Strengði hon elfi: Female Reactions to Male Violence in Eddic Heroic Poetry

The majority of the heroic poems of the Codex Regius (in manuscript c. 1270) focus on the hero Sigurðr Fáfnisbani, the Gjúkung family into whom he marries, particularly his wife Guðrún Gjúkadóttir, and the valkyrie Brynhildr, to whom he is ambiguously bound through mutual oaths. These poems belong to a Vǫlsung-Gjúkung “storyworld,” a coherent, if multifaceted, universe in which the characters, settings, and objects of the story exist, and in which at least some of the events that occur are asserted as fact (Herman 2007, 282). The texts could also be described as part of a Vǫlsung-Gjúkung “immanent saga”: episodes focusing on events and characters drawn from a longer narrative known to the audience, who construct a relationship between the individual text and their knowledge of the story as a whole (Clover 2005). Despite a variety of composition dates and authors, the poems of the Codex Regius were presented as a unified collection to a thirteenth-century Icelandic audience, and the texts’ participation in the Vǫlsung-Gjúkung storyworld enables discussion of those poems as a literary group, thought to be compatible by at least one compiler (Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013a).² Though each poet or group of poets portrays their characters slightly differently, the eddic heroic poems can be said to belong to the same immanent narrative and to operate within that narrative’s general parameters. We can thus fruitfully, if cautiously, analyze recurring characters across eddic texts. The two female characters who appear most prominently in the eddic heroic poems, Brynhildr Buðladóttir and Guðrún Gjúkadóttir, come into sharper literary focus through such analysis.

The word “character” does necessarily require qualification. Given the variety of ages and origins of the eddic heroic poems, details of the figures portrayed therein differ between texts. We cannot identify single, unified “characters” across a corpus of poems with different authors and composition dates. And yet the poems collectively participate in the Vǫlsung-Gjúkung storyworld, drawing on certain consistent features belonging to the figures of Brynhildr and Guðrún that are essential to the immanent narrative. Indeed, as the present work will demonstrate, strong tendencies of characterization recur across the heroic poems. Single characters, of the type we might find in a prose saga, do not feature in the Codex Regius; rather, what emerges is a broadly coherent, composite portrait of a given figure that aligns with the immanent narrative at hand. Although the Vǫlsung-Gjúkung storyworld encompasses numerous iterations—ranging from the fornaldarsǫgur Vǫlsunga saga and Þiðreks saga to the German Nibelungenlied and an interlude in Beowulf—the present study focuses on portrayals of Brynhildr and Guðrún in the eddic heroic poems, as these depictions have elicited the greatest amount of debate and professed bewilderment over the texts’ implied motivations for the characters’ bloody actions.

Brynhildr and Guðrún have been treated as valuable and contentious examples of complex female characters in scholarship on women in Old Norse literature. These examinations are broadly concerned with the question of whether female characters have personal autonomy, and, if so, what kind of power they possess, and, if not, the ways in which masculinity works to subjugate femininity, and how male-female binaries of power are established.³ In the most recent comprehensive study of women in Old Norse literature, Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir argues that female characters are depicted as having a particular set of skills, including offering counsel and whetting men to commit vengeance. Women are recognized by the narrative when those skills are employed in the service of a male agenda, but they also work through whatever avenues of power are available to them to achieve their own ends (Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013b). In particular, women make use of speech acts: performative utterances that change reality by being spoken, including oath making, whetting, cursing, and spell casting (Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013b, 15–46; Austin 1975). Though Brynhildr and Guðr...