From Sinner to Saint: Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, Laxdæla saga, and the Lives of Women Penitents

In 1953, Gabriel Turville-Petre wrote that the lives of the saints "did not teach the Icelanders what to think or what to say, but it taught them how to say it" (142). Traditionally, it has been assumed that, just as Turville-Petre concluded, the translated lives of the saints were the narrative starting point for the "vernacular" sagas that developed in Iceland during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This notion has carried through to more recent years; in his Eddas and Sagas: Ice-land's Medieval Literature, Jónas Kristjánsson (1988) emphasized that the so-called heilagra manna sǫgur (sagas of saints) hold an important place within Iceland's literary history, since they "doubtless served in many ways as models for native authors" and "played some part in bringing the genre of Íslendinga sǫgur into the world and had some influence on their form and composition" (136). In her 2017 monograph The Saint and the Saga Hero: Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature, Siân Grønlie (2017) challenged this long-assumed "model of linear development from saint's life to saga" (31). Grønlie, who was influenced by Massimiliano Bampi's examination of the influence of translated romance on other genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature,¹ argued for a new and more nuanced understanding of the relationship between translated hagiographic and vernacular saga literature. Using Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory,² Grønlie (2017) demonstrates "the ways in which sagas engaged creatively with saints' lives over the medieval period," and has illustrated the various means by which saga literature adapts, challenges, and interferes with the saint's life, specifically with regard to the male saga hero (36). Indeed, as Grønlie points out, the sagas of saints and the sagas of Icelanders were often produced in the same scriptoria, by the same scribes, and for overlapping audiences; as such, the genres had important influences on one another that an application of Even-Zohar's polysystem theory brings to light (23).

However, Grønlie was not the first to argue that the secular sagas interacted with hagiographic literature; in 2007, Shannon Godlove made an argument for the "'hagiographic' endings" for the main characters of both Njáls saga and Laxdæla saga, which were notably written in the mid- to late thirteenth century, around the same time as the "florid style" sagas of saints. With regard to Laxdæla saga, composed between 1250–1270, Godlove (2007) argues that "Guðrún's grief at the deaths of her husbands and remorse for her past sins turn her to a life of contrition and penance in her final years" (112). Godlove (2007) notes that while Guðrún's conversion may seem abrupt and even disingenuous, it is in line with hagiographic motifs that would have been well-known to the saga writer, and effectively "replaces demonized pagan femininity with an appropriate expression of thirteenth-century Christian female devotion through penance, compunction, and affective piety" (112). Godlove's observations on the character of Guðrún as a secular saint are, I believe, compelling and convincing, and signal the need to examine the character more closely within the context of those hagiographies circulating contemporaneously with the saga, and specifically those structural models and character motifs that could have influenced how Guðrún's story was written.

This article draws upon Godlove's observations on how Guðrún was a kind of "secular saint" and uses Grønlie's comparative model in order to demonstrate the specific ways in which Laxdæla saga adopts the structure and rhetoric of hagiography through the character of Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir. I argue that Guðrún is not only a "secular saint" whose saga writer drew on hagiographic motifs, as Godlove concludes, but more specifically that her life may be said to reflect important elements from the lives of the four women penitents represented in Old Norse-Icelandic translated hagiographic literature, namely, Mary Magdalen, Pelagia, Thaïs, and Mary...