Bridal-quest romance in medieval Iceland (review)

164 Reviews des hommes et des femmes (1622) and William Whatley's A bride bush or a directionfor marriedpersons (1623). There are far too many texts for them to be listed individually here. Some are well-known and important, others are minor and have only a passing interest for the topic. It is perhaps worth noting here that interesting if controversial readings are offered for such famous books as Sidney's Arcadia (pp. 220-240) and Rabelais' Tiers Livre, in the latter case involving those chapters where Panurge mulls over the problem of his projected marriage (pp. 191-198). Maxwell J. Walkley Department of French Studies University of Sydney Kalinke, Marianne E., Bridal-quest romance in medieval Iceland (Islandica XLVI), Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1990; p. xiv, 223; R.R.P. US$27.50 + 1 0 % overseas. Bridal-quest romance in medieval Iceland surveys arichgenre of prose narratives that has been all but neglected by recent scholarship, especially in the Englishspeaking world. Marianne Kalinke redresses this situation with a thorough exploration of the plots of the Icelandic bridal-quest romances, beginning with Hrdlfs saga Gautrekssonar (chapter 2: 'A paradigm of bridal-quest romance') and proceeding through the sagas of 'The misogamous maiden kings' (ch. 3), those with a 'Passive protagonist' (ch. 4) and those she distinguishes according to the fraternal affinities of the heroes (ch. 5). As well as establishing the common elements of these stories, Kalinke draws on other indigenous nanatives for comparison and in each case documents any significant analogues from Continental romance traditions. Medieval Icelandic prose fiction has long been the subject of scholarly disputes over generic classification and nomenclature, as well as over origins. The nanative type of the bridal-quest happens to occur within two different saga genres: riddarasQgur (chivalric romances) andfornaldarsogur (mythical-heroic sagas). To some extent, this received dichotomy has inhibited research across both groups of texts. Inspired by Northrop Frye's taxonomic principles, Kalinke, with Palsson and Edwards before her, has therefore sought to make generic distinctions according to the characteristic qualities of each saga's hero rather than to the saga's chronological or geographical setting. She delimits the genre of bridal-quest romance to those riddarasQgur andfomaldarsqgur in which the quest for a wife generates the plot (p. 9). Kalinke also insists that the Icelandic bridal-quest romances were written products, indebted to Continental texts for their nanative structure as well as for particulars of plot and motif (p. 11), a critical position that is in opposition to Gerd Weber's recent work on the evolution of the riddarasaga in Iceland, in which he argues that the written genre Reviews 165 had its origins in an indigenous oral tradition ('The decadence of feudal m y t h — towards a theory of Riddarasaga and Romance' in Structure and meaning in Old Norse Literature: New approaches to textual analysis and literary criticism, ed. John Lindow, Odense, 1986, pp. 415-54). Curiously, Kalinke frames her study with references to Jane Austen's observation that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, suggesting that this might have served as a motto for the writers of bridal-quest romance in medieval Iceland (pp. 1, 210). But the niceties of this allusion are flouted by many of the figures in the bridal-quest romances, particularly in the sagas of the maiden kings: those misogamous women who were sole rulers of kingdoms and who often insisted on being called king and not queen. Their suitors, as Kalinke observes (p. 81 ff.), are in want of a meykongr as wife for the very reason of her fortune (and her power), which they will gain on subjugating her through maniage. Their unwelcome attention is met with various forms of humiliating punishment including being whipped, having then heads shaved and taned, and being thrown into a pit of poisonous snakes and toads, courting practices that do not find ready parallel in the genteel culture of nineteenth century rural England. The cunents of sexual politics and societal anxieties expressed by the medieval Icelandic bridal-quest romance run deep indeed and in time these extraordinary texts will no doubt be the...