Queens and Bodies: The Norwegian Translated lais and Hákon IV’s Kinswomen

Among the texts translated from Anglo-Norman or French into Old Norse at the behest of Hákon IV Hákonarson (1217–63) were the Strengleikar, a group of lais including those attributed to Marie de France, and Möttuls saga (The Saga of the Cloak), the translation of Le lai du cort mantel, which also has an Icelandic rímurversion, Skikkjurímur.¹ Both Strengleikar and Möttuls saga were translated in Bergen in the early to mid-thirteenth century as part of the king’s program of translating courtly literature.² Hákon’s aim of centralizing political power in Norway, transforming old warrior-based, regional and autonomous power bases into a medieval European feudal state whose ideological center was the royal court, was underpinned by the promotion of European Arthurian literature in which a powerful king adjudicated honor and status in a world-famous court.³ In addition to the larger work of centralization, Hákon’s medium-term political tasks were: first, securing his claim to the Norwegian throne as the illegitimate and posthumous son of king Hákon Sverrison; second, achieving sole rule over Norway after years of power-sharing with his kinsman, jarl, later hertogi (duke) Skúli; third, assuring the succession; fourth and last, cementing important diplomatic links with other royal European houses. These included his immediate neighbors in Sweden and Denmark, but he also had contacts with England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Vatican, and, as discussed below, with Spain.⁴ Each of these four projects was guaranteed to some degree by the bodies of royal women: specifically those of his mother, his wife, and, to a lesser extent, his daughters-in-law and his daughter. The important female kindred of Hákon were: his mother, Inga of Varteigr; his wife, Margrét Skúladóttir, and his only legitimate daughter, Kristín Hákonardóttir. Other influential female figures in Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, the biography of the king, commissioned by his son Magnús, and composed by the Icelander Sturla Þórðarson in the 1260s, were Ingiríðr Skúladóttir, Margrét’s sister; Ragnhildr, Skúli’s wife and Hákon’s mother-in-law; and the Swedish granddaughter of king Eric the Saint, frú Kristín, wife of Hákon galinn, Skúli’s half-brother, who was the mother of Knútr Hákonarson.⁵

The Strengleikar collection includes two lais attributed to Marie de France which deal with Arthurian material: Geitarlauf and Januals ljóð, versions of the Anglo-Norman Chevrefueil and Lanval; both these lais feature adulterous queens: Isolt and Arthur’s unnamed queen. Möttuls saga is a chastity-test tale that attributes sexual misbehavior not only to Arthur’s queen, but to every lady—bar one—at the Arthurian court.⁶ Marianne Kalinke has suggested, following Cederschiöld, that Möttuls saga, which fails to recognize the names of some major Arthurian figures including Yvain and Perceval, is among the earliest of the texts translated for Hákon’s court.⁷ Whether or not this is the case, this group of stories imported from the sophisticated south raise three related questions. What might Hákon’s court, the likely original audience of the translations, have made of the accounts of the irredeemably sexually-compromised queen and court? How did the imported models chime with, or contrast with, available native literary, historical, and contemporary models of queenship? And what impact did the chivalric material have on the historiography written at the court of Hákon’s son, Magnús, who commissioned his father’s biography? These are the questions that this essay seeks to investigate, to try to flesh out the reception context of these lais in the Norwegian milieu.

European and Native Queenship

As Janet Nelson has observed, in comparison with medieval kingship, medieval queenship was ill-defined.⁸ The role changed considerably between the early medieval period and the twelfth century, when the original poems were composed, and the thirteenth century when they arrived at Hákon’s...