The Bare-Sarked Warrior: A Brief Cultural History of Battlefield Exposures by Oren Falk (review)

In his brief preface, Oren Falk explains the contents and purpose of his book: “This book traces a peculiar microhistory: the career of a literary configuration, whose stable form endures across centuries, continents, and cultures, but is in each case modulated and firmly embedded within a particular society’s history. Conceptually, the argument thus constantly looks in two directions: toward the timeless mechanisms of literary effect, on the one hand, and toward the specific contexts of historical circumstance, on the other. “It is this interaction of the universal and the specific that I seek to chart” (p. vii). The “literary configuration” in question is what Falk calls “the bare-sarked warrior,” drawing on Snorri Sturluson’s faulty etymology of berserkr in Ynglinga saga. The bare-sarked warrior is exemplified by the Norse Greenlander, Freydís Eiríksdóttir, who is at the center of the study, and who is known from only two Icelandic sagas, Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða. In the former, she plays a major role as a woman who, along with two Norwegian brothers, undertakes an expedition to Vínland. While in Vínland, discord mounts between Freydís and the two brothers, until one morning Freydís taunts her husband into assembling his men and dragging the Norwegian brothers, their men, and their five women out of their camp, whereafter she has them all killed. Eiríks saga rauða has less to tell about Freydís than Grœnlendinga saga. She is briefly mentioned around the middle of the saga as being an illegitimate daughter of Eiríkr rauði and married to a certain Þorvarðr. When she reappears, she is in Vínland as a member of the expedition lead by Þorfinnr karlsefni. It is related that the Norse Greenlanders are attacked by Native Americans (skrælingar) in such a great number that the Norse Greenlanders decided to retreat. According to the saga, the pregnant Freydís berates her compatriots for being poor fighters, stumbles upon a dead compatriot with a sword lying beside him, snatches up the sword, and prepares to defend herself. She then pulls one of her breasts of her bodice and slaps it with the sword. According to the saga, the Native Americans are so terrified at this that they flee. The episode in Eiríks saga rauða is the catalyst of the ensuing discussion in this book. The Preface also addresses the book’s intended readership, which Falk calls “astigmatic”: “The seven chapters of the main text aim to draw readers forward along a narrative track. They are largely free-standing and allow casual readers to bracket the more technical aspects dealt with in the notes. The intellectually curious and specialists in various aspects of the history I touch on can confirm the accuracy of my claims, retrace my argumentation, and weigh it against others’ opinion by consulting the scholarly apparatus. Finally, a series of sidebars are designed to help non-specialist readers—which, in such a wide-ranging investigation, means every reader, at one point or another—orient themselves in the argument” (p. vii).

Chapter 2, “Introduction: First Contact,” is concerned mostly with the presentation of Freydís in the two Vínland sagas and the dating of the sagas. For reasons that do not become clear until Chapter 5 (where Falk attempts to establish a link between Freydís’s exposure of her breast and miracles about the Virgin Mary baring her breast), he adheres to Jón Jóhannesson’s dating of Grœnlendinga saga to the early thirteenth century and of Eiríks saga rauða to after 1264 as opposed to Ólafur Halldórsson’s more recent view of the sagas as independent versions of a shared oral tradition...