy the love of women on a grand scale? This must have been even more important in the case of Iceland, an extremely precarious 134 135 136 137

Laxdœla saga c. 45. Cf. Bredsdorff, Kaos og kærlighed (21995). Chronicon Roskildense, in sm, vol. 1, 22; see above, Chapter 1. MsE c. 37: “Magnús konungr var léttlátr ok leikinn, gleðimaðr mikill ok kvinnamaðr mikill.” 138 Adam of Bremen iv, 21: “In sola mulierum copula modum nesciunt; quisque secundum facultatem suarum virium duas aut tres et amplius simul habet; divites et principes absque numero.” History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, ed. Tschan (2002), 203. In scholium 132, Adam adds that not only did the Slavs—the Church of Hamburg’s other problem children—suffer from the same vice but, according to Lucan and Sallust, so did Parthians and Moors; in a word, it was typical of those waiting to be civilized. “Mulieres … absque numero” is biblical (Song of Sol. 6:7).

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s­ubsistence economy with a constant foreign trade deficit and a gradually more threatening scarcity of resources partly due to ecological damage caused by overcultivation, than in Adam’s Sweden. Thus a special grandeur was demonstrated by saga characters like Hǫskuld, who bought a slave in passing on a stop en route home from a long journey, impregnated her before they got to Iceland, but then renounced further intercourse with her—and then gave her a house of her own for support! His potency must have impressed. Everyday practice may have been less exuberant but essentially similar. The numerous frillur of the Sturlung-era Icelandic magnates that are mentioned in passing would to some extent live ‘uxorilocally’ (or better, ‘mulierilocally’) on one of the various dependent farms, meeting ‘her’ man there periodically in the course of entertaining as circumstances required.139 According to the snippets of women’s everyday life, others were part of chieftains’ entourages, living alongside armed retainers, one or two skalds, and the crowd of relatives to whom they sometimes belonged—like, for instance, Valgerð Jónsdóttir, one of Jón Loptsson’s son Sæmund’s women and his second cousin. Polygyny appears to have been commonplace, as a passing remark in the Sturlunga saga suggests: “Þorvald was at home and seven of his men were with him. He lay in his bedcloset with two of his frillur, Halldóra and Lofnheið, when suddenly …”140 In her study of the Icelandic frillur, Auður Magnúsdóttir points to a further issue: one must be able to both take and keep them.141 Although formal raptus did not generally play a role ‘at home’ in Iceland in the acquisition of frillur, which was usually consensus-based (meaning that whatever pressure was applied resulted in face-saving handovers), Þorlák, whose approval, grudgingly granted by assent retrospectively, mattered very little in the formation of his sister’s relationship with Jón Loptsson, was certainly not an isolated case. Another casually related episode of contemporary topicality runs as follows: Gizur [Þorvaldsson, the most powerful chief on Iceland in around 1250 through the favour of the Norwegian king] rode with some of his people westwards across the wasteland to Langadal in Geitaskarð to Gunnar Klœngsson, and took his daughter Ingibjörg as his frilla and soon loved 139 See the survey in Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 83–107, where the known frillur and their men are listed according to their place of residence. 140 StS i, 295: “Þorvaldr var heima ok sjau karlar. Hann lá í lokhvílu ok tvær frillur hans, Halldóra … ok Lofnheiðr …” The scene is described only because at that moment, enemies burst into the house. Þorvald quickly grabs a women’s cloak, which enables him to escape—a successful if not entirely elegant exit. 141 Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 90ff.

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her very much. She was an outstanding woman, and it was good to have her on side in many things. She travelled home with him to Ás.142 We cannot rule out the possibility that this represented a real opportunity for Ingibjörg, whose wit and vigour are registered by the adjective skǫrulig (“outstanding” in comparison to others), given that some—not all—frillur in the contemporary sagas are portrayed as belonging to the small group of women who find their peers among men. And likewise the father, Gunnar, may have been appreciative of the benefits the relationship could bring. The point, however, is that neither had much of a choice. For Gizur Þorvaldsson, his new ­acquisition was both a prize and a risk. For him, like all the other magnates who had acquired women in this fashion on one or more occasions, it was not just a question of ensuring a smooth, conflict-free process, but also of defending the women. The ‘mulierilocal’ distribution of frillur to different residences could be an even greater difficulty (and challenge). A handful of cases, which Jón Viðar Sigurðsson cites in his study of the abduction of women in Iceland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,143 may illustrate this. Around 1160—Jón Loptsson was just over 30 years old and Þorlák was abroad studying—the elderly priest Þorgrim and his “beautiful” wife Álof were staying at the chieftain’s farm Staðarhol. One of the followers (heima­ maðr “household man”) of the chief there was so struck by Álof’s looks that he took her away from her husband, and declared that he could not stand that an old man sullied so beautiful a woman.144 Heaping insult upon insult, the henchman robbed the priest of his horse—“the best of all horses” (allra hesta beztr), no less. At this, the priest had had enough and turned to Hvamm-Sturla, founder of the Sturlung family’s power, for assistance. The magnate’s reaction is interesting: he took up the case, and declared that he did not see any great feat here.145 It was not the double robbery itself which was reprehensible, but the rather inglorious fact that the victim was an ageing churchman. Still more interesting is that Sturla does not blame the perpetrator but the chief to whose

142 StS i, 500f.: “… reið Gizurr vestr yfir heiði með nǫkkura menn til Langadals í Geitarskarð til Gunnars Klængssonar ok tók til sín Ingibjörgu Gunnarsdóttur til frillu ok unni henni brátt mikit. Hon var skǫrulig kona ok góð viðfangs fyrir marga hluta sakir. Fór hon heim í Ás með honum.” 143 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, “Konur og kvennarán” (1997). 144 StS i, 78: “kvað þat aldri skyldu lengr, at gamall maðr flekkaði svá væna konu.” 145 StS i, 78: “kvað eigi sýnast mikilmennsku [literally, “great-man-ness”] í sliku.”

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household the perpetrator belonged.146 Moreover, he immediately sent one of his own people to kill the woman- and horse-thief. The attack was unsuccessful, apparently to the relief of the chiefs on both sides, who were thus spared the inevitable escalation. Not long after, Álof, the priest’s wife, appeared at Sturla’s farm in Hvamm, and her husband took her back. Evidently, the wifesnatcher’s lord, desiring deescalation, had been putting pressure on him. The matter of the horse remained, for the accounts had to be balanced, and when nothing further happened in this matter, Sturla “reminded” his protégé, the priest, that while he had got his wife back, he had not retrieved his excellent steed. It was clear to the priest that there was no way he could return to Hvamm without a horse, and so he set off—and waited until he was able to take the horse, unnoticed, in heavy flurry of snow. (Considered in the light of Clifford Geertz’s Moroccan sheep rustlers or Werner Schiffauer’s Pontic peasants,147 the episode is a model case for social-anthropological research on conflict deescalation: the snowstorm arrived at just the right moment so no one would be obliged to ‘see’ that the priest came to steal his own horse, and the matter could therefore be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.) The “Jóreið Affair” is another case of staking out claims by arrogating the right to control a woman. In 1225, the widow Jóreið Hallsdóttir rejected Ingi­ mund Jónsson’s request for her hand and her fortune, explaining that she wished to bequeath the latter to her daughter undiminished. The scorned suitor complained to his patron Sturla Sighvatsson (a grandson of HvammSturla from the previous episode), who was prompted to immediately set out with his client, abduct the widow Jóreið, house her in his own farm, and there put pressure on her to abandon her resistance. Now Jóreið’s brother Pál was well-­positioned as a “very good friend” (mesti vinr) of the uncle of the opposing chieftain, Þórð, and thus possessed, as it were, insurance to cover his legal costs. The matter therefore became part of a larger Sturlung feud: the conflict between Sturla and Þórð, now brought to a head by the issue of w ­ omen, ­‘actually’

146 StS i, 78: “en kvað Einar þat illa gera at veita vandræðismǫnnum á leið fram ok leggja þar við virðing sína” (“and said Einar [Þorgilsson, the goði] would be wrong to protect people bent on trouble, and to link his honour to them”). 147 Cf. Geertz, “Thick Description” (1973), 3–30; Schiffauer, Bauern von Subay (1987), esp. 61: since in extreme cases ‘political’ rationality (oriented around public profile and the “honour reference system”) entails complete social and economic irrationality—multiple deaths, prosecution, and economic ruin—all parties handle it with great care and deliberation; social and economic interests “can, by contrast, only be pursued in the background, unacknowledged, almost by stealth.”

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revolved around the office of goðorð and land. Snorri Sturluson, brother of one of the rivals and uncle of the other, stepped in as a mediator, and the whole affair was settled by means of considerable compensation. The actual abduction of a woman would appear to have become a mere detail—if we did not know that Sturlunga saga labels the entire affair as Jóreiðarmál, “the Jóreið affair” or “the Jóreið dispute,” and creates the impression that it concerns an event known throughout the country. Incidentally, the abducted Jóreið decided her own fate: she went on hunger strike until the powerful chief let her go.148 Here, too, it is important to consider whether the ‘hunger strike’ did not suit the chief, now interested in a settlement, but this should not distract from the fact that public opinion of the widow conceded this degree of self-determination as a plausible course of events, and the chief did not object to being ‘beaten’ by her in this matter. Of course, he could afford to do so precisely because she was not to be taken seriously as an opponent. But this was only to Jóreið’s advantage. 13

Resource Polygyny

If entering into a concubinal relationship with a woman (usually a daughter) of the house was a sign of a clientele-type alliance with a local landowner, a man like Jón Loptsson, building and maintaining the Oddaverjar’s ríki, was almost obliged to practise simultaneous polygyny. But there is more to the ‘habitus’ value of the accumulation of women. In a study of the demographic gender balance in early Scandinavia, Carol Clover has argued that literary sources— the exposure of newborns (barna útburð), frequently referred to in laws, sagas, and even accounts of Christianization—and archeological findings, such as the ratio of male and female burials, suggest an imbalance brought about by preferential female infanticide.149 Since dysfunctionality within society as a whole does not necessarily lead to changes in individual decisions, the cultural pattern in which it was more intuitive to expose girls than boys could last for a long time, despite a worsening shortage of women. The intensified competition for women then led to their concentration in the upper classes and thus to their relatively higher reproductivity, which in turn intensified the competition for resources and helped to shape the extremely competitive society of medieval Iceland. 148 StS i, 309–11. 149 Clover, “Politics of Scarcity” (1988). See in general Guttentag and Secord, Too Many Women? (1983); for the Middle Ages, Herlihy, “Life Expectancies for Women” (1975).

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In these circumstances, the rather obvious objection that a society with a shortage of women is the least likely to develop a marked inclination towards polygyny (thus acerbating the shortage for most men) is not sound. On the contrary, the ‘accumulation’ of women becomes all the more powerful as a status symbol, the scarcer they are overall.150 Moreover, Iceland was a ‘frontier’ society, which meant that the proportion of men among the first generations of settlers may from the outset have been far above average.151 Many characteristics of societies with an unbalanced gender ratio can be found here: intensified male competition for women and the key role of women in male status; male homosexuality—which can scarcely be substantiated as such in medieval Scandinavia and certainly not quantified, besides its great effect as an ­insult—; the relative ease with which relationships could be ended (and consequently serial polyandry for women); but above all the extent to which women were imported, a fact famously established for Iceland at the end of the twentieth century through serial genetic studies: according to these studies, of the early Icelandic population, around 75 per cent of the men but only half that of the women were of Scandinavian descent, while the majority of women came from Celtic areas.152 The enslaved Irishwoman Melkorka stands on behalf of very many other women. Taken alongside the high added value of women’s work (food and wool processing), the overall result is that in both material and immaterial terms, women were a key resource. 14

Women and Plunder

A chieftain’s duties (and opportunities to win ‘status’) thus undoubtedly included supplying not only himself, but also his followers, his ‘clients,’ with women. Poul Holm has convincingly demonstrated this for the Irish kings of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and also pointed out the connection between increased competition and increased interest in the enslavement of

150 Clover, “Politics of Scarcity” (1988), 171. 151 The Landnámabók, which records a significant proportion of the overall immigration with its several thousand names, probably provides a distorted picture given its focus on property rights. Nonetheless, the analogy with the USA, where in some western states there was still a male-to-female ratio of 1.5:1 in around 1900, and a balance was not reached nationally until around 1940, allows us to infer that an at least tendentially similar situation existed in the first Icelandic centuries. 152 Cf. Helgason, “Estimating Scandinavian and Gaelic Ancestry” (2000), 697–717; Helgason, “mtDNA” (2001), 723–37.

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women for the purposes of profit or redistribution (in contrast to the traditional ‘hostage-taking’ of male opponents).153 While raids on enemy property, such as the well-known Irish cattle raids (crech), were not the only way to acquire women for distribution, as shown by slave-trading posts on Western European coasts that operated for centuries, they were credited with additional habitual prestige. The testimony of the Frankish sources on the abduction of women, the rape of girls, and special attention for feminas quae formosae videbantur154 fits so well with Nordic and Irish reports that there can be no doubt that taking women as plunder in war had an important ‘habitual’ function in maintaining a warband. How this aspect of magnate excellence was celebrated by and for Nordic audiences is impressively demonstrated by some of the two dozen skaldic stanzas which the court poet Þjóðólf Arnórsson wrote about the struggle for power between Norwegian king Magnús the Good and his rival Sven Estridsen in Denmark around 1040 (and which Oddi pupil Snorri Sturluson used as a basis for his kings’ saga two centuries later, citing them extensively). It should be noted that Magnús himself was filius a concubina of Saint Olav, and his mother Álfhild the “king’s handmaid” was, according to William of Malmesbury, an abducted noble Englishwoman (see Chapter 1). Incidentally, the same chronicler claims that the sister of Cnut the Great had made her profit in the luxury slave trade across the North Sea, “especially with girls who were particularly valuable on account of their age and beauty.”155 Against this pattern, it comes as no surprise that Magnús’s raids on the Danish islands in their poetic form, probably first sung at some ‘concluding banquet’ of the war and then disseminated throughout the Norse world, are narrated with relish: One word told the Selund [Zealand] woman who bore the standard; it’s true, moreover, that many men bore shields blood-reddened. The treasure-twig was fated to tiptoe through the forest;

153 Holm, “Slave Trade” (1986), esp. 339, who takes into account the fictional but nonetheless revealing lists of provisions (tuarastal) for clients in Lebor na Cert (around 1100). 154 Adrevald of Fleury and Richer, cited after Zettel, Bild der Normannen (1977), 134f. On the sexual exploitation of the unfree, see Chapter 1. 155 William of Malmesbury, gra ii, 200: “quod dicebatur agmina mancipiorum in Anglia coempta Danemarchiam solere mittere, puellas presertim quas decus et aetas pretiosiores facerent.”

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many who fled footed it fast to Hringstadir.156 The kenning of the women as ‘treasure-twigs,’ that is, ‘wearers of jewelry,’ not uncommon in skaldic poetry, makes the prey being hunted here doubly attractive. Moreover, the apposition of war banners and reddened weapons on the one hand, and slender girls on the other hand makes for a compelling metaphor. The hunt ends in Ringsted, making Magnús’ victory complete, for the central Zealand thing site is located in the middle of the island and is therefore the last refuge when attacked from the sea. (Perhaps Snorri felt special suffisance when using the old stanza about the place, which had in his day become the liturgical centre of the Danish royal house—after all he was describing the attack by the son of Norway’s royal saint on Sven Estridsen, forebear of the Valdemars.) From Zealand, Magnús crossed to Funen with his fleet and booty: Men must, Frey of battles, remember to get to know in Danaveldi the weaving-Gefn of Sven’s soldiers, since there were three encounters. On Fjón one may look forward to a fair girl; it’s good to redden blades; let’s join the forefront of the force in weapons’ tumult.157 Power over women is bound up with fighting and winning, amassing and distributing booty, and the reputation this entailed for the leader of the group, a group held together solely through the self-interest of the participants and which could rapidly disperse with the onset of failure—and all this condensed into skaldic stanzas, as they were collectively consumed in the ‘thick’ moments

156 MsG c. 31, stanza 54: “Spurði einu orði, / ǫld blóðroðna skjǫldu, / satt es, at svá mǫrg átti / Selunds mær, hverr vé bæri. / Auðtróðu varð auðit / yfir of skóg at spróga. / Títt bar týmargr flótti / til Hringstaða iljar.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 32. 157 MsG c. 32, stanza 59: “Menn eigu þess minnask / manna Sveins at kanna, / – víga Freyr! –, síz vǫru, / Vef-Gefn, þríar stefnur. / Vǫn es fagrs á Fjóni / fljóðs; dugir vǫpn at rjóða. / Verum með fylkðu folk / Framm í vápna glammi.” Gefn is one of Odin’s many women, “­weavingGefn” is a women kenning following the conventional pattern of ‘mythological name + concrete term.’

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under the roof of the princely hall. Wide-ranging campaigns of devastation of the kind described above had moved further into the Baltic by Jón Loptsson’s time,158 but the Icelandic feud cases cited above make it clear that on a smaller scale, the abduction of women was also put to use in local ‘everyday’ competition. If Bishop Þorlák resolved to force Iceland’s most powerful chieftain (and his own patron) to cave in on the question of women, then he had truly set himself a goal that at least equalled the agonistic potential of his predecessor’s church-building. 15

From Canterbury to Camelot

Þorlák had lost the major clash. His Life now pivots temporally and spatially to the western quarter (one of the three regions belonging to the diocese of Skálholt which Þorlák had not yet visited in his libertas campaign) and reports a seemingly unconnected case, the independently documented “dispute with Hǫgni at Bœr” (Hǫgna-Bœjarmál),159 which, however, only takes Þorlák’s two major causes, the freedom of the church and sexual morality, to a new battlefield. The original Icelandic readers and listeners of Þorlák’s Life would surely have drawn the correct conclusion: following his defeat against the greatest, the bishop tried his hand against a lesser opponent. His new adversary, Hǫgni, was “quite wealthy, albeit without great kin” and, moreover, ordained as a priest.160 There were two problems: Hǫgni refused to have his church, pretentiously constructed with imported Norwegian timber, consecrated by the bishop as long as he maintained his position on the right of disposition, “and said it would instead be the most magnificent stable in Iceland if he did not have his way”161—crowning a spectacular performance in ‘conspicuous consumption’ with an even more remarkable witticism. The other matter was delicate. Hǫgni’s daughter Snælaug “lived unmarried at home. She gave birth to a child who was generally attributed to one of her father’s workers, Gunnar, who was known as ‘cow-bitch.’ Hǫgni did not take this amiss, and he valued his daughter as highly as before.”162 This lone remark 158 Still, at the time of Jón and Þorlák’s dispute, Archbishop Eystein issued a ruling against “men who take women while on campaign” (“men[n] þeir er konur taka med herfangi,” di i, no. 41, around 1176). 159 StS i, 131ff. 160 C. 23: “prestr at vígslu ok mjǫk auðigr en ættsmár.” 161 C. 23: “ok sagði at þat skyldi skrautligast hrossahús á Íslandi ef hann réði þessu eigi.” 162 C. 23: “Hon fœddi barn þat er kennt var verkmanni fóður hennar er Gunnarr hét ok var kallaðr nautatík. Ekki hataði Hǫgni hana fyrir þat, ok ekki helt hann nú dóttur sinni minnr

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nevertheless provides a telling insight into the ubiquity of brief relationships tendentially related to polygyny (and in this case probably polyandry as well), whose key precondition—or consequence—was the medieval North’s disinterest in the physical virginity of women. Perhaps such situations were no more common than in other parts of Europe, but the social semantics were certainly different and the consequences for the women involved therefore far less serious: the sexual act itself played almost no role; whether or not there was injury and insult depended entirely on whether the act was understood as an attack. This was clearly not the case here, probably because as cowherd of the head of the house the child’s father bore no symbolical relation to a competitor, and therefore was meaningless. A problem arose only when the daughter—meanwhile ‘married’ (keypt, “bought” consensually) to a priest—heard the news of the death of a certain Hrein, who had lived in a valley further into Gilsbakki and had not returned from a trip to Norway. She now stated that it had been in fact this Hrein, not the herdsman, who had fathered her child. She had not wanted to make the fact public during his lifetime out of fear of his family. Now Hrein and Snælaug’s present husband were related to each other in the fourth degree, and Bishop Þorlák promptly called for the couple to separate. They did not comply; interdict and excommunication followed; and Þorlák personally appeared at the althing to publicly annul the relationship (again hjúskap “common household” for coniugium). Snælaug and Þórð, “who loved one another very much” (unnusk þau mikit), agreed to separate (but still went on to have three children together), and the bishop was subsequently able to settle a number of other tricky situations through his tenacity. Þorlák now stepped up the calibre of his opponents. Among others, he moved against one of the sons of the mighty Hvamm-Sturla, who had “put into his bed” a close relative of his wife,163 and escaped armed retaliation only through divine intervention. With these successes, the bishop had somewhat made up for his earlier defeat, and the narrative could return to his chief adversary: Bishop Þorlák made many allegations against Jón Loptsson in Oddi, concerning fornication and the unlawful appropriation of property, but especially that he kept his [Þorlák’s] sister Ragnheið in his household with á lopt en áðr þetta gerðisk.”—All three individuals, including the shepherd with the curious nickname, are independently attested in Sturlunga saga. 163 C. 25: “Þessi maðr lagði í rekkju hjá sér náfrændkonu húsfrú sinnar.” The ‘wife’ is here referred to with the Saxon loan word húsfrú “house-lady.”

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open defiance and disobedience while his wife still lived. And although Jón was prepared to accommodate the bishop in other matters, yet he was on no account willing to negotiate a separation from Ragnheið with him. In the end, it got to the point that the bishop excommunicated him. Jón was greatly distressed at having to suffer the bishop’s attacks on account of his metnað.164 So the bishop went all out—and Jón felt obliged to retaliate. The first blows are struck through others; in the vita his impetuous son prepares attacks on the bishop, which miraculously fail (on one occasion thick fog conceals the bishop and his followers; on another occasion the house is already surrounded, the bishop steps out of the door, and Jón’s son’s ax remains unmoving in the air). “At this, Jón Loptsson does not leave the matter unfinished, however”165 and organizes an attack himself, which is thwarted in turn by fog; one wonders whether this is a ‘deescalating’ fog, like the snowstorm during the horse theft. Finally, it comes to a showdown. Jón arranges it at the churchyard of Ytri Skarð—tellingly, the farm worked by his and Ragnheið’s adult son Pál. This time there is no talk of lying in wait at the fords. Jón lines up his armed men in two rows, and he himself waits at the church door at the end of the gauntlet formation: it is the provocative inversion of the staging of a public repentance ceremony. Everything is ready for Canossa or Canterbury. The bishop hurried forward and told his companions not to be afraid, “for this game has been prepared for me, not you.” He was the first to ride into the narrow passage, followed by the priest Orm, his chaplain, and then the all rest one by one, until the bishop reached the entrance to the churchyard, came before Jón, and dismounted. They could not enter for the entrance was full of men, and there was no more avoiding it, as the crowd surged in from all sides. No one spoke a greeting. The bishop said, “What are you thinking of, Jón, denying me the church?” Jón answered, “Right now, that’s entirely up to you.”

164 C. 26: “Herra Þorlákr byskup kærði marga hluti á Jón Loptsson í Odda, bæði um hórdóma ok rangan fjárafla ok einkanliga þat at hann helt Ragnheiði, systur hans, heima hjá sér með fullu þrái ok óhlýðni at lifandi húsfrú sinni. En þó at Jón svaraði at nǫkkuru hófi um aðrar ákærslur byskups þá vildi hann þó til øngrar sættar ganga at skilja við Ragnheiði. Kom svá um síðir at byskup forboðaði . Jón angraði mjǫk at þola stríðu af byskupi sakir metnaðar …” 165 C. 27: “Jón Loptsson leggr þá eigi niðr upptekinn óþokka.”

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The bishop said, “Then it appears to me as if you were intent on deciding this matter. But I want to know why you are doing this.” Jón replied, “You have denied me the church for a long time [bannat mér kirkju] and announced that you wished to excommunicate me [heitit at bannfœra mik]. So I desired a meeting where I had the upper hand.” The bishop said, “It is true that I have imposed an interdict on you [lýst forboðum yfir þér], and with reason. But I always held back from excommunication, because I thought you were reasonable enough to abandon your aberrations. But if you do not, you can be sure that I will not hesitate to excommunicate you, and perhaps it would have been better if this had happened sooner.” And now an astonishing twist: “I know,” said Jón, “that your ban is lawful and duly justified [at bann þitt er rétt ok skin nóg]. I will accept your decision in such a way that I move to the Þórsmark [an impassable area 70 km east of Oddi] or any other place where no one will commit an offence by having dealings with me, and be there together with the woman you care so much about [ok vera þar hjá konu þeiri sem þér vandlætið um], for as long as I see fit [sem mér líkar]. Your ban should not bring me out of my difficult situation [skilja mik frá vandræðum mínum], any more than the pressure of any other man until God breathes it into my breast to release her of my own volition [til þess at Guð andar því í brjóst mér at skiljask viljandi við þau]. But let me tell you, I will ensure you can never render this service to anyone else.” At these words, the bishop remained silent for a while. Finally, he said, “I am resolved in this matter to endure whatever lies ahead. Do whatever you will, for I am determined not to put off the ban any longer, given your threats.” Jón answered, “If you mean to do as you say, then there is nothing more to be said.” The ax could now fall. But it does not: this is Canossa or Canterbury in the context of Icelandic conflict society. If a conflict that has become hopeless through the agonistic automatisms turned unproductive, then a mediator steps in. This role is here assumed by the priest, who stands next to Jón and now steps in front of the bishop. In a long speech, he appeals to the bishop not to allow Jón to add a greater sin (the threatened killing) to the lesser one; in any case, the Church would be damaged less by episcopal forbearance than if it now lost

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“you both.” The bishop, his martyrdom thwarted, “initially looked at him with displeasure.” As it then gradually becomes clear to him that he risks losing his moral advantage in the eyes of the audience, he stubbornly relents: “It’s like last time all over again, Jón, you have your way and not for the better.” Þorlák cannot even obtain a deadline for the promised separation from Ragnheið: “The bishop must leave the timing to me, if nothing more is to happen here today. The implementation is mine to decide.”166 The bishop does not insist further, Jón and his men stand aside and ride away. Fundamentally, the scene of the church consecration at Höfðabrekka, with which the conflict began, is repeated here as an anticlimax: the bishop is outmatched, urged to relent, and forgoes martyrdom with a few suitable words which appear somewhat colourless when set against Canterbury. Northern Europe is perhaps no place for clerical martyrs. Instead, Jón Loptsson is a martyr to worldly love, who keeps face during open confrontation and will not even have a deadline set—to be able to have one’s way (ráða) is the non-negotiable core of a ‘man’—but nonetheless effectively capitulates. A decent interval of a few months is then long enough to prove to himself and others that he is the one who will choose when the time is right. He then ends without further ado his love affair with Ragnheið, which had lasted “from childhood.” Þorlák has the bittersweet pleasure of absolving both. A little later, as is customary with previous concubines, she is provided with a husband and household, “and they had many offspring.”167 So far, so unromantic. One passage unsettles this picture. It is Jón’s abrupt offer to enter the wilderness. Þórsmark is the very end of the inhabitable regions, a small area, now wooded, reached from the south and from Oddi by a valley of alluvial sand, prone to flooding, and enclosed by glaciers on the other sides. Here he wished to live with Ragnheið, as a hermit of love far from the world, until the Holy Spirit himself might bring this worldly love to an end. In his next sentence, when the bishop does not take up the issue, he makes a barely concealed death threat. The influence of contemporary views on lay aristocratic couple relationships (‘courtly love’) is unmissable. The first glance speaks for Tristan and Isolde, the second for Chrétien de Troyes (Tristrams saga ok Isöndar, a faithful 166 “Heita hlýtr byskup biðstundinni ef atgørðalaust skal vera, en ek mun ráða verða framkvæmðinni.” 167 “… ok kom frá þeim mart manna.” The man’s name was Arnþór; all we learn about him is that he was from the east (austmaðr), which is probably to be understood as meaning mainland Scandinavia, perhaps eastern Iceland. Either way, Ragnheið is removed from the region—and this, too, was unusual for a former woman of a magnate. In the end, the brother and cleric who had insisted on permanent separation prevailed.

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a­ daptation of the Anglo-Norman models, was completed in Norway in 1226 as part of Hákon Hákonarson’s campaign of cultural Europeanization): Qui a le cuer, si ait le cors, “he who has the heart shall also have the body,” reads the famous principle in Cligès, with which the French poet introduced the principle of marriage by consent into lay culture. Above all, the great parallel is to Lancelot and Guinevere: a very similar crescendo occurs in the great Lancelot prose cycles of the period after 1220, when, shortly before the end of the Arthurian kingdom, Lancelot offers to go into exile with his queen so that the impending war between the knights of the Round Table can be averted and Arthur can continue ruling without blemish. The offer comes to nothing, and Camelot falls. Whatever the case may be with Western European ‘influences,’ borrowings, adaptations, the details of which must remain unverifiable: for a brief moment, the Jón of Oddaverja þáttr is a courtly lover from the same Anglo-French sphere as his opponent, Thomas Becket’s double. However, Jón’s role is so incongruent that he cannot sustain it for anywhere near as long as Þorlák, who comes quite close to martyrdom on at least a few occasions. This incongruence is one of the reasons why the ‘source value’ of the Icelandic romance of Jón and Ragnheið is sometimes rejected and often called into question. The editor of the new standard edition in the Íslenzk Fornrit series, Ásdís Egilsdóttir, makes use of very traditional arguments to do so: if Ragnheið had two sons with Jón around 1155, she could hardly have then had further children with a Norwegian she married thirty years later.168 The argument is in itself not entirely convincing, for assuming an extreme case with the first birth at fifteen years of age, another birth at just under 45 is perfectly possible without requiring a Sarah. Crucially, however, the argument takes an all-or-nothing approach, for a biographical impossibility may derail the chronological sequence without affecting the veracity of individual episodes. After all, some really prominent figures were involved in the events which took place, according to the most optimistic estimates, about fifty years before Oddaverja þáttr was set down in writing, and according to the most pessimistic, around a century earlier. We have no traces of earlier written versions of Oddaverja þáttr but fragments of a Latin vita written on the occasion of Þorlák’s translation in 1198, a ceremony presided over by Bishop Pál, the son of Jón and Ragnheið, whose farm had been the site of the final encounter. There are therefore some good reasons to expect a fair degree of factual evidence in Þorláks saga. If we do not want the primacy of the text to turn into the tyranny of the text, the historian may ask the question: did Jón and Ragnheið ‘really’ love each 168 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Formáli,” in Biskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002), xl.

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other? From their childhood to old age, when the implacable brother and churchman separated them? The question may be asked precisely in these terms, for the words are there: elska (“to love”),169 unna (“to love,” cf. Old English unnan), ást (“love,” nominalization of unna). The dossier: they have two sons together. This is the only non-lexical evidence of their relationship, so we know that they had a relationship for several years in the mid-1150s (Jón was 27; we can only speculate about Ragnheið’s age). We only have the testimony of Oddaverja þáttr for its beginning, duration, and continuity. It is possible to simply maintain that Jón and Ragnheið’s relationship only lasted for a few years around 1155 (after all, the text explicitly states that Ragnheið also had children with other men, and even if the North had a comparatively relaxed attitude towards such things, it is hardly likely that an agonist like Jón could have afforded to share her with other men). The bishop’s verbal outpourings would then merely be old grudges, which he (or his listeners) used to accentuate his current denouncements of Jón’s polygyny. To me, this seems possible, but implausible—Ragnheið plays too great a role in the conflict in its literary form, and she would hardly be suitable as an a­ rgument if she was just one of several probable ex-partners, and she would be, moreover, a blot on Þorlák’s—not Jón’s—shield. On the other hand, an actual lifelong love, which even prompts Jón’s offer to enter the hermitage, before it tapers off so unspectacularly, is similarly ­implausible—precisely because it tapers off in this way. It seems far preferable to assume that Jón never definitively separated from the mother of two of his most promising sons over the decades, never ‘sent her away,’ that she was an established part of the Oddi household and no one (besides Þorlák) thought anything of it. There are less consistent lifelong partnerships. Why the incongruence then, why Tristan and Cligès and Lancelot? The brief, seemingly unmotivated introduction of a frame of reference wholly different from the saga conventions, which immediately disappears again without consequence, further ennobles the aristocrat. The Jón of action, once challenged by Þorlák, must hold onto Ragnheið at any cost because he cannot afford to lose her. (He renounces her in the end, but as part of a quid pro quo, ostentatiously not a defeat, which for the moment can be dressed up as his own free will: “þann tíma sem mér líkar.”) The literary Jón, however, would present a fairly lacklustre figure if all he ever did was insist on his right to take and keep the women he wanted. His counterpart, Bishop Þorlák, may already have chosen Thomas Becket as a role model in the lived world, and ‘lived’ this model—the 169 Probably connected to the Indo-European *al- “grow; nurture” (Latin alere) with the suffix -isk-, so “to nurture, nurse, care for (someone)”; see Collitz, “Old Norse elska” (1924).

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literary Þorlák is, in any case, an Icelandic Becket; his vita even places the date of his episcopal ordination on 29 December, St Thomas’ feast day. Only there cannot be an Icelandic martyrdom. It is similar for Jón. The fashionable garb of the courtly lay culture of continental provenance lends a contemporary ‘European’ gloss to his customary polygyny. The ‘Camelot Jón’ honours his damsel, not because he cannot afford to relinquish her in the face of her brother’s challenge, but because he ‘loves’ her. But like Thomas Becket, Lancelot founders on the reality of Icelandic conflict and consensus culture. In his ‘Lancelot’ speech, in which he offers selfexile in the wilderness of lasting love, Jón does not declare—as we might initially think from a quick reading—that no one can separate him from Ragnheið. What he says is: “Nobody can separate me from my difficult position” (skilja mik frá vandræðum mínum). Elsewhere in the sagas, the ‘difficulties’ (vandræðir) such as that which Jón here calls his ‘love’ are a struggle against superiority, a reckless attack without the possibility of retreat, a voluntary visit to a wrathful prince, and the like.170 Honourable challenges, all of them. It is these (við þau), and not the woman,171 which he will “divorce” only when the Holy Spirit prompts him. In the end, it is the pronouns that betray what the whole dispute over Jón and Ragnheið was actually about. Cultural particularism once again leaves its mark on the saga, which is neither a vita nor a romance and therefore cannot glorify the bishop or demonize his opponent who, in turn, can only be brave, not loving. But that does not make the story of the chieftain, the bishop, and his sister an Icelandic exception. Some aspects of it are context-dependent, above all the fact that it was written down, and how. Yet in Aquitaine and Francia, in Saxony and Swabia, too, the powerful liked to be seen with others’ women, “two or three at a time, whenever word got around of someone having a young and pretty wife or 170 Cf. Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. vand-: “difficulty, trouble,” in the plural (as here) also “hostilities, discord”; a hopeless situation could be described as vandráðit (“difficult to master”); a vandræðafélag is a partnership in hard times, vandræðakost a “difficult choice.” Hallfreð Óttarson, who was court poet around the year 1000, first for pagan Jarl Hákon and then for his successful opponent, the missionary king Óláf Tryggvason, was famous for provoking his masters to the point where his life was in danger, which earned him the respectful epithet vandræðaskáld “the poet who gets himself into trouble.” 171 “… at skiljask viljandi við þau” “to voluntarily separate from them”: skiljask is a reciprocal form of skilja “divorce, separate”; þau the pronoun acc. pl. neuter., which refers to the plural vandræðir “situations difficult to master.” The pronoun acc. sg. fem., referring to the kona “woman” (Ragnheið) mentioned, would be hana. So the translation quoted above (“until God breathes it into my breast to release her”) is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is rather something like: “until God breathes it into my breast to give up the struggle against adversity.”

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daughter; and those who would not be seduced were handed over by applying pressure,” and they did not like to be reprehended for it by leading churchmen.172 And perhaps they, too, often acted out of quite different reasons than passion or love—non libidine sed ob nobilitatem. The comparison with the history of Jón and Ragnheið allows at least the suspicion that while the sources elsewhere in Europe are less explicit, the interests and conflicts there were perhaps no less complex than in Iceland. 172 For example, the East Frankish king (and emperor) Henry iv in Bruno’s book on the Saxon war (1070/82), c. 6: “Binas vel ternas simul concubinas habebat; nec his contentus, cuiuscumque filiam vel uxorem iuvenem et formosam audierat, si seduci non poterat, sibi violenter adduci praecipiebat.” The pretty women and daughters of other men, according to Bruno, came on top of Henry’s apparently more regular “concubines,” two or three at any one time—a bad record indeed. Of course, Bruno is partisan (see Althoff and Coué, “Pragmatische Geschichtsschreibung” [1992]), but comparison with Jón Loptsson’s Iceland may make it possible to concede a certain factuality to the reproaches instead of either condemning Henry iv as wantonly libidinous or defending him from malicious slander (cf. Struve, “War Heinrich iv. ein Wüstling?” [2004]).

Chapter 3

The Agonistic Aspect 1

Snorri Takes a Bath One evening, while Snorri was sitting in the bath, the talk turned to chiefs. Some said that there was no chief like Snorri and none could match Snorri in terms of kinship. Snorri agreed that his relatives were not insignificant people.1

Talk of competition followed the great men right into the hot springs, a preferred place for momentous conversations. Perhaps Jón, Ragnheið, and Bishop Þorlák were also gossiped about in the baths. The charming thing about this vignette from Sturlunga saga is that the chieftain bathing in admiration is none other than Snorri Sturluson, whose authority as author of the great chronicle of the kings and Eddic poetry sometimes makes us forget that he himself was one of those magnates about whom—or more precisely, about whose predecessors—he wrote. For him, relentless self-measuring was not a studied cultural phenomenon but an everyday habitus. His depictions of communicative processes are often strongest in such situations. Among the most famous is the “comparison of men” (mannjafnað) of the kings and brothers Sigurð (r. 1103–30) and Eystein (r. 1103–23), sons of Magnús Barelegs and Jón Loptsson’s maternal uncles. The episode provides a good example for illustrating another aspect of medieval magnate polygyny, which I would like to call the ‘agonistic.’ In the preceding chapter, the focus was on the ‘habitual’ aspect under the conditions of an extremely competitive society. I suggest to differentiate the actual ‘agonistic’ aspect of polygyny from the practices illustrated above: the ‘habitual’ aspect refers to the significance which the fact of polygynous behaviour has for the self-representation and perception of prominent men. As has been shown, this behaviour can take on characteristic traits under the conditions of an extremely competitive culture. However, in a case such as that of Jón Loptsson, it is always about defending his reputation as a “man of women” at all costs; the women themselves are not at issue (Jón and Þorlák were not vying for Ragnheið). The ‘agonistic’ aspect is about individual 1 StS i, 319: “Þat var eitt kveld, er Snorri sat í laugu, at talat var um hǫfðingja. Sǫgðu menn, at þá var engi hǫfðingi slíkr sem Snorri ok þá mátti engi hǫfðingi keppa við hann fyrir sakir mægða þeira, er hann átti. Snorri sannaði þat, at mágar hans væri eigi smámenni.”

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women who become the subject of competition between men. The mannjaf­ nað of the kings Sigurð and Eystein offers a vivid example of this. 2

Mannjafnað—“Comparison of Men”

A Norse ‘comparison of men’ (mannjafnað) is a literary-rhetorical and presumably also social-practical convention.2 It is encountered in sagas of all kinds, in eddic poetry, and in Latin historiography,3 it appears prominently in Old English poetry4 and more generally from ancient Greece up to the ethnographical accounts of present-day societies. It must therefore be emphasized that the significance of “comparisons of men” in medieval Northern Europe is not r­ eally the phenomenon as such but the fact that it is regularly seen as a central political event. For example, the first ‘summit’ of the kings of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in Konghelle (Kungälv) in 1101 takes the form of such a comparison in the saga accounts.5 Because of its rather variable context, course, and outcome, the mannjafnað (“men-even-ing” from jafn “even, equal”) can hardly be called a ‘ritual,’ but it is certainly one of the conventional means of staging agonistic tensions. Thus Eystein says in the opening of his mannjafnað with his brother Sigurð: “It has often been customary while drinking for men to make a comparison of men, and so I would have it now.”6 At this point, the brothers’ shared rule has already been one long contest for a decade and half (a third brother and co-king, Óláf, has died shortly before). So it appears in Snorri’s Magnússona saga, and so it must also have appeared 2 Von See, Altnordische Rechtswörter (1964), 242–48, views jafnaðr as “the typical Norse concept of justice.” Among its etymological counterparts are Middle Low Saxon eveninge, Latin aequitas, Gothic ibnassus. Its typical use is ‘making even’ the shares of an inheritance and, by extension, reaching ‘equitable’ settlements by arbitrage. Cf. Marcel M.H. Bax and Tineke Padmos, “Senna–Mannjafnaðr,” in EMSc 571ff., with further references; Marcel M.H. Bax and Tineke Padmos, “Verbal Dueling” (1983), 149–74; Swenson, Performing Definitions (1991), 49ff.—I agree with reservations raised by Bax/Padmos over the generic distinction between senna (‘dispute’) and the actual ‘comparison of men,’ whose principal features are considered the essential equality of opponents and the rule that the speaker’s individual remarks refer only to themselves, thus precluding direct insults against one’s opponent. The source term mannjafnað (jafn adj. “equal, the same; equal birth”; jafna v. “level; compare, equate”) already implies the element of parity. 3 Saxo v, 3,17; the most in-depth analysis remains Svennung, “Eriks und Götvaras Wortstreit” (1942). 4 Cf. Ong, Fighting for Life (1981) (methodologically based on findings from the present day); Clover, “Unferþ Episode” (1980) (on Beowulf); Parks, Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative (1990). 5 MsB c. 15f. 6 Mss c. 21: “Sá ǫlsiðr hefir opt verit, at menn taka sér jafnaðarmenn. Vill ek hér svá láta vera.”

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to his contemporaries, considering the pair’s diverging but complementary styles of rule. Over twenty chapters in Heimskringla, Sigurð is built up as darkhaired, powerfully built, and taciturn, a stern protector of the law and attentive to its form and custom, in contrast to Eystein, a mid-sized, light-haired, blueeyed gifted speaker and scholar, who was popular on all sides. A fraternal war, such as had already threatened to break out in Norway on several occasions in the past and would become the norm over the following century, is expected at any moment, but this is precisely what does not happen: the dissimilar brothers, who sometimes come close to war in the saga narrative maintain their tension throughout a quarter of a century. Naturally, mannjafnað begins at birth. According to Snorri the two brothers’ father, King Magnús Barelegs (r. 1093–1103), at the time of his ‘marriage’ to Margrét, the daughter of the Swedish king Ingi, had previously had some children that are named: a son of his was called Eystein, and his mother was of low rank. A second was called Sigurð, and he was a winter younger. His mother was called Þóra. The third was called Óláf, and he was by far the youngest. His mother was Sigríð, daughter of Saxi in Vík, a noble person in Trøndelag. She was the king’s frilla.7 The king’s (at least) four women are placed in a social continuum reminiscent of Saxo’s treatment of Erik Ejegod’s women discussed in Chapter 1. At one end, the nameless woman of “low rank,” at the other, the magnate’s daughter who had previously claimed the first place and who was now being replaced by the Swedish princess—without this granting the latter a different status besides her prominence (hann fekk Margrétar dróttningar “he received of queen Margrét’s”). That is already something, even if it is not ‘marriage.’ We have seen that in the case of Jón Loptsson, whose mother Þóra was another of Magnús’s children, and his heirs, the women seemingly owed their eminence to their sons, whereas here the Swedish “queen” (king’s daughter) Margrét assumed the leading position by virtue of her origin and political importance, even though she never had a son with King Magnús (after his death, she married the Danish 7 MsB c. 16: “En Magnús konungr átti áðr nǫkkur bǫrn, þau er nefnd eru. Eysteinn hét sonr hans, ok var hans móðerni lítit. Annarr hét Sigurðr, ok var hann vetri yngri. Þóra hét móðir hans. Óláfr hét inn þriði, ok var hann miklu yngstr. Móðir hans var Sigríð, dóttir Saxa í Vík, gǫfugs manns í Þrándheimi. Hon var friðla konungs.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 139. The bond with Margrét is denoted through the verb fá “get” + genitive ­(metonymically for the transfer of goods, conventionally understood as Muntehe), and her arrival from Sweden with an “honourable entourage” (“vegligt fǫruneyti”): the maximum effort is made, moving Margrét into first place in the relational framework of the king’s women.

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king Niels and then stood at the beginning of a relatively unsuccessful line of the royal house there), while all three named sons from other women jointly succeeded their father in Norway. This indicates that the saga provides a minimum catalogue here: as Þóra, the daughter married to the Oddaverjar, shows, King Magnús had an unspecified number of additional children and probably women beyond those “named” in later sagas.8 As things stand, one would in fact assume that of the three ruling sons of the king, it would be Óláf, the son of the magnate’s daughter, who outshone his two brothers from less prominent women. The opposite is the case. Although he died aged seventeen, old enough for the usual eulogies, his characterization is more colourless than any second-rate king in the Heimskringla. A few brief words describe Óláf as an affable friend of the people whose death was regretted to some extent; nothing is said about the deeds of his twelve-year reign. The situation is quite different with the two ‘lower’-born brothers. They advocate and practise different ‘styles of government,’ and at the end of their saga, we find it impossible to tell which style is preferable, or even which one Snorri wants us to prefer. We certainly cannot go by their respective origins: Sigurð is somewhat higher-born but younger than Eystein. Anyway Óláf the highestborn is also the least successful of the three; in fact, Snorri balances advantages and disadvantages so finely that there must be method in it: a mannjafnað only works when there are no handicaps either way. The great scene is set shortly after Óláf’s death. It takes place when the travelling kings cross paths: the pair are being entertained in farms situated close to one another, and a joint feast is inevitable. The atmosphere is tense (Snorri blames the bad beer), which provides Eystein, the more eloquent, with the pretext to force the situation and ask his famously silent brother to commence a “good-humoured conversation” (skemmtanarrœða) to improve the mood. Sigurð refuses point blank (“speak as much as you please, and let me say nothing for both of us!”) and then tries to evade Eystein’s ever more elaborate words by waiting it out. But when Eystein becomes directly offensive—“Now then, I call you, brother, my competitor (jafnaðarmann ‘the man I’ll be compared with’)!”—Sigurð no longer has a choice. The form of the mannjafnað requires that each allegation is accepted and then returned with greater intensity. Eystein makes the first move: the brothers are not only equal in rank and wealth, but also in terms of their origin and education (this claim would appear to contradict Snorri’s authorial statement discussed above, so it is interesting he lets his Eystein make it). According to the 8 The genealogical survey ii/3, in Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, vol. 3, Appendix, lists eight women.

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‘flyting’ convention, Sigurð cannot now simply assert the opposite, but must outdo Eystein: although a year younger, he regularly knocked down his elder when wrestling. The dialogue on children’s games continues for a few exchanges, but of course it is not ‘childish.’ Besides the fact that 13th-century saga audiences knew well enough that children’s games could be serious to the point of being lethal,9 the magi/úmagi gender binomial is transparent with a succinct sexual posture: there was a time when Eystein lay on his back before Sigurð. The undertone of sexualized aggression remains present. Some of the commonplaces of rulers’ qualities (íþróttir) are dealt with: rowing, skiing, but also physical size and beauty. In terms of more original content, when Eystein cites his legal knowledge and eloquence, Sigurð counters that he does not waste his time on legal tricks (lǫgprettir, with the nuance “deceit, guile”), and that fine words only have value if backed up; Eystein merely tells everyone what they want to hear. Eystein must not simply disagree but has to return the challenge with a vengeance: if it is the way of kings to want to please their petitioners, and if he can please everyone, that certainly suits him—Sigurð prefers to snub them all and let them expect the worst, but in that he can be counted upon. From here on, they argue with sharp words. Sigurð claims that his journey to Jerusalem—undertaken in coordination with Eystein, who temporarily ruled alone—has brought him fame “while you sat at home as your father’s daughter.” Eystein is defamed as unmanly, and everyone waits to see how Eystein will retaliate, all the more so because the fame of Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer (Jórsalfari) was indeed largely based on the fact that he was one of the first Northern European rulers to exploit the enormous habitual potential of crusading.10 By 1230 the requisite episodes had long become standardized: fighting with Muslims in the Mediterranean (Nordic cosmography makes them blámenn “blue men”), visiting the holy places, swimming across the Jordan (not much of a feat in fact but Northmen obviously envisaged the Jordan in terms of the width and currents of Scandinavian rivers), acquiring relics, and as grand finish, a sojourn in Constantinople, the Great City, receiving fantastic honours from the “king of the Greeks.” Eystein gives what he admits to be an answer he has worked out in advance: it had been, after all, he who had outfitted Sigurð for his journey as if he were a sister (the ‘unmanliness’ defamation is thus returned), and, besides, he built five new churches and a royal court, 9

10

Cf. the famous first homicide of the Icelandic saga hero Egil, aged seven, during a ball game (Egils saga c. 40). The child’s age is supposed to be indicative of the eminence of the later hero, much like his first composition of a skaldic stanza at the age of three. This assumes, however, that such events were deemed commonplace among older children. See most recently Krüger, “Rezeption von Pilgerreisen nordischer Herrscher” (2002); Etting, “Crusades, Pilgrimages” (2004).

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constructed a harbour, and secured waterways by building beacons “while you sent blue-men to the devil down there in Arabia, which I regard as of little use to our kingdom!”11 With this sober assessment everything has been said about both kings’ reigns, and the escalation enters the next round. Sigurð now declares that when he swam across the Jordan, he knotted a cloth into a bush, and spoke a verse (formáli) over it that would strike Eystein if he did not go there and untie the knot with his own hand. This is an open challenge, moreover one tinged with another sexual defamation,12 so Eystein now needs to land a blow himself: if he had only desired it, he could long ago have placed his own “knot” around the neck of his brother, who had returned from the East unaccompanied and powerless, and it would have been one that Sigurð could never untie. The silence which now falls begins to feel ominous. But Snorri comes with an anticlimax: the brothers part resentfully, “yet the peace between them lasted as long as both lived.” 3

Social Rhetoric: the Contest for Borghild í Dali

I have given some space to the kings’ mannjafnað to illustrate the extent to which the agonistic political discourse itself is sexually coloured, even when it is ostensibly about crusading or trade infrastructure. We may also assume that this colouring is reflected in political practice. In the chapters building up to the mannjafnað, Snorri and other kings’ sagas include the story of Borghild, daughter of the prosperous Óláf í Dali of Østfold, an “extraordinarily beautiful woman, wise and very knowledgeable.”13 We may be fairly optimistic about transmission since the royal brothers were the uncles of Jón Loptsson, with whom Snorri Sturluson grew up and who provided him with several eyewitness reports, so I shall regard the concatenation of events as basically factual.

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13

Mss c. 21: “… meðan þú brytjaðir blámenn fyrir fjándann á Serklandi. Ætla ek þat lítit gagn ríki váru.” On magic (seið), as is particularly characteristic of Odin in the mythological stories but is also practised by many people in the sagas (usually women), and its contact with the ‘open’ gender boundary, see Grambo, “Problemer knyttet til studiet av seid” (1991); Jochens, Images of Women (1996), 74; Strömbäck, Sejd och andra studier i nordisk själs­ uppfattning (2000) (contains Strömbäck’s 1935 dissertation and studies commenting on it); Solli, Seid (2002). Mss c. 19: “hon var kvinna fríðust ok vitr kona ok fróð mjǫk.”

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While King Eystein spends the winter in Viken (the Oslofjord region), Óláf í Dali moves into the royal residence of Borg (now Sarpsborg) with his family, possibly in the hope of increased proximity to the king in more ways than one; at any rate, his daughter was with the king so often that people began to talk. If Óláf í Dali had hoped for a royal grandson, he was disappointed; when Eystein moved north next year, his “conversations” (the standard euphemism in saga prose) with Borghild remained unfruitful. The following winter, it was King Sigurð who pitched his winter quarters in the region, some two hundred kilometres further south in his favourite town Konghelle. Meanwhile, “Borghild Óláfsdóttir heard people spoke evil about her and King Eystein, about their conversations and their friendship.” In other words, as King Sigurð assumed control over the region, it seemed prudent to have never been in a fruitless liaison with faraway Eystein. Apparently the situation was considered extremely serious. Borghild went to the central town of Borg “and fasted for the trial by iron, and carried the iron in this matter, and became wholly pure.”14 This, however, had the effect of focusing Sigurð’s attention on Borghild and made it impossible for him to ignore her further. Combined with Borghild’s evident bravery and already proven credentials as a king’s woman, the challenge was irresistible. “When King Sigurð heard the news, he rode to Óláf í Dali’s farm in a day, though it usually takes two days, and arrived that night. There, he took Borghild as his frilla and carried her away with him.”15 Sigurð’s approach in this matter is as different from that of his consensual, law-abiding brother Eystein as the rest of his reign. Once more, he proved himself to be just as harsh as Eystein accuses him of being in the mannjafnað cited above. His approach looks like a regular abduction: formally, the word used here, frillutak, is only the ‘technical term’ for establishing a relationship with a frilla, but it has the semantic nuance of ‘robbery’ in the sense of ‘action without the consent of relatives,’16 a nuance that is emphasized by the nocturnal intrusion. Sigurð also leaves no doubt about the state of things (unlike his brother, 14

Mss c. 19: “Borghildr Óláfsdóttir heyrði þann kvitt, at menn illmæltu þau Eystein konung um tal sitt ok vináttu. Þá fór hon til Borgar ok fastaði þar til járns ok bar járn fyrir mál þetta ok varð vel skír.”—The final adjective skír “clean” combines the literal sense (her wounds were clean) with the figurative (she was ‘cleansed of suspicion’). 15 Mss c. 19: “En er þetta spurði Sigurðr konungr, þá reið hann þat á einum degi, er miklar váru tvær dagleiðir, ok kom fram í Dali at Óláfs, var þar um nótt. Þá tók hann Borghildi frillutaki ok hafði hana brot með sér.” 16 Cf. Egils saga c. 56, where a litigant in the central legal dispute casts doubt on his opponent’s claims to inheritance by claiming that their mother was “seized and later taken as a frilla, and that without the consent of the relatives” (“hernumin en tekin síðan frillutaki, ok ekki at frændaráði”). It is not the form of the relationship but the way it came about that makes it lower status. See above, Chapter 2.

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who had left room for interpretation) but simply takes the girl with him. A son is born to them in due course and receives the royal name Magnús. Sigurð does not, however, send him to be raised with Borghild’s family, but instead to a magnate family on Bjarkey in northern Norway, not far from modern Tromsø, and thus as far away as possible from his maternal kin: again, he does everything to satisfy his reputation as a hardliner in the royal office. And yet this stylization does not completely cover the fact that the process may actually have been consensual, despite King Sigurð’s staging it as a ‘robbery.’ The reaction of Borghild and her family is not mentioned. In itself, this is no indicator one way or another, and is moreover not uncommon in the sagas, which tended to dispense with explicit commentary, preferring to incorporate the reaction in the plot. In fact, the story stops here: Borghild and her father do not appear again in the saga. The son Magnús is built up as the designated successor of Sigurð, who became sole ruler after Eystein’s death but soon found himself in competition with Harald gilli (Irish gille Críst “servant of Christ” for christicola), who arrived from Ireland and introduced himself as the son of Magnús Barelegs, alleging to have been fathered during Magnús’s last British campaign. After Sigurð’s death, a conflict broke out between Borghild’s son Magnús and the Irish pretender, which was won by the latter. Borghild’s brother Hákon Fauk remained with the captured Magnús to the end, as one of his last two followers: the consequences were dire for both. This may go some way towards indicating that Borghild was not in fact snatched away from her family; we might even speculate whether Sigurð’s arrival was not highly welcome. To allow the valuable son that the relationship produced to be raised in Norwegian Bjarkey, in one of the most powerful Norwegian chieftain’s houses, by a man who had proved to be a faithful companion of King Magnús Barelegs, may have meant not deprivation, but security and honour. And when, some twenty years later, we find Borghild’s brother as the last companion of Magnús, loser in the power struggle, we see the frilla’s son’s strongest support coming from his mother’s family. In other words, the family group had good reasons to stake a lot on Borghild’s royal son to assert its position which they owed to their proximity to the king, contrived, carefully and not without setbacks, through their daughter. However, the strategy of Borghild’s father Óláf í Dali could only succeed if, besides the prerequisites—periodic geographic proximity to the competing royal winter households, and, of course, a daughter suitable as a king’s woman— the agonistic mechanism could be counted on to work. It is only a slight exaggeration to state that the moment just one of the kings noticed Borghild, she was bound to be taken by one of them.

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Women in Mannjafnað

It is tempting to read an episode like this as just one of so many examples of the winner taking it all—a connection that might range from Troy and Plato through ancient and Byzantine narrative traditions to Montesquieu, not to speak of more recent instances.17 The Christian Middle Ages were certainly alive to the model: “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”18 This side of the ubiquitous rivalry of men over women, the Middle Ages have some famous stylizations of such rivalry: the lady as “prey” in the competition of landless knightly young men, be it in the game of courtly love or in the harsh reality of the frustrating hope of a wealthy heiress as a wife, is a wellknown figure of scholarship on chivalry and feudal society.19 Even if the woman is not the coveted prize in her own person—or enters into a system of substitution in such a curious fashion as in the tournament at the court of the counts of Champagne, where the ladies had to present a pike to the victor20— she is indispensable as a resonance body of great male deeds. Such rivalries are also present in the Latin North, for instance in an episode from Saxo about a Danish campaign against Sweden in around 1150: Two nobles were so seized by desire at the reports of a Swedish maiden that a fierce war of words broke out between them. The king claimed that the right to gift her in ‘marriage’ belonged to him, and promised to award this to whoever appeared the stronger after the conquest of Sweden. This promise provoked a great contest between the two rivals.21

17 Plato, Politeia v, 460b, on the necessity of giving the best girls to the best young men (the “guards”). According to Nicholas of Damascus (1st century b.c.), the Samnites, supposed to be descendants of the Spartans, had the custom of choosing the best youth each year, who then had first choice of girl, and so on. The theme would be taken up again in Constantine Porphyrogennetos’s collection (10th c.), and later by Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois viii, 16, as “Belle coûtume des Samnites.” 18 Hebr 12:1: “per patientiam curramus propositum nobis certamen.” 19 See the essential Georges Duby, “De l’amour que l’on dit courtois,” in Georges Duby, Mâle moyen âge (21990), 74–82. 20 Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal (1986), 59. 21 Saxo xiv, 11,3: “Duo quoque ex proceribus eius ad opinionem unius Suetice uirginis libidinis emulatione correpti magnis inter se iurgiis dissidere coeperunt. Cuius nuptias rex in beneficio suo reponere par estimans capta Suetia fortiori connubium pollicetur. Quo promisso libidinis emulis magnum uirtutis certamen ingessit.”

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The locus classicus for the ‘intrusion’ of women into the sphere of martial fame and competition is probably the account in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ­Historia regum Britannie of the witty (facetae) women who, standing on the wall, watched the martial games of the knights, “who for the sake of their love grow ever nobler.”22 In a study on the apostrophes for women in skaldic poetry, the American Norse scholar Roberta Frank has pointed out that this episode from the founding text of high medieval Arthurian literature is indeed early in a Western European context but that the literary figuration of female spectators or even umpires in the great deeds of men starts at least a century earlier in skaldic poetry.23 We thus encounter here early evidence for women playing a central role in the staging of politically relevant agons. These deeds need not be warlike in a strict sense. In the sixty-five stanzas in the most prestigious of all skaldic metres, the dróttkvætt (“lord’s verse”) which contain a direct address to one or more women, the formal addressees are told, among other things, about a lucrative haul of herring or a successfully mastered shipwreck. This only appears strange until we remember the íþrótt catalogues, which included quite practical skills for overcoming serious emergencies in Northern ecological conditions, such as an acute famine. What mattered was that such acts (and their translation into well-wrought words) also entered the competition. The observing women were probably so well suited to be referees because they themselves were not involved in it. Unlike, say, the envois of courtly poetry, these verses are not ‘addressed’ to any particular woman. The salutation usually occurs by means of customary kennings for women such as “goddess of beer” or “tree of gold rings,” rarely simply as “woman,” “girl,” and occasionally collectively: “The proud women should look out of the houses quickly, they will see nothing but our dust cloud.” Such collective addresses are directed at society at large as represented by its women. To modify a well-known theorem of gender studies, it is as though the masculine deeds were being reported indirectly through ‘the female gaze’ in order to be credited to the account of the respective hero. (Of course, the actual community which produced and consumed dróttkvætt verses was very much a male one, but not exclusively so.24)

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Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britannie c. 157 (in Faral, ed., La légende arthuri­ enne, vol. 3 [1929], 63–303): “milites pro amore illarum nobiliores.” Frank, “Why Skalds Address Women” (1990); cf. Frank, Old Norse Court Poetry (1978). Fidjestøl, “Ut no glitter” (1976), considers this phenomenon a residue of former invocations of protective deities in battle (valkyries, etc.) that had faded into a literary convention, and does not envisage any social relevance. Cf. Lindow, “Riddles, Kennings” (1975); Ballif Straubhaar, “Ambiguously Gendered” (2002).

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The primary extra-textual addressees of these verses are, of course, their male recipients—but there were others too. Women can only be plausibly written into literature as a “supervisory body for safeguarding male standards”25 if they were supposed to perform a similar function in reality. Taken to its extremes, theirs is the function of the “whetter,” the woman who reminds ‘her’ men of unfulfilled duties of vengeance, using words or gestures of exquisite ingenuity, occasionally to the point of rekindling a conflict when all the men involved are willing to compromise.26 Carol Clover and Else Mundal in particular have convincingly argued for the plausibility of the ‘whetting’ role for women in actual society.27 According to them, women had the role of vicariously formulating general opinion about the actions—or lack of action—of individual men. The appeal to women in a dróttkvætt that narrated prestigious deeds was the verbalized form of such assessment.28 Now these are not actually polygynous situations—even when a man such as Sighvat Þórðarson, confidant of Saint Olav, calls upon the women of the whole episcopal town of Skara in his ‘Verses on a Journey to the East’ (Austrfararvísur), which recount a daring diplomatic mission to the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung. Yet the role of women in assessing the agon adds to the pithiness of situations where the agon does directly involve women. In his competition with his brother Eystein, King Sigurð had to be careful to succeed in acquiring Borghild, not only in front of his brother and all their followers, but also in front of Borghild herself and the group she stood for.29 Lack of success could have serious consequences and at times called for elaborate balancing acts. Certainly, Eystein was not explicitly charged with indecision over Borghild. Yet despite all the balance in the discussion of ‘good’ kingship in the subsequent mannjafnað, where Eystein is indeed given credit for his infrastructure measures, after his death in the sickbed the balance sheet 25 Frank, “Why Skalds Address Women” (1990), 75. 26 Heller, Literarische Darstellung (1958). 27 Mundal, “Kvinnebiletet” (1982); Mundal, “Position of Women” (1994); Clover, “Hildi­gunnr’s Lament” (1986). Jenny Jochens’s reservations (cf. Jochens, “Medieval Icelandic Heroine” [1986]; Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society [1995]) are not altogether convincing; cf. Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005). 28 Even if one were inclined, following Rolf Heller and Jenny Jochens (though not Else Mundal and Carol Clover), to be cautious about the ‘reality’ of female judgements, the argument remains valid, for to express deeds in noble verses and thereby turn to the widest possible audience of competitors does indeed mean literarization—and there can be no doubt as to the social potency of such an extensive and varied literature which almost always takes the same theme. 29 For Icelandic conflicts over frillur with a fatal outcome for one of the men, see Agnes Arnórsdóttir, Kvinner og “krigsmenn” (1990), 154.

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of the brother who loved consensus is paltry. Eystein’s last efforts to demonstrate excellence remained fruitless: he had a warship built and magnificently decorated after the dimensions of the unsurpassed Long Serpent on which Óláf Tryggvason had sailed in his legendary final battle in 995, and constructed ship sheds on a large scale in Nidaros. Yet he never took the new ship out of his new harbour—an elegant simile to sum up his reign. Eystein’s kingship was also lacking in heirs. Not least because of his approach to Borghild, he was one of only a very small number of Norwegian kings to leave no offspring: a dead branch on the trunk of Harald Fairhair. With skilful decency, Snorri says that his death was lamented like that of Magnús the Good in 1047:30 that son of a concubine (and Saint Olav) had also distinguished himself through goodness, died relatively early, and left no heir—except, that is, for a half-brother and co-king, namely Harald Hardrada, the former leader of the Byzantine Varangian Guard, who bears a striking resemblance to Eystein’s surviving half-brother Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer, albeit he surpassed even Sigurð both in terms of severity and Mediterranean lustre. And both fathered abundant royal offspring. 5

Renegotiating Status Loss i: Saint Olav’s Lover

Not even the future royal saint, Óláf Haraldsson, was exempt from paying the price of failure in the competition for a woman. Clearly the customary candour about polygyny became a little trickier when the subject was Norway’s rex per­ petuus. Snorri Sturluson, who composed the most important sagas on Saint Olav,31 is radical: Saint Olav, whose saga alone runs to a third of the overall length of Heimskringla (which contains sixteen individual sagas), is the only king who is barely polygynous. Certainly, Snorri is obliged to mention two women, the prestigious Swedish princess Ástríð and the “king’s handmaid” Álfhild, indispensable as the mother of his only son, but that is where he stops. By contrast, several other sagas about Olav contain more women. An outstanding one is Steinvǫr, a woman with whom the young Óláf Haraldsson had a relationship before his time in England with Cnut the Great and his own subsequent seizure of power in Norway (c.1013/15). It has the merit of appearing in several skaldic stanzas attributed to Óláf and thus apparently belonging 30 31

Mss c. 23. Snorri’s so-called ‘separate’ or ‘independent’ saga about Olav (Saga Olafs konungs hins helga) provides the basis for the abridged version, which occupies the middle section of Heimskringla.

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to the oldest tradition.32 Several versions of the prose commentary recount how Steinvǫr, after Óláf’s departure, became the wife of Þórvarð, a wealthy man in Sunnmøre on the northwestern coast of Norway, and how Óláf, having returned and become king of Norway, rejects his shipmates’ proposal to pay a visit to his former lover. In Óláf’s long song praising his own part of the conquest of London in 1013—which incidentally is also addressed to a “woman” in the manner discussed above33—Steinvǫr is mentioned by name and subsequently becomes a stock element of the heroic journey which will win Óláf his royal power. However, this also established as a fact that Óláf had not been able to hold on to Steinvǫr when he left Norway, or win her back when returned. Óláf’s stanzas and the commentary on them in the later sagas hint at the social cost of defeat. Indeed they are measures for damage containment: despite everything, Óláf must get the last word on the successful competitor. On the one hand, he already does this in his song of praise about his feats of arms in London, by contrasting his own deeds—wholly in the form of an attack as part of an exchange of insults in verse (senna)—with the inactivity of Steinvǫr’s husband Þórvarð: “That warrior does not redden a sword in the morning!”34 The attack on the unwarlike, idle man—in itself abuse that comes close to constituting níð, slander through words—conceals an innuendo which gives the questioning of his rival’s masculinity its sting. In multiple places the song turns to talk of war, women, and early mornings: sometimes the “talkative” man, who has “taken care” of a girl, rushes into battle at dawn, sometimes women see (or experience) reddened swords on the banks of the Thames in the morning: the imagery conveys the equation of conflict and sexuality.

32 33

34

Mundal, “Heilagmann” (1984), argues convincingly on textual-strategic grounds for the authenticity of the Steinvǫr stanzas, which have occasionally been dismissed as a late addition inspired by ‘courtly love.’ Legendarische Saga, ed. Anne Heinrichs et al. (1982), 48–53; the apostrophes are directed to ilm “woman,” mær vitr “smart girl,” Hlǫkk horna “valkyrie of the drinking horns,” among others. The addressees are not identical with the lover, who is identified with a transparent pseudonym (Grjótvǫr < grjót “pebble” as opposed to stein “stone”). Legendarische Saga, ed. Anne Heinrichs et al. (1982), 48–53, stanza 10: “Ryðr æigi sa svæigir / sara lauk i are / hinn er Griotvarrar (i) giæter / Gunnborz firir Stað norðan.” Literally: “the shield-shaker [= warrior] who protected ‘Grjótvǫr’ north of Stad [the Norwegian northwestern cape] does not redden the wound-leek [=sword] early in the morning.” The half-verse is placed parenthetically in the description of a dawn attack on the Thames bridge.—On the special significance of the leek, whose metaphorical associations were already quite transparent (“a centerpiece of the regeneration of Odin as a mystery of polytheistic religion”) in the 13th-century runic formulas and the creation and fertility myths, see Lamm et al., “Der Brakteat des Jahrhunderts” (2000), 28ff.

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Óláf expresses this in a verse that caused such headaches for high medieval commentators that some modern researchers, baffled, missed the point.35 This lausavísa (“loose stanza”) is placed in the saga text as follows: Óláf, now king of Norway, travels northwards along the coast with his ship. Cape Stad, a difficult waterway even in good weather, is carefully circumnavigated; Steinvǫr lives on her husband’s farm a little to the north. His fellow travellers ask the king slyly (með gamni “in jest,” one version says) whether the king would like to visit her. Given the circumstances, this is quite a bitter provocation: it was already bad enough when in England Óláf got the news through a merchant that another man had got hold of Steinvǫr; to remind him of it in front of the whole crew of armed men is the kind of speech which provokes action (eggjan), which it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to refuse. King Óláf manages though, replying with a stanza: “It is now more difficult than before to sail around Stad to my gold-adorned woman—I yearn for her—for now, warrior, a barrier has been poured across the front of the entrance to the harbour into which I was accustomed to sail.”36 The allusion is manifestly not to a landslide that had made a formerly safe anchorage unusable, as some modern commentators have assumed. The sexual reading of the metaphor, obvious enough to us, caused some embarrassment to thirteenth-century saga writers who had to comment on the saintly king’s níð poetry about his former lover.37 Around 1220/1230, Styrmir Kárason piously interprets the king’s words: “I will not go ashore here now, for it is more fitting for me to do God’s will than to live by my evil desires.”38 Plain abstinence, however edifying, was not sufficient; Saint Olav was not Saint Louis. Therefore, the commentator must add a scriptural allusion to how the king here fights “manfully” against the “incitement” of the “foe” and defeats him;39 indeed the Bergsbók version uses the same word—eggjan—for diabolical temptation that the sagas conventionally use for a provocation of the kind voiced by Óláf’s companion, asking whether the king would like to “anchor” 35 On the following, see Mundal, “Heilagmann” (1984). 36 Skj i, 221; the translation smoothes out the kennings, and follows both Finnur Jónsson and Ernst Albin Kock, the second translator of the skaldic corpus, who often diverges from Jónsson. After Mundal, “Heilagmann” (1984), 54. 37 Styrmis Olavssaga: vinkona (~ amica); Bergsbók: “er hann lagdi elsku a.” 38 “Eigi skal ek nu her vndir land leggia sagdi konungr. af þui at mer somir meirr at gera vilia guds hellr enn lifua eftir minni fyst rangri.”—Bergsbók, a composite manuscript created before 1400, amplifies piously: “rather than always focusing on the evil desires of my body and carnality” (“en ganga fram j ollum hlvtvm epter ravngvm girndum mins likama ok holldzins fvstvm”). 39 “… hversu karlmannlega hann mundi strida sinum uvinvm”; cf. 1 Cor. 16:13: “vigilate, state in fide, viriliter agite et confortamini.”

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with his former woman. It is the devil who incites Óláf to action through the mouth of his joking comrades, and it is notoriously easy to yield to him. In this moment, a true hero is therefore one who “manfully” (karlmannlega) refuses the challenge. Whatever induced the historical late Viking Age chief Óláf Haraldsson to back down we can only guess. Insofar as any details are known about the balance of power around 1015/17, it appears he won important allies in both Rogaland (southwestern Norway) as well as in Trøndelag and Hålogaland (northern Norway), but not in the intermediate coastal regions. Thus near Cape Stad he would have found himself in an area without support, perhaps reason enough to let the occasion slip by. Even a question of ‘honour,’ of reputation and renown does not compel an agonist into an automatism process. That day in 1015 Óláf Haraldsson may have decided, on consideration, that the risk was too great. But now that his itinerary leads past Steinvǫr’s harbour, he cannot simply sail on; some form of reply is required. This takes the form of a níð stanza, a sexual insult.40 We should not underestimate its impact and dismiss it as a somewhat helpless, defiant gesture, for—setting aside questions about belief in the effectiveness of the numinous powers invested in skaldic verse—insults of this kind were considered to be most severe forms of attack, punishable by law and practice.41 Whether it was enough to impress Óláf’s entourage—and the wider public to which the episode and stanza became known—we do not know. Regardless, the king subsequently ruled for more than ten years with some success. Yet two centuries later, saga writers still considered it necessary to absolve their hero from the suspicion of weakness. The argument that ‘resisting temptation means showing true strength’ is recited with conspicuous effort and, most notably, adapted to the terminology of the customary competitions: “King Óláf often entered into physical battles here on earth, yet more often he engaged foes spiritually; and just as he defeated his enemies physically, more often he conquered the unclean spirit in the spiritual holmgang”—the true duel according to the battleground demarcated beforehand. The king becomes “God’s 40

41

The precise aim of the insult that Steinvǫr was now useless for “anchoring” anyway is unclear and maybe also unimportant; the general meaning is: ‘While real men fight, you’re just at home in bed, yielding to every conceivable carnal pleasure; accordingly, you are disqualified as a competitor and no longer someone I need to consider. So I can carry on my way.’ Sleeping with a woman, hardly suitable for defaming someone as unmanly in most societies, can brand a man as completely ‘powerless,’ that is, indiscriminate and inactive. See, in summary, Meulengracht Sørensen, Norrønt nid (1980); on the stanzas about women (mansǫngvar), see Jochens, “From Libel to Lament” (1992).

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champion” (Guðs kappi) in the sense of a judicial duelist and drawn into the semantic field kapp- that we have already come across with Jón Loptsson and which characterizes the mentality of making an agon out of every conceivable thing. The thirteenth-century editors of the sagas hoped to reinterpret Olav’s restraint as a manly victory. As suggested earlier, Snorri Sturluson was not convinced. He prefer to omit the episode altogether, which meant he had to cut out any reference to Steinvǫr from his portrayal of Óláf’s campaign in England, even the verses about the capture of London, which ought to have been highly welcome to him as a skaldic (and therefore valuable) source. For this reason, it appears to me mistaken to accept with Sverre Bagge that Snorri omitted the figure of Steinvǫr because it was “without political relevance”:42 her relationship with the young Óláf may have been without consequences, but the competitive situation in which Óláf found himself on her account was obviously not. But the fact that this altogether minor episode had the potential, almost two centuries later, to create headaches among those whose secular and spiritual self-conception was invested in the rex perpetuus hints at the significance the competition for Borghild—and many others—must have had for those directly involved in it. There was little room left for personal preferences: even the companion of a winter residence was a ‘political affair.’ 6

The Women’s Agon

And the women? We have seen Borghild and her willingness to clear her reputation (and thus, in a political stylization, her continued availability) by undergoing a truth test that required great courage. After she followed King Sigurð, we do not meet her again, but learn that she bore him a son who became king: Magnús ‘the Blind’ (r. 1130–39). Perhaps she lived to see her son captured, blinded, mutilated, and castrated by his rival for kingship, Harald gilli, the professed king’s son who had come from Ireland, after her own brother had been killed on the spot. In any case, we can assume that like her family, she remained close to the king all her life. How many of Sigurð’s ‘co-wives’ she had to contend 42 Bagge, Society and Politics (1991), 292. Rather, I suspect that Snorri felt Óláf’s prudent but perhaps less than impressive backing off was incompatible with ‘his’ report of a swift and ruthless campaign. In contrast to the ‘hagiographical’ sagas about Olav from around 1200, Snorri’s prospective saint completely withdraws behind the forceful, sometimes unduly hard Viking king, so that unlike them he could not even refer to Olav’s triumph over the tempter.

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with we do not know—and nor, therefore, do we know how many found themselves pushed aside by the birth of Borghild’s son. Only one other woman is reported for Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer: Malmfrið, whom he ‘married.’43 She ‘only’ bore him a daughter, Kristín: it was she who later gave her son Magnús Erlingsson his questionable claim to the throne which Magnús’ father and the archbishop tried to help along through consecration and coronation (see Chapter 1). Malmfrið’s significance is made clear by the reference to her relatives, which directly follows the Borghild episode: she was the granddaughter of both the last Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson and the Swedish king Ingi, daughter of the Novgorod prince Mstislav (r. 1125–32), related by marriage via her sister to Cnut Lavard in Denmark and so to the royal line of the Valdemars. After Sigurð’s death Malmfrið appears to have remained in Norway. It is perhaps possible to infer the relationship between her and Borghild, king’s widow and king’s mother, from the tensions reported from the same constellation after the death of Saint Olav. The quarrel between the two women at the court of the newly established son of Olav, Magnús, expressed through questions of seating arrangements and tone of speech, is reported by skaldic verse as an object of general interest around 1035/40.44 The competition became yet fiercer when several women had sons capable of succeeding. The most famous case concerns the women of Cnut the Great: Emma, widow of Cnut’s luckless Anglo-Saxon predecessor Æthelred, whom he married after completing the conquest of England, primarily for her ties to the Norman ruling family, and who, according to the Encomium Emmae reginae, had previously sought to ensure that their children would enjoy an exclusive right to succeed;45 and, besides her, Ælfgifu the daughter of a prosperous magnate from the Danelaw who had marriage connections with Denmark.46 There is nothing ‘second-rank’ about Ælfgifu, however insistently Emma had her denigrated as a nameless concubina in the Encomium Emma reginae. As regent she was considerably more independent politically than the regina Emma, using her sons as viceroys in Cnut’s sphere of influence among the Baltic Slavs and in Norway, and after Cnut’s death in 1035, she launched her son Harold with great success while Emma found only regional support. The unsuccessful 43 44 45 46

Mss c. 20: fekk “get” + genitive. MsG c. 8; 10; see above, Chapter 1. Gesta Cnutonis regis/Encomium Emmae reginae (in: sm, vol. 2, 375–426) ii 17f. Her mother bore the Nordic name Wulfrun; for details and further references cf. Campbell, “Queen Emma and Ælfgifu” (1971); Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983); Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997); Stafford, “The Powers of the Queen” (1997), 3–26.

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queen, who had previously conspired in favour of her sons to no avail (while her sons from her marriage with Æthelred, including the later Edward the Confessor, seemed completely out of the game), subsequently saw herself robbed of the crown jewels by Ælfgifu’s son Harold and sent into exile in Flanders. Only Harold’s early death brought Emma’s son to the English throne and the king’s mother back to England. We lose track of Ælfgifu around this time. There is no direct report of the two women together during Cnut’s lifetime or after. Yet in view of the systematic defamation of Ælfgifu in the Encomium Emmae reginae, probably dating to shortly after 1040, in which Harold is described, among other things, as the ailing concubine’s changeling son of a household slave,47 there is no doubt about the bitterness of the rivalry between the two women: first over influence over the man they shared, and then as each attempted to assert their own son as successor. Moreover, Emma and Ælfgifu were seemingly the only women capable of competing in this agon, which does not mean that Cnut the Great did not entertain relationships with other women still. But whether motherhood alone provided the two of them with this unique advantage, or whether it was more a result of the political weight of their ties and origins, remains unclear, along with how the women otherwise fought over the position of themselves and their children. For the everyday life ordinariness of such an agon we have an instructive episode from Snorri, concerning the winter camp of Harald gilli (the successful pretender from Ireland who became the downfall of Borghild’s son Magnús) in Bergen 1136: On St Lucia’s Day, two men sat at the king’s table in the evening talking, and one said to the king, “Lord, now you must decide a bet for us, which we have sealed with two barrels of honey. I say that tonight you will lie with Queen Ingiríð, your wife, and he says that you will lie with Þóra Guthormsdóttir.” Laughing, the king replied, “You will likely lose your wager.”48 47 Encomium iii 1: “eligentes sibi in regem quendam Haroldum, quem esse filium falsa aestimatione asseritur cuiusdam eiusdem regis Cnutonis concubinae; plurimorum vero assertio eundum Haroldum perhibet furtim fuisse subreptum paturienti ancillae, inpositum autem camerae languentis concubinae. Quod veratius credi potest.”—In some redactions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later in Florence of Worcester, a craftsman and a priest are identified as the fathers of Ælfgifu’s sons, for similar reasons; see below, Chapter 4. 48 MsBHG c. 15: “Lúcíumessu at kveldi tǫluðusk við tveir menn, er þar sátu. Mælti annar til konungs: ‘Herra, nú hǫfum vit skotit órskurð þrætu okkarrar til yðarra órslita, ok hǫfum vit veðjat ask hunangs hvárr okkarr. Ek segi þat, at þér munuð liggja í nótt hjá Ingiríði

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This short exchange of words would probably not have been newsworthy if nothing significant had come of it: even though at night the guards stood at the queen’s chamber as always, nonetheless the two gambling companions were well aware that the king slept elsewhere. The information obtained with this trick was pivotal to the success of the assassination of Harald gilli that night. Dazed from many drinks, the king mumbled in his sleep, “You are treating me quite roughly, Þóra!” as the first blows struck him. “They treat you harshly who wish you more harm than I!” she cried, but it was too late.49 The murder plan had rested on the fact that the king’s sexual behaviour was a common topic of conversation, and it was the subject of jest among his retinue to dicuss which woman was currently in favour or disfavour.50 One may find the king’s answer to his tablemate’s bet a little strained, and in this respect, the episode also casts a light on the pressure on the man at the centre moderating the agon of his women in full view of his retinue. One could ask the king this question and he had to answer it: the competition of the king’s women was as open as that of the kings for a woman who had become the object of agonistic efforts. There is little room for private passion in this environment.

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dróttningu, konu þinni, en hann segir, at þér munuð liggja hjá Þóru Guthormsdóttur.’ Þá svaraði konungr hlæjandi …: ‘Eigi muntu hljóta veðféit.’” MsBHG c. 16: “en konungr hafði drukkinn niðr lagzk ok svaf fast ok vaknaði við þat, er menn vágu at honum, ok mælti í óvitinu: ‘Sárt býr þú nú við mik, Þóra!’ Hon hljóp upp við ok mælti: ‘Þeir búa sárt við þik, er verr vilja þér en ek.’ Lét Haraldr konungr þar líf sitt.”— Interestingly, the coup only half succeeded. Although the man behind it, Harald’s alleged half-brother Sigurð slembi, son of another of Magnús Barelegs’ many women, already had a part of the royal retinue behind him, his proclamation foundered the next morning, as the people of Bergen were unwilling to acclaim a fratricide: “And if he was not your brother, then your descent gives you no claim to the royal title!” As indicated, I assume that the information in the kings’ sagas is largely factual when dealing with the 12th century or important details, such as the death of a king. The essential features of the episode must have been widely known; cf. Saxo’s account for 1200 (xiv, 29,2: “Haraldum amandi gratia noctu castra latenter egressum in amplexu pellicis per insidias interfecit”). Even if we were to cast doubt on the episode, the fact remains that the murder plan was plausible in the context of the saga narrative of the early 13th century, which only defers the argument a little.

Chapter 4

The Expressive Aspect 1

Political Relations?

To say that the union of king Æthelred the Unready with Emma, sister of ­Richard ii, in 1002, served to establish or consolidate long-term good relations between Wessex and the princes of Rouen would be something like a truism to scholars and students of history today. So well-established is the knowledge of the symbolic character of a marriage in old European societies, so well-worn Maussian ideas on the ‘exchange of women,’ that an elaborate justification for interpreting this marriage ‘politically’ is quite unnecessary. On the other hand, if anyone claimed that Æthelred married Emma because he thought her irrestistably attractive, they would find themselves—to say the least—with a considerable burden of proof. The evidence would also be difficult to furnish. There are no indications of Æthelred’s feelings for Emma, or vice versa, while the alliance between Wessex and Rouen proved consequential and enduring. Similarly, Emma’s second union with Cnut the Great (r. 1014/16–35), the victorious successor of her first husband in England, can also be understood in light of his efforts to achieve a good relationship with Normandy. Emma’s rival for power, influence, and the succession in England, the concubina Ælfgifu ‘of Northampton’ might be understood in a quite similar light. She came from the Anglo-Danish elite of the Danelaw; her father, Earl Ælfhelm, held an important position in Northumbria and the East Midlands.1 This would seem sufficient to make plausible that the conqueror wished to negotiate backing in this region by way of striking an alliance with the daughter of a foremost leader. If this was his aim, he succeeded. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that after Cnut’s death in 1035 “almost all thegns north of the Thames” 1 For “Ælfgiue Ælfelmes dohtor ealdormannes” see asc E, s.a. 1036, for Ælfhelm’s violent death and the blinding of his sons by King Æthelred, see esp. s.a. 1006. Cf. Campbell, “Queen Emma and Ælfgifu” (1971), 69. Timothy Bolton’s excellent study “Ælfgifu of Northampton: Cnut the Great’s ‘Other Woman,’” Nottingham Medieval Studies 51 (2007), 247–68, was published shortly after completion of this book. As with other subsequent publications, I refrain from ‘working them into’ this version so as not to give the impression of nicing up my previous results ex post. I am, however, happy to direct readers to Bolton’s study for Ælfgifu’s background and career. Bolton’s assessment of her relationship with Cnut’s is similar to mine, though we were unaware of each other’s work at the time.

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supported Harold, his son with Ælfgifu, as his successor, while his son with Emma was only backed by the West Saxon heartland of the old dynasty.2 Hence both of Cnut’s marriages, the ‘correct’ one with the Norman and the other with the Anglo-Dane who was later slandered by her enemies as a “concubine,” permit a ‘political’ interpretation, they express something—as had Emma’s earlier union with Æthelred. How do we interpret them today? Do we assume that since Ælfgifu ‘was’ a concubine, Cnut’s designs on her were personal? At this stage of the study, that sounds like a rhetorical question. Yet Saxo says that Cnut, “enchanted by the extraordinary beauty of the woman, demanded intercourse with her.”3 ­Although Saxo does comment on the political advantage of the connection in the same sentence,4 he nonetheless presents feminine beauty and male pleasure as the driving forces of a relationship that would lead to the birth of a regent of Norway and the Wends and a king of Denmark and England. It is much the same in the most influential modern accounts: the ‘concubines,’ conceived in contrast to the ‘wife,’ served sexual gratification or the fulfillment of emotional needs, at best self-stylization in the sense of what has been here termed the ‘habitual aspect’ of polygyny. The “attractive young women” appear as a kind of collective which tends to have an unlimited number of members, who are serially or simultaneously allocated to a man, and generally appear indistinguishable and interchangeable: they are “the shoal from which the prince fished partners, with whom he whiled away his time.”5 Even in studies explicitly ­devoted to the theme of ‘women and politics in the Middle Ages,’ concubinage is understood as merely a “sexual relationship” as opposed to a marriage, a “social affair” (Pauline Stafford), or dismissed out of hand: “There is certainly no reason to seek political motives for amorous adventures of this kind, ­neither 2 asc E (F), s.a. 1035: “mæst ealle þa þegenas be norðan Temes 7 þa liðsmen on Lunden.” A century later, in the radically united England of the Norman period, William of Malmesbury offered an ‘ethnicized’ explanation: the Danes and the Londoners, already set apart by the barbarorum mores they had picked up during regular trade contacts, went in for Harald, while all “Englishmen” wanted a son from Emma’s first or second marriage. 3 Saxo x, 14,5: “eximia matrone specie delectatus stupro petiit.” 4 Here, the otherwise unsubstantiated earlier relationship between Ælfgifu/Alwiva and Óláf Haraldsson, which prompts Óláf, already frustrated with Cnut in other matters, to leave England; see above, Chapter 1. 5 Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 277. Similarly, 277: “…while he [Richard i, duke of Normandy], widower of the empress, sought his pleasure here and there”; 271: “the beautiful ‘girlfriends,’ with which princes amused themselves”; similarly Duby, “Die Ehe in der Gesellschaft des hohen Mittelalters,” in Duby, Frau ohne Stimme (1989), 7–31; Duby, “Was weiß man über die Liebe im Frankreich des 12. Jahrhunderts?” in Duby, Frau ohne Stimme (1989), 33–51.

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for the solid nor the less permanent” (Sverre Bagge).6 Voices which at least differentiate between the operation, meaning, and purpose of polygyny to some ­degree remain rare. In passing, Régine Le Jan mentions “sexual greed, the display of wealth and power, the attempt to increase connections and secure succession”7—thus the ‘generative’ and the ‘habitual’ aspect. The women, however, remain a collective: in principle these goals can be realized with any woman. In short, what matters is that the prince is visibly with many women, not who these women are. If this were the whole story, medieval writers could have kept themselves to remarks that more or less follow the Solomonic model. They could ascribe a multitudo feminarum (mǫrg konur, moutes femes) to this or that great man, explicitly blaming or implicitly admiring him for it, and perhaps representing his polygynous practices as governed by the contingencies of personal experience. Such remarks are in fact frequent; in most regions of Europe they are the customary or even the only way in which magnate polygyny is ever recorded. But there are other, more detailed traditions; they name those involved, perhaps their social background, the origins and course of the relationship, opinions and reactions of the participants and observers. In the Scandinavian material, such precision is frequent; in other parts of Europe, it is rare or wholly absent. However, the comparative study must not be content with establishing this imbalance and drawing conclusions from it. It also may reckon with the possibility, indeed make it a working hypothesis, that the verbosity of one region also has something to say about another, more silent one. Perhaps the sources are silent in this matter because there is nothing to report; but perhaps they also refrain from reporting on what could be easily observed and could have been communicated. We already learn far more about the Norwegian kings and Icelandic chiefs in terms of the ‘aspects’ treated thus far, the questions of offspring, stylization, competition, victory and defeat, than we do about the West or East Frankish rulers and the nobles of Burgundy, the Rhineland, or Flanders. The difference becomes very striking when it comes to the individuation of the participants:

6 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983), 67; more nuanced in Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997), 73ff; Bagge, “Kvinner i politikken” (1989), 23: “hverken de faste eller de mer [sic] permanente” (neither the solid nor the more [sic] permanent relationships)—I take this contradiction to be an editorial error and have corrected it in the quotation in the text. In quoting only Stafford and Bagge, leading experts on English and Norwegian history respectively, I do not aim at singling out these two for criticism but let them stand as prominent examples of a widely held view. 7 Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir (1995), 272.

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when the focus of the narrative is not on a great man’s polygynous behaviour but rather on the women concerned. Here, the Northern sources are unparalleled in Europe in their prosopographical precision. From Gregory of Tours to Jan Długosz, chroniclers report at best the name of a princely concubine, loosely outline their origins, and perhaps name the father—a name that generally does not lead anywhere, as it is mentioned nowhere else. The course of the relationship is reported, if at all, anecdotally rather than systematically, and the anecdotes largely function according to the overall rhetorical system. There are two ways of understanding this difference. Either we understand it as genre-related—in which case the social phenomena described in them may well have existed elsewhere but have not been recorded in the absence of a written tradition corresponding to the sagas. Or we explain it as an extratextual difference—in which case other regions where the written narratives do not mention or describe “concubines,” polygyny took different forms or was absent as a socio-political phenomenon. As always, the sensible path lies somewhere golden in the middle: it would probably be as much of a mistake to assume that Jón Loptsson’s dispute with Bishop Þorlák could have taken place in the dioceses of Worms or Orléans just as it did in the diocese of Skálholt, as it would be to claim that the Capetian Louis vii or the Salian Henry iii never had occasion to frequent a chamber other than that of their respective queens, although no source reports anything of the jests and bets their followers made about it. For my part, I feel it is a safe bet to assume a number of basic similarities in the socioeconomic framework of the political cultures between the Arctic Circle and the northern fringe of the Mediterranean Basin.8 My hypothesis would be that sexual behaviour is shaped by these similarities if not likenesses. As all hypotheses, this is a tentative one, and by stressing ‘basic’ similarities I do not wish to give the impression that I consider the differences between, say, eleventhcentury Wessex or Flanders and Norway or Denmark ephemeral. But neither are they on different continents, or even climate zones (not entirely anyway). I will return to the subject of transferability in the last two chapters and I am introducing it here mainly in order to be able to widen the perspective a little beyond the Norwegian and Icelandic focus by drawing England in. The ‘expressive’ aspect to be discussed in this chapter concerns the question of whether there really is “no reason to seek political motives for amorous adventures of this kind,” and to ask whether and to what extent the multitudo feminarum mattered, who the women were, and how such unions were formed. If Cnut had 8 For this view cf. Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute” (1985/2006), esp. 247.

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merely been looking for a charming new bedfellow, her name would hardly have entered the chronicles of England, Denmark, and Norway—at most she would have remained the kind of footnote Emma’s party sought to reduce her to: quaedam concubina regis.9 2

What Ælfgifu Means

Ælfgifu of Northampton is a good case in point. It makes perfect sense to us why so much more is known about her than all Cnut the Great’s other concubinae.10 Her political role and significance is so obvious that Pauline Stafford approaches Cnut the Great’s relationship with Emma and Ælfgifu as one of the few actual cases of royal bigamy in the High Middle Ages.11 Thus she resists the suggestion of the sources which would make the latter a concubine, but provokes the question of why Cnut the Great stopped at bigamy. The answer can only point to the contingent circumstances of his reign: as far as we know, he had only two such important women at his side, but nothing automatically precludes the possibility of there being a third or a fourth, only their sons did not become kings. In the English sources of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the binomy uxor/ concubina, to which Emma’s encomiast attached such value for tactical motives, finds almost no support. Although the terminology of ‘concubinage’ was known, it was used in a seemingly arbitrary way. However, it appears arbitrary only if we expect it to mirror a categorial classification. So it is initially striking to find beneath thirty names in the witness list of a donation of King Edmund (r. 939–46) to the cathedral church of Rochester: Ego Ælfgifu concubina regis affui.12 The presence of “the king’s bedfellow” among those whose names give 9

Encomium Emmae reginae iii, 1: “just one of the king’s concubines.”—William of Malmesbury (gra ii, 179) even resorts to the classics to differentiate Emma from a successful rival in the time of Æthelred, “Erat iste [King Edmund Ironside] non ex Emma natus sed ex quadam alia, quam fama obscura recondit” (cf. Vergil, Aeneid v, 302). In this case, the manipulation of rumour was successful: we know nothing about Edmund’s ignoble mother, “hidden by her lack of renown.” 10 Adam of Bremen labels the mother of Cnut’s sons Sven and Harold as concubina, without mentioning her name (ii, 74). The sagas do identify her by name, giving her no epithet other than “mother of Sven/Harold.” On her policies as regent in Vinðland (the coastal regions of the Polabian Slavs) and in Norway, especially her role in the translation of the relics of Saint Olav, see OsH cc. 239, 243. 11 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983), 73. 12 S 514, in Charters of Rochester, ed. Campbell (1973), no. 28.—This Ælfgifu is unrelated to the two Ælfgifus around King Cnut three generations later; like many compounds of ælf“auspicious power,” the name is widespread.

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particular significance to this gift in nomine Dei summi to Saint Andrew, patron of the church of Rochester, is further underlined by her placement: her name is after the king, his brother and mother expressing their approval, the two archbishops, and six bishops, but before five duces and 13 ministri, the king’s lay entourage. The witness list was prepared with great care,13 and we must take seriously the positioning of the concubina at some distance behind king’s brother and mother, but above all the lay magnates. This distance, however, also precludes seeing in the term concubina only the literal meaning of ‘the one who shares the king’s bed,’ that is, his spouse, for she would have stood alongside the king’s brother and mother, before the clergy. Now, the concubina acting as a witness here is not just anyone, but a queen who would be buried in the West Saxon royal abbey of Shaftesbury, and at whose grave “countless miracles” soon occurred.14 In his chronicle, written thirty years later, the royal kinsman, ealdorman, and diplomat Æthelweard calls her coniux regis and ­regina.15 The choice of words may be prompted by both the context and the ­circumstances—Æthelweard was editing the genealogical memory of the Essen abbess Mathilde. A later document of King Æthelred likewise speaks of Ælfgifu as the deceased coniux of King Edmund.16 Conversely, royal documents often refer to well-established queens of the eleventh century, such as Emma of Normandy—wife first of Æthelred, then Cnut—and Eadgyth, the wife of Edward the Confessor (who styled himself as living in monastically inspired celibacy)17 as mea collaterana “the woman by my side” rather than coniux or uxor, and equip them with a certain imprecision which even encompasses the Garden of Eden.18 Elsewhere, however, it may be politically advisable not only to call Emma nobilissima coniunx, but to also add 13

The verbs allocated to the various witnesses attest to this: the archbishop of Canterbury responsible “signs,” the archbishop of York and the other bishops “agree,” and the two women—and only they—“are present” (affui). 14 Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England (1984), 65, merely states that in one case, a concubina regis has witnessed a document and skips over her identity.—I am very grateful to the late Peter Sawyer, then at Uppsala, for his help and advice on this point. 15 Æthelweard, Chronicon, iv, 6. 16 S 850 (confirmation of donations to Shaftesbury Abbey): “coniugi sue Algife.” 17 William of Malmesbury, gra ii, 198: “Illud celeberrime fertur, numquam illum cuiusquam mulieris contubernio pudicitiam lesisse.” 18 Thus S 923 and S 943 (Æthelred 1011 and 1006/11); S 957 (donation from Cnut and Emma to Evesham Abbey, 1020): collaterana and regina; S 1011 (Edward 1045): Emma as “mater regis,” Eadgyth as “collaterana regis”; different again in S 950 (donation by Cnut to Canterbury Cathedral, 1018): “petitione coniugis ac reginae Ælfgyfe” (= Emma, who bore this royal name in England—though one wonders, of course). In several almost identical arengae, Eve is referred to as Adam’s collaterana during the paradisiacal state: S 788 (972); S 812 (around 970); S 948 (around 1015). DuCange, s.v. lateranus, merely mentions the meaning of “agnatic relatives,” which is not relevant here. Certainly, Eve has been the

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an impressive courtship story.19 Conceptual history reaches its limits here:20 apparently Edmund’s saintly concubina and coniux, Æthelred’s and Cnut’s collaterana and regina, and Ælfgifu of Northampton, concubina, king’s mother, and regent of Norway, move in a field of open relational positioning, undefined by concepts, within which it is for them and their relatives, friends, and faithful to secure the maximum achievable in any situation. In 1014, the Danish king Cnut succeeded his father Sven Forkbeard to complete the conquest of England. His willingness to cooperate with the key forces in those parts of the island where he could hope for support could hardly have been signalled more aptly than by entering into a relationship with the daughter of Ealdorman Ælfhelm and his Danish wife Wulfrun, prosperous landowners in Northumberland and the East Midlands. The magnate for his part, along with the group he represented, showed himself to be a follower of the new king by surrendering or gifting his daughter to the conqueror—and nothing entitles us to assume that Ælfgifu herself did not support this intention along with the other central figures of this party. However, this tells us nothing about the sexual element so central in modern research, or indeed any affective reactions of the two individuals, Ælfgifu and Cnut. We can at least get an idea of the physical appearance of Cnut (albeit from a very late source): unusually large build, hooked nose, fair skin, thick hair (he was twenty) and “not very clever,” as Knýtlinga saga noted with characteristic lack of décor.21 We know nothing at all about Ælfgifu’s appearance. Perhaps together the two enjoyed what the sources of the time call dilectio or ást; their two sons are born around ten years apart. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the skalds, and the later histories and sagas instead report Ælfgifu’s origin

19

20

21

central antecedent of Christian monogamy since Tertullian; however, a certain ambivalence is undeniable, just as concubina and collaterana are structurally not far apart. Thus the Encomium Emmae reginae (ii, 16), where, after the completing the conquest of England, Cnut sends messengers to every country to find a bride; only the virgo Emma, holding back at first, is good enough for him. Her decade-and-a-half-long marriage to King Æthelred is passed over both textually and terminologically. Clunies Ross, “Concubinage” (1985), 19ff., points out that in the older Anglo-Saxon laws, the word field hæman “have intercourse” and the corresponding noun hæmed are applied equally to all forms of sexual unions. This changes towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, especially in clerical texts (Blickling homilies, martyrologies), where unrihthæmed “improper intercourse” is opposed to (riht)æw “(right) marriage” (for legitimum connubium). This shifts results in hæmed tending towards designating all forms of canonically or  moral-theologically felonious relations, even without prefixed qualifications such as u­ nriht-. However, these changes were not immediately reflected in practice, or in the diplomatic and historiographical material. KnS c. 20.

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(while the Encomium Emmae reginae, in the service of her rival, so pronouncedly does not) because this was politically significant: not only ex post as mother of successful sons, but on her own account. The political significance of her relationship with Cnut ‘the Mighty’ may already have been just as evident to contemporaries as it was to later chroniclers, their audiences, and modern scholarship. It was understood what Cnut wanted to say by taking Ælfgifu, and what Ælfgifu and her group meant when they let Cnut take her. 3

Polygyny as a Semantic System

This ‘expressive’ aspect of polygyny is certainly the most multi-faceted of the five suggested in this study. For the multiformity of medieval polygyny allowed its actors to use it as a system of signs that made ‘statements’ possible: quite diverse statements according to time, place, context (so many ‘telling’ details), audiences and, of course, the persons involved. For the ‘generative,’ the ‘habitual,’ the ‘agonistic’ aspects of polygyny as presented in the preceding chapters we still view, beyond the many individual instances, common concerns: succession, stylization, competition. This is not the case when we consider medieval polygyny under its ‘expressive’ aspect, that is, as a system of social semantics by means of which actors are able make statements. When Cnut established his connection with Ælfgifu, he was in the first place signalling something to her, along with her group (her house, her ‘network’), and—as the news spread—other English magnates, the country’s clerics, his own followers, perhaps his relatives, allies, and opponents in Denmark. But the news was certainly also for the Æthelred’s widow and mother of Cnut’s rival for the rule of England, precisely that Emma whom he would ‘marry’ some time later, and for her brother, the Norman duke. Other recipients are conceivable— and the meaning of the statement changed depending on whom it reached. For Emma, the aggressive nuance may have been paramount: Cnut showed his willingness to establish a ruling line anchored in the northeast of the country and was prepared to risk a fundamental conflict with the Wessex dynasty. (His association with Emma in 1017, however, indicated an attempt at amicable settlement with the supporters of the defeated old line and their Norman and Flemish allies.) For the powerful in Northumbria and Mercia, whose distance from the Wessex dynasty had been repeatedly proved and could be expected to continue, it may have signified the shift in the regional balance of power and the promise of future proximity to the king that registered; in Denmark, a relocation of the centre of power to England may have been construed as the most important part of the statement.

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Ælfgifu is certainly a special case because of her outstanding importance; few other royal concubinae have their own article in the Lexikon des Mittelalters.22 But she is not unique. To remain in eleventh-century England, we may consider the women of Harold Godwinson, the most powerful magnate of the country during the rule of Edward the Confessor, and briefly his successor in 1066. There is Eadgifu ‘the beautiful’ (pulchra, faira, bella), with whom he was probably associated for some twenty years. She was not quite of the same rank as Eadgyth, widow of the Welsh prince Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, defeated and killed by Harold, who then took her as his ‘wife’ in 1063 in a situation reminiscent of Cnut and Emma. While we do not know anything about Eadgifu pulchra’s family background, her considerable property—she was the greatest female landowner in England besides the wives of King Edward and Earl Godwine—suggests that his connection with her may have been of great importance for the rising Harold Godwinson. If we look at the regional distribution of Eadgifu’s goods, the parallel to Cnut’s rise around 1015 is even more striking. Her own (probably familial) centre of gravity was in southeastern Northumbria and eastern Mercia; much like the foreign pretender Cnut, the West Saxon Harold established support in the Danelaw through this relationship, or conversely, Eadgifu and her group made use of the Godwinson on the rise. Eadgifu’s possessions in southern England, on the other hand, indicate transference through Harold;23 though no sources provide direct information, it can nonetheless be assumed that the geography of power played at least some role in endowing this king’s woman, however faira. 4

Domestic and Foreign Policy: Harald Hardrada’s Women

Another case in point is Harold Godwinson’s unfortunate opponent at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066, King Harald ‘Hard-Ruler’ (harðráði) of Norway (r. 1046–66), who almost became king of England as well. The halfbrother of (the later saint) Óláf had in his youth been among the losers in the Norwegian power struggles of 1030 and spent many years in Byzantium with the ‘Varangians.’ Here he learnt advanced politics and Mediterranean military techniques, and here he also acquired the material and symbolic capital that would bring him to power. In 1046, when he dared to seize the Norwegian kingship, he brought with him the daughter of Prince Jaroslav, Elizabeth/Ellisif, from Novgorod/Hólmgarð. “He got exactly the kind of relations he wanted,” 22 23

N[icholas] P. Brooks, “Ælfgifu v. Northampton,” LdM, vol. 1, Sp. 179f. I here follow Meyer’s account, in Meyer, “Women’s Estates” (1991), esp. 116–25.

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commented his court skald, Stúf the Blind: “plenty of gold and a princess.”24 Along with a remarkable recklessness in changing sides (Harald initially supported the Danish king Sven Estridsen in Sven’s fight against Harald’s own nephew, Magnús, forcing the latter to accept a division of power) and good luck (Magnús died in an accident the following year), they made him sole ruler of Norway. To secure this, a further step appeared appropriate to him: King Harald received (fekk) Þorberg Árnason’s daughter Þóra the next winter after King Magnús the Good died. They had two sons. The elder was called Magnús and the second Óláf. King Harald and Queen Ellisif had two daughters. One was called Maria and the other Ingigerð.25 The political value of that union was obvious: Þóra’s father Þorberg was one of the seven sons of Árni of the Arnmœðlingar family group, who played the leading role in Trøndelag and Møre. He was based at Giske, near modern Ålesund, and thus controlled the waterway between Trondheim Fjord and southern Norway; his prosperous brothers were more powerful still in rich Trøndelag. At the end of Saint Óláf’s reign they had chosen differently and faced one another at the Battle of Stiklestad—Þorberg was among those who had fought there on the side of King Óláf’s young half-brother Harald. The brother, who at that point had been one of the winners, meanwhile found himself fleeing the country as a result of the restoration of 1035, as doing otherwise would have been detrimental to the other sons of Árni, who enjoyed the favour of Óláf’s son Magnús, the winner of the moment. And Þorberg’s wife—the mother of Þóra—was a daughter of the southwestern Norwegian chief Erling Skjálgsson, who had spent his entire life dealing with several successive rulers in his region on an equal footing, and whose infamous murder following his capture by Óláf Haraldsson had initiated the latter’s fall. As with King Cnut with Ælfgifu and (presumably) Earl Harold with Eadgifu in England, Harald Hardrada, the new man in the saddle, brought about both tangible and symbolic ‘expressive’ effects through his connection with the magnate’s daughter. Tangibly, he could now address the powerful Finn Árnason, the brother of his new wife’s father, as

24 25

HsS c. 17, stanza 89: “Mægð gat allvaldr Egða / ógnar mildr, þás vildi: / gulls tók gumna spjalli / gnótt ok bragnings dóttur.” HsS c. 33: “Haraldr konungr fekk Þóru, dóttur Þorbergs Árnasonar, inn næsta vetr eptir en Magnús konungr inn góði andaðisk. Þau áttu tvá sonu. Hét inn ellri Magnús, en annarr Óláfr. Haraldr konungr ok Ellisif dróttning áttu dœtr tvær. Hét ǫnnur Máría, en ǫnnur Ingigerðr.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 66, slightly adapted.

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“brother-in-law” and could expect appropriate solidarity.26 The ‘expressive’ was the signal to the Rogaland supporters of the still unatoned Erling Skjálgsson, to whose descendants the new king was now also related by marriage. The sons that came out of this union, Magnús and Óláf, were designated as future kings through their names, and went on to become kings—as did Ælfgifu’s sons with Cnut in their day.27 In one respect, the ‘case’ of Harald Sigurðarson differs from the ‘cases’ of Cnut the Great and Harold Godwinson. The latters’ exogamous marriages to princely daughters postdated their relationships with daughters of regionally important magnates, and, so to speak, represented the coronation and safeguarding of the power they had gained. For Harald of Norway, the opposite is true: his relationship with Elizabeth and what she stood for—besides “much gold” this was above all the alliance with the Rus’, which already Harald’s two predecessors would not have been able to rule without—belonged to his rise; the chief’s daughter, socially a shade lower, sealed his victory. Once again the vocabulary indicates no difference: Prince Jaroslav “gifted” (gipti) his daughter to Harald; Harald “received” (fekk) Þóra, who is also referred to as his “woman” (kona). All words denote the same kind of ‘high-end’ consensual form of attachment.28 The only difference lies in the epithet dróttning “lady,” which is ascribed to Elizabeth much as the word regina was attributed to Emma: her seniority is that of her father over Þóra’s father. Harald retained both women throughout the entirety of his twenty-year reign. In the autumn of 1066, when he set out to invade England, Þóra and her elder son Magnús remained in Norway, while Elizabeth and the daughters accompanied him and took up residence in the Orkneys, which were allied with Harald. Harald also did not hesitate to make the close cohabitation of the two women even closer by initiating a connection that was rather risky, at least in canonical terms (Snorri reported it around 1230, unflinching and without comment): Þóra’s brother Eystein—one of King Harald’s most faithful followers and his standard-bearer at the Battle of Stamford Bridge—was to marry Mary, 26

27 28

Cf. HsS c. 45, where his mediation saves King Harald from a desperate political impasse: “Mágr, ek vil nú senda þik…” Finn Árnason profited from the relationship in his turn when, after unsuccessfully switching sides, he was captured by Harald and released into exile; HsS c. 66. Of course, the same is true for most princely marriages in the Middle Ages, however, only one major signal of this kind was possible at any one time, while polygyny allowed far greater flexibility. The names of Elizabeth’s daughters, Maria and Ingigerð, express the symbolic capital their father had gained by virtue of their birth, namely, the link with Byzantium and with the Swedish kings, from whom Elizabeth’s mother was descended. HsH cc. 17; 33; 45.

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one of Harald’s daughters with Elizabeth.29 Þóra’s sister, Jórunn, was “given in marriage” to a companion from Harald’s Byzantine adventures, Úlf Óspáksson, when Harald made him his marshal. “He and King Harald loved each other very much,”30 and the marriage to the bigamously structured royal family was, alongside the conferral of rank, a suitable sign of their love. Like King Harald’s other brother-in-law (and his daughter’s groom), Þóra’s brother Eystein, Úlf the marshal was, until his death shortly before the 1066 invasion, “the most dependable and a man most attached to his king.”31 The cases of the (at least) bigamous rulers of the eleventh century considered here show no legal-lexical distinctions between the women involved, making it very difficult to apply the classificatory labels ‘wife’ and ‘concubine’ to, respectively, Emma and Elizabeth, and Ælfgifu and Þóra, apart from a very slight difference in their respective fathers’ positions. Of course it is generally assumed32 that a concubine is of lower status than the man who takes her, in contrast to the at least equal and often higher-ranking wife. This assumption, however, is on the one hand circular, on the other useless: if the discussion is about princely polygyny, by definition almost all conceivable relationships that the man could enter into are hypogynous in nature; other than Emma and Elizabeth, kings Cnut and Harald could hardly find women of the same ‘rank’ (if we indeed believe that ‘rank’ was something basically static, which we might be well-advised not to do in discussing high medieval societies).33 Ælfgifu of Northampton or Þóra Þorbergsdóttir were scarcely ‘below’ them; one may indeed wonder whether either woman was much impressed by the pedigree of her upstart king and spouse. Considering the lack of a formalized ‘class’ structure among the high medieval aristocracy and, in particular, the fact that kings often owed their position 29

30 31 32 33

HsS c. 87: “Þá hafði Haraldr konungr heitit honum Máríu, dóttur sinni.” Our modern language, unfamiliar with bigamy, lacks the vocabulary for this degree of kinship; Maria is a kind of step-niece for Eystein.—The death of both men in the battle prevented the plan from being executed, or possibly failing. HsS c. 37: “Úlfr Óspaksson var með Haraldi konungi í miklum kærleikum. … Haraldr … gipti honum Jórunni Þorbergsdóttur, systur Þóru, er Haraldr konungr átti.” HsS c. 79 (King Harald’s eulogy for Úlf): “dyggvastr ok dróttinhollastr.” Cf. Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001); Ebel, Konkubinat (1993); Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? (2002); H[ermann] Reichert, “Nebenfrau,” in rga, vol. 12 (2002), 18–31, and many others. Strictly speaking, Emma, daughter of Norman Prince Richard i, is not even of the same rank as Cnut, the king’s son, but there is little doubt that her contemporaries regarded her as such—even if the sagas attach importance to the formal subordination of the Rúðujarlar, the “jarls of Rouen,” who stemmed from a Norwegian magnate family, to the Norwegian kings.

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to personal luck and skill rather than their family background,34 the politicalrepresentational value of a ruler’s various women may have fluctuated a good deal according to the situation. There is no evidence that Þóra and Elizabeth faced similar status disputes to those reported about the seating arrangements of Saint Óláf’s two women (cf. Chapter 1), and it is more likely that by and large they maintained the balance between them. With social nuances as minor as  those between Ælfgifu and Emma or Þóra and Elizabeth, it is possible—­ notwithstanding the fact that Cnut the Great and Harald Hardrada probably had further relationships with various women—to speak of bigamy, assuming the word is meant as a descriptive term (as opposed to a criminal offence in contemporary church law). Alternatively, we might use the ethnological concept of ‘co-wives’35 to a polygamous situation in which there are indeed social distinctions within the group of women. On the other hand, the difference between these magnates’ daughters and the servant or peasant women with whom their husbands also associated for a greater or lesser period of time, is so substantial as to preclude subsuming them all under a category such as ‘concubine.’ If the word at least has an indisputable, if limited, meaning in canon law and moral theology, it does not really work well as a descriptive term for both Ælfgifu and the mill maid. A man could establish relationships with higher and  lower-placed women, and different social situations led to different modalities.36 The formation of alliances through the handover of women is perhaps the most obvious mode of operation of polygynous practice in its ‘expressive’ aspect. Auður Magnúsdóttir’s study of Icelandic politics and frilla relationships is so well documented and so convincingly demonstrates the functioning of chiefly polygyny from the point of view of local alliances that there is no need  to go further into this ‘function.’37 However, with the greatest respect, I would here like to formulate an objection. It does not apply to the study and 34

35 36 37

For example, Harald ‘Hard-Ruler’ was the son of wealthy free farmers (whose implausible descent from Harald Fairhair was surely written up after the fact, cf. Chapter 1) and built his claim to the throne solely on the fact that he was a maternal half-brother of Saint Óláf. Repeated mention has been made in this study of the long line of gifted upstarts who laid claim to the Norwegian royal title on the basis of a more or less plausible paternity claim, sometimes successfully. Cf. Bretschneider, Polygyny (1995), passim; White, “Re-Thinking Polygyny” (1988), 529–88. Two essential social criteria, the consent of the relatives and—connected to this—­ possible transfers of property, only rarely show up in the sources. In the cases under con­ sideration here, however, both clearly existed for the ‘concubines’ as much as for the ‘wives.’ Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, “Makt och kärlek” (1997); Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), esp. 72ff. (“vertical” relations in 13th-century Iceland, between territorial chiefs and farmers, who had a form of client relationship with them); Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och

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the findings of Auður Magnúsdóttir, but to a tendency that is perhaps stronger in its Scandinavian recipients than in Auður Magnúsdóttir’s own work:38 while the hypothesis ‘frilla relationships create alliances between families/factions’ is demonstrated convincingly, the fundamental identification of the sign (a frilla relationship) with the signified (an alliance between groups) precludes the possibility that polygynous relationships could generate different, possibly widely divergent statements—depending on a number of circumstances, such as the individuals involved, the manner in which the relationship came about, its duration and dissolution, the role of relatives and possible offspring, and so on—and that the actors knew perfectly well how ‘to set signs.’ In a word, we ought to reckon with social polysemy. By way of explanation, in what follows I take a look at around a dozen cases of polygyny for their expressive potential and the various ways the parties involved made use of them. This is quite an extensive series, which may strain the patience of the meticulous reader. It is necessary, however, for this book to provide them if the assertion, ‘Polygyny was, among other things, a sign system’ is to become more than just an assertion. If, according to the linguistic aphorism, a sign only has uses, not meaning, then as many uses as possible should be considered. Those offered here are in any case only a selection. 5

A Successful Takeover: Harald Hardrada and Þóra Þorbergsdóttir (1047)

When King Harald “took” Þóra Þorbergsdóttir in the summer of 1046 after his royal elevation, Harald, Þóra, her father, and her father’s brothers (the sons of  Árni) signalled their willingness to cooperate. The context in which this statement became significant was as follows: in 1035—after five years under Cnut the Great’s son Sven and his mother Ælfgifu of Northampton as regent—­ Magnús, son of Saint Óláf, had returned from exile in Rus’ and was generally accepted as king. At first, however, contrary to expectations, he pursued a confrontational course, which among other things forced Kálf (the son of Árni who had fought against King Óláf at Stiklestad, but had then backed Magnús’s return) into exile in England, changing course only after massive pressure from all sides. Against this backdrop, the alliance with the remaining sons of Árni makt (2000), esp. 173ff. (“horizontal” relations between different magnate groups in 12thcentury Denmark); summarized in Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), 132ff. 38 Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt (2000), 174; Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 81.

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only became all the more important. When, in turn, Óláf’s half-brother Harald came out of Rus’ and sought power, his relationship with Magnús remained unsettled, despite their common rule being agreed just in time. It is unclear whether Harald’s union with Þóra was initiated during Magnús’s lifetime (he suffered a fatal accident in the same year). If so, the sons present in the country may have seen this as guaranteeing the continuation of their close and amicable relations with the king, and perhaps encouraged the exiled brother Kálf to hope for a possible return;39 above all, however, King Magnús and his followers must have viewed the union as a successful attempt by Harald to break up and appropriate his nephew’s alliance system. But if the bond occurred chronologically after Magnús’s death, then no such aggressive statement is made, and it is mainly a question of signalling that the new sole ruler wished to take over the alliance system of his predecessor intact. Either way, much the same signal was sent to the southwestern region of Norway, Rogaland, where the party of Erling Skjálgsson, killed by Óláf’s supporters in 1028, remained alienated from Óláf’s successors. Since Þóra was a granddaughter of Erling through her mother (and niece of his surviving sons), Harald could not make a better choice to turn two potential opposition groups into “royal kinsmen,” and, more importantly, to communicate it to the whole Norwegian public in a way that provided for the dissemination of the message that this public knowledge imposed restrictions on the future actions of the two opposition groups. 6

The Near-Failure of a Party Formation: Eindriði Einarsson and Sigríð Erlingsdóttir (c.1023)

A look at a related source, the ‘Story of Eindriði and Erling’ (Eindriða þáttr ok Erlings) is included in a version of the saga of Saint Óláf,40 further shows how nuanced statements could be made through the shape and form of couple relationships. The time is 1023, the protagonists are Erling Skjálgsson, g­ randfather 39 40

Harald did indeed permit him to return; however, his death on one of Harald’s campaigns shortly after appeared so suspicious that it led to the break with Árni’s son Finn; see HsS cc. 51ff. Eindriða þáttr ok Erlings, which is preserved in the 14th-century composite manuscript Flateyjarbók, ed. Sigurður Nordal, vol. 2 (1944), 284–91. For a German translation, slightly abridged, see Norwegische Königsgeschichten, trans. by Niedner, vol. 1 (1925), 157–63, where the names of the protagonists are at times mixed up, which impairs understanding somewhat. Titlestad provides an assured account of its value as a source for the political situation around 1023—albeit not always the particulars—in Karmøy-konflikten (1996).

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of Þóra Þorbergsdóttir, brother-in-law and respected opponent of King Óláf Tryggvason (r. 995–1000), and the only remaining ‘autonomous’ rival to Óláf Haraldsson (later Saint Óláf, r. 1015–28/30), and Eindriði, son of chieftain Einar ‘Bowshaker,’41 the most powerful man in Trøndelag besides the sons of Árni, who are not mentioned in this story. The story goes as follows: Sigríð, daughter of Erling, was entrusted to be raised by one of her father’s followers, to whom King Óláf has given a new bailiwick in northern Norway. Sigríð, wanting to return home, sees her chance when one day a ship drops anchor. She begs the young shipmaster—Eindriði, the son of the Einar Bowshaker—to take her with him, and he agrees. Although the two youths pay careful attention to public propriety during the journey, Eindriði’s father Einar is worried about the affront to Sigríð’s family, and indeed Eindriði, who brings the girl to Erling Skjálgsson’s farm as promised, meets with harsh words on his arrival, and when he asserts that he has not approached the girl improperly, he is compelled to undertake a trial by iron. This, in turn, is taken as an affront by both Eindriði and his father (when he finds out). Thanks to the mediation of Sigríð’s brother, an armed clash is averted at the last moment, and instead Sigríð is formally ‘given’ to Eindriði. The key issue here is not whether every detail in the narrative is ‘factual evidence’ for the course of events in the 1023 conflict. That the narrative is at least questionable can be gauged by the fact that in Heimskringla Eindriði does indeed have a wife called Sigríð but she is the daughter of a rather second-rate landowner, while Erling’s daughter Sigríð is married to the brother of another northern Norwegian magnate, Þórir Hund, who like Erling opposed King Óláf Haraldsson. Thus in the narrative material as it circulated two or three centuries after the events, the allocation of the individual roles could vary, but putting antiquarian accuracy to one side, the story was nevertheless ‘true’: in all cases, it is about the most famous magnates who stood at a distance from or in opposition to King Óláf Haraldsson. What this story is about is the slow and halting development of a nationwide coalition against King Óláf, which would lead first to his overthrow and then to his death (and subsequent sainthood) in 1030 during his failed attempt to return. The negotiations were conducted in the idiom of polygyny, and it is this process which we will now look at.

41

Þambarskelfir (Saxo x, 12,4: “sagittarius Enarus”); on alternative explanations of his slightly obscure epithet, see Saltnessand, “Hva betyr tilnavnet Tambarskjelve?” (1968).

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The opening move is made by Eindriði, the chief’s son from Trøndelag. Divested of its almost romantic cladding,42 the episode reads as follows: he takes a ship to the unprotected place where he knows the daughter of Erling Skjálgsson of Rogaland to be, and ‘robs’ her. Whether or not this occurs with her consent is not a consideration according to the judgement of this environment,43 and the reaction of Eindriði’s father Einar Bowshaker, to whose seat, Gimsan in outer Trøndelag, Eindriði first travels with the girl, leaves no doubt about the extent of his bravado: “You aim high with your frillur, my son, now that Erling’s daughter is your frilla!”44 The problem is relational: the formerly more or less equal (and untested) relationship between the two chieftains, Einar in the Trøndelag and Erling in Rogaland, has become so unequal through Eindriði’s act that Erling has no choice but to accept the challenge and retaliate. It is pointless to speculate whether Einar Bowshaker,45 politically successful for decades under five different regimes, really had not known about his son’s plan in advance, whether he had second thoughts at the last moment, or whether he simply wanted things to look as though his son was acting with independence, for the fiction of Flateyjarbók’s narrative largely leaves Einar in the shade (Eindriði is forced by a headwind to enter Trondheim Fjord and repair his ship with his father). What is clear, however, is that Eindriði sets out again, this time to bring Sigríð back to her father: an aborted abduction. On Sola, Erling Skjálgsson’s base in southwestern Norway, near modern Stavanger, the stage is being set for a well-orchestrated confrontation. Sigríð is received, Eindriði is wordlessly feasted among armed men and then taken to his chamber, where he finds a woman already lying in bed: the frightened Sigríð. The impressive staging in front of a large audience (immediately afterwards, Erling Skjálgsson, who has not yet appeared, enters the chamber with his entourage) makes Eindriði a defendant. Although he solemnly asserted in the form of a skaldic stanza, that he had kept “all the girl’s limbs remote besides 42 43 44 45

When Eindriði initially asks the ‘hitchhiker’ Sigríð for her name, he is too busy loading his ship to hear her answer properly, and only repeats the question when they are already on the high seas; only then does the explosiveness of the situation dawn on him. Cf. the discussion above, Chapters 2 and 3; and the contemporary discussion of the parallel case in Egils saga (cc. 32ff.), where the girl’s consent is made explicit. Flateyjarbók c. 144: “Ekki hafi þér nú, frændi, lítit við um frillurnar, þar sem nú er dóttir Erlings frilla þín.” He began his ascent in alliance with the Jarls of Hlaðir, to whom he was related by marriage, then maintained a respectful distance from Óláf Haraldsson, managed to remain at sea during the critical months of Óláf’s fall, held his own with the representatives of Cnut the Great and Magnús the Good, and only finally fell victim to an attack by Harald Hardrada, together with his son.

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her mouth,”46 Erling refuses to accept these words and compels him to take a trial by iron, which he formally (and successfully) undergoes. That Eindriði, cleared of suspicion, now displays the behaviour of one who has been mortally offended, appears unmotivated to the modern reader. We should, however, recall that the situation in which he was coerced corresponds to the juridical construction called “self-judgement” (sjálfdœmi): one party is so weak that they leave it to the other side to pronounce the verdict. If the other side then exploits the situation to impose a maximum demand instead of demonstrating conciliation, as has happened here, this implies that they see themselves in full possession of power. The sagas label men who behave as Sigríð’s father Erling does ójafnaðarmenn, literally “un-even-men”: they let pure power shine through, instead of maintaining even the appearance of parity, thus leaving the other side with no option except to go all in, to victory or permanent defeat. They know in Sola what it would cost both sides if Eindriði, and inevitably his father, go all in—and who would be left laughing, namely King Óláf. ­Erling’s son Skjálg, the next-in-command as it were, and who has wisely kept, or been kept, in the background, now attempts to mediate. It soon becomes apparent that both sides are ready to back down, and realize that Eindriði must now retain Sigríð to compensate for “extortion and degradation.”47 But negotiating the actual terms proves very difficult: does Eindriði ask her father for her, does Skjálg assume responsibility for offering his sister, or does her father Erling ­offer her to Eindriði? Ultimately, they agree upon the last, most honorific ­option. Once the settlement is reached, the formal public transferral of Sigríð can take place, and Eindriði returns northward. On the way he comes across an impressive fleet headed by his father, who is already informed of the situation and has set out to “repay hot iron with cold.”48 Attempting to deescalate the situation, Eindriði describes the individual elements of the settlement point by point, but neither the initial monetary payment nor the transfer of Sigríð can at first dissuade his father from continuing 46 Skj i B 285: “Mér kom, mundar fúra, / meyjar hold í eyju, / fátt segir hit réttra, / fjarra allt nema varrar.” 47 Þrǫngving from þrǫng “cramped,” that is, the fact that Erling Eindriði has been crowded into a hopeless situation, losing the capacity to take the initiative (and so emasculating him, according to Clover’s theory of gender hierarchy); mœða, actually “debilitation, fatigue” (used in an unusual transitive construction here), which is done to Eindriði; svívirðing “shame-worth,” which—as Skjálg is saying—must be settled through an equivalent virðing “worth.” 48 “Þótt þú hafir heitt járn borit ok brennt hold þitt, þá munda ek vilja, at sumir bæri kalt járn í holdi sér.”

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his expedition; it is only when he learns that it has been Erling himself who has offered his daughter to Eindriði that Einar changes his mind. The fleet continues on, primarily to demonstrate to the Rogalanders that Erling has made a wise choice in compromising, but the signs now point towards an alliance rather than a conflict—the alliance, in fact, that will initiate King Óláf Haraldsson’s downfall. The episode provides evidence for two things. On the one hand, it shows how finely-tuned ‘statements’ could be made through the medium of polygynous practice.49 The same course of action generated different, even contradictory ‘statements’ depending on the actors and context; what began as a challenge and went on to be a failed attempt at confrontation turned into an alliance, which, however, elsewhere continued be understood as a conflict (by Einar Bowshaker, who had not kept abreast of the latest developments). Which interpretation prevailed could depend on fine details. On the other hand, the episode shows that ‘speech’ through the medium of polygynous practice was a very expedient form of communication. If the Middle Ages are a “gestural culture”50 then few other gestural processes are as suitable for underlining the significance of the messages made with them as those centred on the women of a group. This is perhaps especially true of a culture like the Nordic, which valued mastery in the epigrammatic rejoiner, and, at the same time, perfected an art of differentiated wordlessness that pushed comportamental stoicism to extremes,51 and in which the sharpest form of gestural expression was to do nothing at all (which inevitably meant that observing  those around you—the colour of their face or the swelling of the neck ­muscles—became an important survival technique). In such a culture, the further development of not only verbal and gestural but also practical sign systems is perhaps more to the fore than elsewhere; however, the possibility of 49

50 51

While only one woman is mentioned in this episode, it is certainly possible to pursue this thought and wonder whether there might be others besides Sigríð (this is made explicit by Einar Bowshaker talking to Eindriði of “your frillur”). Not even the formal “wedding” (brúðhlaup) in the end precludes competing relationships in the future, as King Harald’s example shows. Le Goff, La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (1964), 440. As seen, for example, in the striking description of Halldór Snorrason, one of Harald Hardrada’s companions to Byzantium (HsS c. 36): “He has been the one of the men that had been with him that was least taken aback by sudden events. Whether it was deadly danger or welcome news or whatever might turn up in the way of danger, then he was no happier and no sadder, he slept and drank and enjoyed food neither more nor less than was his custom.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 70, 71. The inculcation of this ideal is also served by the numerous (in-)famous quips at the death or mutilation of a friend or opponent; see Miller, “Emotions” (1992).

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semantizing polygyny results from the central importance of women for the group is certainly not confined to the saga North: all the participants and their audience knew that things had become serious when they came into play. Centuries later, when the episode of Eindriði and Sigríð had long become history, it remained a productive conceptual tool as a representation of the present. The kings’ sagas were current at a time when King Hákon Hákonarson, after eliminating almost all competing pretenders in an attempt to consolidate his sole rule, had to find an arrangement with the only remaining rival, Jarl or ‘Duke’ Skúli Bárðsson. The alliance held for a while, until tensions came to a head after a long period of uneasiness. According to the ‘contemporary sagas,’ these conflicts were also occasionally staged through polygynous practices.52 If the sagas are not just textbooks for future ‘politicians’ but, in a broader sense, interpretations of society’s current practices,53 then the tales about the eleventh century endowed the party struggles of the thirteenth century with a timeless but not ahistorical meaning. Eindriði’s journey with Sigríð, Harald Hardrada’s alliance with Þóra, and his foreign marriage with Elizabeth, stood ready to be used by the recipients and actors of later epochs in new contexts. 7

An ‘Unproductive’ Communication: Valdemar the Great and Helena Guttormsdatter (c.1200)

The ‘expressive’ aspect ought probably not to be read into every affair that we know about. When King Sigurð entered into a relationship with the singing mill maid, as short-lived as it was consequential, he obviously did not intend to signal anything in particular except his royal presence and his right to be received as a guest, with all that entailed. On the other hand, the ‘expressive’ aspect can occupy the foreground and push back all other nuances, indeed, an intended statement can become so dominant that it virtually stifles the dynamics of the semantic system. In 1204, the Danish magnate Esbern Snare died, as did his famous brother, Archbishop Absalon of Lund, both members of the Hvide family (or ‘collective’), who had been the most important basis for Valdemar i’s rise to become sole ruler. The Hvide collective’s alliance with the royal line of Cnut Lavard was almost familial: Valdemar was the foster brother 52

53

For instance, HsH cc. 192f.: One of Skúli’s reeves took the woman of a trusted follower of the king’s followers “by force” (tók konu nauðga). The king and duke acted equally outraged, but immediately afterwards, the king dispatched one of his followers, and several deaths ensued. For the first view, see Bagge, Society and Politics (1991), for the second, Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993).

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of Esbern and Absalon. Esbern now left his third wife, named Helena, a widow. She was a daughter of the Swedish jarl Guttorm, the godfather of Cnut (vi), the eldest son of Valdemar i and his co-regent. Immediately after Esbern’s death, the reigning king, Valdemar ii, took the widowed Helena as his frilla, before entering into a ‘dynastic’ marriage with Dragomira/Dagmar, the daughter of Otakar i of Bohemia, the following year.54 Formally, the case resembles that of the other bigamous kings examined here, with the one difference that the Valdemars in Denmark had introduced and rigorously implemented the principle of ‘legitimate birth’ as a prerequisite for succession to the throne. So Cnut, the son from Helena’s relationship with King Valdemar ii, had no chance of succeeding. But like his father’s ‘legitimate’ sons born after him, he was entrusted with goods, titles, and important political tasks, among others in the newly conquered Estonia.55 However, the context is substantially different. Valdemar ii’s association with the widow of his foster uncle did not bring him a badly needed alliance; rather, it is likely to be a consequence of an alliance that had already existed for decades. By entering into a kind of levirate concubinage, Valdemar ii was signalling, two years after his accession to the throne, that he was retaining the alliance system of his dynasty. Considered canonically, his relationship with Helena—who on the one hand was the daughter of his brother’s godfather and, on the other, the widow of his father’s foster brother—was as daring as the levirate marriage of the Old Covenant (Dt 25:5–10), prohibited by the New Covenant. However, there is no indication that any of this created problems with the church of Lund, though its new archbishop, Andreas Sunesen, made his mark around this time in the intellectual elaboration of the current canonical trends, including in sexual theology.56 It is unclear whether Helena remained in the vicinity of the king after he had married the Přemyslid princess,57 but the whole situation as well as her son’s prominent role makes it unlikely that it came to a form of repudiation. In this case, the reception of Valdemar ii’s relationship with Helena is clearly conditioned by the royal alliance system and semantically ‘unproductive’ insofar as there could hardly be any doubt 54 55 56 57

Cf. Hans Olrik, “Helene,” in Dansk biografisk Leksikon (1887–1905), vii 288f.; Kræmmer, Den Hvide klan (21999). On the career of Cnut Valdemarsen, see Chapter 1. See most recently, Nors, “Anders Sunesen” (1998). Helena is known to have donated a benefice to Linköping Cathedral in Östergötland, the region she originated from, and she may have returned there towards the end of her life. But it is unclear when this was, and also when her son Cnut was born. In 1219, he was old enough to be entrusted with the command in Estonia; thus we cannot rule out the possibility that he was conceived during Valdemar’s marriage to Dagmar.

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about this state of affairs. There is a certain correlation between the relatively strong systematization of the structure of dominion in the Valdemar period: there were no longer ‘open’ situations on a scale that called for constant negotiation between many actors—and their communication through a semantized system of practices—as there had been in Denmark until two generations earlier and was in Norway until around 1250. 8

Renegotiating Status Loss ii: the Bridal Journey of Óláf Haraldsson (c.1017)

Any account of the ‘expressive aspect’ of Northern European polygyny ‘at work’ can only be illustrative: the expressive possibilities are too diverse to undertake a comprehensive ‘grammar’ of this idiom. Looking at the bigamous kings of the eleventh century has already shown how the same actions could be nuanced to convey alliance, challenge, or threat to different beneficiaries. The story of Eindriði Einarsson and Erling Skjálgsson has shown the stages of the negotiating process and the reinterpretation of the narrative in its various historiographical permutations. A few more cases will further serve to illustrate the productivity of the ‘expressive’ aspect. What took place between Eindriði and Erling on the level of internal Norwegian magnates can also be observed in the ‘foreign’ relations between kings and kingdoms. The longest such episode in the sagas—it comprises twentyfive chapters of the story of Saint Óláf in the Heimskringla and is itself longer than most of the individual king’s sagas—recounts the king’s courtship of Ingigerð, daughter of the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung (‘Tax-King,’ r. c.980– 1022), in around 1017/19. According to the not entirely consistent testimony of Adam of Bremen and the kings’ sagas,58 Olof, lauded as the first Christianizing king in Svealand and Götaland, had an Abodrite woman who received the Nordic name Ástríð and was designated as his “wife” (Adam: uxor; legitima) and “lady, queen” (Snorri: dróttningin) respectively. They had a daughter and a son, Ingigerð and Anund, King Olof’s successor, who received the baptismal name Jacob. Besides, King Olof had a number of other children with a concubina

58

OsH cc. 69–93; Adam of Bremen ii, 39; 59; iii, 15; Cf. Alf Åberg, “De första sveakonungarna,” in Carlsson and Rosén, Den svenska historien, vol. 1 (1966), 191ff.—In order to distinguish more clearly, I use the Old Norse form for the Norwegian Óláf Haraldsson and the modern Swedish form for Olof ‘Tax-King’ (Skötkonung) < skattr ‘levy, tax, tribute; treasure, wealth.’

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(Adam)/friðla (Snorri), including the future King Emund and the daughter Ástríð. Adam, obliged to provide at least in principle a monogamous account of the ‘good’ King Olof, had good reasons to choose the mother of the ‘good’ successor Anund Jacob as uxor, which conveniently made the mother of the ‘bad’ Emund (who in Adam’s account does not lapse into paganism, but nonetheless gains a similarly sinister stature through his inclination towards Gniezno in ecclesiastical politics) the concubina. Snorri, following Adam, similarly declares the Slav princess to be a woman seized in war as a means of creating the rhetorically required distance between her and the queen, whom he identifies as Swedish.59 Snorri also supplies a background: the concubine, called Eðla (“lizard, adder”), was the daughter of a “Wendish jarl” (i.e. a prince of the Polabian or Pomeranian Slavs), who had been abducted in the course of an expedition (hertekin) and was called “the king’s handmaid” (konungs ambótt) like several other royal bedfellows who became mothers of kings (cf. Chapter 1). The rank and the origin of both women were therefore the same; the difference lies in the manner of their acquisition—as, respectively, the outcome of an agreement or the deployment of military superiority. The difference did not reflect on the children: both sons succeeded their father as kings in turn, and both daughters were given to neighbouring rulers: Ingigerð (daughter of the uxor) to Jaroslav of Novgorod, Ástríð (daughter of the concubina) to the Norwegian king Óláf. All the rulers and their respective successors regarded themselves as kinsmen, with significant political consequences. According to Snorri, even the group originating from the “robbed” Slav Eðla was included in this alliance: “The king sent his son Emund to Wendland, and he was brought up there with his mother’s family, and he did not observe Christianity for a long time. The king’s daughter Ástríð was brought up  in Vestra-Gautland with a high-ranking man called Egill.”60 Here we encounter another usage of polygyny for expressive purposes: giving over a child for someone else to raise brought them closer to the royal power (and the close, evidently affective bond to one who would become an important man or woman, which is frequently documented), but at the same time—at least in  the sagas—it functions as a sign of the establishment of a hierarchical 59 60

OsH c. 94 (on the succession arrangements in Sweden): “annar er øðliborinn ok sœnskr at allri ætt, en annarr er ambáttar sonr ok vinðverskr at hálfri ætt” (“one is of high birth and a Swede on both sides, the other is the son of a bondswoman and half Slav”). OsH c. 88: “Konungr sendi Emund, son sinn, til Vinðlands, ok fœddisk hann þar upp með móðurfrændum sínum, ok helt hann ekki kristni langa hríð. Ástríðr konungsdóttir fœddisk upp í Vestra-Gautlandi at gǫfugs manns, er Egill hét.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 84.

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­relationship: “it is a common saying that a person who fosters a child for someone is of lower rank.”61 Apparently, Snorri does not see any inherent contradiction in the relatives of the royal handmaid, who had once been taken as a booty of war, now raising their son. Snorri’s real interest, however, concerns Eðla’s daughter Ástríð and her association with King Óláf Haraldsson of Norway. On the basis of the “Verses on a Journey to the East” (Austrfararvísur), the long skaldic poem in which Óláf’s then-emissary Sighvat Þórðarson had described his mission, Snorri wrote a veritable adventure and romance novel. The woman whom Óláf courts in this story is, surprisingly, not Ástríð—who Óláf ends up with—but her half-sister Ingigerð, whom Jaroslav of Novgorod was to marry and at whose court Óláf was to live in exile after his loss of power in 1028 and before his fatal attempt to return in 1030. As so often with Snorri, none of the participants end up looking particularly good. In Snorri’s tale, Ingigerð herself wants Óláf too, and those in favour of the match manage to get the awkward and stubborn Swedish king to the point that—yielding to the pressure of the assembled farmers of the Uppsala thing— he gives his consent to her marriage to Óláf of Norway. Yet at the agreed meeting point, Óláf waits in vain for the bridal procession and eventually learns that Ingigerð has meanwhile been given to the prince of Novgorod. Faced with the inevitable threat of Norwegian retribution to a snub of this magnitude, the magnates of the West Götaland border region promptly arrange an alternative solution: they offer Óláf the king’s daughter Ástríð, who is living in the region, and “who, in the opinion of all men, in no way lagged behind her sister Ingigerð.”62 The difference in rank—again measured by the origin and nature of the mother, not the ‘legitimacy’ of the form of bond63—would be compensated for in two ways: firstly, the regional chiefs would club together so that the 61 62 63

HsH c. 39: “Þat er mál manna, at sá væri ótígnari, er ǫðrum fóstraði barn.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 85. Cf. Ármann Jakobsson, Í leit að konungi (1997), 135ff. OsH c. 91: “at þat mæltu allir menn þar, at hon væri at engum hlut verr um sik en Ingigerðr, systir hennar.” OsH c. 94: Ingigerð is from the Uppland Svear’s royal line on both sides, “the noblest in the Northern lands, for this line is descended from the gods themselves” (“af Uppsvía ætt, er tignust er á Norðrlǫndum, því at sú ætt er komin frá goðunum sjálfum”—a reference to Yngling’s origin myth reported by Snorri), Ástríð’s mother is “a bondswoman, and moreover Wendish” (“er ambótt móðir hennar ok þó vinðversk”). Like the parallel passage about the brothers (note 59), the passage must be seen against the background of the intensification of historiography propagating Nordic-Slavic antagonism in the era of the Danish crusades in the Baltic region from about 1160. According to Adam of Bremen, Ingigerð’s mother was (also?) a filia Sclavorum.

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dowry (heimanfylgja) that had originally been agreed could still be paid; secondly, as they sardonically suggest to Óláf, “We do not need to ask the Swedish king for consent!”64 Óláf is satisfied with this opportunity to insult the bride’s father in return, for it allows him to unexpectedly gain an attractive point in the agon of kings: “I doubt the Swedish king imagines that I would dare take his daughter against his will!”65 The festivities can begin. The Götaland jarl Ragnvald formally betroths (fastna) the king’s daughter, dowry (heimanfylgja, ‘what follows her from her home’) and morning gift (tilgjǫf ‘supplementary gift’) are exchanged, and “the wedding [brullaup ‘bride-run’] of King Óláf and Queen Ástríð was drunk with all honour.”66 Óláf has accomplished the decisive thing: a wedding with the daughter of a king. The insult inflicted on him by the Swedish king’s breach of the original agreement has been repaid through the bruise received by the bride’s father. Olof of Sweden feels the blow precisely as Óláf of Norway had hoped, and wishes to have Jarl Ragnvald, who “went to Norway with my daughter and there surrendered her to him as a frilla” (seldi hana til frillu, literally: “sold her as a concubine”), hanged for this betrayal. But even in this he is thwarted; of all people, the other daughter, Ingigerð, now “queen” in Rus’, instead makes ­Ragnvald a jarl in Staraja Ladoga/Aldeigjuborg, her dower from Prince Jaroslav. We note in passing that to the Swedish king, his daughter has become merely a frilla despite all the paraphernalia of ‘wedding’ and ‘dowry.’ The operational factor, for him, is not the solemnity of the marriage ceremony but the fact that he has not been consulted. Seen in this light, Snorri’s use of the expressive possibilities of princely polygyny proves congenial to agonistic chiefly culture with its ‘open’ conflict sequences, which are only ever provisionally solved. By choosing an episode from the historical books of the Old Testament as the basic theme—Saul’s promise to give the rising David his eldest daughter Merab as his wife, who is then ceded to another, whereupon David receives the junior daughter Michal (1 Sm 18:17ff.)—Snorri not only lends his own story, tailored to this purpose, a certain degree of world-historical transcendence, but also reinforces his political commentary by equating his actors with Saul and David, including the inevitable associations. 64 65 66

OsH c. 91: “Þá vætti ek þess, at um þetta ráð spyrim vér ekki Svíakonung eptir.” OsH c. 91: “Eigi mun Svíakonungr þat hyggja, at ek myna þora at fá dóttur has fyrir útan hans vilja.” OsH c. 92: “var þá drukkit brullaup Óláfs konungs ok Ástríðar dróttningar með mikilli vegsemð.”

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231

A Woman in Reserve: the Icelander’s Booty and the Orkney Alliance (c.980)

Compared to a monogamically structured system with theoretically permanent, ‘once-and-for all’ bonds, polygyny as a social sign system is more flexible, more adaptable to varying situations, allowing individual relationships to remain dormant, resume, or, if necessary, be terminated by an act such as sending the woman home or handing her on. The Slav woman whom Olof Skötkonung captured and took as his “concubine,” and with whose kin their son was later raised, established a lasting connection of the parties involved, which was initially determined by antagonism, later apparently by cooperation without the political tension being completely resolved.67 All sides expanded their respective ‘networks.’ When King Valdemar ii made the widow of Esbern Snare his bedfellow, he reaffirmed an existing network. When, towards the end of the tenth century, the Vatnsdœlingar family in Northern Iceland developed transmarine ambitions and sought contacts with Orkney, the original handicap of the co-opted maid’s son Þorkel ‘Scratcher,’68 admitted into the kin group shortly after demonstrating his bravado with an ornate ax, became an asset. Introduced to the entourage of the Orkney jarl Sigurð through the intercession of a middleman, he gained the jarl’s attention when talk finally turned to his family (“from now on Þorkel rose in the jarl’s esteem”), and soon the jarl’s respect when, in the course of a military expedition to Scotland, he undertook an initiative that was as brave as it was lucrative. Jarl Sigurð commented: “I believe you will be a source of honour to your kinsfolk.”69 That put the seal on the successful establishment of the family link. It hinged on the jarl’s willingness to recognize the newcomer’s mother—whom the saga up to this point had only described as a frilla from Orkney named 67

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It is no longer clear which 11th-century women Adam and Snorri’s contradictory statements refer to; for Adam, there is an uxor, who is filia Sclavorum de Obodritis, and an unspecified concubine; whereas Snorri has an unspecified “lady” and a distinguished Slav as frilla. We might suspect that Adam’s “wife” and Snorri’s “concubine” are the same person. But for the present purposes, the question is as unanswerable as it is inconsequential; the subject of the discussion can only be the figures constructed in the particular accounts and their contextualization. In this sense, “Eðla” is a Slavic woman of noble family who was been seized and brought to the Swedish king. Vatnsdœla saga cc. 37 and 42; see above, Chapter 1. Vatnsdœla saga c. 43: “Jarl jók þá virðing hans … ‘Þess væntir mek, at frændum þínum verði sœmð at þér.’” Sagas of the Icelanders (2005), 259. Among the “kinsfolk” is the jarl himself, whom Þorkel has already referred to as frændi.

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Nereið—as a relative of his.70 The kinship thus concluded obligates the jarl to give gifts to Þorkel on his homeward journey, including a gold ring weighing half a mark, as an impressive payment for Nereið’s freedom as well as a complete set of high quality women’s clothing and accoutrements “for the sake of their kinship.”71 The investment pays off: there is no talk of Nereið’s immediate return home, and, following the death of her ‘husband’ and former owner shortly after, she may have acted as an enduring symbol of the overseas power behind her son’s subsequent unstoppable rise to become a great chief in northern Iceland. It was her good fortune that, at a crucial moment, the jarl of Orkney felt he had a reason to grasp the opportunity of building an alliance with Iceland when it was offered to him.72 10

A Family on the Rise: Sigurð Haraldsson’s Woman (c.1150)

The formation of such networks was closely observed and, where necessary, grudgingly acknowledged. In this respect, the sagas share the resentment, widespread elsewhere in Latin Europe from the twelfth century onwards, against those who suddenly rose in royal favour—against “men raised from the dust” of diverse qualifications.73 Having a suitable woman to offer could be one of these qualifications; we have seen that the farmer Símun, owner of a charming mill maid, found himself close to the king out of pure luck. This kind of  ‘special relationship’ could, especially in times of war, afford effective ­protection.74 In normal circumstances, it signalled to friend and foe alike the

70 In Njáls saga (c. 89) Néreið appears as Jarl Sigurð’s sister. 71 Njáls saga c. 89: “Gullhring sendi hann Þorgrími [her owner, Þorkel’s father] til frelsis Nereiði, er vá hálfa mǫrk. Nereiði sendi hann allan kvenbúnað góðan fyrir frændsemi.” 72 For correlations with the lived world of the 13th century, see the discussion of the Odda­ verjar’s Orkney marriage policy in Chapter 2. Rapprochement among the North Atlantic Islands remained an issue up to the later 13th century—always with one eye on the possibility or reality of a direct takeover by the Norwegian kings. Naturally, we cannot even begin to ascertain whether the contemporary public actually received the episode of Vatnsdœla saga discussed here with reference to Sæmund Jónsson’s laborious marriage arrangements with the daughter of Harald, jarl of Orkney. 73 On this 12th-century phenomenon, see Turner, ‘Men Raised from the Dust’ (1988). 74 Saxo xiv, 16,7: in the struggles for the Danish throne around 1157, it is assumed that the educator of a concubinarii filii of King Valdemar, as the sole landowner in a region, had nothing to fear from Valdemar’s looming invasion, even though he also acted as advisor for the opposing king, Sven.

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protection of the powerful man who had entered into a relationship with the sister or daughter of the house in question.75 We should not see this ‘protection’ as an unqualified blessing for the house to which it was granted. The topographical distribution of the houses in or from which the individual Icelandic chiefs had their women seems to suggest that here too the couple relationship is not so much a cause as a consequence—or, better, a kind of formalization—of a situation of political and economic imparity: the alliance ‘partner’ had a certain obligation to deliver. It is similar with those ‘raised from the dust’ surrounding the Norwegian kings: it is impossible to ascertain whether they came close to the king because the king had picked a member of their family to be his bedfellow, or if he did so because he already had a close relationship of trust with the family. Concerning King Sigurð ‘Broad Shoulders’ (the king with the mill maid), the ‘Summary of the History of the Kings of Norway’ (Ágrip af Nóregs konunga sǫgum), one of the earliest of the kings’ sagas (c.1180), reports this episode from around 1150: There was a man named Geirstein who had two sons, Hjarrandi and Hísing, and a daughter who was the frilla of King Sigurð, and they were on intimate terms with him. Geirstein was an unruly man and unjust. He was in the king’s favour.76 The modern translation is a weak reflection of the original, in which something like a love affair develops between the father and brothers and the king as the logical consequence of the fact that the daughter is the king’s frilla: ok þeir í kærleikum við hann.77 Geirstein must have felt confident about the depth of royal affection when he took the following initiative:

75 76 77

On Iceland, see Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 47–98. Ágrip c. 60: “maðr hét Geirsteinn ok átti .ii. sonu, Hjarranda ok Hísing, ok hans dóttir var frilla Sigurðar konungs ok þeir í kærleikum við hann. Geirsteinn var óeirðarmaðr mikill ok ranglátr, sat í trausti konungsins.” Ágrip af Nóregskonungasǫgum, trans. Driscoll (2008), 79. Þeir “they” is the masculine pronoun third-person pl. nom. Old Norse uses the neuter pronoun (3rd pl. nom. þau) for mixed-gender groups, so the daughter is explicitly not included in the ‘love’ relationship here. Kærleik, which is used for example to translate caritas in religious texts, has a more restrained character compared to ást (the more common word for man–woman relationships, which also appears in this source later on). Above all, its use in the plural (as here) often stands for an intimate closeness to the king. Cf. Cleasby and Vigfússon, Icelandic – English Dictionary (1874), s.v. kærleik.—Other terms for these men in Ágrip are ofstopamaðr “presumptuous man” and óeiramaðr “perpetrator of violence” (literally, “merciless man,” one who starts and engages in quarrels).

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A short way away from him lived a noble widow named Gyða. Her sister was Ragnhild, who was married to Dag Eilífsson from Vík in the east. She was a woman of outstanding character [skǫrungr mikill—one of those women who belonged to the ‘powerful gender’] and Geirstein often went to see her and was eager to gain her love [ást], but she was unwilling. As a result he went into a rage and said that refusing him would prove to be a mistake.78 Now the chicanery begins, using every trick in the book: Geirstein drives his cattle onto the widow’s pastures; he drives her cattle onto his pastures and demands atonement from her; Gyða seeks assistance without success; only one ‘good man of good family’ from the neighbourhood, a man called Gyrð, is ready to help her. She gives him a spear, he seeks out an encounter with Geir­ stein, who taunts him—“that they had promoted slaves too highly if people like him were to be measured against him”79—and then gets killed in the encounter. The irony of these words from the mouth of the one who owed his rise to the king’s side to his daughter will not have been wasted on the public, and his death will have been received with even greater satisfaction in consequence. Back to the story: Gyða already has two horses ready: one for the escape of her helper and the other also for him, “as remuneration” (við fé); she herself stays on her farm. But more importantly, she also provides Gyrð with a place to flee to: Gregóríús Dagsson. He is her nephew, the son of her sister with Dag Eilífsson. Gregóríús at first hesitates to receive his aunt’s helpful neighbour (in another version of the story he is Gyða’s foster son)80 but then protects him from the king’s grasp and from reprisals by the sons of the slain; when it comes down to it, he even kills them. King Sigurð is now directly affected—and the symmetry of the escalation inevitably drives Gregóríús Dagsson to the side of Sigurð’s brother and co-king Ingi (we remember that from 1139 to 1155, the three sons of Harald gilli shared a tense joint rule). The flare-up of this rivalry is indeed only a question of time as the brothers come of age; Gregóríús Dagsson appears at just the right moment. His political skills soon become apparent, and through these he ­becomes 78

79 80

Ágrip c. 60: “Skammt í frá hónum bjó gǫfug ekkja er Gyða hét, systir Ragnhildar, er átti Dagr Eilífssunr austan ór Vík. Hón var skǫrungr mikill. Geirsteinn ferr opt á hennar fund ok vill gjarna fá hennar ǫst, en þat var ǫn hennar vilja, ok þá ylmðisk hann í móti ok segr því munu vera misráðit.” Ágrip af Nóregskonungasǫgum, trans. Driscoll (2008), 79, 81. “…at þeir hafa of dregit fram þræla, er slíkir skulu hónum jafnask.” Ágrip af Nóregs­ konungasǫgum, trans. Driscoll (2008), 81. Mks c. 98. The rest of the episode is only known through the Morkinskinna, as the sole manuscript for Ágrip breaks off here.

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Ingi’s closest confidant and mastermind behind his rise to become sole ruler, which will cost his two brothers and co-kings their lives. But it is noteworthy that Ágrip, set down in writing only a generation later, chooses to clad the outbreak of the fraternal strife with polygynous trappings: not in the form of a ‘cherchez la femme’ episode, since the king’s frilla herself does not make an active appearance, but rather in the form of an enquiry into the consequences for the father and brothers of a suitable girl who suddenly find themselves close to the king—and for those who make enemies of such social climbers. 11

A New Party: the Daughters of Saxi í Vík (from c.1095)

The story of the two daughters of Saxi í Vík towards the end of the eleventh century is a case study of how much a relationship could ‘mean,’ in every sense. Based in Vík (now Saksvik, 10 km east of Trondheim) on a promontory on the south bank of Trondheim Fjord, Saxi, “a venerable man in Trøndelag,”81 controlled the waterway and coastal path from the open sea to the rich agricultural zones in inner Trøndelag. When in 1093 King Óláf ‘the Quiet’ (kyrri, the son of Harald Hardrada and Þóra, the Árnasons’ sister from this very region) died after a long and exceptionally uneventful reign, his succession did not go entirely smoothly. Although his only son Magnús ‘Barelegs’ (r. 1093–1103) was proclaimed sole ruler, Oppland decided on Hákon Magnússon, the son of the deceased king’s brother, who had been brought up by a prosperous local chieftain called Steigar-Þórir. The succession thus turned into a struggle between parties, and probably, regions. As was so often the case, control over Trøndelag was key. Hákon, who had the shorter journey, reached Nidaros first and proclaimed himself king at the Eyrathing. He gained the necessary support through sizeable tax concessions.82 Magnús, who likewise immediately travelled to Nidaros with a fleet, was as angry about this precedent as he was about the overall situation, but faced with local resistance he was forced to retreat and withdraw to Westland. The imminent war was prevented by Hákon’s death by accident, whereupon Magnús, now the sole surviving king, hounded Hákon’s followers out of Trøndelag into Northland, where they were wiped out. This approach was unusually 81 82

MsB c. 16: “gǫfugs manns í Þrándheimi.” The verb for the adjective gǫfugr “distinguished, respected” is gǫfga “worship, revere (in a religious sense).” MsB c. 1: he abolished the land tax (landauragjald) and the payments in kind due at midwinter (jólagjafir) and renounced the royal share in many legal fines (réttarbœtr). Following his success in Trøndelag, he continued this policy in other parts of the country.

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harsh even by Norwegian standards, especially when Magnús had the already handicapped elderly chief Steigar-Þórir hanged—the first one to proclaim Harald Hardrada king half a century ago, he must have appeared to contemporaries as a kind of living prehistoric monument. Given the already hostile atmosphere in Trøndelag, the king now had every reason to worry about allies in the rich region. Saxi í Vík offered such an alliance for strategic reasons (and perhaps other reasons, the details of which remain unknown to us), and Magnús took his daughter Sigríð as a frilla.83 The ‘expressive’ interests of both sides are obvious: Saxi í Vík signalled to his countrymen in Trøndelag that he—and with him, possibly a sub-region or at least a larger group—gave up opposition and allied himself with the victor. King Magnús signalled to the region (and moreover to the country as a whole) that after the successful conclusion of an aggressive campaign, he now sought friendship and offered the benefits of royal friendship. Of course, the ‘expressive’ was not the only aspect in the matter. With Sigríð Saxadóttir as King Magnús’ frilla, Trøndelag gained the opportunity to raise its ‘own’ pretender for the first time in the history of Norwegian kingship.84 The son born out of this relationship received the royal name Óláf. In addition, secondary but by no means unimportant signals emerge. One concerns the stylization of the victorious king Magnús’s rule. He was himself a son of a frilla; the origin given his mother varies, suggesting that the sagas wished to portray her as originating among free farmers but lacked the details.85 Magnús grew up in his father’s retinue (hirð) and, according to the later historiography, scarcely twenty years old he had already fathered several children with captured women—who were apparently more or less indiscriminately at the disposal of the retinue at the royal court if the prince did not expressly monopolize them as a “king’s handmaid”—and

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MsB c. 16: “hon var friðla konungs.” Óláf’s conception can be dated to 1097/98 based on information in Mss c. 1, the suppression of the opposition to 1095. At which moment within this remaining period the relationship between Magnús and Sigríð began cannot even be pinned down in terms of relative chronology, as the children of the king and their mothers are dealt with together in a single passage (c. 16). I believe an early date is plausible, for the reasons set out above; and given the sagas’ selective reporting, it is of course possible that the later (co-) king Óláf was not the first child to come out of this relationship. Snorri calls her Jóansdóttir, Morkinskinna and Fagrskinna name her father as one Árni lagi, but say as little about him as Snorri does about Jón (see Chapter 2). Theodricus, ­Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium (in Monumenta historica Norvegiae (1880), ­1–68, c. 30): “ex concubina natus.”—King Óláf’s childless ‘main wife’ was Ingiríð, daughter of the Danish king Sven Estridsen.

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girls of low birth.86 The magnate’s daughter Sigríð was the first new woman at Magnús’s side after he took power. A few years later, the king crowned his polygynous course of honour with Margrét, wrested from her father the Swedish king Ingi Steinkelsson by a massive threat of war. Her semantic function is almost overdetermined in her saga byname friðkolla “Peace Girl.”87 The relationship of King Magnús and Sigríð Saxadóttir had significant repercussions. The main beneficiary was Sigríð’s son from an otherwise unknown relationship who would now enter the sagas as Kári ‘King’s Brother.’ With the farm Austrått he controlled the entrance to Trondheim Fjord (a position that was later updated with the latest military technology of the time, first by the Danish kings and later the Wehrmacht during the Second World War), although it is unclear whether the place belonged to the family or whether the victorious king entrusted his newly acquired henchman with an important royal demesne.88 Dag Eilífsson, father of Kári’s wife Borghild, was also part of the nascent kinship group; he would be among the very last to leave the battlefield in Ulster on 23 August 1103 where King Magnús fell. The kinship group outlived the reign of the king around which it had formed, and held on for several generations. The importance of Gregóríús Dagsson, great-grandson of the Dag Eilífsson mentioned here and grandson of Kári ‘King’s Brother,’ for King Ingi’s rise around 1150 has been referred to above; his grandson Jón, who also controlled Austrått, was involved in the struggles for the throne in the thirteenth century and was related by marriage to Duke Skúli, the protector of Snorri Sturluson—which, incidentally, is an argument for the credibility of even the details about this family in the Heimskringla. Erling skakki, effective ruler of Norway between 1162 and 1179, was also marginally 86

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See above, Chapter 1. Ordericus Vitalis refers to the mother of the later king Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer as “Anglica captiua sed nobilis.” In light of other insular reports of English women who were seized and went on to be the mothers of ‘good’ Norwegian kings, we might suspect this account of echoing a trope, but this does not make it altogether unrealistic: the trope may also have existed as a social practice, so the sons of ‘high-value’ English women enjoyed a certain prestige. Interestingly, Ordericus describes the king’s relationship with the friðla Sigríð a “legal[e] conubi[um].” MsB c. 15; on the name, see Heimskringla, vol. 3 (1951), 228 note 2. She had no children with Magnús. In favour of the latter, is the fact that Magnús’s opponents in the region were wealthy and he may have acquired Austrått by seizing it. Given that Finn Árnason had possessed Austrått a generation earlier, Harald Hardrada may already have done so. Finally, it is also possible that, through Finn Árnason’s marriage connection with Jarl Orm Eilífsson, Dag’s brother (see below), the estate came to Kári through Dag’s daughter Borghild; this hypothesis is shared by Løberg, “Austråtts eiere gjennom 1000 år” (1963). In any case, it must have been sanctioned by the king, if not initiated by him.

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connected to this group: he was related to Gregóríús Dagsson in the fourth generation.89 Just one remarkable initiative among the party’s activities should be mentioned here. With the early death of ‘their’ King Óláf, Sigríð’s son, in 1115 the Saxi group lost their most important asset, but given the continuing concord between the sons of Magnús, who were in power from 1103 to 1130, they may have retained the ear of the king(s). The real blow came in what would later become known proverbially as the “warbands’ winter” (múgavetr) of 1134/35, when Harald gilli, the alleged son of Magnús Barelegs from his expedition to Ireland who had been accepted as co-king, overthrew his nephew Magnús.90 Now the time had come for the Saxi party to execute a plan that had long been in the making. The king’s frilla Sigríð had a sister called Þóra, who had a son named Sigurð with (it is said) a priest named Aðalbrikt, nominally a (Anglo-) Saxon. The priest’s son had been “set to book-learning” and received lower orders; however, he proved to be strikingly strong and contentious and acquired the nickname “the troublesome deacon” (slembi djákn). In the face of Magnús’ defeat and Harald gilli’s triumph, the Saxi group made their move: Then it got about concerning Sigurð that his mother says that his father was Magnús Barelegs. So as soon as he became independent in his way of life, he neglected the clerical life, then left the country. He stayed a long time on his travels. Then he set out on a journey to Jórsalir [Jerusalem] and reached the Jórðán and visited the holy relics, as is customary with pilgrims. And when he got back, then he spent time on trading voyages. One winter he was present for some time in Orkney. He was with Jarl Harald at the fall of Þorkel fóstri Sumarliðason. Sigurð was also up in Scotland with King David [I] of the Scots. He was regarded very highly there. After that Sigurð travelled to Denmark and according to his own and his followers’ account, he had there performed an ordeal about his paternity and it was proved that he was King Magnús’s son, and there were five bishops present.91 89 90 91

Although kinship alone was no guarantee of practical solidarity, the likelihood of frændir working together was relatively high. Magnús was the son of Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer and Borghild (who had undergone the trial by iron, see Chapter 3). Maimed and blinded by the victors, he was imprisoned in a monastery. MsBHG c. 13: “var settr til bókar … Þá kom þat upp fyrir Sigurð, at móðir hans segir, at Magnús konungr berfœttr væri faðir hans. Ok þegar er hann réð sjálfr háttum sínum, þá afrœkðisk hann klerkasiðu, fór þá af landi brot. Í þeim ferðum dvalðisk hann langa hríð. Þá byrjaði hann ferð sína út til Jórsala ok kom til Jórðánar ok sótti helga dóma, svá sem

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We should not take the stylization of Sigurð’s career—which, incidentally, is almost a mirror-image of the story designed by King Sverrir about his own rise—as the personal initiative of an impetuous problem child.92 What we see here is the careful training of a future pretender by his kin group. Although the strict observance of the minimum age of 25 years for diaconal consecration can hardly be assumed,93 it nonetheless provides a rough indication that Sigurð’s ‘launch’ began within the period 1120/30.94 His kin had thus kept him in reserve for a remarkably long time, evidently because he was not required as a king’s son while his “brother” Óláf lived and ruled. If anything, it might even have been detrimental to the stability of the regime if the existence of another son of Magnús with a claim to participate in governance had got about. Therefore “he was known as” the son of an English or Saxon priest,95 until the right moment had come. From then on, little by little he acquired all the key qualifications. A wellbalanced mixture of expeditions for war and trade familiarized him with the relevant forms of accumulation and redistribution; in the most important North Sea countries, he established useful connections and procured the necessary credentials per ordalium under favourable terms (all too favourable, some found, who spoke of “lies and deception of the Danes”). Most important was the pilgrimage to the Orient: following the First Crusade, Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer had ultimately made the trip to Jordan—because the river, not the Holy City en route, is always the final goal in the sagas—into an accomplishment that much enhanced royal dignity.96 In short, there was perhaps never a more qualified frilla’s son to enter the race for the Norwegian kingship. It is, of course, pointless to ask whether the king or the priest (or whoever) ‘in fact’ was Sigurð’s biological father. Two issues are key. Firstly, the choice of a foreign cleric for alternative paternity is very adroit, insofar as it suggests a

92 93 94 95 96

pálmarum er títt. Ok er hann kom aptr, þá dvalðisk hann í kaupferðum. Einn vetr var hann staddr nǫkkura hríð í Orkneyjum. Hann var með Haraldi jarli at falli Þorkels fóstra Sumarliðasonar. Sigurðr var ok uppi á Skotlandi með Dávíð Skotakonungi. Var hann þar virðr mikils. Síðan fór Sigurðr til Danmerkr, ok var þat hans sǫgn ok hans manna, at þar hefði hann flutt skírslur til faðernis sér ok bar svá, at hann væri sonr Magnúss konungs, ok væri þar við fimm byskupar.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 182–83. SvS cc. 1–6, written three or four decades before Heimskringla and Morkinskinna. B[ernd]-U[lrich] Hergemöller, “Diakon, Diakonat, ii: Lateinischer Westen,” in LdM, vol. 3, col. 941f. Magnús Barelegs died in 1103, his son with Sigríð was born in 1098/99. For the sake of credibility, Sigurð must have been born around this time. MsBHG c. 13: “Hann var kallaðr sonr Aðalbrikts prests.” See above, Chapter 3. Snorri’s account of Sigurð’s trip to Jerusalem may be the least enthusiastic account of such a journey from the entire Middle Ages.

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nonentity in terms of networking (“Aðalbrikt” had no relatives and was probably long since out of the country), so the maternal kin had the pretender all for themselves. Secondly, the claim that King Magnús was the father must have had a modicum of plausibility, so the king having sexual relationships with both sisters simultaneously must have been generally credible. The house of Saxi í Vík was the focus of regional interest since Sigríð had become a king’s woman; what happened there was noticed; we can therefore also “actually” reckon with this possibility.97 Perhaps Saxi í Vík was safeguarding his newfound proximity to the king with both his daughters. The prohibition on sororal polygyny belongs to the core elements of the canonical incest regulations and was received in Northern Europe around 1200 at the latest.98 Gregory of Tours had already condemned the practice among the Merovingians, and under the influence of both Jewish-Christian and Roman ideas, over the course of the Middle Ages it stabilized into a taboo.99 However, the practice seemingly did not constitute a problem in Norway around 1100. The fact that King Magnús had sexual relations with two sisters, probably at the same time, is not insisted on, but neither is it concealed. Sigurð’s attempt to seize the kingship, momentarily successful, failed completely, and his torture by the victors is the most extensive cruelty in all saga literature. Yet there is no indication that his opponents made any propagandistic use of his (doubly) ‘sinful’ birth.100 Nor is the fact commented upon in the kings’ sagas of the thirteenth century; Snorri reports on Sigurð’s conception with the same composure he displays for all genealogical digressions. If Sigurð had remained 97

That does not mean that Sigurð was ‘actually’ the king’s son. Þóra herself may not have been able to say with certainty who Sigurð’s father was. 98 For example, Older Gulathing Law §24; Older Frostathing Law iii §3: the maximum penalty for intercourse with “systir konu manns” is outlawry. The age of the individual provisions of the provincial laws is contentious, but they certainly existed around 1200. The key thing for the discussion here is that in the Heimskringla King Hákon the Good (934–61) is considered the legislator of these laws, thus in the narrative logic, Magnús Barelegs was bound to the secular as well as the ecclesiastical prohibition. 99 Gregory of Tours, Historiae iv, 3; prohibition of sororal polygyny: Lv 18:18; Greco-Roman culture’s fascination with incest is illustrated by numerous myths, including Caligula’s vehemently rejected attempt to emulate the gods (and pharaohs) in this respect ­(although Suetonius’s Caligula is admittedly more drastic than Gregory’s Chlothar and Snorri’s Magnús). To my mind, the fundamental differences in context and presentation rule out any suspicion that Gregory is directly echoed by Snorri.—As far as I know, there has been no standalone treatment of the subject for the Middle Ages; the essay by Durkheim’s student Granet remains stimulating and worth reading: Granet, La polygynie sororale (1920). 100 Strictly speaking, his opponents’ position rested on the claim that Sigurð was not a son of King Magnús at all; but propaganda and defamation does not need to be consistent or stringent.

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an assistant priest—we may assume—his mother would not have been named at all; she does not appear in the saga of Magnús Barelegs, but only in that of her son. Yet even if this nonchalance is not a calculated opinion, this disinterest in sororal incest would in itself be remarkable: is this a difference in the judgement of the societies or ‘only’ a difference between historiographers? 12

“And He Will Take Your Daughters…”: Magnús the Good and Margrét Þrándsdóttir (c.1040)

In the interpretation suggested here, the two daughters of Saxi í Vík (and others) function as a sign of the rapprochement of the king and the regional magnates of Trøndelag after previous violent conflicts. In fact, we do not know anything about the modalities of this alliance building. The assumption that it was a question of a consensual process rests solely on the subsequent course of events, the apparent continuation of the good relations between the Saxi group and King Magnús and his line, and their hostility towards pretenders— such as Harald gilli—who challenged Magnús’s descendants. The wording of the source, however, is vague: “Óláf’s mother was Sigríð, the daughter of Saxi í Vík, an eminent man in Trøndelag. She was the king’s frilla.”101 It does not say how, precisely, she came to be his frilla. The same is true of the Icelandic alliances examined by Auður Magnúsdóttir through frillur relations, where we likewise learn about the participants and the fact that the relationship existed, and through the wider source context learn which other (topographical, juridical, military) ties connected the parties involved, but almost nothing is said about the modalities of starting the relationship. Strictly speaking, we do not know whether King Magnús, having seized power, returned from his campaign to eradicate the opposition in Northland and carefully sought out a discussion with Saxi í Vík, or appeared at his farm armed with five longships at his back to take the daughters of the house and “place them under him” as his fair-haired ancestor had done. The argument for the former rests on the assumption that the future association of the king and the Saxi party suggests a consensual course of events, but that is a plausibility argument. All we know is that as a result he got one (maybe two) of the chief’s daughters, and we have reason to suspect that Saxi and his group did not harbour a grudge afterwards. This means that we cannot rigidly separate the meaning ‘alliance/consensus’ from other statements expressed through polygynous relationships. By ­taking the daughter (daughters?) of Saxi í Vík, before any nuances—in this 101 MsB c. 16, in the context of the king’s other women.

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case, (probably) the readiness for rapprochement—King Magnús made one central message: he was the ruler. This common denominator ranges the consensual case of Saxi í Vík within a continuum of more or less consensual and paritarian situations right down to the other extreme, the undisguised or even staged robbery of women. In principle, the prince could have as many women as he required to negotiate and express their respective relations. Behind all these contingencies there is always that core element of domination which the Old Testament (1 Sm 8:11–18) sets alongside other essential characteristics of hierarchical monarchical rule: “And he will take your daughters…”102 It combines the story of Saxi í Vík and various polygynous episodes, superficially wholly different (recall the ‘abduction’ of Borghild í Dali discussed in ­Chapter 3), into a system in which all individual events refer to each other and thus acquire additional meaning. In relation to the specific case this means that the frilla relationship of Magnús and Sigríð only gains its specific ‘expressive’ value if placed in the context of the stored knowledge of theoretically similar cases in which the variables are arranged differently. The sagas’ readers/listeners—including the modern historian—can only interpret this case as consensual by referring it to similar cases (the same ‘praxeme’: isolable courses of action which can carry meaning, such as ‘king arrives at house and starts frilla relationship with woman from the house’) and comparing it with them. Morkinskinna, a kings’ saga manuscript more or less contemporary with Heimskringla and often very similar in content, has an episode from the early years of King Magnús ‘the Good’ (r. 1035–47) not reported by Snorri. A “respected district chieftain” in southern Norway named Þránd holds an autumn feast, lasting several days and attended by landowners from throughout the region. One afternoon, a magnificently equipped longship appears in the bay below the farm. The assumption that the king comes visiting uninvited is soon confirmed. In the banqueting hall, Magnús shows himself to be in “good humour,” and the potentially explosive situation develops into a good one—except for the detail that Þránd’s daughter Margrét, “a woman who was very wise and very beautiful” and who has not concealed her misgivings when the king’s ship had first been sighted, keeps herself very much in the background.

102 “Filias quoque vestras faciet sibi unguentarias et focarias et panificas”: the labours enumerated for the girls whose service the king will require resonate with the “mill maid.” On the approximation of concubinage and bondage, see the discussion in Chapter 1; on the biblical context, cf. Schottroff, “Zugriff des Königs auf die Töchter” (1989), 268–85; Friedl, Polygynie (2000).

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This provokes a reaction from the king: He asked Þránd who the fair woman was who preceded the others. Þránd said it was his daughter. The king said: “And still she does not want to greet us. She must certainly be well bred, and she is a beautiful woman to boot. I wish to spend the night with her.” “That does not befit you honour, sire,” said Þránd. “This is nonetheless the way it will be,” said the king.103 Þránd informs his daughter, who finds her misgivings fully confirmed and only hopes “not to love him first and then lose him immediately.” In other words, she reckons that if she has to be one of King Magnús’s women, she would prefer things did not turn out for her as they had for the mill maid, and she might at least gain a position, reputation, and influence for a time as the king’s frilla. The king is prepared to negotiate: “I am not generally reputed to be a scoundrel, and this can be done in a way that turns to her advantage. But there is no fitting alternative to my deciding this matter.” A bed chamber is prepared and Margrét gets ready. The episode now turns into a miracle story: a stranger enters the room, promising her safety before King Magnús’s arrival: “He then touched her breast and marked her for himself, and she felt a cold shiver go through her.” The man instructs her to tell the king that his relative Sigurð (a steward on a nearby royal estate) has been with her, and leaves. King Magnús arrives, and Margrét does as advised. The king jumps up indignantly and sends for Sigurð immediately. No sooner has he been brought before the king than he must explain himself before Magnús’s wrath, but he is ready to swear that he has never slept with Margrét. At this, the king summons the girl, who now reports the strange event. Margrét must bare her breast; the sign visible on it has the shape of a silver penny. “It turns out,” said the king, “that my father does not wish me to lie with this woman. The man who visited her was my father.” Saint Óláf, whose sanctity has become the basic consensus of Norwegian politics in the shortest possible time, providing his son with the necessary legitimatory advantage over his Danish counterparts, may not be gainsaid. The king gives Margrét to his ‘relative’ Sigurð to marry, and continues his journey.104 103 Mks c. 25: “En konungr spurði Þránd hver sú væri in fríða kona er fyrir gekk. Þrándr svarar at sú var dóttir hans. Konungr mælti: ‘Ok ekki vill hon oss kveðja. Víst lætr hon vel, enda er hon fríð kona ok hjá henni vil ek rekkja í kveld.’ ‘Eigi samir yðr þat, herra,’ svarar Þrándr. ‘Þat mun fram fara,’ segir konungr.” Morkinskinna, trans. Andersson and Gade (2000), 169. 104 Mks c. 25: “‘…ok þykki mér þat tungt at leggja fyrst ást við hann ok týna honum brátt.’ … ‘Ekki em ek kenndr við ódrengskap af flestum mǫnnum, en búask má svá um at henni

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Caution is required when reading a miracle story for its political content. However, the décor of this and most of the other Óláf miracles embedded in saga narrative may well be understood as encouragement to the beneficiary to await the intervention of the royal saint in his very own domain— royal ­politics—and to interpret salient events of everyday political life in light of the holiness of the rex perpetuus Norvegiae. This entitles us to eliminate the mysterious man’s performance from the narrative for a start, and to read the remaining narrative as a process that, seemingly predictable, takes an ­unexpected—and therefore ‘miraculous’—turn. King Magnús seems to have encountered a situation in which he must demonstrate his authority, without any opportunity for lengthy preparation (time and again, the topography of Norway means that the king on his itinerary is faster than the news of his imminent arrival). The southeast around Oslofjord, traditionally a zone of predominantly Danish suzerainty and whose affiliation to the Norwegian kingdom remained contentious until the late eleventh century, is particularly sensitive, as Magnús is locked in dispute with Sven Estridsen over the right of succession in Denmark. Magnús cannot know for what purpose Þránd has organized his lavish autumn feast. Therefore he comes uninvited to check, meets Þránd with friendliness but nonetheless establishes an unmistakable sign of his power: he demands the daughter. Þránd and Margrét just manage to negotiate the form of an alliance rather than a showdown ­(recall Saxi í Vík, where precisely these modalities remain unclear), and the king goes to bed to consummate his symbolic staging of power. We might imagine that Magnús simply changes his mind and opts to de-escalate at the last moment, or that, once the bedchamber has been prepared according to his wishes, and publicly so, consummation is no more necessary (to abstain from it might then even count as a snub, which would make the ‘miracle’ a face-saving device). We might even imagine that the sight of a characteristic birthmark on Margrét’s breast ‘miraculously’ signals to the king at the last moment that he is about to commit incest.105 Either way, he must now verði gæfa at þessu, ok engi hœfendi munu á ǫðru verða en ek ráða fyrir.’ … Hann tøkr síðan á brjósti hennar, ok varð henni við kalt nǫkkut, ok merkti hana sér … ‘Er svá farit,’ segir hann, ‘at faðir minn vill eigi at ek tœka þessa konu til lags við mik. Faðir minn hefir sá maðr verit.’”—On the “mark of adultery between her breasts,” cf. Hos 2:2 (God’s speech): “iudicate quoniam ipsa non uxor mea et ego non vir eius, auferat fornicationes suas a facie sua et adulteria sua de medio uberum suorum.” In the thirteenth century, a minted coin would have been the only visible and tangible remnant of an earlier kingship. 105 Sleeping with a woman who had previously had sexual intercourse with a blood relative is a similar case to sororal polygyny and is treated as such in the provincial laws. However, setting aside the canonical similarities, it is quite possible that from the point of view of the men involved, it was a far more serious matter to take each other’s women away

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make a substitute gesture of domination. He—and not her father, who is also present—gives the girl to the royal bailiff Sigurð, who (as the episode is possibly to be understood) has ‘known’ her once before and probably reported all the details at the royal court, and continues his royal tour. Princely polygyny—it is a polygynous episode in the sense that something similar could, and sometimes did, occur at each farm throughout the rest of Magnús’s journey—is thus a repertoire of signs, through which both the general fact of existing royal dominion and its current character (from consensual to confrontational) can be expressed. After all, intercourse does not ‘signify’ Magnús’s success in asserting his claim to power, but rather happens as part of that success. With a pinch of semiological salt, we may be justified in understanding the (intended and nearly implemented) intercourse with Margrét as a sign with a message. To do so, we must assume that Magnús does not demand to spend the night with Margrét because he was swept away by the sight of her charms to what the Latin texts call amor, and what the Norse texts (which only explicate actions, not motives) never spell out.106 If we understood his demand as motivated by sexual desire—as some medieval historiographers condemning lay luxuria and many modern historians do—the sexual service demanded would not be a sign but just another service which the subordinate owes the prince, like other contributions in kind and, where appropriate, military support.107 Now, the practical demand of hosting the king is never solely motivated by practical concerns (material supply of the itinerant royal entourage), but always has a ‘semiotic’ character. In the case of Margrét, however, I think it can be assumed that the practical motivation (the king’s desire for exactly this sexual partner) is wholly eclipsed by the sign ‘the chief’s daughter is demanded and received’: the demand has a purely expressive function vis-à-vis her father, her household, and herself. The king does not act out of sexual desire; that sting cannot be ruled out, but neither can it be assumed. Furthermore, in order within the same kin group than to take two women from the same outside group. Magnús, at any rate, jumps up and shouts: “Then in no circumstances may I lie in this bed”: he does not want to challenge Margrét’s ‘previous owner.’ There is also the difference in sources, the composite manuscript Morkinskinna, in which an older collection of royal tales is amalgamated with episodes incorporated into later redactions over the course of the 13th century, and the consistent authorial performance of Heimskringla. 106 There is a comparable passage in Knýtlinga saga: “konungr leit ástaraugum til hennar” (The king cast love glances at her). 107 The summary term for these services, veitsla “feast,” refers to their dominant aspect, tied up with the supply of agricultural produce. Military service was usually only owed by men tied to the king’s entourage, while general mobilization was a 12th-century innovation with mixed results.

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to drive home the point Magnús must now—whether he wants to or not—­ indeed sleep with Margrét, and publicly, insofar as everything that does or does not happen will become public knowledge because if no one else, Margrét herself is there as a witness. Literally, nothing short of a miracle can stop the king now, and the king cannot let himself be stopped by anything short of a miracle (which, expediently, happens). Any action on the king’s part must be calculated according to its consequences, and must never be left to the impulse of the moment. Little remains of the purportedly thoughtless, impulsive men chasing young women, if, in fact, they disciplined their sexual conduct in subordination to the same logic as their feuds, drinking habits, and speech skills. It should have become clear in what way the interpretation of the polygynous side of political culture as proposed here differs from other, anthropologically or sociobiologically motivated interpretations. Not the connection between power and sexuality, which is virtually negligible given its ubiquity and evidence, but its operationalization under contingent conditions are the subject of historical analysis. Like the Merovingians,108 and doubtless many others without literate observers, the Norwegian kings of the eleventh century took advantage of the opportunities offered by their sexuality in particular ways for particular purposes, and under the given circumstances developed an expressive system that could be used for differentiated statements. 13

Danish Encounters

Fragmentary though they often are, traces of this system can be found in many sources of different kinds and make it possible to bring these elements—­ otherwise all too easily dismissed as topical set pieces—into context. For instance, in the thirteenth-century Knýtlinga saga, the Danish royal saint Cnut (d. 1086), touring his kingdom in much the same manner as Magnús, likewise breaks off an attempt to demand a night with his host’s wife.109 The episode 108 Chronik des sogenannten Fredegar iv, 59 for the year 630/31: “Anno 8. regni sui, cum Auster regio cultu circuerit, quadam puella nomen Ragnetrudae aestrati sui adscivit…” [sic] (“When, in the eighth year of his reign, he [Dagobert i] passed through Austrasia in a royal manner, he took a certain girl named Ragnetrude to his bed”). This relationship produced King Sigibert iii, and this alone is the chronicler’s occasion for mentioning Ragnetrude. 109 KnS c. 31. Following the model of Heimskringla, centred around Óláf’s saga, the middle third of the Danish kings’ saga is occupied by a Life of Saint Cnut, which is far closer to hagiographical conventions than Snorri’s work.—No miraculous intervention is required in this episode (unlike in the episode of Magnús and Margrét in Morkinskinna, cited

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may in first instance be read against the backdrop of the motif of his monogamous abstinence, established since his first vita.110 In the same context, however, it gains the additional nuance of the reference to Cnut’s “harsh” style of rule, his nimia crudelitatis sevitia (Sven Aggesen), which was likewise well established in the historiography, and which even in the hagiography was considered the cause of his fall. It encouraged the audience to see Cnut’s demand for a night with the lady of the house as part of a whole series of actions which included his outrageous tax demands and severe treatment of the opposition. The situation is similar with the miraculous conception of (locally revered, never canonized) ‘Saint’ Nicholas of Aarhus around 1150. Travelling around Jutland, Cnut Magnussen—one of three co-kings in Denmark sharing a fragile common rule—has just reached Haderslev in South Jutland when an “astronomer” prophesies the imminent conception that night of a man great before God and man. “I want to be the father of that child!” exclaims the king, ­summons a young noblewoman, and fathers the future saint.111 The well-established motif of ‘illegitimate’ miraculous conception, whose leading representative may be considered Charlemagne, acquires, when read in an ‘expressive’ context, a quite precise political nuance: Cnut wishes to make his precarious rule in South Jutland—the former jarldom of Cnut Lavard, father of Cnut’s co-king and rival Valdemar—visible in the most impressive way possible. The Norwegian King’s Mirror (Konungs skuggsjá, around 1260), the first parenesis of rulers in the North and thus already a testimony to the ‘Europeanizing’ adaptation phase of the kingdom of Hákon iv, lists as one of the characteristics of periods of unclear royal succession: “Some women are robbed and raped and others gained with cunning and intercourse.”112 A similar observation is made in the law of the king’s retainers (Hirðskrá) from the time of Magnús the Law-Mender (1263–80), c. 44: The ‘guests’ (gestir, the second rank of the retinue) should, when undertaking a royal mission, always remember their errand and as far as possible refrain from doing the following: plundering,

above), as the king himself is the saint; therefore, after a pastoral-sounding plea by the woman, he himself leaves her be. 110 Ælnoth c. 8; see above, Chapter 1. 111 vsd 404: “Dicitur de Kanuto rege transeunte a plaga boreali Jutie uersus australem, quod iuxta oppidum Hathersleuense de nocte dixit ei astronomus, quod illa nocte generaretur puer magnus coram deo et hominibus. Dixit rex: ‘Vellem ego esse pater illius pueri’; et fecit ad se uocari puellam nobilem, de qua genuit sanctum Nicolaum.”—On the political/ dynastic context, see above, Chapter 1. 112 KSs 53: “þa værda konor sumarr hærnæmðar oc nauðgar tæcnar en sumar velltar mæð brogðum oc lægorðum.”

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theft, rash homicide, and “above all breaking women’s peace.”113 Reading the saga of Hákon’s reign indicates that such practices were commonplace. This ‘politicization’ and semantization even affects a seemingly ubiquitous motif: the narrative sequence ‘brutalizer demands the surrender of girls for sexual abuse under the threat of violence.’114 This is the motif of the pucelle esforciee which, inter alia, provides a key scene in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain,115 allows Saxo to illustrate heroic deeds of the Norse in Rus’,116 and generated powerful additional references through its affinity to the narrative pattern of the legends of virgin martyrs.117 However, in the sagas the place of giants, savages, and prefects is taken by the usual actors, and their diabolically inspired misdeeds reduced to the level of commonplace feuding between Nordic magnates. The saga of Hávarð from Ísafjord (northwest Iceland), set in the early eleventh century but surviving in a version penned around 1300, portrays a regional ruler as follows: He was of noble kin, a great chieftain, and very prone to flaunt his power [literally, “he was the greatest man of no measure,” the term being ójafnaðarmaðr “un-even-man,” inequitable man] so that no one in the Ísa­ fjord dared to object to any of his demands. He took men’s daughters or other kinswomen, and kept them with him for a while, then sent them home again; he also took the dwellings of some, or drove them from their land.118 113 Hirðskrá c. 44: “þeir eigu ok sjálfer vandlega at at hyggja, til hverju luta þeir ero sender … ok minna á aðra, þá sem þeir sjá, at misgera, varazt við rán ok stuld ok allra helzt um kvenna frið ok þeira fé, laupa eigi bráðlega til manndrápa…” Cf. Lunden, “Sagakvinner” (1980/1991), 56. 114 See the survey of instances in Boberg, Motif-Index (1966), no.s R0-99 “Captivity” (esp. R10ff.) and R100-199 “Rescue” (esp. R111ff.). 115 V. 3768–4305: Yvain saves some of Gauvain’s relatives from a giant who is besieging their castle and demands Gauvain’s niece be handed over to his people; for an interpretation from the point of view of textually constructed rape, see Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens (1991), 45ff. 116 Saxo vi, 5,14: a warrior who is so sure of his power that he “illustrium uirorum coniuges maritis spectantibus raptas ad stuprum pertraheret,” and is defeated by Starkad, returning from Byzantium. 117 For example, in the Norse Margrétar saga (Unger, ed., Heilagra manna søgur, vol. 1 [1877], 475), where the jarl Olibrius wants to make Margaretha his frilla (~concubina). For Norse versions of the virgin legends, see most recently Wolf, ed., Heilagra meyja sǫgur (2003), as well as Gad, Helgener (1971); Carlé, Jomfru-fortællingen (1985); Carlquist, De fornsvenska helgonlegenderna (1996), and as an important contribution to research on reception, Lewis, “Model Girls” (1999). 118 Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings c. 1: “Hann var stórættaðar maðr ok hǫfðingi mikill ok inn mesti ójafnaðarmaðr, svá at engir menn þar um Ísafjǫrð báru styrk til neitt í móti honum at

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This negative model of an ójafnaðarmaðr, a man who refrains from preserving the paritarian consensus (jafnað/aequitas) even as a matter of form, gets what he deserves in the course of the story, along with the brutalizers in the  midst of society who behave “recklessly in the hunt for women and in boasting.”119 ­Occasionally, this role falls to marginal figures such as the standardized ‘berserker’ who, in the sagas of Icelanders, is not a mythical figure but a profit-driven professional duelist, presenting the farmers with the alternative ‘daughter or death’ before the hero takes him down.120 In such cases—much like in Chrétien’s Yvain—social and sexual disgrace go hand in hand, making for a transgressional element in a narrative that is ultimately affirmative: the indignation over lowly brutalizers who take the daughters of honest people suggests that access from ‘above’ to ‘below’ is less problematic. In the framework of a saga of Icelanders where the local big man takes the place of the ‘berserker,’ the scandal consists precisely in the fact that a member of the paritarian society, committed to the safeguarding or restoration of jafnað (evenness), shuts himself off from this basic consensus: the narrative parallels make the magnate an antisocial ‘berserker’ whose death no one mourns. The affirmative effect of transgression is central for the ‘prehistoric’ heroes, who are always granted a little more than the men and women of the ‘historical’ period, which begins around the tenth century. These were not just any heroes but, from the perspective of the high medieval recipients, the founders of their own political universe, only slightly obscured by the fog of pagan prehistory. The prehistoric sea king Helgi from the Dan dynasty—“it was uncertain whether tyranny or lust burned more intensely in him”121—committed the most famous rape of the Nordic heroes while pillaging in the Danish archipelago, where he sent his people in search of “a suitable girl” for his pleasure and they returned with a “baron” and his daughter.122 Helgi leaves her behind, pregnant—and does not know that the girl he will claim, many years later on his next landing on the island, is his own daughter conceived that night. The mæla. Hann tók dœtr manna eða frændkonur ok hafði við hǫnd sér nǫkkura stund ok sendi síðan heim; fyrir sumum tók hann bú upp eða rak brott af eignum sinum.” 119 Ljósvetninga saga c. 1: “óeirðarmenn miklir um kvennafar ok málaferli”; given the wider sense of the term mál, “speech; litigation” the final word can also mean that they did not shy away from a feud. 120 See, for example, Egils saga c. 64; Gísla saga c. 1; Similarly, Saxo (vii, 11,7ff.) reports of two brothers, who “excellentis forme uirgines parentibus ereptas concubitu uiolarent.” 121 Saxo ii, 5,2: “ut ambigue existimationis esset, tyrannide magis an libidine arsit.” 122 This is the oldest surviving version of the legend in the Chronicon Lethrense from the mid12th century (sm i, 47): “carnali captus concupiscencia milites regi aptam quesituros puellam mittit. Qui cuiusdam baronis Rolfcarl filiam, nomine Thoram, prosequente patre regi adducunt.”—Saxo’s amplificatio sets aside the realistic decor and focuses on the moral implication of the incest resulting from this stuprum.

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boy born out of this father-daughter incest is the mythological King Rolf Krake (Hrólf kraki, Rolpho). From a European perspective, this is a not uncommon birth legend for a somewhat superhuman hero. However, when transferred to the saga world by Snorri (who could assume his audience’s familiarity with the material), the story is completely integretated into the narration of early Nordic politics. In Ynglinga saga Yrsa (the daughter from the first encounter) initially appears as part of the loot brought back from a Viking expedition to Saxony by the king of Uppsala; through her beauty, skill, and eloquence, she distinguishes herself from the other captives, so that the king claims her for himself. Only now does the Danish king Helgi appear, attack Sweden, capture Yrsa in her role as local “queen,” and make her his wife. Rolf Krake is then born out of this relationship. Thus far, this constitutes the customary story of a captive woman taken as the victorious king’s bedfellow, only that this happens twice over. A few years later, however, the queen of Saxland, apparently on a diplomatic visit to Denmark, reveals to Helgi, who had impregnated her in the course of a previous plundering expedition to Saxony, that Yrsa is their child from that accounter. In response to the news of Helgi’s parental incest, which remains uncommented, Yrsa is left to return to Sweden and remains there as queen for the rest of her life.123 Thus in the kings’ sagas, the same story which gives rise to stylistic-­ affective flights of epic or moralizing Latinity in other versions from around the same time, is subordinated to the narrative principle of political rationality in much the same way as happens with the scaled-down fiends of the Icelandic saga. It is this generalized practice—and not, say, in the fact of the incorporation of mythical motifs in itself—that makes for the specific characteristics of Northern European thought and writing of history around 1200. By seamlessly integrating berserkers and incestuous mythical kings with crusading, harbourbuilding, farming, conquering England, feasting in Constantinople, crossing the Atlantic, and more farming, it endows the material of the genus grande with the commonplace, and simultaneously furnishes the everyday with grandeur. Raiding the beaches of neighbouring shores and capturing beautiful girls124 belonged to the everyday experiences of many recipients of these stories,125 whose cultural socialization in this intrareferential system had 123 Ys cc. 28f. 124 Thus Snorri about Yrsa (Ys cc. 28f.): “var mær ein undarliga fǫgr.” 125 ‘Everyday’ may be an exaggeration for the 13th century, and the coasts of Saxony and the British Isles had long been spared Viking-style attacks. However, both the internal conflicts in all Scandinavian countries and the crusades in the Baltic region continued to offer opportunities for such practices.

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­accustomed them to understand even such an action as laden with multifaceted meaning. Once again, we may wonder whether this was very different on the coasts of Southern and Western Europe (and in the landlocked interior), even if the local narrative worlds did not find their way into scholarly writing in the same way. 14

The Emperor’s Daughter and the Elbe Frontier: Erik Ejegod and Queen Bothild (c.1100)

Using women to designate martial superiority in conflict—the last, perhaps most striking, way of semantizing polygynous practice to be discussed here— is almost ubiquitous. The Judith of the Septuagint raises her voice to God: “Punish the strangers who have loosed the girdle of a virgin to defile her, and uncovered her thigh to put her to shame, and polluted her womb to disgrace her … you gave up their wives for booty and their daughters to captivity!”126 The Anglo-Saxon versified Bible echoes: “Many a fearful, white-cheeked woman must go trembling into a stranger’s embrace; mortally struck, the defenders of women and rings fell.”127 And in Beowulf, the woman who sits at Hrothgar’s side in the king’s hall and fills the hero’s cups is called Wealhþeow, “foreign slave.” The annals of Inis Faithlinn reported for the year 1111 “a foray by Muirchertach Ua Briain against the men of Bréifne, and he plundered and brought their women and their cattle to Munster,”128 while at the other end of Europe it was told of the capture of Antioch in 1098 that the crusaders there “took their pleasure in the beautiful Saracen women.”129 It is no surprise in itself that victory and defeat were also expressed in Northern Europe in terms of ‘war rape’; what we need to look at is whether the framework of the social-­ semantic system of polygyny discussed here also tinges the representation of sexual warfare. The Northern Europeans agreed with the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish chroniclers that ‘their’ Viking-era past was characterized by the belligerent seizure of

126 Jdt 9:2f. The Vulgate is abbreviated compared to the Septuagint: “in defensione alienigenarum qui violatores extiterunt in coinquinatione sua et denudaverunt femur virginis in confusionem … et dedisti mulieres eorum in praedam et filias eorum in captivitatem.” 127 “Sceolde forht monig / blachleor ides / bifiende gan / on fremdes fæðm; / feollan wergend / bryda and beaga, / bennum seoce”; cited from Fell, Women (1984), 67, on Gn 34:29. 128 Annals of Inisfallen, s.a. 1111: “Cresc.sluaged la Murcerrtach .H. Briain i firu Bréfni coros airg 7 co tarat a mmná 7 a mbú co firu Muman…” 129 Chanson d’Antioche, v. 6413: “des beles sarrasines i ont fait lor delis.”

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women.130 But this does not look any different in the post-Viking, ‘recent past.’ Of the many detailed narratives about women being carried away in the high Middle Ages—perhaps often similarly lost amid the stereotypical viros interficientes et mulieres captivantes of the Latin chronicle tradition131—I will focus on two. The first—an episode from Knýtlinga saga, the Danish royal history from the mid-thirteenth century—concerns the conception of the later jarl of South Jutland, prince of the Abodrites, ‘martyr’ and saint Cnut Lavard around 1096. King Erik i (Ejegod, r. 1095–1103) has gone on a pilgrimage to Rome, and Henry, “the emperor in Saxony,”132 seizes the opportunity to subjugate Wendland, until now dominated by the Danes. The most powerful of the hǫfðingjar won over by the emperor is Bjǫrn, who demands and gets Henry’s half-sister Bothild for the risk he takes. Through her father, a Jutlandic magnate, Bothild stems from the jarls of Lade; it remains unclear who her and Emperor Henry’s mother is supposed to be. Returning from Rome, Erik successfully undertakes a retaliatory campaign, kills Bjǫrn, and from the spoils he keeps the emperor’s sister for himself, with whom he fathers Cnut Lavard. The saga depicts the subsequent separation of the king from his booty as follows: When [Cnut] was still young, King Erik once said to Bothild: “You’ve been here some time, but that’s over now, and I’ll have you escorted home to your relatives.” She replied: “I believe that love was not a major factor in our being together, and you lay with me more out of vengeance than love. You will grant me, sir, that Cnut, our son, will go with me for my consolation.” The king answered: “I will not remunerate your kin so highly that I grant it to them that this boy grows up there, for I suspect that they and many others will have honour through him.” Thereupon she was escorted home to her relatives, and the king gave her a respectable entourage.133 130 The locus classicus is Dudo of St-Quentin (i, 3, based, in turn, on the Old Testament standards): “uxores a pluribus stuprate, ducuntur flebiliter aduenae; omnis puellarum sexus, ab ipsis turpiter deuirginatur.” A collection of similar notices is in Zettel, Bild der Normannen (1977). 131 Henry of Livonia, Chronicon Livoniae, 22,5—and countless others across Europe. 132 KnS c. 75: “keisari í Saxlandi.” Purely chronologically, this would have to be Henry iv. However, we should not expect the figure of the emperor to be individualized overly clearly. Henry iii’s ‘Danish’ tie with Gunhild/Kunigunde, daughter of Cnut the Great (1036), is at most a vague suggestion, given how far removed it is from the case being described here, both temporally and factually. The same is true for the marriage of (W)Úlfhild, daughter of Saint Óláf and Ástríð, to the Billung Ordulf at about the same time. 133 KnS c. 78.

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The episode is already remarkable for the turn of phrase meirr af heipt en ást (“more out of vengeance than love”), which the saga places in the mouth of the victim of the political vicissitudes. Socio-historically, it offers a literary illustration of the powerlessness of women in Bothild’s position, however well-born, vis-à-vis the man when it comes to dissolving the relationship, the woman’s insecurity and lack of control over the children. The image is rendered even more poignant by the matter-of-fact way it is recounted. Politically, however, it is striking, as it conflicts with almost all points of the historical knowledge about the parents of Saint Cnut Lavard of Ringsted, the progenitor of the reigning Valdemar dynasty, long since established at the time of the composition of Knýtlinga saga. Only Bothild’s paternal line is consistent with the ‘Valdemarian’ version, but in all the chronicles, annals, and genealogies, along with Saxo and his compilers, two circumstances are emphasized: Bothild, the “queen of the noblest Danish stock,” is the one and only uxor legitima of King Erik, and she accompanied him on his journey to Jerusalem— the first by a Nordic king—and, like him, died and was buried there. In Saxo, Botilda is an almost saint-like, faithful wife on account of her mildness, akin to Rachel and Livia, to the point of adorning with her own hands her husband’s concubines; reports of miracles at her grave on the Mount of Olives and that of her husband on Cyprus complete the image.134 It remains completely unclear how Bothild’s mother, unnamed in the ‘Valdemarian’ version, could have been impregnated by a Salian either before or afterwards. That King Erik should have sent Bothild back to ‘Saxony’ instead of going on a crusade with her contradicts an otherwise consistent tradition. As far as the factuality of the report is concerned, one must agree with Thyra Nors’s verdict: the saga author “himself probably did not believe what he wrote.”135 Yet Nors’s reference to the frequency of the motif of the captured ancestress in the genealogical literature of the French lay aristocracy, while undoubtedly correct as far as it goes, is not sufficient. It remains to be explained why in this case the ruling dynasty had opted so strikingly for another version—­the mild uxor legitima from a native chiefly house—long before 134 Genealogy of Abbot William of Æbelholt, written around 1190 for submission in the process of the marriage of Philip Augustus to Ingeborg of Denmark (smd i 180): Botilde “Regina de nobilissima Danorum prosapia orta.” Chronica Sialandie, ed. Kroman, s.a. 1101: “cum Botilda regina, uxore sua legitima.” Cf. Saxo xii 1,1; 3,6; correspondingly, Compendium Saxonis (sm i, 386f.). Bothild appears as uxor in five other annals. The only exception is Sven Aggesen, who does not mention Bothild in his Brevis Historia and sums up all Erik’s children as “sprouting from different connections.” 135 Thyra Nors, “Bodil,” in Jytte Larsen, ed., Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon (Copenhagen: 2000–01) and online edition.

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the ­alternative version appears in writing in Knýtlinga saga. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Valdemarian monarchy with its twin pillars of agnatic succession and legitimate birth (in a canonical sense) was firmly established; a change of course was nowhere in sight. The version of Knýtlinga saga thus reveals a considerable interest in the history of the Danes beyond direct involvement (‘propaganda’) of the Danish monarchy, which would certainly not have encouraged such a discordant version of the basis of its dynasty’s legitimacy. Language and genre of Knýtlinga saga show that the subject was considered interesting and relevant in Norway and the Atlantic world, and that at least there—and probably elsewhere, too—other interests and interpretations went around than the one that prevailed in the Valdemars’ Denmark.136 What ‘meaning’ does the rewriting of the quasi-canonized version of Cnut Lavard’s birth acquire in this context? The emperor’s ‘awarding’ his sister Bothild to Bjǫrn, the frontier zone turncoat magnate, and her subsequent capture by the Danish king are both situated in the context of the fight for Vinðland—later Eastern Holsten and Mecklenburg—which Knýtlinga saga claims was originally (and rightfully) under Danish suzerainty, but was then unjustly seized by the Saxons; the Danish king then restored the lawful state of affairs and kept the emperor’s sister, whom Henry had given to his ‘margrave,’ for himself. Two possible political subtexts come into question: in the 1120s, with the approval of the Saxon duke and emperor Lothar iii, Cnut Lavard— whose conception the episode is about—achieved recognition as overlord (knes’) of the Polabian Slavs, bringing Northalbingia into the Danish sphere of influence after the end of Billung rule. Cnut’s murder in 1131, the youth and exile of his son, the party struggles that broke out in Denmark in 1134, and the (re-) appointment of the Schauenburg Adolf ii as count in Holsten and Stormarn in 1143 and his subsequent offensive against the Polabians returned Northalbingia to Saxon overlordship.137 Sixty years later, Schauenburg control over Northalbingia, such as it was, collapsed after the fall of Henry the Lion, and Cnut vi and Valdemar ii accomplished the transition of the lands “beyond 136 There is no recent study on the political content Knýtlinga saga. The lively debate in the 1960s, concentrated on the issues of the sources and literary models as well as the question of author. For various textual reasons, the authorship of Óláf Þórðarson hvítaskáld, one of Snorri Sturluson’s nephews, seems possible, if ultimately unprovable. Crucially, a primarily non-Danish, namely Norwegian-Atlantic context, can be assumed for both the composition and its audience, at least in the present version. See in the introduction in Danakonunga sögur, ed. Bjarni Guðnason (1982), and Rikke Malmros, “Knýtlinga saga,” in EMSc 359f., both with additional references. 137 Cf. Hoffmann, “Sachsen, Abodriten und Dänen” (1986); Hermanson, “Danish Lords” (2004).

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the Elbe and Elde”138 from the empire to Denmark, first de facto and later formally. However, the Battle of Bornhöved in 1227 and the reinstallation of the Schauenburgs with the support of Hamburg and Lübeck once again separated Northalbingia from Denmark.139 In a period when the question of the cultural unity of all “Northlands” (norðrlǫnd) was much under discussion in learned circles (at least), this indeterminateness of the ‘frontier’ zone between the Elbe and the Baltic Sea took on an importance that went beyond political issues in a narrower sense. For the British Isles, the southern border of ‘the North’ could be moved to the English Channel, with reference to the long Danish rule in England and, after 1066, to the alleged continued affinity of the ‘Northmen’ with their fathers’ lands of origin—even Normandy could be included.140 In the east, the rulers of Hólmgarð/Novgorod and Kœnugarð/Kiev, always tied to Scandinavian dynasties, ensured that ‘the North’ reached as far as the great rapids on the steppe borders on the way to Miklagarð/Byzantium. The critical part was the FrisianWendish southern rim and in particular the isthmus between the North Sea and the Baltic. The question of whether Saxony, as opposed to the ‘Frankish’ interior, was part of Norðrlǫnd was a matter of controversy in the thirteenth century,141 and was apparently only resolved after the transition of the Nordic monarchies from primarily sea- to land-based political formations towards 1300, whereby the North Sea and Baltic Sea took on a divisive character. The initial orientation of Valdemar i towards Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony and (to a lesser extent) Emperor Frederick i, soon to be replaced by the assertion of Danish supremacy on the northern Saxon marches and Wendland, left a notion of confrontation on the part of historians such as Saxo and the editor of 138 The so-called ‘Privilege of Metz’ of Frederick ii in 1214, in dd i, 5, no. 48. 139 For a reasonable evaluation of Holsten in the Valdemar era, see Hoffmann, “Bornhöved” (1977); cf. most recently Wille-Jørgensen, “Ostseeimperium” (2003); Riis, Ostseeimperium (2003); Lind et al., Danske korstog (2004); Rüdiger, “Helgenkongen” (2005); now also Rüdiger, “Holstein” (2008); Rüdiger, “Framing the Frontier” (2009). 140 For example, Knýtlinga saga c. 19 refers to England as “the richest of all Northern lands in  money”; a fortiori, Scotland, Ireland, and Northumberland are integrated into the ­Norwegian-Danish network of relations. 141 See von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999). The Latin Skjǫldunga saga and the Snorra Edda Prologue include Saxonia/Saxland with Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Atlantic islands (the Prologue even makes Saxony Odin’s first stop in the North), whereas Snorri does not seem to, and Saxo certainly does not. It is needless to point out that the Saxland under discussion is the ‘Old Saxony’ of Anglo-Saxon historiographers, the lowlands between the lower Elbe, Weser, and IJssel, and not the modern Free State of Sachsen, the former margraviate of Meissen, which came to be called ‘(Upper) Saxony’ through a series of dynastic incidents.

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the Annales Ryenses which would decisively influence later Danish historiography (and modern nationalism): whatever came from south of the Elbe was evil and dangerous. This view also characterizes the representation of the seizure of Bothild in Knýtlinga saga. The issue here is the conflict over the border, fought out in the Holsten-Mecklenburg area, which was treated as a glacis by both sides.142 Even Bjǫrn, who was established in Danish historiography as a royal relative (in Saxo he is a kind of Danish margrave over Holsten) and, as the founder of Rendsborg on the Ejder borderline, is explicitly linked to the tradition of the early heroic Prince Offa,143 is ‘inverted’ and, while retaining his almost emblematic Nordic name, now holds the emperor’s Northern March against the Danes. Bothild, Danish on her father’s side, close to the emperor on her mother’s, appears similarly ‘inverted’: first Henry makes her a sign of his arrogated control over Northalbingia by giving her to its leader; then after the restoration of order, Erik has her atone for the disturbance by exploiting her ‘imperial’ body for the auspicious conception of their son, Cnut—that Cnut Lavard who, as Knýtlinga saga reports in detail, will actually establish Danish rule in Wendland and acquire first a king’s and then a martyr’s crown. Although this presentation is quite close to one of the tendencies in Danish historiography at the time—claiming Northalbingia against the Schauenburgs—its means of representation differs significantly from the ‘Valdemarian’ version. It thus hints at a kind of Nordic public sphere, in which history is utilized as an argument, where, from one version to another, while maintaining a certain core set of narrative elements, it was possible to arrange and rearrange them into almost arbitrarily disparate patterns of meaning. 15

The Cheese and the Anchor: Harald Hardrada’s Booty (1047)

The second episode is about the range of statements made, not in later ­appropriations and reassessments, but by the protagonists. It takes place in the 142 The word “glacis” is already used in Fritz Rörig, Schlacht bei Bornhöved (1927), 14, albeit for Holsten and Slesvig. It seems to me that there is no question of a “glacis” situation north of the Ejder/Eider and Slien/Schlei, and that Rörig, influenced by the ‘Schleswig question’ of the 19th and 20th centuries, draws back the line of conflict too far into the premodern era. Until around 1840, it is Holsten rather than Slesvig which is the indeterminate zone. 143 Saxo xii, 3,6. According to Saxo, it is King Erik who gives one of his daughters ex concubinatu to the man who avenges the murder of Bjǫrn: further demonstrating how Knýtlinga saga turns signs on their head, creating a new context from the familiar elements of history, but more congenial to the demands of contemporary meaning-making.

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summer of 1047 in northeast Jutland. Harald Hardrada, the ‘bigamist’ from the beginning of this chapter, has returned from Byzantium and Rus’ a few years earlier and, initially in cooperation with Sven Estridsen, sought to undermine the rule of his half-brother Magnús ‘the Good,’ who had succeeded to the Danish kingship after the death of Cnut the Great’s son Harthacnut in 1042, through regular military expeditions along the Danish coast. Harald had already had his skalds sing of these expeditions: The crowd, sadly scattered— Danes still living were fleeing loitered, and lovely ladies were captured. A lock held the lass’s body, lots of women to the warships passed before you; bright fetters into flesh bit greedily.144 This is clear enough in translation, although still not as drastic as the original. While the verse contains no untranslatable kennings, some of the sophistication of the wording is nonetheless lost. In the final sentence, bitu fíkula fjǫtrar hǫrund bjartir (“bright fetters into flesh bit greedily”), the metaphorical connotation of the gold rings which normally decorate maidens’ arms, is produced through the adjective bjartr, which is usually chosen for yellowish lustre (sun, gold) and denotes reflexes of light. It is not just that women are captured, but the scopic focus of the stanza—addressed primarily at King Harald’s followers, and secondarily at any other conceivable gathering of warriors in a festive ­setting—is on high-ranking women, now wearing arm rings of a quite different kind. Since verses such as these are aimed at both the own retinue and the prospective enemy, the Danish women wearing golden torques are themselves, along with their menfolk, among those challenged by the metaphor.

144 HsS c. 19, stanza 95 (from Valgarð, probably part of a drápa, a longer song of praise): “Dvalði daprt of skilða, / drifu, þeirs eptir lifðu, / ferð, en fengin urðu / fǫgr sprund, Danir undan. / Láss helt líki drósar. / Leið fyr yðr til skeiða, / bitu fíkula fjǫtrar, / fljóð mart, hǫrund bjartir.”—Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 55.—Cf. TurvillePetre, Harald the Hard-Ruler (1968). An alternative English translation (Kari Ellen Gade [ed.], Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From c. 1035 to c. 1300) reads: “The pitifully scattered crowd was delayed; the Danes who were still alive fled away, but fair women were captured. A lock secured the girl’s body; many a maiden went before you to the warships; bright fetters bit greedily into the flesh.”

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In 1047, Harald has taken over the kingship of Norway as sole heir of his halfbrother Magnús. He continues his annual military expeditions along the Danish coasts as the heir to Magnús’s claim to suzerainty over Denmark, only he now attacks different regions than before. The imminent threat has been noted in Jutland and the challenge taken up: in the house of the “great leader” Þorkel the Fierce (geysa)145 at the mouth of the Gudenå near the later town of Randers, Þorkel’s two daughters undertake to respond to Harald: “They had made a great joke the winter before about King Harald travelling to Denmark with warships. They had carved an anchor in cheese, saying that it might well serve to hold back the king of Norway’s ships.”146 With adequate dissemination, the gestures of girls’ hands could be no less powerful a verse from men’s mouths. Harald acknowledges the counter-challenge in a half-verse: Lǫtum vér, meðan lirlar líneik veri sínum, Gerðr, í Goðnarfirði, galdrs, akkeri halda.

We’ll let, while the linen-oak lulls her husband, the anchor grip in Gudenå, the Gerð of incantation.147

And his court skald Þjóðólf Arnórsson adds, completing the half-verse and thereby reworking Harald’s guidelines into a masterful overall metaphor: Sumar annat skal sunnar, segik eina spǫ, fleini, vér aukum kaf króki, kaldnefr furu halda.

Further south next summer— I speak a prophecy—cold-nose shall fix with its fluke the vessel of fir; we add a hook to the ocean.148

145 His byname is actually a verb: geysa “surge, advance fiercely”; the related agent noun geysir “the surger” has given the loan word “geyser.” In Morkinskinna (c. 31) Þorkel appears as the mastermind behind Sven Estridsen’s royal elevation and so in real political terms becomes Harald’s main opponent. Snorri reports nothing more about him beyond the following episode. 146 HsS c. 32: “Þær hǫfðu gǫrt spott mikit áðr um vetrinn um þat, at Haraldr konungr mundi fara til Danmerkr með herskipum. Þær skáru ór osti akkeri ok sǫgðu, at slík mundi vel mega halda skipum Nóregskonungs.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 65. 147 HsS c. 32, stanza 100. The girls are designated through two women’s kennings: lineik “linen-oak” (the linen-clad body like a tree) and Gerðr galdrs “Gerð [the name of a giantess] of the song”; both kennings evoke the peaceful domestic sphere and generate a frivolous scenario with the rare verb lirla “lull, hum, trill.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 64. 148 HsS c. 32, stanza 101; note how both the insult brought back to the Norwegian court as well as the two half-stanzas stem from the same verb, halda, “hold (on).”—In the different versions of the episode in the sagas (Heimskringla, Morkinskinna, various copies of Fagrskinna), the attribution of the half-stanzas to the two authors varies; Snorri’s solution is the

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The first level of metaphor is directly accessible only to those familiar with a Viking-age anchor (that is, the entire original audience). The shape is fairly similar to modern anchors, but the upper end is connected to the anchor chain with two adjacent rings.149 This is the “fluke” or “cold-nose” (similar in shape to nostrils, but made of iron), which secures the “fir” (the wooden longship). Underneath, the sexual aggression—keeping constantly to the anchor metaphor and in doing so targeting Chieftain Þorkel’s daughters—generated by the imagery of “add a hook” and “fluke” is unmistakable. Finally, the anchorage chain tethering the slender ‘fir’ refers back to the earlier stanzas about chained girls, and thus to Harald’s past victories. All that remained was to turn words into deeds. Morkinskinna explicates what Heimskringla leaves unsaid (but amply expresses by the events themselves): “He [Harald] addressed his men … he said that he did not mind if they put their hearts into the work in order to avenge the mockery of the Danes. The whole army was eager to have the Danes pay a proper price.” In the summer, Harald campaigns in Jutland and, of course, along the Gudenå. “Then they burned Þorkel geysa’s estate … Then his daughters were led to the ships as captives … People say that an informant who had seen King Harald’s fleet said to Þorkel geysa’s daughters: ‘You said, daughters of Geysa, that Harald would not be coming to Denmark.’ Dótta replied: ‘That was true yesterday.’”150 A verse was also circulated about it: Skǫru jast ór osti eybaugs Dana meyjar, þat of angraði þengil þing, akkerishringa. Nú sér mǫrg í morgin

Island-ring objects, anchor-rings, Danish maidens carved out of yeast-cheese; that irked the ruler. Now in the morning many

most compelling against the backdrop of skaldic poetry’s sociological setting.—Finnur Jónsson has a somewhat variant text, especially kaldnets instead of kaldnefr, whereby the ‘cold nose’ (the anchor ring) becomes the genitive determination of the ship (‘of the cold net’). This version does not appear very convincing to me. 149 A ship grave with a very well preserved, 1.36-metre-tall anchor on a 10-metre-long anchor chain was uncovered in Ladby near Kerteminde on Funen in 1935; on the findings and interpretation see most recently, Sørensen, Ladby (2001). 150 HsS c. 32: “Þá brenndu þeir bœ Þorkels geysu. … Váru þá leiddar dœtr hans bundnar til skipa. … Svá segja menn, at njósnarmaðr mælti, sá er sét hafði flota Haralds konungs, við dœtr Þorkels geysu: ‘Þat sǫgðu þér, Geysudœtr, at Haraldr mundi eigi koma til Danmarkar.’ Dótta svaraði: ‘Svá var í gjárna.’”—Dótta, here understood as a proper name, may be a corruption of dóttir “daughter.” Morkinskinna, trans. Andersson and Gade (2000), 194; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 65.

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mær, hlær at því færi, ernan krók ór járni allvalds skipum halda.

a maid sees—fewer are laughing— a hefty hook of iron holding the overlord’s vessels.151

The metaphor has become reality, the girls are Harald’s booty. Their father, who escaped the attack completely unscathed, pays for their release with a “tremendous ransom” (með ógrynni fjár), and the episode is concluded. Harald Hardrada never succeeded in enforcing his claim to Denmark, but would only conclude a truce with Sven Estridsen twenty years later. Politically, the episode was thus the prelude to a prolonged failure,152 but if we approach the conflict only in terms of words and gestures, Harald ends ‘in the black’— and it is certainly conceivable that this propaganda success was more important for the reputation of this fledgling monarchy than the precise balance of pillage and conflagrations which the kings inflicted on one another across the Skagerrak. The two girls not only played a decisive role in this conflict, but an active one; they are sememes of a symbolic system, but also its users. To a certain extent, they perform a semantic act with themselves. This assessment arouses critical suspicion: surely the whole episode is a (male) literary fiction, or rather the genre-conditioned literarization of political events that certainly affect the real Harald and the real Þorkel the Fierce, but at best allows his daughters to appear as passive prey? Although the critical objection may be methodologically justified, I do not believe that it holds water. Unless one takes the stance that women generally have little or no room for manoeuvre in a male society such as this—a view I think is quite uncalled for—, there is no fundamental reason to doubt the lived reality of the episode. It is at least as well supported in terms of sources as most other events reported in the king’s sagas, and, moreover, the account of the challenges is both particularly detailed and strikingly unusual. We can at least extract the core of the stanzas—‘women express an insult connected to the durability of Harald’s anchors’—and attempting to

151 HsS c. 32, stanza 103. Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 65. It is unclear whether the words two verses apart, eybaugs “of the island ring,” a kenning for “the sea,” and þing “thing, object” belong together (“sea object” to mirror “anchor ring”)—this is the solution chosen by Finlay and Foulkes in the translation quoted—or whether they should be allocated to the adjacent syntactic units (“the Danish maidens from the coast” and “the matter irked the ruler”). Either way, nothing is gained or lost contentwise. 152 Snorri explicitly states (c. 34) that Sven’s attacks on Norway inflicted no less harm than vice versa.

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discredit them would require an excessive philological effort.153 It might just be possible to argue that it was only with the saga writers of the thirteenth century that the stanzas around the anchor metaphor (which mention Harald and some Danish girls, but not any particular chief) were linked to Harald’s raid on Þorkel. But this would be a secondary detail, because the important thing is that an insult worked by girls, which according to the saga commentary “incensed [Harald] beyond measure,”154 as well as its consequences are integral parts of the exchange of verses. All the important thirteenth-century kings’ sagas would incorporate the storyline established by this contemporary tradition, and integrate it into their own narrative texture. So what we see here is probably how high-placed women, alongside the men, take a hand (and words) to make politics happen—accepting the risk alongside the men, or more so. In what sense is this a polygynous episode? There are no sexual actions beyond the metaphorical hook and eyelet in Þjóðólf’s skaldic verse. Certainly, it concerns two girls, and if we consider the episode biographically we might note that King Harald already had a wife (Elizabeth of Novgorod) at this point, and was about to take a second (Þóra, the chief’s daughter), so the situation was potentially polygynous. But in fact, whether it went as far as rape is irrelevant to the ‘expressive’ aspect of the episode. As soon as he had the girls on his ship in chains, Harald could safely forget about them, given that neither virginity or its loss, nor the number and kind of former sexual partners in general were decisive for the social rank, reputation, or future prospects of a woman. What mattered was that he had brought them into his power and this had been staged in a way that in some way answered their original (likewise gestural) challenge. As soon as this was done, he could enter into negotiations with the father—a wise course to take from the point of view of de-escalation. Harald wanted to rule Denmark, not devastate it, and it was therefore advisable to follow up the assertion of his authority with a certain consensus.155 In this way, despite all appearances, the girls are no longer victims, but actors in the episode. Like their father (who has lost wealth and his farm), they come out with diminished status but substantially unscathed. Much the same 153 Besides the whole prose episode, the third verse cited here (“carved out of yeast-cheese …”) would need to be explained as an unhistorical, late addition, which would leave the punchline of the preceding two verses by Harald and/or Þjóðólf going nowhere. 154 Signalled by the use of the expletive particle of “so much, all too much” in the words “þat of angraði þengil” (“that angered the prince beyond measure”). 155 In Morkinskinna, Þorkel concedes Harald sjálfdœmi, the right to judge his own case, thereby acknowledging Harald’s victory. After the payment of the ransom money, interpreted as a fine for the insults inflicted, the two depart, their conflict “settled.”

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applies to all active participants in saga conflicts, assuming they survive, but the situation is quite different for those who are passively involved in these conflicts: the house and farm, servants and followers, and often also the women, who are abducted and enslaved. Through their performance, Þorkel’s daughters have escaped this role; they have—again in Carol Clover’s terms— sided with the ‘powerful.’ Without thereby becoming socially ‘men’ in any way, they use their semantic possibilities as women to make statements with themselves. The episode is necessary to avoid the impression that the interpretation of polygyny under its ‘expressive’ aspect makes women signs in a discourse that men conduct among themselves. For, in fact, women participate in this discourse in various ways: we would be doing an injustice to women like Ælfgifu of Northampton or Sigríð of Vík if we assumed that they were only indifferent or suffering tools of ‘their’ men, and did not take an active interest in the concerns of their group. Morkinskinna says about Margrét the chieftain’s daughter: “Her father would consult with her about almost everything.” And once again we may ponder whether things were all that different in other parts of the medieval West, where the Latin historical narratives almost only ever present women collectively and as the grammatical patient. The warriors of King ­Henry IV of East Frankland, who according to a hostile Latin chronicler publicly raped the Saxon women or took them back to their camps, “violating them whenever they wished,” and eventually sent them back to the men,156 are contemporaries of Harald Hardrada and the daughters of Þorkel geysa. Often enough, these things may have happened collectively, as ‘war rape.’ In other cases they may have taken an individuated, ‘expressive’ aspect, though not all women’s agencies and fates may have been the same. And even where they were been recorded, such stories may have been told and retold, sung, and remembered, and the Saxon (and Frankish, Irish, and Aquitanian) women of the ruling groups certainly also often demonstrated similar initiative to the chief’s mocking daughters on the Kattegat—and risked as much. 156 Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, s.a. 1073: “Filias eorum et uxores consciis et pene aspicientibus maritis violabant. Nonnullas etiam vi in castella sua raptas et, quanto tempore libido suggessissent, impudicissime habitas ad ultimum maritis cum ignominiosa exprobatione remittebant.”

Chapter 5

The Performative Aspect 1

“Castles and Maidens”

Now and then medieval writers have stories of ‘political relationships’ that leave us puzzled and disturbed. They seem to elude the purposefulness of generational opportunities, habitual needs, agonistic constraints, and expressive possibilities presented in the previous chapters. When, according to the Austrian rhyming chronicle of Ottokar of Styria, King Philip iv ‘the Fair’ of France (r. 1285–1314) took the daughter of Count Guy of Flanders, imprisoned in the Louvre, “with force and against her will” (mit gewalte und ân iren danc),1 this was pointless in terms of desirable offspring, and rather counterproductive for habitus and the stylisation of authority, given that the chivalrous ethos disapproved of the rape of noblewomen. The rape in prison can also hardly be understood as an expressive act, since the count’s daughter Philippa was a hostage in the Louvre as a result of a conflict her father had already lost, so all the necessary signals had long since been sent. Even if one doubts the facticity of the report, the question is whether the rumour as such had migrated from Paris to Styria, or whether Ottokar drew a pointed conclusion from the circumstances that had become known to him; ultimately, what is crucial is that the king of France was thought capable of sexual violence against the imprisoned daughter of a ‘disloyal vassal.’ What, then, drove Philip the Fair, the political actor, or ‘Philip the Fair,’ the royal figure in the Styrian rhyming chronicle, into Philippa’s dungeon? What caused Swen Godwinson, returning from a martial foray into the Welsh frontier in 1046, to have the abbess of the Mercian monastery of Leominster “brought to him, and he kept her as long as he pleased, and then let her go home”?2 Why, in 1002, did Edmund ‘Ironside’ deem it appropriate to supplement the St Brice’s Day massacre by making his way to the wife of one of the burned nobilissimi Danorum: “he beheld, desired, and took her?”3 A little later, 1 Ottokar i of Styria, Österreichische Reimchronik, v. 63,482f.; cf. Rieger, “Viol” (1988), 243. 2 asc C, s.a. 1046: “Her on þysum geare for Swegn eorl into Wealan 7 Griffin se norþera cyng [Gruffydd ap Llewellyn, King of Gwynedd and Powys; he married a daughter of the earl of Mercia] forð mid him, 7 him man gislode [he received hostages]. Þa he hamwerdes wæs, þa het he feccan him to þa abbedessan on Leomynstre 7 hæfde hi þa while þe him geliste, 7 let hi syþþan faran ham.” 3 William of Malmesbury, gra ii, 179: “Vxor Sigeferdi Malmesberiam in captionem est abducta, spectabilis nobilitatis femina; quapropter Edmundus, regis filius, dissimulata intentione © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_008

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Archbishop Wulfstan of York painted a picture in a sermon of how, “often ten or twelve [Danes], one after the other, will disgracefully put to shame a thane’s wife, and sometimes his daughter or close kinswoman, while he looks on, he who considered himself brave and strong and good enough before that happened.”4 On the one hand, these cases of war rape are part of a continuum that extends (at least) from the ancient Near East—“the women were raped according to the right of the warriors and the victors”5—to the present day. On the other hand, as with all ‘historical constants,’ some variation is to be expected even behind the seemingly eternal formula, “Castles and maidens. Both must surrender.”6 This is what concerns us here. 2

Abishag at the Court of Hákon Hákonarson

Is war rape, including Philip’s visit to the prison, not simply an extreme case of the ‘expressive aspect’? Doesn’t it aim at making a point about victory and defeat, triumph and subjugation? Our twenty-first century has brought the subject painfully to the fore, and from the (seemingly) impregnable fortresses of academia, scholars have increasingly stressed the importance of war rape to warfare past and present. The overall image resulting from recent research is all too obviously true to be commented upon here; we may take it as read and, moreover, argue that mass war rape does not really fall within the range of relationships, wide but not all-englobing, with which this study is concerned. To reiterate what I have stated in the introduction: Not every sexual encounter establishes a ‘relationship’ in the sense studied here (nor need, of course, all man–woman relationships be sexual), though some may. I should like to in partes illas iter arripiens, uisam concupiuit, concupitae communionem habuit.”—Even more than with Philip the Fair, the level of detail prevents us assuming that general moral condemnation is the sole aim of the episode: it took place in Malmesbury, the site of William’s monastery, and a place for which William could provide detailed reports about much earlier events in its history; for the burning at St. Frideswide’s church in Oxford following the (in)famous St Brice’s Day Massacre on 13 November 1002, which directly precedes this episode both logically and directly, William relies on a—preserved—documentary source in archiuo. 4 Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (1014), in Bethurum, ed., The Homilies of Wulfstan (1957), no. 20, 267–75: “oft tyne oððe twelfe, ælc æfter oþrum, scendað to bysmore þæs þegenes cwenan 7 hwilum his dohtor oððe nydmagan, þær he on locað, þe læt hine sylfene rancne 7 ricne 7 genoh godne ær þæt gewurde.” 5 Jgs 21:22: “rapuerunt eas iure bellantium et victorum.” cf. Jgs 5:30; 19:23ff.; 2 Sm 12:11. Latin rapere is “rob” (i.e. abduct) as well as “rape” but the difference, in practice, is not a neat one. 6 Faust i “Vor dem Tor” (the soldiers’ song just before the Easter walk).

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­suggest that there may be an ‘aspect’ which is close to, but not part of, the ‘expressive’ as described in the previous chapter. I shall try to make the disctinction a little clearer by way, again, of biblical examples. Absalom was pursuing an ‘expressive’ purpose when, after successfully entering Jerusalem in the course of his revolt against his father David, on the advice of his confidants he first “went in to his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel.” The hoped-for effect of David being “sullied” in such a manner on the hesitant in the country is explicitly referred to.7 It is, however, less easy to understand the following episode ‘expressively.’ Adonijah, another of David’s sons, and one of several who were competing for a good position in the run for succession, had sought to strengthen the advantage provided by his relatively high birth through demonstrative generosity, but at the decisive moment he found his position challenged by Bathsheba, who used her proximity to the dying king to launch her son Solomon. Adonijah, his claim apparently deferred, carelessly asks Bathsheba, of all people, to make a request on his part of the designated successor, Solomon: he would like to have Abishag the ­Shunammite—the bedmate of the ageing, already impotent David8—for his wife (uxor). Bathsheba phrases the request in a way that makes Solomon reply that not only Abishag is being demanded of him, but the kingship as well! Solomon then invokes his God as his ally and has Adonijah slain (3 Kgs 2,19–25). Solomon’s reaction has left some modern commentators at a loss.9 By ­contrast, at the Norwegian royal court circa 1250, there would have been no 7 2 Sm 16:22: “ingressusque est ad concubinas patris sui coram universo Israhel.” Absalom’s advisor Achitophel explicates (16:21): “ut cum audierit omnis Israhel quod foedaveris patrem tuum, roborentur manus eorum tecum.”—Recognizing its continued political relevance, the Norwegian royal mirror (Konungs skuggsjá, ed. Holm-Olsen [21983], 109) closely echoed the original text in its summary of the lesson, thereby emphasizing its public effectiveness: “Absalon son hans gecc i augliti allz folks oc lagðez mæðr [sic] friðlum hans oc gerðe þessa skom fæðr sinum firi allu folki” (“His son Absalon went before the eyes of the whole people and lay with his frillur, and inflicted this shame on his father, before all the people”). 8 On the figure, see Häusl, Abischag und Batscheba (1993), who uses comparative linguistic arguments to suggest the hapax legomenon s-k-n-t (today vocalized as sokènèt; the root skn “bring benefit” with feminine suffix -t), translated verbally by the Vulgate as “foveat eum” (King James Bible 1614: “let her cherish him”), be understood as an official title (such as “Head of the King’s Household”). Adonijah would therefore be seeking to marry an influential figure within the palace. While these considerations are undoubtedly valuable for interpreting the biblical text, they are irrelevant in the present case where the Latin Bible was authoritative. Here, Abishag is an “adulescentula[.] virg[o] … erat autem puella pulchra nimis / dormiebatque cum rege et ministrabat ei / rex vero non cognovit eam” (3 Kgs 1, 2, and 4). 9 Häusl, Abischag und Batscheba (1993), 245ff. In support of her hypothesis, Häusl argues that Solomon’s violent reaction would be incomprehensible if Abischag was ‘merely’ the old king’s juvenile bedmate, rather than a powerful officeholder.

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­problems understanding, like Solomon, that in seeking his father’s last concubine Adonijah was also seeking power. In the King’s Mirror (Konungs skuggsjá, cf. Chapter 4) the story from the Israelite Book of Kings is interpreted as follows: Abishag was a young virgin, the fairest maid in the kingdom and of the best and noblest family; she was brought to King David’s bed to lie close to him and warm him and cherish him, in the hope that the king might draw warmth from her soft and blossoming form. … And for this reason Abishag won such great honour that she came to be regarded as the first queen and she ranked above all the other queens in the eyes of the people; and thus her dignity was sanctified [helgat] by David’s embraces. But Adonijah had a purpose in seeking this union after David’s death, for he hoped in this way to obtain the kingship by deceitful intrigue; inasmuch as all the people would say, if he could get hold of Abishag, that he was most worthy to sit on David’s throne who was most worthy to mount his bed and lie in the arms which David had sanctified with his very self. He also presumed, as seemed reasonable, that the brothers and all the kinsmen of Abishag would rather have him as king, if she were his, than a man who was not bound to them in this way.10 It seems astonishing that the Abishag story was worth such an extravagant amplificatio to the author of the Norwegian King’s Mirror at all. Its position in the King’s Mirror is even more astonishing: it is treated as valuable knowledge for future kings—the manifest (and indeed probably primary) addressees of this 10

Konungs skuggsjá, ed. Holm-Olsen (21983), 119f.: “Þa var abisag vng ok meyia fegurzt j rikinu ok af ennj beztu ok stæstu ætt. Enn hun var leidd til sængur davids kongs til þess at liggia ner honum ok uerma hann ok þiona honum. at david skylldi taka verma af blautu hennar horundi. … Enn firi þat hlaut abisag suo mikla sæmd at hon uar uird hofuddrottning jfir ollum drottningum j augliti allz lyds. ok helgadizt suo tign hennar af fadmlagi davids. Enn med þeiri athygli leitadi Adonias kuanfangs eptir andlat davids at hann ætladizt suo at komazt at rikinu med flærdsamligri uel. þuiat suo mundi folkit allt mæla ef hann fengi Abisag at sa ueri makligaztur at sitia i sæti davids er uerdaztr uar at liggia j sæng davids. ok þess uar uerdr at liggia j þeim fadmi er david hafdi helgat med sialfum sier. þat ætladi hann ok sem uera mundi, at brædr abisag ok allir frændr hennar mundi betur unna honum rikis ef hann fengi hennar. helldr en þeim manni er ecki uar uid þa leytum bundinn.”—With around 60 manuscripts dating back to the 13th century, the King’s Mirror is probably the most widespread work of Norse treatise literature. See Ludvik Holm-Olsen, “Konungs skuggsjá,” in EMSc, 366f., with further references, and from a historical perspective, see especially Bagge, “The King’s Mirror” (1987).

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treatise built up as a dialogue between father and son—and those around them. Particular attention should therefore be devoted to deviations from the Vulgate text, especially the linguistic adaptation through which the Israelite priest (sacerdos) Ebjatar becomes a “bishop,” Adonijah’s conduct is labelled with terms such as dróttinsvík “high treason” and níðingsráð “conspiracy of a dishonourable man” we recognize from Norwegian legal and historical prose, and the Old Testament concubines become frillur.11 In contrast to the exegetical standard readings of Abishag,12 the King’s Mirror offers a purely literal, non-allegorical reading. Two points stand out in particular. Firstly, Abishag’s kin group, unmentioned in the biblical account—which, on the contrary, gives the impression of a girl being plucked out of the populace for her looks only (1:3)—are described as a political grouping to be reckoned with. Secondly, the relationship that evidently exists between Abishag and the regnum, nowhere explicitly explained in the Bible, is explicated at several points13 in great detail and clarity: the girl “is sanctified” ­(helgaðizt) by David’s embrace, and this sanctification passes to the next man whom Abishag, in turn, is to embrace. Drawing conclusions about contemporary attitudes from biblical exegesis, be it ever so close to the Norwegian court in setting and language, is not entirely straightforward. Let us try to disentangle the passage. The ‘expressive’ aspect is unproblematic: Adonijah’s speculation about the support of Abishag’s “brothers and relatives” must have been immediately comprehensible in light of the career of Saxi í Vík (see Chapter 4), and for kingly brothers to compete for power through the takeover of frillur was an idea thirteenth-century audiences were familiar with, for example, through the mannjafnað of Sigurð and Eystein over the young Borghild (see Chapter 3). In this respect, Adonijah’s attempt to secure Abishag certainly has an ‘expressive’ component.

11

Konungs skuggsjá, ed. Holm-Olsen (21983), 109 (on Absalom, following 2 Sm 16:21): friðlur (plural of friðla~frilla) for concubinae (Vulgate) or παλλακαί (Septuagint)/Hebrew pilagšim (plural of pilègèš), probably a loan word from Greek. 12 Following Jerome, from at least Hrabanus Maurus (Comm. lib. Reg. iii, 1, in pl 109, col. 123ff.) the prevailing tendency was to interpret the figure of the Abishag purely allegorically, and in particular to see Adonijah’s claims as a threat to the purity of the peaceful kingdom promised to Solomon by God. For Petrus Damiani, she serves as an example of the sentence ‘he who sins once and is not admonished (as Adonijah prepared his usurpation with generosity and hospitality) commits a second,’ in the fight against an ‘unworthy’ archbishop ( MGH Epp. Kaiserzeit iv,2, no. 88) or as an allegory of sapientia and intelligentia (MGH Epp. Kaiserzeit iv,3, no. 135). 13 The amplificatio of Solomon’s angry response to Adonijah’s request, conveyed by his mother, repeats the passage about the “suitable successor who lies in David’s bed.”

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But how did the author of the King’s Mirror arrive at the idea that through his embrace David had “sanctified” the woman who would now help Adonijah succeed? Ideas about regal fertility rites, and hence the thorny question of ‘sacral kingship’ (its possible existence in pre-Christian times; the possibility of such notions lingering on)14 spring to mind but we are perhaps well-advised to steer clear of that line of thought here. We should be wary of the idea of ‘traditions’ and ‘notions’ lingering on as though by themselves. This is a piece of thirteenth-century biblical exegesis and ought to be approached on coeval terms. Although there is something akin to ‘sacred kingship’ in some of the sagas, especially in the recurrent phrase ár ok friðr “good harvest and peace,” the absence of which would lead to the overthrow of ‘unlucky’ rulers—an idea not limited to Scandinavia, of course—, there is no indication that royal emanations as such were ever granted benedictory power. Much discussed for the Viking Age, the question of Scandinavian sacral kingship in the Middle Ages arises on the one hand with regards to the royal saints Óláf, Erik, and the two Cnuts,15 and on the other with regards to the mythography of the kings’ sagas and their depiction of pre-Christian sacral kingship. Neither route leads us to David and Abishag. Óláf and his counterparts in Sweden and Denmark are never shown to be thaumaturges during their lifetime, and their postmortem protectorate over their respective kingdoms is conceived within the framework of the visio beatifica and lacks any physical component. Ideas about the beneficial effect of royal effusions are definitively displaced to pagan prehistory (the much-quoted self-sacrifice of the early Uppsala king Dómaldi, for one16) and there fulfill an ambiguous but rigorously ‘othered’ function. Not even the blood of Christ’s campaigner and martyr Saint Óláf, spilled at Stikle­ stad, has an effect that goes beyond standard contact and healing miracles for individual believers: it does not saturate the soil of his kingdom, but forms pools in which a blind man inadvertently dips his hand, rubs his eyes, and regains his eyesight.17 The remark in the King’s Mirror about the “sanctification” of the successor by the predecessor through Abishag’s embrace, included with explanatory intent and underlined by multiple repetitions, has more to do with her than with him. 14

15 16 17

See, in summary, McTurk, “Sacral Kingship in Ancient Scandinavia” (1974–77); McTurk, “Scandinavian Sacral Kingship Revisited” (1994–97); McTurk, “Kingship,” in EMSc, 353ff. (with further literature); Steinsland, “Mythologische Grundlage” (1992); Steinsland, Den hellige kongen (2000); Steinsland, Norrøn religion (2005). Cf. Hoffmann, Die heiligen Könige (1975); Røthe, “Odinskriger” (1999). Heimskringla, Ynglinga saga c. 15; see, in summary, Lönnroth, “Dómaldi’s Death” (1986). The miracle is reported in, among others, OsH c. 236; Passio et miracula beati Olavi (in Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, ed. Storm [1880]), ii 1.

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This “sanctification” obviously goes beyond the ‘expressive’ aspect of Abishag’s embrace, it does not only ‘mean’ something, but rather ‘is’ something in itself. By lying with Abishag, Adonijah would not merely signal his attempt to claim the kingship, but already perform it. In his theory of the speech act, J.L. Austin distinguishes between perlocutionary and illocutionary speech acts. Perlocutionary acts are those ‘by which’ something happens, that is, utterances with consequences—the normal communicative situation. Illocutionary speech acts (‘in which’) are those that already have consequences through the fact of being spoken—Austin’s classic example are the words “I hereby declare this bridge open.”18 Translated into social semantics, this more or less corresponds to the difference between the aspects discussed here. Adonijah’s desire to get Abishag is perlocutionary enough (the consequences are drastic), but had he got her and been “sanctified” in this way, this would clearly have been the practical equivalent of an illocutionary act. Now intercourse is not a speech act, and therefore Austin’s terms, derived from the word locutio, cannot properly be applied to it. There is in fact something frivolous in describing a sexual union, even one between biblical characters, in linguistic terms. (It is the kind of frivolity that often attaches to what academics call ‘the linguistic turn’ in the view of some of their more conscientious readers. Often enough, ‘culturalist’ readings of history carry the risk of smoothing down the harsh facts of past human experience for comfortable consumption in ivory tower reading chairs and conference rooms.) However, if it is true that to attempt historical explanation is not to diminish the seriousness of past experiences to those who had to live through them, we may be justified in carrying the analysis of polygyny in its various ‘aspects’ one step further, as long as we keep in mind that social symbolics are not ‘just symbolics’ but lose nothing of their immediacy if we try to understand what made men and women act ‘symbolically.’ We also need a word for this fifth ‘aspect’ of polygyny, and ‘symbolic’ might be one. But ‘symbolic’ would not be sufficient (Abishag is clearly not merely a symbol of dominion). ‘Sacral’ would be restrictive (what Philip the Fair did in the dungeon was anything but sacral). With a certain amount of embarrassment, I would like to call this aspect ‘performative,’ recognizing that even J.L. Austin rejected the term and instead introduced the word pair ‘per-/il-locutionary,’ and hoping that the reader will not be put off, tired at the sight of this well-worn cultural-studies cliché. Unlike ‘symbolic,’ the word ‘performative’ highlights the difference to the ‘expressive’ aspect. The  ‘performative’ is not primarily aimed at external perception and effect 18 Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962).

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(­ Adonijah wishes to be perceived as a pretender), but unfolds its effect through the performance itself (Adonijah aims at “sanctification” through his father’s woman). That the act, once ‘performed’ (literally ‘carried out’), will also be communicated and perceived is not precluded and is probably the rule, but this comes later. So if faðm er helgat (“the embrace is sanctified”), what does this mean? 3

Northern European Hierogamy?

Helgi “holiness, sanctity” and faðm “embrace” are the lexical equivalents of hieros and gamos: the ‘performative’ aspect is nothing else than the question of medieval hierogamy. Phrased so broadly, the question can of course be answered in the positive: of course there is hierogamy in the medieval standard exegesis of the Song of Songs as Christ’s marriage to the church, as well as its concomitants, furthered by Pauline thought, such as the union of the individual soul to Christ, or the bishop’s marriage to his diocesan church at the moment of investiture.19 It is perhaps no exaggeration to claim that the medieval sacramentalization of human marriage echoes these theological presuppositions. So what we are asking is not whether there were ideas about sacred unions with a transcendental side to them (of course there were) but whether we can expect such ideas to have an influence on actual political culture in particular settings. At least in one of the cases alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, ­Margaret Clunies Ross has endeavoured to identify—though cautiously—such connections. She compares Swen Godwinson’s assault on the abbess of Leominster in 1046 with other notices in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle about nuns being taken by a party leader in the course of a succession dispute or other quarrels between magnates, and concludes that the sexual mastery of a consecrated woman from the country that will be or has been conquered is not only indicative of, but synonymous with the victor’s “absolute power of disposition.”20 According to Clunies Ross, widespread lay guardianship over churches and monasteries may well have led the cirican hlafordes (“lords of the churches”) to assume that they were entitled to make sexual demands of the inhabitants of these convents, much as the members of their own household were subject to

19 20

See the classic Ohly, Hohelied-Studien (1958); in summary, H[elmut] Riedlinger, “Hohelied,” in LdM, vol. 9, col. 79ff. Clunies Ross, “Concubinage” (1985), 31.

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their violence. By extension, these women thus become a suitable object of symbolic domination by rivals of the respective hlafordes.21 With this in mind, I would like to supplement the observation that one of the cases cited by Clunies Ross—the seizure of a nun by the ultimately ­unsuccessful pretender Æthelwold recorded for the year 900 in the Anglo-­ Saxon ­Chronicle—includes the information that the woman was ær to nunnan gehalgod (“was already consecrated as a nun”).22 Certainly gehalgod is an obvious word to describe the entry into orders and may as such not seem very noteworthy. However, given that Æthelwold abducted the nun at a critical moment in the struggle for the throne from his own family nunnery of Wimborne, burial place of his royal father Æthelred, we should consider the possibility that ideas other than ecclesiastical consecration were associated with the term halig. Belonging to the sphere of law as much as that of religion—if ‘spheres’ is at all the word—the concept of hæle with its etymological cognates ‘hallow,’ ‘holy,’ ‘heal,’ and ‘whole,’ belongs to the idea of what is in fact its lexical equivalent, ‘integrity.’23 The pretender’s seizure of ‘his’ nun may well have been aimed at the sanctity she had acquired through her consecration and resultant closeness to God’s ear—however loudly the bishop objected.24 But Æthelwold’s own hæle, his integrity, was also in play: he had to show that, come what may, he at least knew how to act as lord in ‘his’ own minster.25 Concrete, ‘expressive’ demonstrations of political clout and the search for the cultic sanctification of one’s own actions are inextricably entangled in Æthelwold’s assault. The laconic Anglo-Saxon Chronicle merely hints at motives. Later chroniclers are not always more explanatory. For William of Malmesbury, writing around 1120, King Edgar (r. 959–75) was praiseworthy in many respects but an 21

22 23

24 25

Stafford, “Sons and Mothers” (1978), 97, argues from perspective of individual actors, assuming that nuns of the same kin may at times have been prepared to provide their ‘blood’ to allied pretenders; Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (2003), 153–59, does not mention the possible ‘sanctity’ of such unions. asc A, s.a. 900; it concerns the succession of King Alfred the Great. The Anglo-Saxon Lord’s Prayer reads “sanctificetur nomen tuum: sie þin nama gehalgod.” Cf. Durrenberger, Dynamics (1992), 95: “In medieval Iceland, concepts of honor followed from concepts of holiness. … To respect what was holy was to be honorable. Part of that respect was to maintain one’s own sense of holiness, not to allow one’s self to be violated by the actions of others.” asc A, s.a. 900 states explicitly that the bishop’s intervention was futile, just as Æthelwold’s rival had been powerless in the contest for the kingship: “þæt wif þæt he hæfde ær genumen butan cynges leafe 7 ofer þara biscopa gebod.” Æthelwold’s attempt to seize the Crown of Wessex failed, yet after a desperate breakout from a surrounded camp, he succeeded in being recognized as king in Northumberland— a detail the ‘West Saxon’ version A omits, but which is expanded in D.

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exemplary polygynist, libidinosus in virgines.26 He demanded the surrender of aristocrat daughters when their formae fama (“talk of her looks”) reached him, and had children from a number of women, whom William makes an effort to present as a series (and not as a shoal). But Edgar also fetched a beautiful maiden out of the monastery, “stole her chastity and took her into his bed more than once.”27 Another girl, though not ordained, donned the habit to escape the king’s advances but he “tore off the veil and laid her in the ruler’s bed.”28 In all cases, Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury, the chronicler’s hero, makes a swift appearance and puts the king in his place (in the latter case, for violation of the habit). How much of William’s ‘Edgar’ is the default post-Gregorian prince who respects the church walls as little as her commandments—and how much the tenth-century politician making use of the tools available to him? To what extent is the penance imposed on the king by the archbishop for the abduction of the beautiful nun, namely a seven-year penitentia during which the king was not permitted to wear his crown, a mirroring of the crime? In short, what is the mentality of the association of woman and authority? 4

Hákon Hlaðajarl

Instead of lining up single incidents such as these, more elusive in their ‘meaning’ than those discussed in the previous chapters, I prefer to focus on a single case study and examine it at some length: the story of the north Norwegian jarls of Hlaðir/Lade in the late tenth century as depicted in contemporary and subsequent poetry and prose. Any student of Norwegian history knows that the Lade jarls are not just a ‘case’ but come at a pivotal point: The story of King Óláf Tryggvason, and ultimately of the Christianisation of Norway, hinges on them. To my knowledge, they have not before been studied with a view to their women. The aim here is to argue that polygynous practices might be charged with a meaning that was not (only) ‘expressive’ but ‘performative,’ and was not dependent on the future reception of others for its effect, but rather already unfolded it through the act itself. The later jarls of Lade came from Hålogaland,29 probably from the island of Andøy on the north side of the Lofoten archipelago. The material basis 26 27 28 29

gra ii 157; William himself labels the episode as “exempl[a] libidinis” (ii, 158). gra ii 158: “Virginis Deo dicatae audiens pulchritudinem, uiolenter eam a monasterio abstraxit, abstractae pudorem rapuit et non semel thoro suo collocauit.” gra ii 159: “[Wulfthryth] quam certum est non tunc sanctimonialem fuisse, sed timore regis puellam laicam se uelauisse, moxque eandem abrepto uelo lecto imperiali subacto.” Hálogaland is the medieval name for the Atlantic coastal strip between roughly the 65th and 69th parallel (more or less the present-day Norwegian ‘fylker’ of Nordland and the

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of life—and accumulation—was neither agriculture nor livestock farming (although around 1000 the agricultural land certainly extended further north than in the late Middle Ages and modern times),30 but fishing and seal hunting and above all bartering with the nomadic hunters in the interior of Bjarma­ land, the subarctic taiga and tundra belt.31 This made the northern Norwegian chiefs highly mobile and allowed Grjótgarð Herlaugsson, the first historically tangible member of this kin group, to shift his land base further south towards the middle of the ninth century and settle in Yrjar/Ørland, an arable peninsula at the entrance to Trondheim Fjord. From this key position he controlled the coastal sea route between its Northland resources and the North Sea region, and had improved opportunities to directly participate in the burgeoning Viking trade and pillage economies. His son Hákon, a contemporary of Harald Fairhair, was already so powerful that he has been described as “unifying Norway from another direction.”32 Both King Harald’s concentration of power in the south and Hákon Grjótgarðsson’s parallel rise in central and northern Norway were supported by the common commercial interests of the coastal powers in norðveg.33 Harald’s alliance with Hákon Grjótgarðsson, sealed or signified by the fact that Hákon gave his daughter Ása to the rising southern king Harald, helped the latter gain the support he needed for his expansion towards the west, and at the same time secured Hákon’s power in the north. Throughout the entire tenth century it remained an open question whether Scandinavia west of the mountain range would be organized into one or two realms. The Danish effort at gaining control of the coasts of the norðveg allowed both Harald’s and Hákon’s offspring to use the changing support of the Danish kings for attacks on the other side’s sphere of influence.34 southern part of Troms). In the south, it bordered on Trøndelag and Namdalen, in the north, it petered out in Bjarmaland/Finnmark, which was inhabited by nomads. The Vesterålen and Lofoten islands would be regarded as part of Hálogaland. The modern name form ‘Helgeland’ is used for the southernmost part of Nordland, while ‘Hålogaland’ is official for diocesan and legal administrative units. 30 Cf. Ulf Sporrong, “The Scandinavian Landscape and Its Resources,” in Helle, ed., Cambridge History of Scandinavia, vol. 1 (2003), 15–42, 38ff. 31 A unique self-description of a Hålogaland “swyðe spedig man[nes]” (very wealthy man) and his economy is contained in the ‘travelogue’ of Óttar/Ohthere, recorded at the West Saxon court around 890 and transmitted in the geographical preface of the Old English Orosius (The Old English Orosius, ed. Bately [1980]; now also: Bately and Englert, ed., Ohthere’s Voyages [2007]); cf. Hansen, Samisk fangstsamfunn (1990), and in general Zahrisson, ed., Möten i gränsland (1997). 32 Krag, Norges historie (2000), 48: “rikssamling fra en annen kant.” 33 For this view, see above all Schreiner, Norges samling (1929), which remains relevant. 34 The idea that ‘Norway’ emerged as a result of Danish politics is represented most clearly by Tøtlandsmo, “Vikingtidas ‘norske rikssamlingskamper’” (1996); cf. the critical synopsis

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With the dynastic seat relocated once more, this time to the interior of Trondheim Fjord to Hlaðir/Lade (a promontory some eighty metres high with excellent views across the fjord, controlling both the exit towards the Atlantic and the route into the alluvial plains in inner Trøndelag), Hákon also effectively took over land-based power in the most important agriculture zone of Western Scandinavia, and in doing so fundamentally altered the older settlement and power structures.35 Under Hákon’s son Sigurð, the relationship with the kings from Harald Fairhair’s line deteriorated; in 962, Jarl Sigurð was attacked and burned to death. His son Hákon took over the paternal heritage, and, with a skill that identifies either Hákon or his chronicler Snorri Sturluson as a master of Machiavellian intrigue, secured the backing of Harald Bluetooth in Denmark, and destroyed Harald Fairhair’s grandchildren one after another. From about 970 he held effectively sole authority over Norway for a quarter of a century—and soon proved to Harald Bluetooth that the famous inscription on the Jelling Stone recording the “winning” of Norway (sąr uan … ok nuruiak) was somewhat illusory. This Hákon Sigurðsson Hlaðajarl takes centre stage in the following discussion. In the kings’ sagas, which may go back to a lost *Hlaðajarla saga,36 one characteristic stands out above all others: Hákon’s pronounced paganism. In Snorri, the Lade dynasty with its consistent adherence to the sacrificial cult is  sharply contrasted with the Fairhair line’s wavering between acceptance, practice, and tolerance of Christianity and paganism: the Lade jarl is inn mesti blótmaðr, “the greatest sacrificer” or “the greatest idolater.”37 After assuming power, Jarl Hákon provided for the restoration of the neglected cults and had the fact recorded by skalds: “All Lone-Rider’s ravaged temple lands [hof] and

35

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of research by Krag, Norges historie (2000), 216f., with reference to P.A. Munch (Det norske folks historie vol. 1,1 [1852]) and Halvdan Koht (Dansk og svensk i norsk historie [1920]) as early advocates of this line of thought. Cf. Sognnes, “Trondheimen før Nidaros” (1998); Røskaft, “Trønderske maktsentra” (1999), as well as the contributions of both in Trøndelags historie, vol. 1 (2005); crucially, in the 1990s, archaeological findings made it clear that, at least in terms of the geography of power, Lade was a new foundation rather than an established chieftain’s seat. In contrast to the older centres in Gauldal, Stjørdal, and Verdal, with their relatively extensive arable land and long river valleys, at the mouth of the short Nidelv (at whose mouth the Eyra thing would meet later in the Middle Ages, and the trading place Nidaros arose after 1000), Lade has an insignificant hinterland, but is an excellent site for control. Essentially continuing Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, “Formáli,” in Heimskringla, vol. 1 (1941), esp. xcv and cv-cvii. HsG c. 14. The term ‘idolater’ is not actually appropriate for the sagas’ often respectful handling of the blótmenn, especially as conventionally the hallmark of paganism is never faith and rarely the idols, but usually the cult practice (sacrifices). Pagan sacrifice (blót) is not related etymologically to “blood” (blóð); we hear almost nothing about the actual procedures, besides references to sacrificial animals.

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sanctuaries of gods [vé] / Did the wise-hearted man, famed among armies, at once make holy.”38 As Snorri Sturluson freely observed in around 1230, years of famine then belonged to the past: “The first winter that Hákon ruled over the country, herring came in all over the country, and the previous autumn corn had grown wherever it had been sown. And in the spring people got seedcorn, so that most farmers could sow their land, and there was soon prospect of a good harvest.”39 In terms of the agrarian necessities of life, the rule of the last “great pagan” was, according to the high medieval saga, a blessing for Norway. Politically, Jarl Hákon was also on the right track vis-à-vis the Ottonians and their missionaries: on behalf of Harald Bluetooth he inflicted a tremendous defeat on Otta keisari and his Saxon-Frankish-Frisian army at the Danevirke,40 and while the Danish prince nonetheless ultimately accepted baptism, Hákon took onboard the “priests and scholars” destined for Norway but had them all wade ashore before his departure. He subsequently held a “great sacrifice,” during which two ravens flew past, “from which the Jarl concluded that Odin had accepted his sacrifice and now was the right time to fight.” He then campaigned in Denmark and Götaland with great success, and returned home in triumph.41 One

38

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40 41

From the praise poem Vellekla by Hákon’s court skald Einar ‘Scale-Tinkle’ (skálaglamm), 975/85: “ǫll lét senn enn svinni / sǫnn Eindriða mǫnnum / herjum kunn of herjuð / hofs lǫnd ok vé banna.” Longman Anthology, trans. North (2011), 37. Quoted in Heimskringla (OsTr c. 16, stanza 108), it receives the following prose commentary: “Jarl Hákon, when he travelled from the south along the coast in the summer and the people of the country submitted to him, then he ordered over his whole realm that people should maintain temples and rituals, and this was done.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 148.—The hof was a locality emphasized by the traditional cult, which lent a certain eminence to its owners. Toponymic evidence has demonstrated that the hof was an essential element of pre-Christian cult practice, and it is often seen as a prerequisite both for the Icelandic goði system and for the early ‘proprietary churches’ (hægindakirkjur) in Norway. The passage immediately follows the quotations from the panegyric on Hákon’s restoration of the cult: “Inn fyrsta vetr, er Hákon réð fyrir landi, þá gekk síld upp um allt land, ok áðr um haustit hafði korn vaxit, hvar sem sáit hafði verit. En um várit ǫfluðu menn sér frækorna, svá at flestir bœndr søru jarðir sínar, ok varð þat brátt árvænt.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 149.—This description of the farmers and fishermen’s new-found confidence in the future contrasts with the account of the preceding hardships (HsGr c. 16): grain and fish failed to appear for years, things grew ever worse, especially in the north, where it snowed at midsummer and the cattle had to remain indoors until July; the kings were blamed on all sides. OsTr c. 26. Contemporary skalds name Saxons, Frisians, and Franks; see Chapter 4. OsTr c. 27, following version K: “Gerði hann þá [probably in the skerries off Östergötland] blót mikit. Þá kómu þar fljúgandi hrafnar tveir. Þá þykkisk jarl vita, at Óðinn hefir þegit blótit ok þá mun jarl hafa dagráð til at berjask.”

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only needs to read a chapter from the biblical books of Kings or Chronicles to see the parallels go far beyond language and style: the pagan period is something like the Old Covenant of medieval Christian Northern Europe, and Jarl Hákon, described with complicit sympathy, is a worthy precursor to his great successor, the Christian King Óláf Tryggvason—whose harshness and weaknesses, incidentally, the sagas point out with markedly less indulgence than those of the “great sacrificer.” Jarl Hákon went from triumph to triumph. He gained his greatest victory in the three-day naval battle of Hjørungavåg off the coast of Møre in 985, considered in the sagas the apogee of Viking feats of arms. The victory was also ‘politically’ important: the autonomous warrior collective in the Jómsborg at the mouth of the Oder, which for a long time had been able to evade incorporation into suzerainties through skilful alliances with the Pomeranian and Polish hinterlands as well as through sheer military power, had been recruited by Harald Bluetooth to weaken Jarl Hákon to the point where he resumed paying tribute to Jelling. The recruitment took the form of a feast that would become famous for its series of heitstrenging (agonistic oath-swearing)—sleeping with the daughter of an enemy chief was inevitably among the war aims declared over beer and mead.42 Hákon’s victory not only broke the military might of the Jómsvikings, who had intimidated even the Danish kings, but also ended the latter’s influence north of the Skagerrak for several decades. It has never been entirely clear why, after twenty-five years, such a successful regime suddenly crumbled and came to an embarrassingly modest end. Snorri, normally not one to miss an opportunity to comment at large on the political mistakes of the leaders whose fall he is describing,43 gives a description that falls a little short of his usual flourish:

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43

The story was told and retold many times. In Snorri’s version, which is relatively straightforward, the pertinent word is heit (“vow,” the fifth in the series, OsTr c. 35), thus: “Þá strengði heit Vagn Ákason, at hann skyldi fara með þeim til Nóregs ok koma eigi aptr, fyrr en hann hefði drepit Þorkel leiru ok gengit í rekkju hjá Ingibjǫrgu, dóttur hans” (“Then Vagn Ákason made a vow that he would go with them [the Jómsvikings who had already committed themselves] to Norway and not come back before he had killed Þorkel leira (Mudflat) and gone to bed with his daughter Ingibjǫrg”). Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 170.—Snorri takes away much of the lustre of the scene, so dear to some 20th-century Germanomaniacs, by showing how the Danish king carefully inebriates his guests, who on waking up the next morning come to think that perhaps they spoke a little too much (“þóttusk þeir hafa fullmælt”). The model example is the collapse of Óláf Haraldsson’s authority in 1028, which was followed by his futile comeback attempt at Stiklestad in 1030.

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While Jarl Hákon ruled over Norway, there were good harvests in the country and good peace within the country among the farmers. The jarl was popular with the farmers for the greater part of his life. But as time went on, it increasingly came about that he was unprincipled in his relations with women [um kvennafar]. This got so bad that the jarl had rich men’s daughters taken and brought back to him and he lay with them for one or two weeks, afterwards sending them home, and as a result he became very disliked by the women’s kinsfolk and the farmers began to complain bitterly, as the Þrœndir are accustomed to do about everything that displeases them.44 The problem with this passage is that it is too obvious. It shows an ageing autocrat (Hákon was probably getting on sixty) becoming a tyrannus, and thereby turning a community of free farmers against himself, a community cultivating the ‘right of resistance’ which medieval Trøndelag is often seen to claim as a regional particularity.45 In a word, the story fits well into two major medieval narratives: the typology of dominion (unjust rulership, tyrannis) and the overthrow of the haughty pagan by the Christianizing king Óláf Tryggvason, who at this juncture is coming from England into Norway.46 On the face of it, Jarl 44

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OsTr c. 45: “Meðan Hákon jarl réð fyrir Nóregi, þá var góð árferð í landi ok góðr friðr innan lands með bóndum. Jarl var vinsæll við búendr lengsta hríð ævi sinnar. En er á leið, þá gerðisk þat mjǫk at um jarl, at hann var ósiðugr um kvennafar. Gerðisk þar svá mikit at, at jarl lét taka ríkra manna dœtr ok flytja heim til sín ok lá hjá viku eða tvær, sendi heim síðan, ok fekk hann af því óþokka mikinn af frændum kvinnanna, ok tóku bœndr at kurra illa, svá sem Þrœndir eru vanir, allt þat er þeim er í móti skapi.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 180. The so-called right of resistance in the Frostathing Law (the provincial law of Trøndelag, iv §§50–52), often interpreted as ‘Germanic’ and contrasted with the Christian, monarchical Middle Ages, according to which the Trønder may undertake atfǫr (resistance, opposition) against a bad ruler, is easily recognizable as a variant of a common medieval attitude to the limits of authority (cf. Isidore, Etymologiae ix, 3,4: “rex eris si recte facias; si non facias, non eris”); cf. Hallan, “Den trønderske motstandsretten” (1976); Sjöholm, Sveriges Medeltidslagar (1988); Sandnes, “Germanisches Widerstandsrecht” (1992). Still, it is remarkable that a similar provision does not exist in any of the other provincial laws. Since in the sagas Trøndelag is consistently portrayed as the stock region for great farmers unifying against royal power, we are probably dealing with the successful self-portrayal and public image of a politically quite independent region. However, the suggestion of a processual automatism does a disservice to the saga authors’ awareness of historical contingency. Snorri certainly thinks in epochs: “And the chief cause of it happening like this was, that then the time had come for heathen worship [blótskaprinn] and heathen worshippers to be condemned [fyrirdœmask], and be replaced by the holy faith and proper morals” (c. 50). Yet the Christian king Óláf Tryggvason does not return from long exile under a false name at the providential moment: rather, he

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Hákon, hitherto ever-victorious, falls at just the right moment, almost by himself as it were. This is the course of events as told by Snorri: Jarl Hákon was at a banquet in Gauldal at Melhus [the first traditional chieftain’s seat south of Lade], and his ship was lying out off Vigg [in the fjord, 15 km from Melhus]. There is a man called Orm lyrgja (Loafer), a rich farmer. He lived at Býnes [on the headland to the west of modern Trondheim, a few kilometres from Melhus]. He had a wife whose name is Guðrún, daughter of Bergþórr of Lunde. She was known as Lundasól (Sun of Lunde). She was a most handsome woman. The jarl sent his slaves to Orm with his orders to bring Orm’s wife Guðrún to the jarl. The slaves delivered their message. Orm told them first to come and have supper. But before the slaves had finished eating, there had come to Orm’s many men from the district, to whom he had sent word. Now Orm said there was no chance that Guðrún would go with the slaves. Guðrún spoke, telling the slaves to tell the jarl that she would not come to him unless he sent Þóra of Rimul for her. She was a rich lady and one of the jarl’s mistresses. The slaves say that the next time they came the farmer and his lady would soon regret this, and made many threats and after that went away.47 This is the beginning of the end of Hákon’s reign. Orm now does word for word what the Frostathing Law says concerning the rights of the free man (he has the “war arrow cut,” that is, he sends out a message to muster the farmers of the region), and the jarl, whose way back to his ships is already blocked by the

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is tracked down by an agent provocateur sent by Jarl Hákon, identified, and misled into attempting to seize power prematurely by false information about purported unrest in Norway. At best, it is providential that Jarl Hákon is no longer able to spring his trap, as what was false information has since become true. OsTr c. 48: “Hákon jarl var á veizlu í Gaulardal at Meðalhúsum, en skip hans lágu út við Viggju. Orm lyrgja er maðr nefndr, ríkr bóndi. Hann bjó á Býnesi. Hann átti konu þá, er Guðrún er nefnd, dóttir Bergþórs af Lundum. Hon var kǫlluð Lundasól. Hon var kvinna fríðust. Jarl sendi þræla sína til Orms þeira ørenda at hafa Guðrúnu, konu Orms, til jarls. Þrælar báru upp ørendi sín. Ormr bað þá fyrst fara til náttverðar. En áðr þrælar hǫfðu matazk, þá váru komnir til Orms margir menn ór byggðinni, er hann hafði orð sent. Lét Ormr þá engan kost, at Guðrún fœri með þrælunum. Guðrún mælti, bað þræla svá segja jarli, at hon myndi eigi til hans koma, nema hann sendi eptir henni Þóru af Rimul. Hon var húsfreyja rík ok ein af unnustum jarls. Þrælarnir segja, at þeir skulu þar svá koma ǫðru sinni, at bóndi ok húsfreyja munu þessa íðrask skammbragðs, ok heitask þrælarnir mjǫk ok fara brot síðan.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 182.

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topographical conditions, must flee inland into the valleys. He separates from his retinue, which is to reach the fjord through another valley, hides in a cave for the night, and the next day reaches the farm Rimul, where Þóra—the mistress of the house and “one of the most beloved” (ein af unnustum) of the jarl, the one whom the unwilling Guðrún had ridiculed with her reply to the ­messengers—is to hide him. At this point, only his slave Kark is still with him. To conceal themselves from the approaching pursuers, the two dig a pit in a pigsty, cover it up, and wait for the next day, which the jarl—thrown into a vortex of premonitory dreams and suspicions—will not live to see: in a fit of panic, Kark cuts off the jarl’s head when he screams in his sleep. 5

Death in the Pigsty

This hideously spectacular episode has been exemplarily analyzed by the Liverpool Norse scholar Andrew Hamer, who has mapped out in detail how carefully the sagas have crafted Hákon’s nightmarish journey, both topologically (from the valley to the cave and then into a self-dug pit/grave [grǫf]) as well as scripturally (Mt 8:28: the Gadarene pigs, see Chapter 1).48 Through correspondence at different levels, Hákon and Kark gradually become fateful ‘twins’ and ever more pig-like in their sty, while in the courtyard above Óláf Tryggvason is already (implausibly) consulting with his allies. The composition, which was perfected in Snorri’s work but similarly furnished with moral-theological or political significance in other versions, has presumably contributed to the fact that the episode’s account of events is now so unhesitatingly accepted. The various twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources focus on elaborating on the theme of the fall of tyrants; in historical interpretations from Gustav Heber to Sverre Bagge, Jarl Hákon is nothing more than a greedy old man, who falls victim to hubris in his last sexual stirring.49 In what follows, I will try to establish an alternative interpretation, one that shows Hákon Jarl to be a prince whose unswerving attention to the political coherence of his actions were to be his undoing. To that end, let us first identify the elements common to all or most high medieval adaptations of the story of Hákon’s downfall, those that may be presumed to originate around or not long 48 Hamer, “Death in a Pig-Sty” (1992). 49 Heber, Harald hårfagre (1934), 86, on Harald Fairhair’s reportedly average sexual appetite: “No, Jarl Hákon was something else entirely.” Bagge, “Mann og kvinne” (1992), 11f., adopts the saga epithet of “woman-lover” (“en kvinnekjær mann”): Hákon’s problem was not his age as such, but misjudging boundaries; similarly Bagge, “Det primitive middelaldermenneske?” (1990), 48f., 57.

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after the events. The otherwise unremarkable farm Rimul in Gauldal is one of them.50 Somewhat more topical are the claims made on other men’s women towards the end (and pinnacle) of Hákon’s reign, although if nothing else, this study has shown that such ‘expressive’ actions were perhaps commonplace enough in themselves. What is unusual is the causal connection between these actions and the jarl’s fall. The connection between triumph as a warrior, rulership style, and tyranny is very explicit in the ‘Series of Norwegian Kings’ (Nóregs konungatal) from the early thirteenth century: After the battle with the Jómsvikings, Jarl Hákon reckoned he held complete power [fullkominn til ríkis] as he had defeated such great chiefs, and thought he never needed fear the Danes as a threat to his rule again. So he became ever harsher with his compatriots and became stingy [that is, abandoned ruling through largesse] and no longer respected the law. The pinnacle was his boundlessness with women [literally: hann var ósiðar maðr um konur “he was an un-customs-man about women,” one who would not recognize the boundaries imposed by custom and rules], and his people emulated him, and neither the relatives of powerful men nor married women, powerful or not, were safe.51 Of Hákon’s death, the ‘Series’ only reports the place and the perpetrator (his skósveinn “servant” Kark—it lacks the emphasis of bondage which makes Snorri’s portrayal both powerful and somewhat unrealistic), while there is no mention of the “mistress” and householder Þóra of Rimul and the demand for Guðrún ‘Sun of Lunde’ which provoked the uprising. The saga of the Icelandic monk Odd, dating back to the late twelfth century, has the same characterization of Hákon’s reign and stresses the attacks on “virgins and the wives of great

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The localities are half a day’s journey from Nidaros/Trondheim, where the first known historical works about Norway were written in Latin and Norse. Nóregs konunga tal, ed. Finnur Jónsson (1902–03) c. 20: “æftir iomsvikinga orrastu þottez Hacon iarl fullcomen til rikis er hann hafðe sva mikla hofðingia sigrat. oc þottezk hann ækki þurfa þa at rædaz Dane um sitt riki. þa toc hann at harðna við lannzmenn sina. oc gierðez fegiarn oc rœkte ækki logen. en mest var at þui at hann var osiðar maðr um konor. oc þar æftir gierðo menn hans. oc var hvarke þyrmt frend conom rikis manna. ne ægin konom bæðe rikra oc orikra.” The saga work, compiled in the early 13th century, is called “fair parchment” after one of the two manuscripts of Fagrskinna lost in the 1728 fire at the University library in Copenhagen—to distinguish it from the strophic genealogy from the circle of Oddi discussed in Chapter 2, also called Nóregs Konungatal.

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men”52 whom he sent home “defiled” (svívirðar) after weeks or months. In both versions, the closeness to canonical standards is striking: it is the married women and virgins which make Hákon’s actions worthy of being condemned as saurlífi (luxuria), using a term borrowed from contemporary pastoral care, while Snorri focuses solely on the aspect of the insult to the Trondheim magnates; for him, it is thus not the women who are “defiled” by their temporary concubinage, but the men to whom they are returned. By contrast, the two Latin histories do not contain any diatribes against Hákon’s immorality. The Historia Norwegiae (c.1220) offers a purely political account of Hákon’s triumph and even refers to the legendary origin of his kin (more below on this), but names idolatria as his only weakness and narrates his death (with place and perpetrator) without any reference to women.53 Theo­doric’s Historia de antiquitate rerum Norwagiensium (before 1180) provides a relatively detailed account of Hákon’s last days, mentioning the farm, the slaves, the pigsty and Hákon’s concubina Thora, but does not establish a connection between the event and other stories about women.54 The ‘Epitome of Norwegian Royal History’ (Ágrip af Nóregs konunga sǫgum) written around 1190 is closest to Snorri’s version in the details it provides; among others, it includes the names of the last woman coveted by Hákon (Guðrún Lundasól) and his frilla Þóra who grants him his final hiding place.55 The variations in detail, however, are striking. The principal difference is that in Ágrip Hákon is not slaughtered in his sleep, screeching like a pig, but instead, like another Nero, asks his slave for the coup de grâce when he sees the henchmen approaching. But the stories concerning women also display marked idiosyncrasies: Guðrún “the sun of Lunde,” the woman demanded by Hákon, lives on the farm Lunde (in Snorri that is where she comes from, but now lives elsewhere) and she organizes help for herself when Jarl Hákon’s men arrive. Unlike in Snorri’s and Odd’s versions, there is no mention of a man by her side. Her retort to the jarl—she will come only when the messenger is Þóra 52 53 54

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Saga Óláfs Tryggvasonar af Oddr Snorrason munk c. 20/14: “hann hafði við hond ser [at hand = side] konur manna, oc stor ættaðar [even from men of great houses], oc margar meyjar.” Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, ed. Storm (1880), 111. Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, ed. Storm (1880), c. 10: “ille vero derelictus a suis et in sola fuga spem ponens devenit in quedam viculum, Rimul nomine, ibique cum solo servo suo, Carke nomine, a concubina sua Thora in ara porcorum absconsus …” According to Adam of Bremen (ii, 25), the Norwegians banish Hákon “from the kingdom on account of his haughty behaviour” (“in Norveia Haccon princeps erat, quem, dum Nortmanni superbius agentem regno depellerent …)”—from this point, Adam confuses him with King Hákon the Good. Ágrip c. 13.

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of Rimul, the jarl’s faithful frilla—therefore seems better motivated than in Snorri, where she appears, as it were, to merely supplement her husband’s words with feminine spite. The Guðrún of the Ágrip can voice her own challenges. What do these narrative variations tell us? First, Jarl Hákon’s death was firmly anchored in the historical knowledge of the period around 1200 with some core elements (the place, the murderer, the frilla/concubina as lady of the house) and the general context (the revolt in Trøndelag). Second, there is a general image of Jarl Hákon as an overly successful autocrat who suddenly shows astonishing lack of judgement concerning women. The circumstances are, according to almost all the sources, polygynous in nature. Jarl Hákon would seem to exemplify all the ‘aspects’ outlined in this study in one: his grandiose “demeanour with women” (kvennafar) begins with the final triumph over the Jómsvikings and the Danish king at Hjørungavåg, which puts him firmly among the greats (habitual); Guðrún’s demand that she would only join the ranks of his women when he sent Þóra of Rimul as his messenger—and thereby degrade Þóra in relation to herself56—suggests that either Guðrún herself or the saga authors had a keen eye for the open competition within the relational system of Nordic polygyny (agonistic). Hákon’s intensified demands for intercourse were universally understood as a change of rulership style, as a revocation of consensus57—in the words of the Frosta­ thing Law, as atfǫr—and acknowledged accordingly (expressive), although the summary description “the daughters of powerful men” leaves us at a loss to know whom precisely Hákon was targeting. Finally, the generative aspect is represented elsewhere: a woman with whom the jarl had slept while being 56

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This interpretation is at variance with Driscoll’s translation of the passage in Ágrip: “nema hann sendi konu þá er hann hafði er Þóra hét.” In Driscoll’s translation: “unless he sent away the woman he kept as mistress, who was named Þóra”—it presumably appears natural that Guðrún would demand the departure of her predecessor before she herself consented to a relationship with Hákon. I think that the verb senda “send out, send,” much like its modern English counterpart, would require an adverbial complement to be understood as “sent away” (Latin dimittere as distinct from the simple form mittere). The issue in Ágrip is, I think, that Guðrún jeeringly demands her potential co-wife act as a messenger, thereby establishing hierarchy in the public eye right from the outset. As long as one’s own position was satisfactory, the plurality of women as such was not a problem, indeed, in the agonistic sense, it might even appear attractive. Either way, however, the argument relies on grammar and stylistics and would be for experts on saga style to decide. He had seemingly already regularly demanded and received women while being hosted in the past (HsGr c. 8: “Hákon jarl fór einn vetr til Upplanda ok á nǫkkura gisting ok lagðisk með konu einni”), but these women had no significant relatives (“var sú lítillar ættar”).

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feasted in Eastland later turned up at Lade with their son of that night; Hákon gave him to be raised by a “friend” in Trøndelag, and thus kept him in reserve— with reason, as it turned out.58 The last of what are here termed the ‘aspects’ of medieval polygyny—the performative—eludes narrative representability. On the other hand, the sagas leave an explanatory gap that indicates a further, missing aspect. It is not sufficiently clear why, after a long reign and sometimes astonishingly skilful manoeuvres, Hákon suddenly became a bungler. The events proceed so mechanically that a man of Hákon’s skills ought to have anticipated them, yet he stumbles on as though blindfold. As we have seen, both the tradition’s level of detail and the variety of narratives constructed with it make it difficult to shrug Hákon’s tale off as just another superbia parable. Even a simple explanation, such as Óláf Tryggvason being the stronger of the two, will not wear because Óláf Tryggvason’s success is consistently presented as a consequence, not the cause, of Jarl Hákon’s downfall. The jarl and the women remain an irreducible fact. A wholly different kind of source assists with its interpretation. 6

Jarl Hákon and His Patron Goddess

Jarl Hákon kept conspicuously productive skalds—so much so that in his case poetry can indeed be called “an instrument of propaganda.”59 The outstanding work from this production is the Háleygjatal (“Genealogy of the Háleygir”) by Eyvind skáldaspillir, datable to 985, and so influential that Snorri Sturluson cites it as a prime example of a reliable source in the prologue of Heimskringla and Adam of Bremen (ii, 25) makes use of its information. Only fragments of the Háleygjatal have survived; however, the preserved elements and indirect evidence allow a fairly reliable reconstruction of the substance of the work.60 Similar to Ynglingatal, the metrical genealogy of Harald Fairhair’s competing 58

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HsGr c. 8. The father had little time for him at first, prompting the son Eirík to react with the kind of bravado which the aspiring sons of frillur frequently made careers out of: he provoked a quarrel with one of the jarl’s trusted followers, killing him, and then unilaterally pardoned the leading Jómsviking in the aftermath of the Battle of Hjørungavåg. Indeed, in the following decades, Eirík would go on to become the last successful jarl of Lade. Ström, “Poetry” (1981). Large sections of several sizeable songs of praise and a number of skaldic sagas, which give an account of individual poetic figures at Jarl Hákon’s court, have been preserved, testifying to a lasting awareness of Lade as a centre of cultural production around 1000. Cf. Edith Marold, “Eyvindr Finsson skáldaspillir,” in EMSc, 175f.

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kindred, it traces Jarl Hákon’s ancestral line back through twenty-seven generations in the region of their origin in northern Norway, all the way back to the dynasty’s founding pair: Odin and the giantess Skaði.61 Gro Steinsland has analyzed the Háleygjatal in her important study on "The Holy Wedding and Old Norse Royal Ideology.” On the basis of a variety of linguistic, ethnographic, and literary documents, she concludes that the court skald Eyvind, in lining out the divine origin of the Lade jarls, was building upon well-established traditional ‘knowledge’ about the hierogamous character of the house’s early power.62 Replacing Odin as it were, Jarl Hákon is seen to sleep with the whole country: Þeims alt austr til Egða býs brúðr val-Týs und bœgi liggr.

Under [Hákon’s] arm the bride of the slaughter-god [Odinn] lies all the way east to the territory of the Agder.63

Literally “under the crook of his arm”: the jarl holds “the earth” (jǫrð, grammatically feminine in the Nordic languages) firmly in his grasp. Lexicalized formulaically, this image is also regularly found in the sagas when a king wins power: “He put the whole country under him.”64 The actual hieros gamos tradition of the Lade jarls, however, does not refer all the way back to the primeval giantess of Háleygjatal (who in this constellation could very well be a learned skaldic construction). A different female figure, more disparate and yet more widely recorded than the clean mythological 61

The fragments are edited in Skj B 1, 60–62.—Adam of Bremen (ii, 25): “Haccon iste crudelissimus ex genere Inguar et giganteo sanguine descendens …” Inguar (Yngvi–Frey) is the divine progenitor of the Ynglings (the royal dynasty), not the Háleygir/jarls of Lade, and Adam mixes up other figures in this passage as well. Still, the essential information reached the competent metropolis of Bremen.—Krag, Ynglingatal og Ynglingesaga (1991), even advocates dating Ynglingatal to the 12th century, whereby this royal genealogy would be considered a replica of the earlier Háleygjatal. 62 Steinsland, Det hellige bryllup (1991), 214–26, Háleygjatal is here the only ‘historical’ poem alongside three eddic songs. 63 Háleygjatal, in Skj B 1, 62. Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, ed. Whaley, vol. 2 (2012), 195; literally: “all the way eastward to Agder,” from the viewpoint of the sailor who, sailing out of Trondheimsfjord from Lade, first turns southward along the Norwegian west coast and then eastward to reach the southern Norwegian region of Agder on the Skagerrak. 64 Here HsHb c. 19: “lagði allt land undir sik.” Equivalents such as ‘subicere, unterwerfen, soumettre’ and the modern Scandinavian ‘underkaste’ have a slightly different nuance due to the notion of ‘throwing.’

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construction of the court poet, provides the nexus ‘woman~land’ for the Lade jarls. In mythology she is known by the name Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð. She is fairly comprehensively documented, being repeatedly mentioned in the Snorra Edda (inter alia, in a list of names of recommended figures for use in skaldic poetry), in several of the kings’ sagas and Icelandic sagas, as well as in Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, and even in an example sentence in a grammatical treatise from about 1150.65 Saxo, something of an outsider among the mythographers of Nordic prehistory with no political commitments to northern Norway, nevertheless supplies a detailed description of the courtship by Helgo, Halogie rex (king of Hålogaland) of Thora, daughter of rex Finnorum Byarmorumque (king of the Finns and ‘Bjarmalanders,’ the subarctic Finno-Ugric peoples so important for the Hålogaland Lade jarls’ trading economy). Helgo (Hǫlgi in the Norse texts66) is the eponymous royal father of the land of Halogia and appears as the forbear of other prominent Hålogaland chiefly houses as well; his bride Thora is close enough to Þorgerð, Hǫlga brúð (“Bride of Hǫlgi”).67 In a society used to thinking in skaldic metaphors, even the basically ordinary personal name ‘Þorgerð’ must have triggered the association “bedfellow-deity.” While the personal name ‘Þorgerð’ is one of the common women’s ‘Thor-’ names in Norway until the late Middle Ages, and as such not necessarily mythologically motivated, Steinsland rightly observes that the second part of the name, -gerð (widely used by skalds as a kenning for women) was also the name of the bestknown giantess associated with the Æsir.68 This Gerð is, in turn, inextricably intertwined with the hierogamy motif as the sexual partner of the fertility god Frey (the progenitor claimed by the Ynglings, and mentioned by Adam of Bremen in connection with the templum of Uppsala). This overall construction is not the personal achievement of a twelfth-­ century intellectual with a penchant for etymology; on the contrary, Saxo uses 65

The first detailed study of the forms of her name was Storm, “Om Thorgerd Hölgebrud” (1885); a comprehensive inventory of the documents is available in E.F. Halvorsen, “Þor­ gerðr Hölgabruðr,” in klnm, vol. 20, col. 382ff.; see also Chadwick, “Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr” (1950) (for a cultic/religious interpretation); Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, vol. 2 (21957), 340f.; Motz, “Goddess of the North” (1997) (mythological); McKinnell, “Þórgerðr Hǫlgabrúðr and Hyndluljóð” (2002) (for integration into the pantheon); Røthe, “Þórgerðr Hölgabrúðr” (2007) (for the euhemerization of a revered matriarch). 66 Cf. Snorra Edda–Skáldskaparmál c. 42: “konungr sá, er Hǫlgi er nefnd, er Hálogaland er við kent” (“Hálogaland was named after the king who was named Hǫlgi”). 67 Saxo iii, 2,6–8. For the references and especially the discussion of the phoneticetymological distinction Helgi/Hölgi, see Storm, “Om Thorgerd Hölgebrud” (1885). 68 Steinsland, Det hellige bryllup (1991), 221.

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the myth to promote his own narrative, but only provides a rough outline of it ­because he assumed it was well known.69 That “Hǫlgi” was already known as the progenitor of Hålogaland in the tenth century is attested, inter alia, by Þorbjǫrn Hornklofi’s verse about Harald Fairhair’s polygyny (see the liminary chapter), in which he enumerates the girls from the various parts of Harald’s empire who were sidelined by Harald’s union with the Danish princess, among whom was one Hǫlga ættar “of Hǫlgi’s kin.” It was thus common knowledge in Jarl Hákon’s time that his house and his power had arisen out of his eponymous ancestor’s marriage to a female figure with slightly nonhuman connotations. This notion had significant political consequences. No less than Jarl Hákon’s victory over the Jómsvikings at the Battle of Hjørungavåg in 985 was generally ascribed to the intervention of Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð, understood as the jarls of Lade’s tutelary deity—an idea strongly encouraged by the “propaganda” of his court skalds. One version of the saga of Óláf Tryggvason reports that during this day-long naval battle, the fortunes of war gradually shifted ever more in favour of the Danish invaders until Jarl Hákon has himself rowed to a small island and, reaching a clearing, kneels towards the north (that is, towards Hålogaland, his ancestral home) and calls upon Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð. He then sacrifices first an animal, then a man, and finally his son Erling. After these sacrifices, a storm of snow and hail breaks out from the north, driving the Jómsvikings’ ships together and turning them into helpless victims of Jarl Hákon’s fleet.70 In other late medieval accounts, the jarl arrives instead at a temple in the forest, furnished with glass windows and statues, resembling the numerous chapels frequented by chevaliers errants in Arthurian literature and thereby testifying to the integration of Jarl Hákon’s story into the basic narrative stock of medieval Northern Europe. Therefore, even a historian like Snorri Sturluson, who always prefers rational themes to supernatural ones, must deal with this established knowledge. He does so with every sign of disgust, but he cannot fail to mention both the storm—dismissed in passing as a mere ­meteorological 69

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Characteristically, Saxo juxtaposes the courtship of the—formally human—King Helgi with the god Baldur’s courting of the beautiful girl Nanna: a hierogamous story of a very different sort, with a different textual strategic function, but nonetheless part of a similar constellation. OsTr c. 154 in Flateyjarbók; cf. Røthe, “Þórgerðr Hölgabrúðr” (2007), 4f. The byname of the demonic deity in this 14th-century manuscript is Hǫrða brúð “Bride of the [Western Norwegian] Hordalanders”; this phonetically minor but geographically significant lapse, nonsensical in this context, suggests that the compiler was reproducing an older tradition here without any particular agenda of their own.

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fact—and the sacrifice, which he tries to do away with as a hearsay postscript (“people say that …”) after the end of the battle, the release of the most ­prominent prisoners, and the dissolution of both armies.71 Even more than the explicit description of the son’s sacrifice—as a negation of Christ’s sacrifice, as it were, the most repugnant manifestation of the devil’s work on earth ­conceivable—, the fact that a writer like Snorri who would prefer to do without it feels obliged to at least reference the tradition allows us to conclude that it was common historical knowledge about the jarls of Lade that they were in direct contact with their eponymous protector, and were prepared to play off this connection. This is the background for the other great surviving song in praise of Jarl Hákon, the Hákonardrápa of the Hallfreð Óttarson from around 990. This is how it portrays the jarl’s rise to power in Norway:

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Sannyrðum spenr sverða snarr þiggjandi viggjar barrhaddaða byrjar biðkvǫn und sik Þriðja.

With the holy words of the swords the wind-steeds brisk partaker entices Third-Party’s [=Odin’s] fir-haired waiting-wife beneath him.

Því hykk fleygjanda frakna – ferr jǫrð und menþverri – ítra eina at láta Auðs systur mjǫk trauðan.

And so I think the famed showerflinger (Earth lies down for the man who dispenses necklaces) is quite unwilling to leave Auð’s gleaming sister alone.

Róð lukusk, at sá, síðan, snjallráðr konungs spjalli átti einga dóttur Ónars, viði gróna.

The deal closed after that in such a way that the king’s eloquent intimate took possession of the wood-covered only daughter of Onarr.

Breiðleita gat brúði Báleygs at sér teygða stefnir stöðvar hrafna stála ríkismǫlum.

The ravens’ jetty navigator [the lord of the battlefield = the jarl] has ably lured to him the broad-featured bride Of Furnace-Eye with the kingdom-building talk of steel blades.72

OsTr cc. 41f.: “Þat er sǫgn manna …”—namely, the sacrifice, the hailstorm, and the reversal of the fortunes of war. Much like the infinitive + fertur used in the Latin chronicles, this formula allows Snorri to distance himself from traditions he feels he has to record because they are old, but cannot accept. Skj B 1, 147f., arrangement and translation based on the Longman Anthology, trans. North (2011), 589–90, with changes made where I make or follow different interpretations of the

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We can see what prompted Hallvard Lie in 1957 to comment that in the Hákonardrápa, Hákon’s path to power became a kind of Viking woman’s abduction.73 The metaphor of the original, however, ensures that the conquest of Norway does not “become” a woman’s abduction, but rather “is” one. Strictly speaking, this is not an issue of the metaphorical in the classical sense, as the kennings of this song do not transfer concepts from one field to another but rather aim to reveal the coincidence of two only seemingly distinct fields: Hákon’s conquest, accomplished with stála ríkismǫlum “power talk of steel blades” (here with metonymy), of the land, the earth (jǫrð) is at the same time the Allfather Odin’s successful courtship of Jǫrð, the giantess who is one of his eljur “co-wives” (see Chapter 2).74 Moreover, the Earth/woman won through struggle and political skill (snjallráðr “shrewd in council”) is barhaddað “firhaired,” viði gróin “wood-covered,” and breiðleit “broad-featured”: the very image of the Norwegian highlands and fells, strange in light of the medieval canon of beauty perhaps, but no less compelling for that. The “Earth lies down under” (ferr jǫrð und) the jarl, he “entices her beneath him” (snarr und sik): the country submits to the victor, and not unwillingly. This mythographic way of narrating the Lade jarls’ rise is, in its own way, no less ‘meaningful’ than Snorri’s version of the cunning tactician and successful warrior Hákon; both had their social place and their audience. The song of praise—in comparison to the narrative prose of the saga, a far more formalized language form which was consequently far richer in associations— derives its specific effect from the fact that the connection between the Lade jarl being praised and his guardian deity belonged to the inventory of retrievable associations of the discerning public.75 Beyond compelling language for kennings. North has “barley-wimpled” rather than “fir-haired” for barrhaddað and “backwards-grown” rather than “wood-covered” for viði-gróin. 73 Lie, ‘Natur’ og ‘unatur’ i skaldekunsten (1957), 97. 74 In the Jarðarkenningar “phrases for ‘land’” section in the Skáldskaparmál, Snorri recommends the designations “sister of [the giant] Auð,” “daughter of [the giant] Onar,” “bride of Odin,” “co-wife of Frigg” or any giantess Odin had slept with. One of the authorities he cites is actually Óttar and his Hákonardrápa. 75 In religious studies, it remains controversial whether Þórgerð Hǫlgabrúð should be interpreted as (1) a Vanir deity, (2) a giantess, or (3) originally a historical matriarch worshipped as fylgja and/or dís (protective essence of a person and/or place). For the historian, this is not the issue—although, in view of Jacques Le Goff’s research on the role of the fairy Melusine for the genealogical self-invention of the Lusignans in twelfth-century Poitou (Le Goff, “Mélusine maternelle” [1977/1999]), the latter hypothesis, proposed by Gunnhild Røthe, appears convincing. In any case, early and high medieval sources credit the jarls with lasting, potent contact with a female figure endowed with superhuman powers.

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­solemn occasions, this connection may also have been manifested in other social practices. Nora Chadwick, Folke Ström, Gro Steinsland, and most recently Gunnhild Røthe have argued that Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð was an object of the cult practised by the Lade jarls. Critical doubt about the descriptions of such cult celebrations in late sources76 reflect on the details of the reports rather than the overall assumption, borne out by the unanimous insistence of the sagas and the evidence of early skaldic poetry, that the authority of the chiefs at Lade was bound up with responsibility for the exercise of local-regional cults. Indeed it would be hard to believe that rulers as power conscious as the Lade jarls would have passed up the opportunity to be considered “the greatest sacrificers,” deciding yet another agon in favour of themselves. The question of the concrete form of the cult, however, can only be discussed with great caution. Textual criticism provides a valuable clue. Among the late medieval variants (“distortions”) of the epithet Hǫlgabrúð “Håloga (land)’s bride” there are several compounds with hǫrga-. If we accept them lexically rather than regarding them as corruptions, they refer to hǫrg “sanctuary” (especially a small physical structure or burial mound) and thus possibly to an impressive episode in the family tradition of the Lade jarls. The core of this episode, reported in numerous sources, is the creation of a burial mound by the last remaining members of the kin group residing in northern Norway, and their subsequent voluntary self-interment.77 It is pointless to speculate whether a new earth structure, reminiscent of the chthonic family sanctuary in the north, was also created at the new ancestral seat in Trondheim Fjord (in the landscape itself, the promontory of Lade evokes such an oversized mound) because the jarls’ relationship to the earth of the founding father and mother, tied into so many different strands, is sufficiently impressive to have a lasting influence on the style of governance of their individual representatives. 76

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Snorri provides a detailed account of the sacrificial feasts held by Hákon’s father Sigurð in Lade (HsG c. 14); assessed as a source in, among others, Ström, “Hauptriten” (1966); critically Walter, “Opferfest von Hlaðir” (1966). Düwel, Opferfest von Lade (1985), sees Old Testament blood rituals, not Nordic cult practice as underlying Snorri’s description; qualifying this: Hultgård, “Altskandinavische Opferrituale” (1993). The alleged sacrifice of his own son can be explained by biblical (Abraham) and classical (Carthage) models, although we can never be sure that at some prehistoric occasion someone did not ‘really’ sacrifice a child, however little we may believe it. Snorri is careful to specify in his version (HsH c.8)—in which the self-demotion of the former ‘kings’ to ‘jarls’ in the face of the approaching Harald Fairhair provides the basis for the episode—that the mound is built with grjót “coarse debris.” The son of the buried king, the first historically tangible Lade jarl in the vicinity of Trondheim, bore the name Grjótgarð “debris-enclosed/secured.”

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Perpetual Hierogamy

Against this background, Jarl Hákon’s kvennafar, his “approach to women” acquires quite a different shade. To my knowledge, the connection between Hákon’s so-called gluttony in sexual matters, on the one hand, and his leading position in a cult with hierogamous characteristics, on the other, has so far not been pointed out. In arguing this hypothesis, it must first be acknowledged that no Nordic source explicitly makes such a connection. According to the skaldic songs, Jarl Hákon assumed the male role in a hierogamous union with the earth, conceived as a woman. According to the sagas, Jarl Hákon was a central figure in the practice of pagan cults and ‘immoderate’ with women. Nothing is said about a possible cultic motivation for the latter. However, this is less of a limitation than it may at first appear, as the sagas do not foster authorial explications of correlations and motivations, but report actions, arguing ‘implicitly’ with textual means such as the sequence of episodes, and lexical or structural correspondence. A saga author would not say that Jarl Hákon claimed the right to sleep with all the women in his sphere of influence because the cultic legitimation of his rule required it, even if that is what the author meant. It is different in Ireland. (The comparison is meaningful, not because of possible cultural dependencies, but because of the structural similarities of both early medieval societies.) In Irish narrative literature, it does happen that a hero such as Níall Noígíallach, the son of a king and a slave descended from a line of British kings, in acute competition over the succession with his betterplaced brothers, encounters a woman in the forest who suggests he sleep with her—when he asks her name, he receives the blunt answer: “I am sovereignty.”78 The idea of Erin as a woman, whom the ruler must sleep with, lived on throughout the Middle Ages (and well into the eighteenth century) in a way that is no longer observable for Norway. Nor was this a matter of recondite anachronism. In his first speech before parliament as king of England (and Ireland) and Scotland, in 1604 the Protestant James i/vi declared: “I am the Husband, and the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife.”79 78

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Echtra mac Echach Muigmedoin, c. 15: “‘Cia tusu?’ or in mac. ‘Misi in flaithius,’ or si.”— The ‘Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid Muigmedón’ are transmitted in two late medieval manuscripts, the text in its present form probably goes back to the 11th century. The hero, Níall Noígíallach (‘of the Nine Hostages’), belongs to the late Roman period and was considered the progenitor of Uí Néill. Speech on the opening of Parliament, 19 March 1604 (printed London 1604), quoted from Mackie, History of Scotland (21978), 187. James’s goal was the union of the two kingdoms, which he would champion over the following years against increasing resistance; his

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The disparity between the sources, not least the significant divergence between the rhetorical and stylistic structure of the Norse sagas and the Irish narratives (unfortunately also sometimes referred to as ‘sagas’), makes the difference with Scandinavia appear greater than it must have been. Against the backdrop of the hierogamous anchoring of his rule and the need for its cultic perpetuation, Jarl Hákon was certainly under at least as much pressure as any new high king in Teamhair/Tara, preparing for the inaugural banfheis, the banquet that literally means “coitus-feast.”80 Tacitus’s dictum of polygyny non libidine sed ob nobilitatem appears more applicable to Jarl Hákon than almost any other Norse magnate whose relationships with women have been discussed in the course of this study. But do, perhaps, the opposites meet here? Might not the libido of the jarl have been spurred on, reliving his path to power, the victory at Hjørungavåg and triumph over the Danish king, time and again in the “holy embrace” of the women of the land—and, for a moment, to be embraced by the whole land in the arms of a Þóra of Rimul?81 We have seen that it is short-sighted to dismiss polygynous practices as motivated by individual, or ‘male,’ sensuality. But neither should we go to the opposite extreme of viewing them as nothing but a social set of

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point in the speech was that as a Christian king he could not be a “polygamist and husband to two wives.”—Of course, this is not evidence for the persistence of Celtic, preChristian myths, but it does attest to a productive hierogamous accent in early modern political theology. Incidentally, following the death of Charles de Gaulle on 9 November, 1970, President Georges Pompidou opened his televised address with the words: “Français, Françaises, le général de Gaulle est mort, la France est veuve …” Cf. Byrne, Irish Kings (1973), 16ff., 50ff.; Jaski, Early Irish Kingship (2000), 143–71; on the myth, esp. Ó Máille, “Medb Chruachna” (1928); Trindade, “Irish Gormlaith” (1986); Ní ­Mhaonaigh, “Tales of Three Gormlaiths” (2002). From a mythological perspective, Nora Chadwick (“Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr” [1950]) has proposed that the saga character Þóra be identified with the mythological Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð. This presupposes a tradition surviving intact over two centuries, which is difficult to argue and impossible to prove. More plausible—if no more provable—would be to assume that Þór-names were perhaps commonly used for daughters in the vicinity of the cult of Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð. However, ‘Þóra’ seems to be something of a generic name for princely concubines in the kings’ sagas, so any interpretation based on this name is problematic. The byname of Guðrún Lundasól, the woman who escaped the jarl’s grasp, may, however, be enlightening. Ágrip and Snorri say that the name is derived from the farm Lundar. But lundar is the plural of lundr “grove, copse” (the word that, in the singular, gave the name of the Scanian thing site and later archiepiscopal seat of Lund). Guðrún’s epithet “Sun of the (sacred) grove” may well have a religious aspect, though there is nothing to associate the jarls of Lade with a solar cult. Tempting though a mythological interpretation is, we ought to remind ourselves that it gets us into the realm of speculation. What we do know is that the saga authors want us to imagine Guðrún as the radiant beauty of her farmstead.

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rules of conduct and communication. And while allowing for libidinous pleasure (of whatever kind and composition) we should not forget that being a hierogamist could be, at times, hard work. But what, then, led to the jarl’s fall? Overfulfilling his hierogamous obligations, it seems. From a thirteenth-century perspective, the sagas say that he no longer spared “even the women of the powerful.” This is the perception of the observers three centuries after conversion (or “the change of customs” as the sagas have it),82 accustomed to the operating principles of the ‘expressive’ aspect in the political games of their own time. But as stated earlier, it hardly seems credible that, after a successful reign of a quarter of a century, the politically astute Jarl Hákon, would suddenly disregard elementary precautions in dealing with the most important men in his core region. The opposite interpretation is, however, quite plausible: Jarl Hákon, who “believed that he had a uniform right to dispose of all women,”83 perhaps failed to notice that times were changing and ever more people, both men and women, questioned this cultic usufruct. The ease with which Óláf Tryggvason became sole ruler—­ arriving from England with only a few followers (albeit with powerful political ­backing)—allows us to take Snorri’s summary epilogue for Jarl Hákon literally: it was time for a change.84 If the ruler’s polygyny was indeed as cultically connoted as the sources indicate, then Óláf Tryggvason and his English missionaries did not need the biblical identification of promiscuity and idolatry85 to keep a sharp eye on these practices. “Should a noble sully himself on the lips of many women and, like the dogs and the pigs, believe he can call as many

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The literal meaning of siðaskipti, the usual term for the conversion to Christianity. Ágrip c. 12: “at hann lét sér konur allar jamt heimilar.” The final word is a legal term: “disposable, freely disposable; rightfully,” Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. heimill. As an adverb, it refers to the transfer “for usufruct”; the derivative noun heimild “rightful possession” plays an important role in Icelandic litigations in conflicts over claims to farms, lands, or goðorð (cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains [1999], passim).—Cf. God’s words to David (speaking through Nathan, 2 Sm 12:8): “dedi tibi domum domini tui et uxores domini tui in sinu tuo.” Against this background, one could argue for a typological interpretation of the saga passage based on the Old Testament; however, on the basis of the contemporary sources cited and the fact that Ágrip has no notable scriptural tendencies, I think it is justifiable to link the passage not only to the remote verse of the Bible, but also to the medieval Norwegian ideas of law and justice. OsTr c. 50: “þá var sú tíð komin, at fyrirdœmask skyldi blótskaprinn ok blótmenninir, en í stað kom heilǫg trúa ok réttir siðir.” The central passage, on which the rest—particularly Solomon’s wavering in cultic matters because of his wives’ influence (3 Kgs 11)—depend is Exodus 34:16: “fuerint fornicatae cum diis sui …” (“their daughters who prostitute themselves to their gods …”).

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women his own as he is able to bind to his lust?”86 While Jarl Hákon “ended his filthy life and his power in a dirty place,”87 Óláf Tryggvason began establishing the new era, according to one version of his saga, by having the idol of Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð, his enemy’s “dearest beloved,” stripped and shattered before the assembled people.88 The winner humiliating the loser’s bedfellow, however divine or demoniacal: even the change of faith was represented in terms of a sexual union. Considering the ‘performative’ polygyny of north Norwegian magnates around the turn of the millennium in a comparative perspective is more difficult than for the other aspects. Elsewhere in Christian Europe too, reges et s­ acerdotes were responsible for ritual practice to a greater or lesser extent, and were held accountable for it by the populace until the late Middle Ages (and beyond).89 Yet as was briefly suggested at the beginning of this chapter, hierogamy played a more indirect role, and when ideas about Christ’s relationship to the ecclesia or the anima to God drew on earthly sexual practices, it was in the sense of biblical-patristic monogamism: polycoity is idolatry

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Salvian of Marseilles, De gubernatione Dei iv, 28 (mgh Auct. ant. 1,1 41): “numquid multarum uxorum labe polluitur et canum vel suum more tantas putat coniuges suas esse, quantas potuerit libidini coniugare?” This would add another reference point to the inventory of scriptural-patristic references in Snorri’s account of Jarl Hákon’s death in the pigsty. Ágrip c. 14: “lauk svá saurlífismaðr í saurgu húsi sínum dǫgum ok svá ríki.” Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta (iii 11f.): the king discovers the clothed cult figure in a forest clearing, identifiable as Þórgerð hǫlgabrúð, “with whom Jarl Hákon had the most intimate friendship” (“er Hakon jarl hafdi mest vinfengi vid”). He removes her clothes and the gold and silver jewelry (votive offerings from Jarl Hákon), ties her to the tail of his horse, and rides into camp. Here the statue is reclothed and placed on an altar, and the gold and silver put into baskets. Now she is once more undressed in full view of the audience (“sidan bad hann afkleda hana”), then smashed with clubs, and the remains burned. While the latter part represents the standard way of dealing with cult images in hagiographical works (on the likely existence of pagan cult statues, cf. Olsen, Hørg, hov og kirke [1966], 121; Røthe, “Þórgerðr Hölgabrúðr” [2007], 3ff.), the rather cumbersome sexual humiliation which precedes it seems more idiosyncratic. Cf. Ez 23:29f.: “et tollent omnes labores tuos / et demittent te nudam et ignominia plenam / revelabitur ignominia fornicationum tuarum / scelus tuum et fornicationes tuae / fecerunt haec tibi quia fornicata es post gentes inter quas polluta es in idolis eorum” (“and they shall deal with you in hatred, and take away all the fruit of your labor, and leave you naked and bare, and the nakedness of your whorings shall be exposed. Your lewdness and your whorings have brought this upon you, because you played the whore with the nations, and polluted yourself with their idols”). See most recently summarized by Erkens, “Herrschersakralität” (2006); Erkens, “Heißer Sommer” (2003).

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(and vice versa)—“we only know one marriage, as we only know one God!”90 But this side of transcendence it is still possible that under certain circumstances, in some places, and at some times, lay elites and their audiences held less edifying views.91 This brings us back to the beginning of this chapter: What did Philip the Fair do with the Flemish count’s daughter in the dungeon, what did Swen Godwinson do in his monastery, and the many conquerors in the cities? Was the contextual coincidence woman~land (city, dominion) sometimes more than ‘merely’ symbolic? These questions should be kept in mind throughout the final two chapters, in which the findings from the Nordic material is tested on other European regions, actors, and modes of expression. 90

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Hos 1:2: “fornicans fornicabitur terra a Domino”; Tertullian, De monogamia i, 4: “Unum matrimonium novimus sicut unum deum.” Tertullian is primarily concerned with serial polygyny (remarriage, which he rejects); simultaneous marriage is ruled out anyway. Both these stances were obviously a matter of contention. To those who invoked the example of Abraham and the patriarchs in order to defend polygyny, Tertullian replies that Abraham only became polygynous when he was circumcised, thereby making monogamy the badge and essence of the new covenant. Cf. Gießauf, “Feind in meinem Bett” (2005) on Central Asia; Groebner, “Mit dem Feind schlafen” (2007) on the Mediterranean.

Chapter 6

The Comparative View: Western Europe 1

In the Heartland of Medieval Studies

On the map of European history the middle part of its Atlantic fringe, the West Frankish countries between the Bay of Biscay and the Rhine estuary plus England, are to some extent the ‘ideal landscape’ of medieval studies. Research on aristocratic society and sociability, on kinship, family structures, and their interaction with economic circumstances, on the legal system and sense of justice, on faith, fear, and hope, and finally on political history, which it is (once again) in vogue to interpret as ‘protonational’ and at the same time as a source of strength for present-day Europe,1 all seem to have a strong focus on this zone rather than, say, Asturia, Sicily, Bohemia, or indeed Norway. There are, of course, excellent studies on those (and other) regions too, but they come with a label. In studies and handbooks of medieval history tout court, one is apt to find discussions of France and England rather than Poland or Spain. It may be that the leading role which France assumed in international medieval studies in the second half of the twentieth century, combined with the fact that AngloAmerican medieval studies traditionally focus on England and northern France, contributes to this impression. What is certain is that international research into the social history of kinship is shaped more by the conditions in this zone than by any other part of the continent.2 The wealth of investigations into the aristocratic maisonnées, canonized in the works of researchers such as Georges Duby and Dominique Barthélemy and still going strong,3 would 1 A prominent example would be Le Goff, Geburt Europas (2004); for a critique, see the review by Michael Borgolte (2004). 2 This position is rarely stated as clearly as in Mitterauer, Warum Europa? (2003); see my review for a criticism (2003). It is nonetheless implicit when general accounts of medieval history are primarily or exclusively based on material from this area, including the East Frankish core regions between the Middle Rhine and Lake Constance; among many others, cf. Ennen, Frauen im Mittelalter (31987); Goetz, Leben im Mittelalter (1986); Klapisch-Zuber, Geschichte der Frauen, vol. 2 (1993); Aurell, Noblesse en Occident (1996); correspondingly, the relevant study by Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? (2002). If such works were primarily concerned with material from Northern, Eastern, or Southern Europe, it would hardly be possible to omit this fact in the title. 3 Three centres of French scholarship should be named: the Centre de Recherches Archéologiques et Historiques Médiévales (crahm) set up at the University of Caen, which is home to Claude Lorren and Pierre Bauduin and their numerous activities, including the

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­appear to make the lands between Flanders and Poitou the terre d’élection for the search for high medieval polygyny. 2 Scholarship “In this polygamous society,” as Georges Duby calls twelfth-century northern France,4 the search is not in vain. Yet however numerous the “girls” who knew how to “please [men] through their physical charms, their courtesy, and their skill”5 might be, they are not considered a fundamental element of this society. Martin Aurell, in his 200-page textbook La noblesse en Occident (ve–xve ­siècles), devotes just eight lines to the subject. In their conciseness, they deserve to be quoted in full: … Par leurs divorces et remariages à répétition, des nobles s’adonnent ainsi à une polygamie successive, sérielle. Ils ne rejettent pas pour autant une polygamie simultanée. En Normandie, le mariage more danico, “à la mode danoise,” permet à certains nobles d’entretenir une concubine à côté de leur femme légitime. En Flandre, Lambert d’Ardres, chapelain et chroniqueur des comtes de Guines, évoque les égarements de son maître Baudouin ii (†1169), “qui corrompit plus de vierges que David, Salomon et Jupiter,” devenant le père d’au moins vingt-trois bâtards. Faire ostentation de sa puissance, s’assurer une descendance et obtenir de nombreuses alliances déterminent la polygynie aristocratique.6 ­online journal Tabularia; a school researching “feudalism” in southern France and northern Iberia at Toulouse in the vein of Pierre Bonnassie; the ‘Mondes Plantagenêt’ team around Martin Aurell at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale in Poitiers, which has held several important colloquia (“La cour Plantagenêt (1154 –1204),” Thouars 1999 [published 2000]; “Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154 –1224),” Poitiers 2002 [published 2003]; for a current synthesis, see Aurell, L’empire Plantagenêt [published 2003]). 4 Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 267. —Duby’s vast Dames du douzième siècle (1995; English edition: Women of the Twelfth Century [1997]) has been published and republished in one, two or three volumes. The German edition quoted is a one-volume reedition. 5 Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 286; for style critique, see the review by Doris Ruhe (2001).—In this chapter, Duby’s research is often drawn upon to characterize certain views in research, parte pro toto. This will, I hope, be taken as a tribute to a ‘maître’ whose books have often been eye-openers for me, and whose clearly expressed, occasionally pointed but never dull hypotheses invite debate and criticism—and he was never one to evade a debate. For an appraisal, see Duhamel-Amado and Lobrichon, ed., Georges Duby (1996). 6 Aurell, Noblesse en Occident (1996), 66. Of the almost 450 pages of Judith Green’s comprehensive account of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, a total of eleven lines are devoted to

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With just a few words, Aurell gets to the heart of aristocratic polygyny—­ moreover, he is one of the few medievalists to use this term. His keywords “puissance—descendance—alliances” seem to correspond to at least the first two ‘aspects’ of the present study. And yet the passage, embedded in the chapter “Le mari et la femme,” is not subsequently expanded upon; polygyny remains a peripheral ornament of a social structure based on the inseparable unity of “marriage and power.”7 The famous trio of the knight, the lady, and the priest of Duby’s book title only join forces for “the making of modern marriage in medieval France,”8 however much the knight continues to behave like ­another Jupiter or Solomon. This is certainly connected to the intellectual legacy of structural anthropology and, moreover, conditioned by the focus on aristocratic ‘houses,’ with marriage viewed as the “keystone of the social edifice,”9 while by their nature less formalized bonds leave little trace. However, the disregard of polygyny in research on medieval Western Europe is also to a great extent source-related. A fundamental asymmetry of the sources informs research on kinship, including polygyny, in Northern and Western Europe. The principal difference is the wealth of documentary sources, which are almost completely absent for Northern Europe. None of the great regional studies, such as Bonnassie for Catalonia, Duby for Burgundy, Barthélemy for the Vendômois, Lemesle for Maine, Fossier for Picardy, and Warlop for Flanders,10 could be carried out even rudimentarily for Scandinavia—which is why the transferability of their results is among the most discussed topics of

­concubinage (Aristocracy [1997], 356); Constance Bouchard’s account of French chivalry (Chivalry and Society [1998]), despite strong social-anthropological tendencies, contains no mention of concubinage or polygyny besides a few references to “bastard sons.” 7 Hence the title of Aurell’s major study, published around the same time: Noces du comte (1995). Here, too, the wives belong in the political sphere, the concubines are a matter of passion (424: “Comme aux siècles précédents, Catalans et Toulousains continuent [in the twelfth century] de pratiquer la polygynie, répudiant leurs épouses au gré des vicissitudes politiques ou prenant des concubines au rythme de leurs passions”). 8 Duby, Le chevalier, la femme et le prêtre (1981); full title of the English version: The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (first published in 1983). 9 Duby, Knight, Lady and Priest (1993), 19. The German version has “Eckstein” (cornerstone): Duby, Ritter, Frau und Priester (1985), 25. The French original has “la clé de voûte de l’édifice social”: Duby, Chevalier, femme et prêtre (1981), 23. If you remove the keystone from the arch, the building collapses. 10 Bonnassie, La Catalogne (1975); Duby, La société aux xie et xiie siècles (21971); Barthélemy, Vendôme (1993); Lemesle, Haut-Maine (1999); Fossier, Picardie (1987); Warlop, Flemish Nobility (1975–76).

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comparative European history in Northern Europe.11 Above all these sources provide (alongside much else) rich information about ‘legal’ marriage accompanied by the transfer of goods, making it possible to investigate kinship systems, identify “marriage strategies,”12 and even develop “alliance theories.”13 Non-marital relationships, on the other hand, ‘concubines’ as scholarship usually calls them following the canonical classification of the time, are almost by definition absent from this source material. In his one-thousand-page book on the Vendômois, Dominique Barthélemy has precisely two occasions to mention the topic of ‘concubinage’—which, moreover, does not necessarily have anything to do with polygyny, but can denote a form of monogamy which in one way or other falls short of ‘full’ marriage.14 The children of such relationships are more visible than their parents. Though rarely mentioned (or identifiable as such), they have a certain place in the documents because of their property.15 Against the generalizing view of Jean-Pierre Poly and Éric Bournazel in their well-known study of ‘la mutation féodale,’ according to which the exclusion of ‘bastards’ was one of the characteristics of the fundamental restructuring of kinship relationships in the decades after the year 1000, Barthélemy emphasizes that the inclusion or exclusion of ‘bastards’ from the solidarity of aristocratic kin groups depended very much on the particular case, but concludes that by and large only a second-tier

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Cf. Paludan, Familia og familie (1995); Gelting, “Det komparative perspektiv” (1999); Lind, “Europæiseringer i middelalderen” (2003); Hybel, Danmark i Europa (2003). The term, commonly used in other periods and epochs, is used in the title programmatically by Martin Aurell: Stratégies matrimoniales de l’aristocratie (2000). For Catalonia—the only part of the West Frankish realm unaffected by the archival damage inflicted during the revolutionary period—see the excellent study (mannerisms notwithstanding) by Ruiz-Domènec, L’estructura feudal (1985), in which source-based regional research is consistently conducted on the basis of structuralist theory, thereby avoiding the danger (cited by Ruiz-Domènec) of “transforming historical scholarship into a cabinet of curiosities” (František Graus). A late 10th-century document, preserved in the cartulary of Saint-Père in Chartres, provides the following exemplary ‘definition’ of correct marriage as it was understood at a regional level: “secundum legem salicam et secundum consuetudinem qua viri proprias uxores dotant” (Barthélemy, Vendôme [1993], 545), to which the author adds the observation: “On ‘dote’ ainsi une femme légitime, mais non une illégitime. Ainsi, le douaire coutumier n’est-il pas responsable, par contraste, de nombre de concubinages? Peu d’indices sur ceux-ci …” In his rich documentation for the county of Vendôme, Barthélemy (esp. 536–40) finds ten ‘bastards’ for the whole of the tenth century, all male, of whom four are labelled as such and seven are explicitly named (thus one is identified both ways).

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position remained to them from the eleventh century onward.16 Documentary sources present an unbalanced picture, and the number of ‘bastards’ is likely to have been considerably higher—but how much higher remains, at least for the high Middle Ages, elusive. If we consider the offspring of the Norman king Henry i of England (r. 1100–35), the ratio is 1:10 in favour of the ‘bastards,’ but then the beau clerc was certainly viewed by contemporaries as an extreme case, given his concupiscentia feminarum.17 The point is that numerical estimates are simply impossible. In summary, although the documentary evidence does indeed support the assumption that extramarital (and potentially polygynous) connections may have been widespread, it tends to highlight marriage, that “cornerstone.” 3 Sources One more difference between Western and Northern Europe in particular is crucial for the study of polygyny: the place of the vernacular. From the beginning of literacy, Norse stood alongside Latin in the Atlantic North: it was cultivated with an extraordinary linguistic self-assurance, even on a theoretical level, and it dominated the writing of history in large parts of Northern Europe, while Latin chronicles and histories were rather small-scale (excepting Saxo, of course). The situation is almost reversed in Western Europe. Latin dominates not only in documents, but also in narrative sources; historical writing in English ceased by c.1150; Flemish was not used until the latter part of the thirteenth century; and the French vernacular in its four literary dialects developed its written form with constant reference to and dependence on Latin. Lars Boje Mortensen’s dictum about literature in European vernaculars being mere footnotes to Latin up until 1250 undoubtedly holds true for French.18 Until the midthirteenth century, its domain remained ‘courtly’ lay romance, including a

16 Barthélemy, Vendôme (1993), 540, on Poly and Bournazel, Mutation féodale (1980), 187; cf. Barthélemy, Vendôme (1993), 536: “la bâtardise est un statut : la filiation est reconnue, mais non légitime.” Barthélemy has also spoken out against the “mutationist” these associated with Poly and Bournazel; cf. Barthélemy, La mutation de l’an mil (1997). 17 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, vol. 1, 3; cf. Ordericus Vitalis, he xi 23. The Complete Peerage devotes a special appendix to Henry i’s children (White, Appendix D [1949]), and lists two (possibly three) legitimate and 20 (possibly 22) extramarital children; the sexes are almost balanced in both cases. Cf. Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 60–73. 18 Mortensen, “Medieval Latin Literature” (2003).

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rich, largely versified narrative tradition. Within the modern division of dis­ ciplines, this has earned these texts the label ‘literature’ and put them within the claim of Romance philology, while the Latin prose of historiographers (including occasional prosimetrum such as that of Dudo of Saint-Quentin) was claimed by the discipline of history, and left Romance chronicles such as Be­ noît’s history of the Norman dukes or the life of William Marshal somewhere on the fence, and Latin romance and drama to the ever-shrinking field of Medieval Latin literature.19 French literature of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries developed what is certainly the most well-known cultural formalization of polygyny: the Amour courtois. Despite all misgivings, the term launched in the nineteenth century has proved useful for describing the totality of cultural products whose driving force is the relationship between a man, a woman, and amour.20 Historians’ attempts to include courtly love into their analysis are as diverse as they are bewildering. If we decide to view courtly love as a sociopolitical phenomenon, and to put psychosocial or emotional-historical interests to one side, we have opted to take a partial view of the subject. Nor will we in the course of the following discussion consider such topics as ‘love theory’ or ‘love discourse.’ We are concerned with the manifold contingent uses of courtly cultural practices. On the other hand, we must take these practices seriously, so as to avoid the distinction, underlying some ‘social history’ approaches, between romances and songs on the one hand, and the “real structure of social forces and relationships”21 on the other—as if documents and chronicles were not only different, but also ‘truer’ kinds of sources. In terms of cultural anthropo­ logy, the cortoisie of a region was always at once a model of and for society.22 19

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The creation of the Centre of Medieval Literature at the universities of Odense and York in 2012 has resulted in a number of impressive studies that aim at bridging those gaps (or tearing down fences), especially with regard to Latin writing. It remains to be seen whether this redress of balances will prove to be sustained. There are occasional indications that the best poets were aware of the trinitarian implications of the system; see, for example, Raimon de Miraval’s almost monothelete formula (pc 406,2 v. 10f.: “Ma domna et eu et amors Eram pro d’un voler tuich trei” “My Lady and I and Love were all three of one mind”).—Songs of the Troubadours and Trouveres, trans. Rosenberg, Switten, and Le Vot (1998), 121. For an analysis of courtly poetry in light of discourse theory, see Huchet, L’amour discourtois (1987), on its connection with other ‘discourses,’ see Baldwin, Language of Sex (1994). Duby, “À propos de l’amour que l’on dit courtois,” in Duby, Mâle moyen âge (21990), 74–82, 74: “… les correspondances entre ce qu’exposent ces chansons et ces romans et, d’autre part, l’organisation vraie des pouvoirs et des relations de société.” Cf. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), 87–125, 93. For the concept of ‘courtly rites’ cf. Köhler, “Can vei la lauzeta mover” (1979), 348f.

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Gadi Algazi and Rina Drory have described ‘Love’ of the Abbasid period as a “rulebook of social competence,” and I have proposed that the Occitan fin’ amor be understood as a “grammar of mentality.”23 This does not mean that other courtly cultures must be viewed in similar terms. I am not proposing a similarly comprehensive theorization of the courtliness between the Loire and the Scheldt (and the Irish Sea); I am of the opinion that cortoisie in Anjou, Normandy, or France played a wholly different, considerably less important role than the totalizing cortesia of Tolosan Occitania. Nevertheless, as a part of lay elite culture cortoisie is of some importance for the understanding of aristocratic polygyny. In itself, of course, the courtly love relationship is conceived as monogynous—the ‘lady’ suffers no other woman— which would seem to align cortoisie much more with Christian law than with the ‘feudal’ or seigneurial system which, according to some powerful interpretations, it is supposed to mirror and mimic. In fact, the hallmark of ‘feudal society,’ despite all attempts to restrict and perpetuate the bonds between men, is precisely the real or potential multiplicity of bonds. But then the courted woman too must always be aware that a failing on her part might lead to the man transferring his homage (homenaticum) elsewhere. There is a whiff of polygyny just around the corner of the courtly protestations of fidelity. A second, more specific trait, reinforces the polygynous flavour of courtly love in its French manifestation. In Occitan fin’amor the lady is guarded by shadowy generic types such as the ‘spy’ or ‘observer’ (gelós) and the ‘slanderer’ (lauzengier),24 appropriated from Arab love poetry, while her position in ­everyday life as a daughter, sister, wife, and/or widow remains completely unaddressed. The French amour courtois, by contrast, is inherently conflictual. The ‘rights’ of the lovers collide with those which right and custom concede to other men over the woman. In French cortoisie the ‘lady’ is generally married, and sexual access to her is strictly privileged by ecclesiastical and secular law.25 23 24 25

Cf. Algazi and Drory, “L’amour” (2000); Algazi, “Hofkulturen im Vergleich” (2001), Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001). I commented on the connections between Occitan and Arabic-Andalusian poetry (in this instance, the figures of raqīb/ḥāsid and wāšī) in Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 210–22, and my view of selective appropriation has not changed since. This aporia is likewise discussed in the early troubadour poetry of Aquitaine and Poitou; Cercamon (fl. 1135/45) has a courtly trinity dedicated to hellfire: “Drut, moiller e marit, tug tres Sias del pechat comunau … Non a valor d’aissí enan Cela c’ab dos ni ab tres jai” (Ab la pascor [pc 112,1a] v. 27f., 36f.: “The lover, the wife, and the spouse, all three have fallen into sin together … A woman who sleeps with two or three henceforth has no worth [personal courtly quality] whatsoever”; see also Delbouille, “Tristan” [1966]). In the ‘classical’ troubadours, real life stops being mirrored to the extent that sex, lo plus, like an ineffable singularity is pushed beyond the ‘event horizon’ of all the laws of cortesia.

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This is not the place to go over the ‘courtly model’ once again, nor to discuss what basis its stagings had in the lived world. Any positioning on the question of whether men and women ‘actually’ lived as couples in a courtly manner ends in aporia, just as much as the question, fiercely debated by nineteenthcentury philologists, of whether the famous courts of love presided over by Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie of Champagne, or other high ladies ‘actually’ met and passed binding judgements.26 There is a fairly significant body of poems with several voices debating questions of court etiquette,27 so that we can presume they were staged, or perhaps ‘only’ spoken aloud with distributed roles, in front of courtly audiences; how far the practice of the courtly code influenced the behaviour of those affected by it, not only eludes measurement, but measurability. The same is true for the issue of how far ideas of courtly togetherness shaped the behaviour of the individuals tangible in the chronicles and (rarely) documents—at best, we can retrace their influence on the chronicles, and occasionally in charters.28 Like its charters, the historiography of Western Europe was dominated by Latin and all the linguistic, generic, rhetorical, and cognitive conventions bound up with it. The reason why the women around a “David, Solomon, or Jupiter” are never described as extensively as in the sagas has more to do with the linguistic and rhetorical conventions of Latin than with any intentional censorship by the hegemonic ideology of ‘clerical culture.’ The descriptions of polygynous relationships in the narrative sources of the West, however frequently alluded to, swiftly reach their limits. The disregard of polygyny as a social phenomenon by scholarship is largely (though not exclusively) due to its disregard in the sources. The working hypothesis for this chapter is that the study of elite polygyny in Northern Europe (Chapters 1–5) arouses the suspicion that the social significance of polygynous practices in the West may have been greater than is often 26

27 28

The treatise De arte (honeste) amandi, written shortly after 1180 by Andreas Capellanus, contains nearly two dozen ‘cases,’ in which disputes related to the rules of courtly conduct were submitted to a court of justice composed of prominent women, and then argued with much casuistry. The existence of these tribunals, equipped with the authority to establish norms, was argued by Raynouard in 1817, and given some weight by Stendhal in his essay De l’amour (1822). However, the idea had already been rebuffed in 1825 by Friedrich Diez, and gradually lost ground with the emergence of scientific philology. It might be tempting to resurrect the idea of ‘real-life’ courts of love being staged by twelfth-century men and women in the light of modern ideas of ‘deep play’; cf. Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 304–20. See Neumeister, Spiel mit der höfischen Liebe (1969). On the possible influence of Cortesia phraseology on documents, see Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 234f.

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allowed for. Marc Bloch valued the comparative method for ensuring a vitalizing “choc mental.”29 On a case-by-case basis, I will ask whether comparison can do still more: namely, whether the sources from Western Europe are open for new perspectives if read with recourse to those of Northern Europe. 4

Figurations of Polygyny: Arthurian Literature

When the abbot speaks of God, the monks fall asleep. But if he then interrupts himself and starts again: “Listen, brothers, listen, as I relate a great and new thing to you: there was a king who was called Arthur …”30—then even the snoring lay brothers wake up immediately, as the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, around 1220, remarks bitterly in one of his most famous anecdotes. Lay elites too preferred to be told of the world and of God by way of the chivalric world of the Round Table, and the Cistercians quickly came to wrap their teachings into Arthurian romance.31 The Arthurian world mediates between the oral-vocal narrative world and historia, vernacular and Latin, prose and verse, monastery and castle, meadow and forest and misty isle; it offers an entry point on the way from the saga North to the romance West. To a great extent, the Arthurian world is based on the multitude and variety of available women, among whom the knights of the Round Table live out their adventures, not always successfully. Its most dramatic moments are love triangles: not only does Iseult stand between two men, her wedded royal legitimus 29

30

31

Bloch, “Histoire comparée” (1928/1963), 18. Programmatically, Bloch preferred local over distant transcultural comparison: “étudier parallèlement des sociétés à la fois voisines et contemporaines, sans cesse influencées les unes par les autres, soumises par leur déve­ loppement, en raison précisement de leur proximité et de leur synchronisme, à l’action des mêmes grandes causes, et remontant, partiellement du moins, à une origine commune” (ibid., 19). Western and Northern Europe were probably not “ceaselessly influenced by each other” in the 10th–12th centuries but had “the same great causes” and “the at least partially common origin.” Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum iv, 36: [Abbot Gevard of Heisterbach] “verbum exhortationis in Capitulo ad nos faceret, et plures, maxime de conversis, dormitare, nonullos etiam stertere conspiceret, exclamavit: ‘Audite, fratres, audite, rem vobis novam et magnam proponam. Rex quidam fuit, qui Artus vocabatur.’ Hoc dicto, non processit, sed ait: ‘Videte, fratres, miseriam magnam. Quando locutus sum de Deo, dormitastis; mox ut verba levitatis inserui, eviligantes erectis auribus omnes auscultare coepistis.’” Caesarius underlines that he witnessed the episode. Around the time Caesarius of Heisterbach was writing, the Queste del Saint-Graal, part of the so-called Prose Lancelot Cycle emerged, probably in Champagne. It contains numerous eloquent hermits who bring the chivalrous religiosity of the Grail theme into line with pastoral concerns.

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and his confidant and nephew, but Tristan too stands between two women, both of whom are called Iseult, one of them beloved by him and the other one wedded to him, almost in hypostatic union as it were. Time and again, the other knights of the Round Table conjure up similarly intricate if less numinous situations, even Perceval, the ‘holy fool,’ who does not know when it is better not to enter a noblewoman’s tent and her bed.32 Polygyny, under its ‘performative’ aspect, is at the very foundation of the Arthurian kingdom. The so-called Elucidation, an early thirteenth-century text prefixed to a manuscript of the Perceval romance, contains its sole known prehistory. We learn that the original kingdom of Logres (Lloegr “England,” the name of the Arthurian kingdom in the French romances) was a golden age idyll, where no one was starving, and travelling knights were everywhere waited on with food and drink by the maidens of the well (puceles des puis)—until a wicked king, not content with the service granted, “overpowered one of the damsels and deflowered her at her well.”33 The wicked king’s knights immediately followed suit, affirming the collective character of chivalrous rule. The fall, the transfer of this chorographic polygyny from latency into virulence, makes the puceles disappear and the land desolate.34 Much later, after the Round Table has been established and the land has experienced a renewed agrarian upturn, in memory of this primal mistake the knights undertake to restore the status quo ante through protective measures akin to the Peace of God, “and certainly, for the sake of damsels, there have been many struggles in this land.”35 But only with the recovery of the court of the Fisher King will the original state be restored and the maidens of the well resume their service: a remarkable equation of that ultimate goal of all questes, the Grail, which in its standard version is the Chalice (the one relic they couldn’t steal in Constantinople), with the multitude of primordial mothers of the arable land, the resource which provided the material base for the audience of the Arthurian romance.36 Most Arthurian romances are less explicit, but time and again their plots reveal the extent to which the string of adventures depends on the multitude of available puceles who need saving or their rights defended against sinister neighbours. Sometimes the adventures intersect: “Take, Sir Knight! Now you 32 33

Chrétien de Troyes, Le conte du Graal, v. 602–741. Elucidation nach der Handschrift von Mons, in Chrétien de Troyes, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5 (1932), 417–29, v. 69f.: “Des puceles une esforcha Sor son pois le despucela.” 34 Ibid., v. 100 and 116. 35 Ibid., v. 155f.: “Por les puceles, ce m’est vis, Ot mainte batalle el païs.” 36 The Elucidation explicitly refers to the raped virgins of the well as “ancestors of us all” (v. 189: “Tuit somes né des damoseles”).

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have two.”37 The polygynous hero par excellence is Gawain, the king’s nephew. Over the course of his career, from the epic hero in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin history of Britain around 1130 (in which he is still the undisputed paladin of the kingdom, cheered by the women on the castle walls), to the schoolforming romances of Chrétien de Troyes, where, as a model knight lacking the genius imparted by true (courtly) love, he always delivers a good second place to the particular hero of the story, Lancelot, Yvain, or Perceval, until his inability to escape women becomes constitutive of his character as the habitual adventurer in the often burlesque situations of late romance. “Alas!” laments a maiden whom Gawain has just come across combing her hair in a spring meadow, deflowered after a charming conversation, and promptly abandoned (Gawain is in a hurry): “Yet I know that he will have two or three before the end of the month, who are fairer than me and who love him also!”38 If he for once pulls himself together, he soon risks his reputation: for the purpose of breaking a male costume—the elimination of unjust innovations is the noblest task of the knights of the Round Table39—two damsels urge him to “choose which of us you prefer tonight.”40 Being on a Grail quest, he declines the offer, and promptly gets to hear he is probably just an imitation: “cist est uns Gavains contrefez!” If a life of serial polygyny—and simultaneous polygyny too, given that the episodes often contain pledges to be faithful and return—is a core characteristic for Gawain, the eternal nephew and iuvenis, he only pushes to the extreme what most of his companions also exemplify. Even with the sincerest intentions in the world, the chivalric hero, defined by multiple behavioural codes, cannot avoid getting himself into impossible situations. It is worst for Lancelot, who can only love one—the queen—while at the same time owing all others every assistance they demand. When around 1220/30 the Arthurian kingdom lost its timeless otherworldliness in the romances of the so-called Vulgate or Grail Cycle, which gave Logres a telos (the end of the Grail quest) and an apocalypse, it was precisely this situation which was to lead to its downfall: Lancelot torn between his courtly commitment to 37

38 39 40

Lancelot du Lac (around 1225), 480: “Tenez, fait il, sire chevaliers. Or en avez deus.” The knight and his squire cannot agree on who should “have” the two damoiseles trop beles, who, after successful duels, they have just taken from a mysterious island and a grand tent, respectively. Finally, they decide to send the women to Camelot as trophies. The so-called second continuation of Perceval (anonymous, around 1200, in Continuations, vol. 4 [1971]), v. 30,467ff.: “Je puis tres bien de fi savoir Que, ainz que soit passé li mois, An avra il ou deus ou trois Qui plus belles de moi seront Et autant com je l’ameront.” Cf. Köhler, “Rolle des ‘Rechtsbrauchs’” (1962). Perlesvaus (anonymous, c.1210), cited by Busby, Gauvain (1980): “choisiroiz ennuit la quele qui mielz vos plaira de nos .ii.”

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the demoisele d’Escalot and his reciprocated love for Queen Guinevere, which proves even more devastating in its political consequences than Tristan’s for Iseult. The bigynous aporia of the ‘best knight’ sets in motion a chain reaction of dutiful action which leads to the collapse of the Arthurian kingdom. Given how much the Logres of the Round Table was taken to be a foil of the Plantagenet empire,41 there is no doubt that discussions about the right path for a knight in the world by way of construing polygynous situations held a weighty place in the aristocratic culture of their time. 5

Strategies of Representation: Under the Spell of Monogamism

Aristocratic narratives could therefore certainly play on the ‘expressive’ aspect of polygyny—as long as events were acted out at a safe distance in Logres. Evidence for a direct discussion of polygyny in a Latin Christian aristocracy is rare. The calculated nonchalance of the Danish chronicles and Norwegian-­Icelandic sagas is not found in the West. No history of an Anglo-French dynasty provides straightforward reports about its noblest representatives’ numerous concubinae. One way or another, any reference to such a relationship is invariably accompanied by a tinge of moral judgement indicating that the text responds to a system that might be termed hegemonic monogamism.42

41

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The ‘discovery’ of the tomb of Arthur rex quondam rexque futurus in 1191 in Glastonbury Abbey, identified with Avalon, and the ruling house’s attempt to create a dynastic link with the early British kings onomastically (Arthur, son of Geoffroy Plantagenêt, designated duke of Brittany and hapless pretender to the throne in 1199/1202) are two outstanding moments of this appropriation. For this extensively discussed topic, see most recently the study by Chanou, L’idéologie Plantagenêt (2001). This term is intended to avoid ascribing the spread of marriage and denigration of other forms of relationships to ecclesiastical teaching in the narrower sense, as if ‘the church’ was responsible for the advance of monogamy in a polygynous ‘lay culture.’ The concept of hegemony makes it possible to identify protagonists and profiteers of a particular hegemonic mindset without needing to assume that ‘someone’ (actors, milieus, classes or groups) had contrived a scheme to engineer social change. It allows for the acquiescence, not to say complicity, of the ‘losers’ of an ideology-driven change. In this sense, even the most powerful concubinarii of their time are on the defensive, and no amount of assertiveness on their part (“David and Solomon”) can change this. Monogamism implies that there is an ‘ideology’ (a widespread assumption which in itself seems convincing) tending towards monogamy as the standard form of sexual relationships; it does not imply that those who came to share the view necessarily organized their social practices accordingly. Henry I was not monogamous, but monogamism was pervasive in the twelfth-century Channel region.

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One way of doing this is forward defence, as in the remark in the History of the Counts of Guînes, cited by Martin Aurell, about the prince surpassing David, Solomon, and Jupiter. This is the kind of chivalrous hyperbole known in poetry as gap, the kind which allowed Duke William ix of Aquitaine (vii as count of Poitou, r. 1086–1126) to boast of a polycoital week with two ladies (“a hundred and eighty-eight times!”),43 without damaging his reputation as ‘first troubadour.’ By contrast, William of Newburgh’s epilogue about King Henry i (r. 1100– 35) appears like an inverted gap. The Anglo-Norman ruler, a contemporary of the Aquitanian troubadour-duke, was adorned with many of the virtues fitting for a prince, nevertheless [tamen], these were greatly obscured by his appetite for women, in which he emulated the voluptuousness of Solomon. He also loved the rough pleasures of the hunt more than appropriate, and went as far as treating poachers on a par with murderers in public trials.44 And yet we might wonder how difficult it would be for an aristocratic audience to simply replace the adversative signals (tamen) with additive ones, completing the image of an impressive ruler with women and hunting (a characteristic sequence). The same king also received a different sort of praise for the same behaviour: “His whole life, he was completely free from fornication and lust,” says William of Malmesbury, a contemporary of Henry i: “For, as I know from those closest to him, he would not pour into women’s wombs from unrestrained lust, but for the purpose of conceiving offspring.” Mindful of his sovereign dignity, he always considered the effective use of the royal seed, “for he subjected nature like a lord, and did not obey lust like a slave.”45 Those who evaded this constant performance monitoring might even be applauded for deviating from the polygynous norm, such as the Scottish kings and brothers

43 44

45

pc 183,12, v. 79f.: “Tant las fotei com auzirets: Cent et quatre-vinz et ueit vetz.” William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, vol. 1, 3: “Homo multis quae decerent principem bonis ornatus: quae tamen plurimum denigrabat in concupiscentia feminarum imitando petulatiam Salomonis. Feras quoque propter venationis delicias plus iusto diligens, in publicis animadversionibus cervicidas ab homicidis parum discernebat.” gra v, 412: “Omnium tota uita omnino obscenitatum cupidinearum expers, quoniam, ut a consciis accepimus, non effreni uoluptate sed gignendae prolis amore mulierum gremio infunderetur, nec dignaretur aduenae delectationi prebere assensum, nisi ubi regium semen procedere posset in effectum, effundens naturam ut dominus, non obtemperans libidini ut famulus.” When eating and drinking, William continued, he would stop when he was full.

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Edgar, Alexander i and David i, who, as good sons of their saintly mother Margaret, besides excelling in diet, alms, and prayer, crucially also avoided the domestic evil of the kings [domesticum regibus vitium] and, as far as anyone knows, none other than their legal wives ever came into their beds and their modesty was never sullied by concubines.46 There is also a slight whiff of sanctity around Baldwin vi, count of Hainaut and later Flanders as well as first Latin emperor in Constantinople, who failed to surround himself with the customary crowd of puceles, preferring demonstrative monogamy with Marie, daughter of the Count of Champagne. Georges Duby has, perhaps somewhat hastily, taken him to be an “original,” a “laughing stock.”47 If Giselbert of Mons’s report is considered more than merely an attempt to certify the crusader emperor’s morality by borrowing directly from the Decretum Gratiani,48 it is quite conceivable that some observers regarded the count as comical. However, at a time when courtly lay culture also conceded some value to self-controlled orientation towards one ‘lady’ only, Count Baldwin could be respected for his expedient restraint even while Henry i was respected for his no less expedient promiscuity. The chroniclers’ most common way of dealing with princely polygyny, though, is to maintain a silence which is only broken when there is no other choice—for example, when the relationship produces a son or daughter who cannot be skipped over—and this is the reason why direct observation of aristocratic polygyny in Western Europe is often difficult. Outside the Latin narratives we come across testimonies such as the lai Eliduc by Marie de France (Anglo-Norman, around 1170/80), which in its unpretentious ruthlessness is an outstanding but entirely atypical representative of courtly literature. The lais—relatively short, episodic verse narratives, 46

47

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gra v, 400: “ita domesticum regibus uitium euicerunt ut numquam feratur in eorum thalamos nisi legitimas uxores isse, nec eorum quemquam pelicatu aliquo pudicitiam contristasse.”—On dynasty building in the “polygamous society” of Scotland around 1100, see Wall, “Queen Margaret of Scotland” (1997); on polygynous practice in Scottish society, see Sellar, “Marriage, Divorce and Concubinage” (1978–80). Duby, “Que sait-on de l’amour en France au xiie siècle?” in Mâle moyen âge (21990), 34–49, 44: “Un original. Ridicule.” For criticism, see Joris, “Un seul amour” (1992), esp. 198: Duby fails to see that the implicit alternative is not ‘youthful’ promiscuity, but full-blown concubinage. Giselbert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense, 172 (the text is here identical to the edition by Leo Vanderkindere, Brussels 1904, used by Duby and Joris): “ea sola contentus sit” echoes Gratian’s Decretum D 34,4: “unius mulieris … sit coniunctione contentus.”

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f­requently marvellous in character—share with the Arthurian world the ­Breton-British backdrop, with figures from the Round Table appearing in some of them. Yet they are strikingly distinct from the bulk of Arthurian literature. Eliduc tells the story of the eponymous hero, a married Breton knight who, wrongfully banished from the country, takes service on the other side of the Channel. There, love seizes him and Guilliadun, the daughter of his new lord. Back in favour once more, Eliduc returns to Brittany with a heavy heart, promises his amie Guilliadun that he will return swiftly, finds a pretext to do so, and abducts her with her consent. At this point she still does not know that he has a wife called Guildeluëc in Brittany; she finds out by chance during the crossing and collapses, apparently dead. Eliduc, heartbroken, lays her out in a chapel in the forest and comes every day as a mourner. Inevitably, Guildeluëc notices, finds her way to the chapel, understands the connection, and is overcome by compassion for the dead girl. Guildeluëc’s renunciation is followed by the apparently miraculous reawakening of Guilladun, upon which Guildeluëc, the wife, retires to a monastery, to be joined by Guilliadun, the amie, after a few years with Eliduc. At this, Eliduc also withdraws into the monastery newly created for this purpose, in which all three pray for one another. To us, the shadow of Abelard and Héloïse appear to hover over this Breton story of human and divine love. It also contains one of the few explicit discussions of polygyny in courtly literature. Initially Eliduc still reasons that he will not fall in love dishonourably because he owes his wife his given word (fei~fides), and moreover he is the ‘man’ of Guilliadun’s father.49 Soon he feels helpless: “If I marry my beloved, that is against Christianity!”50 The sailor who wants to throw Guilliadun overboard to calm the life-threatening storm expresses it in more drastic terms: “You have a lawful wedded wife (leial espuse) and now lead another woman home, against God and the law (lei), against right (dreiture) and your given word (fei)!”51 Later, Guildeluëc expresses similar concerns about the impropriety of the stuation but draws the opposite conclusion, asking her husband to establish a new monastery so she can withdraw there and he “can marry her whom he loved so greatly, for it is not good and

49 50 51

Eliduc (in Marie de France, Lais, ed. Karl Warnke [1990], 270–327), v. 473–76: “Mes ja ne li querra amur Ki li aturt a deshonur, Tant pur sa femme guarder fei, Tant pur ceo qu’il est od le rei.” Ibid., v. 601f.: “S’a m’amie esteie espusez, Nel suffereit crestiëntez.” Ibid., v. 835–38: “Femme leial espuse avez Et sur celi altre en menez Cuntre Deu e cuntre la lei, Cuntre dreiture et cuntre fei.” Eliduc throws the mariner into the sea and takes command; Guilliadun falls into a coma.

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proper (bien ne avenant) to have two wives at the same time, and, moreover, it is against the law (lei).”52 In both cases, “law” means Christian law. Lay ethics have different standards: dreiture (‘right-ness’) expressed in terms of the fei (reinforced by the assonance of the Pauline fides), the force of the given word. The wife uses the courtly phrase bien ne avenant, meaning something along the lines of: “bigamy’s just not on!” While hegemonic monogamism shapes even the literary artistry of the lai, it allows Marie to exploit its semantics to her own end.53 Her concept of bigamy is astonishingly unorthodox. Canonically, there is no way Eliduc could marry his amie after his first wife took her vows (and as long as she was alive); if Guildeluëc nonetheless develops her plan to resolve the dilemma and implements it without any apparent problems, this is done in accordance with a coherent lay ethic which is only hinted at,54 clearly at peace with religion, and whose goal—wholly in the Bernardine sense—is the envelopment of human love in the love of God.55 Given the subtle treatment of current ideas in the lais, it would be a mistake to assume that what Marie is describing here is simply a survival of the prereform custom of enclosing women who had become unwanted in convents. The courtly monogamism knows how to be in accordance with the canonists’ teachings on marriage—consensus facit nuptias—without being dependent on it. The view that ‘feudal’ marriage represents the triumph of the “ecclesiastical model” over traditional lay practice, best known through the work of Georges Duby, has been repeatedly, and rightly, nuanced.56 We might go further: in Western Europe, to a certain extent the intensification of sexual pastoral since the eleventh century runs in parallel with changes in the familial 52 53 54

55 56

Ibid., v. 1127–30: “cele prenge qu’il eime tant; Kar n’est pas bien ne avenant De dos espuses meintenir, Ne la leis nel deit cunsentir.” For instance, the captain’s words “sor … menez” (“over and beyond (her) you lead (another) home”) echos the verb superduxere “to lead home a second wife” used in the documents. In his treatise on love, the roughly contemporary Champagnian court cleric Andreas Capellanus does indeed compile a veritable law of love (ii 8: regulae/praecepta amoris) in which several relevant passages are found, such as regula 3: “nemo duplici potest amore ligari”; however, the satirical tendency of his work makes it difficult to take his codex as an expression of the ‘courtly model.’ Ibid. v. 1177–79 (the closing words): “Mult se pena chescuns pur sei De Deu amer par bone fei E mult par firent bele fin.” For instance, Bouchard, Chivalry and Society (1998), 67ff.; see generally, Baschet, Civilisation féodale (32006), 753: “l’institution ecclésiale … est peut-être davantage que la colonne vertébrale du système féodal : son enveloppe, voire sa forme même.” One can go along with this assessment insofar as it refers to a regionally limited ‘feudal culture,’ that is, in northern France and the surrounding regions.

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structure of lay society, for which the fundamental and durable privileging of just one woman and her children was likewise an innovation. Due to the coincidence of individuals and interests, both ‘ruling classes’ arrived at forms of monogamism that, while occasionally sharply diverging in their manifestations, were nonetheless fundamentally compatible; and polygyny caused problems for both. In this respect, the twelfth century perhaps did not invent love,57 but ‘the couple.’ Marie’s position is that of Fenice in Chrétien’s Cligès, who only wishes to give her body to one who has her heart (and not to the emperor), and of all the courtly poets who put themselves and their actions in the service of the one, but hers is also the current ecclesiastical idea of consensus. In comparison to many of the lay elite’s other dispositions—including polygyny—, French courtoisie was, as a version of Western European Christianity, relatively close to the church, even and especially when it was not always in harmony with the latest church doctrine in every detail. 6

The Invisible Women

There is no longer any place for plural women in this milieu. They are undoubtedly there, and their offspring are expected, but they cannot be ‘spoken’ of (in a social sense). The History of the Counts of Guînes (a place near Dunkirk) is a good example of this. Polygyny is omnipresent in it. From beginning to end, the history is quite literally swarming with “countless sons and daughters of various descent” (innumerabiles et multigenas);58 the daughters are given to the lower nobility of the region, the sons are knights or canonici and, in Leah Shopkow’s words, represent a “pool of talent,” to be drawn on as necessary.59 The position of the children of concubines in the Artesian-Flemish landed

57

58

59

The traditional formula, attributed to Charles Seignobos (probably wrongly), “L’amour, cette invention du xiie siècle,” has been advocated in one form or another since Stendhal and romantic philology; through Denis de Rougemont (L’amour et l’Occident [21956], 57) and the ‘12th-century renaissance’ (see, for example, Morris, Discovery of the Individual [1972]). It continues to shape the history of culture, literature, and emotions to this day; see most recently, Schnell, “Historische Emotionsforschung” (2004). Lambert of Ardres, Historia comitum Ghisnensium c. 89.—The ostensible founder of the house of Guînes, Sigfred the Dane, takes the daughter of the count of Flanders with gentle force (“sine vi ludendo vim intulit,” c.11); the chronicler’s source, Walter of Le Clud, is the great-grandson of a lord of Ardres through a thoroughly ‘illegitimate’ tie. History of the Counts of Guines, trans. Shopkow (2001), 15, with a reference to the limited preservation of the legal rights of illegitimate sons even in the 15th-century Coutumes de Guînes (cf. Espinas, Origines du capitalisme, vol. 4 [1949], 57).

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­aristocracy was shaped by familiarity and subordination.60 Some were more resigned to being disregarded than others, who led plundering raids against their brothers’ possessions with the aid of notorious professional warriors—a common way of expressing legal claims and encouraging negotiations61—or chose to express their outsider status rather more flamboyantly, as did Anselm, son of the lord of Ardres and one of the three puellae impregnated by him while he was staying in England. As the textbook ‘younger brother’ that he indeed was, he went in ultramarinas; there he was taken prisoner, converted to Islam, and cultivated demonstratively “Saracen” attitudes even after he returned home, going as far as eating meat on Fridays, offending everyone and providing them with the opportunity to expel this returnee unwilling to reintegrate from the house.62 It is a pity that the History does not record whether he sought to maintain Muslim marriage laws alongside dietary laws. Given the customary practices in Guînes, attempting to emulate the polygynous Saracens would presumably have missed the point of alterity. By and large, in this twelfth-century landed aristocratic milieu the sons of the numerous puellae appear to have come to terms with the limits their birth imposed on their ambitions. The ‘bastards’ of the counts of Hainaut became canons, provosts, chancellors of Flanders, and, insofar as they were de mulieribus nobilibus, were provided with bona quedam63 but they did not become count on the Sambre and Scheldt or, for that matter, emperor on the Bosphorus. Of the Anglo-Norman ruler Henry i’s eleven sons from concubines, not one took the death of the only legitimate royal son who went down with the White Ship as an opportunity to venture a bid for succession during the remaining fifteen years of their father’s reign, which meant that Henry remained ‘heirless.’ And they did not lack ability: One of them at least, Robert of Gloucester, ­certainly knew as well as any pretender to position himself against Henry’s

60 Duby, Ritter, Frau und Priester (1985), 203ff., has already described a similar crisis in this milieu—although his premise leads him to reach very different conclusions to those proposed here. 61 For this characteristic of the “chivalric style of rule” cf. Barthélemy, “Les comtes” (1995), 453: “… tout repose sur des rapports de force socialement régulés et symbolisés, c’est-àdire sur les revendications, concurrentes es successives, par chacun de son droit. L’équilibre social s’obtient par un travail social permanent, d’une manière qu’on ne doit raisonnablement ni déprécier, ni idéaliser.” (Emphasis in original). From this perspective, the very exclusion of the “bastards” from the paternal inheritance and their ensuing aggression would actually signify their inclusion in the constantly feuding knightly class. 62 Historia comitum Ghisnensium c. 113. 63 Giselbert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense cc. 227, 72, 252; cf. Joris, “Un seul amour” (1992), 198.

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­ ephew Stephen of Blois, the main competitor in the expected competition n over the unsettled succession. In the course of the solemn act by which Henry hoped to secure his ‘legitimate’ daughter’s succession to the throne, “there was, it is reported, a remarkable contest” between the two men on the question of whether a son’s privilege or nephew’s dignity took precedence when swearing oaths.64 But throughout the entire war of succession and until his death in 1147, Robert held up his half-sister’s cause as military commander without ever reaching for the crown himself65—which would have been the first thing to do for even the most implausible candidate during the contemporaneous Norwegian power struggles. Given the devastation wrought by the so-called ‘Civil War’ (or ‘the Anarchy’) between Matilda and Stephen in England and Normandy, it is tempting to argue that the Norwegian open competition between the sons of frillur was perhaps not the worse solution. Shortly after his coronation in 1135, Robert and Matilda’s opponent Stephen of Blois made his ‘concubine’s’ son Gervais abbot of Westminster Abbey, where he represented his father’s interests so faithfully that despite the amicable succession of 1153, Stephen’s successor Henry ii had him removed soon after Stephen’s death. Gervais’s gravestone in the cloister of the abbey proclaimed the prelate’s descent as if the impedimenta were something that could be provocatively ignored.66 Morgan, one of Henry ii’s many sons (the king’s relationship with the mother, the wife of a knight, must have been fleeting), became provost of Beverley and bishop-elect of Durham, but at that point encountered difficulties with Rome. Something similar happened to his half-brother Geoffrey, whose mother Hikenai/Ykenai, probably from a knightly family but not clearly identifiable, gained access to the English royal court with the threeyear-old immediately after Henry’s accession to the throne; she may already have obtained a foothold in the circle of the count of Anjou and pretender to the Anglo-Norman throne beforehand. For many years, Geoffrey then occupied the bishopric of Lincoln without being able to obtain final consecration, yet even without that, as chancellor of England and a successful army commander—against his rebellious legitimate half-brothers, among ­others—he 64

65 66

William of Malmesbury, Historia novella c. 5: “Notabile fuit ut fertur certamen inter Rotbertum et Stephanum, dum emula laude virtutum inter se contenderent quis eorum prior iuraret, illo priuilegium filii, isto dignitatem nepotis spectante.” William later claims in a panegyrical context that Robert took the oath first; John of Worcester claims the opposite (Chronicle of John of Worcester [1998], vol. 3, 178f.), but suggests that the issue was settled amicably in order of age. On Robert’s career, see Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 74–93. Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 96: “De regum genere pater hic Gervasius …”

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was a mainstay of his father, to whom he remained faithful to his deathbed at Chinon in 1189.67 All in all, then, the ‘bastards’ were very well integrated into the system of government of their fathers and brothers. In the light of the material gathered by Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis, it seems that they were readily entrusted with ‘neuralgic points’ of Norman-Angevin rule: the southeastern border of Normandy on the one hand and the ‘Celtic’ marches on the other.68 Henry i twice gave away illegitimate daughters across the border, to the Breton duke Conan iii and the Scottish king Alexander i (c.1110). The contrast with Henry’s rebellious sons from his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine is striking— it looks as though a Norman or Angevin king had to counterbalance the threat to his authority posed by his legitimate sons with the help of his “less worthily begotten” children.69 In this sense, William of Malmesbury, remarking that Henry i always had the kingship in mind when deciding in which womb his seed would be fruitful, captures the system accurately.70 Considering that the children had such prominence, the absence of the women from the written narratives is all the more astonishing. Around 1140 Robert of Torigny, monk (and later abbot) of Mont-Saint-Michel, fascinated by genealogies of all kinds and an enthusiastic interpolator of the Gesta Normannorum ducum—originally by William of Jumièges and already supplemented by Ordericus Vitalis—compiled a detailed catalogue of Henry i’s “less worthily begotten” descendants, but does not name a single one of their mothers. And yet, the annalist’s terse references and the Pipe Rolls’ scattered information71 suggests that the Norman-Angevin rulers did indeed find their women with 67

68 69 70

71

Richard the Lionheart fulfilled his father’s wish and arranged Geoffrey’s election as archbishop of York. Cf. Douie, Archbishop Geoffrey Plantagenet (1960); Lovatt, Geoffrey Plantagenet (1975); Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 103–25; Turner and Heiser, Richard Lionheart (2000), 77ff. Turner and Heiser, Richard Lionheart (2000), 70ff. gnd viii, 28: “de ceteris liberis Henrici regis, licet minus idoneo modo procreatis …” With a variation a few lines later: “licet minus honesto, ut prediximus, modo progenitos.” The children’s loyalty went so far that it could have disastrous consequences in an extreme situation. In the catastrophic shipwreck of 25 November 1120, the legitimate heir to the throne was already sitting in the rescue boat when his illegitimate sister Matilda, fighting for her life, shouted for him to turn back. Overladen, the boat capsized shortly after, and all the occupants drowned—leaving Henry i without a legitimate male heir.— The policy failed just once, when Henry i’s daughter Juliana and her husband Eustace de Pacy—who was, in turn, an illegitimate son of the Norman magnate William of Bréteuil— rebelled against her father in 1119 due to disagreements over Eustace’s paternal inheritance, which resulted in some of the most burlesque and some of the most brutal scenes of Norman historiography. Cf. Ordericus Vitalis, he xi 4ff. See White, Appendix D (1949), 105–21.

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the diligence commended by William of Malmesbury; Kathleen Thompson speaks of “affairs of state” and proves her point. Since both her article and Alice Curteis’ and Chris Given-Wilson’s book contain extensive discussions of them,72 I will keep their presentation to a minimum. Henry i’s long-standing ‘concubine’ Sibylle Corbet was the daughter of a Norman knight with land on the Welsh border in Warwickshire and Shropshire. Nothing is known about the origin of Ansfride, with whom the king also had a relationship for many years. But the background of her (already deceased) husband, her documented property, and her burial place in Abingdon Abbey point to the local aristocratic milieu in the upper Thames Valley. Another of Henry’s women, Edith, was the daughter of the magnate Forn Sigulfsson, based in Cumbria but also landed in Yorkshire, and a potential pillar of Norman rule on the rim of the Irish Sea. Isabelle de Meulan, with whom the king had a daughter of the same name around 1130, had Robert of Beaumont, the first earl of Leicester and “one of the most powerful Norman barons,”73 as her father; her grandfathers were Roger de Beaumont, probably the most important of William the Conqueror’s confidants, and Hugo the Great, count of Vermandois. Doubtless, the king’s relationship with the virgin daughter and sister of such a house was arranged with considerable care, and it is to be assumed that none of the participants would have viewed it as a minus honestus modus (as Robert de Torigny had it) of relationship. In the political practice of the Anglo-Norman empire, not only the king’s children but also his women, along with their fathers and brothers, had an importance as yet largely unimpaired by monogamist ideas. After all, throughout almost the entirety of his 35-year reign Henry i was ‘married,’ that is to say, had more or less isogynous relationships with princely women (Edith/Matilda of Scotland 1100–18, Adeliza of Louvain from 1121). A number of his children, including Robert, the future earl of Gloucester, who is probably the most prominent (his early epithet, ‘de Caen’ indicates his mother came from a Norman, perhaps urban milieu),74 were conceived in the period prior to his seizure of power in 1100, prior to which the youngest son of William the Conqueror, without hereditary lands and provided only with movable goods, appeared destined to a subordination such as his own sons would later experience. However, although we do not have precise details for any of these cases, Henry clearly did not become monogamous during his union with the Scottish 72 73 74

Thompson, “Affairs of State” (2003); Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984). R[obert]-H[enri] Bautier, “Beaumont-le-Roger,” in LdM, vol. 1, col. 1759. Cf. Crouch, Beaumont Twins (1986), the political biography of Isabelle’s brothers Waleran and Robert. For Caen’s early urban boom in the 11th century, see Jean-Marie [sic], Caen (2000).

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princess (which he entered into only two months after his accession in England, and in a sense constituted part of it), and the knights and counts who consented to their ‘Solomonic’ king’s relationships with their daughters, sisters, and wives did not object in principle: whatever the power relations may have been in each individual case, we can rule out the application of brute force in cases such as Isabelle de Meulan. Yet it is quite conceivable that establishing a relationship with the daughter or sister of an aristocrat was understood as part of the king’s ‘friendship’ with them, investing them with a certain special authority in important regions—with all the advantages and disadvantages this entailed75—or of the reestablishment of lost ‘friendship.’ Isabelle de Meulan may be a case in point. Her relationship with the king began roughly at the time when her enterprising brother Waleran was released from five years of imprisonment after his prominent involvement in a Norman rebellion against Henry i, which had been quenched in the battle of Bourgthéroulde in 1124. David Crouch has surmised that Isabelle may have “offered her body for her brother’s release” or that the king may on his part have offered Waleran’s release “in return for her sexual favours.”76 Stripped of its overtones of ‘private’ desire and submission, there may be something to the surmise: for Isabelle to become Henry’s amie might have been regarded as the sign and seal of the (re) establishment of good relations between the king and the Meulans just as much as Waleran’s release and subsequent readmission to the court, where he soon became, together with his twin brother Robert, the head of a veritable ‘court party.’ We may assume that their sister played no lesser role than the Beaumont twins in bringing this change about; at any rate it would be imprudent to credit her with any less agency than her brothers in managing and maintaining the family’s fortunes. At times, there may well have been an element of overt pressure, and entering into a relationship a sign of submission. The allegations made against Henry i in 1168 by Eudo iv of Porhoët, former count of Brittany—to have impregnated Eudo’s daughter, who had been entrusted to him as a hostage—show that such demonstrations were at least conceivable. A similar story was peddled by Gerald of Wales and William the Breton, among others, about Henry ii and Alice, the daughter of the king of France, who was betrothed to H ­ enry’s son Richard at a young age and grew up at the Angevin court.77 The more 75

See, for example, Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), passim, for the accumulation of alliances and subsequent endowment of the children from such relationships with land in Devon and Cornwall, a region that had important metal deposits but was difficult to secure. 76 Crouch, Beaumont Twins (1986), 25. 77 Cf. Warren, Henry ii (1973/2000), 119f.; Gillingham, Richard Löwenherz (1981), 110f.

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c­ onsensual relationships, however, usually ended after a period of time—if they ended at all—with the woman being married off. As far as we can observe, nuances were carefully considered: Edith, the daughter of the Cumbrian magnate Forn Sigulfsson, and Sibylle Corbet, the mother of numerous children, were married to wealthy knights. Subsequent to her relationship with Henry i (though strictly speaking we do not know that), Isabelle de Meulan became the wife of Gilbert fitzGilbert de Clare, member of one of the Norman families close to the dukes and part of the power elite of the Anglo-Norman empire. Shortly after, as first earl of Pembroke Gilbert would become one of the main stakeholders in the expansion into Wales, continuing into Ireland in the next generation.78 All this ensured that the king’s children would find the necessary support for their diverse duties and were provided with a network of other supporters of the king. These supporters—or those the king hoped to turn into such— gained reliable, durable access to the king’s ear through the king’s children and, above all, his women. When King Henry i died suddenly while travelling in late 1135, five counts were with him: his son Robert of Gloucester from his time in Caen; Rotrou, count of Perche, widower of Matilda who had died in the sinking of the White Ship; William de Warenne, who had expected to marry another of Henry’s daughters a quarter of a century earlier until Anselm of Canterbury had objected on the grounds of consanguinity; finally, the twins Robert and Waleran, brothers of Isabelle de Meulan.79 At one momentous occasion, we see the sons and brothers of concubines forming the king’s inner circle. 7

In Comparison: the Generative Aspect

All of this gives the impression of a diverse and politically relevant elite polygyny in Western Europe. This should make it possible to consider the West in light of the five aspects derived from the analysis of the North. The ‘generative’ aspect was obviously present, we might even say there were more distinct variations of it than in the North, where generation appears to have happened with less planning, and success or obscurity was determined more by contingency. However, the principle that all sons had the capacity to inherit, maintained in Scandinavia until the thirteenth century, meant that every male descendant was considered to be competing against all his brothers 78 79

See Altschul, The Clares (1965). See Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 73.

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and cousins in a potentially agonistic selection of the most suitable. By the mid-eleventh century at the latest, this was no more the case in Western Europe, not even in Normandy, where the polygynous component in dynastic succession was a central part of its political self-conception (see discussion below). As we have seen, no ‘bastard’ sought a crown after 1066. This was no hard-and-fast rule or even a societal norm. Around 1100 in the Norman lordship of Bréteuil, the sole, illegitimate son of the previous lord of the castle prevailed against two legitimate but more distantly related competitors. Ordericus Vitalis commented with some satisfaction that the Normans preferred “an illegitimate compatriot to a legitimate Breton or Burgundian.”80 And even if the crowned successors of William the Conqueror committed themselves to legitimizing the royal line ‘monogamistically,’ they did not lose sight of the expediency of well-begotten children. An observer such as Ordericus Vitalis knew and explained the connection between polygyny, secularis fastus, and political tactics: “Rich in money and pleasures, [Henry i] was very fond of sensuality; from boyhood to old age, he sinfully submitted to this vice and begat many sons and daughters with concubines.”81 But precisely because ‘bastards’ were no longer worth considering even in the case of unsettled succession (as in 1135), the Anglo-Norman rulers were able to “spill their seeds” very purposefully and produce offspring who, depending on the situation, were suitable as chancellors, bishops or abbots, military commanders, or knightly companions and seneschals for their sisters, who in turn became queens in neighbouring kingdoms or wives to specially important lords. Monogamist legitimacy thus merely provided for a hierarchization within the crowd of half-brothers and half-sisters, in place of the open competition in Norway (and among Anglo-Norman magnates as well). The women and children of the Anglo-Norman kings also occupied key positions in the control and use of resources—precious metal deposits, bishoprics, retinues of warriors— and thus probably often had a substantial share in what we term, with deceptive clarity, ‘rule’ and what actually consisted of a permanent attempt by all to

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he xi, 4: “sed Normanni Eustachium de concubina filium eius susceperunt, quia compatriotam nothum quam Britonem seu Burgundionem liberum praeesse sibi maluerunt.”— For Eustace de Pacy, the favourable circumstance was royal protection, expressed above all through his marriage to Juliana, daughter of one of Henry i’s concubines. he xi, 23: “Diuitiis deliciisque affluens libidini nimis deditum fuit, et a puericia usque ad senectutem huic uitio culpabiliter subiacuit; et filios ac filias ex pelicibus plures genuit.” In what follows, Orderic outlines Henry’s strict hunting laws and other safeguards of the new king, who has just prevailed at this point in the Historia, and attests that he was superior to all the English kings in everything “quantum pertinet ad secularem fastum.”

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keep one’s position and, if possible, improve it. That kingship itself now remained outside the agon marks a significant, but not systemic, change. 8

In Comparison: the Habitual Aspect

The hyperbolic pomposity with which a chronicler like Lambert of Ardres proclaimed that, in the serial seduction of young girls, a border count from a peripheral area on the English Channel surpassed all the kings of the Old Covenant and the Olympic gods can leave us with no doubt about the habitual meaning of polygyny. Even more than the generative aspect (whose limited significance for family succession in an agnatic society distracts from its many other purposes), it is this aspect which has been particularly emphasized in previous research. A certain way with women was as much a part of habitus as feats of arms on the battlefield, or at least in the tournament, grandeur in eating and drinking, a largesce that convincingly overplayed income, a similarly convincing abandon in strength sports (hunting and riding), and a sound relationship with the Almighty and his clerical entourage (best maintained from a respectful distance up to a certain age). In the rhetorics of boastful gap, this chivalric attitude to women is merely exaggerated, not travestied. A duke on pilgrimage should perhaps not spend a week sequestered with two wanton chatelaines and overexert himself until “I nearly broke all my reins and my equipment.”82 Yet Andreas Capellanus’s advice that desire—inflamed, perhaps, at the sight of a young peasant woman—should be withstood only as long as it took to find a suitable place to satisfy it,83 however much a sarcasm against courtly fashions on the part of an intellectual schooled in Ovid, would not work as satire if it was not partly recognizable as common practice. In the lyrical form of the pastourelle, the tryst with a shepherdess—consensual or otherwise—is its own genre of Old French literature: it was good to hear of such things and one did not hesitate to cultivate the impression that one would like to join in.84 82 William ix of Aquitaine, pc 183,12, v. 81f.: “Que a pauc no·i rompei mos corretz E mos arnés.” Longman Anthology, trans. North (2011), 821. 83 Andreas Capellanus, De amore i 11: “Si vero et illarum te feminarum amor forte attraxerit …, si locum inveneris opportunum, non differas assumere quod petebas et violento potiri amplexu.” 84 The almost two hundred known poems, each around four to seven stanzas long, are collected in Rivière, ed., Pastourelles (1974–76). Perhaps the best study of the genre is Zink, La pastourelle (1972); a critical reading focused on the stylization of rape as a game is provided by Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens (1991), 104–21.

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In the History of the Counts of Guînes, polygynous ostentation reminiscent of songs, romances, and Andreas Capellanus meets with a wealth of real-life details, which both the chronicler and his ageing informant relate as having happened frequently around them. Rarely does a source make it so clear how literary representation and practice interrelate. On their travels or in the fields, the history’s heroes constantly come across puellulae who are then embraced, impregnated, and abandoned to narrative oblivion. They are only named in exceptional cases; and if they appear in the history at all, it is due to their ­offspring—suggesting that the puellulae without descendants did not even walk away with this dubious posthumous fame or the more tangible benefits of bearing the children of a count or knight. Nothing is more characteristic of this habitual attitude, which always needs the provocative contrast to hegemonic monogamism for its full impact, than the sentence in which Lambert of Ardres reports his own conception, thereby writing himself into his own history: “[Count Arnold’s] brother Baldwin, who was also my father, had an affair (rem habuit) with a virgin—one is ashamed, and yet behold! it is no shame to say it—, a girl by the name Adele, who was the daughter of his paternal uncle, that is, canonicus Ralph.”85 The Latin sentence structure suggests that the shame is caused not so much by the premarital deflowering as by incestuous proximity, but ultimately the question which of the several violations of church law and mores is worst is a moot one: for several decades, the chronicler has lived well off the fact that Count Baldwin fathered him with his virgin first cousin, and now publicly displays his “shame that is not” for the greater glory of his benefactors. This passage highlights an essential distinction between Western and Northern Europe which is important for the way the habitual aspect worked in the two regions: the West’s sustained interest, in line with Latin Christendom in general but in contrast to a marked indifference in the North, in the issues of incest and virginity. The seduction of a cousin could not in itself serve as a proof of particular bravura if the prohibited degrees of relationship attracted so little attention that in the accounts of such sexual relationships we do not even encounter stubborn opposition to, but merely ignorance of, church law on this point.86 Seducing the daughter of his own grandfather’s bastard son, 85

86

Historia comitum Ghisnensium c. 134: “Eodem tempore Balduinus, frater eius, qui et pater meus, cum virgine quadam – pudet iam, et ecce non pudet dicere – patrui sui, Radulfi scilicet canonici filia, nomine Adela, rem habuit; que concepit et peperit ei filium, ista vobis referentem …” History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, trans. Shopkow (2007), 168. By and large, the provincial laws (for example, Gulathing Law §§24ff., Frostathing Law iii §§1ff.) contain the conventional criteria for incest, and Kirsten Hastrup has described the

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whose position as canonicus depended not least on the goodwill of the seducer, was not an exploit that a Scandinavian in Count Baldwin’s position could have boasted about—precisely because its habitual value rested above all in aspects of the matter which meant nothing to Scandinavians. The difference is even more blatant with regard to virginity. In the Nordic provincial laws, even the distinction between the penalties for attacking virgins and other women, so typical of equivalent legal sources in most European regions, is absent.87 The fascination with virginity, despite all speculation about the quasi-constancy of this anthropological ‘fact,’ did not affect Northern Europe.88 This has significant consequences for relationships. For one, there was no ‘first night’ as a means of distinguishing precedence. The Roman univira ideal, manifest in medieval figures such as Enide or Kriemhild, was greeted far less enthusiastically in Northern Europe. On the contrary, the serial polyandry of a heroine figure such as Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir in Laxdœla saga does her no discredit but allows her to look back and rank her husbands (another agon) according to categories wholly detached from the sexual, without the haut goût which would undoubtedly cling to a female figure in Western European literature who had been through five relationships.89 The lack of interest in the

medieval Icelandic family structure on the basis of the information in the late 13th-­ century Grágás law collection (Hastrup, Culture and History [1985], 80ff.). However, the fact that the relations described in the kings’ sagas are often incommensurate with these provisions makes it possible, with Sjöholm, Sveriges Medeltidslagar (1988), to emphasize the strongly ‘European’ character of such provisions and not intrepret them as a self-­ description of the local societies. 87 Perhaps most telling is that this difference in the leges even refers to maids who are on the border between personal and property law: “si vero ancilla et virgo erat, cum qua quislibet homo moechatus est” (Lex Frisionum tit. 9, 3 [mgh ll 3, 635–97, 665]), then the penalty is higher, while the penalty decreases incrementally by one shilling each time she “prius fuerit constuprata”; cf. Obermeier, “Ancilla” (1996), 250ff. Even if we do not accept such casuistry as particularly true to life, it indicates that for the Frankish world, virginity is not just about preserving the marriage value of the daughters of the ingenui—which in itself already contrasts with the Scandinavia findings—but a comprehensive disposition. 88 There is as yet no comprehensive discussion of this issue. For now, see more generally the account by Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995) and Jochens, Images of Women (1996), as well as Sawyer, “Sköldmön och madonnan” (1997), particularly for the reaction to the intrusion of religiously-inspired forms of virginity (the insistence on consensus; nunneries). 89 While Laxdœla saga is undoubtedly influenced by Western European ideas of kurteis, down to the vocabulary it employs (see Sävborg, “Kärleken” [2004], 75–109), I would suggest that it is precisely in this encounter that the incompatibility of autochthonous features becomes a matter for discussion.

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“temple of a virgin’s body” (Jerome)90 and corresponding lack of incentive to desecrate it also shapes the way in which the habitual aspect of polygyny operates. A “great man for women” such as King Magnús Erlingsson (r. 1161–84) could have agreed with his contemporary Baldwin of Guînes that a Solomonic multitude of women was becoming to a prince, but the Norwegian would not have seen why these should preferably be iuvenculae. Another difference which emerges through the comparison of the regions: King Magnús and Count Baldwin may have been in agreement; whether the Norman-Angevin princes would have shared this view, however, is questionable. None of them would behave as their Anglo-Saxon predecessor Eadwig had in 955, according to William of Malmesbury, when “on the day of his consecration in the midst of a council meeting attended by many nobles, at which the vital and serious concerns of the kingdom were discussed, he suddenly, as if completely relaxed, sank onto a couch into the embrace of his playmate.”91 Even the harshest critics among the chroniclers could not have charged a Norman or Angevin king of England with such a thing, because such ostentation was alien to even those among them who, like William of Newburgh’s Henry i, readily invited comparison with the “brashness of Solomon.” The idea that the king more or less publicly having sex might aim at an effect not all that different to that of the preceding consecration (sacratus fuerat)—a ‘performative’ effect, perhaps—was not a current one in William of Malmesbury’s time. Twelfth-century rulers of the West as stylized by the chroniclers are in a sense implicitly polygynous: their women’s more notable children become visible, but not the women themselves. This applies to the Anglo-Norman rulers as much as to the extremely monogamist Capetians, whose two famous polygynous affairs, Philip i’s ‘abduction’ of the Bertrade de Montfort in 1092 and Philip ii’s liaison with Agnes of Meran instead of the sequestered Ingeborg of Denmark in 1196, were certainly not conducive to the stylization of their rule. It also holds true for the great principalities92 such as Flanders, Hainaut, and 90

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Jerome, Ep. 23 (pl 22, col. 410): “Neque enim vas aureum et argenteum tam carum Deo fuit quam templum corporis virginalis.” Later in the same letter, the ‘Assyrians’ plunder the poorly-guarded ‘temple treasure,’ and King Belshazzar drinks from the stolen ‘vessels’ “inter concubinarum greges” (cf. Dn 5:2). gra ii 147: “Ipso quippe die quo in regem sacratus fuerat, frequentissimo consessu procerum, dum de rebus seriis et regno necessariis inter eos ageretur, e medio quasi ludibundus prorupuit, in triclinium et complexum ganeae deuolutus.” Abbot Dunstan of Glastonbury, the later archbishop, pulls the “lasciuentem iuuenculum” out of bed, has the pellex expelled, and thereby incurs the enduring enmity of the new king. Cf. Barthélemy, L’ordre seigneurial (1990), 200, on the value of the concept of “principautés féodales.”

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Anjou, where rulers’ women are just as absent as in the histories of the AngloNorman kings, or only emerge indirectly through their children or in episodes such as the pronounced monogyny of Baldwin vi of Hainaut, quod in aliquo homine raro invenitur (“such as it is hardly ever found in a man”). Polygyny as the “domestic evil of the kings,” as William of Malmesbury puts it, is known and presupposed, but preferably left unmentioned. 9

In Comparison: the Agonistic Aspect

Western European aristocrats did not need the Old Testament to get the notion that rivalry between men could be played out through access to women. In medieval history, there are few more impressive (or more widely discussed) examples of political rivalry for women than King Philip i’s seizure of Bertrade de Montfort, wife of the Angevin Count Fulk iv (1092), and Eleanor of Aqui­ taine’s switch from Louis vii to Henry ii (1152). Both cases also clearly indicate that the women themselves were anything but the passive objects of male rivalry. These affairs—cases of ‘marriage’ insofar as they took place at the very highest levels of society and involved ostentatious ceremony—fitted well into a polygynous mode of perception. Ordericus Vitalis’ presentation of the concupita puella Bertrade de Montfort, whom the count (consul) of Anjou joyfully receives after long negotiations, sounds like one of the counts of Guînes’s young girls; anyway Fulk “married his third wife while two of his wives were still alive.”93 (Bertrade was at least Fulk’s fourth, perhaps fifth ‘wife’; the first was dead, the others divorced. As with the Oddaverjar, we wonder what it was that earned precisely these five women the name of uxor, and in whose view.) After a while, Bertrade begins to have misgivings that the same future might lie in store for her as for her predecessors, and she would be treated “by everyone as a cheap harlot” (cunctis ceu uile scortum). “Aware of her beauty and good origin” (conscia nobilitatis et pulchritudinis suae), she makes contact with Philip i—whose complicity lands him Orderic’s damning predicate mollis princeps (“weak” or “soft ruler”), even though his willingness to risk conflict with Anjou would perhaps suggest the opposite to us—and goes through with switching

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he viii 10: “Deinde Andegavensis consul concupitam puellam gaudens suscepit, et uiuentibus adhuc duabus uxoribus terciam desponsauit.” On Philip and Bertrade see Duby, Ritter, Frau und Priester (1985), 7–28, though his interpretation differs from that suggested here.

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husbands: “So the fugitive mistress left the adulterous count and remained with the equally adulterous king until his death.”94 It is curious how the condemnation of Bertrade by the severe and subtle Benedictine nonetheless intermingles recognition of her univiral fidelity to the king, whose conduct, incidentally, appears reprehensible to Orderic above all because his existing queen Bertha, ousted from her leading position by Bertrade, had borne him an heir for the throne and a daughter, and therefore deserved due respect. The image of Bertrade remains curiously ambiguous throughout what follows. On the one hand, the crudelis adultera repeatedly attempts to poison Louis, the heir to the throne; on the other, with womanly ingenium she contrives the reconciliation of her two men, to the point where King Philip and Count Fulk eat at the same table and sleep in the same chamber, while “she attended them, as seemed appropriate.”95 It is almost as if the Anglo-Norman rigorist did not want his recognition of a woman who takes the initiative like a virago when the men prove to be molles to be completely drowned out by mandatory condemnation. It is clear enough as it is how astutely Bertrade manoeuvred in order to stay on top and outdo her competitresses. Bertrade’s possible fate as yet another of the discarded uxores of Count Fulk of Anjou is echoed by the Old French chansons de femme—songs with a female ‘voice’—about the precarious position of those young women whom Orderic (and modern research) would call “concubines” and who in Old French are called soignants. The nominalized present participle of the verb soignier “care for; nurse” (< Frankish *sunnjōn) belongs to the sphere of domestic service in the first instance; it is one of the rare lexical echoes of the everyday coincidence of sexual and other duties which the chronicles and romances almost never mention.96 Within the framework of courtly monogamism, the word is used as the equivalent of concubina as opposed to uxor/mouillier; S­ olomon’s

94 95 96

he x, 20: “Sic peculans pelex adulterum comitem reliquit, adulteroque regi usque ad mortem eius adhesit.” he xi, 9; viii, 20: “prout placuit illis ministraret.” In fact, the settlement of the dispute was finally staged in Angers in 1106. Jean Renart’s verse novel L’escoufle (Picardy, around 1210) offers a rare portrayal of an evening in front of the hearth, where the count is resting his head in the lap of a “completely ungirdled” (thus clad only in undergarments) bele pucele, waiting for his baked apples. The girl is the heroine of the romance, while the count is the benefactor of the couple, who will soon be miraculously reunited; in terms of textual strategy, there is no pejorative intent underlying the description of the count’s favourite deduit. Cf. Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 182–86.

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seven hundred uxores quasi reginae and three hundred concubinae appear in the French Bible as femmes cume reines and suinnantes respectively.97 In a French chanson de toile (‘cloth song,’ sung by a female voice in a setting of domestic labour), such a fate is painted out in scenic detail. “Sabine,” the count says to his wife’s chambermaid, “your beautiful body gives me an appetite, and I want your love!” The pretty girl has reservations about “spending my youth in concubinage” (soignentage). The count assures her of a ­lasting relationship and is finally permitted to “take from her the sweet name of the maiden” (li a tolu le douz non de pucele)—concupitam puellam gaudens suscepit, as Orderic Vitalis says of Fulk and Bertrade. In the end, he keeps her with him for a long time, until the now-grown sons of the count’s abandoned wife—­thinking of their position and inheritance—broker a reunion. It is Sabine who loses out from this, and she is “driven out of his lands with shame and disgrace”98—ceu uile scortum, as Orderic’s Bertrade feared. If the future prospects of the uxores of a count of Anjou were not essentially different from those of the soignant of the song—what about the children? In the song, the male heirs ensure their parents’ reconciliation at the expense of their father’s mistress, but in political practice the contest could turn out differently, as Bertha of Holland, the wife of Philip i, found out at her expense when she lost out to Bertrade de Montfort despite her two royal children. Bertha’s son Louis (vi) was raised to rex designatus in 1098 and for many years ruled in cooperation with his father—the very man who had repudiated his mother. Even a son legitimized in this manner did not ensure a mother’s security. All this can only have intensified the agon among the women further. In other cases, where the heirs had more solidarity with their mother, precisely this could escalate the conflict and have serious consequences for the uxor, as Eleanor of Aquitaine discovered at her cost when she supported the rebellion of her sons Henry and Richard against King Henry ii in 1173. Detained 97

98

The Latin gloss is focaria < focus “hearth” (cf. Greimas, Dictionnaire [21986]; Godefroy, Dictionnaire [1881–1902], s.v. soignant). Norse legal language has similar words, for example arinelja (“hearth co-wife” in the law books) and fylgikona “companion woman.” All of them are reminiscent of the verbs used by the Vulgate for David and Abishag: “foveat dormiebatque.” Au novel tans pascour que florist l’aube espine, in Zink, ed., Belle (1978), no. 13: “Sabine, dit li cuens, vos gens cors m’atalente” (v. 15); “Qu’en soignentage soit usee ma jovente” (v. 19); v. 30; “Et Sabine a touz jours de la terre honie” (v. 124). This chanson de toile is attributed to the trouvère Audefroi le Bâtard (Arras, early 13th century), an example of that ‘popularizing’ genre of courtly poetry, whose metrical text, mimicking a folk song, was put into the mouth of a girl sitting in her chamber. In this song, Sabine is the chambermaid (sa pucele) of the count’s wife; the wife protests against the concubinage, and is sent away as a result. Her sons grow up to be knights and succeed in reinstating their mother.

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and held prisoner, she had to look on as the king stopped being discreet with one of his mistresses and—demonstratively—brought her into the public sphere.99 Walter de Clifford, an upwardly mobile castellan in the Welsh march, who had acquired his fief around 1150 during the last stages of the ‘Civil War,’ must have been delighted at his daughter Rosamund’s ascent in the two years following the royal couple’s split. ‘Fair Rosamund’ has become a favourite of English historical romance ever since the first embellishments of her story in the fourteenth century. This is at the expense of the historically tangible figure. To emotionalize Eleanor’s reaction as ‘jealousy’ is to misunderstand the political explosiveness of the conflict— which in no way means that the ousted queen or her followers could not actually have engineered Rosamund’s early death, as the legend would have it. Stripped of its legendary embellishments, the story exhibits certain parallels with that of Philip i eighty years previously. Bertrade’s origin in the milieu of French castellans, in contrast to the princess Bertha, who had ensured legitimate offspring, resembles Rosamund’s position vis-à-vis Eleanor. There are ­differences too: Henry ii’s open relationship with Rosamund remained an episode and never came to be, as Philip i’s had, a political issue that would divide the kingdom’s magnates and bishops for a decade;100 Eleanor was still queen— and when her sons Richard (r. 1189–99) and John (r. 1199–1216) finally ­succeeded 99

Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), De principis institutione, cited after T[homas] A[ndrew] A[rcher], “Rosamond Clifford,” in: Dictionary of National Biography (1937/38), vol. 4, 531–33: “[Rex] qui adulter antea fuerat occultus effectus postea manifestus non mundi quidem rosa iuxta falsam et frivolitatissimam compositionem sed inmundi verius rosa vocata palam et impudenter abutendo.” Gerald specifies the period of this open connection: “biennali vero clade sedata.” Archer has traced the later development of the details about the labyrinthine pleasure-house at Woodstock where Eleanor finally tracked down and killed her rival. It should not, however, therefore be dismissed as entirely legendary: several complementary chronicle and documentary accounts concerning Rosamund’s burial place in Godstow Nunnery (ten kilometres south of Woodstock, near Oxford) make it appear at least plausible that Henry’s favourite may have lived at what was one of the preferred royal residences in the 12th century, however elaborate its architecture may have been at the time. 100 The case was the subject of much controversy, judging by the chroniclers’ varied comments: William of Newburgh (Historia rerum Anglicarum iii, 26) defends Henry somewhat by specifying that the king had “made ample use of the queen in bed in her time,” and only when she was no longer fertile did he yield to desire and father bastards (“regina pro tempore sufficienter usus ad sobolem, ea desinente parere, sectando voluptatem spurios fecit”). Ralph Niger, who paints Henry in the blackest terms, does not fail to mention— topically and, at least some respects, accurately—that the debauched king, emulating his grandfather Henry i, vented his illicit desires first on the wives and then the daughters of the noblility; for the sake of whoring without inhibition, he had the queen shut in the dungeon (“corruptor pudicitiae et avum sequens in flagitiis, primo in sponsas, post in

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their father, Eleanor, aged almost seventy, remained the respected queen mother until her death in 1204. Crucially, Henry and Rosamund’s relationship did not produce a son who, like Bertrade’s son Philip, could have become a serious competitor for the designatus (at the time, Henry the “young king,” Henry ii’s and Eleanor’s eldest son, who died in 1183). But these differences should not distract from the essential similarity of both cases, and the course of events might have demonstrated yet more similarities in different circumstances—if, say, Rosamund had lived longer. In any case, any legal distinction between Bertrade the uxor and Rosamund the amica was not among the decisive factors. Only a few such agonistic constellations between men (King Philip i vs. Fulk of Anjou, the Capetian Louis vii vs. the Plantagenet Henry ii) or women (Bertha vs. Bertrade, Eleanor vs. Rosamund) have left any trace. They mark the escalation of tensions into open conflict. By contrast, no source tells us whether a similarly agonistic situation existed between some (or all) of Henry i’s at least twelve women or whether competition brought tangible consequences for the women, their relatives, or their children. (Strictly speaking, we do not even know whether and how many of Henry’s women competed at any given time, though simultaneous relationships are likely, given what we know about their children’s lives.) References to the women are so scanty that it is not even apparent whether the women regularly accompanied the king as he travelled his kingdom from the Maine to the Tweed, or lived ‘uxorilocally’ in their respective countries to receive the king as occasions arose. What held true for the knight’s daughter from the Welsh march was not necessarily true for the French magnate’s daughter. In light of the scantiness of the information and the consistent refusal to narrativize rulers’ women, the comparative view might shed some light. Given broadly analogous real-life circumstances, the findings from the North concerning occasional, though not regular, fierce competition between women may, as a hypothesis, be transferred to the West. Overly fierce competition for the ‘resource,’ the king, as a source of material support and habitual future security would be less necessary and perhaps even counterproductive, as the Norman and Angevin rulers were among the most successful accumulators of material and immaterial capital known to twelfth-century Europe; the cake was, so to speak, big enough for all, as long as the top position was not at stake. Even at the level of the counts of Guînes and castellans of Ardres, at least a number of puellulae and their offspring were permanently provided for.

f­ilias procerum illecebras exercens … Reginam, ut liberius stupris vacaret …, in domo carceris inclusit”).

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Here, too, much hinges on the concrete details of the polygynous environment. If everything took place within the confines of the castle of Ardres or the palaces of the Anglo-Norman kings, conflicts over rank of the kind described by Snorri Sturluson between the king’s widow Ástríð and the queen’s mother Álfhild could hardly be avoided; if, however, the women were dispersed geographically (or at least over several households), the latent competition is likely to lose much of its sting. However, the underlying agon is always present implicitly, affecting not only the women themselves but, where appropriate, the groups behind them. The Beaumont twins Robert and Waleran must have closely monitored whether their sister Isabelle held a fitting position in the king’s favour or was being challenged by other amicae, perhaps of competing origin. And the king, for his part, may not have forgotten the important role of the Beaumonts in securing Normandy when he “purposefully spread the royal seed” elsewhere.101 The strikingly wide geographical distribution of the origin of Henry i’s women (in contrast to their subsequent endowment which, as stated, was focused on strategically important zones) may indicate that the king was anxious to minimize such conflicts. 10

In Comparison: the Expressive Aspect

If the agonistic aspect of Western European elite polygyny can, more often than not, only be indirectly inferred, this is even more the case for the ‘expressive’ aspect. The chronicles are as silent about public opinion on individual relationships as the sagas are forthcoming. In Lambert of Ardres’ chronicle, concubines of the Artesian aristocrats abound, yet the way they are discussed leaves us completely in the dark as to what—besides the charm of “spotting a particularly beautiful girl’s body” (invenit sibi prestantissime forme puellam)— actually prompted the relationships. After deflowering his first cousin and fathering the chronicler, Count Baldwin slept “with another young girl of outstanding, truly exceptional forms and high nobility” (cum quadam alia eminentis, immo supereminentis forme, generose nobilitatis iuvencula), his brother Arnold “had an affair with a girl from Herchem called Helewide” (cum puella quadam de Herchem nata nomine Helewide rem habuit) and, shortly after, “with a certain girl from Ardres” (cum quadam puella in Ardee rem habuit). A puella pulcherrima here, an eminentissimae pulchritudinis puella there, but we never

101 gra v, 412: “… ubi regium semen procedere posset in effectum.”; see the discussion above.

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get to know them. It is easy to see why Georges Duby and others who deal with northern French noble houses dismiss them summarily as “playmates.” Did those lords have occasion to send ‘expressive’ signals with specific puellae? It might be possible to localize relationships, plot them on a map of land holdings or donation charters, and so make assumptions about whether sleeping with a girl from a particular village could be interpreted as, for instance, an act of territorial aggression or revendication. Material inducements, hopes of social advancement on the part of the girls or their parents, the count’s competition with his brother about resembling Jupiter, or simply opportune circumstances may all have led to the formation of spontaneous relationships. The comparative perspective does not answer these questions, but it does make it possible to ask them in the first place. Returning to some of Henry i’s relationships, however, we may be more sanguine about assuming that all the king’s relationships that are known to us in the first place held social significance, for we are dealing with a minimal catalogue, already reduced twice over: for one, the women are known to us only in connection with their children, and not every royal ‘sowing’ bore fruit. Occasionally we have chance supplementary details, such as an entry in the royal accounts for 1184 for the delivery of garments to a woman called Bellebelle— presumably a telling sobriquet—and the payment of £30 to another amica regis.102 Such details are not available for Henry i, from whose reign only one pipe roll survives, but they illustrate how fragmentary the narrative sources are. On the other hand, even women with children may be unknown: these are ‘dark numbers,’ and we can barely even begin to guess the size of the figure.103 In some cases, it may have already been quite clear in advance which relationships would prove “officially” usable; the mutual benefit of Henry’s liaison with Isabelle de Meulan from the French-Norman border region is obvious. Similarly, Henry’s relationship with Edith, daughter of Forn Sigulfsson of Cumbria, meant—or signified—the alliance of the rex Normanglorum with a local chieftain in the Norse-Celtic world of the Irish Sea. This was in itself already a valuable asset, such as the English kings on the other side of the Pennines would not previously have been able to establish on their own. The relationship then acquired special significance in light of competing claims from Scotland. Alexander i, who had married another of Henry i’s illegitimate daughters, died in 1124. His brother David i—who had grown up at the court of Henry 102 Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 99f.; 127. 103 See Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 63, the table summarizing Henry i’s 24 known “bastards,” some nameless, and their mothers (where known), as well as the inventory in Appendix D (cf. note 16).

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i and was well acquainted with his political style—had previously ruled in southern Scotland under Alexander. After Henry i’s time, he successfully engaged in southward Scottish expansion, securing the earldom of Northumbria from King Stephen. Under Plantagenet pressure, David’s grandson William ‘the Lion,’ later king of Scots, to whom David transferred the earldom of Northumbria in 1152, married one of Henry i’s great-granddaughters through his Norman ‘concubine’ Isabelle de Meulan. We know of six children which William had outside this relationship. As far as we can tell, the mothers were all the daughters of the local Northumbrian aristocracy. In view of the fact that Henry ii deprived William ‘the Lion’ of the earldom in 1157 when he was around seventeen, it is reasonable to assume that his polygynous activities south of the border were to be understood as an assertion of his continued claims.104 Competition between the English and Scottish kings for Northumbria and Cumbria/Strathclyde, acted out through polygyny among other means, allowed local leaders and their women some temporary room for manoeuvre—and miscalculation: “noblewomen and chaste virgins were abducted together with the other women and prey. Naked and tied together with ropes and straps, they were driven forward with lance and spears.”105 Things were similarly warlike, and ‘expressive,’ on the Welsh march. With the death of Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr in 1093, Anglo-Norman ‘marcher lords’ began ruling de facto in Deheubarth/Suthwallia (south-west Wales). Several of Rhys’ sons from different relationships were killed or fled to Ireland. His daughter Nest, who on her mother’s side was related to the royal family of Powys in northeast Wales, was married off by Henry i to his follower Gerald fitzWalter of Windsor, who was also entrusted with Pembroke on the southwestern tip of Wales. Either before or during their marriage (the chronology is far from clear) the king fathered a son with Nest. He received his father’s name—as far as we know, the only one of his mistresses’ sons to do so, although others bore the

104 See Owen, William the Lion (1997), 67; 82. On Northumbria as an independent historical region, cf. Musgrove, The North of England (1990); Rollason, Northumbria (2003). 105 Richard of Hexham, De gestis regis Stephani, 156 (of a Scottish invasion in 1138): “solas nobiles matronas et castas virgines, mixtim cum aliis feinis et cum praeda, pariter abduxerunt. Nudatas quoque et turmatim resticulis et corrigiis colligatas et copulatas lanceis et telis suis compungentes ante se illas abegerunt.” When the Picts tired of abusing the women “more brutorum animalium,” they either made the prisoners their ancillae or swapped them for cattle with other “barbarians.” Richard’s account is complemented by contemporary observers, which suggest the Scots always acted thus in war, albeit even more than usual in this instance.

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family names of Robert, William, and Matilda—and was apparently initially considered perfectly capable of succeeding. Nest became a pressing political issue in 1106, when the local ruler in West Wales, Owain ap Cadwgan, attacked Gerald’s castle of Cenarth Bychan, torched several buildings, forced the lord to make an embarrassing escape, and seized Nest with her children.106 We have no means of knowing whether the attack was intended and/or construed as a direct attack against Henry i not only as king, but also as Nest’s man (and therefore one of the losers in the agon with the victorious attacker Owain). In any case, Henry arranged Gerald’s retaliatory campaign to Ceredigion—a region of non-Norman Wales characterized by “strong regional self-awareness”107—which would prove fatal for Owain and earned Nest the epithet “the Welsh Helena.” As in other cases we have seen, the context, brought to a head by the 1109 attack, is of considerable political relevance; moreover, Henry, Nest’s son with the king, would in later years be actively engaged in the Norman-Angevin Welsh campaigns (he died during the conquest of Ynys Môn/Anglesey in 1158), and his two sons were among the most important leaders of the 1169/71 invasion of Ireland, and holders of seized land afterwards. However, the only reason we know about the relationship at all (besides a brief note in the Annales Cambriae, where Henry is inaccurately described as the son of Henry ii), is due to the works of Gerald of Wales, who mentions it because his mother was one of the daughters of Nest and her husband Richard. Through her Gerald establishes his descent from Welsh princely houses, an argument to back his candidacy for the bishopric of Menevia/St Davids.108 Had Nest’s grandson not by chance been a prolific author and ambitious churchman, we might know as little about her as the kings’ presumably many other women. 11

In Comparison: the Performative Aspect

The sources leave us very much in the dark about the final aspect, the elusive ‘performative aspect’ in which the generation of meaning is not subsequent to the act (seizing Nest only becomes ‘expressively’ effective when the public and King Henry i learn of it), but is inherent in the act itself (in one version of the 106 Brut y Tywysogion [“Chronicle of the Princes”], s.a. 1106. Various details are offered by the different versions of the chronicle; this is the common core in them all. 107 J. B[everly] Smith, “Ceredigion,” in LdM, vol. 2, col. 1630. 108 Giraldus Cambrensis, De rebus a se gestis c. 1, 9, and passim; cf. Kightly, Medieval Wales (1988), 7f.

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Welsh princely chronicle, Owain rapes Nest immediately on taking the castle).109 Certainly the approximation and equation of ‘woman’ and ‘land,’ as suggested by agrarian experiences and physiological-lexical ideas, was common in Western Europe. At the beginning of the Norman chronicle tradition around 1020, Dudo of Saint-Quentin describes both conquered Normandy and Gisla, daughter of King Charles the Simple—given to the conquering chieftain Rollo as part of the settlement that established the Normans at the mouth of the Seine—in mirror-image expressions as “desolate and untilled” (penitus desolata… aratro non exercita) but fruitful when cultivated by men (si fuerit frequentia hominum usitata, valde erit fertilis et uberrima). A century and a half later, the Plantagenet version of the story by Benoît still exploits the grammatical gender of terre and fille. Benoît has Norman magnates exhort Rollo on the subject of “Pren la!” for a good hundred verses, with passages such as: “Let us also think of populating the earth—and living off the fruits that she will produce for us.”110 While this is partly an echo of the Promised Land and the Aeneid, it is also a particular way of ‘feminizing’ the Norman settlement, a subject to which we will return. We never learn how all this was acted out on an everyday level. Still, we may ask whether the balanced geographical origin of Henry i’s women— a Norman from the old heartland, the daughter of a French magnate, some Anglo-Norman and Saxon women from England, a Welsh woman, a Cumbrian of Scandinavian descent, and so on—which Kathleen Thompson with good reasons refuses to view as a conscious gesture of ‘ethnic’ integration111—might have some such ‘performative’ resonance. With a view to aristocratic narratives about the Otherland of ‘Logres’ such as the Elucidation with its story of the abused maidens of the well we may feel entitled to ask the question; comparison with the polygyny of a Jarl Hákon may allow us to cautiously answer in the affirmative. It is ultimately a question of method. Even if one is not prepared to hypothetize about ‘performance,’ the more tangible aspects discussed here still suggest that—with some significant differences, particularly in relation to inheritance rights—the aristocracies of Western and Northern Europe shared fundamentally similar polygynous practices, which appear more dissimilar than they might because of differences in the rhetorics of the narrative 109 Brut y Tywysogion, Peniarth Ms. 20, s.a. 1106. 110 Dudo of Saint-Quentin ii, 26; Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique, v. 8580ff.: “Penson de la terre popler; Sin vivum des fruiz des or més Dunt ele nos rendra adés.” I discuss the Norman chronicles in more detail below. 111 Cf. Thompson, “Affairs of State” (2003); the notion is clearly based on both the postmodern and reawakened premodern interest in ethnicity.

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s­ ources, i­ ncluding their language, and the uneven distribution of documentary sources. In the West, magnate polygyny essentially eludes narrativization (as opposed to ‘flashlight’ mentions). This phenomenon, shared by Benedictine chroniclers and courtly poets alike, is part of the characteristic monogamism of the high medieval West—that region in which the ‘secular’ and the ‘ecclesiastical’ models of marriage were developing in the later eleventh century and onwards. For all the nuances in form and foundation, the two models had one crucial thing in common: they both aimed at monogamy, either according and subject to reinvigorated church law and pastoral of mores (the “ecclesiastical model”), or in the sense of a privileged form of relationship which granted one specific woman and her future children an immediate and durable precedence which was no longer up for negotiation (the “secular model” with its differentiation of legitimate and illegitimate children). Before moving on to a final assessment, however, we must look at the one major exception: Normandy before 1066. 12

Polygyny as Political Principle: Normandy

The peculiar self-representation of Norman polygyny is one of the many sides of ‘Normandy before 1066.’ In an understandable reaction against the perpetuation of the ‘Norman Myth’ cultivated especially in imperial Britain, scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century tended, sometimes explicitly so, to downplay the discontinuities of the Norman settlement and emphasized the continuation of Carolingian structures and rapid assimilation of the Nordic newcomers into existing West Frankish society.112 As a consequence, the older inclination to explain Norman peculiarities—above all the expansionary force demonstrated in England and Sicily, probably unparalleled in the history of the European Middle Ages—in ethnic terms, highlighting some intangible Scandinavian-Viking quality of the Northmanni, may now have been set aside for good. On the other hand, the decision to consider the Norman history of the tenth and eleventh centuries “entirely in its French context”113 and to emphasize the continuity of Carolingian structures even during the invasions, now shrunk to a mere ‘event,’ may carry the risk of treating the statements of the written testimonies—necessarily Latin/Carolingian—too much at face

112 For a clear statement of this view, see Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982), and more recently, Lifshitz, “La Normandie carolingienne” (1998). 113 Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982), xviii. However, he also warns against the trend, current at that time, of minimizing the Scandinavian influence in the tenth century (16).

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value. The debate over the ‘mutation féodale,’ likewise centred on the decades around 1000 if mostly on other parts of West Frankland, has in any case shown that documentary stability can be evidence for a desperate conservatism faced with rapid change.114 In Norman history, ‘continuity’ no longer seems a safe bet. It remains striking that around 900 the ecclesiastical structure suffered a long-term collapse in large parts of what would be Normandy,115 and the reestablishment of bishoprics and the refoundation of monasteries only got under way around 1000. David Bates’s formula of “heavy institutional continuity combined with a drastic rupture in the personnel of the ruling classes”116 has been convincingly questioned by Eleanor Searle, who in her 1988 monograph analyzed the particular political culture of Normandy with the avowed intention of producing an ‘alteritizing’ account. Among many other points, Searle reevaluates Dudo’s portrayal of a “deserted, unploughed, depopulated country,” much quoted by those who accuse the chronicler of ignorance of the vigour of Carolingian Neustria at the beginning of Norman settlement. In Searle’s view, the Norse warbands arriving in the latter half of the tenth century coalesced with the earlier, dispersed and rather weak Seine Norse to form a coherent group which accentuated their ‘difference’ from surrounding Francia rather than the merging and acculturating that went on in the Loire and Rhine-Scheldt zones of Norse settlement. This precarious coherence was secured through ‘predatory kinship’ (the title catchword of Searle’s book) and the cultivation of a notional together- and otherness which is reflected in Dudo’s work: in a sense, the Normans would only ever reach ‘empty land.’117 Klaus van Eickels has provided a balanced description of the autonomous Norman political culture, illustrating how concepts of masculinity not only became effective in political 114 Cf. White, “Feudal Revolution” (1996). Lifshitz, Norman Conquest (1995), draws attention to signs of a profound ‘religious-psychological’ crisis reflected in hagiographical texts: while the demons in texts from before the invasion are almost exclusively associated with temptation or disease, in later texts they are disturbingly omnipresent, and whole ‘street gangs’ of them throw Rouen into confusion. 115 Of the seven dioceses of the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, the bishop lists are interrupted (or bishoprics abandoned) for Avranches 862–990, Bayeux 876 to around 1000, Sées from 910, Coutances from about 900 to 1025. 116 Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982), 16. 117 Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), 242, contra Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982), 11, for whom the claim that the region was (literally) devoid of population is “forever refuted” by the work of Lucien Musset and Jean Yver on the agricultural and commercial structure. Searle’s suggestion would seem to be that however densely populated Neustria was when the Norsemen arrived, it was ‘empty’ in the sense that it was theirs for the taking, much like Iceland, though there was no population there so it had to be imported.

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­practice, but were also utilized for reflective self-description and differentiation, especially vis-à-vis Francia.118 In much the same way, the polygyny of the ‘jarls of Rouen’119 is to be understood, not as a quasi-essential cultural ‘heritage’ (least of all as an element inherent in some obscure ethnic Scandinavian ‘origin’), but as a cultural system developed and discussed under contingent circumstances. The key figure here is Gunnor/Gunnvǫr. Born around 950, she is central to Norman dynastic history as the ‘concubine’ and later ‘wife’ of Richard i (r. 942– 96) and mother of Richard ii (r. 996–1026).120 For half a century (she died in 1031) she was at the centre of ducal power, as evidenced by the documents she witnessed and particularly her position in them: she testifies after the duke, overall on a par with her son Robert, the archbishop of Rouen, and before her son’s wives.121 But her significance for Norman history goes far beyond this. During the profound upheaval and renewal of the Norman leadership in the second half of Richards i’s reign, either as a symbol or an actor she played the decisive role.122

118 Van Eickels, “Domestizierte Maskulinität” (2002); Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens (2002). 119 The sagas refer to the Norman princes as Rúðujarlar; cf. HsH c. 24, KnS c. 9. While the title dux is used in Norman chronicles and documents before 1066, it is neither the most common term (which is comes) nor used consistently. However, the chieftains/rulers/princes of Rouen are conventionally referred to as “dukes” and, as such, the term is used here. 120 Van Houts, “Countess Gunnor” (1999) offers a summary of the well-known biographical data as well as a commentary on her possible literary patronage. 121 Van Houts, “Countess Gunnor” (1999), 17 (eleven documents overall). Half are originals, the rest mainly survive in cartularies. 122 Searle, “Dudo of Saint-Quentin” (1984), and Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), assumes that, faced with Frankish pressure, the threatened colonists in Rouen and Pays de Caux (the coastal region between the lower Seine and the English Channel) were significantly strengthened around 960/70 by the arrival of new warriors and settlers focused on Cotentin, much like the Norse settlements on the lower Loire and Scheldt. The readiness of the newcomers to accept the ‘chieftain’ they encountered, along with his Christian cult, marked the actual foundation of Normandy; Gunnor is to be understood as the daughter of an exponent of these new arrivals, and her prominent position as a consequence. Even if one was unconvinced by this hypothesis, Gunnor, whose “noble” and “Danish” origin is emphasized in almost every text, would remain symbolic of the emphasis on Norman particularity over the dukes’ Frankish marriages, which always remained genealogically fruitless. Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (21999), 277, regards Gunnor’s ‘noble and Danish’ background as encomiastic and without factual basis, but does not explain why such an origin would have been impossible in his view. On the documentary evidence for the wealth of Gunnor’s forefathers in Cotentin, see Searle, “Dudo of Saint-Quentin” (1984), 135; Van Houts, “Countess Gunnor” (1999), 8f.

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Norman political culture was based on two principles: first, the princely line was conceived agnatically, each ruler only had one son with the capacity to inherit—wholly different to Scandinavia and most of Western Europe, though quite similar to the Ottonians. Any further sons were either ignored or provided with dioceses; the fact that such sons were successfully excluded from the succession in almost every case is testimony to the desperate strength of group cohesion. Second, the entire ruling group regarded itself as a cognatic kin group, with Gunnor—or her “noble Danish” parents, who remained unnamed—chosen as the principal ancestor.123 When Dudo of Saint-Quentin, a Frankish canonicus who held a benefice in Normandy, wrote his groundbreaking history of the Normans (De moribus et actis primorum Normannorum ducum) around 1015/26, two elderly members of the ruling group supplied both information (huius operis relatore[s]) and cues. One, Rodulf of Ivry, was the uterine brother of Richard i, son of one of William Longsword’s (r. 930–42)124 former wives from a later relationship. The other was Gunnor herself, “a treasury of memories with her enormous capacity to remember the past.”125 Witness to six decades of Norman history, she was singularly well qualified for the task that fell to matrons such as her: the stabilization of the memoria of her house126 and therefore probably in large parts its ‘invention.’

123 For details, see genealogical tables 1–7 in Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988); White, “Sisters and Nieces” (1921), 57–65 and 128–32; various individual studies in Keats-Rohan, Family Trees (1997); Green, Aristocracy (1997); fundamentally, Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre des ancêtres (2000). According to the information collected by Robert de Torigni in the mid-12th century and interpolated into the Gesta Normannorum ducum, the ducal/royal house, along with the Warenne, Giffard, Mortimer, Beaumont, Montgomery, Clare, fitzOsbern and numerous subsequently less important branches all stemmed from Gunnor, her brother Herfast/Árnfast, two sisters, and five nieces. According to this genealogical understanding, from around 1030 marriages within the Norman aristocracy were overwhelmingly endogamous—even when the practice was damaging, as in the case of Henry i’s failed attempt to marry a concubine’s daughter to Walter de Warenne. 124 Dudo himself calls her (iii, 42) “a certain very noble girl of the most attractive appearance,” and follows with a versified appeal by the magnates, that the martyr Clioneus deliver himself to her “lawful embraces” for the sake of the state. For Flodoard of Reims, she is a Breton, presumably taken captive. 125 Dudo iv, 125: “capacisque memoriae et recordationis thesauro profusius locupletat[a].” 126 Cf. Shopkow, History and Community (1997); Van Houts, Memory and Gender (1999); Van Houts, History and Family Traditions (1999; collected articles). On Gunnor’s role in literary production, cf. Ziolkowski, Jezebel (1989); Van Houts, “Jezebel and Semiramis” (1992); Bate, “Les normands et la littérature latine” (2000).

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It is tempting to ascribe her commitment to the reestablishment of the diocese of Coutances127 not just, as hitherto argued,128 to her probable familial origins in Cotentin and local solidarities, but also in connection to the foundation myth of the civitas reported by Orderic Vitalis. A kind of proto-Christian due to his clementia and service to the cause of God, not least by consistently eschewing the persecution of Christians,129 Constantius Chlorus founds a city called Constantia in outermost Neustria. “In this province he had a concubine named Helena, with whom he fathered Constantine the Great, the later founder of Constantinople.”130 Coutances thus becomes a first Byzantium on the English Channel, and a good example of Norman readiness for hyperbole. If the suggestive idea had already been launched a century before Orderic, at the time of the refoundation of the cathedral, it is easy to see that Gunnor, erstwhile concubina of Richard i, and her son of the same name had particular cause to repeat the story and thus imbue local polygyny with universal meaning: the sons of concubines become rulers of the world.131 Something similar happens in the strand of historiography initiated by Gunnor and Rodulf, of which Dudo is our first witness. If the ‘Norman myth’ flourishing after Dudo bears the characteristics of the story of the chosen people,132 then consistent extramarital succession is the will of God. Norman historiography goes on to eleborate on this from Dudo (c.1020) via William of Jumièges (around 1060) and his interpolators Orderic Vitalis and Robert de Torigni (c.1110/50) to the French versifications of the Plantagenet era (Wace around 1150, Benoît around 1170). For once, Western sources serve us better than the sagas, whose narratives cannot be traced further back than c.1150: The story of the Normans was continued, adapted, and applied to changing circumstances over almost two centuries. We can thus see how the different versions handle 127 Its bishops had been officiating in ‘exile’ for some time at a church in Rouen, but it was not until 1025 that Coutances was reestablished as the episcopal seat in western Cotentin, abandoned almost a century and a half before. Gunnor was present for the laying of the first stone.—See Toussaint, Coutances des origines à nos jours (1979). 128 Van Houts, “Countess Gunnor” (1999), 8f. 129 HE v 9 (with reference to Eusebius): “homines multa clementia, erga Deum uero religione utebatur maxima …” 130 he v 9: “et in ipsa prouincia concubinam nomine Helenam habuit, ex qua Constantinum magnum conditorem postea Constantinopolis genuit.” 131 Ralph Glaber (Historiae iv 6) justifies the Norman “usus a primo adventu istius gentis” of only making the sons of concubines princes with reference to the sons of Jacob and the proto-Christicola Constantine. The Burgundian monk would not have been known in Normandy, so his view demonstrates that the consistent Norman system was recognized as such elsewhere. 132 Cf. Davis, Normans (1976); Musset, “Idée” (1993).

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the same basic stock of polygynous situations to ever-changing needs and ends. 13

The Spoils of the Conqueror: Rollo and Poppa

The author is Dudo, his hero is Rollo/Hrólf, the year of the story is c.890. Viewed from Rouen and the lower Seine, where Rollo’s band are establishing themselves, Bayeux, the episcopal city in the fertile limestone plain of Bessin, is the key to western expansion—the only option landwards, as Frankish pressure in the east and south is overpowering.133 The riches of Bessin are the first to attract attention: a shortage of supplies affect the plundering campaigns up the Seine and interrupt the attacks on Robertine Paris (the land of the Normans’ ‘natural enemies’ in the works of Dudo and his successors). But Bayeux, defended by the brave comes Berengar, is no easy target; the Frankish defenders even capture the Norman leader, Rollo’s faithful companion Botho, and the Normans are forced to accept a one-year truce for having him returned. This allows them to focus on Paris again, but once the deadline had passed, Rollo leads the Normans west again, “attacked Bayeux, and took her by force.”134 Moreover, it pleased Rollo to take with him (secum laetus adduxit) a maiden called Poppa, very beautiful, from a proud line, the daughter of the mighty Berengar; and he took her to marriage (sibi connubio ascivit) and had a son with her named William.135 The city taken, the girl taken—no one could be in any doubt about what kind of connubium this was. In the view of the leading circles a century later, the second duke of Normandy was not merely “from noble stock through his D ­ anish 133 The term ‘expansion’ does indeed disregard the reality of the first decades of Norse conquest, which was far more defensive than the jeremiads of the Frankish annalists suggest. It would be better to say that, faced with Frankish pressure, Rollo had to secure at least the west as a refuge and supply base. See most recently, Bauduin, La première Normandie (2004); on the toponymy, most recently Lepelley, “Trace” (2002). 134 Dudo ii, 16: “Baiocas petit, eamque violenter cepit …” Classically, petere translates as “to attack,” and Dudo’s classicizing Latin bears this out. But Dudo also knew that petere might mean “ask for, demand”—in some respects, this amounts to the same thing from a Roman general’s or a warband leader’s perspective. 135 Dudo ii, 16: “Quin etiam quamdam Popam virginem, specie decoram, superbo sanguine concretam, praevalentis principis Berengarii filiam, secum laetus adduxit eamque sibi connubio ascivit, et ex ea filium nomine Willelmum genuit.” For contextualization, see Bauduin, “Chefs normands” (2005).

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father, namely Rollo, and his Frankish mother, namely Poppa”136—he was also the son of a Norse conqueror and a Frankish captive. It helped preserve the political proportions vis-à-vis Francia. Some thirty years after Dudo, William, monk of Jumièges Abbey, just a couple of bends of the Seine downriver from Rouen and already favoured by William Longsword, set about to retell Dudo’s ornate epic with Benedictine sobriety. In William’s account, there is no struggle for the city and woman extending over several years: Bayeux falls, carnage ensues, and there Rollo also caught a very noble girl named Poppa, the daughter of the outstanding Berengar, and tied her to himself in the Danish style (more Daniso sibi copulauit) a little while later. He fathered William and a very beautiful daughter named Gerloc with her.137 Even the monk does not forego the obvious word pair urbs capta–puella capta, which the Normans, so notorious for abducting women in the Frankish and English annals,138 happily incorporated into their own self-representation, and which Dudo had already done justice to with his unambiguous-ambiguous language. His face-saving invention of the “relationship according to the manner of the Danes” (puellam … more Danico sibi copulauit) has been immensely successful. Wary of blatant warrior polygyny, the Benedictine sought to both ennoble and pardon his lords’ seizure of young women by referring to their origin. This attempt not only succeeded among his medieval successors, but also prompted modern scholarship to construe a specifically Norman variant of the so-called Friedelehe.139 William wrote roughly in the

136 Dudo iii, 36: “ex prosapia insigni, patre Daco, scilicet Rollone, matre Francigena, videlicet Poppa …” 137 gnd ii, 6: “in qua [sc. urbe = Bayeux] quamdam nobilissimam puellam nomine Popam, filiam scilicet Berengerii illustris uiri, capiens non multo post more Danico sibi copulauit. Ex qua Guillelmum filium genuit filiamque nomine Gerloc ualde decoram.” 138 Cf. the collection of documents by Zettel, Bild der Normannen (1977), 133ff. 139 “Mariage et concubinage légal” (1952), a study published by Elizabeth Eames in the leading historical periodical for Normandy, was very influential here, with the idea that what William of Jumièges, and after him other chroniclers, called a relationship more Danico was in fact the “Friedelehe” then dear to German legal historians, according to which a friðla/frilla was a comrade-like partner in a free, consensual relationship. Many authors since, taking William’s remark at face value, have similarly assumed the existence of a peculiar early Norman institution of ‘free marriage.’ Although the “Friedelehe” concept has long been refuted, it seems to survive, along with the early Norman dukes’ “Danish

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period 1060/70,140 just as the councils of the church province of Rouen were beginning the reception of the Reformist sexual morality,141 and, with reference to the customs of recent converts (in William, Frankish marriages are con­cluded Christiano more), he found a formula which made it possible to apply to ‘his’ dukes the rules on the tolerability of concubinage for a given affectio, duration, and exclusivity, which had been customary since late antiquity. However well the formula dovetails with both medieval and present-day assumptions about ethnicity and cultural heritage, there is no indication whatsoever that such an institution existed in the lived world—unless, of course, the accumulation of women as a matter of course may indeed have appeared as a mos danicus to a monastic observer from an abbey proud of its Merovingian tradition.142 But Poppa, or rather the actual, real-life girl in an analogous situation to the ‘Poppa’ of Dudo’s and William’s chronicles, would in any event have been one of the women who owed her retrospective promotion to quasi-spouse to the selection of her son as Rollo’s successor—much as in the case of Jón Loptsson (see Chapter 2). Indeed, William of Jumièges has his ‘Poppa’ disappear as soon as Rollo has married the ‘Lavinia’ figure of Gisla, daughter of Charles the Simple, Christiano more following the so-called agreement of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911. Only after she dies childless, (William says without so much as a trace of a wink), did the duke reestablish his relationship with the abandoned Poppa, who had already given him a son, William, now fully grown.143 Canon law is satisfied to the letter. A few decades later, the situation had changed. The gradual integration of Lower into Upper Normandy, by no means complete in 1050, lost much of its

140 141

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marriages,” in Norman history as well as in general handbooks (cf. Otis-Cour, Lust und Liebe [2000], 120f.). Gesta Normannorum ducum (1998), xxxii. Lisieux in 1055 (the deposition of Richard i’s ‘illegitimate’ son Mauger as archbishop of Rouen) and Rouen in c.1060 contain provisions on priestly concubinage, and the elaborate canons of Rouen, 1072, and especially Lillebonne, 1080, also touch on issues of divorce and incest; see Foreville, “Synod of the Province of Rouen” (1976), 19–39. More on Mauger below. Founded in the seventh century, the abbey was abandoned during the invasions and only reestablished in the early eleventh century.—Besides the collection Jumièges. Congrès scientifique du xiiie centenaire (1955), which remains essential, and the survey by Le Maho, L’Abbaye de Jumièges (2001), for the history of the monastery during the invasion see now Keats-Rohan, “Francs, Scandinaves ou Normands?” (2005), and for prosopography, Gazeau, Normannia monastica, vol. 2 (2008), 14370. gnd ii, 15: “Per idem tempus morte preuenta uxor eius absque liberis moritur et dux repudiatam Popam ex qua filium nomine Willelmum iam adultum genuerat, iterum repentens, sibi copulauit.” Dudo says nothing about this recurrence.

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significance in light of the conquest of England. Bayeux was no longer Rouen’s antagonist144 but the diocese of William’s half-brother Odo, one of the key players in the establishment of Norman rule in England. When a cleric named Wace, born in Jersey and raised in Caen, began his Roman de Rou around 1160 at the court of Henry ii Plantagenet, the emphasis of the ‘Poppa’ story was quite different: Count Berengar had a very beautiful daughter. She was called Poppa and she was a very noble girl. She did not yet have a bosom, not even the buds of breasts; there was no nobler woman, nor a nobler girl. Rou [= Rollo], who greatly desired her, made her his lover [amie]; she bore William, nicknamed Longsword.145 There is no longer any trace of the mos Danicus: the object of desire resembles the pucelles and amies of other aristocratic campaigns of conquest in every detail. Considering that much of the change of tone is caused by the change of poetic language (French verse instead of Latin prose), we should not underestimate the finesse with which the Norman clerc works his literary models. He reuses the identification of taking girls and castles, as found in Dudo and William of Jumièges, but judges them too crude for a courtly age. So he conceals it behind a biblical intertext: “She is still small and without breasts … ‘I am a wall, and my breasts are towers!’”146 Rollo thus becomes a new Solomon in a

144 In Dudo (iv, 68), William Longsword has his son Richard sent to Bayeux to study the Dacisca eloquentia, to complement the Romana he had acquired in Rouen. This remark has prompted much argument about the survival of Norse in Lower Normandy and its early extinction around Rouen, though as becomes apparent in Dudo’s sequel—especially the famous nine-day palaver with the pagan Danish chieftains—the point was not primary language acquisition but eloquence and the practice of the specific political rhetoric of the independent chiefs in the West. The purported expansion of Rouen’s rule to the whole of later ‘Normandy’ in 924/933 is a later fiction, concerned with territorial/familial cohesion. In fact, the west, especially the Cotentin Peninsula—a landscape neatly separate from the plain around Caen and the lower Seine valley—long maintained a notable distance from the entourage of the princes. It hardly participated in the conquest of England, but was soon far more involved in Sicily. 145 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 2, v. 591–96: “Li quens Berengier out une fille moult bele, Pope l’apeloit l’on, moult ert gente pucele, N’avoit encor eu sain ne triant ne mamele, Ne savoit l’en plus gente dame ne dameisele. Rou en a fait s’amie, qui moult l’a desiree, De li‚ fu nez Guillaume qui out non Longue Espee.” 146 Song of Sol. 8:8;10: “soror nostra parva et ubera non habet … ‘ego murus et ubera mea sicut turris.’”

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further, exquisite way. His descendants need not be ashamed of their origin—a­ sensitive issue in view of Henry ii’s great-grandfather William ‘the Bastard,’ who was usually best left unmentioned in the king’s presence.147 Such an amie merits the top position herself, once the princess Gisla had died childless: “Afterwards, Rou married Poppa and kept her for a long time.”148 Wace’s successor as courtly historiographer of the Plantagenet court, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, did little to change his model, but did develop Wace’s six lines in Alexandrine metre into forty-two octosyllabic verses. In the process, the prepubescent trouvaille becomes a courtly beauty matching the standard descriptio puellae of the day, with an only slightly daring emphasis: Rou saw her so pleasant, so beautiful, and so wonderful to look at: such beautiful hair, such a beautiful face, fresher than rose and lily; such a beautiful mouth, such beautiful eyes, which contained no falsehood or pride, such a well-formed figure and such beautiful arms—more words I dare not make.149 Benoît apparently did not wish to dispense with the older model entirely, however, and subsequently repeats the sentiment that at the sight of her face and beautiful breast “the duke was overcome by desire.”150 But what consumes the duke is ‘courtly love,’ fine amor, which brings the couple together in ethnic ­solemnity—reinstated by Benoît for the occasion:

147 An episode in the Magna vita of Hugh of Lincoln (iii, 10) describes how the bishop, summoned to the king in a tense situation, forces himself into the circle of the king’s hunting companions resting in the forest despite a massive show of royal wrath. After a few minutes of nervous silence, the bishop murmurs to the king, who is picking at a finger dressing with needle and thread: “How you remind me of your family in Falaise” (“quam similis es modo cognatis tuis de Falesia”). The king can scarcely believe that someone dares to allude to the rumoured lowly origin of the mother of William the Conqueror, and collapses in a fit of laughter. The few who heard Hugh’s words hardly trust their ears: “mirantur enim supra modum sub tali articulo tale improperium tanto principi ab homine tali fuisse intortum.” Once the king has composed himself, he even explains the joke at his expense. 148 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 2, v. 1289: “Donc espousa Rou Pope, qu’il tint puiz longuement.” 149 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Histoire, v. 6295–6302: “Cele vit Rou si agraable, Si bele e si tres remirable, Si tres beiaus chés, si tres biaus vis, Plus freis de rose e flor de lis, Si belle boiche e si beiaus oiz Ou n’apareist mau ne orguiz, Si bien fait cors e si beiaus braz. Autre parole n’os en faz.” 150 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Histoire, v. 6313–16: “Quer de si tres grant beiauté fine Mire son vis e sa petrine Que de voleir, ce li est vis, En a tot le coraige espris.”

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He took her as a wife with great solemnity, with great joy and merriment, according to the custom and the law that the Danes have in Denmark. He held her in much honour.151 William of Jumièges’ century-old invention suggests itself at just the moment in the romance when listeners begin wondering just what difference there is between Pope, the courtly lover of the ducal ancestor Rou, and Bellebelle and the others who adorned the account books and bed of the reigning king—but whose sons did not rise to become sole heir. The lay monogamism that regulated succession in the Angevin empire may have been an even more sensitive issue than its ecclesiastical counterpart which William of Jumièges had had to come to terms with a century earlier. Just in case the costume and lei of the Danish forebears do not suffice in the long run, Benoît also has the lovers come together in proper consensual church marriage following the expedient death of the Frankish wife: “When she was dead, he took Pope back again and married her [l’esposa] because he loved her the most. He had expelled her, without malice, for the daughter of the king of France, but never had he forgotten the great love [amor] he had for her.”152 The woman seized by Vikings has, over the course of a century and a half, become the heroine of a romance novel. There is just one only constant in the many shapes of ‘Poppa’: the legitimacy of William, second ruler of the Normans, conceived in a relationship which could be just about anything except a regular marriage. Once established, the ‘Poppa’ figure goes serial: In the next generation of Norman rulers, Sprota, consort of the second and mother of the third duke, likewise appears a “very noble girl, who was joined to the duke in the Danish fashion.”153 There are just two variations on the precursor couple Rollo-Poppa: Unlike the conqueror Rollo, William Longsword, Numa Pompilius to Rollo’s Romulus, has to be urged to think about women at all by a justifiably worried assembly of magnates. The son subsequently conceived is praised by Dudo as “born of a saintly mother, heir of a line of integrity”—although this does not prevent the duke from immediately replacing the saintly mother with the daughter of Count Herbert of Vermandois.154 William of Jumièges follows his 151 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Histoire, v. 6323–27: “Son la costume e son les leis Qu’en Denemarche unt li Daneis L’a prise a fenne a grant haustece, A grant joie e a grant leece. Moct la tint honnoreement.” 152 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Histoire, 10,128–34: “Mais aprés ce que fu fenie Reprist Pope, si l’esposa; Ce fu la riens qu’il plus ama. Gerpie l’oct sanz mauvoillanze Por la fille le rei de France. Porquant ne mist pas en obli La grant amor qu’il oct od li.” 153 gnd iii, 2: “nobilissima puella sibi Danico more iuncta.” 154 Dudo iv, 46f.: “Pollens iste puer, matre satus sacra / justae progeniei …”

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model Dudo, albeit tersely (iii, 2f.): before William could undertake the returnexchange, the chronicler records his untimely death. Wace omits the Sprota figure entirely, while Benoît declines authorial responsibility by quoting his Latin predecessor: “He took a noble and beautiful girl, Sprote, and loved her greatly, but wanted to have her in the Danish manner and not otherwise: so says the Historia, which does not lie.”155 The third duke’s mother could be passed over if necessary, but on no account could she be an uxor. 14

Mother of the Nation: Gunnor

Gunnor’s case proved more complicated. If Poppa and Sprota belonged to the legendary early period, Gunnor was at the centre of the ‘reboot’ of Norman rule around 970/80 on which all later Norman history was based. She was the mother of Duke Richard ii, of Emma, queen of England twice over, and of Archbishop Robert of Rouen. She also became a kind of passepartout ancestor for all members of the Norman leadership group, the specifics being fixed only with the genealogical interpolations of Robert of Torigni in the mid-twelfth century, as the constitution of the Anglo-Norman elite came to a close. Both alive and dead, she was therefore a sensitive figure to deal with. Writing under Gunnor’s own supervision, Dudo chooses the grand style: borrowing from Martianus Capella and others, he adopts an almost anagogical tone in telling how Emma, Richard i’s Frankish wife (daughter of Hugh the Great), is predestined to be childless, but “with divine aid one day a heavenly girl will come, of Danish descent, noble, mild, … whom the just margrave, Duke Richard, will choose as one among many and will join with her …”156 Emma dies childless, of course. Richard, plagued by “itchy weakness” (also taken from Martianus Capella), fathers four children with concubinae, but then the prediction becomes reality, and Gunnor proves equal to the deceased Emma in terms of charms, lineage, and wealth. Richard “took her in love and concluded a forbidden union with her.” His subjects call on him to marry her properly, since the providence of the supreme deity has brought them together “so that the heir

155 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique, v. 11,039–44: “Por c’en prist une franche bele, Sprote, qui ert jentis pucele. Icele ama moct e tint chiere, Mais a la danesche maniere La voct aveir, non autrement, Ce dit l’estoire qui ne ment.” 156 Dudo iv, 102: “Verum, divino numine nutus, / coelestis virgo proiet olim / stirpe Dacigena, nobilis, alma … quam dux Ricardus, marchio justus / pluribus sibimet eliget unam, / jungens connubio, foedere, pacti …”

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may have a Danish father and a Danish mother.”157 And thus, over time, the providential princely couple have five sons and three daughters together. Had Dudo and his readers at all been concerned about legitimacy in the sense of coniugium legitimum, it would have made no sense for him to allow the widowed duke to initially enter into a “forbidden union” which only later became a marriage through public pressure. The objection that Dudo’s contemporaries still remembered the course of recent events well enough seems to miss the point given his liberality with the facts elsewhere. The point is that Dudo rather insists on, not simply allows for, the “forbidden union” to have providently preceded “marriage.” Dudo’s chronicle is about the coherence of historical sense, not a sequence of haphazard events, a fact that has earned him black marks with modern positivist critics.158 In this case, historical sense demands that the heir to Normandy simply must always emerge from the paternal polygynous relationship which proves best; it must be culturally (certainly regionally, in this situation also ethnically) endogynous; a later transformation into a marriage of the “Christian sort” is possible but cannot happen at the the beginning of the relationship, as for Norman rulers such relationships are always politically exogynous and must therefore remain without issue (especially if the woman is from Francia). For Dudo, a duke born out of a ‘legitimate’ marriage would be near-illegitimate if providence did not see to it that the question never arises. William of Jumièges has different notions of legitimacy. For the Benedictine, the more Danico model, though acceptable for the early dukes, clearly no longer seemed a viable excuse for a figure of ‘contemporary history,’ a woman who had lived to see the reigning duke William the Conqueror grow up. His solution is strict serial polygyny:

157 Dudo iv, 125: “se connexuit, eamque prohibitae copulationis foedere sortitus est amicabiliter … Providentia summae Divinitatis, ut remur, hanc tibi Dacigenam, quam modo refoves, connexuit, ut patre matreque Dacigena haeres hujus terrae nascatur …” 158 Anyone hoping for a reliable account of historical events from Dudo will be sorely disappointed, and this has led to remarkably harsh assessments of an author who is stylistically difficult to tolerate for those unaccustomed to the genus grande, and yet highly respectable, given his holistic historical scheme: “a thoroughly untrustworthy document, a bombastic and rhetorical text, embroidering a long and frequently tedious discourse around a very small number of facts” (Bates, Normandy before 1066 [1982], xii f.); “l’emphase rhétorique, le goût des mots rares et la pédanterie la plus insupportable dominent sa prose comme ses vers. Malheureusement ce détestable auteur est la seule source d’information directe dont on dispose sur le premier siècle de la Normandie” (L[ucien] M[usset]/G[illette] T[yl]-L[abory], “Dudon de Saint-Quentin,” in Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, vol. 1 (21992), 393f.).

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At this time [Richard i’s] wife Emma, daughter of Hugo the Great, died without children. But a little later he married a very beautiful maiden named Gunnor, from the noblest Danish family, in the Christian manner.159 Without actually deviating from Dudo’s chronology—first Emma dies, and later the duke marries Gunnor—he silences any thought of an initial ‘forbidden union,’ just the thing Dudo had asserted so insistently. The terminological precision (in matrimonium Christiano more desponsauit) is almost uncharacteristic for the laconic Benedictine, and makes it clear that for William the era of acculturation is over. Following this passage, he lists Richard and Gunnor’s children, thereby suggesting a chronological posteriority that the monk at Jumièges, along with the rest of Normandy, must have known to be untrue. Nor did his version last long. Seventy years later, his continuator Robert de Torigni corrected William’s Gesta on this point, and furthermore described in some detail how “some people” drew the duke’s attention to the fact that canon law ruled out making his and Gunnor’s son Mauger archbishop, since his mother was unmarried (ideo quod mater eius non fuisset desponsata). The monk of Mont-Saint-Michel even uses the same term as the monk of Jumièges (desponsauit/non desponsata) to state the opposite. In Robert de Torigni’s version, the duke belatedly marries Gunnor in a “Christian” manner (more christiano sibi copulauit) in order to see his plan through. During the ceremony, the parents and their children are covered with a cloak—the only Norman evidence for this form of retroactive legitimization—whereupon the second son can become archbishop as planned. By that time, Richard’s and Gunnor’s relationship had been going on for at least a decade and a half. In the same spirit, Robert de Torigni expands William’s list of Richard and Gunnor’s ostensibly legitimate children with the omitted children ex concubinis and their scarcely less prominent offspring. The attempt to align the Norman dukes with the monogamous model has failed. Gunnor’s polygynously established eminence, through which the members of the leading group could legitimize their affiliation with the ducal kin group, remained indispensable for the constitution of the Norman elite. When Wace and Benoît rendered the story into courtly French, versified it and made it palatable for courtly consumption, they no longer needed Gunnor to be the radiant creature of providence created by Dudo. The glory of the 159 gnd iv, 18: “Qua tempestate Emma eius uxor, filia Magni Hugonis, moritur absque liberis. Ipse uero non multo post quamdam speciosissimam uirginem nomine Gunnor, ex nobi­ lissima Danorum prosapia ortam, sibi in matrimonium Christiano more desponsauit.”

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­ ormans was by then obvious enough without that. The magnates between N the Loire and the Irish Sea were content with having their ancestress depicted as a highly qualified noblewoman from the palace, “Danish on both sides,” welcoming and friendly by nature, and “as well-versed in women’s work as any woman. The count loved her and made her his lover.”160 Her Danish origin remained important to the Anglo-Normans: as the barons say to Richard, “It is God’s will that after you we will have a lord with a Danish father and a Danish mother; this is why the Frenchwoman never had children!”161 Under general pressure (the clergy’s “requests” and the “advice” of the barons) the duke eventually marries her, for it would be an evil and a hideous lack of courtliness, for a prince such as that which God has made you, if your heir were not born of a wife according to the law given by God and established by the Holy Church.162 Formal justice is done to the requirements of the time, while the polygynous political culture is acknowledged by the remark that legal form actually does not matter: Anceis e puis l’a bien amee—“he loved her before, and afterwards too.”163 For Gunnor the woman, however, everything had changed. Wace dedicates around thirty verses to describing her wedding night, in one of the most empathetic portraits of the lived experience of an aristocratic amie. “I used to lie in your bed and only fulfill your wishes,” she says, and turns her back to him for the first time, “now I lie in my bed and lie down as I please.” And then the cri de cœur of the woman who prefers not to recall that a married woman like ­Eleanor 160 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 3, 235–45: “El palaeis out une pucele, Gunnor out nun, si fu mult bele, Bien afaitie et bien curteise, De pere e de mere daneise, De nobles Daneis esteit nee, De dous parz bien enparentee; Debonaire iert e amiable, Large forment e honurable, De ovraigne de femme saveit Quantque femme saveir poeit. Li quens l’ama, s’en fist sa amie.” 161 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique, v. 27,053–56: “Que Dex par sa sainte douçor Vect qu’après tei aion seignor De pere et de mere daneise: Por ce n’enn oct nul la Franceise.” 162 Benoît, who follows the text of Wace’s description very closely, combines the beginning of the relationship and the marriage, which are quite far apart in Wace (340 verses, which corresponds to about twenty minutes’ fast reading aloud), into one long scene (106 verses out of only eleven of Wace’s + 9 extra octosyllables). With Benoît, it is the barons—not the clerics—who present the cited justification for their demand that Richard take Gunnor en mariage (v. 27,077–81: “D’iteu prince cum Dex t’a fait Sereit maus, vilanie e lait Que tis eirs ne fust d’esposee Sum lei que Dex a commandee E en saint’ iglise establie”). Courtly monogamy prevails, with almost the same justification as that provided by Marie de France in Eliduc—who may have been living at the same court at this time. 163 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 3, 246.

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can also end up imprisoned: “Never have I felt safe as I lay here, never was I without fear. Now, at last, I am safe.”164 15

The Henchman’s Daughter: Herleve

When Dudo formulated the concept of extramarital legitimacy, he could not have imagined to what heights this system would lead his Normandy. The chronicler may perhaps have noticed that around the time he was finishing the Gesta, Gunnor’s grandson Robert (the second son of Richard ii) had a son with a young girl from his entourage, but if so, this was not something he incorporated into his work. At this point it could not be foreseen that, following Richard iii’s suspiciously premature death, Robert would succeed only to abandon the title shortly after, preferring the Holy Land. The birth of William, ‘the Bastard,’ ‘the Conqueror,’ is the crowning moment of Norman polygyny. Successive Norman chronicles made various claims about his mother Herleva, and inattentive reading has somewhat impaired understanding of the episode,165 so to round off the picture of Norman poly­ gynous succession it may be useful to try to place Herleva in her context. First of all, her story continues the traditional systematic succession practice, in which the duke’s prestigious exogynous relationships, generally with the daughters of Frankish princes or kings, had to remain heirless, while the relationship with the successor’s mother was endogynous and hypogynous. In this respect, Herleve was a good choice. Orderic Vitalis, the earliest witness, describes the mother of the later conqueror king on an unrecoverable erasure “the daughter of the chamberlain (cubicularius) Fulbert.”166 This is by no 164 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 3, 635–38: “Je soil en vostre lit gesir E soil faire vostre plaisir, Ore gis el mien, si me gerrai Sur quel cost‚ ke jeo voldrai …”; v. 643–45: “Unkes mais aseüre n’i jui Ne sanz poür od vus ne fui, Ore sui aukes aseüree.” Benoît completely omits this episode. The “security” spoken of by the former ‘concubine’ could also refer to the end of the sinfulness of her actions, as suggested by Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 280f. But the emphasis on self-determination in her words and body language suggests a more secular interpretation. 165 In Lexikon des Mittelalters, Karl Schnith describes the king as the son of “a girl of lower status” (K[arl] Schnith, 2nd article, “Wilhelm i. ‘der Eroberer,’” in LdM, vol. 9, col. 127). Approaching the issue from a philological perspective, Elisabeth van Houts, “Origins of Herleva” (1986), assumes that Herleve’s father was some form of gravedigger or one who prepared the dead for burial (pollinctor). 166 gnd vii [3]: “Fulberti cubicularii ducis filia natus.” Of course, Fulbert may have risen only as a result of his daughter’s relationship with the duke, however, this is not suggested by the wording. For source criticism, see Gesta Normannorum ducum (1998), vol. 2 96 n. 1.

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means a ‘low’ origin but a safe choice, as it were, from his own household. Orderic also provides the famous account of the siege of Alençon in 1049: the defenders up on the walls, defying William and his men who are besieging the town, brandish and beat hides and skins. Orderic has only the gesture, no eventual shouts and insults to go with it, but supplies the authorial comment that the gesture aimed at William’s maternal ancestors who had been pollinctores, a difficult word to i­nterpret—it has to do with handling (fleecing, tanning) the skin of dead bodies. Wace renders it as parmentier and Benoît as peletier. These readings in turn provide the basis for the idea that the slight of Alençon meant that William came from a family of tanners, and hence, that William’s mother was of lowly or even despicable origin. I feel that this reading of an elaborately designed and executed insult during a prolonged siege seems too literal and therefore too innocuous. Taken literally, the message “tanner’s son!” meaning “son of lowly origin!”—that is, “concubine’s son!”—does not seem to cover William’s extreme reaction: After the capture of Alençon he “cut off the hands and feet of the mockers before all the inhabitants.”167 The extraordinary harshness, commented upon in all accounts, makes little sense in terms of his mother’s background alone, which was an open secret throughout his life. I suspect that flogging the skins and furs, along with Orderic’s comment that William’s parentes were ultimately pollinctores has a more metaphorical and overtly political meaning. Alençon, situated in the western part of the lands ruled by the Bellême, was something of an outpost of Francia in the borderland with Normandy and Maine; over years of repeated conflict, the staging of cultural difference (in themselves minor) is likely to have hardened and become exaggerated. From the perspective of this French outpost, the Normans were, firstly, those with curious concepts of kinship and, secondly, cruel barbarians. The Normans themselves fully shared this view, though of course with a positive slant.168 In my view, Herleve’s origin was common knowledge among the entourage of Robert ‘of Falaise’; even if her father Fulbert had only risen to the rank of cubicularius after the fact, which is possible,169 he would previously have been part of the duke’s son’s entourage, and while in his service would 167 gnd vii 8: “illusores uero coram omnibus infra Alentium consistentibus manibus pedibusque priuari iussit.” William does not say what this mockery consisted of. 168 See Van Eickels, “Hingerichtet, geblendet, entmannt” (2005). 169 Cf. Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), 127, on the rudimentary official titles at the ducal court found in the documents. Searle rejects (154f.) all ‘professional’ interpretations for Fulbert, including “washer of the dead,” suggesting that the insult (“tanner!”) essentially means “the very lowest of births!” given the low prestige of this malodorous industry, polluted through its contact with cadavers.

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have participated in those acts of war which were regarded by the Franks— who may well have practised war in much the same manner as the Normans, but tended to overstate the few differences there were and endow them with cultural significance—as particularly repugnant. So when they bludgeoned skins and hides on the walls, and thereby declared that William’s family consisted of pollinctores, this amounted to saying: “thugs and hyenas.” His paternal, ducal line was no better than his maternal, the henchman’s line. Understood this way, William’s reaction following his victory is no longer inexplicable, but depressingly consistent: he showed them how right they were. There is no need to go into Herleve’s later career in Norman historiography here.170 The historical Herleve was well endowed by the duke before he departed to the Holy Land, and given in marriage to Herluin de Conteville, a respectable landowner on the Seine estuary. This relationship produced two sons, Odo (who would become bishop of Bayeux) and Robert (who would become count of Mortain): together, they shored up William’s grip on western Normandy, although after 1066 they proved not always equally reliable. If Herleve is the last and most glorious bearer of extramarital legitimacy in Norman history, which lost its practicability with the takeover of the English Crown, then in their closeness to the king and supporting role, Herluin and his sons already correspond to the fathers, brothers, and (subsequent) spouses of the concubines of later Norman kings. Aided by the efforts of writers such as Robert de Torigni, Wace, and Benoît to adapt the material, the Anglo-Norman aristocracy was able to simultaneously celebrate its polygynous origin story, continue its polygynous political practice, and make occasional use of monogamy in high spots. We have seen that in most of ‘the West’ the fragmentary nature of the information about polygyny precludes definite statements about the ‘aspects’ of polygyny save the ‘generative’ and the ‘habitual,’ which seem obvious enough. On ‘agonistic’ and ‘expressive’ uses of polygynous relationship we often lack explicit material, and some of the conclusions drawn in this chapter are inferences reinforced by arguments based on comparison with the North. The ‘performative’ aspect remains similarly elusive in the North and in the West. In a word, much remains implicit. Normandy before 1066 is the only exception to this picture. The Norman rulers’ numerous recorded women—for each tended to have many ­competitors,

170 Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), devotes a separate chapter to the literary ‘Arlette’ (287–99).

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even if only one (the mother of the successor) emerges from the agon—are the central bearers, almost the engine, of the narrative. This reflects that peculiarity of Norman politics which Eleanor Searle terms ‘kinship by choice.’171 By means of polygyny and the control of progeny through selection dictated by political contingencies, a newly crystallized leadership group tended to assume from the end of the tenth century that the dukes and the major magnate families stemmed from the ancient nobility from the settlement period, and ensured its continued cooperation through periodic intermarriage. Searle suggests we instead talk of a family fiction that completely embraces the Norman upper class, according to which all those who were integrated into this remarkably tight leadership group conceived of themselves as a clan. If we conceive kinship as resulting from, rather than in, group solidarity and the need for common action, doubts emerge about a ‘fact’ consistently emphasized by the Norman historiographers, namely that all the (Frankish) marriages of the Norman rulers were without issue.172 Retrospective selection and kinship construction around polygynous relationships appear to have been basic principles of Norman politics. Yet precisely the strict structuring of the Norman polygyny system means that even such a striking personality as Gunnor cannot escape predetermination: on the one hand, the ‘generative’ aspect is (of course) important, because all the dukes’ women only appear as the mothers of their sons and (rarely) daughters. On the other hand, they are marked by the ‘expressive’ aspect: “Poppa” signifies victory over the Franks in Bessin, “Gunnor” the alliance of the older and newer groups of settler-warriors originating in Scandinavia. Since the ruling polygyny also encompasses the Frankish uxores, we might continue and state: “Gisla” signifies the negation of the ‘generative’ aspect and is virtually reduced to its ‘performative’; from Dudo to Benoît she is described as basically identical with the agrarian landscape. Therefore, as much as polygyny is in the foreground—the limelight, even—, the Norman chronicle tradition nonetheless presents a reduced account. An ‘open’ social-semantic system, such as the sagas describe in Northern Europe, is based on polysemy. When a Norwegian king or Icelandic chieftain enters a

171 Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), title of Chapter 3 and esp. 94ff. 172 Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), 94: the Frankish marriages were “were artificially, officially, infertile, whatever they may have been biologically.” This pattern was likewise clear to contemporary observers; Ralph Glaber noted (Historiae iv 6): “Fuit enim usui, a primo adventu ipsius gentis in Gallias …, ex hujusmodi concubinarum commixtione illorum principes exstitisse.”

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relationship with a woman it can generate very different, sometimes competing, meanings depending on the circumstances. The fragmentary evidence gathered here about the women of kings and magnates in the West permits us to conclude that, even if we lack coherent textualizations, these societies ­similarly if not equally made use of the many possibilities offered by elite polygyny, though the conceptual frame of coherent written narrativization came to be marked by monogamism.

Chapter 7

The Comparative View: Southern Europe 1

“Unbearable Heat”

Looking from England or Normandy, or Norway for that matter, the South is first and foremost what they are not. “No future age will ever be able to praise them sufficiently, if it judges rightly,” William of Malmesbury writes of the crusaders, “those men who came out of the bitter cold of Europe and plunged into the unbearable heat of the East!”1 Climatic differences shape the encounter of ‘tribal Europe’2 with the Mediterranean3—William of Malmesbury speaks of Constantine the Great’s relief at having found a site on the Bosphorus which was favoured by northerly winds, to found a world capital suited to his temperament, “since he was born in Britain, he hated the embers of the sun”4— and influenced the course of events more than once. The battle on the Horns of Hattin in 1187 was perhaps the most important, but by no means only, conflict in which the July heat was a decisive factor against the Europeans who came out of the cold.5 The climatic is a necessary, but certainly not sufficient criterion for the definition of a ‘Southern,’ Mediterranean area in a work on aristocratic polygyny. Over the centuries, repeated attempts have been made to explain particular sexual characteristics of individual regions in terms of climate. Medieval Northern Europe’s disinterest in the scopic display and enjoyment of women’s bodies has been discussed in terms of the sheer volume of heavy fabric that the women wore, in contrast to Ovid’s Rome6—which, if we pursue this argument, 1 gra iv, 372: “quorum titulis nullas umquam affiget metas postera, si rectum iudicet, aetas; uiri qui ab extremo Europae frigore in importabiles se Orientis calores immerserint.” 2 Robert I. Burns, historian of the crusader kingdom of València, describes England, Germany, and (northern) France as “the tribal north” and “fringe” in contrast to the Mediterranean centre of the medieval world. 3 Besides Braudel’s pioneering historical geography in the first chapter of La Méditerranée (1949) and its essay-like epitomization in Braudel, ed., Die Welt des Mittelmeers (1987), its most compelling portrayal is found in the Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea (2000)—conceived as part of a larger work, but already an overwhelming history of the Mediterranean in its current form. 4 gra iv, 355: “quia enim in Britannia natus fuerat, ardoris solis exosus erat.” 5 See for a recent assessment Van Eickels, “Schlacht von Hattin” (2005). 6 Jochens, “Male Gaze” (1991), 21. Though Jochens’s observations on this disinterest and the transposition of the perception of beauty onto clothing are convincing, her climatic explanation is perhaps less so. Pindar’s and Sappho’s “beautiful-armed virgins” and the eddic beloved © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_010

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raises the question of everyday clothing in medieval Damascus or Troyes. But since elite polygyny is more concerned with the contingencies of political culture than with its structural bases, we will refrain from discussing climate, physical geography, soil quality, and cultural boundaries marked out by, say, the inclination of roofs or the use of butter and oil. Nonetheless, the demographic and political characteristics which are at least codetermined through such longue durée phenomena also play a role in that much-described bundle of different, but generally coinciding boundaries that separates the Mediterranean basin and its rim from the “tribal north.” One of many differences may be seen in the fact that in the South, autocratic monarchy as a model of world order was not merely a dead letter in manuscripts of the Corpus iuris, but a living tradition. ‘Rome,’ that is, Byzantium, dominated not only the imagination (as in the North and West) but also political practice. Over the centuries, the kosmokrator on the Bosphorus was joined by imitators, first in Damascus, then Baghdad, Cairo, and Córdoba, and finally dozens of smaller centres such as Seville, Zaragoza, Palermo, Ikonion, or Tripoli. In a Mediterranean context, its northwestern edge, partly touched by Frankish rule, was in a kind of ‘frontier’ situation characterized by, among other things, the vivid presence of autocracy as a representational option and the simultaneous practical inability to imitate it. Occitania developed an acephaly with an exaggerated sense of parity, in itself not all too dissimilar to the agonistic ethos of the North or the segmented group competition of “authentic feudalism” in ‘Grand Anjou,’7 but which became the sole principle on the northwestern edge of the Mediterranean. This final comparative analysis is focused on polygyny as a way of negotiating Mediterranean autocracy and its acephalous counterpart.8 2

Concubinage at the Highest Level: James i and Aurembiaix of Urgell (1228)

On 23 October 1228, in Agramunt, in the southern, flat part of the Catalan ­Pyrenean county of Urgell, a hundred kilometres northwest of Barcelona, a of the gods, with “her bright arms illuminating heaven and earth” (Skírnismál 6), are no more than thirty degrees of latitude apart, and Ovidian verses about the beauty of a puella in the midday sun—“ignibus calesco”—were also carved into runestaffs in Norway (cf. Düwel, Runenkunde [32001], 166ff.)—cf. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois xvi, 2: the law of monogamy matches the “European climate,” polygamy the Asian. 7 The expression is Dominique Barthélemy’s: “Note sur le ‘maritagium’” (1992), 19. 8 On paritarian acephaly on the northwest edge of the Mediterranean, cf. Rüdiger, “Mit Worten gestikulieren” (2000); Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001).

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d­ ocument was drawn up which has survived until today,9 and has been rightly described by Odilo Engels as an “astonishing concubinage contract.”10 The contracting parties were James i, king of Aragon, count of Barcelona and lord of some minor counties and principalities both sides of the Pyrenees (r. 1213–76), and Aurembiaix, heiress of Ermengol viii (r. 1184–1209), last of the line of the counts of Urgell which stretched back to the tenth century; both were around twenty years old at this point.11 The affair is peculiar in two respects: firstly, sexual unions between a ruler and a nobilissima of his country are by no means uncommon, but rarely ever reach the princely level that existed at least de iure between Aurembiaix, the countess of Urgell, and James, the count of Barcelona.12 Secondly, they are not normally recorded in a formal charter—not even in the northwestern Mediterranean, where administrative writing had for long been far more common than in the West, let alone the North. We must therefore ask whether this case is not merely strange, but unique, or how far it corresponds with common polygynous practices.

9

Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, perg. 389 Jaume i, edited in Soldevila, “Fou Aurembiaix d’Urgell amistançada del rei Jaume i?” (1926), 408–10, and Soldevila, Els primers temps (1968), 298–300.—The county of Urgell, like other Pyrenean principalities, has an elongated north-south form as a result of the expansion of the dominions established in the late Carolingian period from the mountains into the Muslim-ruled Ebro plain. Its heartland around the episcopal city la Seu d’Urgell [