All the King’s Women

The Northern World

North Europe and the Baltic C.400–1700 ad
Peoples, Economies and Cultures

Editors

Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (Oslo)

Piotr Gorecki (University of California at Riverside)
Steve Murdoch (St. Andrews)
Cordelia Heß (Greifswald)
Anne Pedersen (National Museum of Denmark)

volume 88

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All the King’s Women
Polygyny and Politics in Europe, 900–1250

By

Jan Rüdiger

Translated by

Tim Barnwell

leiden | boston
This volume was originally published as Der König und seine Frauen. Polygynie und politische Kultur in
Europa (9.–13. Jahrhundert) by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, 2015.

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Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations x

Introduction 1
1 Libido and Satyriasis 1
2 Scholarship 6
3 ‘Polygyny’ 9
4 Structure 12
5 ‘Aspects’ of Polygyny 15
6 Objective 17
7 Postscript 2020 20

King Harald Fairhair’s Women: a Word on the Sources 22

1 “…And Then He Took Her to Bed” 22
2 “Concubine or Wife?” 27
3 On Sources 31
4 Scholarship on the Sagas 34

1 The Generative Aspect 42

1 Thorns, Pigs, and Two Dreams 42
2 Royal Blood 47
3 Danish Particularism: Polygyny in the Chronicles 52
4 Practices of the Valdemar Era 61
5 Dissenting Voices: Sven Aggesen and Saxo Grammaticus 65
6 The ‘Generative Aspect’ of Polygyny 74
7 Harald, the All-Father 77
8 The ‘Good’ Bastard King 82
9 The Mill Maid’s Tale 87
10 Suitability 91
11 Co-optative Kinship 93
12 Twofold Legitimacy: Sverrir of Norway 99
13 Married, Crowned, Unsuccessful 102
14 Low-Born and Successful 105
15 Polygyny as a Guarantor of Parity 109
16 Polygyny without Women? 111
vi Contents

2 The Habitual Aspect 120

1 Models 120
2 Polygyny and Historiography: the Oddaverjar 122
3 A Song of Praise 129
4 “Very Susceptible to Love”: Jón Loptsson’s Women 136
5 A Lovers’ Saga? 141
6 Portrait of a Competitor 146
7 Were There Wives? 152
8 ‘Retrospective Marriage’ 155
9 A Vocable for the Ineffable: Elja 156
10 The Brother-in-Laws’ Confrontation 159
11 What Was at Stake I: Bishop Þorlák 165
12 What Was at Stake II: Jón Loptsson 169
13 Resource Polygyny 174
14 Women and Plunder 175
15 From Canterbury to Camelot 178

3 The Agonistic Aspect 187

1 Snorri Takes a Bath 187
2 Mannjafnað—“Comparison of Men” 188
3 Social Rhetoric: the Contest for Borghild í Dali 192
4 Women in Mannjafnað 195
5 Renegotiating Status Loss I: Saint Olav’s Lover 198
6 The Women’s Agon 202

4 The Expressive Aspect 206

1 Political Relations? 206
2 What Ælfgifu Means 210
3 Polygyny as a Semantic System 213
4 Domestic and Foreign Policy: Harald Hardrada’s Women 214
5 A Successful Takeover: Harald Hardrada and Þóra Þorbergsdóttir
(1047) 219
6 The Near-Failure of a Party Formation: Eindriði Einarsson and Sigríð
Erlingsdóttir (c.1023) 220
7 An ‘Unproductive’ Communication: Valdemar the Great and Helena
Guttormsdatter (c.1200) 225
8 Renegotiating Status Loss II: the Bridal Journey of Óláf Haraldsson
(c.1017) 227
9 A Woman in Reserve: the Icelander’s Booty and the Orkney Woman
(c.980) 231
Contents vii

10 A Family on the Rise: Sigurð Haraldsson’s Woman (c.1150) 232

11 A New Party: the Daughters of Saxi í Vík (from c.1095) 235
12 “And He Will Take Your Daughters...”: Magnús the Good and Margrét
Þrándsdóttir (c.1040) 241
13 Danish Encounters 246
14 The Emperor’s Daughter and the Elbe Frontier: Erik Ejegod and
Queen Bothild (c.1100) 251
15 The Cheese and the Anchor: Harald Hardrada’s Booty (1047) 256

5 The Performative Aspect 263

1 “Castles and Maidens” 263
2 Abishag at the Court of Hákon Hákonarson 264
3 Northern European Hierogamy? 270
4 Hákon Hlaðajarl 272
5 Death in the Pigsty 279
6 Jarl Hákon and His Patron Goddess 283
7 Perpetual Hierogamy 290

6 The Comparative View: Western Europe 295

1 In the Heartland of Medieval Studies 295
2 Scholarship 296
3 Sources 299
4 Figurations of Polygyny: Arthurian Literature 303
5 Strategies of Representation: Under the Spell of
Monogamism 306
6 The Invisible Women 311
7 In Comparison: the Generative Aspect 317
8 In Comparison: the Habitual Aspect 319
9 In Comparison: the Agonistic Aspect 323
10 In Comparison: the Expressive Aspect 328
11 In Comparison: the Performative Aspect 331
12 Polygyny as Political Principle: Normandy 333
13 The Spoils of the Conqueror: Rollo and Poppa 338
14 Mother of the Nation: Gunnor 344
15 The Henchman’s Daughter: Herleve 348

7 The Comparative View: Southern Europe 353

1 “Unbearable Heat” 353
2 Concubinage at the Highest Level: James I and Aurembiaix of Urgell
(1228) 354
viii Contents

3 Ornamental Mediterraneanness: Christian Princes and Moorish

Maids 363
4 Iberian Renunciation—Llibre dels Feits and Primera Crónica General
(c.1250) 366
5 Ornamental Europeanness: Polygyny in Andalusia 371
6 Paritarian Polygyny—Autocratic Abstinence 375

Polygyny and Europe—By Way of a Conclusion 383

Appendix 394
Bibliography 395
Index 448
Acknowledgements

This book is the English translation of Der König und seine Frauen. Polygynie
und politische Kultur in Europa (9.–13. Jahrhundert), the outcome of the three-
year research project “Aristokratische Polygynie im Hochmittelalter im eu-
ropäischen Vergleich” financed by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The Founda-
tion granted research trips to Norway, Iceland, and Normandy, and generously
supported the printing of the original edition. I would like to thank Professor
Michael Borgolte, Chair of Medieval History at the Humboldt University of
Berlin from 1991 to 2016, for making it possible to carry out my postdoctoral
habilitation as a research associate at the Institute for the Comparative History
of Europe in the Middle Ages, for many stimulating discussions, and for relent-
less support.
I am thankful to my Berlin colleagues for much advice and encouragement,
to the Hilfsassistenten at my Basel Chair, Lynn Zimmermann and Lukas Pfeif­
fer, for their work on the index, to Marcella Mulder at Leiden who patiently
nursed this book into existence, and to Tim Barnwell for his arduous transla-
tion work. For their advice and help during my years of research, I thank Mar-
tin Aurell (Poitiers), Else Mundal and Sverre Bagge (Bergen), and especially
Barbara Crawford (St Andrews), who initiated the publication of the book in
the ‘Northern World’ series. For their hospitality and enriching conversations,
my thanks go to Parish Priest Geir Waage and the Snorrastofa in Reykholt, Suf-
fragan Bishop Sigurður Sigurðarson † at Skálholt, the Deutsches Historisches
Institut in Paris and its director Werner Paravicini, and Pierre Baudouin and
the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines in Caen. The Nordisk Center
for Middelalderstudier granted me and my family two wonderful gæsteforsker­
ophold at the University of Southern Denmark at Odense; my thanks go to all
the people in Bøgene and Knoldene, especially to Kurt Villads Jensen (now
Stockholm), Lars Bisgaard, Lars Boje Mortensen, and Karen Fogh Rasmussen.
My special thanks go to Birgit and Peter Sawyer, who on the strength of a timid
email from an unknown post-doctoral researcher invited me to Trondheim
and over the following years gave me advice, help, räksmörgås, encourage-
ment, and endlessly engaging conversations. Bibi also wrote the positive re-
view of this manuscript for the Northern World editors. This book is dedicated
to their memory.
My wife Sabine has always been with me, and our children Jakob and Kath-
rine have grown up with this book. Tak for turen!
Abbreviations

The Individual Sagas of Heimskringla

Ys Ynglinga saga
HsSv Hálfdanar saga svarta
HsH Haralds saga hárfagra
HsG Hákonar saga góða
HsGr Haralds saga gráfeldar
OsTr Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar
OsH Óláfs saga helga
MsG Magnúss saga góða
HsS Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar [=harðráða]
OsK Óláfs saga kyrra
MsB Magnúss saga berfœtts
Mss Magnússona saga
MsBHG Magnúss saga blinda ok Haralds gilla
Hss Haraldssona saga
HsHb Hákonar saga herðibreiðs
MsE Magnúss saga Erlingssonar

Other Abbreviations

ANF Arkiv för nordisk Filologi

AASS Acta Sanctorum
ASC Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
col. column
DD Diplomatarium Danicum
DmA Danmarks middelalderlige Annaler
DI Diplomatarium Islandicum
DN Diplomatarium Norvegicum
EJ Encyclopaedia Judaica
EMSc Medieval Scandinavia. An Encyclopedia
GND Gesta Normannorum ducum
GRA Gesta regum Anglorum
HE Historia ecclesiastica
HsHs Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar
HZ Historische Zeitschrift
Abbreviations xi

ÍF Íslenzk fornrit
KLNM Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder
KnS Knýtlinga saga
KSs Konungs skuggsjá
LdM Lexikon des Mittelalters
LThK Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
Mks Morkinskinna
NgL Norges gamle Love indtil 1387
(N)HT (Norsk) Historisk Tidsskrift
Os Orkneyinga saga
PC Bibliographie der Troubadours
PL Patrologia Latina
RGA Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde
S Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters
s solidus, shilling
s.v. sub verbo
s.a. sub anno
(S)HT (Svensk) Historisk Tidskrift
Skj Finnur Jónsson, Den norsk-islandske Skjaldedigtning
SM Scriptores minores historiae
StS Sturlunga saga
SvS Sverris saga
ÞsH Þorláks saga biskups hins helga
VSD Vitae sanctorum Danorum
ZfG Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft
ZhF Zeitschrift für historische Forschung
Introduction

1 Libido and Satyriasis

At the end of the first century a.d., in a (not so) oblique criticism of the mores
of the time, Cornelius Tacitus told his Roman readers that, in a faraway country
on the northern edge of the world, the barbarian Germani adhered to strict
morals and monogamy. For sure, some, particularly the wealthy and powerful,
maintained several women. Yet they did this “non libidine sed ob nobilitatem.”1
Tacitus’s epigram contains the question that has guided and motivated the
present study: what has polygyny to do with nobility?
A millennium and a half later, in another work in which the North was a ci-
pher for golden pasts and a bright future, Montesquieu took up Tacitus’s dic-
tum and traced his lines through subsequent history. For him, it provided an
obvious explanation for the political value of Merovingian polygamy. “Ces
mariages étaient moins un témoignage d’incontinence qu’un attribut de dig-
nité : c’eût été les blesser dans un endroit bien tendre que de leur faire perdre
une telle prérogative.”2 But human progress was relentless, and by Montes-
quieu’s own times such mores did no more exist, at least in the temperate cli-
mates of civility. There were still harems “in lands where you need bars instead
of laws,”3 but in Enlightenment Europe the passions had long been so harmo-
nized, love’s access to the heart so cultivated, and the social code so complete
“that our wives, reserving themselves for the pleasures of one, contribute to the
amusement of all.”4
Another eventful century later, in Norway, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson faced the
problem of reconciling the mood of the liberal narrative of progress with the
national appeal to his country’s medieval heyday. This was particularly awk-
ward as the end of royal polygyny coincided almost precisely with the end of

1 Germania c. 18: “… exceptis admodum paucis qui, non libidine sed ob nobilitatem, plurimis
nuptiis ambiuntur.” Tacitus, of course, hardly creates a reliable picture of the society he os-
tensibly describes, but rather an “Otherland” which serves to admonish his imperial address-
ees, too little concerned with nobilitas in their libido for his liking.
2 De l’esprit des lois xviii, 24.
3 De l’esprit des lois xvi 8: “Dans ces pays, au lieu de préceptes, il faut des verrous.”
4 De l’esprit des lois xiii 11: “… nos pays du Nord, où leurs mœurs sont naturellement bonnes ;
où toutes leurs passions sont calmes, peu actives, peu raffinées ; où l’amour a sur le cœur un
empire si réglé, que la moindre police suffit pour les conduire ? Il est heureux de vivre dans
ces climats … où les femmes, se réservant aux plaisirs d’un seul, servent encore à l’amusement
de tous.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_002

2 Introduction

Norway’s independence: legitimate primogeniture was formalized as an exclu-

sion criterion for the succession to the throne under Magnús the Law-Mender
(r. 1263–80); only half a century later, Norway entered into a dynastic union
with Sweden and then Denmark, which in the sixteenth century led to its in-
corporation into the latter. Like Montesquieu, Bjørnson solved the problem
from a developmental perspective: early medieval polygamy turned into later
medieval concubinage, and subsequent to further upward steps in the Refor-
mation period and the development of the bourgeois age, mores became so
pure that “no one who is not afflicted by satyriasis could wish that everything
that has been gained for the health, spirit, and character of mankind as a result
of the fact that women now generally follow the law of monogamy, should be
abandoned once more by the human will to progress!”5
Besides diction, nothing substantial has changed in assessing polygyny in
European history since Montesquieu and Bjørnson. While anthropologists
­discuss the statistical probability of the incidence of polygyny on the basis of
variables like climatic zone, forms of cultivation, agricultural technology, and
­“levels of social complexity” and find it to be vastly prevalent in human societ-
ies over time and space,6 the distinctive prevalence of monogamy in the Euro-
Mediterranean has become a standard component of histories of Europe and
the West and in intercultural comparisons. According to the grand narrative,
the continent has been characterized by the ever increasing spread of mon­
ogamy and its social corollaries since late Antiquity, and especially since the
Middle Ages. It is perhaps not too bold a claim that monogamy is today re-
garded as one of the most decisive characteristics of ‘the West.’ Polygynous
features, in so far as they are acknowledged at all, come with linguistic markers

5 Bjørnson, Engifte og mangegifte (1912–13), 88f.: “… men tror nogen, som ikke er besat af Satyri-
asis, at det, som er indvundet for Menneskehedens Helse, Aand og Karakter ved, at Kvinden
i stor Almindelighed er blit tro mod Engiftets Lov, skulde Menneskehedens Fremgangsvilje
atter opgi?” The lecture was first presented in 1887 in the Grundtvigian Folkehøjskole of
Askov in Denmark, and the laureate repeated it several times in Denmark, Norway, Sweden,
and Finland.
6 Cf. White, “Re-Thinking Polygyny” (1988), and Bretschneider, Polygyny (1995), for studies
based on the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (sccs) with 186 “societies,” most of them re-
cent or contemporary but including Babylon, Israel in the late monarchic period, the city of
Rome under Trajan, and Tenochtitlan at the time of the Spanish conquest. Of these, some 170
practised polygyny, sixteen were censed to be monogamous, and one was polyandrous. Even
if we apply a few pinches of salt to both the sccs as a working tool and to individual
­assessments, the overall picture is still impressive enough. In his interpretation, Bretschnei-
der rejects generalizing hypotheses based on variables such as gender-specific divisions of
labour and forms of subsistence and calls for specific regional studies with a view to
variation.
Introduction 3

such as ‘still,’ ‘yet,’ ‘even to this time’—their time are the Merovingian and per-
haps ‘still’ the Carolingian periods; at all later periods they are residual, mar-
ginal, peripheral, and above all ‘no longer’ structurally relevant.7
Our own day and age may seem to many, in Bjørnson’s words, “afflicted by
satyriasis.” Serial polygyny is much practised and heavily commented upon,
with polyandry now on an (almost) equal footing alongside it, and perhaps for
the first time in recorded history, society at large is happy to celebrate both, as
witnessed in countless pop songs, novels, films, tv serials, sociology reports
and newspaper analyses. Yet in most of its cultural representations, satyria-
sis is at an uncomfortable angle to some other central tenets of cultural self-­
imaging. However easily partners may switch in film, television, and life, for as
long as they last, ‘couple’ relationships are supposed to be exclusive, and if they
are not (which is often), we readily apply to them a near-feudal vocabulary of
loyalty and betrayal. “I’ll be true to you, yes I will,” fidelis ero tibi, is the formula
straight out of a twelfth-century charter as sung by the Hollies8 and countless
others in a similar vein. Relationships may be flighty but love is forever, and
you can only love one partner at a time. ‘Love’ is writ large across Western soci-
eties, even (or perhaps especially) at times when marriage as an institution
seems to be on its way out, or to change beyond recognition. Over the last few
decades, European law has abolished most elements of ‘marriage’ (durability,
legal status of progeny, heterosexuality) but the end of monogamy has not so
far entered the debate. On the contrary, it seems that the more Western societ-
ies are faced with outright polygamy—apparently a common practice in some
immigrant communities, providing the public authorities and law courts with
interesting challenges—the more they uphold and advocate monogamy,
which can lead to intricate dilemmas of ‘political correctness.’9 The very

7 Parte pro toto: Goody, Development (1983); Goody, Geschichte der Familie (2002); Mitterauer,
Warum Europa? (2003), Ch. 3; nuanced: Betzig, “Medieval Monogamy” (1995). For concubi-
nage/polygyny before the period under investigation in this study cf. the classic Wallace-
Hadrill, Long-Haired Kings (1962), esp. 185–204; Ewig, “Studien zur merowingischen Dynas-
tie” (1974), 38–44; Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers (1983), 62–79; Le Jan, Famille et
pouvoir (1995), 271–77; Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? (2002).
8 Yes I will (words and music by Gerry Goffin and Russ Titelman), 7″ single record Parlophone
R5232, released 22 January 1965.
9 In 2004, the higher administrative court of Koblenz ruled in favour of the right to remain of
the second wife of an Iraqi; it would be unreasonable to deny only her a resident permit
while the first wife could stay (Az.: 10 A 11717/03). On the varying practices of Swedish authori-
ties, see Elin Andersson, “Månggifte godkänns – ibland,” Svenska Dagbladet, 12 August 2007;
for a compelling controversy, in which two opinion leaders from a similar emancipatory-­
liberal perspective argue for and against Islamic polygamy respectively, see “Er flerkoneri
nogensinde i orden?,” Kristeligt Dagblad, 27 May 2007.
4 Introduction

v­ ehemence with which monogamy is reclaimed as a universal woman’s right—

the right to “exclusive sexual intimacy” and to “creating something unique with
a partner,” as a Human Rights report advising the Canadian Department of
Justice has it—reveals its bipartisan importance as a fundamental element of
what constitutes Us vs. Them.10 In this respect we are in complete agreement
with Montesquieu and Bjørnson.
Like many other identity markers, monogamous marriage—that “unique
expression of a private bond and profound love between a couple, and a life
dream shared by many in our culture” in the words of a recent New York State
court ruling11—is a concept that takes the modern collective mind right back
to the Middle Ages. Not only does consensual marriage seem a medieval inven-
tion, and quite justly so, but also ‘profound love,’ and indeed ‘the couple.’ The
troubadours still warm our hearts, however much they are, in their popular
shape, a creation of the nineteenth rather than the twelfth century, and even
those who profess to shun the highly-flung ideas of highly-strung knights and
damsels and prefer the ordinariness of real-life experience readily attribute to
medieval men and women “the profound desire for a harmonious relationship
in marriage.”12 So many popular novels and visual narratives echo the senti-
ment (or vice versa) that we may suspect a fair amount of ‘medievalist’ projec-
tion in this matter, as of course in many other, perhaps most subjects of ‘doing’
medieval history. Both the ‘romantic past’ and the ‘dark ages’ versions of medi-
evalism, that is the notions that sublime eternal love beats all odds and that
marital oppression and clerical suppression were commonplace, colour gen-
eral ideas of our medieval ‘heritage’ of love and marriage and our way of coping
with our own discursive discrepancies—acceptance and approval of contem-
porary polygyny/-andry in representation and practice versus acceptance and
approval of the ideal of ‘the couple’—by way of discussing medieval history.
Our view of the historical pluralities of relations between the sexes—which,
under the overpowering impact of the principle of monogamy on Western his-
tory, is predicated by the binomy of marriage and concubinage—inevitably
gets caught up in this tension. While Tacitus’s correlation of libido and nobili­
tas has not, on the whole, been particularly fruitful in scholarship, another

10 Cook and Kelly, Polygyny (2006), 10; see Rüdiger, “Polygyny and Monogamism” (2020), for
a further discussion of monogamy and human rights.
11 Hernandez et al. v. Robles, 794 n.y.s.2d 579 (Sup. Ct., NY County 2005), 609, quoted in
Cook and Kelly, Polygyny (2006), 11.
12 Otis-Cour, Lust und Liebe (2000), 187.
Introduction 5

­ ell-known ancient quotation appears to have had far greater influence: the
w
categorization of Athenian women according to their function as transmitted
through Demosthenes.13 Concubinage is, more or less explicitly, ascribed to
the sphere of libido, along with all heterosexual forms of relationship except
the most solemn in any given situation, which was understood to be normative
marriage. The reduction of Demosthenes’s triad to the binomial pair would be
of decisive importance for the history of the Middle Ages. For Augustine, it was
the difference “between a legitimate marriage, concluded for the purpose of
producing children, and a pact of libidinous love.”14 For centuries, councils and
canonists repeated Leo I’s injunction “aliud est uxor, aliud concubina,” so that
the idea that one could only be either a “friend of marriage” or a “slave to lust”15
ultimately became essential to the Augustinian tradition of thought, which
was so important for the literate section of medieval societies and therefore
our sources. Concubinage is personal and tends to be reprehensible; marriage
is social and tends to be commendable: this dichotomy determines the study
of medieval relations between the sexes up to the present day.
Without wishing to deny that libido, lust or love can be a major driving force
for concubinage, this study proceeds from the following hypothesis: The fact
that a substantial number of polygynous relationships are recorded in our
sources, sometimes to considerable detail (such as the names of the partici-
pants), would seem to suggest that to the observers, the circumstances around
such relationships could attain meanings beyond libidinal gratification and
were regarded as matters of general interest. What other such ‘meanings’ might
these relationships have, considering their number and variety in the sources
and therefore in imagination and (probably) practice? What is the place of
what Tacitus and Augustine call libido in the relationships of those who caught
the public eye? And what, exactly, is libido for medieval elite men and women
who knew they caught the public eye?

13 Demosthenes 59, 122 (“Against Neaira”): “Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, con-
cubines [παλλακαί] for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate chil-
dren and to be faithful guardians of our households.” Demosthenes with an English transla-
tion, trans. DeWitt (1949). The evident polemical intent of the legal orator has not
prevented his classification from largely shaping the perception of women’s life in ancient
Athens (see most recently Hartmann, Heirat, Hetärentum und Konkubinat [2002]; for a
critique, Davidson, Courtesans [1999], 96ff.)—and mutatis mutandis in the Middle Ages.
14 Confessiones iv 2,2: “quid distaret inter coniugalis placiti modum, quod foederatum esset
generandi gratia, et pactum libidinosi amoris.” A council text as an example: Tribur 895
(mgh Capit. 2, Nr. 252) c. 38.
15 Confessiones iv 2,2: xv 25: “non amator coniugii sed libidinis seruus.”
6 Introduction

2 Scholarship

Formulated as a paradox of sorts: concubinage has often been discussed, po-

lygyny almost never. This book is concerned with the latter. The former has
been a concept of Roman and then canon law and its various receptions since
late antiquity, and it has been thoroughly and repeatedly studied over the cen-
turies, first in terms of legal and ecclesiastical history, then from the perspec-
tive of social history, usually with reference to and dependent on the institute
of marriage.16 However, the focus here is on the precepts of the different legal
systems, and therefore to some extent on an ‘institutional’ view of concubi-
nage, whether in terms of inheritance law, moral theology, or public order (the
fact that the institution of concubinage is still a concept of the law codes of
several European countries has certainly influenced historical research). So
there is no shortage of either overviews or in-depth studies of medieval concu-
binage, particularly from the perspective of ecclesiastical writers, the church
fathers, decretists, lawgivers, and judges.17 If this book makes relatively little
use of this kind of material, it is because its subject is not the legal category of
‘concubinage’ but polygyny, a social phenomenon. While there are indeed in-
stances of polygyny to which the term concubinatus is relevant—for instance
when the term is used by an observer writing in Latin—, the reverse is not
­always true: not all cases of medieval polygyny should necessarily be termed
concubinage.
A number of attempts have been made in scholarship to move beyond the
Roman legal and ecclesiastical term ‘concubinage’ and its Augustinian coun-
terpart in order to get to the heart of the multiplicity of ties. Most famous, per-
haps now rather infamous, is the idea that the early Germanic peoples knew
a pre-Christian consensual marriage (Friedelehe) freely entered into, and dis-
solved, by two partners on the basis of personal preference (love). The Frie-
delehe, developed above all by early 20th-centuy German legal historians, was
supposed to be an institute clearly differentiated both from the heavy Muntehe

16 Rather than listing a sequence of generally older legal historical titles, I refer to the very
useful survey article by Becker, “Nichteheliche Lebensgemeinschaft” (1978), which offers
abundant further references, as well as the pertinent keywords in the lexicons (rga, s.v.
Kebse; Beischläferin; Nebenfrau; klnm, s.v. slegfred). See also Kottje, “Eherechtliche
Bestimmungen” (1990).
17 The definitive overview of Christian sexual teaching in the Middle Ages, in which the
relevant evidence on the subject of “concubinage” is collected and discussed, is Brundage,
Law, Sex, and Christian Society (1987). Ines Weber, Ein Gesetz für Männer und Frauen. Die
frühmittelalterliche Ehe zwischen Religion, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Ostfildern, 2008) was
published only after this book had been completed.
Introduction 7

involving whole kin groups, property transfers, and a number of legal con-
sequences, and from inconsequential concubinage. The hypothesis, so obvi-
ously prompted by the desire to endow the ‘original,’ pre-Christian Germans
and their Germanic cognates with a “sittlich hochstehende” (morally superior)
comradeship-like marriage form, has proved surprisingly long-lived in Western
scholarship although it was soon criticized and has for long been definitively
refuted.18 Meanwhile, research on the role of man–woman relations in medi-
eval lay societies has been informed by an anthropological perspective since at
least the 1970s. Proceeding from a concern with fundamental social structures
and phenomena such as kinship, generational succession, and the transmis-
sion of property and memory, studies spanning the entire Middle Ages and
occasionally beyond have brought some fundamental characteristics of Latin
European kinship to light.19 These socio-anthropological and socio-biological
studies are important for the present study as they help us to understand some
essential premises for the phenomena considered here. However, their rele-
vance for a genuinely historical perspective is sometimes limited by their ac-
centuation of the general at the expense of the particular. The same applies to
numerous studies of the last two decades which approach the issue from the
perspective of women’s or gender history.20 Both the social practice of con-
cubinage and the associated representations have been treated, ­sometimes
comprehensively, in terms of “forms of life” and “images” of women (or men)
respectively, with a focus sometimes more on the comparison of gender hi-
erarchies across periods than their impact on particular political cultures.21

18 The main proponent of this thesis was Meyer in “Friedelehe und Mutterrecht” (1927) and
elsewhere; on the history of research cf. Mikat, Dotierte Ehe (1978), and now Karras, “His-
tory of Marriage” (2006). For criticism, cf. in recent times Ebel, Konkubinat (1993); Ebel,
“Friedelehe,” in rga 9 (1995), 598–600; Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? (2002). The thesis,
considered refuted, appears in several newer, widespread accounts, such as Duby, The
Knight, the Lady and the Priest (1983), 41f.; Ennen, Frauen im Mittelalter (31987), 35f.; Otis-
Cour, Lust und Liebe (2000), 120f. and elsewhere, and studies such as Le Jan, Famille et
pouvoir (1995), 273.
19 Alongside the titles mentioned above in note 7, mention should be made of Herlihy,
M
­ edieval Households (1985), which has influenced numerous subsequent studies. Jörg
Wettlaufer has lately presented himself as a proponent of sociobiological interpretations
of medieval history; for discussion see below, Chapter 2.
20 On the methodological premises and differences between the two approaches, see
the programmatic introduction in Hausen and Wunder, eds, Frauengeschichte –
Geschlechtergeschichte (1992), 9–18.
21 The literature on the subject has meanwhile become unmanageable. Instead of an almost
arbitrarily expandable list of individual titles, only a few surveys are mentioned here to
illustrate the field (while relevant individual studies are discussed in the appropriate
8 Introduction

Nonetheless, the results (and premises) of gender history have played a crucial
role for understanding the historicity of gender-related behaviours.22
Many studies in social and political history—even some of those inspired
by the history of mentalities or historical anthropology—convey the impres-
sion that marriage is a serious matter, but any other form of relations between
the sexes is not. The former is the “keystone of the social edifice,” “founding
moment and foundation of the family,” “centre of the network of kinship re-
lations” or even “a central life order encompassing all people … a truly total
social phenomenon in the sense of Marcel Mauss.”23 Anything else is merely
about “attractive young women” and “weak men” who “take concubines in step
with their passions” in “fleeting sensual passion without consequences.”24 Even
Georges Duby, that maître with a keen eye for all the various manifestations of
lay aristocratic mentalité, and a social historian who has repeatedly engaged
with the themes of “love” and “marriage,” places little emphasis on concu-
bines in aristocratic society and always discusses them in relation to the most
solemnized form of marriage.25 The same is true for research on “literary”26
sources on the topic, the study of high medieval (especially vernacular) epic,
poetry, and narrative. Though the essential concern of both “courtly love” and
many situations in epic poetry or tales of the merveilleux is the representation

place): Klapisch-Zuber, Geschichte der Frauen, vol. 2 (1990/1993); Rossiaud, Dame Venus
(1989); Karras, Common Women (1996); Otis-Cour, Lust und Liebe (2000).
22 From the particularly fertile area of the “rereading” of medieval literature, mention might
here be made of: Gaunt, Gender and Genre (1995); Huchet, L’amour discourtois (1987),
and—less indebted to gender studies than “literary anthropology”—Bloch, Etymologies
and Genealogies (1983). To my knowledge, there is no study of the phenomenon polygyny/
concubinage in a gender theory perspective.
23 Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest (1983), 19 (see Chapter 6); Goetz, Leben im Mit-
telalter (1986), 39; Goody, Geschichte der Familie (2002), 89; Borgolte, “Kulturelle Einheit”
(2004), 4 (there in the genitive).
24 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society (1987), 297 (“… men of wealth often kept women
of inferior social status as concubines, feeling that it was less scandalous and more conve-
nient to retain attractive young women as companions than to marry them”); Firpo, “Con-
cubinas reales” (1986), 338 (concerning the Castilian kings of the 13th/14th centuries):
“hombres débiles sujetos a la voluntad de sus madres, sus barraganas o sus privados”;
Aurell, Noces du comte (1995), 424, about the Occitan-Catalan 12th century (cf. Chapter 6);
Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalter (1973), 70.
25 Cf. Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest (1983), 81: “… show that lawful marriage, in a
society widely given to concubinage, was first and foremost a political weapon.” Duby re-
tains a similar view in his last major work, Women of the Twelfth Century (1996), in which
he devotes some thirty pages to concubinage.
26 “Literary” insofar as they are today considered primarily the object of literary scholarship.
Their “historicity” is as little in question as the “literariness” of texts that are regarded as
the domain of historical scholarship.
Introduction 9

of non-marital relationships, this fact is usually either not expanded upon as

such, or set against the norm of permanent monogamy (usually understood
as the “ecclesiastical model of marriage”), again at the expense of diversity.27
The most far-reaching research to date has been in Scandinavia. In the wake of
numerous studies of medieval Iceland from a decidedly historical-anthropo-
logical perspective since the 1970s,28 the Icelandic frilla system has now come
to be understood with reference to the specific (political) situation as a central
element of aristocratic practice and representation.29 These approaches may
help to inform a comparative view of other European regions.

3 ‘Polygyny’

This study includes the word ‘polygyny’ in its title and uses it a lot in the text.
This requires a definition. ‘Polygyny’ means ‘to have many women.’ A wide-
spread usage of the word is to understand polygyny (the sexual or legal rela-
tionship of a man with multiple women) and its counterpart polyandry (the
relationship of a woman with multiple men) as two variants of the umbrella
term polygamy.30 Poly‘gamy,’ properly speaking, is about multiple sexual

27 The most extreme cases of a rather naive reading (see Liebertz-Grün, ‘Amour courtois’
[1977]) are a thing of the past given recent trends in literary scholarship; cf. for example
Gaunt and Kay, eds, Troubadours (1999). Still, even in more recent research, interpreta-
tions remain more or less explicitly linked with the patterns that have been widespread
since the first major works by Erich Köhler (for instance, Trobadorlyrik [1962]). For a cur-
rent panorama cf. Rieger, ed., Okzitanistik (2000). A recent study which proceeds from
“literary” sources and directly touches the subject of this investigation is Ebel, Konkubinat
(1993).
28 Notably by Hastrup, Culture and History (1985); Hastrup, Island of Anthropology (1990);
Hastrup, A Place Apart (1998); Byock, Medieval Iceland (1988); Miller, Bloodtaking (1990);
see also Turner, “Anthropological Approach” (1971). For the history of research, see the
prefatory chapter.
29 Cf. Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, “Makt och kärlek” (1997); Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och
fruar (2001); Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt (2000). Bandlien, Å finne den rette (2001)
does not go as far; however, the expanded English version, Strategies of Passion. Love and
Marriage in Medieval Iceland and Norway (Turnhout, 2005), was not used for this study.
Holtan remains within a traditional legal history approach: Holtan, Ekteskap (1996);
Holtan, “Frillelevnad” (1997).
30 Peter Gerlitz, “Polygamie,” in LThK 8 (31999), 399f. From an anthropological perspective
polygyny is, for example, defined as “for a man to be married to more than one wife si-
multaneously” (Bretschneider, Polygyny [1995], 11), which, in a transcultural compara-
tive study of as many as 186 past and present societies, immediately entails a serious—
albeit unrecognized—problem of definition regarding the word “married,” more serious
10 Introduction

­relationships (γάμος “sexual intercourse”). However, the term ‘polygamy’ is

now normally used, not in this ‘narrow’ or ‘original’ sense (for which the term
‘polycoity’ has been coined) but according to the figurative meaning of γάμος
as “multiple marriages.” In this sense, ‘polygyny’ would mean ‘for a man to
be married to many women,’ which, in a medieval Christian context, would
be an impossibility. But marriage, particularly ‘full marriage’ (the matrimonium
iustum/legitimum of the juridical texts), is only one form of couple relationship
and can exist alongside other forms, and may consequently be considered as a
partial aspect of complex polygyny (or polyandry, although this only occurs as
a form of representation in medieval Europe in exceptional cases). Moreover,
the suitability of the concept of ‘marriage’ is one of the questions to be exam-
ined, and thus cannot be part of the premise. Therefore this study avoids the
word “polygamy” and instead uses ‘polygyny’ throughout as a descriptive term:
to refer to the socially conspicuous circumstance of a man being in a sexual
relationship with multiple women. (Polygyny may be ‘serial’/‘successive’ or ‘si-
multaneous.’ The latter variant, which contradicts canonical positions more
sharply, is of greater interest.)
I hope the preceding pages have made it obvious why the most common
term for non-marital relationships in the Middle Ages, ‘concubine, concubi-
nage’ cannot serve as a descriptive term (as opposed to its narrower usage in
the context of the sources that contain it).31 It is defined in relation to and as a
deficiency of marriage, and can therefore not be used to describe situations
that encompass both—and other—forms.32 Moreover, the concept is inextri-
cably associated with its juridical anchoring in late Roman civil law, canon law,
and in the later secular legislation of the Middle Ages, and it loses this specific
value when used to label cases that lack this nuance.
Finally, I propose no minimum characteristics or duration for a relation-
ship  to be considered polygynous. The only criterion for the inclusion of a

­perhaps than the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Right’s article 16 on the univer-
sality of the “right to marry.”
31 Clunies Ross, “Concubinage” (1985), 3–34, here 6. In a study with a similar subject matter
to the present investigation, based on a different approach to the term ‘concubinage,’ Cl-
unies Ross states: “[Polygyny] refers to a situation in which a man is permitted to have
more than one wife on a fully legal basis, though it is rare for the several wives to share
equal social status. … [Concubinage] is a type of polygyny available to certain groups of
men within a community that overall practises monogamy.”
32 The term “polygyny” lacks an agent noun like “concubine” for “concubinage.” Therefore, I
make use of terms such as “concubine,” “co-wife” (analogous to the anthropologists’ term)
on a case by case basis, and wherever possible the terms used by the particular source or
simply “(his) woman,” “one of his women,” etc. As far as possible, the aim is not to inter-
pret the categorial ambiguity of the sources through a modern term.
Introduction 11

­man–woman relationship is its social significance, its being perceived, report-

ed, and recorded; therefore, by definition, every individualized relationship
between a man and a woman to be found in a source, even if in extreme cases
it might last only a few minutes, is ‘significant’ in the sense of this investigation
because it acquired a certain social notoriety and duration. This also means
that not every such sexual relationship need ‘actually’ have been sexual (some-
times we simply cannot tell) for it to be socially so.
In the new edition of the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, s. v.
“Nebenfrau” (‘co-wife’), Hermann Reichert proposes the following definition:
“The term Nebenfrau refers to women in polygynous forms of marriage of soci-
eties in which the legal system permits a man to simultaneously form, along-
side a principal marriage, one or more other bonds of lower legal status or
marriages of equal rank. Polygyny therefore differs on the one hand from con-
cubinage, that is, monogamous relationships with less regulation than matri-
monium, particularly in divorce and inheritance law (cohabitation), and on the
other hand from illegal or shifting short-term sexual relationships during a mo-
nogamous marriage.” Reichert goes on to acknowledge that “the extent of true
polygyny is uncertain” as neither clerics nor chroniclers “distinguished clearly”
between the different types of relationships.33
It may have become clear that the concept of polygyny proposed in this
book differs from Reichert’s in all essential respects. I am going to argue that
polygyny is not a form of marriage, but marriage can be a form of relationship
within overall polygyny;34 concubinage is not a form of relationship, but a per-
ceptual category that can be applied to very different types of bond depending
on the context; legal status is irrelevant for the inclusion or exclusion of a case;
also “short-term sexual relationships” are taken into account. Different rela-
tionships interrelate within a continuum of comparatives such as ‘longer or
shorter,’ ‘more or less prestigious,’ ‘associated with higher or lower status,’ but
there is no minimum (for we must always reckon with relationships that we
know nothing of) and only a relational maximum (a woman is the most emi-
nent at a certain point in time or in a particular situation). Whether the legal
historians’ ‘full marriage’ occurs in a certain continuum, and whether it then

33 H[ermann] Reichert, “Nebenfrau,” in rga, vol. 11 (2002), 18–31, here 18.

34 Bernhard Jussen, “Scheidung, Konkubinat, Polygynie,” in EdM, vol. 1 (2008), 166f., discuss-
es this position with reference to my habilitation thesis and contrasts it with the view of
polygyny advocated by Michael Borgolte, “Kulturelle Einheit” (2004), 4, as an “aspect … of
the vast sphere of marriage law and practice.” Borgolte’s essay may have been influenced
thematically by the present study, which was taking shape at his institute at that time, but
is independent in terms of content (see the reference in ibid., 6f. n. 23).
12 Introduction

defines an absolute maximum (the uxor cannot be more than legitima), is part
of the question, not a foregone conclusion.

4 Structure

The first and larger part of this book (Chapters 1–5) is a study of polygyny in
medieval Northern Europe between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries—
or rather, of the narrative constitution of social order based on the representa-
tion of polygynous practices in 12th-/13th-century sources that purport to por-
tray the tenth to thirteenth centuries. There is also a prefatory chapter called “A
Word on the Sources.” In the original version of this book, which was published
in a series of general comparative history of the European Middle Ages, this
chapter aimed to introduce German-language readers, in their majority not
conversant with Scandinavian history and Old Norse, to the sagas, to problems
and tendencies of saga criticism, and other sources available. Scandinavian
and Norse studies loom larger in Anglophone medieval studies (I owe my own
introduction to them to my teacher, Jo Hunter, at the University of Sheffield),
and as this translation now appears in the ‘Northern World’ series, I suppose
that much of this chapter is somewhat redundant or may even seem rather
‘first-year’ to its readers. I have reduced it considerably, but not deleted it alto-
gether because it contains some of the justification for my treatment of sourc-
es with which, I am sure, many readers of the present edition are much more
familiar than the author. So I encourage readers to tackle the prefatory chapter
at their own pace, to fast-forward or to skip pages at their own discretion.
Chapters 1–5 contain the discussion of the five ‘aspects’ of polygyny by way
of case studies drawn from Northern European history. These can become
rather detailed at times, and I realize that the reader’s patience may be put to
the test in places. I feel, however, that having made some rather sweeping
statements on marriage and polygyny in the introduction, I need some in-
depth discussion of the sources to support those statements with evidence.
I can only defend myself by pointing out that what is offered here is just a se-
lection, which is perhaps small comfort.
“The North” comprises the Scandinavian peninsula, the southern rims of
the North and Baltic Seas, and the North Atlantic islands35 as well as parts of
the British Isles. An alternative name for it might be ‘the Viking World,’ but I

35 The discussion on pan-Nordic commonalities and intra-Nordic differences cannot be ad-

dressed in more detail here; see the transdisciplinary collective study, Hastrup, ed., Den
nordiske verden (1992), and countless other works.
Introduction 13

prefer the more sober geographical denomination, not least because ‘the Vi-
kings,’ whoever they were, would have had good reason to include parts of
present-day France, Spain, Russia and Ucraine in ‘their’ world.
Given that Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla traces the unification of the Nor-
wegian kingdom back to the Harald Fairhair’s relationship with a frilla (more
about this in the prefatory chapter), the subject hardly requires further justifi-
cation. References to polygyny are found in all relevant testimonies, beginning
with Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum. The pro-
visions of the various provincial laws, especially in the area of inheritance law,
contain much information about the forms and consequences of heterosexual
relationships, though their dependence on the views and interests of the legis-
lators, as well as the fundamental problem of dating specific items and expres-
sions of these laws, whose extant versions date from the late twelfth century or
later, place a limit on what they can tell us about how the ‘rich men’ (and wo­
men) practised and above all imagined polygyny. The bulk of the material is
found in the West Norse narrative works, the sagas,36 with an emphasis on the
kings’ sagas and therefore on Norwegian history. The descriptions of polygy-
nous relationships here are often sufficiently detailed to be analyzed as “thick”
moments.37 Besides the sagas, there are the Latin histories, above all Saxo
Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum,38 as well as the minor histories and annals, ha-
giography39 and scattered sources, all much used by the prolific Scandinavian
and Anglo-American research on Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia.
Chapters 6 and 7 contain the two “comparative views” of the West and the
South by way of the North. “The West” is represented, grosso modo, by the re-
gion around the English Channel: Normandy, “le Grand Anjou,”40 and England.

36 For the sources and methodological foundations of this study, see below, “A Word on the
Sources.”
37 In the sense of the long since classical “thick description.” Cf. Geertz, “Thick Description:
Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
(1973), 3–30. The justified criticism of the fuzziness of Geertz’s concept of “social semio-
sis” (cf. Pecora, “Limits of Local Knowledge” [1989]) can be answered with a more careful
distinction between significant and less significant events; cf. Hastrup, “Kultur som analy-
tisk begreb” (1998).
38 Cf. Friis-Jensen, Saxo Grammaticus (1981); Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980); Skovgaard-
Petersen, Da tidernes herre var nær (1987); Santini, Saxo Grammaticus (1992); Riis, Gesta
Danorum (2006).
39 Stephens, ed., Ett forn-svenskt legendarium (1847–74); Unger, ed., Heilagra manna søgur
(1877); Wolf, ed., Heilagra meyja sǫgur (2003); cf. Gad, Helgener (1971); Carlquist, De forn­
svenska helgonlegenderna (1996).
40 Barthélemy, “Note sur le ‘maritagium’” (1992), 10: besides Anjou in the narrow sense, this
term includes the adjoining regions such as Maine, Vendômois, and Western Touraine—
i.e. the southern part of the “Western region” of this study.
14 Introduction

The key question is whether the findings of the study on Northern European
polygyny can help provide a more comprehensive understanding of the situa-
tion in the ‘West’ than is possible on the basis of the material available from the
region itself. Beyond the vast Latin historiographical and documentary mater­
ial, the ‘West’ is famed for its vernacular literary production: the faux-Celtic
lais, romans more or less characterized by the new behavioural standard of
‘courtly love,’ archaizing epics, and chansons de toile. Here we find questions of
polygyny everywhere, in passing or prominently, from the two great imaginary
kings, Arthur and Charlemagne,41 to the diverse adventures of the Knights of
the Round Table. We encounter women from familiar or seemingly familiar
environments—the pucelles of castles and entourages—as well as women
who are more or less clearly marked out as otherworldly—the sarrasines and
the fées. Unlike in the North, Western European testimonies for polygyny are
often short, terse, incidental, and ‘fragmentary’ in the sense that they lack the
context that would permit further interpretation. Such at best ‘significant de-
tails’42 or even insignificant findings can be combined to form a significant
chain of facts, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense,43 so the Western European findings
are here considered in light of the investigation of the ‘aspects’ of elite polygy-
ny in Northern Europe.
“The South” encompasses the northwest of the Mediterranean Basin, that is,
Catalonia and Mediterranean Occitania; in the broader sense, it extends to the
entire Iberian Peninsula with occasional glances overseas. The focal point is
the Crown of Aragon, a region immediately adjacent to the Muslim-controlled
part of the peninsula in constant contact with its trans-Pyrenean neighbours.
A particularly striking example of princely concubinage serves as the starting
point here: King James I (‘the Conqueror’) and Countess Aurembiaix of Urgell
in 1228. In this last chapter, discussion of some generalizing hypotheses takes
the place of systematic comparison so as to avoid the tediousness of repeti-
tion. It highlights the contrast between an earlier, ‘paritarian,’ aristocratic style
with the ‘monarchical’ style chosen and cultivated by James I44 as well as the
concept of the “grammar of mentality,”45 the symbolic idiom of the Occitan-
Catalan aristocracy based on the linguistic and practical polysemy of ‘wom-
an’ and women. Iberian perspectives are on Castile (the story of the “Jewess

41 Cf. Boutet, “Bâtardise et sexualité” (1992).

42 Cf. Ginzburg, Spurensicherungen (1988).
43 Cf. Bourdieu, Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen (1974), 14.
44 Cf. Rüdiger, “Mit Worten gestikulieren” (2000); Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001);
Rüdiger, “Herrschaft und Stil” (2005).
45 On the concept, see Rüdiger, “Das Morphem Frau” (2000); Rüdiger, “Orchards of Power”
(2019).
Introduction 15

of Toledo,” probably the most well-known, though apocryphal, case of royal

concubinage in the Middle Ages, does not fall into the period under investi-
gation) and the polygynous practices of the aristocracy in al-Andalus, based
on different religious and legal foundations but shaped by similar political
contingencies.
My discussions of the West and the South make no claim to comprehensive-
ness, as any reader familiar with English, French, or Spanish history will soon
realize. Rather, they aim to suggest paths of further investigation drawn from
the discussion of the North. The history of the Mediterranean, so rich and mul-
tifaceted, can here only be addressed through brief pointers. It must also large-
ly do without Byzantium, which is unforgiveable for a work of European his-
tory. The ‘Byzantine Gaze’ does form the point of departure of the conclusion,
which is small consolation.

5 ‘Aspects’ of Polygyny

The hypothesis of this study is that, under certain circumstances, polygynous

relationships can acquire socio-semantic meanings. What are the meanings,
the ‘uses’ of polygyny? If we assume that these relationships were not (merely)
a matter of powerful men experiencing a ‘moment of passion’ but that men
and women with them (also) practised what we call, with a certain embarrass-
ment, ‘politics’—then it might be a good idea to investigate these uses. To do
so, I name five ‘aspects.’
The generative aspect (Chapter 1) is the increased likelihood of producing
socially acceptable heirs, to whom material and immaterial succession can
be transferred. Social anthropologists such as Jack Goody and many others46
have focused above all on this aspect. Goody emphasizes the radical changes
brought about by the church’s teachings since late antiquity, which reached
their most intense form at the beginning of the study’s focal point: endogamy
(“incest”), adoption, sororal marriage, and concubinage were curtailed or per-
manently eliminated. Traces of these conflicts can be found in all regions un-
der consideration; the focus will be on Norway and Denmark.
That polygynous practices should offer great potential for the stylization of
masculinity is all too immediately apparent to us.47 Indeed, we tend to take

46 See above, note 7.

47 Henry iii of Guelders, prince-bishop of Liège (s. 1247–85), boasted of fathering 14 chil-
dren in 22 months (Fabritius, Geschichte des Hochstifts Lüttich (1792), 115, following the
17th-century chronicle of Servais Foullon, abbot of Sint-Truiden)—according to his op-
ponents, who sought his deposition at the Council of Lyons.
16 Introduction

this for granted, without stopping to ask why or in what way polygyny can
serve to increase status, and whose status is at issue. Lying in bed between two
women, the Icelandic magnate Þorvald Snorrason acquires status in a different
manner to Robert of Arbrissel or the insular saints Aldhelm and Scothíne in
the same situation.48 It is therefore necessary to examine the habitus of indi-
vidual aristocratic milieus in order to understand the operating principles of
this habitual aspect (Chapter 2). Related to it is the agonistic aspect (Chapter 3),
which works both gender ways: in the competition of several men over one
woman, or one man’s agonistic choice from a group of women. Both deal with
the Tacitean “non libidine sed ob nobilitatem” in their own way.
The expressive aspect (Chapter 4), which has, to my knowledge, not previ-
ously been discussed as such, is particularly dependent on specific circum-
stances, on time, place, and participants. When a powerful man forms a rela-
tionship with one or more women in a way that is sufficiently conspicuous to
be registered and commented upon, the participants—the man, the woman
(or women), and their kinship and friendship groups—can make a number of
statements. What is uncontested for ‘marriage’ (“marriage politics”) can equal-
ly apply to other relationships, even more so given the various situations and
possibilities offered by plural bonds. This is about the ‘social semantics’ of po-
lygyny. In the last aspect described here, called somewhat hesitantly the per-
formative aspect (Chapter 5), “libido” and “nobilitas” meet again. In the literary
imagination and (by all accounts) in concrete practice, the acquisition of land,
possessions, and lordship often goes hand in hand with the acquisition of
women with a particular relationship to the land, possession, or lordship in
question. From raids on Anglo-Saxon nunneries to the beles sarrasines whom,
according to the crusade epics, the victorious milites Christi took lor delis in,49
this motif runs throughout the European Middle Ages. In this context, it is also
important to consider the possibilities offered by the practice of enslavement
for converting a hypergynous situation into a hypogynous one.50 But symbolic
appropriation also assumes less immediate forms, and in this mediatization,

48 On Þorvald Snorrason, see Chapter 2. On Robert of Arbrissel, see Dalarun, Erotik und Ent­
haltsamkeit (1987); on Aldhelm and Scothíne (and Western spiritual, ascetic marriage in
general), cf. Reynolds, “Virgines subintroductae” (1968); Herbert, “Legend of St Scothíne”
(2000–01).
49 Chanson d’Antioche, v. 6413; see Chapter 5.
50 On medieval slavery in general, see Verlinden, L’esclavage (1977); on the regions: Verlinden,
Slavenhandel en economische ontwikkeling (1979); Heers, Esclaves et domestiques (1981);
Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading” (1981); Karras, “Concubinage and Slavery”
(1990), 141–62; Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei auf Island (1978); Iversen, Trelldommen (1997).
Introduction 17

examined by Jacques Le Goff among others,51 the woman cannot only signify
but also in a certain sense be the land, the city, the spoils in their entirety. Here
we are venturing into the realm of mentalités collectives with sources only giv-
ing very oblique hints, so we are well advised to move with caution and only
draw conclusions by analogy with care. This aspect is discussed by way of a
Norwegian case from the conversion period (around 1000).

6 Objective

It might be a good idea to state what this study does not aim to be. It is not a
history of women who lived in polygynous relationships. It is not they, their
experiences, and lifeworlds that take centre stage. Much as we should like to
get close to the individual experiences of the women concerned, it is only rare-
ly that we get a glimpse of their lives and minds, and though that is true of
medieval men too—we know a lot more about very many eighteenth-century
women than about any medieval man—the women all but fade into intangi-
bility. This is why this book, like other works on medieval history, has an inevi-
table male bias which can only to a limited extent be redressed by historio-
graphical reflection. I am certain that women were as much actively involved
in the socio-political games this study deals with as ‘their’ men, but I am very
hard pressed to show it. So this book is less about women, men, and their rela-
tionships than about the way these relationships impinged on the society
around them, ‘made a difference.’
This study is not about concubinage, or whatever name we might choose to
attribute to the legal and social institution. Firstly, its focus is on ‘political cul-
ture,’ that is, on the groups that are today called ‘elites,’ although probably only
their most stalwart propagandists would claim (as Ramon Llull did)52 that
elites actually came into their positions through any kind of “election,” as the
etymology would suggest. Polygynous and/or non-marital relationships among
the vast majority of men and women therefore do not play a role in this book.
Secondly, its premise is the doubt about the idea that extramarital—and by
extension, marital—relations are ‘institutions’ that can be grasped in terms of
legal history or the deductive models of social history. Insofar as the assess-
ment of the mere existence of polygynous relationships remains outside its

51 Le Goff, “Krieger und erobernde Bürger” (1990); cf. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens (1991);
Gravdal, “Chrétien de Troyes” (1992).
52 Ramon Llull, Llibre de l’Orde de Cavalleria c. 1, on the etiology of chivalry as a meritocratic
selection procedure in primitive society.
18 Introduction

scope, neither is it a social history of the aristocracy. Instead, it takes a good

deal of its inspiration from Jacques Le Goff’s programmatic remark—still rel-
evant half a century later—about the “new political history,” the call for a “po-
litical anthropology” of the Middle Ages, and the suggestion that “particular
attention would be paid to the study of the various semiological systems be-
longing to the science of politics: vocabulary, rites, behavior, mental attitudes.”53
Aristocratic polygyny is here understood as one such system, and approached
in its diversity beyond monistic explanations of pleasure and love, power and
status.
The study is conceived as a contribution to European history, but consid-
ers only three larger regions of the medieval West. This is not done with the
(usually deceptive) expectation that the particular will somehow turn into
the general. On the contrary, as Árpád von Klimó urged in 2005, “in the fu-
ture, European history should be written by way of the precise and compre-
hensive analysis and presentations of some few problems, without any claim
to completeness.”54 So this is a history of elite polygyny in the medieval West
but not of ‘Elite Polygyny of the Medieval West.’ As I will argue in the conclu-
sion, the medieval West has had its fair share of ‘centring’ these last twenty
(or perhaps two hundred?) years, so it might not be amiss to try, in Hans Med-
ick’s words, a “decentring comparison” which “does not brush aside individual
­cases, but always uses them as a reference point from which to ask the ques-
tion of the similarities, commonalities, and differences of historical phenom-
ena and their explanation.”55
The study is also ‘decentring’ in another sense. Two of the three main re-
gions under discussion are on what is commonly considered the periphery of
Latin Europe. The North, central to this study, belongs to “younger Europe”
(J. Kłoczowski),56 the medieval expansion zone of Latin Christendom. The
northwestern Mediterranean arc, a strongly Romanized zone of early Christian
penetration, does not at first glance resemble the expansion zones of the
North, but during the period covered here, this region on the ‘frontier’ of Dar
al-Islām was also a zone in which Latinity was on the retreat and certain

53 Le Goff, “Is Politics still the Backbone” (1971), 11f.

54 Von Klimó, Review of Mythen der Nationen (2005).
55 Medick, “Entlegene Geschichte?” (1992), 174 and 176; the plea was included—in both
­cases with reference to Natalie Zemon Davis—in the editorial of the first issue of Histo-
rische Anthropologie (1, 1993, 4). Cf. Emeliantseva, “Historischer Vergleich” (2005).
56 Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa (1998). For Scandinavian historiographical debate, see Inges-
man and Poulsen, eds., Danmark og Europa (2000); Ingesman and Lindkvist, “Norden och
Europa” (2001); Staecker, ed., European Frontier (2004); Blomkvist, Discovery of the Baltic
(2005).
Introduction 19

i­mpulses from the integrating centres, be they in Frankland or beyond the

Strait of Gibraltar, created a lot of uneasiness. By contrast, the lands around the
English Channel are clearly at the centre if not the centre of ‘the medieval
West’ or ‘Latin Europe.’ This means, among other things, that literary Latin al-
most completely dominated the production of written sources available to us.
Only towards the end of the period did a sectional vernacular literacy develop,
but this happened arguably within a framework laid out by Latin genres, stylis-
tics, and ideas of literary propriety. Frankland was, and remained, ‘Latin.’
Things were different on or beyond some of the fringes of (post-) Carolingia:
in England before 1066, in Wales and Ireland, in Norway and Iceland, in Occi-
tania and, mutatis mutandis, in the Iberian Peninsula. And the non-Latin writ-
ten languages of Latin Europe are by no means makeshift attempts at the clos-
est approximation a semiliterate population could muster to an encounter
with the true yet only crudely understood grammatica, but an enormous ad-
ditional cultural endeavour, in which solid Latin foundations were creatively
applied to a linguistic situation for which they were not created. The mere ex-
istence of a relevant corpus of sources in a ‘vernacular’ (actually an alternative
high-level language) already testifies to the desire of the particular culture to
distance itself from the Frankish core of the continent which had so pro-
nouncedly opted for Latin literacy alone. This is not necessarily a confronta-
tional distancing; but it is a reflexive one.57 A study whose fundamental meth-
odological concern is to set, against the uniformity of concubinatus suggested
by Latin sources, the diversity of the practised and imagined varieties of Euro-
pean magnate polygyny, its frillur, soignants, amasias, and barraganas (with a
glance at the ğawāri), will do well to consider the non-Latin testimonies of
‘Latin Europe.’
This study is predominantly concerned with narrative sources. The objec-
tive pursued is to make the individual case and its contextualization the
­starting point of any interpretation. While documentary sources on polygyny
in the High Middle Ages are few and far between, this study also makes com-
paratively little use of the numerous available legal sources. On the one hand,
this is because most previous studies on the theme of marriage/concubinage
focus on legal and prescriptive material and I should like to try a different
­approach here. On the other hand, significant individual cases tend to be found
in narrative sources, and generalization in tracts, legal books, and council

57 For further discussion, see Rüdiger, Did Charlemagne know (2011); Rüdiger and Foerster,
“Aemulatio – Recusatio” (2014).
20 Introduction

­decrees.58 The latter tells us more about the pan-European; with luck, the for-
mer reveals things that appear quite different in Norway in the twelfth century
than in France in the eleventh. Some of these sources have thus been little
used in scholarly discussion, so introducing them here may also be useful in
that respect. If the results of this study differ from other positions, this is prob-
ably due in no small part to the selection of sources.59 It does not deny the va-
lidity of earlier, diverging results; at most it raises the question of whether and
to what extent seemingly contradictory findings are due to the difference in
approach, or whether it might be indicated to modify some or other general-
izing conception after all. The floor, as they say, is open.

7 Postscript 2020

I am glad to see Der König und seine Frauen published in English, and in the
‘Northern World’ series too. In a way it belongs here, since it now sides with
many other studies of medieval Scandinavia and Northwestern Europe. In its
2015 German first edition, it was perhaps something of a loner.
The translation process has not been a straightforward one. Readers will
notice that this book bears the indelible imprint of Academic German
(a quaint sociolect). This has to do with the genesis of the book. It started life
as the habilitation thesis I submitted to the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in
September 2006. Due to an eventful career, undertaking the revisions neces-
sary to turn a Habilitationsschrift into a readable book was a drawn-out pro-
cess. The book was finally published in November 2015. It was about time too.
Meanwhile, the editors of the ‘Northern World’ series at Brill had accepted
to publish an English version of the book. I am profoundly grateful to the series
editors then and now as well as the staff at Brill who have made it happen. Tim
Barnwell provided a faithful translation of the original. Reading it, it really
came home to me how far apart the two academic languages are; the book
seemed even to have become more ‘German’ in translation. So I undertook a
revision. Two revisions really: one was syntactical and grammatical, chopping
up hypotaxes and deleting phrase-initial subclauses by the dozen; the other

58 This generalizing distinction is, of course, of questionable validity (for the ‘narrative’ char-
acter of legal sources, see the following chapter). While individual cases abound in legal
records, those are rare or non-existent for the period under discussion.
59 In this sense, I would like to invoke a dictum of the Danish anthropologist Kirsten Has-
trup, who states in Culture and History (1985), 7: “I claim that my story tells the truth; and
if this is not the whole truth, then it is at least one whole truth, about the early history of
Iceland.”
Introduction 21

was stylistic, smoothing down what is perfectly acceptable in German but

sounds intolerably heavy-going in English. No doubt a number of new mis-
takes of all kinds have crept into the text in the process, mistakes for which Tim
Barnwell must not be held accountable. I hope the result is palatable for Eng-
lish readers.
The book has not been revised or updated as to its content, and neither have
the apparatus and bibliography, accounting as they do for the material I used
when I wrote it more than a decade ago. I have only added references to some
of my own more recent publications which develop further some of the points
discussed here. Of course, there have been important new scholarly publica-
tions on all of the quite disparate topics touched upon in this book. To include
them would have meant to rewrite it. I do hope that even in its original form,60
its essential points are still relevant (reviews will undoubtedly let me know if I
am wrong).
Norse personal names are usually given in standardized spelling based on
Íslenzk fornrit usage but without the nominative ending if it makes the name
look all too unfamiliar (Óláf not ‘Óláfr’). For places, unless there is an English
convention I use modern names, preferring regional over nation-state forms.
Unless otherwise stated, translations from sources or secondary literature are
by the author.

60 This is also the form referred to in some recent Anglophone scholarship such as d’Avray,
Papacy, Monarchy, and Marriage (2015); McDougall, Royal Bastards (2017); van Houts,
Married Life in the Middle Ages (2019).
King Harald Fairhair’s Women: a Word on the
Sources

1 “…And Then He Took Her to Bed”

This is a story told in thirteenth-century Norway about a ninth-century king:

King Harald sent his men to fetch a girl whose name was Gyða, daughter
of King Eirík of Hǫrðaland—she was being fostered in Valdres with a rich
farmer—whom he wished to take as his frilla, since she was a very beauti-
ful girl and rather proud. But when the messengers got there, they deliv-
ered their message to the girl. She replied in the following manner, that
she is not willing to sacrifice her virginity in order to take as her husband
a king who had no more of a realm than a few districts to administer. “But
it seems strange to me,” she says, “that there is no king who wants to take
possession of Norway so as to be sole ruler over it, as King Gorm has in
Denmark or Eirík at Uppsalir.”
The messengers thought she was replying astonishingly haughtily, and
put the question to her, what good this reply can do, saying that Harald is
such a powerful king, that he can do as he pleases in this. But although
she is responding to their mission otherwise than they would wish, they
see no alternative to carrying her off, unless she would agree to it, and
they prepare to depart. And when they are ready, people came to see
them off. Then Gyða spoke to the messengers, told them to take this mes-
sage to King Harald, that she will only agree to being his if he will first do
this for her sake, subject the whole of Norway to himself and rule that
realm as independently as King Eirík rules the realm of the Svíar or King
Gorm Denmark. “For then it seems to me,” she says, “that he can be called
a sovereign king.”
The messengers now go back to King Harald and tell him these words
of the girl, and say they think that she is remarkably bold and silly, and
they think it fitting that the king should send a great army to fetch her in
disgrace. Then King Harald replies that this girl had not said or done any-
thing wrong, so as to merit punishment, saying she should be heartily
thanked for what she had said. “She has drawn my attention to things,” he
says, “which it now seems to me strange that I have not considered be-
fore.” And he went on: “I make this vow and I call to witness the god who
created me and governs all things, that my hair shall never be cut or

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_003

King Harald Fairhair’s Women 23

combed until I have gained the whole of Norway with its taxes and dues
and government or die in the attempt.”1

This tale opens the saga of Harald Fairhair (Haralds saga ins hárfagra) in
Heims­kringla, the history of the Norwegian kings, composed in the years
around 1230 by the Icelandic magnate Snorri Sturluson. It comprises the third
and fourth chapters of the 43 chapters of Harald’s saga. The preceding two
chapters report how the ten-year-old Harald succeeded his father, the south
Norwegian petty king Hálfdan the Black, just after the middle of the ninth cen-
tury, and how he gradually expanded his sphere of control at the expense of
neighbouring petty kings with the help of his maternal uncle. All this is still
confined to the area around Harald’s local base; there is no mention of any
ambition to rule “the whole of Norway” on Harald’s part. His failed attempt to
gain a Westland girl is therefore a turning point in Norwegian history. It marks
nothing less than the beginning of rikssamling, “the unification of the king-
dom”: the start of the history of Norway.
Over the following chapters of the saga, both Harald’s hair and the number
of petty kingdoms subjected to him continue to grow. Finally, it comes down to
the decisive battle at Hafsfjord near Stavanger in southwestern Norway, tradi-
tionally if uncertainly dated to 872. Only then does the king allow his hair to be
cut, and subsequently goes down in history as Haraldr inn hárfagri, Harald the
fair-haired. And he also brings another story to an end:

King Harald had now become sole ruler of all Norway. Then he called to
mind what that proud girl had said to him. He then sent men for her and
had her brought to him and lay with her. These were their children: Álof
was eldest, then was Hroerek, then Sigtrygg, Fróði and Þorgils.2

The young Norwegian nation, whose ʻre-ʼemergence after its secession from
the Danish Crown in 1814 coincided so well with the advent of modern histori-
ography, has made Snorri’s splendid narrative its own to a degree that is

1 HsH c. 3–4; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 55–56. The basic textual
criticism remains Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, “Formáli,” in Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnar-
son, vol. 1 (1941), lviii-lxxxi; a good introduction with further references is offered by Whaley,
Heimskringla (1991); on its compilation, see also Louis-Jensen, “Heimskringla – et værk”
(1997); on parallel sources, Kreutzer, “Bild Harald Schönhaars” (1994). If in the following I call
the author of Heimskringla “Snorri” this is not meant to reflect on Jonna Louis-Jensen’s (and
others’) doubts concerning his authorship; let us say, slightly disingeniously, that I use “Snor-
ri” as shorthand for “the author(s) and/or compilators of Heimskringla.”
2 HsH c. 20; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 68.
24 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

­ robably unparalleled in Europe. Even today, almost a century after the onset
p
of serious source criticism of the sagas in general and Heimskringla in particu-
lar, Snorri’s Book of Kings remains the first recourse when it comes to historical
myths of medieval Norway.3 His compelling narrative has survived scholarly
examination almost unscathed—or rather, professional historical knowledge
based on a century of source criticism4 coexists with Snorri’s unscathed narra-
tive in the sense that in the 21st century both are ‘true’ in a complementary,
non-competitive way. As unifier of the kingdom, Harald rests under a ‘Viking’
memorial site of burial mounds and memorial stones near his royal court at
Avaldsnes in the Westland, precisely the region which first caught his attention
through his interest in Gyða, and whose conquest at the Battle of Hafsfjord has
been regarded the keystone of the unification of the realm ever since Snorri.
Harald Fairhair will always be the first king of Norway.
It is therefore astonishing that Gyða Eiríksdóttir, the girl who gave Harald
Fairhair the idea of uniting Norway, has not been chosen to be a heroine at his
side by modern national history. She has not become a Queen Clotilde, a Thyra
Danebod, or Libuše, and this is certainly not because the source base is shakier
here. Causes of different sort must lie behind the refusal to grant young Gyða
the transformation into a historical fact, a transformation granted to King
Harald, his parents, and many other people in Haralds saga hárfagra. Instead,
the patriotic national histories of the nineteenth century, which by and large
retell the political history of the 10th–13th centuries by paraphrasing Heims­
kringla or a few other similar saga texts, in unison relegated the Gyða story to
the realm of fiction. In his History of the Norwegian People, which reads much
like a book of folk tales, Peter Andreas Munch, retelling the episode in detail,
judges that it “has too romantic a character to be trusted.” One element only,
Harald’s vow not to shave his hair before he reaches his goal, is, according to

3 Beginning with the Stiklestad festivals on St. Olav’s Day (29 July), held for the first time in
1954 and annually since 1961, a culture of summer open-air festivals has developed through-
out Norway, which usually feature the performance of an episode from Heimskringla, drama-
tized and/or set to music. The significance of these festivals for the decentralized cultural
landscape of Norway is considerably greater than comparable events in other European
countries, and transcends the ‘event/tourism sector,’ as reflected, for instance, in the partici-
pation of the regional symphony orchestras and distinguished stage actors. See Stene, ed.,
Slag i slag (1995).
4 Among the more recent handbooks to be mentioned are the relevant volumes (2 and 3) of
Aschehougs Norgeshistorie: Krag, Vikingtid og rikssamling (1995) and Helle, Under kirke og
kongemakt (1995); from Samlaget’s Norsk historie: Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Norsk historie (1999);
Krag, Norges historie (2000). They reflect the source-studies problematization discussed
below.
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 25

Munch, “perfect historical truth.”5 Similar distinctions between the ‘more’ and
the ‘less reliable’ parts of Snorri’s history of kings, the latter always including
the Gyða episode, also characterize the History of Norway, Described for the
Norwegian People by the prominent textual critic Alexander Bugge (Gyða as
legendary material) and the Life and History of the Norwegian People through
the Ages by Haakon Shetelig (Gyða “means no more than the dreams in Half­
dan svartes saga”).6 However, even as a romantic myth, Gyða remained a piv-
otal figure. As a result of the great dissemination of Heimskringla, actively pro-
moted by the state through educational and financial measures, she is, or used
to be, known to practically every Norwegian.
Once declared to be a ‘legend’ by professional historians, the story of the
princess could be retold at will. For one, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the most ven-
erated poet of the country, adopted the motif in his “commemorative speech
on Harald Fairhair” on the occasion of a “feast to commemorate the fathers” at
the student association of the University of Christiania in 1870:

Imbued with the dreams of the father and mother, imbued with the myth
of the whole line, he stretches out his hand to bright Gyda of the North-
land spirit, its revelation; and he receives her lofty response: win me! The
idea of the time shone around her head, the young warrior saw his life
goal—and when it was achieved, there was also her endless love! The
Northland spirit is strict, it imposes strict terms; but it can be won, it loves
endlessly, it has loved Harald and his line endlessly.7

There is a considerable gap between Bjørnson’s ethereal Gyða, “revelation of

the Northland spirit,” and Snorri’s Westland princess whom Harald wanted as
a bedfellow. An all too literal reading of the passage was rather undesirable in
the decades around 1900: it would simply not do to suggest that the venerated
first “rikssamler” had been a young lecher. This made translating the original
Norse text of Heimskringla into modern Norwegian difficult. Certain transla-
tors seem to have felt the need to tone down the original. For example, Didrik
Arup Seip and Anne Holtsmark, two Norse scholars whose knowledge of the
source language is beyond all doubt, saw fit to render the coarse phrase “ok
lagði hana hjá sér” (“and laid her by his side”) as “og giftet seg med henne” (“and

5 Munch, Det norske folks historie vol. 1,1 (1852), 464f. For Munch, the latter detail appears to go
with the practice of agonistic vow taking (heitstrenging); cf. Chapter 3.
6 Those which assured Harald’s mother of the future greatness of the royal line; see Chapter 1.
7 Bjørnson, Artikler og taler, vol. 1 (1912), 336.
26 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

married her”)—in a translation first published in 1959 and repeatedly reprint-

ed to this day.8
The uneasiness around the Gyða figure, the readiness to freely dismiss her
as historically unsupported, as well as the obvious philological liberties that
have been taken with her over time, all are focused on one word, the one that
disqualified Gyða once and for all as a national ancestor: she was a frilla. The
word is a medieval term often used in narrative and legal sources (var. friðla); it
has a rare masculine counterpart friðill and belongs to the semantic field frið-,
the sphere of “peace, friendship, alliance.” Middle High German has a frequent
feminine equivalent, friedel.9 While the revival of the German term essentially
failed in the nineteenth century, frille/-a became common again in modern
Scandinavian and acquired a connotation of moral dubiousness which the
bourgeois interpreters of the Middle Ages had to deal with. The mere fact that
the first king to unify Norway obviously practised polygyny needed to be ex-
plained away somehow. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, lecturing on the subject of
“monogamy and polygamy,” dealt with the problem in the following manner:

Even in Harald Fairhair’s day powerful men could have several wives of
equal status. After this came to an end, we find the son of a frille compet-
ing for the throne on equal terms with the son of a wife. Then this, too,
became impossible; yet still in the sixteenth, even seventeenth centuries,
we come across hosts, even pastors, who were not averse to lending their
daughters to a travelling king or other great man. Then this, too, became
impossible … but the customs in the last [the 18th] century and even the
first years of our own [the 19th] century still permitted much, which
would today [1887] throw society into turmoil. The progress is obvious.10

In this view, polygyny becomes an indicator of moral progress both in time

and in space. Bjørnson compares Europe with backward cultures such as the
USA and the Islamic world, which he views in terms of their slavery, which

8 Snorres kongesagaer (51998), 61; corresponding with Hagen/Joys, Vårt folks historie, vol. 1
(1962), 336. Likewise the translations of Schjøtt/Magerøy, Snorres kongesoger (1979), vol. 1,
61: “gifta seg med henne”; Johansen, Snorre (2002), 17: “de giftet seg.” The recent English
translation by Finlay and Foulkes quoted above has “and lay with her.” For an important
earlier medieval example, cf. Gregory of Tours, Historiae iii, 22: “suoque eam copulavit
stratu.”
9 Most famously perhaps in Walther von der Vogelweide’s song Under der linden, Cf. Ebel,
Konkubinat (1993), 150ff.
10 Bjørnson, “Engifte og mangegifte” (lecture, first given in 1887), 88; reference has already
been made to this lecture in the Introduction.
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 27

“­inevitably” entails polygyny (“it is needless to discuss which society has come
further, theirs or ours”). Within the liberal progressist narrative, the Middle
Ages, especially their earlier, ‘darker’ part, become a necessary Other;11 but
through this alterity it also receives its own dignity. What was permissible for
a pre-Christian ‘noble pagan’ like Harald Fairhair was no longer possible in the
Christian Middle Ages; but then the greatest kings of the Norwegian ‘time of
greatness’ (storhetstid), Sverrir (r. 1177–1202) and Hákon iv (r. 1217–63), were
sons of frillur, and even Saint Olav (r. 1015–28/30), the missionary king who
completed the unification of the realm and whose cult was developed in Lu-
theran Norway to become a state-supporting historical myth,12 left Magnus, his
son with a frilla, as heir to the throne. So even this virtually semi-polygynous
stage could not easily be explained away in the national civilization process.
The promiscuity of the powerful, which Bjørnson carefully placed within
­Norway’s “Danish period” (dansketiden 1537–1814), is thus fitted twice over into
a narrative with a positive tendency which leads right up to the present and
future.

2 “Concubine or Wife?”

Meanwhile, it still was expedient to translate Harald Fairhair’s relationship

with Gyða Eiríksdóttir into a ‘marriage’ at least to some reading audiences. The
fact that Gyða was not Harald’s only woman, however, could not be glossed
over by either Snorri or his modern translators. Immediately following the pas-
sage quoted above, in which the king “lay with” (translated as “married”) Gyða,
Snorri lists their four children and goes on to say: “King Harald had many wives
and many children” (Haraldr konungr átti margar konur ok mǫrg bǫrn). Besides
Gyða, he “obtained a woman called Ragnhild, daughter of King Eirík of Jut-
land” (hann fekk þeirar konu, er Ragnhildr hét, dóttir Eiríks konungs af Jótlandi).
Besides, Harald “also had” (enn átti hann…) two further women, daughters of
inland petty kings. So far, things still might be taken to point at simultaneous
polygyny, and therefore to be just on the inside of the borderline of decency.
But then Snorri goes on to claim:

11 See Oexle, “Das entzweite Mittelalter” (1992), and specifically on the current situation in
Scandinavia, Münster-Swendsen, “Moderniteten i middelalderen” (2003).
12 The opening up of the state church to new forms of the ‘cult’ of Olav, whose reactivation
had initially faced rural/liberal opposition within the union with Sweden, began hesi-
tantly at the start of the twentieth century and reached its highpoint in the anniversary
celebration in 1930. Cf. Kolsrud, ed., Nidaros og Stiklestad (1937); Imsen, ed., Ecclesia Ni­
drosiensis (2003).
28 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

They say that when King Harald obtained Ragnhild ríka he put away his
nine wives [or: nine of his wives]. Hornklofi [Þórbjǫrn ‘Horn-Cleaver,’ a
contemporary skald] alludes to this:

Hafnaði Holmrýgjum He would not have Hólmrygir

ok Hǫrða meyjum, or Hǫrðar women,
hverri enni heinversku any from Heiðmǫrk
ok Hǫlga ættar or Hǫlgi’s kindred,
konungr enn kynstóri, when the king of high birth
es tók konuna dǫnsku. chose a Danish bride.13

What the skald is suggesting is a kind of harem of young women (meyjar) from
all parts of Harald’s sphere of influence, including Rogaland and Hordaland
on the west coast, eastern inland Hedmark, and the North beyond the Po-
lar Circle. At this stage, we are not concerned with the political resonances
of this catalogue (“Hǫlgi’s kindred” will be discussed in Chapter 5) but only
with the suggestion that Harald had been maintaining a kind of polygynous
household of representatives whose uneasy balance was upset the moment
he reached out for a woman with a really important father. The emphasis on
Ragnhild’s epithet in ríka “the Mighty” suggests a good reason to discard the
Norwegian women: Abandoning intra-Norwegian polygyny in an attempt to
establish familial ties with the powerful Danish royal family14 is a step forward
for Harald. It comes at a cost, though Hornklofi does not spell out the reason
why Harald “abandons” all the others in favour of Ragnhild. To the modern
mind, the reason was obvious: Harald was climbing one step up towards civi-
lization. Theodor ­Fontane, in his nineteenth-century ballad Harald Harfager,
romanticizes Ragnhild’s answer to Harald’s proposal: “King Harald is Lord over
Norway, over Norway’s women too / But your custom in Drammen is not the

13 HsH c. 21, stanza 47: Svá segja menn, at þá er Haraldr knungr fekk Ragnhildar ríku, at hann
léti þá af níu konum sínum. Þess getr Hornklofi: (…); Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foul-
kes, vol. 1 (2016), 69, though I replace their ‘married’ with ‘obtained.’ A prose translation of
the verse might read: “The king of famous kin forsook the girls from the skerries of Roga-
land and those of Hordaland, all those from Hedmark and Hålogaland [present-day Nord­
land fylke] too, when he took the Danish woman.” The verb hafna “give up, discard, turn
away from” is also used in contexts of conversion or apostasy, so “forsake” is not too heavy
a rendering.
14 We do not know whether a King Eirík existed in Jutland, but given the lack of sources this
is not sufficient to argue that he did not; see Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, “Formáli,” in Heims­
kringla, vol. 1 (1941), 118 note 2. Within the frame of the stanza discussed here, he exists.
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 29

custom in Roskilde.”15 And of course, at the end she “has his whole heart.” The
ninth-century skald is less explicit but makes it clear that Ragnhild, the Jutish
princess, is in a position to demand terms which put her at a distance from
the king’s previous women, as other prized brides have before her.16 However,
this distance is relational rather than conceptual. Neither the ninth-century
Hornklofi nor the thirteenth-century Snorri have a vocabulary to mark the dif-
ference. It is all about “having” or “getting” women, but not about “marrying”
them (or not).17
How, then, does the relationship between Harald Fairhair and Gyða Eiríks-
dóttir fit into this background? Terminologically, it is seemingly ambiguous:
Harald wishes to make Gyða his frilla (vildi taka til frillu sér), while in her reply
to Harald’s messengers Gyða talks of the conditions under which she would be
willing to consent to become his “own-woman” (játa at gerask eiginkona hans).
The term eiginkona is related to the expression eiga konu “to have a wife/wom-
an” used by Snorri in the story quoted above, and in modern scholarship it is
frequently taken to signify formal marriage.18 But this is precisely not the situ-
ation with Harald and Gyða. Sagas and legal texts leave no doubt that in that
case Harald should have had his messengers speak not with Gyða, but with her
father, and he certainly should not have been able to return at a later date to
collect and “lie with” her. All hallmarks of formal marriage—parental consent,
material transactions, bridal homecoming and wedding feast—are blatantly

15 Fontane, Gedichte 1898 (1998), 98: “König Harald ist Herr über Norweg, über Norwegs
Frauen auch / Aber euer Brauch in Drammen ist nicht in Roskilde Brauch.” Of course,
Roskilde is not in Jutland; Fontane obviously has the Skjǫldung kings and their Lejre at-
tachments in mind.
16 Cf. Gregory of Tours, Historiae iv, 28 (Chilperich’s marriage to the Visigothic princess
Galswintha): promittens … se alias relicturum, tantum condignam sibi regis quo prolem
mereretur accipere.
17 The verb eiga “to have, possess” (3rd person sg. pret. ind. átti) often appears in contexts
interpreted by modern research in the sense of matrimonium legitimum, that is, in an
isogamous relationship including transfer of goods (thus “to take a wife”). The same goes
for the verb fá “get” (3rd person sg. pret. ind. fekk). Both take the genitive complement:
hann fekk þeirar konu “He had/got of/from that woman [goods or similar].” For the discus-
sion of this construction, see Chapter 1, note 106—the Old Norse word kona is just as
ambiguous as its modern German equivalent Frau or French femme (“woman”/“wife”);
the Norwegian translation cited exploits the fact that the modern meaning of kone is nar-
rowed down to “wife” and again translates more towards ‘marriage,’ seemingly in line with
the source. Cf. the discussion of the medieval vocabulary and its modern translations in
the case of Jón Loptsson, Chapter 2.
18 Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 67.
30 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

absent.19 So is this then a case of a woman being abducted? Quite apart from
the fact that the much-cited Raubehe (marriage by abduction) as a legal con-
cept has rightly been questioned in recent research,20 in the narrative world of
the thirteenth century, to which the Heimskringla belongs, such an approach
was in no way compatible with any form of solemn bond between man and
woman.
The textual and terminological ambiguities cannot, in fact, be resolved.
With the available material, it is futile to try to ascertain whether Harald en-
tered into a marriage or some other form of bond with Gyða, whether or not he
was ‘married’ to his “nine” women in the same manner as he would later be
with Ragnhild the Mighty. Perhaps there is no point in asking whether any
woman ‘was’ a “concubine or wife.”21 In fact, the moment a man enters into
relationships with more than one woman in a socially significant way, these
women too form relationships to each other. These relationships sum up to a
continuum within which there may be markers of order: Some kinds of rela-
tionship may count as ‘higher-status,’ ‘more eminent’ than others. This con-
tinuum is an important point. It has a relative maximum value, namely the
relationship which at any one time is held to be a maximum. All other relation-
ships are for the time being of lesser value. There is no minimum (that is, a re-
lationship with no possibility of an inferior form beyond it): Although some of
the relationships to be discussed in the following chapters may appear very
‘low-status’ indeed, it must be remembered that many relationships have prob-
ably not been recorded, which in turn means that all the relationships which
have been recorded (and of which only a fraction has come down to us due to
losses of sources) are already a selection. They contain a surplus of “social
energy”22 and therefore narrative dignity: they were regarded as digna ferendi
or, as the Old Norse has it, sǫgulegir, worth reporting.
This means that we cannot set out from an extratextual absolute, a yardstick
to be applied, such as would lie behind the question, ‘Is Gyða (or Ragnhild) a
full-fledged, genuine wife?’ This question would postulate what in fact needs to

19 For a legal-historical perspective, see Carlsson, ‘Jag giver dig min dotter’ (1965–72); for an
approach anchored in social history, see Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995),
17–64.
20 See the literature review in Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 72–77.
21 This claim is not intended to dispute the justification of Andrea Esmyol’s study of the
same (Geliebte oder Ehefrau? 2002), as she coins the phrase to—rightly—refute the older
conceptions of a Friedelehe, ‘free’ marriage, as a third legal form. My doubts lie on a differ-
ent level, namely of whether the categorial dichotomy can be sustained; in no way does
this mean a return to the third category.
22 On the term see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), 1–20.
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 31

be examined: whether there was a concept like ‘wife’ (or ‘being married’) in
this society. Without this methodical caveat, we risk to conflate, for instance,
Ragnhild in Haralds saga hárfagra with the Novgorod princess Elizabeth, the
‘wife’ of King Harald Hardrada in his saga, both with Gisla, the uxor of the first
Norman duke Rollo in Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and all of them with the many
legales coniuges of the various prescriptive texts. What the present study in-
stead aims at is both less ambitious and more rewarding: It aims to understand
how, in a given situation and context, the relationships between Harald Fairhair
(or another man) and his different women with their different backgrounds,
networks, careers and fortunes were perceived, commented upon, and report-
ed by their contemporaries or subsequent narrators—which is the nearest we
can get to: “by society.”

3 On Sources

The following overview will appear patchy and superficial to many readers
trained in Old Norse or medieval Scandinavian studies, but it may be of some
use to readers more conversant with other parts of the medieval world.23 Read-
ers may therefore feel free to skip the following two sections on sources and
scholarship.
Neither archeological findings nor works of visual art or other material cul-
ture, fundamental though they are for the study of most questions of the social
history of the medieval North, including women’s history, can independently
provide information on polygyny.24 So we have to make do with texts. Writ-
ten sources are a problem because they are comparatively late and their pre­
servation and (probably) production is uneven. High medieval documentary
sources are rare for Northern Europe (the oldest known Scandinavian charter
dates from 1082, the surviving fragments of the oldest original from 1135), and
so are legal sources. Besides the handful of early municipal laws, which can

23 For a concise overview of the sources for the Scandinavian Middle Ages, see Sawyer/Saw-
yer, Medieval Scandinavia (1993), 1–26; with regard to women’s history, see Jochens, “Old
Norse Sources” (1990).
24 Still, archeology provides valuable correctives or possible evidence for a view heavily
shaped by textual sources. For instance, a study on women’s part in Viking-era trade inter-
preted the significantly greater number of finds of keys and locks as confirming women’s
control over the management of the house and farm; cf. Stalsberg, “Women as Actors”
(1991), 75–83, with reference to Petersen, Vikingetidens redskaber (1951). On the method-
ological question, see Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005), 33ff.
32 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

largely be disregarded here,25 there are the so-called provincial laws and—
towards the end of the thirteenth century—the Norwegian territorial law of
King Magnús lagabœtir “the Law-Mender.” Transmitted in more or less com-
prehensive traditions are the three Danish provincial laws of Jutland, Zealand,
and Scania, the four laws of the Norwegian legal districts Gula (Westland),
Frosta (Trøndelag and Northland), Borg (“Viken,” the area around the Oslo­
fjord) and the inland Eidsivating, and several provincial laws from the area of
what would later be Sweden. For Iceland, there are the two legal codes issued
by King Magnús the Law-Mender shortly after the island was subordinated to
the Norwegian Crown (the Járnsíða, which was replaced by the Jónsbók shortly
afterwards), as well as the collection of Icelandic law from before 1262/64, pre-
served in two quite different redactions, which has been known since the six-
teenth century under the quaint name of Grágás (“Grey Goose”). However, no
laws are known to have been written down before around 1220 (the Older Law
of Western Götaland and a Latin version of the Scanian Law by Archbishop
Andreas Sunesen). Any assumptions concerning the age of some or all parts
of these laws ultimately remain doubtful. To give just one example, the Icelan-
dic Grágás collection has been viewed as either the tradition of original pre-
Christian legal situations dating centuries back, or a response to current
changes and challenges in late thirteenth-century Iceland immediately before
its subordination to the Norwegian king. In some respects, both positions are
likely to be right to some extent, for transmitting and reshaping a text (or set
of laws) while updating it are not mutually exclusive activities. The laws in
their current form are neither immediate sources for hypothetical earlier (pre-
13th century) societies nor simply a mirror of late 13th-century concerns. They
must be approached as contributions to social negotiations, in which ideas of
the past might be used as arguments. This includes taking into account their
literary character, meaning not only the philological analysis of rhetorical, for-
mulaic, and lexematic orientation, but also their reading as ‘narratives.’26 What
this might involve can be best illustrated initially with reference to the “narra-
tive” sources proper, the sagas, which are at the centre of much of what follows.

25 See the study by Riis, which is primarily based on municipal laws: “Hochzeit” (1998).
26 See Lönnroth, “Ättesamhällets textvärld, ca. 800–1300,” in Lönnroth and Delblanc, eds.,
Den svenska litteraturen, vol. 1 (1987), 33–56, on the influence of poetic language on the
development of juridical phraseology. On Norway, see Rindal, “Dei norske mellomalderlo-
vene” (1995), 7–20; Røsstad, Á tveim tungum (1997). On the legal historical content,
Sjöholm argues for the strongly ‘European’ rather than autochthonous character of the
provincial laws: Sveriges medeltidslagar (1988).
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 33

Saga means simply “speech.”27 The verb is segja “say”; hann segir sǫgu means
“he is reporting something,” hafa sǫgur af einum “having news of someone, re-
counting something you have heard about someone.”28 The sagas, indeed, refer
to themselves with the same word: “—and here ends this saga” is the typical
explicit, the phrase hann er ór sǫgunni “he is out of the tale” regularly signposts
the last appearance of a character, and Snorri Sturluson begins the prologue of
Heimskringla with the sentence: “In this book I have had old stories (fornar
frásagnir) written about those rulers who have held power in the Northern
lands and have spoken the Scandinavian language, as I have heard them told
by learned men…” He proceeds to name his other sources: genealogies and
writings based on old poems and narrative songs (sǫguljóð) that the people
had for entertainment. There has been some commentary dealing with this
“saga entertainment” (sagnaskemtan);29 we may take the word with its slightly
jocular nuance in the sense of the Horatian delectare or, more contemporary,
Gervasius of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, suggesting a similar disposition to leave
the didactics implicit.
Crucially, the sagas, even when they are written, understand themselves as
the result of speech acts and these speech acts are understood as traditional.
Things ancient (Snorri uses the adjective forn “old, former”) were chronicled in
fornum kvæðum “ancient songs,”30 and in sǫguljóð “narrative songs” or “songs
of historical content.” History is to speak of former times (sögufræði “narrative
learning,” is the modern Icelandic term for the academic discipline of History).
Of course, we need not take at face value the written saga’s proclamation of
oral-traditional authenticity, but it is of some consequence that these written
versions were supposed to be understood as part of a discourse sustained over
centuries and intended to be continued in the future. This insistence on an oral
style, well suited to actual oral performance, distinguishes what could other-
wise claim to be good Isidorian rerum gestarum narratio, the narrative of what
happened, from Latin European history.

27 On the term and its application in a cultural analysis, see Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten
(2001), 191–238.
28 See Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 33–36.
29 Cf. Clover, Medieval Saga (1982); Clover and Lindow, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (1985);
Jónas Kristjánsson, Eddas und Sagas (1994); Clunies Ross, ed., Old Icelandic Literature
(2000); McTurk, Companion (2005).
30 The word kvæði, denoting a longer stanzaic text using defined language with narrative
content, is related to the Germanic *kweþan, “to speak”; see Nielsen, Dansk etymologisk
ordbog (1966), s.v. iii. kvæde.
34 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

4 Scholarship on the Sagas

Labelling and classifying medieval texts has become a quagmire. I will try to
steer clear of it by simply repeating the most traditional labels, with the sole
aim of supplying readers unfamiliar with Norse philology with some rough
idea of what we are dealing with. Traditionally, then, within the multitude of
written narratives from a period of several centuries which are lumped ­together
as ‘sagas’ we distinguish the kings’ sagas (the history of Norway and, to a lesser
extent, Denmark as well as that of some non-royal princely houses, such as the
earls of Orkney), the sagas of the Icelanders (or ‘family sagas,’ concerning the
first generations of settlers on the North Atlantic islands from 870 to about
1030), contemporary sagas (samtíðarsǫgur, concerning Iceland from the 12th to
the mid-13th centuries, and thus roughly contemporaneous with the produc-
tion of their written form), among them the bishop’s sagas (vitae of Icelandic
bishops of the same period). Less obviously concerned with the history of par-
ticular regions and periods are the legendary sagas (fornaldarsǫgur, with he-
roes like Sigurð the Dragonslayer or Ragnar Lóðbrok), chivalric sagas (which
adopt Western European material), and fairy-tale or fancy sagas that chronicle
adventures in a wonderland dressed up as Southern Europe and the Mediter-
ranean world. We note that hagiography, both lives of local saints such as Ice-
landic bishops and vitae adopted from the common Christian tradition such as
St Margaret’s, were also considered sǫgur; there is some evidence to suggest
that their Norse versions became models for the textualization of the other
material. Their recipients thoroughly registered the different claims to veracity
attached to various forms of narrative (the Norwegian king Sverrir found “lying
sagas” the most entertaining, but had a Life written about himself which he
would certainly have refused to describe as a lygisaga).31 “And although we do
not know how true they are,” Snorri cautiously says in the prologue to Heims­
kringla, “we know of cases where learned men of old have taken such things to
be true.”32
Along with his elegant, detached style, his authorial grasp of his material,
and not least his position as a key actor in the political game of the Norwegian-
Icelandic world, Snorri’s show of what we call source criticism ensures that
Heimskringla is still today considered a masterpiece of Nordic ­historiography.

31 See Jürg Glauser, “Lygisaga,” in EMSc, 398; on Sverris saga Bagge, From Gang Leader to the
Lord’s Anointed (1996); Krag, Sverre (2005).
32 Heimskringla—Prologus: “En þótt vér vitim eigi sannendi á því, þá vitum vér dœmi til, at
gamlir frœðimenn hafi slíkt fyrir satt haft.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1
(2016), 3. Snorri goes on to list a chain of tradition by name; from his first written text wit-
ness, it goes back to the late tenth century through just one intermediary.
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 35

Modern historians have never stopped mining Snorri for ‘factually reliable in-
formation’ even in times when the sagas of the Icelanders were read less for
their event-historical information than their portrayal of society, ‘the people’
of the Viking Age, or even the entire Germanic early period.33 This view, which
stressed (or chose to believe in) the largely oral-traditional character of the
Icelandic sagas, found itself in turn challenged in the 1930s by the so-called
‘Icelandic school,’ which claimed that the saga authors were men of letters who
knew their craft and who, using information from, among other sources, oral
tradition, produced texts which ought to be approached as pieces of literature
with all the tools of trade of philology. The debate whether the sagas (especially
the sagas of Icelanders) should be understood as unadulterated transcriptions
of centuries-old, traditional oral narratives or as masterful products of high
medieval poets came to be known in terms of ‘free prose’ versus ‘book prose’
theory, although there probably never was a single researcher who would have
completely denied either the changes worked on the tradition by writing or
the presence of traditional motifs in thirteenth-century artistic saga prose.
The possibility of extracting information about the religion, social forms, or
worldview of the pre-Christian period from the sagas was now principally
under question; the 1960s brought a series of very ‘Christian’ interpretations
of saga literature or individual sagas.34 Since the 1970s, historical readings ori-
ented towards mentalité and influenced by social and cultural anthropology
and orality studies35 have to some extent set aside the ‘free prose/book prose’
opposition and reestablished the sagas as historical sources.36 Saga literature is
again studied for its information about society at the time of its writing in the
high Middle Ages, as well as the earlier centuries to which it refers (presuppos-
ing a relatively low level of historical change); to some, even the pre-Christian
period seems to be within reach again.37

33 For the following discussion, see Mundal, Sagadebatt (1977); Meulengracht Sørensen,
Fortælling og ære (1993), 291–327; Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995), 171–82;
Helle, “Historiske sagakritikken” (2001); Bagge, “Mellom kildekritikk” (2002).
34 Lönnroth, “Två kulturerna” (1964); Andersson, Icelandic Family Saga (1967); Hermann
Pálsson, “Ethik der Hrafnkelssaga” (1974); Hermann Pálsson, “Icelandic Sagas” (1974).
35 Vital impetus was provided by Turner, “Anthropological Approach” (1971), and Steblin-
Kamenskij, Мир саги (1971), translated into English as The Saga Mind (1973).
36 Internationally successful works that reflect this tendency include Hastrup, Culture and
History (1985); Byock, Medieval Iceland (1988); Miller, Bloodtaking (1990).
37 For the early Middle Ages, see Bagge, Society and Politics (1991); for the Viking Age and
early Middle Ages, Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995); on method, Vésteinn Óla-
son, Dialogues (1998); Bagge, “Mellom kildekritikk” (2002); Gisli Sigurðsson, Medieval Ice­
landic Saga (2004); a good overview of more recent research is offered by McTurk, Com­
panion (2005).
36 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

However, this confidence still reaches its limits when it comes to the history
of events before about the middle of the eleventh century. Since the pioneer-
ing publications of the brothers Curt and Lauritz Weibull in the early twenti-
eth century, the ‘source-critical’ direction in saga research has also affected
trust in the reliability of the kings’ sagas in matters of political history. Since
the 1980s, Claus Krag, relying predominantly on analysis of skaldic verse
(whose extremely constrained language makes it relatively unsusceptible to
revisions to the tradition, a trait which was already valued by the high medi-
eval saga writers for this reason), has suggested a series of reinterpretations of
the 10th and 11th centuries in Norway at variance with the story in Snorri and
other kings’ sagas. One of Krag’s central points is that the Norwegian kings’
claim to be descended from Harald Fairhair (and the associated interpretation
of Norwegian kingship running “in the genes” of Harald’s line)38 was in fact
probably unfounded. Neither Óláf Tryggvason (r. 995–1000) nor Óláf Haralds-
son (Saint Olav, r. 1015–28/30) and his half-brother Harald harðráði (“Hard-Rul-
er” r. 1046–66), from whom the kings of the later eleventh and the twelfth cen-
turies were actually descended, were themselves descendants of Harald
Fairhair—who in later Latin and Norse historiography was elevated to the
mythical progenitor of the kingdom, but about whom, with the exception of
some significant battles, almost nothing can be said with any confidence.39
Krag’s views, initially controversial, have become established;40 recent at-
tempts to reclaim the reliability of the saga narratives now seem to focus less
on event-historical detail than the “overall picture” of the political circum-
stances depicted in them.41 According to Sverre Bagge’s influential 1991 study,
the politics and power games depicted in Heimskringla is one of conflicts be-
tween individuals and groups of individuals—and not between “classes,” insti-
tutions, or conflicting political ideas, issues which had been in the focus of in-
terest for much of the 20th century.42 This view moves the focus away from the
traditional interest in the emergence of statehood, primarily concerned with
quasi-constitutional issues such as the supposed antagonism between the
monarchy and the magnates, and also from Marxist scholarship’s search for
early class conflict. However, this reading of the world of Heimskringla as an

38 See Óláf Haraldsson’s elaborate legitimistic inaugral address, OsH c. 35.

39 Krag, “Norge som odel i Harald Hårfagres ætt” (1989), 288–301.
40 He has been entrusted with writing the relevant volumes/chapters in both the new As-
chehougs Norgeshistorie (1995) and the Cambridge History of Scandinavia (vol. 1., ed.
Helle [2003], 184–201).
41 Dørum, “Det norske riket” (2001); Bagge, “Mellom kildekritikk” (2002).
42 Bagge, Society and Politics (1991).
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 37

essentially faithful depiction of the real world and—tied up with this—Bagge’s

explicit disinterest in the question of Snorri Sturluson’s own political position
and possible agenda has in turn been called into question.43 This debate is also
important for the present study, for although a somewhat different concept of
‘text’ will be applied to the problem of the relationship between literature and
reality, it is no less important whether Snorri wrote a dispassionate account of
political triumphs and failures, a collection of exemplars for future politicians
(as Bagge thinks), or a history coloured by the agenda of an author whose par-
tisan statements were wholly contained in the narrative—the history of a
kingdom, moreover, in which he directly participated and whose imminent
expansion to his own Icelandic homeland he appears quite critical of.44 Con-
sidering the sagas’ characteristic dearth of explicit authorial engagement, their
almost total withdrawal of the narrator’s voice, the view that an authorial
statement is implicitly contained in the narrative would seem to appear a safe
hypothesis.
It is not surprising that some of the most fundamental methodological de-
bates about the path “from reality to literature and back”45 have hinged on the
sagas of Icelanders, as diplomatic and archaeological material which could be
consulted as a ‘corrective’ is scarcer there than in Norway. However, they are
also pertinent to the Norwegian kings’ sagas. From an anthropological stand-
point, it has been proposed that the sagas be understood as “totemic artifacts”
in a Levi-Straussian sense, by means of which all experience could be orga-
nized as an integrated whole.46 For a historian’s taste, this approach, while cer-
tainly useful for understanding the characteristics of saga literature, carries a
certain lack of interest in historical change and suggests an interpretation of
medieval Iceland as a ‘cold’ society. (My professional feeling would be that Ice-
land was no more or less susceptible to social, economic and political change
than any other part of the medieval world, even if the sources it has produced
are fairly spectacular in comparison.) More ‘open’ and therefore promising are
the proposals developed by Preben Meulengracht Sørensen in several publica-
tions.47 Meulengracht Sørensen starts from the fundamental assumption that

43 Cf. Sawyer, “Sverre Bagge om ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’” (2003), 191–97; Bagge, “Snorre og
‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’” (2003), 285–96.
44 For instance, von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999).
45 Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), the chapter “Fra virkelighed til litteratur
og tilbage igen,” 30ff.
46 Durrenberger, “Icelandic Family Sagas” (1991); cf. Durrenberger, Dynamics (1992).
47 Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og samfund (1977); as well as several summary overviews of
his view, most recently: Meulengracht Sørensen and Else Roesdahl, “Viking Culture,” in
Helle, ed., History of Scandinavia, vol. 1 (2003), 21–146.
38 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

the sagas contain a “complete universe of meaning” and their culture can be
analyzed accordingly. The subject of analysis, however, can never be the his-
torical reality outside them. The sagas already provide the context to their own
text, to which no later observer can add anything more.48 To a historian, this
would at first seem to appear a sobering prospect indeed. But to study “the
process itself rather than what is being processed,”49 that is, the way the medi-
eval North Atlantic developed its stories about themselves, is in fact a fine al-
ternative to histories of events. After all, the existence of the sagas is in itself a
historical fact (indeed, one of the outstanding facts of the Norse Atlantic) and
all evidence for them—their number, distribution, and the volume of allusions
and references made to them over centuries of practice—suggests they were
of great importance for many people in the high (and probably also the early)
Middle Ages.
To say that life has irrevocably become text is therefore not (only) a trite
rehash of the central tenet of the ‘linguistic turn,’ but refers to a specific, strik-
ing peculiarity of the ‘saga world’:50 its tendency to discuss in terms of narrat-
ability precisely those moments which are most dramatic, placed at the centre
of the narrative, and most important for social existence, for ‘honour.’ Meulen-
gracht Sørensen gives as an example the death of the brothers Þórð and Snorri
Þorvaldssynir in March 1232 as told in Sturlunga saga, one of the ‘contempo-
rary sagas’ composed during the lifetime of many of their actors. The brothers
deliberately travel so close to the dwelling of an enemy that he is practically
obliged to offer battle and kill them. The brothers justify their conduct at the
beginning of the fighting scene by explaining “that otherwise there would have
been little to tell.”51 In fact, the entire episode is unmistakably in the style of
the ‘great’ Icelandic sagas, “which reinforce a ­culture by reproducing it, but at

48 “The family sagas contain a complete universe of meaning, a culture that can be analyzed
in great depth since it only exists in the form of texts. On the other hand, due to the lack
of contextual materials [!], this project cannot be undertaken as a description of histori-
cal reality. One could say that the sagas are all-inclusive in that they supply both text and
context. The culture or history that the scholar wishes to describe has already been writ-
ten and rewritten to such an extent that there are no longer any roads to reality outside
the actual sagas. It is simply not possible to add anything new to the description of the
world contained in the family sagas themselves.” Meulengracht Sørensen, “Methodologi-
cal Considerations” (1992), 27f.; more clearly: Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære
(1993), 17f.
49 Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 18.
50 Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), based on the original, synonymous title
of Steblin-Kamenskij, Мир саги (1971).
51 StS i, 352: “at þá væri lítit til frásagnir”; cf. Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære
(1993), 329.
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 39

the same time place this same culture at a distance, as something lost, by re-
porting it as the past … they create their own reality; but they create it as a
historical interpretation and not as fiction.”52 Within the framework of a ‘con-
temporary saga’ that relates contemporary history of the 1230s, the two broth-
ers—and their opponents—act according to a pattern of behaviour which
they (and the writer of Sturlunga saga, and we) know and recognize from the
sagas of Icelanders. Living sögulegt involves the readers/listeners of the saga,
who in turn will relate the brothers’ fight to ever new audiences (including us);
the seemingly ‘unnecessary’ suicidal fight becomes plausible, even mandatory,
within the saga just as much as by the process of its being told. It is impossible
to ascertain whether two men named Þórð and Snorri, living in Iceland at the
beginning of the thirteenth century, actually resolved to seek a death based on
a literary pattern. But other similarly preserved cases make this at least proba-
ble.53 The historian is thus dealing here with a culture in which a central con-
cern is the desire that “acts may become text” (verk … at sǫgum verða)54—that
is, historiographical narrative.55
From the historical standpoint, however, it is just as well to be wary of the
tendency towards harmonization contained in the view of the sagas as a spe-
cific form of social self-narrative. It is not enough to say that ‘the Scandina-
vians’ told a story about themselves in ‘the sagas.’56 Particular stories obey par-
ticular interests and modes of perception that are not necessarily representative
of the whole.57 Not ‘the Scandinavians’ or ‘the Norwegian kings’ took frillur like
Gyða Eiríksdóttir, but rather one or several author(s) or narrative milieu(x) fur-
nished the character of one king with a particular script.58 To use Peter Foote

52 Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 27.

53 See Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og samfund (1977), 153–69.
54 Ynglingatal by Þjóðólf of Kvinesdal, in Ys c. 27, stanza 20, v. 9–12.
55 The sagas differ from other literary genres driven by the desire for posthumous fame, such
as the Western European epic, through their socially inclusive tone aimed at widespread
dissemination in everyday situations.
56 Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cul­
tures (1973), 412–53, 448. Tending toward such unifying is Durrenberger, Dynamics (1992);
against an excessive harmonization of ‘the’ sagas: Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Ritunartími
Íslendingasagna (1965), 17.
57 In this respect, the early ‘historical-anthropological’ positions are often clearer than those
of the 1990s, in which the overwhelming influence of the ‘cultural turn’ occasionally leads
to extratextual interests being obscured; cf. for example, Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og
samfund (1977) as compared to Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993). The cur-
rent slump in the historical-materialist conception of history should not tempt us to re-
gard the methodological problems of the knowableness of the lived world beyond the
text as grounds for disregarding it.
58 On the concept of ‘scripts,’ see Algazi, “Kulturkult” (2000).
40 King Harald Fairhair’s Women

and David Wilson’s words, it is not permissible to write a social history of early
Scandinavia “simply by lifting chunks out of the sagas.”59 The prerequisite for a
successful historical reading of the sagas is respecting the integrity of the nar-
rative. For the present study, this means that while we cannot hope to get down
to the ‘real-life’ experiences of the men and women involved, we can at least
observe the processes of how ‘society,’ that is, the very milieux in which such
relationships would have been formed in real life, made sense of them. This is
more than we can do for most parts of medieval Europe. The Scandinavian
material has the advantage that what is being described—including polygy-
nous relationships—is, so to speak, from the outset endowed with consider-
able social relevance, and that the semantizations presumably formed and
conveyed in and through them occur in close proximity to the linguistic and
lived world of the milieu described.
Therefore, in the matter of Harald Fairhair and Gyða the point at issue is not
the ‘historical’ tenth-century King Harald. But neither is it just the mindset of
one or two thirteenth-century writers. The story of Harald and Gyða is a high
medieval story of some currency, related to the daily lives of contemporaries
and reflecting their relationship to their own past and the value they granted
it.
In this respect, the tales of frillur and other women have perhaps not been
taken seriously enough. Not only have many of them been all too often brushed
aside as “little romantic stories”60 or as narrative flotsam incorporated into so-
cial or moral stories even when the sagas obviously concern great matters (the
creation of Norwegian high kingship as a result of a frilla’s challenge). Quite
apart from the question whether or not a ninth-century chieftain called Harald
ever wanted to sleep with a ninth-century chieftain’s daughter called Gyða,
even the most recent research generally neglects to raise the issue of why thir-
teenth-century writers and audiences put so much store by claiming that he
did. Haraldur Bessason, who has recently commented upon the Gyða episode,
persuasively set out the parallels to the myth of the fertility god Frey’s court-
ship of the giantess Gerð, a common theme which Snorri himself treated not
only in his poetry, the so-called Snorra Edda, but also briefly in the Heimskring­
la.61 His studies of motif, and above all the question he poses—of whether
Snorri here uses a fairytale narrative that goes back to pre-Christian myth, or
the myth was constructed on the model of the folktale—are undoubtedly im-
portant. But beyond the motif study, the historian’s question would have to be

59 Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement (1970), xxv.

60 Bagge, “Kvinner i politikken” (1989), 23, concerning Hss c. 18.
61 Bessason, “King Haraldur Finehair’s Wooing” (1997).
King Harald Fairhair’s Women 41

what it means that Snorri is creating a parallel between his unifying king and a
pagan god.62 And beyond this question, which is ultimately directed at autho-
rial intention, a historical interpretation must take into account that according
to twentieth-century scholarship on orality63 it is quite likely that the story of
Harald and Gyða—which is in other authors besides Snorri, and thus had a
certain currency64—may also be factually ‘true,’ that is, that at some point in
the ninth century a man and a woman like them actually entered into a rela-
tionship that so impressed their contemporaries that the story was retold
through eight generations.
Besides the versions available to us in their literalizations, we must always
reckon with various other oral versions, continually ‘updated’ and perhaps
varying to degrees, which probably circulated at the same time but about
whose form and specific content we can say practically nothing. The written
sagas are all we have, but we must not assume that they are all there ever was.
Judging by the space and emphasis tales about sexual relationships take in the
sagas, we may even suspect that these tales were among the more widely re-
lated issues covered by the sagas. At any rate, we may be somewhat confident
that the study of Norse representations of polygyny is not solely a study of
historiography but that these stories may have shaped the everyday lives of
many people in both imagination and practice.
So, the story of Harald and Gyða may supply us with some leading questions
for the following chapters: What does it mean for Norway’s first unifying king
to have many women? What does his epithet kynstór “great in kin” point to?
Why does Gyða make her consent conditional on Harald successfully imitating
the rulers in Jelling and Uppsala? And why does Harald react to the condition
in such a striking manner? What is Snorri telling his audience by supplying
details about the girl’s father and foster father? And what is meant by Gyða’s
challenge that Harald first “place all of Norway under himself”?

62 Cf. the corresponding discussion of the stylization of Queen Sigríð the Haughty as
‘Guðrún’ in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, in Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993),
19–22; a similar stylization of Ása, grandmother of Harald Fairhair, in Ys c. 48.
63 In place of a literature survey, cf. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982); Schäfer, “Mündlichkeit
und Schriftlichkeit” (2003), 148–87.
64 The different versions of the episode are examined by Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 65–69.
 Chapter 1

The Generative Aspect

1 Thorns, Pigs, and Two Dreams

Shortly before Harald Fairhair’s birth, so Snorri tells us, his mother Ragnhild
had a dream:

She thought she was there in her herb garden and that she took a thorn
from her shift. And as she held it, it grew so that it became a great shoot,
so that one end reached the ground and was soon firmly rooted, and the
other end reached high up into the air. And next the tree seemed so huge
that she could hardly see up over it. It was also astonishingly thick. The
lower part of the tree was red as blood, while the stem above was bright
green and the branches white as snow. There were also many large twigs
on the tree, some high up, some lower down. The branches of the tree
were so huge that they seemed to her to spread across all Norway and
much further still.1

There is no explicit dream interpretation, and neither would it be particu-

larly necessary: Norway’s royal history, as a “root of Harald,” sprang from the
body of the mother of the unifying king, bloody at first, then flourishing, and
four hundred years later at the time when the Heimskringla was written, ven-
erable and ramified. However, the fact that this vision is in the Heimskring-
la requires comment. The image of the ‘family tree,’ conceptions and visual
representations of the sequence of human generations in botanical imagery,
is certainly established throughout the entire Euro-Mediterranean: “A shoot
shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his
roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him” (Is 11:1–2). Moreover, particularly
since the twelfth century, Christ’s lineage, whether as the “root of Jesse” and
its etymologizing Marian interpretation (virga~virgo de radice Iesse) or as the
male line according to the Gospels,2 has become a recurrent subject of textual
and pictorial production, with a huge potential for not only dogmatic but also

1 HsSv c. 7; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 51 [in Chapter 6].
2 Mt 1:1–17; Lk 3:23–38; cf. U[rsula] Nilgen, “Genealogie Christi,” in LdM, vol. 4, cols. 1221f.;
U[rsula] Nilgen, “Wurzel Jesse,” in LdM, vol. 9, cols. 382.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_004

The Generative Aspect 43

secular-­political legitimation. There was room for kings David and Solomon,
archetypes of medieval monarchs, in this generational sequence.
In the Northern kingdoms, however, this sequence was less straightforward
than the contemporary image of the “root of Jesse” suggested. The traditional
principle was that anyone descended from a king could claim the royal title
(konungsnafn).3 The number of potential claimants to the throne tended to
grow ever larger over time, and which of them actually managed to gain and
defend the royal title depended on very different circumstances over time and
place. In the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, the principle solidified over
the course of the Middle Ages into “elective monarchy,” a mixed system com-
bining traditional ceremonies (homage at the regional things, inaugural tour)
with sharp negotiations between the magnates. In the case of undisputed suc-
cessions this could at least ensure the reconciliation of interests and the es-
tablishment of limits on royal authority, but it could also be open-ended in
situations with several eligible candidates for succession. By contrast, Norway
became a hereditary monarchy in the mid-thirteenth century, complete with
a precise order of succession down to the thirteenth position, pushed through
by Hákon iv Hákonarson (r. 1217–1263) and finally institutionalized with lasting
effect by his successor.4 Snorri Sturluson penned his description of Ragnhild’s
dream in a context where the ruling king—with whom Snorri had a complicat-
ed relationship—supported the introduction of hereditary monarchy in place
of the traditional succession by “royal blood.”
Besides biblical lineages, Ragnhild’s dream is evidently modelled on the his-
toriographical tradition of rulers’ mothers’ dreams. Ultimately, it goes back to
the dream of Cyrus’s grandfather about his mother in Herodotus. The most
famous medieval variant—with which Snorri and his audience were undoubt-
edly familiar—was the dream of William the Conqueror’s mother.5 There is an
obvious intention here to construct a parallel between Harald Fairhair and

3 Latin: nomen regium, nomen regis, nuncupationes regum, aliquem regem appellare; (Sweden
14th c.) konungs nampn giwa; cf. Hoffmann, Königserhebung (1976), 179ff.
4 The national law of Magnús lagabœtir ‘the Law-Mender’ (NgL, vol. 2, 26, cited from Landrecht
des Königs Magnus Hakonarson [1941]), Christian law §5: “sa skal konungr vera ifir Noregs
konungs riki, sem Noregs konungs son er skilgetin, hinn ællzti einn” (the oldest legitimate
son of the king of Norway).
5 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique, v. 33,723–34; Wace, Roman de Rou, v. 2861–65: “Ke un ar-
bre de mun cors isseit, Que vers le ciel amunt creisseit; De l’umbre ki entur alout Tute Nor-
mendie aümbroit …” (A tree sprung out from my body and reached the sky, and it cast a
shadow that covered all Normandy …). Similarly in relation to Ida of Boulogne, the mother of
Godfrey of Bouillon; cf. Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 298. We will return to William
and his mother in Chapter 6.
44 Chapter 1

that other great Norseman to win a kingdom. But Snorri adds a surprising post-
script to Ragnhild’s dream:

King Hálfdan [Ragnhild’s husband, Harald’s father] never dreamed. He

thought this was strange and consulted a man called Þorleif spaki (the
Wise) and asked for advice as to what could be done about it. Þorleif told
him what he did if he wanted to find out about something, that he went
to sleep in a pigsty, and then he never failed to have a dream.
And the king did this, and this dream appeared to him: It seemed to
him that he had the finest hair of anyone, and his hair fell all in locks,
some as long as down to the ground, some to halfway up his calves, some
to his knee, some to his hip or halfway up his side, some to no lower than
his neck, and some were no more than sprouting up from his head like
little horns, and his locks were of all kinds of colours, but one lock sur-
passed them all in beauty and brightness and size.
He told Þorleif of this dream, and Þorleif interpreted it thus, that great
progeny would come from him, and they would rule lands with great,
though not all with equally great, glory, but one of his line would be
­greatest and highest of all, and it is accepted as true that this lock symbol-
ised King Óláf the Saint.6

The dream is flawless, surpassing Ragnhild’s, for it individualizes the descen-

dants of the king and even accommodates the agnostic principle so dear to
Nordic culture. And even though it is dreamt by a pagan, the portent of Saint
Olav, cornerstone of high medieval Norwegian royal theology, ensures that it is
ironclad in religious terms—even the word used for the portent, jarteign, is the
term customarily used for Christian miracles. It is the circumstances in which
Hálfdan the Black has the dream which make it so dazzling. For the king, blind
to the future, “who never dreamed,” first resorts to a less than innocuous wise
man (Þorleif appears later, once more in connection with magic, albeit on the
‘good’ side, and his kin defined itself through a certain distance from Harald
Fairhair’s line) and then takes refuge in a pigsty. Beside and beyond notions of
pagan magic, the biblical association of pigs as unclean animals take the stage:
not least the Gadarene pigs from the Gospel narratives into which Jesus ban-
ished the unclean spirits from the possessed man, whereupon the pigs became
frenzied, hurled themselves into the water, and drowned.7 The king spending
the night searching for prescience in a pigsty: Snorri slyly subverts the effect of

6 HsSv c. 7; Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 52.

7 Mt 8:28ff.; Mk 5:1ff.; Lk 8:26ff.
The Generative Aspect 45

the royal dream vision. A vision of the future inspired by such creatures is cer-
tainly not one to be trusted. And since this vision of the future forecasts what,
according to the common knowledge of the thirteenth century, has actually
occurred, the pigsty casts a shadow over the entirety of Norwegian royal
history.
Snorri is a master of indirect commentary; judgements on the people de-
scribed in the Heimskringla are very rare, mostly appearing as short epilogical
summaries after their deaths (and often presented as the opinions of others:
“many people said that…”). One such epilogue appears after the dream. Seem-
ingly unconnected with the preceding and subsequent passages, which deal
with Harald’s birth, Hálfdan is praised as a great and just legislator (vizkumaðr
mikill ok sannenda) who adhered to his own laws and ensured that “arrogance
might not overpower the law” (at eigi mætti ofsi steypa lǫgunum). Indeed, with
the introduction of penalty tariffs he was credited with laying the foundations
for Norwegian territorial law as valid in the thirteenth century.8 It is probably
safe to assume that Snorri’s contemporary audience more or less consciously
made the mental connection with the kingship of their own day, notable as it
was for its legislative activity. However, the precise nature of this connection is,
as ever with Snorri, not clear. All that is clear is that he adds a fairly particular
twist to what would otherwise have been a genealogical dream sequence of a
rather conventional type.
One of Snorri’s touches is that the mother makes an important, perhaps the
more important, contribution. It is she who, like the mother of William the
Conqueror, has the dream vision with the thorn, claiming legitimacy through
the pan-European idiom it was bound in, and wholly without pigs and pagan
magic. Concerning Harald’s childhood, Snorri also explicitly says: “His mother
loved him greatly, but his father not so much” (móðir hans unni honum mikit, en
faðir hans minna). This statement should not, of course, be read as evidence of
his parents’ actual affective dispositions toward him. Rather, it supports the
tendency, developed through textual strategies, to ascribe at least equal rank to
Harald’s maternal as to his paternal heritage. The king’s wife Ragnhild is, as
Snorri specifies immediately before her dream, the granddaughter of the pow-
erful Jutish ruler Klakk-Harald—Rimbert’s Harald ‘Klak’ baptized by Louis the
Pious in Ingelheim in 826—and consequently the niece of Þyri Danmerkar bót
(Thyra Danebod), wife of Gorm the Elder and mother of Harald Bluetooth,
who according to the great runestone in Jelling, “subjected all Denmark and

8 Cf. HsGr c. 11.—Hálfdan dies just two chapters later trying to cross a frozen fjord during a
thaw.
46 Chapter 1

Norway and made the Danes Christian.”9 The kings of Jelling, their runestones,
and their status as progenitors of the Danish royal power were well established
by Snorri’s time; a little earlier, the Danish chroniclers Saxo Grammaticus and
Sven Aggesen had provided what would be, until the late twentieth century,
the authoritative version of the story of Thyra, builder of the Danevirke, and
Harald Bluetooth, the unifier of Denmark. Snorri writes the history of the Nor-
wegian kings as an unrelenting competition with the Danish kings (into the
twelfth century, Harald Fairhair’s successors had to contest with Danish ambi-
tions in the north, sometimes with force), and consequently here and else-
where he provides for the necessary dynastic ties to the royal Danish house—
among which the aforementioned Jutish princess, Ragnhild, for whose sake
Harald Fairhair repudiated Gyða and the others.
The theme of maternal heritage goes beyond the figure of Ragnhild and the
concrete aim of establishing dynastic ties. According to Snorri, it was thanks
to his mother’s initiative that Harald’s father, Hálfdan the Black, was able to
take over the petty kingdom inherited through her line, which he then could
use as a base to reclaim his paternal heritage. What Snorri is saying by way
of Harald Fairhair’s mother and grandmother is this: The king’s mother im-
parts ‘love,’ preserving and defending the heir while the king is still young and
helpless, as well as providing useful relations and numinous blessings. In the
world of Heimskringla an important argumentative role is played by the much-
described ‘king’s luck’ (sæll) which is essentially mediated by the male line.
Indeed, the expectation that this luck was heritable virtually underpins the
rationale behind the principle of the inheritance of the royal title in the male
line. A king must provide that combination of prosperity and security which,
in Heimskringla and elsewhere, is denoted by the phrase ár ok friðr, “good
harvest and peace”; he must prove that he is ársæll, ‘season-blessed.’ Ensur-
ing a good harvest and peace was part of his very essence, and his continued
kingship guaranteed the continuation of this favourable economic situation.10

9 On the various reports about Ragnhild’s ancestry, see Krag, Norges historie (2000), 215; on
recent criticism of the traditional view of the Jelling dynasty, see Sawyer and Sawyer, “A
Gormless History?” (2003). Our concern here, however, is with the received version of
medieval historiography.
10 Cf. Hoffmann, Die heiligen Könige (1975), 90; Røthe, “Odinskriger” (1999). It is not neces-
sary to attribute the idea entirely to Old Testament standards, although the view also
shapes the Latin-speaking chronicles and hagiography of the North (cf. Ælnoth, Vita Cnu-
tonis, in aass Jul. 10, c. 32, and, depending on Ælnoth, Chronicon Roskildense, in sm, vol. 1,
1–33, c. 11) and is encountered throughout Europe until the late Middle Ages (see Erkens,
“Heißer Sommer” [2003], 29–46). On the question of sacral kingship in the North, see
Chapter 5.
The Generative Aspect 47

Even Harald Fairhair’s father, Hálfdan the Black, is for Snorri self-evidently
“the most season-blessed [ársælstr] of all kings”; indeed the powerful in his
kingdom were convinced that even his corpse would bring their lands ‘good
seasons’ (þótti þat vera árvænt þeim), and agreed to dismember the dead king
for regional distribution. This pre-Christian prefiguration of a cult of relics,
like Snorri’s earlier insinuations of the demonic, make such deferential praise
for the ruler appear somewhat suspect. Now Harald Fairhair’s role as unifying
king was so well established by around 1200 that it must have seemed difficult
to openly question his father’s royal virtue. Individual writers’, writings’, and
recipients’ attitudes towards kingship can therefore be assessed, among other
things, by the characteristics of their rendering of Harald’s and his ancestors’
stories.11 The charm of Snorri’s royal history to a great extent lies in the fact that,
by various means, he underpins a tradition that was already largely established
by his ‘trademark’ ambiguity. Harald’s parents are one of the many examples of
this. There is a certain sinister irony in the report by Sturla Þórðarson (Snorri’s
nephew and principal opponent) that King Hákon Hákonarson, the king who
ordered Snorri’s murder in 1239, had the vernacular kings’ sagas read aloud to
him when following the Latin text of the saints’ lives became too exhausting.
Bringing the royal descent line into question could have fatal consequences.

2 Royal Blood

The tree Ragnhild dreamt about had a trunk: her son Harald. The unanimous
resolution of medieval Norway to view the Fairhaired as an obligatory princi-
pal ancestor of every later king is probably unique in Europe. All other king-
doms endured occasional changes of dynasty, and, unless the change from one
regnum or house to another was generally regarded as unproblematic or even
beneficial, it was to some extent legitimized through narratives connecting the
dynasties or heroic tales of the overthrow of the previous line. Even the other
Scandinavian monarchies—which were similarly determined by the practice
that the new king should be sought from the throng of descendants of earlier
kings in the male line (the “Geblütsrecht” dear to German legal historians)—
were content with less far-reaching appeals. While the Swedish monarchy did
not consolidate from an alliance between two rival lines, and, so far as we

11 This reserved attitude is particularly pronounced in the ‘Icelandic sagas.’ In this case, it
should be noted that the Icelander Snorri is the only one who reported Hálfdan’s ritual
dismemberment (and therefore probably invented it); see Heimskringla, vol. 1 (1941), 93
note 2.
48 Chapter 1

know, completely dispensed with genealogical consistency until the thirteenth

century, the Danish royal title was disputed only within a—genealogically
speaking—very small circle, whose members could all easily be traced back to
Sven Estridsen (r. 1047–74/76). Sven was, as expressed in his metronym ‘As-
trid’s-son,’ the grandson of Cnut the Great on his mother’s side, whereas his
father was ‘merely’ a follower and favourite of the same king. Sven’s right to
rule was justified in chronicles and annals through his virtues and/or his victo-
ries over the Norwegian kings Magnus and Harald, son and brother of Saint
Olav and sometime rulers of Norway. No Danish text we know of construed a
line of descent from, say, Harald Bluetooth or one of the many heroic/pagan
early Danish kings for him. In Norway this was invariably the case.12 Where
only putative descent from a single scion matters, where—to retain the imag-
ery of Ragnhild’s dream—every branch of the mighty boughs that go back to
Harald Fairhair is endowed with the same claims, there was no place for com-
peting valences. The Norwegians of the thirteenth century could have repeated
the famous words of Gregory of Tours: “irrespective of their mother’s birth, all
children born to a king count as the king’s sons.”13 Norway is therefore a very
suitable field for the observation of high medieval polygyny. This does not, of
course, mean that in reality, there were more cases of (aristocratic) polygyny
than elsewhere, merely that the chances of such cases entering the record are
far higher where the polygynous relationships of the powerful are of central
political importance.
Indeed, the extent to which the history of the Norwegian monarchy is
shaped by polygyny is surprising. According to Jenny Jochens’s reckoning,14 in
the period 1130–1240, forty-six men claimed the Norwegian ‘royal name’ with
reference to their royal origin: this at a time when an ‘illegitimate’ candidate
had very bleak prospects of being accepted in most of the kingdoms of Latin
Europe. Frequently, groups of (half-) brothers shared the rule of Norway to

12 Sven was the son of Ulf Jarl/comes and Astrid/Estrid, the daughter of Cnut the Great. Her
name fluctuates, but dominates the metronym: Annales Ryenses: “Suen Estraethson”; An-
nales Lundenses: “Swen filius Æstrith”; Annales Ripenses: “Suen Estrithson, filiu[s] Ulff
comitis Anglie de sorore Gamælæknut”; as well as “Sweno Magnus,” often in the tradition
of the Benedictine vita Saint Cnut by Ælnoth. In the Knýtlinga saga, the Norse history of
the Danish kings from the mid-13th century, however, “Sveinn Úlfsson” is used through-
out, perhaps as part of the saga’s wider attempts at a particular consistent conservative
style. The use of the mother’s rather than the usual father’s name is rare, but not unheard
of; it seems to be preferred if maternal line is particularly illustrious—which is undoubt-
edly the case here.
13 Historiae v, 20: “praetermissis nunc generibus feminarum, regis vocitantur liberi, qui de
regibus fuerant procreati”; History of the Franks, ed. Thorpe (1974), 286.
14 Jochens, Politics of Reproduction (1987), 340.
The Generative Aspect 49

some degree for a time, more or less harmoniously, or various regional assem-
blies put forward competing candidates, resulting in conflicts, usually carried
out with armed force or at least the threat of it. In these circumstances, elevat-
ing a candidate to the kingship (konungstekja) mostly indicated a challenge to
competitors rather than sealing an actual success. Scarcely half of them, twenty-
four, enforced their claims at least locally and/or intermittently, and only two
established themselves permanently throughout the kingdom: Sverrir (r. 1177–
1202) and Hákon iv Hákonarson (r. 1217–63).
According to Jochens’s count, of the forty-six pretenders, no more than
twelve or thirteen were from ‘legitimate marriages,’ and of the twenty-four suc-
cessful pretenders, only five: the two most successful, Sverrir and Hákon iv,
were not among them. Of those five, four used their ‘legitimate’ birth as an
additional argument to strengthen their otherwise somewhat weaker claims:
three stemmed from a king only in the female line; the fourth was the half-
brother of a king. In all, of the twenty-four Norwegian kings of this period, only
one, Ingi krókrygg (‘the Hunchback,’ r. 1136–61), was the son of a king through a
‘legitimate marriage.’15
Nearly three-quarters of all pretenders and fourth-fifths of those who pre-
vailed were the product of serial or simultaneous polygyny. An overview of
these relationships is available elsewhere;16 many of them will be discussed in
the course of the following chapters. In purely quantitative terms, it is obvious
that the kings’ sagas’ remarkably detailed manner of writing about frillur has to
do with precisely this political relevance. It would certainly be inadequate to
interpret this as some sort of cultural ‘delay’ in the reception of new attitudes
shaped by the Italian and Western European reformers, as even Jochens does
implicitly.17 Norse rulers had ample occasion to familiarize themselves with all
the latest in Church law and the pastoral of mores. The Norwegian insistence
on legitimating kingship in terms of Harald’s expansive tree rather than an
agnatic descent line is sustained political practice.

15 We might speculate whether this contributed to his kingship being one of the more suc-
cessful of the period, despite his disability—as a two-year-old, he had been carried into
battle by a warrior, and tied so tightly to his back that his bone growth was irreparably
damaged. His depiction in the histories and sagas suggests that he demonstrated unusual
political acumen and—more importantly—an outstanding talent for earning his follow-
ers’ loyalty. Sheer talent may well have compensated for his disability, and there is no in-
dication that the ‘legitimacy’ of his birth was used as an argument.
16 On this, see Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 63–71.
17 Jochens, Politics of Reproduction (1987), 332: “The peoples of Scandinavia … maintained
the older reproductive pattern longer than did the rest of Europe.”
50 Chapter 1

Of course Northern European royal polygyny was noted and commented

upon by high medieval contemporaries. Through recourse to Einhard and
Gregory of Tours they could establish a diachronic comparison, allowing them
to explain the situation in the North as a barbaric delay according to the
Eusebian-Orosian dilatatio model. About 1194, Roger of Hoveden, commenting
on the Norwegian war of parties between King Sverrir and his numerous chal-
lengers, explained that it was the custom in Norway “to the present day” that all
those whose royal paternity was generally known could equally claim the king-
ship, “the illegitimate son of a slave woman alongside the legitimate son of a
freewoman.” That was why there was endless war until in each case one was
victorious and the others dead.18 One hundred and twenty years earlier, Adam
of Bremen made a similar observation about Cnut the Great’s sons through his
concubines, who “according to the barbarian custom,” inherited as much from
their father’s three kingdoms as their half-brother, whose sister would become
the wife of Emperor Henry iii.19 Even Adam’s Sven Estridsen, king of Danes, in
other respects an endearing neophyte who eagerly accepted all the ‘teachings’
of archbishop Adalbert, turned a deaf ear as soon as it came to gluttony and
women, “vices which are natural for these peoples.”20
The cultural-diffusionist undertone thus sounds in unison—and therefore
should not be trusted. It appears too obvious to accept the models of Adam of
Bremen and Roger of Hoveden, wholly congruent on this issue, and to assume
a ‘polygynous early period,’ more or less correlating with pagan culture, slowly
petering out during the two first centuries of Norse Christianity. Progressism is
one of the most compelling ‘master narratives’ in European history. Where the
bourgeois age celebrated the moral progress of the human race in general and
Scandinavia in particular (thus the Nobel laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson quot-
ed in the preceding chapter), recent decades have been pleased to juxtapose,
under the banner of sexual libertinism, an uninhibited and sensual Viking
Age with the “strictly pietistic self-negating life” of the Christian Middle Ages,

18 Roger of Hoveden, Gesta regis Henrici secundi, vol. 3, 270: “Est etiam sciendum, quod con-
suetudo regni Norweiæ est usque ad hodiernum diem, quod omnis qui alicuius regis Nor-
weiæ dinoscitur esse filius, licet sit spurius, et de ancilla genitus, tantum sibi ius vendicat
in regnum Norweiæ, quantum filius regis coniugati, et de libera genitus. Et ideo fiunt inter
eos prælia indesinenter, donec unus illorum vincatur et interficiatur.” Cf. Storm, “Kong
Sverres fædrene herkomst” (1904).
19 Adam of Bremen ii, 74: “ut mos est barbaris.”
20 Adam of Bremen iii, 21: “omnia, quae de scripturis ab illo proferebantur, subtiliter notans
retinensque memoriter, excepto quod de gula et mulieribus, quae vitia naturalia sunt illis
gentibus, persuaderi non potuit.” Similarly ‘barbarizing’ are Ælnoth c. 1 and Dudo of Saint-
Quentin i, 1.
The Generative Aspect 51

“negating everything luxurious, colourful, and sexual.”21 If the latter, as a pre-

vailing consensus has it, is marked by chastity, monogamy, and sensual sup-
pression and oppression, then the former must be characterized by the
opposite.
The dissolute are invariably the ‘Other’—and, at least nowadays, they are
happy to hear it. But even if the positive/negative values have been exchanged,
the equation remains. And precisely because some main tenets of today’s iden-
tity debates are at issue here (women’s rights, sexual permissiveness, civic self-
regulation versus external control, organised religion, the West versus the rest),
when faced with the apparent evidence of this cultural antinomy it is easy to
lose sight of the fact that Viking Age sources are extremely poor on questions
of sexual norms and practices. The consistent image of polygyny as more com-
mon and, crucially, more central in the pre-Christian period in, for instance,
the sagas or Saxo Grammaticus, is in the first instance only suitable as evidence
for the perception and representation of the pagan past in the high Middle
Ages, and by no means direct evidence of the period prior to the eleventh cen-
tury. What is more, precise information about the capacity of ‘illegitimate’ sons
to succeed mostly refers to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Strictly speak-
ing it would be possible, on the basis of available evidence, to claim that fril-
lur’s sons first gained the capacity to become king in the Christian period, per-
haps under the influence of the reception of biblical or historical (Merovingian,
Carolingian) models. I am making this point for the sake of the argument. The
assertion would be as difficult to prove (or disprove) as its counterpart, the one
about early and/or pagan polygyny. We simply cannot know for sure. In any
case, it should not be assumed that the open polygyny practised by rulers and
the competence of the offspring of such relationships, observable for us only in
the Christian era, was necessarily a residual trait from the pagan past. It may
have existed in the Viking Age (I think it is probable, although there is only
scanty evidence), but it certainly existed in the Christian Middle Ages, elev-
enth to thirteenth centuries (with ample evidence).
Furthermore, even if polygyny already existed in the ninth century (which is
possible, indeed probable given its apparently universal appeal), this in itself

21 One example of these public debates: in 1995, the young choreographer Øyvind Jør-
gensen, cited above, staged the dance theatre piece “Brytningstid” (“Time of Upheaval”).
The piece was commissioned by the foundation “Kyrkja i Noreg 1000 år,” which organized
the jubilee of the Christianization for the state church. But after its premiere at the
theatre­festival in Bergen and the fierce controversy which followed, it was excluded from
the official jubilee programme. Besides the S&M costumes of the Æsir, the half-meter-
long plush phallus of the fertility god Frøy was judged to be particularly offensive. The
controversy is documented in Losnedahl, “Brytningstid” (2001), here 66.
52 Chapter 1

would not explain its continuous existence in the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies. After all, this was a field undergoing significant change elsewhere in
Latin Europe. In the post-Carolingian world and England, successors amongst
the secular elite in the twelfth century were generally ‘legitimate,’ and a par-
ticular form of monogamous sexual relationship (matrimonium legitimum,
‘marriage’) was considered an essential element/constituent of ‘legitimate’
birth. Exceptions to the rule were rare and faced difficulties, even when the
principle incurred high political costs: England would have had a quieter pe-
riod if Henry I’s “bastard son”22 Robert of Gloucester had been able to succeed
his father in 1135, rather than the decade-and-a-half-long struggle over the
dead king’s throne between the daughter and nephew (‘Empress’ Matilda and
Stephen of Blois). This cultural choice—the change from the time of Gregory
of Tours to the Western European high Middle Ages—requires explanation
just as much as the differing choice made, for instance, in Norway.
The trouble is that we are so used to the ‘European monogamy’ model that
we hardly notice that this was in no way a natural or even obvious change. All
too rarely does the term ‘legitimate birth,’ with which we try to explain success-
ful succession, invite scrutiny: how and why is a certain birth “legitimate”?23
With Adam of Bremen, Roger of Hoveden, and Snorri Sturluson, some medi-
eval observers have already had their say, discussing answers that vary over
time and space. In the following, the focus is on the ‘generative’ aspects of po-
lygyny, that is, the view of the conception and birth of heirs.

3 Danish Particularism: Polygyny in the Chronicles

There was clearly an awareness in the North of the peculiarity of its own view
of what qualified a person to rule in comparison with the rest of Europe. Yet
one of the characteristics of the sagas as a genre is their tendency to pay as lit-
tle attention as possible to the existence of other ways of life—which has the
strange effect that one always sees the heroes travel through the non-Nordic
parts of Europe in a way that recalls the self-assured ignorance of European
travellers in the modern colonial era—so like so many others, this sociocul-
tural difference is left uncommented. Incidental evidence for an awareness of

22 Thus Jäschke, Anglonormannen (1981), 181. His mother is not clearly identified, but it
seems plausible to view her as part of the Norman landed aristocracy in Oxfordshire; cf.
Crouch, “Robert of Gloucester’s Mother” (1999), and below, Chapter 6.
23 For more detailed reflections, see in Rüdiger, “Ægteskab” (2010), and Rüdiger, “Married
Couples” (2012).
The Generative Aspect 53

this difference is rare, such as when it was noted in the legendary genealogy of
William the Conqueror, whose line led back through Rollo/Hrólf to a compan-
ion of Harald Fairhair, that William bore the epithet ‘the Bastard’24—only the
Franks could come up with such an oddity.
The situation appears different in the Latin texts. The Norwegian tradition is
hardly suitable for comparison in this instance, however, as there are only two
short Latin works of history—the Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensi-
um of Theodoric the Monk (c.1180) and the fragmentary Historia Norwegiae
(13th c.) alongside the rich output in Norse.25 Latin historiography is far more
extensive and diverse for Denmark, for which, in turn, we have only one major
Norse source: Knýtlinga saga, composed around the middle of the thirteenth
century though probably not in Denmark. The Danish historiographers were
thus already compelled by the language they used to face the tradition and cur-
rent debates around the word concubina. The choice of language and of stylis-
tic register (Norse/Latin, saga/historia) is important but of course it is anything
but a simple reflection of different degrees of learning let alone linguistic com-
petence. The Norwegian and Icelandic authors were highly educated clerics,
often trained in the intellectual centres of Western Europe, and there is ample
evidence to show that monasteries and bishoprics of the Province of Nidaros
were hotspots of Norse literacy. Likewise the Danish tradition shows that the
local preference for Latin, in contrast to the Norse prevailing in the North At-
lantic, was certainly not synonymous with a greater acceptance of the con-
comitant positions from the Romano-clerical tradition and specially its latest
trends. This may be shown through a survey of the relevant chronicles, annals,
histories, and hagiography.
The majority—and, taking into account the textual dependencies, the
‘mainstream’—of known texts affect what I would describe as a nonchalant
attitude. As with the sagas, this is by no means synonymous with ignorance; it
can be assumed that the concept of illegitimacy based on the form of parental
relationship was well known as a potential problem. Already in the Roskilde
Chronicle, the earliest surviving Danish historiographical source (c.1140), po-
lygyny is handled as borderline offensive. The succession arrangements of
Cnut the Great († 1035), for example, presented a challenge: Cnut’s ‘legitimate’
son from his relationship with Queen Emma, Harthacnut, took over the king-
ship in Denmark, while his two ‘illegitimate’ sons from his relationship with
the English magnate’s daughter Ælfgifu of Northampton, Harald and Sven,

24 HsH c. 24 (with the loanword bastarðr).

25 Both texts are edited in: Monumenta historica Norvegiæ (1880); the latter now also in: His-
toria Norwegie (2003).
54 Chapter 1

r­ eceived England and Norway respectively. Adam of Bremen, in his History of

the Church of Hamburg, is indignant: “After his [Cnut’s] death his sons suc-
ceeded him in the realm as he had determined—Harold in England, Sven in
Norway, Harthacnut in Denmark. Since the last-named was the son of Queen
Emma, it was his sister [Gunhild] whom Caesar Henry [iii] later received in
marriage. As for the others, Sven and Harold had been born of a concubina; but
they, as is the custom with the barbarians, were then allotted an equal share of
the patrimony with Cnut’s legitimate children.”26
The Roskilde Chronicle, which generally relies heavily on Adam, adopts this
account with a significant omission: “After the death of Cnut, the rule passed
to his three sons: Sven, whom he had from Alvia [Ælfgifu], ruled in Norway,
Harald, another of Alvia’s sons, in England, and Harthacnut, the son of Emma,
in Denmark.”27 A straightforward three-part succession, then, with no men-
tion of whose mother was, or was not, a concubina. The chronicler, though
writing in Denmark, even skips the opportunity to praise the Danish heir, who
in Adam has the imperial connection and ‘legitimate’ birth in his favour, at the
expense of his brothers. Naming the mothers points at a distinction without
making it explicit (Emma is not even given the title of queen), even though
the source offered every possibility of doing so. Neither can this omission be
explained away as a possible Danish indignation at Adam’s remark about the
“barbaric custom,” given that the chronicler could simply have erased this
comment.
Shortly thereafter, however, ‘illegitimacy’ is needlessly foregrounded: When
the son of Saint Óláf Haraldsson, Magnús “the Good” (r. 1035–47), won Norway
and Cnut’s son Sven and his mother, Cnut’s ‘concubine’ Ælfgifu, had to leave
the country, the Roskilde Chronicle does adopt Adam’s epithet, calling Magnús

26 Adam of Bremen ii, 74: “Post cuius mortem, ut ipse disposuit, succedunt in regnum fi-
lii eius, Haroldus in Angliam, Suein in Nortmanniam, Hardechnud in Daniam. Iste cum
­esset filius reginae, sororem habuit eam, quam cesar Heinricus in coniugium postea rece-
pit. Ceterum Suein et Harold a concubina geniti erant; qui, ut mos est barbaris, aequam
tunc inter liberos Chnud sortiti sunt partem hereditatis.” History of the Archbishops of
Hamburg-Bremen, ed. Tschan (2002), 107. Tschan translates concubina as “concubine,” as
does Werner Trillmich in the German 1961 Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gedenkausgabe standard
translation.
27 Chronicon Roskildense, in sm, vol. 1, 1–33, c. 9: “Post mortem uero Kanuti tres filii eius
regnare ceperunt; Sven, quem habuit de Aluia, regnauit in Normannia, Haroldus in An-
glia, eciam filius Aluie, Hartha Knut in Dania, filius Ymme” [Emma]—as in Adam, Nor(t)
mannia here denotes Norway. Unlike his brothers, Sven did not actually bear the royal ti-
tle; his mother exercised a kind of representative rule in Norway, which collapsed imme-
diately after his death.
The Generative Aspect 55

“the son of Saint Olav by a concubine.”28 It might be tempting to think that the
reference to Magnús’ birth de concubina was adopted here with pejorative in-
tent: after all, Sven Estridsen, hero of the Roskilde Chronicle, would later have to
prevail against this very Magnús.29 But to take the epithet as a slur a persona is
difficult to reconcile with another passage where the Roskilde Chronicle de-
scribes the “martyrdom” of Olav Haraldsson at the Battle of Stiklestad 1030:
“His son Magnús succeeded him as ruler, who was born of a concubine; still a
boy, he was magnanimous and beautiful in appearance.”30 In the context of an
appreciation of Saint Olav as proselytizer of Norway and the worker of numer-
ous miracles through relics, disparagement is clearly not the intention. It looks
as though Magnús’s illegitimate birth did not matter either way. That his ex-
plicit (and stylistically unnecessary) designation as the son of a concubine
might even be meant as praise would indeed correspond to the rhetorical logic
of this passage, but cannot be asserted just on the basis of this one example.31
Ultimately, Sven Estridsen, who took over the Danish kingship after the
death by accident of his rival Magnús in 1047, is the true ‘good’ king, gloriosus
rex Danorum, of the Roskilde Chronicle: promotor of the diocese, patron of
Bishop Sven Nordmand revered by the chronicler, who probably was a canon
at the cathedral church.32 Now Sven is a king whose polygyny always needs to
be addressed, as five of his sons, each from different mothers, succeeded him

28 Chronicon Roskildense, in sm, vol. 1, 1–33, c. 9: “Interea Suen obiit in Norwegia, frater
Harthe Knut; tunc Normanni elegerunt Magnum, filium sancti Olaui a concubina.”—
Adam of Bremen ii, 77: “tunc Nortmanni elegerunt Magnum, qui erat filius Olaph mar-
tyris a concubina.”
29 Adam can be ascribed a similar motive here, as the veracissimus rex Sven Estridsen, with
whom he claimed to have had long conversations (i, 26; 28; 48, ii, 61 and elsewhere), en-
joys a sympathetic portrayal in the Gesta pontificum. Adam also uses the concubina motif
elsewhere as a means of denigrating (e.g. the sons of Olof Skötkonung in Sweden, ii, 59);
he has little interest in and respect for Saint Olav, perhaps because England played a far
greater part in his early cult than Bremen (ii, 61).
30 Chronicon Roskildense c. 7: “Qui dum regnum suum primus Christiane fidei subiugasset
totum, a paucis in bello percussus gloriosam martyrii coronam est adeptus. Cuius corpus
a fidelibus Throndemis [Nidaros, the present-day city of Trondheim, in the region of
Þrándheim/Trøndelag] humatur, <ubi> multis hodie miraculis illustratur. Cui filius in reg-
num successit, nomine Magnus, qui ex concubina erat genitus, etate puer, magnanimus,
forma speciosus.”
31 We must consider the possibility that the relative clause “qui ex concubina erat genitus”
was interpolated, but to my mind this seems unlikely. The passage is the identical in all
the manuscripts collated by Gertz, the oldest of which dates back to the late 13th century;
Olav’s status as a saint also gradually became ever more unassailable, especially after the
foundation of the archbishopric of Nidaros (1152/53), shortly after the Roskilde Chronicle
was written, while the political expediency vilifying his son gradually disappeared.
32 Cf. Gelting, ed., Roskildekrøniken (1979), 69ff.
56 Chapter 1

on the throne one after the other, and their respective lines would be strug-
gling over succession for over a hundred years. Moreover, one of those sons is
Cnut (iv, r. 1080–86; the second to succeed Sven as king), who, pursued by his
opponents and killed in Odense Cathedral, was, with the aid of considerable
royal and episcopal involvement, made a saint a few years after his death. Al-
though the Danish saint-king never achieved the popularity or impact of his
obvious role model, Olav in Norway, the fact that the first Danish saint was a
concubine’s son was nonetheless a potentially sensitive subject.
Adam of Bremen, who completed his work a little before Cnut’s, did not yet
have that problem. For him, Sven Estridsen—by and large a positive figure—is
a prominent example for the sexual attitudes which must be condemned: in-
cest and concubinage. According to Adam, it was only under the pressure of
Rome that Sven Estridsen yielded to Archbishop Adalbert’s previously unsuc-
cessful exhortations, and dissolved his marriage with a consanguinea from
Sweden, “still the king would not give ear to the admonitions of the priests.
Soon after he had put aside his cousin he took to himself other wives and con-
cubines, and again still others.”33 Adam expanded his comments de mulieribus
into an exemplum on the king’s punishment for his misconduct that would
develop a certain narrative life of its own in several later Danish historical
works,34 and that, topical though it seems, cannot be totally dismissed out of
hand as event-historical evidence: One of his concubines, Thore, poisoned the
“legitimate queen” Gude; Thore’s son Magnus, sent by his father to Rome to be
consecrated as king, died on the way; Thore never bore another son.35
Short as it is, the story contains some interesting points. First of all, the great
number of concubines is emphasized once again. Sven, the organizer of the
Danish dioceses, is emulating Solomon (elsewhere this is explicit), in both
good and evil. At the same time, it precludes every possible mitigating circum-
stance in Sven’s favour. The late Roman canonical norm, according to which it
did not matter whether a man had a concubine or a wife as long as he ­contented

33 Adam of Bremen iii, 12: “nec tamen rex sacerdotum admonitionibus aurem prebuit, sed
mox ut consobrinam a se dimisit, alias itemque alias uxores et concubinas assumpsit.”—
Consobrina must be understood here in the sense of a terminus technicus: “cognate related
to a degree declared to be forbidden.” History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, ed.
Tschan (2002), 107.
34 Cf. Annales Lundenses (compiled in their extant form in the late 13th century), s.a. 1053;
Danish compilation of the Annales Ryenses (early 14th cent.), s.a. 1074, in dma, 54 and 193.
35 Adam of Bremen, schol. 72: “Nec tamen illi malo defuit ultio, quia una ex concubinis, le-
gitimam Gude reginam veneno extinxit. Cumque rex Suein filium Thore, Magnum vo-
cabulo, Romam transmitteret, ut ibi consecraretur ad regnum, infelix puer in via defunc-
tus est, post quem mater impia non suscepit alium filium.”
The Generative Aspect 57

himself with just one woman, emphasized monogamy but not necessarily
marriage. Repeated over again by early medieval synods and church laws, it
was still a standard prescript in Adam’s day (it also found its way into Gratian’s
Decretum).36 But the little story of Thore and Gude showed that Sven had by no
means “contented himself” with one woman at a time. Indeed, the name of
this son of a “concubine,” Magnus, suggests that from birth he was considered
capable of becoming king. The name had been in use since the eleventh cen-
tury, first in the Norwegian, then in the Danish royal house, occasionally in
explicit connection to Charles “the Great,” and Sven Estridsen himself is some-
times (especially by Ælnoth) called Swenomagnus. Adam’s story, in which a
king-to-be named after Charlemagne makes for papal Rome, confirms this in
its own way—even if we are wary to accept the idea of an actual plan for a
consecration in Rome (in fact, the first Danish sacral coronation ceremony
took place only in 1170), even a papal blessing would have gone a long way.37
The women’s names, Þóra and Gyða, were also very common contemporary
names.38 As nothing is known of Sven Estridsen having a “legitimate queen”
(with the exception of the repudiated consobrina mentioned by Adam), the
eminence which Adam claimed for Guthe may have rested more on her current
position at the royal court than on any categorial difference—in other words,
hearsay from the king’s household. This makes the plot reported by Adam all

36 I. Toletanum (c.400 ad), c. 17: “Si quis habens uxorem fidelis concubinam habeat, non
communicet: ceterum is qui non habet uxorem et pro uxore concubinam habet, a com-
munione non repellatur, tantum ut unius mulieris, aut uxoris aut concubinae, ut ei placu-
erit, sit coniunctione contentus.” Mansi iii 1001, cf. Caselli, “Concubina pro uxore” (1964–
65); cf. the almost identical Decretum Gratiani D 34,4.
37 Hoffmann, Königserhebung (1976), 29f., accepts Adam’s account, including the purpose of
the journey to Rome, and sees it as Sven Estridsen’s attempt to designate a successor dur-
ing his lifetime to the detriment of all his other sons. The plan failed with Magnus’s death,
whereupon Sven instead committed the magnates of the kingdom to choosing his sons
one by one, thus at least restricting the blood right a little. I have reservations about rely-
ing on Adam alone as evidence for such a far-reaching political project: Magnus’s journey
is treated too casually and is too closely tied up with the theme of retribution for the
poisoner-mother. Moreover, it is not quite clear why Sven would resort to a journey to
Rome for an anointing ceremony, which, while practised in a few other kingdoms, was
entirely foreign in a Danish context and unlikely to make much of an impression on a
domestic audience, rather than keeping with custom and, say, having the designated son
‘chosen’ at a thing, perhaps with the assistance of a local bishop. The story perhaps makes
more sense if read as non-factual, as Adam’s comment on God’s work upon the son of the
royal concubine.
38 Both designate important frillur and mothers of kings: the Gyða Eiríksdóttir cited in the
preceding liminary chapter; Harald Fairhair’s old mistress Þóra Mostrarstǫng; Magnús
Barelegs’ mother Þóra Jónsdóttir (see Chapter 2); Jarl Hákon’s last faithful follower Þóra of
Rimul (see Chapter 5), and others.
58 Chapter 1

the more plausible. Certainly, the Bremen canon could have drawn the story of
the murder of a more successful rival from Gregory of Tours or another source;
yet given that Adam repeatedly refers to the king as his direct informant, the
basic content of the scholium with its convincing onomastic colouring is cred-
ible as a rare insight into the agonistic atmosphere between the king’s women.
When one of Sven Estridsen’s sons, Cnut, subsequently became a saint,39 his
father’s mulierum incontinentia (as Adam had put it) became the focus of inter-
est in a completely new way—after all, the prevailing view of the time was that
the new saint king would be disqualified from most church offices due to his
concubine mother. The monk Ælnoth, who had come from Canterbury to the
new Benedictine monastery at Odense,40 founded by monks from Evesham,
made a virtue of necessity in his vita of the saint, written around 1120: “Sven
Estridsen is synonymous with David, the strongest of the kings and the most
eloquent of the prophets.” Not only did he strike down his enemies wherever
they rose against God, and bring happiness and peace to his kingdom, “he also
yielded to the enticing charm of debauchery, and begat numerous offspring,
who would rightfully succeed him in the rule; some he had learn theology, oth-
ers he sent to various places to be educated by nobles.”41
For Ælnoth (who does not use Adam), Cnut’s father Sven Estridsen, Adam’s
‘Solomon,’ is therefore David and Ælnoth’s ‘Solomon’ is Saint Cnut himself—
but a different Solomon to the polygynous temple builder of the Bible: the new
king “thought through his past deeds and mistakes and the misdeeds of his
youth”—for which there were certainly enough opportunities in the course of
an education by eleventh-century nobiles—and “had heard and understood
that those who desire to belong to Christ must be ready to crucify the flesh with
its sins and desires.”42 He demonstrated this not only through ­inconspicuous

39 “Martyred” in 1086, elevated in 1095, first passio written around the same time, probably
canonized in 1099, translated in 1100 with the ensuing new cathedral constructed in
Odense; cf. Kaarsted, ed., Odense bys historie, vol. 1 (1982); Meulengracht Sørensen, “Om
Ælnoth og hans bog” (1984), 115–39; Christensen, Middelalderbyen Odense (1988).
40 Founded for this purpose in 1098/99, the cathedral chapter was erected around 1117; see
Johannsen and Johannsen, Sct. Knuds Kirke (2001), 8–35.
41 Ælnoth c. 3 (in: aass Jul. 10, col. 0130ff.): “Inter igitur praemissa pietatis studia, Sueno
Magnus, veluti regum quondam fortissimus, ut et vatum facundissimus David … luxui il-
lecebrosi appetitus admodum cedens, numerosae prolis sobolem in regni sibi iura succes-
suram emisit; quosdamque divinae scientiae studiis apposuit, quosdam suis in locis sin-
gulis educando nobilibus delegavit.”
42 Ælnoth c. 9: “actus et ignorantias pristinas ac delicta iuventutis suae solerti examinatione
discutiens … audierat enim et audiens intellexerat, … ut qui Christi esse desiderant, car-
nem cum vitiis et concupiscentiis crucifigere non perhorrescunt” (cf. Gal 5:24).
The Generative Aspect 59

fasting—even at banquets, he secretly drank only water instead of mead and

wine and discreetly let the best food pass by him—and clandestine scourging
by two court bishops. He also “kept away from the immorality that many kings
fall victim to, even King Solomon, who long ago was blamed for his sons’ loss of
ten-twelfths of the kingdom.” Cnut’s marriage to the Flemish count’s daughter
Adela “of the imperial family, brought with great deference from the western
shores” (the counts of Flanders were held to be descended from the Carolin-
gians following a hypergynous act of bravado by their ninth-century ancestor
Baldwin i) marked the first dynastic bond of a Danish ruler to the continental
West and may have given him an unprecedented reputation and support. As
Ælnoth implies, he had a good reason “to be content with his marriage to her
and to avoid the unchaste embrace of concubines.”43 Were the further tempta-
tions of the regum lascivia really rendered obsolete by the Carolingian woman?
The parallel to Snorri’s description of King Harald Fairhair, who repudiated his
numerous Norwegian women after his union with the Danish princess, comes
to mind. Like Harald, politically Cnut had good reason to treat his wife from
the south well. Ælnoth’s Cnut, in his commendable monogamous up-market
marriage to Ethela, id est nobilis (“Adele, meaning ‘the noble one’”) is a saint—
a Josephite marriage is not necessary; under the circumstances, monogyny is
already chastity enough.
Ælnoth almost seems to speak out against a certain public indignation at
this restriction of the royal seed. It was no small risk that Cnut was taking if he
did indeed restrict himself in this way. According to the testimony of William
of Malmesbury, a rumour circulated that William the Conqueror, who likewise
concentrated on his privileged relationship with the daughter of a Flemish
count, “was unable to do anything with women.”44 Like the Conqueror, King
Cnut was well advised to give priority to the Flanders connection as he in turn
prepared to invade England in 1085. Contrary to the Conqueror, however, this

43 Ælnoth c. 8: “Regum quamplurium, sed et ipsius Salomonis devitans lasciviam, ob quam

eius quondam posteri bis quinis regni partibus ablatis, vix duabus irato Domino princi-
pari merebantur; imperatorii generis, nobilissimam sibi coniugem, sapientium consilio,
elegit; quam insigni honorificientia ex occidentalibus oris adductam, secundum nominis
eius aestimationem, quae Ethela, id est nobilis, dicebatur, nobilem nobiliter excipiens,
impudicis concubinarum despectis amplexibus, solius eius connubio, Iesu Christo teste
angelisque eius, contentus est.”
44 William of Malmesbury, gra iii, 273: “precipue in prima adolescentia castitatem sus-
pexit, in tantum ut publice sereretur nichil illum in femina posse.” Then with Matilda of
Flanders “ita se egit ut pluribus annis nullius probri suspitione notaretur.” William and
Ælnoth’s works and the kings they describe are more or less contemporary, and both were
English. There is therefore no reason why one must ‘depend’ on the other: rather, both
narrate from within the same political and cultural milieu.
60 Chapter 1

did not bring him any dynastic success. After his death on the run from the op-
position which, for reasons that remain unclear, became overwhelming follow-
ing the abandoned English campaign, Adela returned to Flanders with her son,
who bore the telling name of Charles. In 1119, Charles became count of Flan-
ders and, in 1127, a saint by virtue of his ‘martyrdom’ famously recounted by
Galbert of Bruges. In Denmark, however, the kingship passed to Cnut’s broth-
ers, the remaining sons of Sven Estridsen from his “unchaste embraces with
concubines.” Unlike Harald Fairhair, King Cnut had failed as the founder of a
lineage.
It is remarkable how terse and derogatory the treatment of the saintly king
is in the Danish sources. The Roskilde Chronicle, which grants him less space
than any of Sven’s other four sons, only reports that Cnut introduced a “new
and scandalous” levy—apparently a poll tax—and therefore suffered martyred
in Odense.45 The Danish king lists and annals mention his death at most,
sometimes not even this, never his sanctity, and certainly not his wife or son.46
Certainly, the success of S. Canutus rex was hampered by the fact that he be-
longed to Odense, a see which was politically sidelined shortly after his canon-
ization, and moreover did not himself become the forebear of a line of kings.
The other ‘political’ Saint Cnut of Denmark, S. Canutus dux, Cnut Lavard
(† 1131), father of King Valdemar i (r. 1157–82) who would be so successful po-
litically and dynastically, fared better. With his cult centre in Ringsted on the
island of Zealand, which was becoming the centre of gravity of the kingdom,
he was the patron saint of ecclesiastical-royal coronation ceremonies, and his
church would be the burial place of kings for almost two centuries. Yet if the
holy King Cnut’s ‘failure’ is associated with his lack of a dynastic successor, it
can be seen in the context of the general attitude of the Danish sources to an
abundance of offspring, which in terms of polygynous practices can be charac-
terized as a kind of staged disinterest.

45 Chronicon Roskildense c. 10: “Quo [Harald, Sven’s eldest son] mortuo frater eius Kanutus in
regnum levatus est. Hic cum populum quadam nova lege et inaudita ad tributum, quod
nostrates ‘nefgjald’ [‘nose tax’] vocant, coegit, a Iucia in Fiuniam fugatus Othinse in eccle-
sia sancti Albani martyrizatus est.” A minimal reference to the “many miracles” at his
grave follows.
46 Cf. the six genealogies in sm, vol. 1, 145–94, as well as the nine annals covering Cnut’s era
(collected in dma). Only the so-called Annales Dani-Suecani, probably compiled in
Östergötland around 1500, mention Cnut’s marriage to Adela and three children: Charles,
Cecilia, and Ingeborg, with the latter connected with the jarl of Sweden Birger Jarl (†1266)
and his son, King Magnus Ladulås (r. 1275–90), through a dubious and temporally quite
impossible genealogy.
The Generative Aspect 61

4 Practices of the Valdemar Era

There has already been mention of the Roskilde Chronicle’s telling omissions
from Adam of Bremen’s account, passing up the occasion to label Cnut the
Great’s successors in Norway and England as the sons of a concubine. The
­Danish king lists (series regum, kongetal) engage in similar practices. A late
thirteenth-century king list, whose main concern was the glorification of the
‘martyr’-king Erik Plovpenning, murdered in Slesvig in 1250 by his brother
Abel, comments on the sons of Cnut the Great that “although from different
relationships” (licet diversis hymeneis) he made them his “twin heirs” (geminos
heredes): the intended antithesis is obvious.47 Another king list, probably draft-
ed in the first half of the thirteenth century, does indeed distinguish the Dan-
ish heir as the son of the uxor and the sons who inherited England and Norway
as concubina geniti, however, the division of the empire described immediately
afterwards is given without comment.48 A list from the later thirteenth or early
fourteenth century adds: “His sons succeeded him … as their father had in-
tended during his lifetime.”49 No opprobrium seems to be intended or indeed
attached.
There is a parallel development in the Danish provincial laws, which were
fixed in writing in the early thirteenth century, described by Thyra Nors in her
study on the ‘illegitimate’ children of high status women as a compromise be-
tween the regional custom of not differentiating between offspring and the
canonical categorization, recently exacerbated by the stipulation in the Liber
Extra (1234) about illegitimate children’s incapacity to inherit. Various regional

47 SM, vol. 1, 187; only the Danish heir Harthacnut is mentioned by name, so we do not know
which of the three sons is omitted. That hymeneus (“bridal”), biblically unattested and
missing from DuCange, is to be interpreted here as “legitimate” in the narrower sense can
be ruled out, for a little later, it says of the sons of Valdemar ii in a syntactically similar
and terminologically very precise phrase: “hic quatuor habuit filios legitimos, diversis ta-
men coniugibus” (namely the Bohemian princess Dagmar and the Portuguese princess
Berengaria). The canonical terminology—here, coniugium—was thus perfectly usable,
and its neglect in certain situations should be regarded as a conscious choice: the first
passage therefore means “from different kinds of sexual unions.”
48 sm, vol. 1, 160–66, here 164: “Kanutus victor existens ipsam Immam duxit uxorem genu-
itque ex ea filium Hartheknut. Suein et Haroldus a concubina geniti fuerant. Post mortem
eius succedunt in regnum eius filii eius, Haroldus in Angliam, Suein in Normanniam,
Harthecnut in Daniam.”—The next Danish king, Magnus the Good, is also again here
“filiu[s] sancti Olaf a concubina.”
49 sm, vol. 1, 167–74, here 169f.: “Cui successerunt filii eius, Harthecnut in Dacia, Harald in
Anglia, Swen in Noruegia, sicut pater vivens disposuit.” The ‘legitimate’ son’s connection
to emperor Henry iii through marriage, as well as the name of the concubine, Alviva, had
previously also been specified here, among other things.
62 Chapter 1

laws reacted to these new trends by replacing the traditional unchallenged ca-
pacity of illegitimate children to inherit with a father’s testamentary right and
an unaffected hereditary right on the maternal side.50
At the same time, sons of concubines were being excluded from the roy-
al  succession: since Valdemar i (1157), no further ‘illegitimate’ sons (that is,
sons  not stemming from an at least isogynous relationship) became kings.
However—unlike in Norway a century later—this exclusion was never formu-
lated in legal terms, but was achieved through practice. This was encouraged
by the fact that there was always at least one suitable ‘legitimate’ successor
available on the six occasions when a king died during the Valdemar period;
the long-term success of the new practice, however, did not appear secured for
a long time. Certainly the oldest known son of Valdemar i, Christopher († 1171),
son of a concubine named Tove,51 apparently made no attempt to challenge
his ten-year-younger half-brother Cnut from his father’s relationship with the
Minsk prince’s daughter Sophia, for the designation. Instead we see him as a
faithful member of the royal court, leader of several military campaigns against
the Polabian Slavs, and finally jarl/duke of southern Jutland: a ‘magnate.’52 The

50 Nors, “Illegitimate Children” (1996); see also klnm, s.v. Oäkta barn. The Danish kingdom
consisted of three legal regions: Scania, Zealand (with the smaller islands), and Jutland,
which received written laws in the vernacular between c.1200 (Scania) and 1241 (King’s
Law for Jutland).
51 Thus KnS c. 109. Nors, “Illegitimate Children” (1996), 22, casts doubt on this tradition and
points out Christopher’s striking proximity to prominent members of the Zealand Hvide
magnate house, including Archbishop Absalon. To me, this does not seem sufficient rea-
son to regard the mother as a Hvide, given the abundance of evidence for the sons of royal
concubines being raised by allied aristocrats (see above for Sven Estridsen’s children in
Ælnoth). However, this cannot be excluded, for as Nors demonstrates for Denmark with
several examples, and as becomes clear for other parts of Europe in this study, royal ‘con-
cubinages’ with aristocratic women were by no means rare.
52 KnS c. 122: “Valdamarr konungr gaf Kristófóró syni sínum ríki á Jótlandi; hafði hann her-
togadóm í Heiðabœ ok þat ríki, sem þar fylgir; hann var ríkr maðr.” When Knýtlinga saga
was composed in the mid-thirteenth century, southern Jutland/Slesvig was established as
a ‘princely fief’ (fyrstelen) usually entrusted to the first in the royal succession (the saga
uses the word ríki “regnum, independent sphere of control”). Ríkr maðr “mighty man” is
the saga term for the uppermost group of influential men who deal with kings on equal
terms.—Christopher is also mentioned by Saxo, who talks extensively about his role in
the Rügen campaigns, but says nothing about his mother, as well as in a dozen annals and
chronicles. In one version of the Annales Sorani (dma, 19), his mother is named without
comment—but as Helena, probably being confused with Valdemar ii’s concubine (cf.
Nors, “Illegitimate Children” [1996], 22)—elsewhere, in a late compilation based on the
Annales Ryenses (c.1300 at the earliest; dma, 308), we find the addendum “Valdemari filius
nothus.” Christopher died in 1173, three years after Cnut’s solemn coronation as co-regent
and successor as part of the canonization ceremonies for Cnut Lavard in Ringsted 1170.
The Generative Aspect 63

name Kristófórus, at that time uncommon in Denmark, suggests that Valde-

mar, then a young contender for the disputed royal title, saw his position
strengthened by the birth of a son and wished to reinforce this with the ono-
mastic reference to his own Russian/Greek kinship.53 Valdemar’s son from his
marriage to Sophia, born six years after he had achieved sole rule, was named
Cnut, presumably with the intention of making the name of Valdemar’s two
saintly relatives (his father Cnut Lavard and his great-uncle Cnut iv) the Leit-
name of the new dynasty in the making.
However, not all Danish kings’ sons accepted their exclusion from kingship
by the victorious party so lightly. A grandson of Niels (Nicholas, r. 1104–34), the
last of Sven Estridsen’s five sons to become king,54 the sometime king Cnut
Magnussen left behind two sons through concubines when he was killed in
1157. One of them, also called Niels, was an overseer of important royal pos-
sessions in East Jutland, so he had obviously not pressed too hard, and Valde-
mar found it expedient to be on good terms with him. He made his name
with his piety and was venerated locally as a saint after his death in 1180, a
popular cult that remained alive until the nineteenth century.55 How far the
notion of sacral kingship resonates in this never-sanctioned “grassroot cult”
we can only speculate; however, the illegitimately born saint can hardly have
constituted a danger to the ruling line. The situation was different with King
Cnut Magnussen’s other son, Valdemar,56 who studied in Paris and who, as
bishop-elect of Slesvig, appears at first sight as the typical instance of giving
a church career to a ‘younger son’ excluded from the paternal inheritance. But
given that magnates with a solid level of church education were not rare in

53 Valdemar (~Vladimir) was the son of a daughter of Mstislav of Novgorod/Kiev and Cnut
Lavard, born after his murder in 1131.
54 He was proclaimed king in 1146 and killed on 9 August 1157 at a reconciliation feast of
three ruling kings (the famous ‘Bloodfeast of Roskilde,’ reported by Saxo, Helmold of Bo-
sau, and others), apparently at the instigation of King Sven Grathe. The third king, Valde-
mar, escaped with serious injuries, gathered his army, and marched on King Sven, who
died in a battle in Jutland two months later, making Valdemar sole ruler; see Malmros,
“Blodgildet i Roskilde” (1979), 43–66. Although the major accounts of the bloodfeast side
with Valdemar, it is tempting to see Valdemar as the actual mastermind behind the plot,
though this can hardly be supported by the sources.
55 His vita and miracula are collected in: vsd, 397–407; on his cult, see Paludan, “Sejlivede
græsrodshelgener” (1987). A few years later, the new, present-day Aarhus Cathedral was
built over his grave and the old 11th-century cathedral abandoned, a process that has only
one parallel in Northern Europe, in association with Saint Cnut’s burial place in Odense.
56 Born 1158, died 1236; his name refers to his father’s temporary alliance with King Valde-
mar, which also prompted King Valdemar’s marriage to Sophia—this not only reinforced
kinship ties with Russia, but also had domestic political value as Sophia was King Cnut
Magnussen’s the half-sister; cf. Saxo xiv, 14,1f.
64 Chapter 1

twelfth-century ­Denmark we ought to be cautious about hastily equating ec-

clesiastical education and rank with exclusion from the secular.57 In fact, after
the death of Christopher, his own son by a frilla, King Valdemar i entrusted
his nephew Valdemar with the administration of the duchy in South Jutland,
to which the king’s second son by Sophia, also called Valdemar, was intend-
ed to succeed. In other words, Valdemar was given secular rule of the same
area whose bishop he was to be. However, the combination of possibility and
limitation must have become unbearable for the bishop-elect, and when the
handover of the duchy to the grown Valdemar (the later King Valdemar ii, “the
Victorious,” r. 1202–41) was due, Bishop Valdemar reached for the kingship and
challenged Cnut vi (r. 1182–1202), who had already been designated eldest le-
gitimate son of Valdemar i at the canonization ceremony at Ringsted in 1170.
The attempt failed, Bishop Valdemar was captured, and only released a decade
and a half later after repeated (albeit markedly discrete) papal intervention.
After his controversial election to the archbishopric of Bremen, in the 1220s
he became involved in the Holsten coalition which brought about the end of
Danish rule in Nordalbingia, and, after having been sequestered at various Cis-
tercian monasteries, died in 1236.58
Bishop Valdemar was Denmark’s last ‘illegitimate’ pretender to the throne.
However, it remained customary to grant the sons of concubines influence
with the king or near-princely positions until well into the thirteenth century.
In 1216, King Valdemar ii named the concubine’s son domicellus Niels count of
North Halland (the northernmost region of the Danish kingdom on the Scan-
dinavian mainland, thus in a sense the counterpart to South Jutland/Slesvig),

57 For example, Hoffmann, Königserhebung (1976), 28f., who equates the report concerning
the theological education of some of Sven Estridsen’s sons with early exclusion from the
royal succession. In doing so, I suspect that Hoffmann overestimates Sven Estridsen’s abil-
ity to manipulate custom and the right of magnate gatherings to ‘elect’ a king, as well as
the facticity of the episode, which should be read in the context of the intended hagio-
graphic effect. Furthermore, we might wonder what kind of “theological” training was
even available to future priests around 1050/70. It is difficult to think of anything more
than a stay in Bremen, as attested for some bishops of the Nordic ecclesiastical province.
However, according to Adam’s reports, the atmosphere there was not much different from
the court of a secular prince. This was certainly different in Paris around 1170, at least; but
even in the thirteenth century, a corresponding intention on the part of the Scandinavian
magnates cannot be observed.
58 For a detailed biographical overview, see Hans Olrik, “Valdemar (Knudsen),” in Dansk bio-
grafisk lexikon (1887–1905), vol. 18, 193–97, with a remarkably harsh characterization of
the pretender as “the most demonic figure in our history … the evil apostate, a nightmare
in the midst of Denmark’s happiest time” (197)—a characterization which is to be under-
stood from the national perspective of the time after 1864. Revisions in Radtke, “Sliaswig
(Schleswig, Haithabu)” (1992), 114–16.
The Generative Aspect 65

and his son from his marriage with a Schwerin count’s daughter succeeded him
in this office after his early death in 1218. After the Danish crusade to Estonia
(1219) another of Valdemar’s sons, whom he had from his relationship with the
Swedish jarl’s daughter Helena,59 received the title of duke in Estonia and large
estates in Harjumaa at the age of fifteen. These, however, were lost a few years
later to the Sword Brethren. He subsequently appears as duke of Blekinge and
even retained this title after unsuccessfully rebelling against Valdemar ii’s suc-
cessor Erik Plovpenning along with his younger, legitimate brothers Abel and
Christopher. His later exchange of Blekinge for the island of Lolland was also
no diminution. Valdemar ii’s sons from the union with Berengaria of Portugal,
who became kings one after another in 1241, 1250, and 1252 respectively, clearly
saw themselves bound to preserve the rank their father had given their ‘illegiti-
mate’ brother. Moreover, he had extensive land holdings in Denmark and Swe-
den, most likely through maternal inheritance and paternal endowment; he
was married to a daughter of the Pomeranian duke Swantopolk. He died in
1260; his grave is in the abbey church of Ringsted, centre of the Cnut Lavard
cult and burial place of the Valdemarian dynasty, together with his son who
was assigned the dukedom in South Halland, next to six kings and their queens.
Without doubt, this concubine’s son was at the centre of the stirps regia.60

5 Dissenting Voices: Sven Aggesen and Saxo Grammaticus

This practice was certainly not unique in thirteenth-century Latin Europe—

let us recall the sons of Emperor Frederick ii—but neither was it common.
What is striking is the nonchalance that dominates the chronicles. The over-
whelming lack of comment on polygynous paternity is not ‘barbaric’ ignorance
but a cultural choice. For there are also a few dissonant voices; yet these come
from the ‘great’ minds of their time, who are more likely to be noticed in inter-
national historical scholarship today than the many smaller chronicles, annals,
and genealogies that may be considered the ‘mainstream’ of their time in terms

59 For more detail on this relationship, see below, Chapter 4. The choice of the name Cnut
for the son from a relationship with a frilla close to the mighty Zealand Hvide ‘house’
(magnate clan grouping) indicates that the still unmarried Valdemar considered the suc-
cession of this son to be a possibility.
60 The so-called Tabula Ringstadiensis, a sheet of parchment with a detailed description of
the layout of the royal tombs, produced in the second half of the fourteemth century
(edited with facsimile in SM, vol. 2, 82–86), calls him “Kanutus dux Lalandie, filius regis
Waldemari ii,” the same description as is provided for his two half-brothers from Valde-
mar’s marriages to Dagmar and Berengaria, who were buried alongside him.
66 Chapter 1

of transmission, adoption by other scribes, and geographic distribution. In or-

der to keep comparison as rigorous as possible, I will keep to historiography,
and not stray into sources such as the juridical writings of the canonist and
archbishop of Lund, Andreas Sunesen, who, in his Latin ‘paraphrase’ of Scani-
an law also addressed issues de filiis concubinarum.61
The first ‘great dissenter’ is Sven Aggesen (~1140–90?). He came from a pow-
erful Jutlandic magnate group which produced, among others, the first two
archbishops of Lund. His closer kin relations are, however, more obscure. He
lived in the entourage of King Valdemar i, for whom he edited, among other
things, the “Law of the Retainers” (Lex castrensis/Vederlov). His other impor-
tant work is the Brevis historia regum Dacie (c.1190). Like all twelfth-century
Danish histories, it begins with the legendary kings of a pre-Christian Golden
Age and continues the narrative to the present day.62 With him, we encounter
an almost mocking reading of Sven Estridsen, the gloriosus rex of the other
chronicles: “The rustics called him ‘the father of kings’ because he was a most
prolific begetter of numerous sons, five of whom wore the shining diadem of
kingship in succession.”63 Still, these sons included Saint Cnut, whom Sven felt
obliged to defend against the accusation (spelled out with relish) that he had
fallen victim to a rebellion due to his severity, cruelty, and the “unbearable
yoke” of his measures. Yet Sven Aggesen's explanation for Cnut's downfall (a
series of tactical miscalculations in the run-up to the embarrassing miscar-
riage of the English campaign) does not make Cnut look much better. Of the
saintly king’s self-denial expressed through his strict monogamy, which was so
important to the hagiographer Ælnoth (a model that was undoubtedly avail-
able to Sven), there is no mention.
The other is Saxo Grammaticus, to whose huge Gesta Danorum Sven Agge-
sen refers in a much-cited passage by way of apology for his own summary
treatment of the subject.64 Saxo’s comprehensive, craftfully stylized and high-
ly complex composition fundamentally refuses any treatment of individual
passages, as they immediately lose some of their meaning in isolation, so

61 See Nors, “Anders Sunesen” (1998).

62 Cf. Inge Skovgaard-Petersen, “Chronicles 1. Denmark,” in EMSc, 80f., with references, and
especially Breengaard, Muren om Israels hus (1982).
63 Sven Aggesen, Brevis historia c. 10 (in: sm, Bd. 1, 94–143, Version x): “Hunc ‘Regum Patrem’
turba nominavit agrestis, eo quod numerosa filiorum prole uberrimus extiterit. Inter quos
successive quinque regio fulserunt diademate.” The Works of Sven Aggesen, trans. Chris-
tiansen (1992), 65.
64 Sven Aggesen, Brevis historia c. 10: “Quorum gesta superfluum duxi plene recolere, ne cre-
brius idem repetitum fastisium pareret legentibus, cum … contubernalis meus Saxo ele-
gantiori stilo omnium gesta prolixius exponere decreverit.”
The Generative Aspect 67

that a theme such as ‘women in Saxo’ would always need to be treated in a

­book-length study; in fact, Birgit Sawyer (then Strand) has written that book.65
For this reason, it is difficult to compare the accounts of kings’ sons in other
historical works with Saxo. To give just one example: Saxo does, of course, treat
the succession to Cnut the Great († 1035), and specifies who the mothers of
the three successors were. However, Saxo integrates the English magnate’s
­daughter Ælfgifu (dismissed as concubina in Adam but not the Roskilde Chron-
icle) into his narrative in a unique manner: He makes her the beautiful lover of
the young Olav Haraldsson (the later Norwegian royal saint), who fought with
Cnut in England before claiming the rule of Norway.66 King Cnut requires her
handover, whereupon Olav Haraldsson terminates their association and retires
to Norway in anger. This is rhetorical flourish, deftly recalling Agamemnon’s
and Achilles’ quarrel over Briseis in the Iliad, but not ‘just rhetorical flourish.’
Saxo does not write for his countrymen, or at least not for many of them; he is
concerned with giving his country the historiographical ennoblement which,
in his view, it deserves, and to make it known to the elite of Latin Christendom.
When considering his women, as elsewhere, Saxo must be understood as a ten-
dentious translation of local practice into international high-style patterns of
reception.
Saxo provides Sven Estridsen, the ‘father of kings,’ with a lengthy character
reference, the first part of which reads as follows:

The repressed Danish captaincy now unfurled the billowing sails of suc-
cess. He was famous among men for his generosity, renowned for his mu-
nificence, excellent in every feature of philanthropy, for he also made it
his closest concern to build and adorn holy churches and brought a
motherland still inexperienced in sacred rites to a more refined practice
of religion. He spoiled this splendid conduct only by his excessive lust. By
plucking the chastity of many respectable girls, he fathered a large num-
ber of sons on mistresses [ex pellicibus], but got none through marriage
[ex matrimonio]. From these liaisons came Harald and Gorm, Omund
and Sven. To them were added Ubbe, Olaf, Niels, Bjørn, and Benedikt, all
greatly resembling their father and taking very little after their mothers.
A similar mean alliance produced [Saint] Cnut and Erik [‘Ejegod,’ 1095–
1103, who died in Cyprus on crusade], the noblest jewels of their land.
A daughter, Sigrid, to whom I must return in a later section was born to a

65 The foundational study of the topic remains Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980).
66 Saxo x, 14,5: “Alwivam ab Olavo adamatam Kanutus eximia matrone specie delectatus
stupro petiit. Igitur Olavus, sive quia concubine facibus spoliatus …” See below, Chapter 4.
68 Chapter 1

concubine [pellice] in the same way, and afterwards came to be the wife
of Godeskalk the Wend.
Because the king’s mind at length recoiled from the allurements of
promiscuity and an unrestrained indulgence in love-making, he decided
to check his inclinations by seeking a chaste marriage bed. He aimed to
make amends [ut … redimeret] for his involvement with all those par-
amours through the permitted institution of wedlock, the regulation of a
single union, and not to squander his royal virility in future with bedfel-
lows of that kind; therefore, in his desire for legitimate offspring [legitima
prole], he took Gyða.67

Saxo’s passage, so obviously aimed at Adam of Bremen’s report, oozes with

irony. The master of oblique commentary, whose seemingly straightforward
homage to Danish history and its climax in the Valdemar era (Saxo’s own) has
fooled generations of nationally-minded readers and translators and for a long
time gave Saxo himself the reputation of a royal wheedler, is giving us, at first
glance, a textbook prince: a bold king who, after fierce battles against the Nor-
wegian kings Magnús and Harald, gets the kingdom back on track, and whom
one almost wishes to forgive the youthful ardor of his loins (which the dutiful
churchman Saxo, however, does not fail to rebuke), for in time he recalls his
duty: a monogamous Christian marriage with legitimate children. This is the
prince as we know him from influential works of the present; a prince such as
that painted by Georges Duby or James Brundage. One almost wishes this ideal
‘jeune’ might have had his change of heart coincide with his assumption of
power.

67 Saxo xi, 7,1f.: “… Danie gubernaculum plena prosperitatis vela solvebat. Hic quum lib-
eralitate illustris, beneficentia celeber cunctisque humanitatis partibus perfectissimus
haberetur, etiam sacrarum edium condendarum ornandarumque curam intentissime
edidit rudemque adhuc sacrorum patriam ad cultiorem religionis usum perduxit. Verum
hunc morem candorem sola libidinis intemperantia maculabat. Complurium namque
illustrium puellarum castitate delibata ut nullum ex mantrmonio, ita complures ex pel-
licibus filios sustulit. E quibus fuere cum Gormone Haraldus, cum Suenone Omundus.
His accessere Ubbo et Olavus, Nicolaus, Biorno atque Benedictus, paterno quam maxime,
materno minimum sanguini respondentes. Consimilis copulo obscuritas Kanutum et Eri-
cum, maxima patrie ornamenta, progenuit. Sed et filia Siritha, que postmodum Guthscal-
co Sclavico coniunx accessit, in sequentibus referenda pellice pariter orta proditur. [7,2]
Tandem rex animum suum ab illecebris luxurie et immoderato veneris usu retractum
genialis thori castitate cohibere constituit. Ut ergo multorum pellicatuum experientiam
licenti nuptiarum usu uniusque matrimonii lege redimeret nec talibus ulterius cubiculis
maiestatis sue vigorem absumeret, Gutham, Suetico rege genitam, (…) legitime prolis …
collegit.” Gesta Danorum, trans. Fisher, vol. 2 (2015), 801, 803.
The Generative Aspect 69

As stated above, this is precisely what another king did: Valdemar i ‘the
Great,’ the king whose triumphs Saxo ostentatiously extols. He also had at
least one son through an early relationship with a frilla (Christopher, later
Jarl of South Jutland), but instead chose his children from the marriage
which paved his way to power, described by Saxo as sealing his alliance with
Cnut Magnussen as his successors.68 As shown, his children, Kings Cnut vi
and Valdemar ii, during whose lifetime Saxo wrote, behaved in the same
way—or, to put it more carefully, the sources only say that these kings were
‘officially’ serially (as opposed to simultaneously) polygynous, without explic-
itly excluding the other possibility. It must therefore have been clear to con-
temporaries that Saxo’s Sven Estridsen is a parallel vita. But it has a serious
flaw: in the end, the candidate for the unum matrimonium is, as Adam had
already complained and Saxo had underlined through rhetorical ornamenta-
tion, the king’s blood relative, and the purpose of making good on a chapter
of his life is completely missed: “He may have resolved to make a sacred mar-
riage, but in fact he only covered up his perfidy. Hardly had he escaped the
one crime, he plunged into the other.”69
Out of the frying pan into fire, then—for (and this again is a typical instance
of the uncertainty into which the lay world had been plunged by the reformist
radical tightening of incest rules) even an isogamous marriage among the royal
house did not help: coitum pro matrimonio habuit, he desired a marriage, but
only got illicit sex. Moreover, he was sternly rebuked by the clergy. With Saxo,
it is initially the local bishops of Lund and Roskilde, who then appeal to Arch-
bishop Adalbert in second instance. In response to Adalbert’s admonition,
Sven says that he will answer such impudence with the sword (seque ferro cor-
reptionis insolentiam repressurum edixit)—a threat that prompts the archbish-
op to relocate his seat from Hamburg to the safer Bremen. It is striking how
Saxo subtly transforms Adam’s model point by point for his purposes. In Adam,
Sven first marries his Swedish blood relative, repudiates her under pressure
from the churchmen (in the final instance, the pressure comes from the pope
and not, as in Saxo, from the coaxing of Sven’s episcopal friends in Denmark),
and then, “like Solomon,” takes numerous concubines. With the relocation of
the archiepiscopal see dated two centuries later for this purpose—Adam plac-
es it in 858 (i, 27)—Saxo adds in passing a further episode in his series of exem-
pla on the theme of ‘Danish courage versus Saxon-“Teutonic” cowardice.’ But

68 Saxo xiv, 14,1: “concordiam connubii affinitate componendam” (namely between Valde-
mar and Cnut Magnussen, whose half-sister Sophia he married).
69 Saxo xiv, 14,1: “Ita [ut] dum ad coniugalia sacra celebranda animum induxit, eorum no-
mine flagitium coloravit, dumque ab uno se crimine retrahit, in aliud repente provoluit.”
70 Chapter 1

ultimately—and this is Saxo’s real point—Sven and the reader come to the
conclusion: “Yet it is more tolerable that he seek ties with foreign blood than
with his relatives, although of course both kinds of love must be condemned as
unchastity.”70 It is difficult to imagine a lamer rebuke of kingly polygyny.
With a glance back to the beginning of Saxo’s section on Sven Estridsen, we
now see who is designated through the apparently clear conceptual opposition
pellices (negative) ↔ matrimonium (positive): on the one hand, virgin mag-
nate’s daughters; on the other, an incestuous foreigner. Matrimonium, so we
must conclude, can be the greater sin. We wonder which aspect of the king’s in-
temperantia libidinis was actually a blemish in Saxo’s eyes. For if the royal libido
only unfolds in a socially acceptable manner, for instance under the indulgent
eye of the first wife and without curtailing the rights of her or other relatives
(as had seemingly occurred with Sven’s indiscriminate approach), then the
“noble queen” can be a second Livia, her husband an Augustus or Alexander.71
Thus even in Saxo, the high-flyer cleric, any identification of polygyny and
illegitimacy, conspicuously absent from the majority of Danish sources, is at
best ambiguous. Saxo was well acquainted with the relevant canonical debates
and tendencies of his time and closely associated with leading canonists in the
North,72 and it was not unusual for him to exploit that argumentative poten-
tial. Saxo reports of the ‘Augustus’ Erik Ejegod († 1103) that his first son was said
to be from a concubina, the second from his matrimonium, and the third was

70 Saxo xiv, 14,1: “Sed tolerabilius quod alieni sanguinis quam quod sue propinquitatis
copulam usurpavit, quamquam uterque huiusce veneris usus impudicitie crimini sit
obnoxius.”
71 With Saxo (xii, 3,5), the king’s splendour is also tarnished by “the force of his desire.” His
numerous mistresses, chosen from the immediate environment, were treated with spe-
cial care by Queen Bothild and occasionally even adorned and groomed. Saxo attaches a
longer accolade of Bothild’s singularis moderatio, constructed antithetically. Possible
models include, besides Suetonius’s Livia (Aug. 71), the slightly more remote wife of
Scipio, Aemilianus, in Valerius Maximus (6,7,1); another of Saxo’s favorite authors is Justi-
nus, whose Alexander (xii, 3) evidently provided the template for Erik’s pellicum cubicu-
la; cf. Christiansen, ed., Danorum regum heroumque, vol. 1, 268. In Abbot William of Æbel-
holt’s genealogy, she is labelled as “Botilde regina de nobilissima Danorum prosapia orta”
(SM i 180). Nors, “Ægteskab” (1998) is probably right to doubt that Bothild (who is seen as
belonging to the so-called Thrugot house, a grouping with possessions focused on Jutland
and Scania, based on onomastic grounds and details from Saxo and Knýtlinga saga; see
Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt [2000], 162f.) was so strikingly set apart from the other
puellae through coniugalis copula.
72 On the theology of Andreas Sunesen see Bysted, “Anders Sunesens Hexaëmeron” (1998),
53–74; on cultural contact with regard to the forms of social organization, see Paludan,
Familia og familie (1995); for criticism Gelting, “Det komparative perspektiv” (1999).
The Generative Aspect 71

adulterio ortus, born from a forbidden union.73 The careful qualitative classifi-
cation merits consideration, because this triad would be formally consistent
with the traditional canonical provision, according to which the (still) unmar-
ried man living in concubinage does not sin.74 But Saxo thwarts any possible
‘whitewash’ serial interpretation through his portrayal of a king undeniably
engaged in simultaneous polygyny with his queen patient to the point of com-
plicity. At this point of Saxo’s history, half a century before the succession revo-
lution of Valdemar i, there is still no hint that the son from the legitimate mar-
riage might be privileged over the firstborn son. When king Erik and Queen
Bothild set out for the Holy Land, the concubine’s son Harald (‘Kesja,’ c.1082–
1135) becomes regent on account of his prestantior etas, while the legitimate
Cnut is entrusted to the mighty Hvide kin group for his upbringing, and Erik,
“of less illustrious origin,” entrusted to less influential people—his origin, like
the socialization determined for him, is a matter of a gradual, non-categorial
distinction: he is, in a sense, a secondary resource.75 Harald’s reign—his par-
ents never returned from the crusade—was short and unpopular, but while
the king, soon overthrown due to his harsh administration, is indeed a rex in-
iquus with Saxo, he is certainly not a contemptible one, and by no means af-
flicted by a taint of birth.
By contrast, Erik is: When he demands his share of the paternal inheritance,
he is told by Harald the concubine’s son that one born of adulterium has no
claim to inheritance.76 As a legal principle, this is ‘erroneous’ given that, as

73 Saxo xii, 3,6: “Fuere Erico filii Haraldus, Kanutus et Ericus, sed primus concubina, secun-
dus matrimonio, tertius adulterio ortus proditur …” (alongside several daughters ex con-
cubinatu).—This scale should not be read as factual, indeed, it cannot even be regarded
as evidence of the king’s women being divided into three classes; Saxo’s reasons for estab-
lishing this triad will be discussed below. In the more contemporary Roskilde Chronicle
(c. 12) Harald, Erik, and another son are listed as “filios tres ex concubinis.”
74 Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt (2000), 129ff., in contrast, assumes that Saxo wishes to
disparage Harald, the concubine’s son, as illegitimate, but neglects the classification
mentioned.
75 Saxo xii, 6,5: “Ericum autem, obscuriore loco natum, hebetiore quoque cura complexus
minoris potentie tutoribus applicavit.”—Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt (2000), 129,
suspects that these “less powerful educators” were actually the Bodil family of south-
ern Zealand, which was no less important than the Hvides, but in Saxo’s own time was
not distinguished by the same proximity to the throne. This would nuance the findings
on the intentions of the historical King Erik Ejegod, but does not alter Saxo’s means of
expression.
76 Saxo xiii, 4,2: “Qui quum debitam sibi paterne rei portionem expeteret, ab Haraldo fratre
repellitur, negante adulterio ortum ad hereditatis communionem pertingere.”—Peter
Zeeberg translates this as “at uægte børn ikke kunne få del i arven” although it is clear that
the problem is not “illegitimate” birth, but being born out of a forbidden relationship
72 Chapter 1

noted, even in the twelfth century the father could give his ‘illegitimate’ sons a
portion of the inheritance, and there is no question of exclusion on principle
even in Saxo’s time, let alone when the story was set. It is therefore all the more
interesting as an argument. Saxo chooses the concubine’s son to advocate the
‘legitimate/illegitimate’ categorization championed by the most radical voices
in his own time, but thwarts it over and over again in the Gesta Danorum, creat-
ing a twofold irony: It never seems to enter the mind of Saxo’s Harald that by
arguing about adulterium and exclusion from inheritance, he could be talking
about his own rights—or rather, in Harald’s conceptual world the boundary
does not run between the matrimonium and all the ‘illegitimate’ others, but
instead separates the reputable, be they matrimonium or concubinatus, from
the rest.
The other man sees things differently, and the fraternal conflict that flares
up—Erik devastates and plunders Harald’s property—is only settled by the
intervention of the third, legitimate brother, who summons the antagonists to
his residence in Slesvig, rebukes them, and then divides the paternal inheri-
tance himself. Unfortunately, it is unclear if these divisions were equal, that is,
whether Cnut (and therefore Saxo) wished to state, contra Harald, that concu-
binage and adulterium were of equal rank.77 However, it is clear that both were
entitled to a portion of the inheritance.
The full effect of the episode is only apparent in its wider context. After all,
the legitimate son and mediator is Cnut Lavard, ‘martyr’ from 1131, later saint

(adulterium). Given that Harald is significantly older than the legitimate son Knud, adul-
terium may relate to the violation of the king’s marriage; but the logic of the argument
rather suggests that it is the king who has violated the marriage of another. Cf. Strand,
Kvinnor och män (1980), 87.
77 Saxo xiii, 4,2: “Presentes deinde fraterne coarguens, curiosa animi inspectione equissi-
mam inter eos patrimonii partitionem peregit, Ericoque <eque> ac Haraldo in paterna
bona eundum iudicavit.”—While “equissimam partitionem” is to be understood as a
“completely equitable division,” Gertz’s conjecture <eque> would refer to the equality of
shares and thus of status. This is evidently based on the interpretation provided by the
14th-century Compendium Saxonis: “facta inter eos patrimonii equali particione” (SM, vol.
1, 396); if nothing else, this is evidence that the medieval recipients understood equality
of shares. However, in my view, this interpretation is prohibited both by Saxo’s general
tendency to treat the potential injury to another man as reprehensible, rather than non-
marital relationships per se (cf. Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980)), and more specifically by
the depiction of the figures of Harald and Erik.—Knýtlinga saga (c. 95), likewise often
based on Saxo, dispenses with this episode and only has the brothers’ struggle, now for
power in the kingdom, begin two years after Cnut Lavard’s death, underlining the con-
structed character of Saxo’s episode. The liturgical texts from the circle of the Cnut La-
vard’s cult in Ringsted, which likely date from around 1170 (in vsd, vol. 1, 169–247), do not
indicate any awareness of the episode.
The Generative Aspect 73

and foremost ancestor of the Valdemars. Saxo’s Cnut here would seem to an-
ticipate the policy of the Valdemars: restriction of kingship to legitimate sons
against all opposition, important functions and princely fiefs to all other sons.
But the point is that of the three brothers, Cnut Lavard, the son from a legiti-
mate marriage, was the only one who never became king. His older brother,
Harald the concubine’s son, enjoyed his brief regency around 1102/03, stepping
aside for Niels, his father’s brother, on the news of his parents’ death in the
Levant. Much later, in 1134, he was once more elevated as co-king by King
Niels, largely to reduce tensions after Niels’s son and designated successor
Magnus had instigated the murder of Cnut Lavard. The third brother, Erik, the
one who according to Saxo was born out of adultery and raised by “insignifi-
cant people,” making a bid for kingship, then defeated Niels and Magnus, had
his half-brother Harald—who according to Saxo once had tried to defraud
him of his inheritance—and some of his sons murdered, and ruled alone for
several years (1134–37).
Although the ‘Valdemarian’ reading, according to which the marital union
led to a saint and a series of triumphant royal figures, is in the foreground, the
counter-reading persists alongside it: With regard to the kingship, the inheri-
tance of the adulterio ortus Erik ultimately turns out to be the greatest, and in
the end the gradation of the sons’ origins was precisely reversed through politi-
cal vicissitudes. The practice outlined here does not permit the a persona argu-
ment of a correlation between ‘illegitimate’ birth and character flaws. As far as
I can see, that kind of argument occurs just once in the Danish sources, in
Saxo’s description of the struggle for the Norwegian throne around 1150, where
Ingi—as mentioned above, he was the only son of a king from a legitimate
marriage to rise to the royal dignity in around a century—“excelled [his half-
brothers] both by birth and by nature.”78 In Saxo’s own country, however, nei-
ther he nor anyone else makes use of this argument, even if it would have been
as politically obvious and factually accurate as in the case of Sven ‘Grathe’
(r. 1146–57), son of the adulterio ortus Erik discussed above, principal opponent
of Valdemar i in the struggle for the kingship, and instigator of the ‘Bloodfeast
of Roskilde’ in 1157, a sensational slaughter of the invited guests, to which,
among others, the third pretender fell victim. Of the instigator Sven, who was
eventually defeated by Valdemar i, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines reports that he

78 Saxo xiv, 29,7. The “iusto matrimonio ortus” is juxtaposed with the sons of a Norwegian
and an Irish pellex—whereby not only ‘illegitimate,’ but also unfree birth is discreetly
­indicated—who are distinguished from the spotless Ingi by avaritia and luxuria. Unfortu-
nately, Saxo continues, Ingi was a cripple.
74 Chapter 1

was the filius ancillae,79 and the biblical subtext supplements this account with
the call to shun him, “for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance
with the child of the free woman.”80 What was known to the Burgundian Cis-
tercian a century or so later could also have been taken up by a Danish chroni-
cler; there would have been reason enough in this case to portray the rival of
the saint’s son Valdemar as a regicide of ignominious birth, like his own
father.
Not to do so, and to miss these—and other—opportunities is a collective
cultural choice. It may bear some similarity to other expressions of what Klaus
von See has termed “a Nordic sense of cultural particularity (nordisches Sonder-
bewusstsein)” along with such traits as the mythographic reinvention of the
pagan-prehistoric past, the Norse linguistic and literary culture, the cultural-
spatial blueprints opposing Norðrlǫnd to ‘the rest,’ the antiquarianist interest
in former burial customs, and, of course, the political constitution as separate
kingdoms and ecclesiastical provinces, which in turn were strengthened by
cultural self-assertion.81 Saxo’s, Sven Aggesen’s, or Snorri Sturluson’s ways of
dealing with elite polygyny are a part of these ongoing ‘negotiations.’82

6 The ‘Generative Aspect’ of Polygyny

British ethnologist Jack Goody, in his enormously influential interpretation of

the development of marriage and the family in the Euro-Mediterranean since
late antiquity, regards “the Church” as the actor whose inexorable penetration
into all areas of society, from kingship to the “fundamental units of production
and reproduction,” was responsible for the striking breakaway of Mediterra-
nean and (correspondingly later) Northern Europe from a general pattern that
the ancient Mediterranean world had still shared with many non-European
cultures. Goody regards four changes to be crucial, together massively reduc-
ing the chances of producing offspring who were entitled to inherit: (i) the

79 mgh ss 23, 831 (44–45), 841 (12); similar to Albert of Stade. Helmold calls him the son of a
concubina named Thunna.
80 Gal 4:30 (on Gn 21:10): “eice ancillam et filium eius, non enim heres erit filius ancillae cum
filio liberae.”
81 The kings and archbishops of the Valdemar period give the opposite impression. On the
particularistic Nordic cultural schemes around 1200, cf. Pesch, Brunaöld (1996), von See,
“Sonderkultur” (1999); my own view in Rüdiger and Foerster, “Aemulatio” (2014).
82 On the concept of ‘negotiation’ in the cultural-anthropological sense, cf. Greenblatt,
Shakespearean Negotiations (1988); Knudsen, “Feltarbejde” (1989), Hastrup, Kulturanalyse
(1989).
The Generative Aspect 75

gradual prohibition of endogamy, which reached its sharpest, ultimately

­impracticable form in the Latin church’s incest regulations of the 11th–13th
centuries; (ii) the prohibition of the levirate (that is, the obligation to marry
the widowed wife of a close relative), which had been obligatory or customary
in many ancient Mediterranean cultures; (iii) the end of the institution of
adoption, which had been fundamental for the Roman culture of pietas; and
(iv) the restriction and depreciation of concubinage—and one could add, a
fortiori, other varieties of polygyny.83 Taken together, these restrictions signifi-
cantly reduce a man’s chances of a legitimate heir, although what matters in
practice is less the actual average duration of a ‘lineage’ in a given ­population—
Philippe Contamine gives six generations as a benchmark84—than the per-
ceived risk of being left without heirs. Furthermore, it is not necessary to ac-
cept Goody’s much criticized view of ‘the Church’ and its active interest in
­reducing numbers of heirs (expecting increased willingness to bequeath pos-
sessions to the ‘main morte’). Even if Goody equips his actors with too much
purposive rationality and collective change with too much consistency, the
phenomenon he describes is no less important for that. It is also obvious that
a man can, in principle, produce more offspring through the practice of po-
lygyny than without it.
This ‘generative aspect’ of polygynous practice and representation appears
indeed so self-evident that it must be insisted that we are not dealing here with
an anthropological constant, but historical phenomena.85 Producing offspring
is not a self-explanatory aim of human behaviour, though biological anthro-
pology tends to view it as just that. The historian’s question runs somewhere
along the lines of: Why should a man in a given society want to father as many
descendants as possible? And what are the desirable circumstances for their
conception?
The first answer, not expressed but nonetheless suggested by Goody—a
kind of quasi (anti-)Malthusian strategy for the proliferation of heirs—is not
so self-explanatory either. As Roger of Hoveden quite rightly remarked about
Norwegian kingship, the large and theoretically uncontrollable number of po-
tential pretenders with legitimate blood claims was dysfunctional in terms of
regulated succession. In the case of Denmark, it can be observed that the kings
of the Valdemar period did all they could to regulate the right of succession
in the sense Goody ascribes to “the Church,” and thereby to curb the violent

83 Goody, Development (1983), 45ff.

84 Contamine, ed., Noblesse (1976), 33, in relation to the high to late Middle Ages in Western
Europe.
85 See the discussion of sociobiological interpretive approaches to polygyny in Chapter 2.
76 Chapter 1

­factional struggles which had run riot in the decades before Valdemar i rose to
power in 1157, and which had at times become critical.86 The remaining ‘right’
of the extramarital sons, that is, the endowments which it appeared politically
appropriate to give them, was still extensive enough to bring the unity of the
thirteenth-century Danish kingdom into question as the portions assigned to
them—South Jutland, North Halland, Estonia, Lolland and Falster—­developed
into ‘princely fiefs’ (fyrstelen). For a time, it seemed as though parts of the king-
dom were on their way to territorialization, which only the duchy of South
Jutland (Slesvig) would then undergo completely.87 And while the other re-
gions given to illegitimate or younger legitimate sons did ultimately revert to
the Crown, these ‘princely fiefs’ existed throughout the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries, in some instances for generations, and formed serious cen-
tres of power, sometimes dangerous to the Crown.88
Undoubtedly, an impressive crowd of sons could be an important resource
for pretenders who had yet to establish their claim against their rivals in war
(Sven Estridsen’s ‘fourteen’ or ‘twelve’ sons, all born out of marriage).89 And
this was a notion shared by their rivals, as demonstrated by Harald’s half-­
brother Erik, who mercilessly hunted down his nephews in 1135. But handling
this resource was anything but unproblematic, both in royal circles and—­
apparently—in wider circles, where the issue was not the realm, but riches.
Again and again the sagas relate conflicts over inheritance between half-­
brothers or other groups of close relatives, implicitly or explicitly commenting
on such disputes as consequences of polygyny, and in doing so attest that the
people engaged in this culture were very aware of the problem.
A wealth of sons could be useful and important. Northern Europeans shared
this conviction with all other Europeans, because they knew that Abraham,
threatened by childlessness through his uxor Sara, had impregnated the ancilla
Hagar, and that Jacob had added two maids to his two wives, even though he
was already blessed with sons without them (Gn 16:1ff.; 29:31ff.)—a flock only
just surpassed by Sven Estridsen. But they also knew that Abraham’s son
through his maid, Ishmael, as the progenitor of the ‘Ishmaelites,’ marked the
beginning of the great enmity between Christendom and its Saracen oppo-
nents: “a man with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against

86 Between 1132 and 1135 alone, six of the eight Danish bishops were murdered or died in the
fighting, not even mentioning the secular magnates.
87 Cf. Hoffmann, Königserhebung (1976), 118ff.; Windmann, Schleswig als Territorium (1954);
Albrectsen, Herredømmet over Sønderjylland (1981); Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins, ed.
Klose, vol. 4,2: Hoffmann, Spätmittelalter (1990).
88 See most recently, Sawyer, “Civil Wars” (2003); Fagerland, Krigføring (2006).
89 Sven Estridsen: William of Malmesbury, gra iii, 261; Knýtlinga saga c. 23: “Sveinn ko-
nungr átti mǫrg frillubǫrn”; Harald Kesja: Chronicon Roskildense c. 17.
The Generative Aspect 77

him.”90 They also knew the history of Israel—a history with many similarities
to the Scandinavian sagas, not only in terms of content but also narrative and
style—where even and especially the most powerful kings with many women
could plunge into ruin: “Absalom, Absalom!”

7 Harald, the All-Father

Jacob, the Old Testament writers, Snorri Sturluson, and Jack Goody are all in
agreement that it was important to have sons, for several good reasons. What
would the social knowledge about these ‘trees,’ their trunks and branches have
looked like in medieval Northern Europe?
Old Norse literature as we know it begins with lists of ancestors (áttvísi “lin-
eage knowledge,” mannfrœði “learning about men”). The first historical work,
the Libellus Islandorum/Íslendingabók, was produced around 1120 by Ari Þor­
gilsson (1068–1148), who was given the byname hinn Fróði “the scholar” by im-
mediate posterity. It recounts the settlement of Iceland in the ninth and tenth
centuries, the introduction of Christianity, and the first bishops. The protago-
nists are situated genealogically, usually by specifying one to six ancestors or
other eminent relatives as required. The book concludes with the author’s own
genealogy (langfeðgatal “enumeration of the father-son sequence” < feðgar m.
pl. “father and sons”), where he presents himself as the thirty-seventh descen-
dant of a line that begins with Yngvi tyrkjakonungr (“king of the Turks,” i.e.
Trojans) and the Ynglings, the prehistoric-legendary dynasty in Uppsala.
Further genealogies and a list of kings were included in the first version of
the work though later omitted, as Ari explains in the preface. Enough of them
remains, however, to tell the reader that Ari’s thirteenth ancestor was the great-
great-great-grandfather of King Harald Fairhair, or Ari believed him to be, or Ari
wanted others to believe him to be: the Icelandic landowners and their heirs
claimed a stake in the royal tree, or shrubbery, of descent. The more or less con-
temporary Landnámabók (“Book of Settlements”), which records the names of
more than 3,500 individuals and almost 1,500 farms on Iceland, continues this
self-positioning of the settler aristocracy in time and space. The bishops’ sagas,
then the Icelandic sagas, and (with the narrative focus on N ­ orway) the kings’

90 Gn 16:12: “manus eius contra omnes et manus omnium contra eum.” Cf. the typological
interpretation in Gal 4:21–31, where Hagar and Ishmael are equated with the Old Cove-
nant (“Sina enim mons est in Arabia”) and the earthly, enslaved Jerusalem, while Sarah
and Isaac are equated with the New Covenant: “Hierusalem libera est quae est mater nos-
tra.” Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae ix, 2,57.
78 Chapter 1

sagas contain hundreds more people similarly ‘related’ to King Harald Fairhair.
Harald’s abundance of children—and his polygyny, which made it possible—
is therefore the prerequisite for this whole culture of the narrative construc-
tion of elite parity based on familial ties.
It is precisely Harald Fairhair’s position as a lynchpin between the fornǫld,
the ‘prehistory’ in which men become gods and giants become men, and the
incipient story of Norway/Iceland, which makes him a convenient principal
ancestor for an almost unlimited number of lineages. With a couple of dozen
children named just in those sources known to us,91 he surpasses even the
most generatively potent Danish kings. Yet his virility is not only decisive for
the royal house but for the entire elite. While only agnates could contend for
the royal title (which meant that every contender had to graft himself upon
some branch or twig of Harald’s ‘stem’), there were also the cognates. “King
Harald gave most of his daughters within the country to his jarls as wives, and
from them are descended great family lines (kynkvíslir ‘kin branches’),” Snorri
Sturluson says in 1230, continuing the botanical imaginary.92 What is more,
Snorri offers an explicit commentary on the familial organization of the king-
dom: “King Harald then summoned a large assembly in the east of the country
and called the people of Upplǫnd to it. Then he gave all his sons the title of
king, and made it law that members of his family should each receive the king-
dom from his father, but a jarldom any that was descended from his line
through females.”93
Norway’s earliest constitution? Given that Snorri surpasses even Saxo as a
master of authorial ambiguity, we must also consider the context of this ar-
rangement: Harald is growing old, his sons are getting restless and have already
gone as far as killing some of Harald’s followers in the regions. The distribution

91 They overlap in part, but some only appear in one or some of the texts, suggesting that we
only know a fraction of the total number known in the Middle Ages. A thorough investiga-
tion, albeit focused on the factual background, is offered in Heber, Harald hårfagre (1934).
92 HsH c. 42: “Haraldr konungr gipti flestar dœtr sínar innan lands jǫrlum sínum, ok eru
þaðan komnar miklar kynkvíslir.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 86.
Similarly in the other known kings’ sagas.
93 HsH c. 33: “Haraldr konungr stefndi þá þing fjǫlmennt … Þá gaf hann sonum sínum ǫllum
konunganǫfn ok setti þat í lǫgum, at hans ættmanna skyldi hverr taka konungdóm eptir
sinn fóður, en jarldóm sá, er kvensift [var. ór kvenkné] var af hans ætt kominn.” Heims­
kringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 78. In Snorri’s time, jarl was used to denote
the second in the kingdom and was replaced shortly thereafter by the Saxon loanword
hertógr, which Snorri already uses for those fulfilling this role, such Harald Fairhair’s pa-
ternal friend Guthorm. Therefore, we should not think of the word jarl here as an official
title, like that of the Danish jarl/dux of southern Jutland, but as a regional ruler who
stands in a slightly asymmetrical alliance relationship with the king: a “magnate.”
The Generative Aspect 79

of regional power to the sons following the title settlement therefore appears a
little bit helpless on Harald’s part, particularly as several conflicts immediately
break out between the sons. This implicitly critical stance towards the Norwe-
gian model of succession of Snorri’s day, rejected by Roger of Hoveden from a
similar perspective, makes the construction yet more succinct: Snorri provides
the justification for the high medieval state of the Norwegian polity, projected
onto the foremost ancestor. Henceforth, all power in the country will emanate
from Harald’s pedigree. But unlike the biblical antecedents, and also unlike
contemporary high medieval kingships—the Capetian monarchy, which oper-
ated strictly agnatically, or the Danish, which had just reoriented around the
same model—the bloodline is not a radix or generatio, but a treetop with a
practically unlimited number of kynkvíslir. Add to this the fact that at various
points the saga emphasizes that Harald always had his children raised by their
respective maternal relatives,94 and the image of the Norwegian polity as por-
trayed by Snorri is that of a kingdom ruled by means of uxorilocal polygyny, in
which the title of king moved between the male descendants of the kingdom’s
founder by agonistic decision, while the rights of the regional potentates were
secured by their cognatic affiliation to the stirps regia.
The consequence is a paritarian political culture in which the precise extent
of its members’ claims remains virtually undefined—for the immediate out-
break of fraternal conflict in the very same chapter makes a mockery of the
original distribution of the regions to Harald’s individual sons. Permanent con-
flict, ‘feud’ and ‘revenge,’95 inevitably follow, making for a model of an ‘acepha-
lous’ society whose essential characteristics are a fundamental preference for
parity over hierarchy and, consequently, a constitutive significance of the ago-
nistic principle with simultaneous self-regulation of the agon by the totality of
those participating in it through cultural processes. This is a society in the
comparative.96

94 HsH cc. 21; 37.

95 Especially Byock, Medieval Iceland (1988), and Miller, Bloodtaking (1990); from a social-
anthropological perspective, see the contributions of Hastrup, Culture and History (1985),
and Durrenberger, Dynamics (1992), although in my view the latter is problematic in
­places. Cf. for Western Europe: Barthélemy, “Les comtes” (1995); Barthélemy, La mutation
de l’an mil (1997); Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik (1997); White, Feuding and Peace-Making
(2005).
96 ‘Parity’ does not, of course, mean equality, just as the rejection of ‘hierarchy’ does not
mean egalitarianism. Rather, it means the refusal to allow social differences of an eco-
nomic, habitual, or other nature to become categorial rather than merely gradual differ-
ences. Cf. Rüdiger, “Mit Worten gestikulieren” (2000); Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten
(2001), 223–334.
80 Chapter 1

Norway is perhaps less obviously acephalous than the model case of king-
less Iceland. But the contrast between the Icelandic ‘free state’ and the suppos-
edly increasingly monarchical mainland Norway, often invoked in saga litera-
ture and more or less tacitly accepted as such by scholarship, is easily overstated.
After all, like the other North Atlantic islands and parts of the British Isles,
Iceland was as much a part of Nóregsveldi as the mainland—more so perhaps
than southeastern Norway along the Skagerrak coast, which until the eleventh
century tended towards Danaveldi—and, as the example of the historian Ari
the Learned above shows, Icelanders also claimed their stakes in the royal line.
Moreover, the primacy that Norwegian kings exercised on the mainland was
far more relational than categorial, perhaps with the exception of the short
and ultimately failed attempt at sacralization around 1160. Of course, the sagas
which paint this picture not only reproduced it but also contributed to its per-
petuation; but that they continued doing so successfully until the mid-thir-
teenth century suggests that this was in accordance with received opinion and
most major stakeholders’ interest.
Polygyny is essential for this system of fundamental parity—albeit nu-
anced by the distinction between agnates and cognates—within the crown
of Harald’s family tree.97 It is not just that additional royal sons enliven and
complicate the picture; the political system itself is based on the fact that the
possibility of connecting oneself to Harald’s line is open to all those participat-
ing in power. This happens through a regional diffusion of a virtually unlim-
ited number of women, with whom ‘Harald’ is then claimed to have fathered
the ancestors of the respective lines. Harald Heber, discussing the facticity of
Harald Fairhair in the sagas, claimed that at every royal farmstead there “lived
a woman who was at his [Harald’s] disposal.”98 This may or may not be true
for the actual King Harald in the ninth century (it is idle to speculate), but it
is certainly true for ‘Harald’ the polygynous founding father as depicted by the
kings’ sagas and presented as a role model to their own time, the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.
The example of Gyða, whose story was told in the preceding chapter, will
serve to illustrate the point. Gyða and Harald Fairhair had a daughter and four

97 Much as in the Danish case, the vernacular texts are even more offensive in their depic-
tion of royal polygyny than the parallel Latin passages. Ágrip c. 2: Harald “átti sunu tvítján
ok með mǫrgum konum” (had twenty sons, with many women); the more or less contem-
poraneous Historia Norwegiae (c. 16), affirms the number, but leaves out the comment
about Harald’s many women. Snorri (HsH c. 21) leaves both numbers open-ended: “Harald
had many wives and many children.”
98 Heber, Harald hårfagre (1934), 86: “… har der residert en kvinne som har stått til hans
disposisjon.”
The Generative Aspect 81

sons, whose subsequent fate Snorri describes quite unevenly. First the sons:
Hrœrek lived in his father’s entourage (the hirð) alongside his half-brothers,
but had his own income from possessions in Westland. By contrast, Sigtrygg,
Fróði, and Þorgils possessed lands in the Norwegian Eastland; the latter two
were even given warships by their father, and after raiding along the British
coasts they became the first Norse lords of Dublin before Fróði fell victim to
poison, and Þorgils to Irish treachery in battle.99
Most revealing is the life of the daughter Álof with the byname árbót, “Sea-
son’s Blessing.”100 She plays a role in the two most delicate conflict settlements
of Harald’s saga. The first concerns the jarls of Møre, the coastal region around
present-day Ålesund which controlled the maritime route (the norðveg). King
Harald entrusted her to his “most beloved friend” Rǫgnvald, who had had the
honour of cutting the king’s hair after Harald’s triumph and giving him his new
byname “Fairhair.”101 He held this important region as jarl until two of Harald’s
restive sons, “who thought that the jarls were of lesser birth than themselves,”102
undertook one of the commando raid expeditions so typical of the sagas,
which ended successfully, with their astonished opponent taken by surprise in
his wooden residence, trapped, and burned together with all those present, in
this case sixty followers. One of the two sons then appropriates three of his
victim’s longships and goes campaigning, the other occupies Rǫgnvald’s es-
tates. Unless he wishes to ruin his reputation and his understanding with the
great men in his sphere of influence, King Harald has no choice but to imme-
diately start a punitive expedition in turn. Faced with Harald’s superior power,
his son capitulates, and Harald “sends” him to another part of the country: an
impotent simulation of authority, which leaves the problem of mannbœt, pen-
ance or atonement for the homicide, unresolved.
The new settlement, as reported by Snorri and therefore likely to be consid-
ered plausible at his time, reinstates the previous rights of the son of the slain
jarl of Møre and, moreover, sees the king’s daughter Álof ‘Season’s Blessing’

99 HsH c. 33. Harald also ‘disposed’ of other sons in this manner; we can see Snorri here
partially adopting the argumentation which Dudo of Saint-Quentin (i, 1) introduced into
the tradition, and which continues to influence research to this day, that the Viking cam-
paigns had served to remove the most restless elements from the resource-poor countries
of their origin.
100 HsH c. 29; the compound from ár “(course of the) year” and bót “recovery, healing; also:
penance” is reminiscent of the agrarian aspect of sacred kinship (the set phrase ár ok fríðr
“[good harvest] year and peace” sums up ‘good’ kingship), in which the princess—or the
hypothetical narrative figure who became Harald and Gyða’s daughter during the textual-
izations of the saga—had a share.
101 HsH c. 24: “inn mesti ástvinir.”
102 HsH c. 29: “ok þótti þeim jarlar vera smábornari en þeir váru.”
82 Chapter 1

surrendered to him.103 It is astonishing that this match could be regarded as

adequate compensation for the most serious violence conceivable, but King
Harald’s power is evidently portrayed as great enough to enforce this settle-
ment. Álof’s daughter from this relationship, Bergljót, is later given to the son
of Harald’s most powerful rival, Hákon Grjótgarðsson Hlaðajarl.104 The jarls
based in Hlaðir (a promontory controlling the mouth of the Nidelv and the
entrance to Trondheim Fjord, today Lade in the metropolitan area of Trond-
heim) were the most powerful men in the rich Trøndelag region; only by mak-
ing an arrangement with them was the petty king Harald, who probably came
from the area west of Oslofjord, able to expand aggressively into Westland and
the interior. The balance of power between the jarls of Lade and Harald
Fairhair’s successors remained the principal theme of saga history until rela-
tions deteriorated in the early eleventh century. So through Gyða’s daughter
and granddaughter, the two most important lines of jarls were tied to the royal
house and, according to Snorri, established in their rights “with force of law”
(í lǫgum).

8 The ‘Good’ Bastard King

This way of integrating practically all the powerful of the country into the royal
house goes far beyond what historiography did in other parts of Europe for
princely houses which vied with the royal line by looking back to a royal ances-
tor of their own, as did, for example, the counts of Flanders and Barcelona with
their almost identical Carolingian legends. The difference is that there was no
pretension to kingship tied up with this constructed claim to equal rank. It is

103 HsH c. 29: “ok gipti honum Álofu, dóttur sína, er kǫlluð var árbót.” The verb gipta < gipt
“gift” does not correspond to gefa “give”(although it belongs to the same lexematic field, of
course). It is often taken to mean “to marry (someone to someone),” which I think is to
move too fast. All that is clear is that it means a contractual transfer with the consent of
all the men involved. Far from the world of the Roman and medieval consensus facit ma­
trimonium, there is no mention of the girl’s consent. Cf. Jochens, “Consent in Marriage”
(1986), 142–76; Jochens, “Með jákvæði hennar sjálfrar” (1993); Schulman, “Make Me a
Match” (1997), 296–321, and generally Sawyer, Kvinnor och familj (21998), with further
literature.
104 HsH c. 37: “Sigurðr jarl fekk Bergljótar …” The verb fá “get” + the name of the woman in the
genitive is, like gipta discussed in the preceding note, often supposed to denote full mar-
riage or Muntehe in research. Genitive objects are extremely rarely in Old Norse; it is con-
ceivable that this fixed and in this sense frequent construction works by way of an im-
plicit accusative object: “Jarl Sigurð gets Bergljót’s [possessions, dowry, etc.]”; see the
discussion of Harald Fairhair “getting Ragnhild’s” above.
The Generative Aspect 83

different in Norway, where in the place of a defined stirps regia there was a
circle of candidates that was practically open to every newcomer, given the
practically endless number of Harald’s women. The royal potential of every
imaginable pretender is further underlined with origin stories such as that of
Hákon Aðalsteinsfóstri (“Æthelstan’s foster son,” also inn Góði “the Good,” r.
probably around 934–61), who received both his socialization and religious
preferences in England, and who would make the first hesitant attempts to
introduce the Christian cult. Snorri recounts:

When King Harald [Fairhair] was nearly seventy, he got a son by a woman
called Þóra Morstrstǫng (Pole of Moster). Her family was from Moster [an
island in the Hardangerfjord, north of present-day Stavanger]. She came
of good kin, she was related to Hǫrða-Kári [the preeminent magnate in
neighbouring Hordaland]. She was the finest of women and most beauti-
ful. She was said to be the king’s handmaid. At that time there were many
in the king’s service who were of good family, both men and women.105

Follows the story of the premature birth of the child on the ship of Sigurð
Hlaðajarl as Þóra tries to reach the king in time. The jarl, Harald’s great rival,
pours water over the king’s son (ausa vatni, a pagan baptismal custom in the
sagas, which has provoked much speculation in the history of religion but
which may be no more than another device for the reclamation of pagan an-
cestors as naturaliter Christiani) and name him after his own father, Hákon
Hlaðajarl. Snorri emphasizes this point. “King Harald had the boy be with his
mother, and they were at the king’s residences [in Moster] while the boy was
young.”106 Snorri’s remark that it was not rare for the king’s servants to be well-
born does not (and perhaps should not) alter the fact that the later King Hákon
the Good was the child of a bondswoman, however well-born and “beautiful”:
a Sirpa or Bilha or even a Hagar, a filius ancillae.
Hákon ended the short and unpleasant rule of the violent and fratricidal
Eirík “Bloodaxe” in collaboration with the regional powers, and was the first
king to accept Christianity. He was not the only ‘good’ king of unfree ancestry:
Snorri describes the birth of King Magnús ‘the Good’ (r. 1035–47), whose father

105 HsH c. 37: “Þá er Haraldr konungr var nær sjaurœðum, gat hann son við konu þeiri, er Þóra
er nefnd Morstrstǫng. Hon var æzkuð ór Morstr. Hon átti góða frændr, hon var í
frændsemistǫlu við Hǫrða-Kára. Hon var kvinna vænst ok in friðasta. Hon var kǫlluð ko-
nungs ambátt. Váru þá margir þeir konungi lýðskyldir, er vel váru ættbornir, bæði karlar
ok konur.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 83.
106 HsH c. 37: “Haraldr konungr lét sveininn fylgja móður sinni, ok váru þau at konungsbúum,
meðan sveininn var ungr.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 83.
84 Chapter 1

Saint Olav is the only ruling figure to outshine Harald Fairhair, in almost identi-
cal terms:

There was a woman called Álfhild, who was referred to as the king’s maid.
She was, however, descended from good families. She was the most beau-
tiful of women. She was in the king’s household. And that spring it came
about that Álfhild was with child, and people in the king’s confidence
knew that he must be the father of the child.107

With the minor variation that this “maid” (ambótt “bondswoman”) did not be-
long to a royal farmstead, but accompanied the royal retinue on its travels—it
later becomes clear that Álfhild was owned by the king’s wife Ástríð (herself
the daughter of a frilla of the Swedish lord Olof Skötkonung)—the whole se-
quence of the episode is repeated. In this case it is the skald Sigvat, one of the
king’s most trusted followers, who stands as godparent for the emergency bap-
tism when no one dares wake Olav after the midnight birth. The boy survives,
and Sigvat must counter the king’s charges, including the choice of baptismal
name:

The king said: “Why did you have the boy called Magnús? That is not the
name of any in our family.”
Sigvat replies: “I called him after King Karla-Magnús. I knew that he
was the best man in the world.”
Then the king said: “You are a very lucky man, Sigvat. It is not surpris-
ing when luck goes with wisdom. The opposite is unusual, which can
sometimes happen, that such luck is found in unwise people, so that un-
wise undertakings turn out fortunately.”
The king was then very pleased.108

107 OsH c. 122: “Álfhildr hét kona, er kǫlluð var konungs ambótt. Hon var þó af góðum ættum
komin. Hon var kvinna fríðust. Hon var með hirð Óláfs konungs. En þat vár varð þat til
tíðenda, at Álfhildr var með barni, en þat vissu trúnaðarmenn konungs, at hann myndi
vera faðir barns þess.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 2 (2014), 140.—William
of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum (pl 179, col. 1663ff.), describes her as a noble-
born Englishwoman Elfidis, who is captured and abducted by Norwegians and passes
through the hands of several owners before she becomes the mother of the future King
Magnus; the episode ends with a miracle of Saint Aldhelm. This report from a century
after events has the advantage of both onomastic and lived-world plausibility and also
brings together Snorri’s two seemingly contradictory claims that the girl’s name was
“king’s handmaid” and yet she was also “of good origin.”
108 OsH c. 122: “Konungr mælti: ‘Hví léztu sveininn Magnús heita? Ekki er þat várt ættnafn.’
Sigvatr svarar: ‘Ek hét hann eptir Karla-Magnúsi konungi. Þann vissa ek mann beztan í
The Generative Aspect 85

Snorri could not express it more clearly. From birth, the bondswoman’s son
is followed by the luck expressed by bearing the name of the most powerful
ruler in Western history, a promise that the adult Magnús fulfills by recovering
the land lost by his holy father and, moreover, gaining control of Denmark, the
kingdom whose ruler, Cnut the Great, had been responsible for his father’s fall.
No Norwegian king had more right to be considered imperator than the first
Magnús, the maid’s son. That this political sponsorship is mediated not by pa-
ternal decision, but by Sigvat the skald, endows it with a validity beyond the
sphere of familial ambition. After all, as custodians of the numinous made tan-
gible through words, skalds were in a sense charged with providing earthly
contingency with a general interpretation.
In fact, the Norway of the sagas affirmed the ‘Merovingian’ view, according
to which paternal blood was sufficient to impart the capacity for kingship—
contrary to biblical precept as well as to contemporary practice in nearby Den-
mark. On the other hand, it complied with the rules for royal succession en-
acted in 1260 by Hákon Hákonarson, the Norwegian king ruling at the time
when Heimskringla was set down in writing, and who was himself the son of a
frilla. These stipulated that in the first instance the firstborn legitimate son
would be entitled to inherit, then grandsons in the male line, and finally ille-
gitimate sons.109 In the case of the succession to Saint Olav († 1030), there were
no children from the Swedish princess Ástríð110 and therefore no grandsons
either. No further order of precedence such as primogeniture was to make the

heimi.’ Þá mælti konungr: ‘Gæfumaðr ertu mikill, Sigvatr. Er þat eigi undarligt, at gæfa
fylgi vizku. Hitt er kynligt, sem stundum kann verða, at sú gæfa fylgir óvizkum mǫnnum,
at óvitrlig ráð snúask til hamingju.’ Var þá konungr allglaðr.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay
and Foulkes, vol. 2 (2014), 139.—The words gæfa and hamingja, translated here as “luck,”
are widely debated. Contra the interpretation of the term as an adoption of the Roman-
Latin European fortuna, I agree with Foote, “Concept” (1973), who asserts an original,
“secular” character of a ‘gift’ for luck (which is the etymological root of gæfa), which
may—but not necessarily—have been based on pre-Christian ideas. See the more de-
tailed discussion in Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 206ff.
109 Bagge et al., eds., Norske middelalderdokumenter (1973), no. 106; cf. Krag, Norges historie
(2000), 247f. In the national law issued by Hákon’s son and successor Magnús the Law-
Mender, as part of the exhaustive general provisions for candidature, the entitled son was
put in 13th place in accordance with the general inheritance regulations of Gulathing’s
Law, with the qualification skilgetinn “lawfully received,” explicitly assumed for the first
twelve ranks, left unmentioned. While the succession of ‘bastards’ became impracticable
at the end of the thirteenth century, it was still formally preserved with reference to na-
tional custom.
110 OsH c. 92 uses the word brullaup “wedding” and describes the negotiations for dowry and
morning gift; the relationship is thus presented as the highest-ranking imaginable. See
below, Chapter 4.
86 Chapter 1

decision, but rather the agon, which was won by Magnús the bondswoman’s
son. In the same way, Hákon the Good prevailed against Harald Fairhair’s many
other sons, even Eirík ‘Bloodaxe,’ son of Ragnhild ‘the Mighty’ and co-ruler dur-
ing his father’s final years, who must have looked like the obvious front runner
to any high medieval audience familiar with succession in Denmark or Eng-
land. In Heimskringla, however, all this does not outweigh his political short-
comings: His brothers and the magnates started “reckoning up the troubles
that they had been subject to at the hands of his brother Eirík. Eirík’s unpopu-
larity grew ever more as everyone became fonder of King Hákon and became
more confident in speaking their minds.”111
The victory of the consensus-oriented Hákon, the first Christian and found-
er of the law, almost a Norwegian Numa Pompilius, who “wished everyone well
and offered to return the farmers their patrimonies which King Harald had
taken from them,” over Eirík, “a big man and handsome, strong and a very val-
iant man, a great warrior and blessed with victory, an impetuous man in tem-
per, fierce, unsociable and reserved,”112 is a prime example of Snorri’s advocacy
of a “farmer-friendly politics, tied to the regions.”113 Once again, the ‘good’ king
is also the son of a bondswoman; in contrast, Eirík Bloodaxe, banished to Nor-
thumbria by Hákon, is—at least according to Snorri—the son from Harald’s
union with the Jutish princess Ragnhild, for whose sake he sent away his many
women from his own country. It is difficult to imagine a clearer commentary
on the ‘monarchic’ style of rule, as practised by the Valdemars in Denmark and
with which Snorri’s own king, Hákon Hákonarson, was experimenting. Con-
temporary tendencies are discreetly turned on their head, general precepts—
right up to the opposition of Isaac/Ishmael anchored in both Old and New
Testaments—are declared irrelevant through silence. The same can be said of
monogamy and matrimonium. If anything, unimpeded royal polygyny appears
to be a prerequisite for ‘good’ rule.

111 HsG c. 2: “ok margir aðrir, er upp tǫlðu harma sína, þá er hlotit hǫfðu af Eiríki, bróður
hans. Eiríks óvinsæld óx æ því meirr sem allir menn gerðu sér kærra við Hákon konung ok
heldr hǫfðu sér traust at mæla sem þótti.”
112 HsG c. 1: “vildi hverjum manni gott ok bauð aptr at gefa bóndum óðǫl sín, þau er Haraldr
konungr hafði af þeim tekit”; HsH c. 43: “mikill maðr ok fríðr, sterkr ok hreystimaðr mikill,
mermaðr mikill ok sigrsæll, ákafamaðr í skapi, grimmr, óþýðr ok fálátr.”—The creation of
the Gulathing and Frostathing laws; Hákon’s Christianity: HsG cc. 11; 13.—On Hákon the
Good, see Bagge, “Hero” (2004), 185–210, on the significance of óðal—patrimony, inalien-
able part of property—for the integrity of the free farmers, cf. Gurevič Weltbild (1978);
Gurevič, “Semantics” (1992).
113 Von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999), 367.
The Generative Aspect 87

The series of kings to come out of polygynous relationships may be contin-

ued at length. Óláf, “whom some call ‘the Quiet’ and many, ‘Farmer Óláf’”
(r. 1066–93), who is credited with fixing the organization of the Norwegian
bishoprics, constructing the large stone church over Saint Olav’s grave in Nida-
ros, and introducing novel table manners and clothing conventions, married a
princess—Ingrid, one of Sven Estridsen’s many daughters—and in the next
sentence fathers a son with a Þóra Jónsdóttir, about whom nothing more is
said, not even about her origin, although the early biblical patronym is surpris-
ing.114 The son is also called Magnús and grows up in his father’s retinue; as
King Magnús ‘Barelegs’ (r. 1093–1103), he will be the last king to be unchal-
lenged for most of his reign for almost a century and a half, and thus one of the
‘great’ rulers in the kings’ sagas.

9 The Mill Maid’s Tale

The casual manner in which King Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders’ (r. 1157–62) was
conceived by King Sigurð, one of three brothers who were sharing the rule
around 1150, is related in Heimskringla as follows:

King Sigurð was riding round attending banquets east in Vík with his fol-
lowing and rode past a farm owned by a powerful man that was called
Símun. And as the king was riding through the farm, then could be heard
from inside one of the buildings such beautiful singing that he was
quite enchanted with it, and rode up to the building and saw inside that
there was a woman standing there at a hand-mill singing to it amazingly

114 OsK c. 5: “Óláfr Nóregskonungr fekk Ingiríðar, dóttur Sveins Danakonungs … Óláfr
Haraldsson, er sumir kǫlluðu Óláf kyrra, en margir Óláf bónda, hann gat son við Þóru
Jóansdóttur.” Before the middle of the 12th century, biblical or saints’ names appear only
rarely; Jón remains the most common. Cf. Lind, Norsk-isländska dopnamn (1905–31), 1931;
Einar Olafur Sveinsson, “Nafngiftir Oddaverja” (1936); Gunnes, “Utenlandsk navneskikk”
(1983); Villarsen Meldgaard, “Navneskifte” (2000). In Morkinskinna, Þóra’s father is called
Árni (a common Nordic name), so it is possible to hypothesize that the name Jón was
introduced retrospectively in Heimskringla under the influence of Þóra’s famous great-
grandson Jón Loptsson, Icelandic chief and Snorri’s foster father (see below, Chapter 2).
The two Jóns in the Heimskringla who could plausibly be Þóra’s father in terms of chro-
nology, including a member of the powerful Arnmœðlingar family clan in Inntrøndelag,
are provided with such detailed information about their children and grandchildren that
it is not possible to attribute Þóra to either of them as well.
88 Chapter 1

b­ eautifully as she was grinding. The king dismounted from his horse and
went inside to the woman and lay with her.115

Even this relationship, hardly the most ceremonious or long-lived, might (and
did) produce a ‘legitimate’ ruler who succeeded in eliminating the hitherto re-
markably successful King Ingi, the only legitimate king’s son to rule in over a
hundred years. The offhand rape of a defenceless slave woman is so distasteful
to present-day sensibilities that our instinct would be to refuse to view it as a
‘relationship’ and hence to include it in the present study. But the story of
Hákon Sigurðsson’s conception goes on. It allows us to examine one conse-
quence of polygyny-based kingship that goes beyond the sheer multiplication
of the number of possible pretenders. What happens when a (presumably) sat-
isfied King Sigurð leaves with his entourage?

And as he rode away, then Farmer Símun realised what the king had been
up to there. But she was called Þóra and she was Farmer Símun’s servant
woman. Afterwards Símun had her taken care of. And later on this wom-
an gave birth to a child, and this boy was named Hákon and was said to be
King Sigurð’s son. Hákon was brought up there with Símun Þorbergsson
and his wife Gunnhild. Also brought up there were her and Símun’s sons
Ǫnund and Andreas, and they were very fond of Hákon, so that nothing
could part them but death.116

Símun Þorbergsson, the yeoman of southeastern Norway, immediately recog-

nizes the good fortune that has landed in his lap without any involvement on
his part—or rather, has landed in a lap belonging to him. We can certainly
speculate whether in political reality Sigurð’s stop at this farm would have
been quite so incidental. The king was “travelling [the region] being feasted”
(hann reið at veizlum), meaning he was reaffirming his royal power in the

115 Hss c. 18: “Sigurðr konungr reið at veizlum í Vík austr með hirð sína ok reið um bý þann, er
ríkr maðr átti, er Símun hét. En er konungr reið gögnum býinn, þá heyrði í hús nǫkkut
kveðandi svá fagra, at honum fannsk um mikit, ok reið til hússins ok sá þar inn, at þar stóð
kona ein við kvern ok kvað við forkunnar fagrt, er hon mól. Konungr sté af hestinum ok
gekk inn til konunnar ok lagðisk með henni.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol.
3 (2015), 200.
116 Hss c. 18: “En er hann fór í brot, þá vissi Símun bóndi, hvat ørendi konungr hafði þannug.
En hon hét Þóra ok var verkakona Símunar bónda. Síðan lét Símun varðveita kost hennar.
En eptir þat ól sú kona barn, ok var sá sveinn nefndr Hákon ok kallaðr sonr Sigurðar ko-
nungs. Fœddisk Hákon þar upp með Símuni Þorbergssyni ok Gunnhildi, konu hans. Fœd-
dusk þar ok upp synir þeira Símunar, Qnundr ok Andréás, ok unnusk þeir Hákon mikit,
svá at þá skilði ekki nema hel.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 200.
The Generative Aspect 89

r­ egion through his presence. A female slave, such as would be bought “for the
bed,”117 and, moreover, of the kind that according to the general consensus was
most exposed to attacks of every kind,118 could be a ready part of their owner’s
hospitality. In Jómsvíkinga saga, the Funen magnate Pálnatóki succeeded in
having “a woman appointed to wait on” Harald Bluetooth, whom he was feast-
ing; the son conceived at the occasion, the future King Sven Forkbeard, was
raised with the host and subsequently ensures his meteoric rise.119 It is quite
possible that “good-looking girls” were kept especially for such occasions, as
William of Malmesbury suggests for tenth-century England.120

117 The frequently cited reference is the Icelandic territorial law, the Grágás, ia §112: “A man
is entitled to buy a slave woman (ambátt) for the bed (til karnaðar < kǫr “bed” + abstract
suffix -nað-, so “what has to do with the bed, ‘bedding’”) at 12 ounces even without permis-
sion.” Cf. H[ermann] Reichert, “Nebenfrau,” in rga, vol. 9 (2002), 28; Karras, Slavery and
Society (1988), esp. 214. In terminology and severity, the passage is a hapax, yet implicitly
or explicitly, the association is repeatedly established in the laws and sagas.
118 The working woman (as Snorri terms her: virkakona) is ipso facto unprotected, especially
if she works away from the household, for example in the fields or in a separate building.
In the chivalric adventures, in the pastourelles and the learned courtly literature of An-
dreas Capellanus or Ralph of Coggeshall, the shepherdess is the easy and (not always)
willing prey of the aventurier; in the leges, sexual assault on them is assessed differently
than an attack on an unfree woman working indoors, who the Lex Frisionum (xiii §1)
names bortmagad and whose hallmark is that she “nec mulgere nec molere solet.” In Ed-
dic poetry, the latter, the mill slave, is repeatedly presented as particularly degraded and
particularly exposed to male access; cf. Grottasǫng, where King Fróði turns two giantesses
into mill slaves, or Helgakvíða Hundingsbana i, where “kissing the maids at the mill” (“á
kvernum kystir þyjar,” stanza 35) is considered characteristic of the overbearing idler. Cf.
Obermeier, “Ancilla” (1996), 132ff.; von Olberg, “Aspekte” (1990), 233; Karras, Slavery and
Society (1988), esp. 79ff. on evidence for the distinction between housemaids and working
maids in the Scandinavian provincial laws. For illicit intercourse with the latter, the per-
petrator only pays a half fine (Gulathing Law §198, Frostathing Law ii §21).
119 Jómsvíkinga saga c. 3. The story takes a different course here, as the king explicitly denies
his paternity, which leads to a struggle—and ultimately the saga has to explain this war
between father and son, which already appears as a decisive phase of the Christianization
of Denmark in Adam of Bremen (ii, 27f.). Both narratives agree, however, that the foster
father makes his fortune with the young king.
120 William of Malmesbury, gra ii, 139 (to ~894): after a shepherd’s daughter, “eleganti spetie
puella,” had the customary premonitory dream (her belly shone like the moon, illuminat-
ing all England), the villica of the royal estate brings her into the house. Travelling through,
Edward, son of King Alfred the Great, is “seized by ‘love’ at the sight of the virgin, de-
manded a night with her” (uisae uirginis amore captus noctem petiit). The son is Æthel­
stan (r. 924–39). We are not dealing here with the factual content of the circumstances of
the king’s conception but with a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman royal history narrating
about the 9th/10th centuries, much like the sagas. Like Harald Fairhair and William,
Æthel­stan is anything but a ‘weak’ king.
90 Chapter 1

Whether deliberately or coincidentally, Símun realizes that with a little luck

and some patience he may in future find himself close to a king. Hence his
sudden concern for the material comfort of the bondswoman, as well as the
care with which he selects the boy’s name, and, crucially, the attention paid to
the solidity of local testimony that King Sigurð was indeed the father. Most im-
portant is the close affective attachment to his household, especially the two
presumably older foster brothers, who would constitute the core of the future
pretender’s faction (flokk)—assuming this ever happened, which must have
appeared very likely given the situation in twelfth-century Norway.
And so it turned out. We encounter the boy again following the death of his
father—Sigurð fell in battle against the followers of his half-brother Ingi—in
the vicinity of the third of the king’s quarrelling half-brothers, Eystein, who
recognized him as his nephew, whether out of conviction, calculation, or both.
After Eystein had fallen and Ingi was the last remaining king, the ten-year-old
Hákon “was accepted as leader of the troop that had previously followed King
Eysteinn, and the men of this troop gave him the title of king.”121 From the be-
ginning, his two foster brothers, farmer Símun’s sons, were key figures in the
campaign, which, after several embarrassing defeats, was ultimately unexpect-
edly successful, as a result of the fortunes of war that so often decided these
power struggles. A chance encounter, or rather a chance conception of a child,
brought about a tangle of bonds from which, we may hope, Þóra the mill maid
who came to be a king’s mother herself would have profited in terms of im-
provements to her conditions of life. For a while things looked bright for farm-
er Símun and his household: “King Hákon then subjected the whole land to
himself and appointed his own men to all the stewardships and likewise the
market towns.”122 But one of his foster brothers did not live to see the day, the
other profited from it only briefly: at just sixteen, King Hákon fell in battle with
the opposing party which after a few problems had succeeded in launching a
new claimant. The surviving foster brother and the members of his party were

121 HsHb c. 1: “var tekinn til hǫfðingja yfir flokk þann, er áðr hafði fylgt Eysteinni konungi, ok
gáfu flokksmenn honum konungsnafn.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3
(2015), 215.
122 HsHb c. 19: “Hákon konungr lagði þá land allt undir sik ok skipaði allar sýslur sínum
mǫnnum ok svá kaupstaði.”—Sýsla (derived from the homonymous verb, meaning “to
perform, execute”) means both a royal commission, an office, and a specific region; thus
what is meant is that Hákon entrusted his people with supervision of royal possessions in
the country along with the corresponding revenues and the market levies.
The Generative Aspect 91

again relegated to guerrillas, made a few futile efforts, before disappearing into
exile in Denmark or Götaland. We hear nothing more of Símun, nor of Þóra.123
It is worth relating the short career of King Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders’ here, to
illustrate the opportunities and interests that could be connected with proxim-
ity to a scion of Harald Fairhair’s tree. Obviously, everything hinged on the con-
dition that those concerned knew or could believe that they were actually
dealing with a royal scion. Not all were so immediately and clearly recognized
as Magnús had been, who had the good luck to be born aboard his father’s ves-
sel with a skald handy to discuss—and preserve for posterity—the naming
and future of the boy “Magnús” with King Olav the very next day. King Sigurð,
at least, does not seem to have minded whether he was leaving a child with
Símun (who, for his part, clearly took the initiative and launched his pupil
when the time came). Eight years later, when the boy appeared with his alleged
uncle, there was only the living tradition and the testimony of those around
him—in other words, not really anything that could withstand critical scruti-
ny, even if in this case independent testimony could conceivably have been
provided by former followers of King Sigurð who remembered the visit to Sí-
mun. Yet even they could only prove the plausibility and not the substance of
the claim. ‘No one can know who his father is.’ For some, this offered chances.

10 Suitability

This state of affairs ought to have driven the Norwegians to despair, and forced
them to think of ever new measures to turn plausibility into certainty. The
“fear” (Georges Duby) of Western European aristocrats of the intrusion of false
blood into a family line is commonly regarded as a reason why the lay world
found itself in agreement with the mistrust of misogynistic churchmen with
regard to the “surveillance” of wives and daughters.124 Now, as we have seen,
the idea of the form of the line of descent was fundamentally different in
Northern Europe; however, the problem of paternity was similar in both
models.

123 We might therefore question whether Monika Obermeier’s optimism about the opportu-
nities for advancement for unfree women is justified (“Ancilla” (1996), 135: “Thus sexual
contact with the lords was certainly always desirable for the maids”).—Incidentally, Sí-
mun’s wife had supported her foster son in her own way by consulting a soothsayer about
the most favorable time for war; Snorri, however, reports this with his customary restraint
when discussing supernatural events (HsHb c. 16).
124 Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal (1986), 64; cf. Duby, Ritter, Frau und Priester (1985); Duby,
Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999); Casagrande, “Die beaufsichtigte Frau” (1993).
92 Chapter 1

It is therefore surprising how stoically the Norway of the kings’ sagas dealt
with the problem. In the saga of Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders,’ nobody, not even his
opponents, expresses any doubt over the legitimacy of his claim; and the same
is true in most such cases. However, questions were sometimes asked. For in-
stance, Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar reports the following concerning the birth
of the great unifying king Hákon iv (and it should be remembered that the
saga was written immediately after his death in 1263 at the behest of his son
and successor by the excellently informed Sturla Þórðarson, who obviously
had access to the royal diplomatarium):

When King Hákon Sverrisson [r. 1202–04] came from the east from the
Götaelv, he resided in Borg [Sarpsborg in Østfold] that autumn for a pe-
riod. There was a good and faithful woman [goð kona ok trulynd] with
him at that time called Inga. She was of good stock, related to Auðun of
Borg, and she had many excellent relatives in that district, called Var-
teigingers or Varteig’s folk. Inga lived in the king’s house and shared his
bed [ok samreckti Hakoni konungi], so Hákon the Mad [a cousin of the
king] and several of the king’s other close followers knew about it.
The summer after Ingi Bárðsson [another cousin] was chosen as king,
Inga lived in a place in Borg district called Falkensborg, where a priest
named Þrónd celebrated Mass. There Inga gave birth to a boy. But the
priest Þrónd knew that King Hákon Sverrisson was the boy’s father. He
baptized the boy and gave him the name Hákon, and he did this secretly,
so no one dealt with him except his two sons and his wife. The priest
Þrónd quietly raised the boy himself.
There was a man named Erlend in Huseby. He was a kinsman of King
Sverrir [r. 1177–1202] from the line of Guthorm Greybeard. The priest
Þrónd went to Erlend and they discussed boy’s future.125

Openness and a series of witnesses with good names: the Varteigings took all
conceivable precautions to clear the way for their future claimant. It helped
that Inga was by no means a slavewoman, but of good origin, that is, locally
respected, well-rooted, cleverly interrelated. Nonetheless, her relationship
with the overwintering king had to be as open as possible, so that not only In-
ga’s own family but also influential men in the royal entourage would be able
to testify to it. Apparently, this was no problem for anyone involved.
If King Hákon Sverrisson had not succumbed to an illness a few weeks after
his time with Inga, the son would probably have grown up in all honour with

125 HsHs cc. 1–3.

The Generative Aspect 93

the Varteigings. Misfortune now demanded other measures, and a priest who
guaranteed integrity, secrecy, and discretion, took the king’s son and in the first
instance concealed him from possible harassment by friend or foe. The priest
Þrónd must have spent a long time deciding which magnates he might turn to
in order to secure the boy’s path to power. As the saga goes on, things still just
turn out well for Inga and little Hákon, aided by, among other things, a healthy
mistrust of the bishop of Hamar and an early thaw, and, after a tense moment
of hesitation, the current king and party leader accepted them. But even many
years later, at a time when Hákon had long held power, the episode was still not
wholly over. In 1219, in the course of the complicated agreement of his party
with the followers of Jarl Skúli Bárðsson, who was himself toying with the idea
of taking the kingship, doubts were expressed about the story of Hákon Sver-
risson and Inga—and therefore the legitimacy of her son’s rule.
The king offered an ordeal. He could not, of course, subject himself to it,
given that he—like everyone—was not in a position to make a truthful state-
ment about his own father. Only one person could do so: Inga. She offered to
undergo a truth test, did so, passed gloriously, of course,126 the agreement
came about, and her son remained sole king. Our astonished shudders at this
process, which more than most aspects of the medieval world reveals to us the
limits of empathy when it came to experiencing and feeling bodily pain,127 find
little consolation in the thought that it was not for nothing.

11 Co-optative Kinship

The effect of a successful ordeal, however, was by no means predictable. Short-

ly after 1130, one such judgement (skírsla, actually “purification”) was arranged
in Denmark to confirm the royal birth of the contender Sigurð ‘the Bad’ (or ‘the
Bad Deacon,’ slembidjákn, r. 1135–39), who was biding his time abroad. The
form of this judgment is unknown to us, but it was reinforced by the testimony
of five bishops and—perhaps more relevant to some—a skaldic verse. None of
this helped him: “Harald’s [the reigning king’s] friends said that this had been

126 In the provincial laws, the iron test was intended as a supplementary or alternative form
of evidence, where the usual oath of cleansing, reinforced by oaths of exoneration, did
not suffice. See, for example, Schonisches Kirchenrecht §§ 5; 7, and more generally Bartlett,
Trial (1986). The episode takes place in 1219, so at a time when trial by ordeal had been
rejected by the church in Latin Europe and was geneally in decline; it entered into Hákon
iv’s semiofficial life-saga in the 1260s.
127 Cf. Georges Duby, “Réflections sur la douleur physique au Moyen Age,” in Duby, Mâle
moyen âge (21990), 203–09.
94 Chapter 1

a deceit and lie of the Danes.”128 In another situation of the same kind, a pos-
sible ordeal again became superfluous, when in 1142 the presumptive king’s
son Eystein, arriving from the British Isles with his mother, after disembarking
and exchanging messengers, agreed a tripartite division of the kingdom with
his two much younger half-brothers Ingi and Sigurð, who were ruling the coun-
try: “For what King Harald [gillikrist, the father of the three] had said about
paternity was believed.”129 It would be naive to believe that the purported
words of the father, long since deprived of his life and kingdom, would have
induced the two child kings to agree there and then to relinquishing a third of
their domain to the lost and refound ‘older brother.’ More likely, after careful
deliberation, after exchanging offers and threats, and considering the respec-
tive forces, it may have appeared opportune to co-opt the newcomer. After-
wards, any further doubts about the biological paternity would have appeared
irrelevant to everyone involved.
Eystein’s rapid success was not an isolated case in a special political situa-
tion. This is indicated by the importance of the theme of ættleiðing, “introduc-
tion into the family group,” in the sagas and some twenty Scandinavian provin-
cial laws. As socio-historical sources, the latter are no less problematic than the
former, since what can be said about both their time of creation and the status
of individual textualizations is rarely secure and often contradictory. Even the
four mainland Norwegian laws vary considerably.130 Moreover, the tradition
for the two southeastern laws is fragmentary. The Westland Gulathing Law and
the Trøndelag Frostathing Law are complete, albeit preserved in late redac-
tions. Snorri attributes these laws to King Hákon the Good, thus placing them
in the tenth century, a dating which seems hard to believe. King Magnús the

128 MsBHG c. 13, citing a stanza from Ívar Ingimundarson’s Sigurðarbǫlk. Heimskringla, trans.
Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 183.—Sigurð’s unusual epithet refers to the fact that he
had already received minor orders when he ‘discovered’ his origins and began his career
as a royal claimant. The precedent of Harald gilli, who arrived from Ireland and under-
went the truth test to validate his claim, in his case with red-hot plowshares, likewise ex-
perienced mixed success, even though the test took place in Norway in full view of his ri-
vals. See below, Chapter 4.
129 Hss c. 13 (ms. F): “Var því trúat af faðerni hans, er Haralds konungr hafði til sagt.”
130 These are: the Gulathing (for the Westland between Jæren and Stadland) with its thing
site in Guli at the mouth of Sognefjord; the Frostathing (for Trøndelag/Þrándheim and the
coastal regions Møre and Hålogaland) with its thing site on the small peninsula Frosta in
Trondheimsfjord; the Borgarthing (for Viken, the regions around Oslofjord) with its thing
site in today’s Sarpsborg; the Eidsivating (for the interior) with its thing place in Eid south
of Mossjø, where in 1814 the liberal opposition to the Swedish annexation of Norway gath-
ered and proclaimed the liberal “Eidsvoll Constitution,” which is considered the begin-
ning of modern Norwegian statehood.
The Generative Aspect 95

Law-Mender (r. 1263–80), who among other things instigated a revised version
of the Frostathing Law, described the older layers in it as “the laws of Saint King
Olav”131 from the early eleventh century in an attempt to move the royal right
to legislate back in time. According to method (or perhaps even preference),
researchers now date larger or smaller sections earlier or later within this
period, and while linguistic/stylistic examination is probably the most sensible
approach to the question of the stability of what are assumed to be particular
oral traditions, even this is no guarantee against the possibility that the
­thirteenth-century writers or scribes occasionally employed archaic linguistic
forms to ennoble innovations—just as the contemporary saga writers com-
posed new skaldic stanzas in antiquated Norse and mingled them with ‘genu-
ine’ traditions.132 In my view, it is advisable to understand the laws in terms of
the ‘saga age,’ in the dual sense that the term has with regard to the sagas: they
provide the sum of the past as relevant to the present that their authors around
1200 wished to convey (“authors” meaning not individuals but the consensual
or controversial ‘textual community’ of scribe/narrator and reader/listener133).
In these terms, the laws—undoubtedly texts formulated with care and the
­participation of many influential people—are among the most important ‘self-
testimonials’ of this society, and their parallel testimony to the saga reports
concerning the integration of ‘brothers’ arriving from outside as a result of po-
lygynous practice is highly welcome.
The ninth section of the Frostathing Law, devoted to inheritance and guard-
ianship, contains the introductory chapter Um ættleiðing, cited here in full:

A man is fully legitimated if his father brings him into the kindred [leiðir
í ætt] with the consent of those who are the nearest heirs to the one who
brings him into the kindred. The father shall give a feast with as much ale
as can be brewed from three sald [a measure of capacity] of malt; and he
shall butcher a three-year-old ox and flay the skin off the right hind leg
above the knee joint and make it into a shoe. Then the father shall order
the one who is to be legitimated to put that shoe on; at the same time he
shall have on his knees the sons who are still minors, but those who are of

131 Prologue to the Frostathing Law (in NgL, vol. 1, 119–258, here 121): “lǫg ins helga Olafs
konungs.”
132 Cf. von See, Altnordische Rechtswörter (1964); Robberstad, Rettssoga, vol. 1 (1971); Sjöholm,
Gesetze als Quellen (1977); Sjöholm, Sveriges Medeltidslagar (1988); Venås, “Kvinne og
mann” (1989); Rindal, “Dei norske mellomalderlovene” (1995); Røsstad, Á tveim tungum
(1997); Helle, “Lov og rett” (1999).
133 On the term, see Stock, Implications (1983), esp. 522; on its use, see Rüdiger, Aristokraten
und Poeten (2001), esp. 188ff.
96 Chapter 1

age shall [also] put on the shoe. If he has no sons who are legal heirs, the
men who stand nearest to the inheritance shall put on the shoe, and they
shall lead the man [who is] to be legitimated to the knees of the father
and his wife. Women may testify for a man on the same terms as men as
to the completeness of his legitimation, as may the shoe which the men
have put on, if it is preserved. [sic]
A thrallborn son shall be brought into the kindred by the one who gave
him his freedom; and let it be given by the father or by a brother or by the
man who is nearest the heir, whether he be young or old; and let them
give their consent who are the nearest to the one who wishes to bring a
man into the kindred. The son of a free woman [frjálsrar konu son] shall
be legitimated in the same way as the son of a bondwoman [sem þýjar].
And after this manner shall the free-born agnatic kinsmen [bauggild-
ismenn] bring a man into the kindred, if there is no father or brother.134

Two principles pervade the slightly casuistic prose of the provision: the con-
sensus of those affected and the freedom of the decision-makers. If the father
(or brother, etc.) desires it, and those who are “closest to the heir,” meaning
those whose prospective inheritance is diminished by the admission of an

134 Frostathing Law (in NgL, vol. 1, 119–258), ix §1: “Sá er ættleiðingr at fullu er faðer leiðir í ætt
sun sinn oc þeir menn iáta et þá ero þess manns arfar næster er sun sinn leiðir í ætt. Þrig-
gia sállda öl scal gera, oc höggva uxa þrevetran oc flá ax heming af eftra foti hinum hœgra
fyrir ofan hœkilinn, oc gera scó or. Þar scal Faðer láta ættleiðing stíga í, oc hafa sunu sína
þá í faðmi ser er í ómegð ero. En þeir sculo synir hans í þann scó stíga er fulltíða ero. En ef
hann á sunu enga arfgenga, þá sculo þeir menn í þann scó stíga er þá ero arfi hans næstir,
en þann mann scal leiða á reca scaut oc rygia. Jamt sculo conor bera vitni þeim manni
sem carlmadr [!] til ættleiðingar at fullu, oc scór sá er þeir stigu í ef hann er hirðr. Þann
þýborenn sun scal í ætt leiða er honum er frelsi gefit, oc gefr annartveggia faðir eða bróðir,
eða hvegi maðr er arfi hans er næstr, hvárt sem sá er ungr eða gamall. Oc iáta þeir menn
er arfi ero þá næstir þeirra manna er þá vilia mann í ætt leiða. En iamt scal friálsrar kono
sun sem þýjar í ætt leiða. Svá sculo aller bauggilldismenn ættbornir leiða mann í ætt sem
faðir eða bróðir ef þeir ero eigi til.”—The term bauggildismenn (“men who owe [golden
arm-] rings”) denotes the extent of mutual liability as regulated by law, in the case of
a crime to be settled by wergild, usually manslaughter; it loosely corresponds to third-
degree relatives in the ‘Germanic’ reckoning of contemporary church law.—Ætt, a word
distantly related with eiga “to own,” is mostly rendered as “kin (group)” or Sippe in the
terms of the Freiburg and Münster kinship studies (Karl Schmid, Gerd Tellenbach), de-
noting all lateral relatives as opposed to Geschlecht/‘lineage,’ which refers to an agnatic
blood line. In modern Scandinavian academic usage slægt/släkt/slekt, borrowed from
Saxon in the Middle Ages, corresponds to ‘lineage’ and æt(t)/ätt to ‘kin’ (cf. the wide-
spread term ættesamfund/ättesamhälle ‘[pre-state] kin society’). The extensive debate
was summarized most recently from a legal-historical perspective by Hansen, “Concept
of Kinship” (2005).
The Generative Aspect 97

extra heir, agree, then there are no barriers to the ættleiðing of a ‘son.’ The son
of a free woman is explicitly placed on the same level as that of a slave; it is
unclear how far the free/unfree dichotomy was still operative on an everyday
level in the thirteenth century,135 but within the narrative system of the law the
dichotomy is important: No distinction is to be made between the children of
high-status frillur and those of peasant women.
The Gulathing Law (§52), which dictates the same procedure for the ætt­
leiðing, is yet more laborious in the ceremony with the shoe, and even pre-
scribes a formula to be spoken by the father, with alliterative parallelisms
clearly intended to suggest anciency. Eligible sons are also further differenti-
ated: besides the “slave’s son” there are the “corner son” (hornungr) and the
“bush son” (hrísungr). The former is defined as the “the son of a free woman
[whom his father has] not bought with mund but to whose bed he has gone
without concealment”; the bush son is “the son of a free woman but begotten
in secret.”136 As will be discussed (Chapter 2), the distinction between open
and secret actions can indeed be considerable for the participants; for the off-
spring, however, there are no consequences in the lawbook: bush son, corner
son, and slave’s son, “they enter into all rights.”137 Indeed, the entire ninth sec-
tion of the Frostathing Law opens with the maxim: “A son shall inherit from his
father when nature takes its proper course, the one who is taken into the kin-
dred as well as the one who is born to freedom and family.”138
It should be noted that the complicated and curious ceremony with the
shoe, which I take to be an archaizing fabrication by the editors of the law (the
ceremony, not the legal act as such), comes from a time when the propensity
for free, consensus-based negotiations between the affected parties was being

135 Iversen, Trelldommen (1997); Karras, Slavery and Society (1988); Krag, Norges historie
(2000), 212; Eljas Orrman, “The Condition of the Rural Population,” in Helle, ed., Cam-
bridge History of Scandinavia, vol. 1 (2003), 589–610, with further references. By the time
this text was edited, the term frjálsi, here glossed as “free,” had already acquired the nar-
rower meaning, ‘not taxable by the king,’ that is, ‘noble.’
136 Gulathing Law (in: NgL, vol. 1, 1–110), §104: “Sa heiter hornongr er frialsar kono sunr er, oc
eigi golldenn mundr við, oc genget i liose i hvilu hennar. En sa heitir risungr er frialsar
kono sunr er oc getenn a laun.” The Earliest Norwegian Laws, trans. Larson (1935), 104.
137 Gulathing Law (in: NgL, vol. 1, 1–110), §104: “þeir koma til allz rettar,” namely seventh in
succession (erfðaskipan); likewise, no distinction is made for the ættleiðing (§52). The
Earliest Norwegian Laws, trans. Larson (1935), 104.
138 Frostathing Law viii §1: “Sonr scal taca arf eptir föður sinn ef at scöpum ferr, oc svá ætt­
leiðingr sem ættborenn.” The Earliest Norwegian Laws, trans. Larson (1935), 324.—Cf. Saw-
yer, “Son ska taka arv etter far sin” (1999), 56–79. “When nature [skapan ‘work of creation’]
takes its proper course” meant: when the father dies before the son; otherwise the father
inherits from the (childless) son. Again, any distinction based on the mother’s status is
ruled out.
98 Chapter 1

put on the defensive by juridical ‘encadrement.’139 The formal regulation of

entry into a lineage, which after all only boils down to freedom for every mem-
ber of a family group to take the initiative if he can ensure the consent of those
concerned or enforce his will, is one such legalistic ‘framing.’ Practically, the
ætt’s freedom to decide on the admission of new ‘sons’ and ‘brothers’ remains
unchanged. The ætt is in fact an interest group governed by rules of co-­optation
expressed in kinship terms.140
The sagas present the same picture as the laws: impressive sons of frillur or
slave women appear in all genres, in the prehistoric and Icelandic sagas as well
as in the kings’ histories. While they have to struggle for their place alongside
their brethren from more respectable relationships, they often receive special
narrative attention for it. One of many examples is the remarkable figure of
Þorkel krafli (‘Scratcher’)141 in the Icelandic Vatnsdœla saga, written down
around 1260/80. The powerful Þorgrím has a son with his frilla Néreið, who had
apparently been captured in Orkney. He was exposed and left to die at the in-
stigation of Þorgrím’s wife/woman (kona), but saved and raised by Þorgrím’s
brothers. However, for many years Þorgrím simply refuses to recognize his
paternity.
The narrative now skips forward to a moment when the boy is around twelve
years old. There is a sociable gathering, the boys play and the adults are nego-
tiating a delicate matter: who will be the next holder of the local goðorð, a
prestigious position conferring precedence at the thing.142 At this point a silent
understanding begins between father and son. The young Þorkel stares relent-
lessly at Þorgrím, or rather something that he has with him, namely an ornate
ax, an attractive piece from Byzantium. Silence is one of the most succinct,
even dramatic forms of expression in all the sagas, and inevitably (sometimes
only after years) leads to peripety of some sort. Þorgrím is well aware of this
and decides to go along with the escalation: “What are you goggling at, slave-
woman’s son?”—knowing full well that he is almost the only man in the world
who can speak such words without danger of death. The boy remains silent
and continues to stare. So Þorgrím puts his cards on the table: “What will you
do, Scratcher, for me to give you the ax, for I see you like it very much—and for

139 Referring to the concept of encadrement (féodal, paroissial, etc.), the ‘framing’ and sys-
tematization of society through closer forms of representation of social relationships.
140 For criticism of the conception of ætt/kin as a structurally fundamental, biologically/
genealogically fixed formation in relation to property, law, and feud, political action, see
Hansen, Ætten (1999), 23–55.
141 From krafla “to stir, to move weakly”; the epithet refers to Þorkel’s characteristic nose
scratching.
142 See Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999).
The Generative Aspect 99

me to recognize my kinship with you?” Now Þorkel can break his silence; he
bids his father keep talking. And he names the price: the death of his competi-
tor for goðorð. “It seems to me that then you would bring yourself into the
house of Vatnsdœlir.”
During another round of negotiations, the boy jostles the opposing candi-
date, provokes and receives an insult—“slavewoman’s son!”—and kills him
with the ornate ax. The scene becomes yet more unappetizing as it goes almost
unpunished: the deceased leaves behind only children, so no one will initiate
the blood vengeance which is due, and a settlement is reached through the
payment of compensation, the least honourable solution in the sagas. And
Þorgrím, now goði, publicly declares: “He has now, so to speak, admitted him-
self into our kin—and now I will also recognize you as my son.”143
The blackmail of a perplexed child is not quite as brutal as it appears to
modern readers at first glance. By conspicuously staring at the ax, the boy
Þorkel had already made his availability sufficiently clear at the outset. This
shows that to him the quid pro quo is, and must be, worth any price: the “slave-
woman’s son” must first show that it is worth accepting him into the family.
Once he has proved this, there is no need for a ceremony with ox-hide shoes for
his admission, indeed no further words are needed: “Now he has admitted him-
self into the kindred.”

12 Twofold Legitimacy: Sverrir of Norway

What this Icelandic story relates about a single family also holds true for the
Norwegian royal kindred, which accepted the newcomer Eystein, questioned
Hákon Hákonarson, and rejected Harald gilli. Eystein, accompanied by his
Gaelic mother, came from Scotland, landed in Norway, and made it very clear
to the two ruling brothers what the consequences of refusing to co-opt him
would be—he too “led himself into the kindred.” The most famous—and
­successful—of the Norwegian kings to come from the Western Isles and claim
their right of succession, invoking the ubiquity of the royal seed, is Sverrir
(born around 1150/55, r. 1177–1202), perhaps the most important, certainly the
most interesting ruler figure of the Norwegian Middle Ages.144 In his case, we

143 Vatnsdœla saga c. 42: “Þorgrímr spurði, hví ambáttarsonr sjá stirði svá á hann. … ‘Hvat
villtu til vinna, Krafla, at ek gefa þér øxina, því at ek sé, at þér lízk allvel á hana, ok hitt, at
ek ganga við frændsemi þinni?’ … ‘… þykki mér þú þá sjálfr fœra þik í Vatnsdœla kyn.’ … ‘…
hefir hann nú næsta sagt sik í Vatnsdœla kyn, ok mun ek ganga við faðerni þínu.’”
144 Cf. Koht, Kong Sverre (1942); Koht, “Korleis vart kong Sverre son til Sigurd Munn?” (1961–
62), 293–302; Gathorne-Hardy, King Sverre (1956); Torkelsen, “Sverre som løgner” (1983),
100 Chapter 1

are in the fortunate position of not being dependent on the thirteenth-century

sagas that tell of bygone kings; like that other great “outsider,” Caesar, he nar-
rates his own life in the third person, as a mixture of the fortunes of war and
plain good luck.145 This lends the story an unprecedented level of ‘officiality’
about his beginnings (in fact, scholars often speak—quite accurately—of ‘pro-
paganda’); that the story is so similar to the reports concerning the background
of royal “outsiders” related in Heimskringla and elsewhere, indirectly attests to
the latters’ representativeness.
Now how did Sverrir start out? He was “said to be” the son of Unás, a comb-
maker from western Norway, and his wife Gunnhild. At the age of five, he came
to his father’s brother, the bishop of the Faroe Islands, who “set him to book-
learning and consecrated him, so that he became a priest.” This education was
already a first stroke of luck: it later enabled Sverrir to always have the right
premonitory dream at the right time, including one which, at a critical mo-
ment as the dispirited leader of a group of desperados, prompted him to risk
reaching for the kingship—not only reliving the Book of 1 Samuel, but having
dreams about it and providing commentary on them. Even before his career
started, however, God revealed his legitimacy. This came directly from the
“pope in Rome”—bypassing the local clergy, which is easy to understand in the
self-portrayal of a king whose reign was characterized by the confrontation
with two reforming archbishops—who, acting as the confessor of his pilgrim
mother Gunnhild, bound her to no longer conceal the “truth” about the birth
of her son. It turned out that Sverrir’s father was ‘actually’ King Sigurð—the
same who had impregnated the enchanting singing mill slave, which fittingly
made Sverrir brother of King Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders,’ who in 1162 had lost
against the ruling Magnús Erlingsson, and whose flokk had been unable to
present a suitable pretender since. It was also fitting that Sverrir lacked priestly
humility and had already picked a number of serious quarrels; a handful of

419–48; Magnús Stefánsson, “Kong Sverre” (1984), 287–307; Ármann Jakobsson, Í leit að
konungi (1997); Krag, Sverre (2005).
145 Unlike the Roman, the Norwegian did not write himself—or let us say that his ‘Hirtius’
received full recognition as an author: “This book was first written by Abbot Karl Jónsson,
and King Sverrir controlled the work and decided what to put in it” (“en yfir sat sialfr Sver-
rir konungr oc reð fyrir hvat rita scylldi,” SvS, Prologue). According to the prologue, the
later parts of the saga are based on witness reports rather than direct authorship. The
Heimskringla and other thirteenth-century kings’ sagas end with the year 1177, thus pro-
viding the prehistory to the Sverris saga.—On the idea of the outsider, see Meier, Caesar
(1982).
The Generative Aspect 101

urgent dreams did the rest, and “Sverrir travelled to Norway to see what he
could do.”146
The issue here is not Sverrir’s subsequent laborious rise to become sole
­ruler, made possible through his ecclesiastical contacts, his marriage ties with
the powerful Jarl Birger Brosa in Götaland, and a series of ominous vicissitudes.
Even so, it is striking that nobody seriously challenged Sverrir’s royal parentage
throughout his career. The leaderless opposition, roving in the wooded
­badlands—the later famous Birkibeinar, named after their shoes made from
tree bark—were more than willing to be convinced; at one point, they forced
the hesitant Sverrir to assume leadership with threats of violence. The reigning
king, Magnús Erlingsson (r. 1161–84), and the real power behind him, his father
Erling ‘the Crooked’ (skakki), had by that time established their claim in a dif-
ferent, innovative manner. Magnús, who was not the son of a king and only
related to the royal house through the maternal line (his mother Kristín was
the daughter of King Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer, r. 1103–30), had been crowned
king in an ecclesiastical ceremony in 1162 or 1163, as the result of a deal between
his father’s party and the new archbishop, Eystein of Nidaros, with the support
of the papal cardinal legate Stephen of Orvieto (and thus of Alexander iii),
dispatched especially for the occasion. This was the first Northern European
coronation (the Danish ceremony in Ringsted followed in 1170) and clearly
made a virtue of necessity, by establishing a legitimacy of a new kind for Mag-
nús’s kingship, which was untenable in terms of his origins.147 The succession
law (in fact, nýmæli: ‘novella,’ new law), which was henceforth to regulate
claims to the throne, was based on the principles of primogeniture and legiti-
mate birth (sá skal konungr vera at Nóregi, er skilgetinn er Nóregskonungs
sunr),148 and thus in principle precluded multiple rule, division of the realm,
and pretenders. ­Furthermore, it pruned the crown of Harald Fairhair’s tree
down to a single royal scion. Under this law, Sverrir’s claim—like those of the
three unsuccessful pretenders who preceded him—was groundless, which
may explain why King Magnús’s side never demanded that Sverrir’s paternity
be proved.

146 SvS c. 6: “Sværir bio nu ferþ sina til Noregs at sia hvat i vill geraz.”
147 Cf. Tobiassen, “Tronfølgelov og privilegiebrev” (1964), 191–273; Gunnes, Erkebiskop Øystein
(1996); Bagge, “Borgerkrig og statsutvikling” (1986), 145–97; Bagge, “Den heroiske tid”
(2003).
148 In NgL, vol. 1, §1: “The king in Norway should be the son of a Norwegian king, born in a
suitable marriage [more literally, ‘duly begotten’].” Where there are no sons or none suit-
able, the law provides for a complicated voting procedure that gives greatest weight to the
bishops and representatives of the regions.
102 Chapter 1

The struggles over the kingship can certainly be recounted as a history of

conflicting ideas about kingship: “From gang leader to the Lord’s anointed.”149
Some of the protagonists supplied theoretical reflection: Archbishop Eystein,
Erling, the king’s exceptionally skilful father, and King Sverrir himself, whose
‘Speech against the Bishops’150 and biblical dreams testify to a remarkable in-
terest in political theology. In these terms, Sverrir’s victory also meant the de-
feat of the ecclesiastically legitimated monarchy that had been formed in
1162/63, a step ‘backwards’ from a diffusionist perspective. Sverrir and his suc-
cessors once again took the royal name in the traditional circumstances.151

13 Married, Crowned, Unsuccessful

We might also say: in circumstances considered traditional by contemporaries.

For the vernacular historiographical activity in the decades around 1200, which
makes Norway (and Iceland) unique in Europe and to which we owe most of
our knowledge, must also be seen against the background of these challenges.
From this point of view, it is interesting to watch Snorri handle the new form of
legitimacy of 1163. Its supporters, King Magnús and his father Erling, are among
those that have been interpreted as ‘positive’ figures in Snorri’s view.152 How-
ever, the failed attempt to restructure the monarchy is completely out of line
with most of Heimskringla, where selecting a king is exclusively a matter for
local powers, and in which every king and royal candidate enjoys formally
equal treatment and churchmen do not differ from secular figures in their
speech or bearing. Snorri’s commentary on the new birthright is therefore a
masterpiece of ambiguity. In the run-up to the coronation ceremony he has
Erling the Crooked, the party’s leader and mastermind, make the following
speech to the archbishop:

149 Bagge, From Gang Leader to the Lord’s Anointed (1996).

150 Edited by Holtsmark (1931); cf. Gunnes, Kongens ære (1971). Even if the king’s contribution
to the manuscript, of which only one version survives, cannot be identified, we can pre-
suppose a certain engagement and familiarity with canon law on the part of the king, who
had once been educated for the clergy.
151 Sverrir also had himself crowned in 1194, but the circumstances could not have been more
different from the coronation of Magnús Erlingsson in 1162/63: the archbishop refused to
perform the coronation, the bishop of Oslo only did so under threats of death, and the
escalating conflict with the church culminated in excommunication and interdiction by
Innocent iii.
152 Von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999), 367.
The Generative Aspect 103

“If Magnús has not been taken as king in accordance with what has
been the ancient custom [forn siðr] in this country, then you can use
your power to give him a crown, in accordance with what God’s laws are
for anointing a king to power. And though I am not a king nor descend-
ed from a kingly line, yet most kings in our memory have not been as
well acquainted with the statutes and laws of the land as I. For King
Magnús’s mother is a legitimate [skilfengin] daughter of a king and
queen. Magnús is also son of a queen and son of a lawfully wedded wife
[eiginkonu sonr].
So if you are willing to grant him consecration as king, then no one will
afterwards be able to deprive him of the kingdom lawfully. William the
Bastard was not a king’s son, and he was consecrated and crowned king
over England, and since then the kingdom has remained in his family in
England and all of them have been crowned. Sven Úlfsson [=Estridsen] in
Denmark was not a king’s son, and yet he was crowned king there and
afterwards his sons and one after another of that family has been crowned
king.
There is now an archbishop’s see here in this country. That is a great
glory and honour for our country. Let us enhance it further with good
things, let us have a crowned king no less than English people or Danes.”153

With a remarkable serenity Snorri here declares two fundamental elements of

medieval royal power, the church’s right to perform a coronation and the bibli-
cal foundation of this kingship, to be virtually irrelevant. For there is a context
to the speech: Archbishop Eystein has unilaterally increased the taxes owed to
the church by farmers in Trøndelag (the usual heartland for general protest
movements against overly harsh rule in the sagas). Erling inquires whether this
is supported by the “Law of Saint Olav” (to whom the original church law is

153 MsE c. 21: “Ef Magnús er eigi svá til konungs tekinn sem forn siðr er til hér í landi, þá
meguð þér af yðru valdi gefa honum kórónu, sem Guðs lǫg eru til at smyrja konung til
veldis. En þótt ek sjá eigi konungr eða af konungaætt kominn, þá hafa þeir konungar nú
verit flestir í váru minni, er eigi vissu jafnvel sem ek til laga eða landsréttar. En móðir
Magnúss konungs er konungs dóttir ok dróttningar skilfengin. Magnús er ok dróttningar
sonr ok eiginkonu sonr. En ef þér vilið gefa honum konungsvígslu, þá má engi hann taka
síðan af konungdóminum at réttu. Eigi var Vilhjálmr bastarðr konungs sonr, ok var hann
vígðr ok kórónaðr til konungs yfir Englandi, ok hefir síðan haldizk konungdómr í hans ætt
á Englandi ok allir verit kórónaðir. Eigi var Sveinn Úlfsson í Danmǫrk konungs sonr, ok var
hann þó þar kórónaðr konungr ok síðan synir hans ok hverr eptir annan þeira frænda
kórónaðr konungr. Nú er hér í landi erkistóll. Er þat mikill vegr ok tígn lands várs. Aukum
vér nú enn með góðum hlutum, hǫfum konung kórónaðan eigi síðr en enskir menn eða
Danir.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 248–49.
104 Chapter 1

a­ ttributed). The archbishop replies that the farmers would have agreed to
whatever the law of Saint Olav says, and it is certainly not forbidden to extend
God’s due. Erling does not refrain from a few biting remarks about what to the
saga audience must have appeared an incredible insult against the royal saint
by the new archbishop, in whose cathedral, moreover, Olav was buried. None-
theless, he indicates that he is prepared to tolerate the increase of church in-
come if the archbishop concedes to the coronation. Eystein replies now that if
his tax increase was unjust, far worse is Erling’s “breach of the law that he is
king over the land that is not the son of a king. There are neither laws nor prec-
edents in this country to justify this.”154
Both are, of course, already moving towards the quid pro quo, which is then
endorsed by the legate and the other bishops. According to the logic of the
text, however, the new royal law was thus equivalent to the previous ‘arbitrary’
duty increase: both are outrageous, unprecedented, and sweep aside both
custom and King Olav’s law. Ironically, it is precisely the archbishop who—­
ostensibly—sets himself up as the advocate of the traditional royal law. But
the audience realize that he uses the ‘right’ arguments only for haggling, and
feels the gap between right and wrong, old and new, all the more forcefully.155
Erling’s speech works similarly. Snorri’s Erling never misses an opportunity
to emphasize the—conventional—royal unworthiness of his son Magnús
(“though I am not … descended from a kingly line …”), and contrast the forn
siðr, the “ancient custom” with the archbishop’s arbitrariness (“… from his own
authority …”). While this would have been a spectacular slip by the historical
Erling, it is a tour de force by Snorri’s Erling. The arguments actually used for
the coronation (David, unction, royal consecration) are thus tainted by the vio-
lation of traditional law; the legitimate birth of the prospective king and his
mother stand out in their irrelevance: when has a king’s mother’s origin ever
mattered?
Snorri reaches the pinnacle of irony with his two foreign examples to be
emulated: William “the Bastard,” who is hardly an example of a “legitimate son
of a queen” and whose hereditary claim to England was as weak as any. And
Sven Estridsen may indeed have been the legitimate son of a queen (Estrid,
daughter of Cnut the Great) and a jarl, and therefore was a suitable example,
all his sons and other successors, blunderingly named by ‘Erling,’ were not. In

154 MsE c. 21: “hin lagabrotin, er sá er konungr yfir landi, er eigi er konungs sonr. Eru þar
hvártki til þess lǫg né dœmi hér í landi.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3
(2015), 248.
155 The fact that it is Erling, portrayed as a legal expert in comparison to the ancient kings,
who twists the law the most, works in a similar way.
The Generative Aspect 105

short, ‘Erling’s speech must make the audience think that if the aim is for Nor-
way to imitate the strongest rulers of England and Denmark, then the country
would have to pursue the opposite course.
This form of kingship, blessed by the church and inherited by a legitimate
son, is thus not only illegal but also ineffective. When ‘Erling’ then goes on to
claim that such a kingship could no longer be contested lawfully, at réttu, the
travesty is complete. For, after all, the audience knew who would soon over-
throw Magnús and Erling: King Sverrir, the frilla’s son from the Faroe Islands.
In the debate, polygynous kingship is elevated to the status of true legiti-
mate rule. The impotence of Erling’s double reference to ‘legitimate birth’ (skil-
fenginn “fathered lawfully, properly” and eiginkonu sonr “son of a married
woman”),156 in turn, highlights the old system, raised by analogy to the rank of
the sacrosanct ‘Law of Saint Olav,’ as an indispensable part of the political or-
der. One of its tenets is the functional equality of the king’s daughter and wife
Kristín, Magnús’s mother, with Álfhild, the “the king’s handmaid of good fam-
ily” and mother of Saint Olav’s son Magnús the Good, and even with the sing-
ing mill slave, mother of Hákon Broad Shoulders: the son of a king is the son of
a king.157

14 Low-Born and Successful

What is more: Some of the most illustrious figures in the sagas are carefully
constructed not just as the sons of frillur, but of slave women. One we have met
is Þorkel ‘Scratcher,’ the captive’s son with the ax. He later surpasses his high-
born brothers in possessions and prestige, becomes a goði himself, and leads
the life of a naturaliter Christianus before actually accepting Christianity in his
old age.158 Better known is Óláf pái (“Peacock,” on account of his fondness for

156 Skil-, from the verb skilja “divorce, separate,” belongs in the semantic field “measure out,
allocate” and is therefore a legal term: “to give each his share,” that is, “rule correctly.”
Eiginkona “own-woman” and the corresponding term kaupa konu “to buy a woman”
means the correct transfer of ownership (bride price, morning gift) in the course of a
consensual attachment.
157 Else Ebel’s attempt to distinguish an earlier epoch in the Icelandic and king’s sagas, in
which concubines were usually spoils of war, from a later one in which they were “taken
from among the farmer’s daughters” (Konkubinat [1993], 64; 72) is, in my view, a little too
neat. As far as the content of the sagas is concerned, both kinds of relationships occur at
the same period, and as far as their time of origin is concerned, we are faced with the
uncertainty of establishing a sufficiently precise chronology for the dating of entire nar-
ratives (as opposed to versions in individual manuscripts).
158 Cf. Lönnroth, “Noble Heathen” (1969).
106 Chapter 1

opulent clothes), the son of an Irish slave girl bought by his father Hǫskuld at a
trading place on his way home to Iceland—Laxdœla saga vividly describes the
market, the selection, the haggling, and the girl’s scanty clothing.159 In this
case, the ‘deaf-mute,’ haughty, silent slave, who, after arriving in Iceland, re-
ceives her own small farm in the face of Hǫskuld’s wife’s fierce disapproval,
later proves to be the daughter of an Irish king, and her son Óláf becomes a
chieftain so glorious that it is not unreasonable to ask whether he and the trag-
edies that arise from his perfection do not demonstrate the problem of excel-
lence in a paritarian society: “He’s of even better family on his mother’s side
than his father’s, which by itself would be more than good enough for us.”160
Again and again any idea that being the son of a slave woman might represent
a blemish is thwarted—though the word could indeed be intended and inter-
preted as an insult, as tunguníð (“verbal níð, libel”), as the story of Þorkel
‘Scratcher’ shows. The remarkable thing is not that in high medieval Scandina-
via it was considered undesirable to have an unfree (or, stated more cautiously,
little-respected) parent, and offensive when this was claimed about someone.
What is remarkable is that all the written sources tend to approach this issue
by repeatedly proclaiming the legal, political, and temperamental equality of
all ‘births,’ whether of a slave or princess—and then go yet further and show
that slaves can be princesses and their sons may look better than their brothers
of proper birth.
There is an originality here which sets apart the ‘generative aspect’ of
Northern European polygyny, beyond the general social purpose of propagat-
ing offspring. The stories of slave women’s sons born to rule are not indica-
tive of a particular predilection for children of slaves as preferred heirs—an
important phenomenon in the medieval Mediterranean, for instance among
the Mamlūks, with obvious advantages, such as the lack of cognates and the
successor’s social dependence on their predecessor. In the practices reported
by the sagas and attested by external sources, there is as little evidence of a

159 Laxdœla saga c. 12.

160 Laxdœla saga c. 23 (the words of his future father-in-law, Egil Skallagrímsson, himself an
experienced saga ‘hero’): “Er hann miklu betr borinn í móðurkyn en fóðurætt, og væri oss
þat þó fullbóðit.” Cf. Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 257f. Sagas of the
Icelanders (2005), 313.—It would be a mistake to dismiss the many women and young
men who are temporarily enslaved in the sagas as a mere ‘motif.’ In the life of a Þorkel
‘Scratcher’ or Óláf Peacock and their mothers, being seized and enslaved was real possi-
bility in the early and (to a lesser extent) even in the high Middle Ages. Insofar as Þorkel
and Óláf (and Joseph, Apollonius, Charikleia, Nicolette, and Cinderella) are a ‘motif,’ we
must ask how and why they appear in their narratives. The sagas show a real concern to
present events as being plausible in the lived world.
The Generative Aspect 107

g­ eneral preference for the ‘lower’ born as there is of the opposite. As argued,
the frequent images of excellent sons of slavewomen have, first and foremost,
the aim of foiling the social opprobrium that potentially clung to them.
There is hardly a better example of this than the views of Rǫgnvald, jarl of
Møre, Harald Fairhair’s “dearest friend,” concerning his different sons. He had
two sons from a relationship with a magnate’s daughter, and he “also had sons
by frillur,” three altogether. Of the five, two would become the founder figures
of new Norse settlements, namely the well-born Hrólf/Rollo, the first Norman
prince, and the frilla’s son Einar. When no son succeeds in enforcing Rǫgnvald’s
claim to Orkney, which is in a state of ‘frontier’ lawlessness, the following dia-
logue unfolds:

But when Jarl Rǫgnvald heard about this, he was displeased with Hallað’s
[one son of a frilla] behaviour, saying that his sons would turn out differ-
ent from their forefathers. Then Einarr [another son of a frilla]: replied: “I
have had little esteem from you. I have little affection to leave behind.
I will go west to the Islands if you will give me some troops. I will promise
you this, which will be a very great source of pleasure to you, that I shall
not return to Norway.” Rǫgnvald says it pleased him well that he would
not return. “For I have little hope that you will be a credit to your family,
for all your mother’s family is slave-born.”161

The moral is clear: of all his sons, only the slave’s son takes up the challenge
contained in the father’s blanket insult. Naturally he succeeds—with a single
longship he secures possession of Orkney for his kindred for three centuries to
come—and what is more, on this occasion he obtains his nickname, ‘Torf-
Einar’: “He was called Torf-Einarr because he had turf cut and used it for fire-
wood, for there was no forest in Orkney.”162 So the frilla’s son not only c­ onquered

161 HsH c. 27: “Rǫgnvaldr jarl … sagði, at synir hans myndi verða ólíkir forellri sínu. Þá svaraði
Einarr: ‘Ek hefi lítinn metnað af þér. Á ek við litla ást at skiljask. Mun ek fara vestr til eyja,
ef þú vill fá mér styrk nǫkkurn. Mun ek því heita þér, er þér mun allmikill fagnaðr á vera,
at ek mun eigi aptr koma til Nóregs.’ Rǫgnvaldr segir, at þat líkaði honum vel, at hann
kvæmi eigi aptr – ‘því at mér er lítils ván, at frændum þínum sé sœmð at þér, því at
móðurætt þín ǫll er þrælborin.’” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 74–
75. The scene is very similar in Orkneyinga saga, c. 6.
162 HsH c. 27: “Hann var fyrir því kallaðr Torf-Einarr, at hann lét skera torf ok hafði þat fyrir
eldivið, því at engi var skógr í Orkneyjum.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1
(2016), 75. Similarly, Os c. 7.—Turf was widely used as a building material in the North
Atlantic islands; see Guðmundur Óli Ólafsson, Torfbærinn (1982).
108 Chapter 1

the islands but also opened them up for permanent settlement, and in this re-
spect surpassed every Norwegian king, albeit on a small North Atlantic scale.
Why this insistence? Certainly not only to legitimize the polygynous free
choice of great men, which might as well invoke Jacob and the twelve tribes of
the People of God, Briseis and Cassandra: “quod decuit reges, cur mihi turpe
putem?”163 And yet the king’s daughter Cassandra, raped and made a slave and
concubine following the fall of Troy, would be relevant to the everyday reality
of women’s lives in a world of raids and plundering expeditions. Any woman
who was hertekin, “captured by the army,” who fell into the power of a man, was
in a similar position to Melkorka, the Irish king’s daughter, who was seized and
sold as a fifteen-year-old girl, and whose new owner Hǫskuld, as Laxdœla saga
makes clear, slept with her that same evening, even before he had given her
clean clothes164 (she is the ‘mute’ future mother of Óláf ‘Peacock,’ mentioned
above), or Eðla, the daughter of an Polabian Slavic chief, whom the Swedish
ruler Olof Skötkonung “had captured during the war, and for this reason she
was called the king’s handmaid.”165
A consequence of this ever-present possibility and danger, together with the
clear refusal in all sources to have the servile status perpetuated per ventrem,
was that unfree ‘status’ did not solidify, either in practice or representation.
Slavery was a risk, a stage of life experienced by everyone from the later conver-
sion king Óláf Tryggvason downwards. This, in turn, has the consequence that
the approximation of the terms “slave” (ambátt etc.) and “concubine” (frilla
etc.) that can often be seen in the sources, does not indicate that Norse poly­
gyny simply resulted from the powerful’s right to sexually exploit their slaves166
nor any contempt for ‘free’ frillur and the convergence of their social position
with that of the unfree.167 The sagas repeatedly designate women who become
mothers of kings as “the ‘king’s handmaid’ even though she came from a good
family.”168 This is neither an attempt to gloss over the low birth of a ‘good’ king,

163 Ovid, Amores ii 8, v. 16.

164 Laxdœla saga c. 12: “Þat sama kveld rekkði Hǫskuldr hjá henni.”
165 OsH c. 88: “Óláfr Svíakonungr Eiríksson átti fyrst friðlu, er Eðla hét, dóttir jarls af Vinð-
landi [Wendland, the usual designation in the sagas for the southern Baltic Sea countries
between Kiel Fjord and Vistula Lagoon]. Hon hafði fyrir þat verit hertekin ok kǫlluð ko-
nungs ambótt.”—In Adam of Bremen (ii, 59, iii, 15), she is Óláf’s concubina and mother
of the “bad” King Emund, who toyed with turning Swedish church allegiance away from
Hamburg-Bremen. See below, Chapter 4.
166 For instance, Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), 132f.
167 This is the argument in Karras, “Concubinage and Slavery” (1990).
168 The only exception I know of in the Scandinavian sources is Saxo—perhaps reflecting the
changes to the royal order of succession in the Valdemar era—who argues for the congru-
ence of a slavish birth and nature. (iii, 6,20: Amleth discloses the unfree origin of the
The Generative Aspect 109

nor to dismiss a wealthy frilla as a near-slave. Rather, both are true. A woman
of good family could all too easily become the slave a powerful man through
plundering campaigns, have his children as a concubine, and then once again
be held in honour by her family.169 There is no contradiction between two as-
sertions, discussed controversially in scholarship, ‘concubines were respect-
able and not socially stigmatized’ and ‘concubines were slaves or similar’: both
hold true at once.
By contrast, the final proposition—‘slaves were respectable and not socially
stigmatized’—is clearly absurd and an oxymoron. By definition, ‘slaves’ are
those who are less respectable than the others. Consequently, all general state-
ments about ‘the concubines,’ their status, and their dignity must founder. Ir-
respective of origin, status, and function, it is purely a question of the person
and their qualities. Guaranteeing this is the true purpose of establishing parity
between kings’ daughters, war booty women, and mill maids.

15 Polygyny as a Guarantor of Parity

To avoid any misunderstanding straight away: parity is not equality. They are
are fundamentally different ideas; indeed, parity is the prerequisite for the de-
velopment of inequality. A social formation based on the agonistic principle,
on comparison and competition, and thus organized comparatively, needs a
common basis, the yardstick by which the dissimilarity of its members can be
measured. Only if there is no a priori hierarchy can all achieve different de-
grees of excellence under the same conditions: without the Round Table, there
is no Arthurian kingdom; without the peer group in which not even the king

queen, whose mother had been captured and enslaved, “ne potius servili more quam ge-
nere esse videretur”).
169 As happens, for example, in Vatnsdœla saga to Nereið, mother of Þorkel ‘Scratcher.’ It is
clear that her son counts on his mother’s background when he—successfully—seeks af-
filiation with his Orkney relatives, at which the local jarl pays for her freedom and sends
valuable women’s clothing to Iceland—without anyone appearing to harbour any resent-
ment over past injustice. (See below, Chapter 4). Ástríð, the mother of Óláf Tryggvason,
experiences a similar fate in Heimskringla, while Álfhild, “king’s handmaid” and Olav’s
former frilla, like many Merovingian concubines five centuries earlier, found her place of
honour through her son as the mother of the king, and only with great difficulty and fol-
lowing the exhortations of the skald Sigvat, was Olav’s childless ‘first wife,’ the Swedish
princess, persuaded to relinquish her seniority in the seating order: “Your circumstances
have, however, greatly improved by God’s will!” (“þér þótt þinn hagr stórum, / þat vildi
Guð, batni,” MsG cc. 7–9).
110 Chapter 1

stands above the others, there is no way of knowing which knight performs all
the quests better than all the others, and earns the siege perilous.
Now the principle of the same starting opportunities underlies every com-
petition, in sports and otherwise, and the rise of chivalry is in itself a case in
point.170 However, the situation is different in saga Scandinavia. Chivalry—to
remain with this example—constitutes a paritarian group of a strongly agonis-
tic character distinguished from the great majority of men (and all women),
achieving a common basis internally through an ever-starker demarcation
from all outsiders, at least discursively. The Round Table only has a limited
number of places. But this clearly does not apply to the Northern Europe of the
sagas—which may be considered to be at least as ‘real’ as the Western Europe
of knightly culture in terms of its reflection of the tangible, lived practice of
Northern Europe. Here we have no adoubements, no categorial disqualifica-
tions, not even in-group terms such as miles or chevalier, no inside and outside;
everyone has their share of a gradual system, and his actual place, as measured
by what we somewhat awkwardly term ‘honour,’ is literally dependent on new
vicissitudes, on actions and reactions from day to day. In this system, the sons
of magnates become figures of fun and the sons of slaves kings and heroes,
while other sons of magnates become heroes and many slaves remain slaves.
For of course we should not take the system to be as socially ‘open’ as it likes to
present itself, and in doing so has for two centuries provided European moder-
nity with the basis of the expectation that the light of democratic freedom in
Europe comes from the North.171 Nonetheless, one thing is rendered impossi-
ble: the idea of an aristocracy originally founded on merit but then perpetuat-
ed by birthright, the continuada honor anciana, as Ramon Llull puts it.172 “An-
cient” and “continuing” honour does not exist in the North, a region where
aristocratic wealth and status depended less on the yields of good farmland as
it did in the more landlocked parts of Latin Europe and more on successful
long-range maritime accumulation and distribution of goods. Perhaps

170 Cf. Bloch, La société féodale (1939–40); Duby, Guerriers et paysans (1973); Contamine, ed.,
Noblesse (1976); Keen, Chivalry (1984); Aurell, Noblesse en Occident (1996); Fleckenstein,
Rittertum (2002); Morsel, Aristocratie (2004).
171 The locus classicus is Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, xvi, 11; xvii, 5. The evidence for the
figure of thought lies in the actual historical product of eight hundred years of change,
namely modern Scandinavia, which does indeed look like a good approximation of these
dreams.
172 Ramon Llull, Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria c. 2.—I have argued elsewhere, with regards to
Tolosan Occitania, that even in Western Europe, an aristocracy based on parity had to
reject the concept of knighthood, and so becomes a ‘special case’: Rüdiger, Aristokraten
und Poeten (2001), 354ff.
The Generative Aspect 111

t­ halassocratic polities are necessarily more prone to sustained paritarian ‘all-

in’ competition than land-based aristocracies.173 In the agonistic society of
saga-era Scandinavia, no one has credit to squander or debts to settle.

16 Polygyny without Women?

So far, the discussion in this book has focused almost exclusively on men,
which may by now be slightly surprising to some readers. Medieval women’s
history has, over the last two to three decaes, moved steadily towards the cen-
tre of medieval history at large, undoubtedly benefiting from the wider social
climate and the corresponding expansion of scholarly opportunities, in Scan-
dinavia perhaps even more so than elsewhere. Yet perhaps as a result of these
same circumstances, it cannot really break free of the defensiveness which
the objective of (re)granting women their place in history entails. Numerous
studies and increasingly also syntheses deal with women’s legal ‘status,’ their
chances and opportunities, room for manoeuvre, economic significance, and
political influence, in short, their place in a society which frequently appears to
be the ‘male society’ par excellence.174 Besides the necessary readjustment of
perspective, this has resulted in major shifts in the overall picture, for instance,
by highlighting the overriding importance of textile exports—the result of
female labour—for the Icelandic trade balance and the relatively minor signi­
ficance of the surplus from the plunder and redistribution economy—obtained
by men.175 Overall, women have won their place in the Northern European
Middle Ages, yet there is still a rhetoric of precariousness about this place.
In a way, the evidence for women who did not content themselves with
‘room for manoeuvre,’ ‘female spaces’ or ‘opportunities’ granted them by a thor-
oughly male (‘patriarchal’) society is stronger than even modern ­scholarship
will allow. Some of the emblematic figures of the Norse world fly in the face

173 For further discussion of thalassocracy as a social and political system, see Rüdiger, “Me-
dieval Maritime Polities” (2017).
174 Ólafía Einarsdóttir, “Staða kvenna” (1984); Agnes Arnórsdóttir, Kvinner og “krigsmenn”
(1990); Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (1991); Lövkrona, ed., Kvinnospår i medeltiden
(1992); Helga Kress, Máttugar meyjar (1993); Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995);
Jochens, Images of Women (1996); Sawyer, Kvinnor och familj (21998); Øye, “Kvinner”
(22001); for a critical appraisal, see Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005).
175 Andersen, “Kvindearbejde i vikingetid?” (1983); Damsholt, “Icelandic Women” (1984);
Anna Sigurðardóttir, Vinna kvenna á Íslandi (1985); Stalsberg, “Women as Actors” (1991);
Helgi Þorláksson, Vaðmál og verðlag (1991); Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995),
141–60.
112 Chapter 1

of traditional womens’ history, for instance, the shieldmaiden (skjaldmær) or

maiden-king (meykóngr), young girls who, like or on behalf of their brothers,
go into battle, lead warships, and (particularly in the later sagas) rule entire
countries,176 as well as the much-discussed ‘whetter,’ the saga figure of the
woman who, at the critical point in a conflict, thwarts the possibility of an ami-
cable settlement—which the men involved may even be inclining towards—
and provokes an escalation through sharp satire and exhortation (eggjan, from
egg “edge, blade”). Traditional womens’ history, assuming that women must
essentially occupy inferior positions in a ‘patriarchal society,’ had to tackle the
evidence: Did shieldmaidens exist? Is ‘the whetter’ a misogynistic literary con-
struct or the literarization of a role that was available for women in real-life
questions of honour and feud?177 The controversy, which—again due to great
sociopolitical topicality—has become a basic element of academic teaching in
Norway,178 must be regarded as unsolved in the long term and probably funda-
mentally unsolvable.
The reason for this may be that the question is flawed. When discussing
whether ‘women’ had a certain social or even literary function in ‘men’s’ soci-
ety, this already presupposes the fundamental dichotomy modelled on the
two biological sexes, which our present associates with the terms ‘men’ and
‘women,’ and that what we can postulate for the European Middle Ages (and
other epochs of Euro-Mediterranean history) can also be applied to medieval

176 The term is attested, among others, in the Annales Ryenses (dma, 156) where Hethe, the
legendary founder of Hethæby/Slesvig, heads a crowd of 300 “virgines quae skalmøær
dicte sunt.” Cf. Wahlgren, Maiden King (1938); Strand, Kvinnor och män (1980); Præstgaard
Andersen, Skjoldmøer (1982); Holmqvist-Larsen, Møer (1983); Clover, “Maiden Warriors”
(1986); Kalinke, Bridal-Quest Romance (1990); Sawyer, “Sköldmön” (1998). Familiar from
nineteenth- and twentieth-century national mythology, the ‘valkyrie’ (valkyrja), compan-
ion of Odin, may ultimately go back to a pre-Christian numinous female figure (we have
no way of knowing). In her modern form, however, she is borrowed from the ‘Eddic’ schol-
arly antiquarianism of the thirteenth century.
177 The former view, earlier already put forward by Heller, Literarische Darstellung (1958), is
now most notably advocated by Jenny Jochens (first argued in: “Icelandic Heroine” (1986);
summarized in: Images of Women [1996], 170–204) who assumes that the agitator was real
in the earlier, “Germanic” period, but had become a literary construction by the Middle
Ages, and served as an “excuse for male failure to provide peace” (203). The opposing view
is represented above all by Else Mundal (for instance, “Position of Women” [1994]; cf.
Mundal’s review of Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995), in Maal og Minne 2 [1997]:
207–21), who argues that the contribution of women in certain positions to conflict man-
agement is not only well documented, but also plausible from a socio-anthropological,
comparative perspective. On the debate, see Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005), 37ff.
178 See the article by Ingvild Øye, “Starke Frauen?” in the obligatory handbook: Blom and
Sogner, eds., Med kjønnsperspektiv (22001), 77f.
The Generative Aspect 113

Scandinavia. Despite sharpening awareness of the social construction of ‘gen-

der,’ modern gender studies, by and large (though of course not always, nor
even necessarily), still have the tendency to be conflated with womens’ stud-
ies: a woman (gender) is usually identified with one born with the biological
characteristics of a woman (sex), and the same applies to men. If scholarship
pays particular attention to points of ‘hybridity’ and ‘transgression’ (such as
the shieldmaidens), these nonetheless tend to prove the very rule that defines
them as deviant or subversive. It is precisely this which motivates the debate
about ‘strong women,’ of shieldmaidens and whetters of saga-period Scandi-
navia: Are we dealing with women who had an unusually large scope for ac-
tion in social fields usually reserved for men, or is it a question of male anxiety
being projected onto discursively constituted female figures? Formulated in
terms of European history: do the ‘strong women’ of Scandinavia represent a
special case, testifying to a freedom to act, even in male domains such as war
and rule, that was unparalleled elsewhere in Europe, or just an original literary
expression of the usual situation, Lilith figures created by supporters of expan-
sionary ideology of clerical provenance?
Probably the most far-reaching proposal for resolving this false opposi-
tion was made by the American Germanist Carol Clover in 1993.179 According
to Clover, early Scandinavian culture knew a gender hierarchy that differed
fundamentally both from that of today and that of the “Christian Middle
Ages.”180 The opposition that modern Norse studies try to describe in terms
of ‘manly/unmanly’ is in fact detached from the biological body and in prin-
ciple operates at the level of social relations, in a way that goes far beyond
the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender.’181 The decisive criterion before any
other means of attribution—including biological sex—centres on the seman-
tic field around the verb mega “to be able.” The key question is the possibility
of ­acting in ­accordance with one’s own will, separating a group that included

179 Clover, “Regardless of Sex” (1993); similarly, Auður Magnúsdóttir’s paper on “Manly Wom-
en and Asexual Virgins in the Middle Ages” at the second Icelandic Historians’ ­Conference
in Reykjavík in 2002. For the following, see in more detail, Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib”
(2005).
180 Clover, “Regardless of Sex” (1993), 364, with a variation of Laqueur’s ‘one-sex’ model.
There is no need to go into Clover’s stance on the source value of the sagas for the pre-
Christian period here, as her observations remain pertinent even if they are only consid-
ered relevant to the period when they were set down in writing, the high Middle Ages.
181 The irrelevance of the male or female body for ascribing the fundamental category could
explain the surprising lack of interest in its display, as is so characteristic of virtually all
other manifestations of the Euro-Mediterranean culture; cf. Jochens, “Male Gaze” (1991);
Helga Kress, “Gægur er þér í augum” (1991), where male interest is, however, understood
as differentiated according to the social level of women.
114 Chapter 1

most (healthy) men and some women, from the other group, a “rainbow coali-
tion” of most women, children, the unfree and old, handicapped or otherwise
(maybe only temporarily) impeded men. Certainly, the groups’ characteristics
are typically connoted as either male or female; crucially, however, no biologi-
cal boundary can prevent a woman from belonging to “the able” or protect a
man from the constant possibility of falling into powerlessness, which means
being grouped together with the elderly, childish, and most women. Therefore,
day by day it was necessary to demonstrate to those around that one counted
for something. Standing out was a goal and necessity: the core concept for
a person who tended to stand out is skǫrungr, derived from the verb skara
( fram), “to stand out”—linguistically, though not culturally, a parallel forma-
tion to “eminent.” Masculinity—or rather what we tend to equate with it, that
is, skǫrungskap and its variants—meant constant pressure to act in a way that
would leave no one in doubt that one possessed this very quality.182
This hypothesis is of the utmost importance for the ‘generative aspect’ of
polygyny. If the merciless meritocratic principle that underlies the agonistic
character of saga society applies to women as well as men—or, more accur­
ately, to some women, those who are on the side of the megnir, the “able and
powerful”—then it is understandable why the sources are so emphatic about
the parity of bedmates and potential mothers of kings and others: it is only
under conditions of parity that the inequality of the women can be expressed,
and the perfection of their characters as gauged by others (“people thought she
was …”) be reliably assessed.
Now, if the central social dichotomy runs at an angle to the boundary of bio-
logical sex, then it is quite possible to sire a child whose biological parents are,
of course, a man and a woman but who nonetheless belong to the same ‘gen-
der’ category socially. It could involve the child of a normal woman, belonging
to the weak party, and an unusually weak man—in modern language we are
tempted to say an ‘effeminate’ man, although this really misses the point. The
worst, lethal insults—those which can push a man into the conceptual field of

182 Clover, “Regardless of Sex” (1993), 381: “… it may be just that ever-present possibility that
gives Norse maleness its desperate edge.” Mention should be made here of the numerous
forms of defamation through more or less explicit allusions to the opponent’s alleged
‘soft,’ cowardly, hesitant, and/or feminine behaviour (including homosexual and bestial
acts), of which the best-known is the níð, well-documented in the laws—a defamation
that inevitably triggers the most severe confrontation possible. See Meulengracht Sø-
rensen, Norrønt nid (1980), who speaks of a “militant masculine ethic” (25), but also Carol
Clover’s reservations about Meulengracht Sørensen’s view in her study cited above.—Cf.
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae xi 2, 22: “Virago vocata, quia virum agit, hoc est opera virilia
facit et masculini vigoris est.”
The Generative Aspect 115

ergi (“incapacity, weakness,” but more than that: “one who cannot master his
own destiny”)183—are aimed at something akin to passive homosexuality. The
implication of the offence, however, goes far beyond homosexual invective in
other societies precisely because of the social definition of the central dicho­
tomy, which is largely detached from biological sex. It surpasses ancient
Greece, where the sexual practices regarded as respectable were likewise large-
ly determined socially, not biologically, for the boundary of biological sex is not
permeable in both directions, but merely allows the growing kalokagathoí to
switch from the passive to the active side, almost as an exception to the rule.184
It even surpasses the obsession of Roman culture with losing the position of
dominus through certain sexual practices (or merely the rumour of them).185
For even there, the threat of falling into the abyss is not constantly present in
the same way as within the overwrought competition of the saga-era sœmdar-
menn (“men of honour”).186
On the other hand, in certain cases a child could have parents who both,
father and mother, belong to the ‘strong,’ the active side, the ‘gender’ of meg-
nir as it were. The child’s mother may be among the women who merit the
designation skǫrungr mikill “one who is wholly outstanding” (grammatically
masculine even if applied to a woman) and thus ranked in the same class as
King Harald Fairhair or Norway’s first archbishop.187 Behind this insistence

183 See Meulengracht Sørensen, Norrønt nid (1980), 18ff.

184 Cf. Winkler, Eros (1994); Davidson, Kurtisanen (1999).
185 See Veyne, “Homosexualität” (1984).
186 It is only against this background that frequently cited passages become comprehensible
as something else than just barbarian incomprehension. Kristni saga includes the story of
the missionary activity of the itinerant bishop Fríðrek (c. 4), travelling around Iceland
preaching in the company of his friend and early convert Þórvald. One day a satirical
verse begins to circulate: “Nine children the bishop has borne, and Þórvald is the father of
all of them” (“Hefr bǫrn borit / byskup níu / þeira’s allra / Þórvaldr faðir”). Þórvald imme-
diately kills two men for merely singing the song in public, and it does not help that the
bishop plays down the issue, saying that he may indeed have “borne” the children to bap-
tism as their godfather. Þórvald’s anger is not macho outrage at the attempt to deny his
male sexuality, but the dutiful reaction to the implicit claim that, by association, he had
been contaminated by the traits of the churchman, who in appearance and habitus, un-
armed and wearing a long dress, may well have invited qualification as blauð/passive. In
other words, if Þórvald had not immediately proven he was still ‘active’ through several
homicides with serious legal consequences, the insult would have appeared justified.
187 The noun skǫrungr denotes an outstanding/eminent person (mikill “great” is an intensify-
ing adjective). However, it only exists in the masculine, even when used for a (biological)
woman and, with its semantics of excellence, is one of the pieces of linguistic evidence
for the distinguishing of gender on social grounds. Modern translators struggle in vain
with the aporia of gender attribution, though some play the ‘feminine’ side up towards
116 Chapter 1

is the notion of inheritance and predisposition which can be read from the
Nordic sources: firstly, that the character of a person was determined by their
parental heritage, and, secondly, that the paternal and the maternal share were
equal188—in line with the (generally more cautious) Hippocratic view and of
course rather similar to our own views on genetics, but in contrast to Aristote-
lian views about the relative or even absolute dominance of the paternal side
that increasingly dominated ideas in other parts of Latin Europe.189
If this is the case, then the criteria for choosing a future parent were surely
fundamentally different from those that made a woman desirable in other
parts of Europe. Two conditions—the capacity of potential children to inherit
in principle and the ideas about the maternal contribution to their character—
disqualified the Nordic counterparts of the pretty but insipid puellulae of other
countries from such an important task. These ideas probably account for why
the image of the desirable woman in Northern texts deviates so strangely from
the ancient, medieval Western European, and modern norms, why women’s
beauty and appearance were treated so summarily—the sober adjective frið
(sýnum) “beautiful (-looking)” suffices for women,190 while male beauty is of-
ten dwelt on and detailed in much the way that feminist scholarship has theo-
rized as typical of the ‘male gaze’ towards women—and why, in particular,
­female nudity and exposure seemingly did not exert any erotically stimulating
effect.191

healthy harmlessness and obliterate the powerful and frightening side of such a character.
See the discussion and evidence in Rüdiger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005), 41–45.
188 Cf. Mundal, “Kvinnebiletet” (1982); Mundal, “Forholdet” (1988). There is only isolated and
relatively late (for example, in the late 13th-century Njáls saga, which is unusual in many
respects) evidence for the view that socialization, for instance being raised by unworthy
foster parents, may have influenced character in later life.
189 Cf. Claude Thomasset, “Von der Natur der Frau,” in Klapisch-Zuber, Geschichte der Frauen,
vol. 2 (1993), 55–83; G[undolf] Keil, “Zeugung: ii. Medizinisch,” LdM, vol. 9, col. 592ff.,
with further literature. The ‘vessel’ conception was supported by Wisdom 7:1f.: “in the
womb of a mother I was molded into flesh, within the period of ten months, compacted
with blood, from the seed of a man and the pleasure of marriage” (“ex semine hominis et
delectamento somni conveniente”).
190 In view of Gn 29:17: “Rahel decora facie et venusto aspectu” (the last two words corre-
spond precisely with the typical saga expression frið sýnum) this could be understood as
the necessary minimum signal for successful insemination.
191 Practically the only case of male scopophilia in the sagas is about the love poet Kormák
spotting the daughter of the house, who is standing behind a door and watching the feast
Kormák is attending. He can only see her forehead and ankles, which inspires him to
some stirring verses about Steinvǫr mjóbeina (“slim-ankles”). Since Kormáks saga involves
an instance of the so-called skald sagas, which deal with the lives of poets, we do not
even have to think of a conscious travesty based on contemporary elements of Western
The Generative Aspect 117

This is not to say that the sight of a woman could not inflame male lust
without calculation and selection for the purpose of achieving an ideal cross.
It is merely to say that, in European terms, the erotic stimuli are strikingly ec-
centric. That a saga woman such as Salbjörg Káradóttir, daughter of a berserker
and herself a “great leader” (skǫrungr mikill), who appears at the beginning
of Egils saga, should self-evidently be an attractive sexual partner does not
seem immediately comprehensible to us. And yet her son Grím—considered a
werewolf—and even her grandson, Egil, excelled in almost superhuman ways,
far exceeding the average in both good and evil; that Egil could write poetry
at the age of three and perform his first murder aged seven is hyperbole, but
it is not absurd within the framework of an anthropology which assumes that
the essence of a person matures and, assuming he survives, decays, but does
not change.192 Egil’s daughter Þórgerð, the great-great-granddaughter of the
berserker and, like her great-grandmother Salbjörg, labelled skǫrungr mikill,193
will marry Óláf ‘Peacock,’ the son of Hǫskuld and the slave he bought while
travelling, the Irish princess Melkorka; their son Kjartan is the saga man of
maximum honour, ultimately too good for this world. His perfection is the cal-
culable sum of his eighth, sixteenth, and thirty-second parts—not for nothing
is the Norse word for genealogy, mannfrœði “learning about men,” really “an-
thropology.” Time and again, similar considerations determine rulers’ choice
of partner in the kings’ sagas, and it is likely that the social practices of the
countries in which these stories were produced and consumed were shaped
by similar ideas. The ideal, so to speak, was for a great man or woman to have
mixed-sex but same-gender parents.
In this light, we can make sense of the sagas’ baffling inconsistency in their
handling of the trials to establish the paternity of newly arrived pretenders.
When, in 1142, Eystein Haraldsson was acknowledged as the son of a king

European courtoisie—in this case, Aucassin et Nicolete—to minimize the representative-

ness of this eroticism. The only naked woman in the entirety of saga literature is a dead
body ready to be prepared for the funeral, which spreads fear and terror as a revenant
(Eyrbyggja saga c. 50). Jochens, “Male Gaze” (1991); on the theory see Mulvey, Visual and
Other Pleasures (1989).
192 Cf. Durrenberger, “Icelandic Family Sagas” (1991), 15: “It is significant to the unfolding of
the structure of a saga that we know precisely who is in it and what their characteristics
are. The openings and other formulaic phrases provide this information … What happens
to a person or what he or she does is immanent in the person, an aspect of the person.”
193 Laxdœla saga c. 24; in Magnusson and Pálsson’s translation (1969), 100: “an exceptional
woman”; in Beck’s (1997), 63: “daß sie außerordentlich tatkräftig war” (she was exceed-
ingly energetic).
118 Chapter 1

without any further evidence and admitted to the ruling collective of three
half-brothers, he had proved through his bold and successful landing and
­subsequent extortion of the opposition that he was equal to the agon. Although
he had brought along his Gaelic mother, this no longer mattered. It was a dif-
ferent matter for Hákon Hákonarson in 1217. At that point, the kingship was not
only contested between two parties, but even within his own party there were
strong tendencies to make another pretender king. Hákon’s mother’s trial by
iron to establish his true paternity—an ordeal that Hákon offered at a critical
moment in the negotiations—came a little late in his career. But what if the
ordeal did not concern the father, but the mother? At a time, the Birkibeinar
party had to select one of several equally feasible kings. How could it be proved
that Hákon was very well qualified? Inga (and most probably her important
relatives as well) was ready to play her part; the same could be said about her
as what Njáls saga says about the no less formidable female figure Hildigunn:
“She was a very hard and implacable woman and of uttermost perfection when
it mattered.”194 She underwent and passed the kettle ordeal, thus proving her
son’s capacity to rule.
Women who wanted or had to distinguish themselves had as much of a
share in the relentless agon as men. And with women, too, the competition
would be distorted by the introduction of unequal starting conditions, such as
the concept skilgetinn/‘legitimate,’ the idea of defectus natalis. Such concepts

194 Brennu-Njáls saga c. 95: “Hon var allra kvenna grimmust ok skaphǫrðust ok drengr mikill,
þar sem vel skyldi vera.” Translations into modern languages fall short, so commentary is
required. The original has a superlative elative (“the …st of all women”) formed from two
adjectives: grim “wrathful; cruel, hard, wild” and skapharð “of hard nature [skap, charac-
ter].” A third attribute follows; they are all connected by the additive copula ok, although
Norse has a contrastive copula en, which would have been equally possible. The third at-
tribute is substantive and grammatically masculine: drengr mikill. This is the concept of
nobility par excellence; similar to skǫrungr, it is grammatically masculine and applies
most frequently, but not exclusively, to men. That is to say, it also reflects the bipolarity
‘powerful/powerless’ mentioned above. Compare Andreas Heusler’s helplessly benign
translation in volume 4 of the Sammlung Thule (Jena 1914, 208): “Sie war von unversöhn-
licher und trotziger Gesinnung wie wenige und ein guter Kerl, da wo Anlaß dazu war”
(she was of an implacable and defiant disposition like few others, and a good fellow
where there was occasion for it). Rolf Heller’s Hildigunn is less staid: “Ihr Charakter war
geprägt von Härte und Trotzigkeit, sie konnte sich aber auch hochherzig zeigen, wo es
darauf ankam” (Her character was marked by severity and truculence, but she could also
show herself to be magnanimous where it mattered) (Isländersagas, vol. 2 [1982]). Heller
cannot reproduce the additive sequence and introduces a “but … also” where the original
has ok. This is no reflection on Heller but on the society he was writing for. Perhaps the
modern mind cannot think of Hildigunn’s characteristics as compatible, without trivial-
izing at least one of them beyond recognition—not for a woman, anyway.
The Generative Aspect 119

(and headstart) suited some, but not others; the outcome was conflicts such as
those described in this chapter. Polygyny ensured comparatively great social
dynamism, often at considerable social cost: an ‘open’ competitive system for
the control of resources, ‘honour,’ and scope for action. Was it different among
the wives and sons of Charlemagne, or around the sons of the Liudolfings?
 Chapter 2

The Habitual Aspect

1 Models

In Jerusalem, after he came from Hebron, David took more concubines

and wives; and more sons and daughters were born to David.
… Solomon clung to these in love. Among his wives were seven hun-
dred princesses and three hundred concubines.
… Rehoboam loved Maacah daughter of Absalom more than all his
other wives and concubines; he took eighteen wives and sixty concu-
bines, and became the father of twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters.1

David, Solomon, Rehoboam: three kings of Israel, models of earthly rule in

both good and evil, may suffice as evidence that the idea that polygyny could
be related to social status was not alien to the European Middle Ages. The fol-
lowing chapter focuses on this ‘habitual aspect’ of polygyny, the one concerned
with ‘habitus.’2 It is about men’s and women’s public image for the purpose of
acquiring added social value, much like decorative shields and fine garments,
the number of oars on the longboat (a carefully monitored yardstick in the sa-
gas), table manners, language mastery, or skill demonstrating a king’s luck.
There can be no doubt about the biblical-Christian foundation of kingship
in the sagas, despite all the scholarly efforts, now largely abandoned, to un-
cover the pre-Christian, ancient Germanic ‘elements’ beneath the Christian
superimposition.3 If anything, the importance of the Old Testament for the
kings’ sagas is still underestimated. Indeed, one could ask whether the sagas’

1 David : 2 Sm 5:13: “accepit ergo adhuc concubinas et uxores de Hierusalem postquam venerat
de Hebron / natique sunt David et alii filii et filiae.” Cf. 2 Sm 3:2ff. (his wives and children in
Hebron); 1 Chr 3:1ff. (enumeration of David’s descendants). Solomon: 3 Kgs 11:2f.: “His itaque
copulatus est Salomon ardentissimo amore / fueruntque ei uxores quasi reginae septingen-
tae et concubinae trecentae.” Rehoboam: 2 Chr 11:21: “Amavit autem Roboam Maacha filiam
Absalom super omnes uxores suas et concubinas / nam uxores decem et octo duxerat concu-
binasque sexaginta / et genuit viginti octo filios et sexaginta filias.”
2 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “Der Habitus als Vermittlung zwischen Struktur und Praxis,” in Bourdieu,
Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen (1974), 125–58, here 143: “Habitus might be defined as
a system of internalized patterns which allows the production of all the typical thoughts,
perceptions, and attitudes of a culture—and only these.”
3 See most recently Ármann Jakobsson, Í leit að konungi (1997).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_005

The Habitual Aspect 121

classical laconic style with its radical departure from ornamentation and pa-
thos, which—again in contrast to the earlier view—does not represent an
echo of the ‘original’ oral narrative form but rather the result of a gradual sty-
listic pruning in the decades after 1200,4 reflects the style of those other Books
of Kings relating the history of a chosen people in a time before the new cov-
enant. So what needs to be explained is not the fact that every polygynous king
is (also) to be thought of as David and Solomon, but how the various modes of
expression exploit this association.
For this reason, I will not introduce any arguments from sociobiology and
biological anthropology, although this has been attempted in medieval history
in recent years and also explicitly called for in relation to the subject of polygy-
ny.5 Jörg Wettlaufer formulated the thesis: “Power and polygyny and their inter-
action thus in effect appear to form an anthropological constant.”6 Whilst the
“interaction” between power and polygyny can indeed be a field, it certainly
does not represent a “constant” in itself—for this, a certain correlation would
have to be asserted, such as a proportionality between power and polygyny. If
we assume that Wettlaufer means proportionality in the sense that the degree
of polygyny (number of relationships, etc.) grows in direct proportion to social
power and that this relation is to be called an “anthropological constant,” we
might, on the one hand, invoke such abstinent celebrities as Pompey the Great
and Mithridates vi. of Pontus, Simeon Stylites, Innocent iii, and Louis ix of
France (to name some arbitrary examples) and ask how many qualifications
both the hypothesis and the concept of ‘power’ can bear. If, on the other hand,
one excludes these questions and accepts that only some versions of ‘power’
are under discussion (which do not include that exercised by a fifth-century
stylite), then, thus qualified, the hypothesis can be plausibly demonstrated,
but loses its historical epistemological value: An anthropological constant,
if it really is a constant (and not just a frequent phenomenon), may be

4 This view was first advocated by Sigurður Nordal, “Formáli,” in Borgfirðinga sögur, ed. Sigur­
ður Nordal (1938); cf. Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 73–78; Jørgensen,
“Sagalitteratur” (2002). It can be undertaken as far as syntactic analysis, see Schach, “Phrase”
(1989).
5 Wettlaufer, Herrenrecht (1999); Wettlaufer, “Male Power Display” (2000); qualifying, Wett­
laufer, “Von der Gruppe zum Individuum” (2002), 25–51. Cf. Devereux, Ethnopsychoanalyse
(1978); Betzig, “Despotism” (1982); Betzig, “Roman Polygyny” (1992); Betzig, “Roman Monoga-
my” (1992); Betzig, “Medieval Monogamy” (1995); Thornhill, “Evolutionsbiologie und histo-
rische Wissenschaften” (1992); Herlihy, “Biology and History” (1995).
6 Wettlaufer, Herrenrecht (1999), 324 and 335: “an anthropological constant, namely the rela-
tionship between power and polygyny […], which can be revealed not only with the aid of
comparative cultural studies, but also on the basis of people’s physiological adaptations.”
122 Chapter 2

­acknowledged for the sake of epistemology, but, being an invariant, has noth-
ing more to offer in terms of historical analysis.
In this sense, “a cultural studies which takes into account the biological
foundations of human behaviour,” as Wettlaufer calls for,7 sounds good but is
self-contradictory. If the kind of power exercised by a great Icelandic landown-
er, a Norwegian bandit chief, a Frankish king, and an ancient Israelite ‘judge’ is
linked by an “anthropological constant” to polygamous practices, then that is a
case of Occam’s Razor: A constant, which must be present in all elements of
the discussion in order to be a constant, can be disregarded. Historical analysis
will rather focus on what according to Marc Bloch constitutes its main contri-
bution: the “perception of differences,” the study of the “‘originality’ of differ-
ent societies.”8
In this sense, the interesting thing is not to establish that a potentate in the
Norse Middle Ages was also an alpha male and a King Solomon, but rather in
what specific manner he wanted and had to be such. ‘Status’ is a word that says
much and explains nothing. The precise status-enhancing effect of having
many women can vary greatly. Quite apart from the fact that perhaps the most
important issue is who the women are (on this, see Chapters 3–5), a potentate’s
polygynous behaviour in itself is not always and equally relevant to status.
Even more than in the ‘generative aspect,’ a ‘thick’ analysis is necessary to get
beyond the catchword. Instead of a string of cases, the following chapter there-
fore considers the relations of a single man, the Icelandic chieftain Jón Lopts-
son (1124–97).

2 Polygyny and Historiography: the Oddaverjar

The farmstead of Oddi is situated in southern Iceland, the largest contiguous

agricultural area of the island,9 near the coast, about forty kilometres as the
crow flies south of the bishop’s seat Skálholt. The Oddaverjar (“men of Oddi”)
were among the winners in the gradual concentration of power through alli-
ances and accumulation that characterized Iceland from the eleventh century
on. In the course of the twelfth century they acquired almost complete control
of the Rangá thing district, the southeastern part of southern Iceland, making

7 Wettlaufer, Herrenrecht (1999), 336.

8 Bloch, “Histoire comparée” (1928/1963), 27.
9 On the ecological conditions in the early and high Middle Ages, see Byock, Viking Age Iceland
(2001), 25–62.
The Habitual Aspect 123

themselves unassailable through alliances with other powerful groups.10 In the

course of this transition “from chieftaincies to principalities (frá goðorðum til
ríkja),” as Jón Viðar Sigurðsson has characterized the ‘long’ twelfth century,11
the Oddaverjar secured their ríki—now defined territorially, with new forms of
obligation for its inhabitants—as one of six such spheres of power on Iceland.
However, in the last phase of Icelandic acephaly after around 1200 they lost
their position among the leading actors whose conflicts led to Iceland’s subor-
dination to the Norwegian Crown in 1262/64.12
Possession of the Oddi farm was a cornerstone of the power of the family
association from which it took its name. Oddi was one of the leading farms
in terms of agricultural value.13 It was situated close to the site of the quarter
spring assemblies14 and controlled the route from western Iceland and the cen-
tral meeting place Þingvellir through southern Iceland along the south coast
to the east, to which there was no alternative due to the glaciated ­mountain

10 There is greater uncertainty about Iceland’s early political structure today than in the
past, since the information provided by the late sources on the political constitution of
the island during the first two to three centuries can no longer be accepted so unreserv-
edly. This applies above all to the widely admired acephalous division of the island into
‘quarters,’ each with a precisely determined number of regional assemblies (várþing) and
chieftaincies (goðorð), preeminent positions equipped with legal competences and a pagan-
cultic basis, which could be bought and sold. While the juridical precision of the system
now appears more as an ex-post construct, its functional core elements—the transfer-
ability of goðorð and their non-territorial character as well as the theoretical possibility of
the clientele of one goði, the thingmen, offering their support to another goði—are plau-
sible. Conversely, the general outlines of Iceland’s political history are largely established
from the introduction of church organization in the late eleventh century onwards, and
documented in detail from the late eleventh century. Cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains
(1999).
11 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Frá goðorðum til ríkja (1989).
12 On the political history generally, see Líndal, ed., Saga Íslands, vols. 1–4 (1974–89); on the
Oddaverjar, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Frá goðorðum til ríkja (1989), 56; Jón Viðar Sigurðsson,
Chieftains (1999), 13ff. and passim; Helgi Þorláksson, Gamlar götur (1989), 18f.
13 Only a handful of other farms besides Oddi, including the see of Skálholt and the famous
Reykholt in the Westland, Snorri Sturluson’s favoured residence, attained a value of 120c
(hundrað vaðmála, a long hundred [120] cubits of loden cloth, the most important Icelan-
dic product, which was used as a basis for general calculations of value). Cf. the numbers
for various farms and their interpretation as the power base of the competing families in
Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 111ff., based on Lárusson, Icelandic Land Registers
(1967).
14 Várþing, the regional gatherings that preceded the althing at midsummer. On the signifi-
cance of the location of ancestral seats near thing sites in the process of consolidation,
see Jakob Benediktsson, “Landnám og upphaf allsherjarríkis,” in Sigurður Líndal, ed., Saga
Íslands, vol. 1 (1974), 153–96.
124 Chapter 2

ranges and lava deserts in the interior.15 Oddi was, moreover, a stað, a farm with
a church and control over the tithes due to it.16 Towards the end of the twelfth
century, this last point was to become a stumbling block for a conflict in which,
for once, a non-royal magnate and his polygyny are extensively described.
The Oddaverjar definitely had royal pretensions. Sæmund Sigfússon ‘the
Learned’ (1056–1133), who was considered by the saga writers of the thirteenth
century to be the first of the Oddaverjar,17 apparently had such good relations
with the Norwegian king Magnús ‘Barelegs’ (berfœtt, r. 1093–1103) that he suc-
ceeded in acquiring the daughter of a royal frilla named Þóra as a wife for his
son Lopt. Among Magnús’s numerous progeny were five later kings; this daugh-
ter too is probably historical even though she is not mentioned in the kings’
sagas, not least because she bears the name of the king’s mother, Þóra Jónsdót-
tir. We later come across the Oddaverjar son, Lopt, in a respectable position in
Norway, and according to Heimskringla, Lopt’s son was also raised there in a
priest’s household with the king’s daughter Þóra.18 With this Jón Loptsson, who
has been labelled “the uncrowned king of Iceland,”19 the Oddaverjar were to
reach the height of their power.
The pretensions of his grandfather Sæmund ‘the Learned’ may in fact have
started the development of Icelandic historiography. It was not the clerical
education he had received in France (one of the first Icelanders to do so)20 that

15 On the ‘strategic’ importance of control over the routes, see Helgi Þorláksson, Gamlar
götur (1989). Journeys were undertaken through the interior, with its scree and lava plains,
but they are recounted with a shuddering respect in the sagas, which on the whole are
hardly lacking in daring expeditions.
16 In practice, the church’s lord had control over three of the four portions of the tithe intro-
duced in the 1080s—the shares for the bishop, the priest, the church building, and the
poor. Cf. Gunnar Karlsson, “Völd og auður á 13. öld” (1980); Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chief-
tains (1999), 105ff.; Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), 326ff.
17 See Úlfar Bragason, “Um ættartölur” (1993).
18 MsBHG cc. 9–11. The son’s foster father, the priest Andréas, plays a leading role in the mi-
raculous rescue of a Byzantine relic of the holy cross during a Wendish attack on the city
of Konghelle on the Götaelv.
19 Einar Olafur Sveinsson, “Nafngiftir Oddaverja” (1936), 190: “ókrýndur konungur Íslendin-
ga”; similarly Halldór Hermansson, Sæmund Sigfússon (1932).
20 The term Frakkland is usually translated as “France,” and in this case a West Frankish edu-
cational institution is probably meant. However, translations of Old Norse texts are often
too quick to identify the country names Frakkland “Frank-land” and Saxland “Saxon-land”
with the west and east Frankish kingdoms, or even France and Germany. The two Norse
counterparts to Francia and Saxonia may indeed have this nuance, particularly as post-
Ottonian East Frankish rulers are occasionally referred to as keisari í Saxland or similar,
and the motivation for extending the term from the respective northernmost ethnic
groups to the political formation is understandable. But since the Continental interior
plays almost no role in Norse literature, the geographical distinction between Frakkland
The Habitual Aspect 125

gained him his epithet, hinn fróði. Rather, the epithet points to a special inter-
est in the Norwegian-Icelandic past and present, to knowledge and experience
in ancestor lists and tales of colonization. Sæmund, as far as we know, was the
first Icelander—indeed probably the first Northern European—to author a
history. It is known only through excerpts transmitted indirectly, and it is not
even certain what language it was composed in (probably Latin), yet Sæmund’s
reputation as an authority among his successors, buttressed by his political
prestige (he was, among other things, closely involved in the introduction of
tithing), allowed him to grow into an almost supernatural figure, one who
could even outwit the evil powers with his knowledge.
Even the historical Sæmund must have appeared impressive enough in his
own day. His marriage connections with a whole series of Norwegian kings was
surely an essential component of his eminence, for to make contact with a
Norwegian king and then return safe and unharmed, even honoured, is ranked
as one of the great deeds in many Icelandic sagas, a deed many lesser men
would shy away from. Sæmund had reason enough to exploit his success with
King Magnús, and it is perhaps not exaggerating to assume that his engage-
ment with Norwegian royal history had the primary purpose of writing himself
and his descendants into this very history—to the detriment of his Icelandic
competitors. This may have already have contained a reference to Harald
Fairhair’s purported law of succession, ubiquitous in the surviving kings’ sagas,
according to which “the descendants of the sons [should be] kings, the descen-
dants of the daughters, jarls” (thus including his grandchildren); it has even
been suggested that Sæmund was the first to construct the genealogical conti-
nuity of Harald Fairhair’s line as such.21 To play the Norwegian card was always
risky in Iceland, whose foundation myth was the exodus of those freemen who
did not want to submit to royal authority; but we know that as the ‘Common-
wealth’ entered its final phase in the thirteenth century, several of the leading
actors (including Snorri Sturluson, with fatal consequences) dared to play this

and Saxland is wholly unclear. While Saxony as far as Brunswiek/Braunschweig is part of

the saga world and the western coastal regions of France (Poitou, Normandy, etc.) are al-
ways Frakkland, it is never clear which term was associated with, say, the Rhineland or
other central Frankish regions.—The Oddaverja annáll, a 16th-century compilation, in its
entry for 1077 specifies Paris as the place of Sæmund’s studies. While the tradition behind
the entry may be considerably older, it is nonetheless probably only conjecture. Cf. Diana
Edwards Whaley, “Sæmundr Sigfússon inn fróði,” in EMSc, 636f., with further literature.
21 Krag, Norges historie (2000), 215. Thus Harald’s historical offspring would not have ruled
for more than three generations before losing the kingship around 970. Consequently, nei-
ther Óláf Tryggvason nor Saint Olav and his half-brother Harald Hardrada, from whom all
later kings were descended (or claimed to be), were in fact Harald Fairhair’s descendants.
126 Chapter 2

game. In Sæmund’s time, there was little danger that the Norwegian kings
might put their claims over Iceland into practical effect, so Sæmund may have
felt the benefits outweighed the risks—correctly, as subsequent events proved.
Lopt, the husband of the king’s daughter, was also a prest,22 and judging by
his upbringing his grandson Jón was destined for the same training. Given the
importance of the church at Oddi for the material basis of Oddaverjar power,
the practical benefit was obvious. Throughout the twelfth century clerical edu-
cation and even entry into the lower orders was by no means tinged with that
tendency towards exclusion which characterized the situation of aristocratic
sons ‘destined for the church’ in Frankland. The intellectual milieu in Oddi in
this period appears to have surpassed the two cathedral schools at Hólar and
Skálholt as well as the six small monasteries. Besides several later bishops, one
famous pupil at the school later established under Lopt’s brother Eyjólf (also a
“priest”) would be Snorri Sturluson; the boy had been taken as foster son by Jón
Loptsson as a result of a complicated conflict settlement, so Oddi can be as-
sumed to be formative for the worldview of the Heimskringla author. It is cer-
tainly true that the earlier attribution to Sæmund of the two great ‘Edda’ poems—
the mythological-didactic Prose Edda, which is today regarded as the work of
Snorri, and the ‘Elder Edda’ or ‘Poetic Edda,’ initially known as Sæmundar
Edda, with its songs of gods and heroes—is not strictly tenable. Nonetheless, it
is quite possible that the amalgam of traditional historical knowledge and
mythological set pieces with imported language, writing, and style that paved
the way for saga and eddic literature do in fact ultimately go back to
Sæmund.23
Sæmund’s grandson Jón, born during his lifetime, continued the familial
pretension from the outset. His mother, the daughter of King Magnús’s frilla,
was named after the king’s mother, Þóra Jónsdóttir (who had in turn been a
frilla of Óláf the Quiet), so the son was named after the grandfather of the king
on the mother’s side, that is, his great-great-grandfather. In his highly detailed
study on the naming patterns of the Oddaverjar, Einar Ólafur Sveinsson over-
looks this connection.24 Though he does note this house’s striking preference
for “foreign” names compared to competing groups and mention Jón as the
first such onomastic import, he does not address the ‘ancestral’ motivation for
this preference, which in his day would have been understood as an attempt to
graft Jón onto at least an offside branch of Harald Fairhair’s tree. The Oddaver-
jar did not take the final step of giving the son of the king’s daughter a royal

22 MsBHG c. 9; we should not look for too much canonical precision in the term.
23 See Halldór Hermansson, Sæmundur Sigfússon (1932).
24 Einar Olafur Sveinsson, “Nafngiftir Oddaverja” (1936).
The Habitual Aspect 127

name, a number of which might have been considered: Harald (like Jón the
name of a great-grandfather), Óláf (great-grandfather), or Magnús (the child’s
grandfather). Later generations of the Oddaverjar were not so reticent: among
the numerous children of Jón’s son Sæmund (named after his learned ances-
tor), there were royal names like Harald and Hálfdan (Harald Fairhair’s father),
the queenly name Ragnhild (Harald Fairhair’s mother), ‘Christian’ names
(Pál/Paulus, Andréas, Margrét), but also one Solveig—referring to the wife of
the priest Andréas of Konghelle, the Norwegian foster mother of her grandfa-
ther Jón Loptsson. There are also references to great Europeans among Sæ-
mund Jónsson’s sons and grandchildren: Filippus (the apostle or Philip Augus-
tus?), the Anglo-Norman Vilhjálm (perhaps mediated by some of the bishops
of Orkney who bore this name, and with whom Sæmund maintained close re-
lations), Kristófórus and Rikiza (from the Danish royal house), and finally even
a Karlamagnús († 1310). By that time, however, the former greatness of the Od-
daverjar was no more.
Thus for Jón Loptsson, grafted through birth and name to the Norwegian
dynasty (which, perhaps, first entered into historiography for this purpose),
much depended on whether there was a willingness to recognize him in Nor-
way. It appears that the Oddaverjar encountered some difficulties in this mat-
ter. Born around 1124, educated as a boy in Konghelle by the priestly couple
Andréas and Solveig, and eyewitness to the devastation of the city by the Pom-
eranians in 1135, he may have had occasion to make and maintain the neces-
sary contacts, especially as his father also resided in Norway at the same time
(and presumably not only on this occasion, which was noted by the kings’ sa-
gas on account of the Wendish raid). Nevertheless, Jón was nearly forty before
he finally succeeded in receiving formal recognition by a king. In the interim,
eight pretenders had claimed the kingship, generally in competition with one
another, so it is surprising—and perhaps throws a revealing light on the rela-
tive importance of Icelandic chiefs within the Norwegian-Atlantic orbit—that
none of them wished to take up the standing offer of connecting themselves to
the Oddaverjar line. The Oddaverjar ultimately found success in 1163, in the
exceptional circumstances of the run-up to the coronation of Magnús Erlings-
son by the Archbishop of Nidaros, assisted by the legate Stephen of Orvieto.
Snorri records:

But when summer came he [King Magnús] sailed north to Bjǫrgyn. There
was at the time a very large number of people there. The legate Stepha-
nus was there from the city of Rome and archbishop Eysteinn and other
native bishops. There also was bishop Brand, who had now been conse-
crated bishop for Iceland. There also was King Magnús Barelegs’ ­grandson
128 Chapter 2

Jón Loptsson. King Magnús [Erlingsson] and other kinsmen of Jón’s had
now acknowledged his kinship to them.25

There is no mention of a ceremony with a shoe made from the hide of an oxen,
or anything similar, but the presence and assent of other relatives suggests that
the co-optation of Jón (taka við frændsemi hans “to accept his kinship”) was a
formal act. Jarl Erling, ruling the country for his seven-year-old son Magnús,
found himself in a particularly difficult position. Two years earlier, he had pre-
vailed against Hákon ‘Broad Shoulders’ (son of the singing mill maid) and had
successfully secured his rule since then; the problem was that his son only
stemmed from the royal lineage in the female line—and we have seen in the
preceding chapter that this indeed was a problem. Additional legitimacy was
thus required. As discussed above, in the summer of 1163, he concluded nego-
tiations with Archbishop Eystein, arranging for the church’s approval and coro-
nation of Magnús as well as the introduction of the succession criterion of le-
gitimate birth. As Snorri makes clear with literary finesse, the construction was
not only revolutionary and illegal, but also politically highly risky—after all,
Erling was betting entirely on the support of an archbishopric that had only
been established ten years earlier, as well as one of a number of competing
popes.
The king’s father thus had reason enough to secure all available support, and
the Oddaverjar seized the opportunity to finally have their king’s daughter’s
son accepted by the ruling king. It is of course conceivable that in doing so the
new regime merely confirmed an ættleiðing long since undertaken by one or
more of its predecessors. The wording, however, suggests rather a first-time
admission; furthermore, with Jón Loptsson as Snorri’s foster father and one of
the first sources for Heimskringla, it seems unlikely that an important event
such as acceptance into the royal kindred at an earlier date would have been
overlooked. Incidentally, it is notable that through the redefinition of kingship
negotiated here, Jón himself comes close to being qualified as king for the first
time: previously out of the question, being descended from Magnús Barelegs
only in the female line, now only his mother’s illegitimate birth distinguished
him from the reigning King Magnús Erlingsson. The Oddaverjar did not exploit

25 MsE c. 21: “En er sumraði, helt hann [Erling skakki] norðr til Bjǫrgynjar. Var þar þá allmikit
fjǫlmenni. Þar var þá Stephánús légátús af Rúmaborg ok Eysteinn erkibyskup ok aðrir
byskupar innlenzkir. Þar var ok Brandr byskup, er þá var vígðr til Íslands. Þar var ok Jón
Loptsson, dóttursonr Magnúss konungs berfœtts. Þá hafði Magnús konungr ok aðrir fræn-
dr Jóns tekit við frændsemi hans.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015),
247.
The Habitual Aspect 129

these legal grey areas; Jón Loptsson’s ‘royalty’ was employed solely in an Icelan-
dic context.

3 A Song of Praise

The strophic “List of Norwegian Kings” (Nóregs konungatal), composed be-

tween 1184 and 1197 at the instigation and in praise of Jón Loptsson, conveys an
impression of the atmosphere of pretension to lofty status current in­
Oddi.26 In content a work of genealogy as encountered in the Íslendingabók
and later in the sagas, and in form a lengthy skaldic praise poem in the kviðuhát-
tr metre (83 stanzas of eight verses), it proclaims Jón Loptsson, and hence any
future Oddaverjars,’ royal descent. The source material was ready for exploita-
tion at Oddi, in the genealogical work of Jón’s grandfather Sæmund the
Learned.27 The influence of Jón’s great panegyric would soon extend beyond
Iceland and Norway: the sagas of the Danish kings, namely Skjǫldunga saga
(known to us only in a Latin paraphrase), which has occasionally also been
considered a product of the Oddi school,28 and the somewhat later Knýtlinga
saga along with its auxiliary texts (Jómsvíkinga saga and others) are based on
the structure and information of Nóregs Konungatal; this is even true for the
Latin history of Sven Aggesen.29 So the message of Nóregs konungatal, if not
the actual wording, must have been known almost immediately in large parts
of Northern Europe. It is worth looking more closely at the song, which would
typically have been (partially?) recited in situations of heightened sociability—
at things, winter festivals, and feasts. It forms part of the backdrop to Jón Lopts-
son’s love story.
After two prefatory stanzas with a regional take on the general prescripts of
poetics (“one must first row away from the whale but then charge before it is
finished; now this is how I have thought to set my words of praise”), the royal
line begins with Hálfdan the Black, father of Harald Fairhair, who appears here

26 Nóregs Konungatal is transmitted in the mid-14th-century composite manuscript Flatey-

jarbók, together with three other poems and 13 sagas, largely concerned with the Norwe-
gian kings; the authoritative edition is Finnur Jónsson, Skjaldedigtning (1912–15), vol. 1
(diplomatic) and vol. 2 (normalized).
27 Nóregs konungatal, Skj i, 575–90, stanza 40, v. 4–8: “intak svá ævi þeira sem Sæmundr
sagði enn fróði” (I have reported their eras just as Sæmund the Learned said).
28 Thus Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Sagnaritun Oddaverja (1937); cf. Bjarni Guðnason, Um Skjöl-
dungasögu (1963), esp. 150–80.
29 See Eric Christiansen, “The Lost Genealogies,” in Works of Sven Aggesen, ed. Eric Chris-
tiansen (1992), 26f.
130 Chapter 2

as the progenitor of the royal tree: “The ruler, who gave gifts, had many chil-
dren who won honours. Therefore the kin of each ruler since is traced to Harald
the fair-haired.”30 He is also provided with an almost Abrahamic reign of 73
years. Over the following sixty stanzas the succession of kings, supplemented
by some prominent battles, is recounted in a manner which in all essential ele-
ments corresponds to Heimskringla and the other prose histories of the early
thirteenth century.
For Magnús Barelegs, Jón’s grandfather, particular emphasis is placed on the
large number of his “children who won honours.”31 His daughter Þóra (Jón’s
mother) is not yet named at this stage, but the praise of Magnús’s five sons who
became kings—“that more outstanding brothers have hardly been born on
earth”32—served to drive home the point. From this stanza, there is some
veiled emphasis on decline, dishonour, and atrocities,33 suggesting that the
pride of the lineage now passes to another line, the Oddaverjar. Accordingly,
only a single king receives a flawless report, namely Magnús Erlingsson, the
king in whose name Jarl Erling had recognized kinship with Oddaverjar in 1163.
There is no hint of any problem about his claim to the throne based on the
maternal line: “The people of the country gave Kristín’s son the royal title after
the death of [King] Ingi.”34 King Magnús is named four times; twice with the
circumlocution “son of Kristín,” stressing the legitimacy of this other royal de-
scendant through the female line. The potential difficulty arising from the fact
that King Sverrir, who was ruling at the time of Nóregs konungatal’s composi-
tion, had taken the land and life of this Magnús is avoided through unswerving
adherence to the agonistic principle: Magnús ruled for twenty-three years (and
was therefore good), then Sverrir came and beat him (so was therefore better).

30 Stanza 8: “átti gramr, sás gjafar veitti, barna mart, þaus biðu þroska; því kømr hvers til
Haralds síðan Skjǫldungs kyn ens Skarar-fagra.” Translations of Konungatal are from Po-
etry from the Kings’ Sagas, ed. Gade, vol. 2 (2009), with “reached maturity” changed to
“won honours.”
31 Stanza 48: “Frák berfœttr bǫrn at ætti Magnús mǫrg, þaus metorð hǫfðu; vǫru þess þengils
synir fremðar fljóts fimm konungar” (“Of Magnús Barelegs, it must be reported that he
had many children who won honours; of the sons of this prince who were showered in
glory, five became kings”). Otherwise, all we are told about King Magnús is the length of
his reign and his death on a military campaign in Ireland, with a significant reference to
his son Eystein, whom he—allegedly—sired there.
32 Stanza 50, v. 5–8: “… hafi varla fremri brœðr á fold komit.”
33 Stanza 58, v. 1–4: “Nú es, heldr svát halla tekr, ævilok jǫfra at telja” (“Now the end of these
princes must be reported, which brought great loss of honour”).
34 Stanza 68, v. 4–8: “gaf landsfolk ept liðinn Inga konungs nafn Kristínar bur.”
The Habitual Aspect 131

“Now it is evident that battle-generous Sverrir alone rules the entire realm
which the kin of Harald Hálfdansson possessed.”35
The circle is thus completed, and in his last eleven stanzas the poem pans to
the Oddaverjar. I give these stanzas in full, partly to provide an impression of
the language and style of high-level oratory in the banqueting hall, but also to
show the construction of the genealogical argument. I would especially like to
use this occasion to draw attention to the comparative character of all epithets,
of the constant appeal to concepts such as “outstanding,” “surpassing others,”
“winning the comparison,” which convey a sense of the ceaseless agon in which
an aristocrat such as Jón Loptsson had to triumph throughout their whole
life—indeed “several times a day,” as it says in verse 81.36

73 Þó skalk enn þokkum fleira Yet I shall still tell somewhat more

frá Berfœtts bǫrnum segja, about the children of [King Magnús]
ǫðlings þess, es aldrigi Barelegs, of that lord, who never
eld né járn óttazk hafði. feared fire nor iron.

74 Hét dǫglings dóttir Þóra ; The daughter of the ruler was called

sú vas gipt gǫfgum manni, Þóra; she was married to a noble man.
allra helzt, sús Jóan fœddi, The sister of princes who gave birth to
vas sonsæl systir jǫfra. Jón was above all son-blessed.

75 Kom ráðvǫnd ræsis dóttir The counsel-heeding daughter of

til næfrlands nykra borgar, the ruler came to the land of the
gǫfuglynd góðrar tíðar roof-shingle [Iceland] of the water-­
allra helzt Íslendingum. monsters’ stronghold, noble-minded,
at a good time above all for the
Icelanders.

76 Þvít hugrakkr henni fylgði Because the upright only son of the

einka sonr jǫfra systur, sovereigns’ sister, the proud-hearted
hjarta prúðr, sás hefir allra, friend of the people who possesses
ýta vinr, orðlof fira. all men’s words of praise, accompa-
nied her.

35 Stanza. 72: “Nú ’s þat sýnt, at Sverrir ræðr ógnar ǫrr einn fyr ríki, øllu því, es átt hefir
Haralds kyn Hálfdans sonar.”
36 “...dǫgum optar fremsk”, literally “he advances himself more often than there are days.”
132 Chapter 2

77 Þat ’s ok víst at Jóans verða It is also certain that the

metorð mest Mistar runna, honours of Jón, the faithful-
einarðlynds, þars eigusk við minded one, are the greatest of
merkismenn mǫlum skipta. the shrubs of Mist [warriors],
where noteworthy men have
dealings with each other
arbitrating cases.

78 Nú vill kapp við konungs frænda Now no outstanding man ­

afreksmaðr engi deila ;  wishes to try his courage against
giptudrjúgr sem glíkligt es, the king’s kinsman. The popular
verðr vinsæll vella deilir. [actually: “friend-gifted”: one
who knows how to win friends]
distributor of pure gold ­becomes
lasting in good luck, as is likely.

79 Þótti ǫrr ok ósvikall His father seemed liberal

faðir hans flestum mǫnnum ; [literally: quick, swift] and honest
vissi Loptr und leið skýja to most men. Lopt had no
óvin sinn engi fœddan. enemy born beneath the flame
of the clouds.

80 En Sæmundr sína vissi But Sæmund, Sigfúss’s son,

Sigfús sonr snilli jafnan, always showed his prowess,
faðir Lopts, sás firum þótti Lopt’s father, who seemed to
hǫfuðsmaðr við hluti alla. people a leader [literally:
“head-man”] in all respects.

81 Þat hefr ætt Oddaverja That descendant of princes

jǫfra kyn alla prýdda has graced the entire family of
dóttursonr sá dǫgum optar the Oddaverjar, the ­daughter’s
fremsk margnýtr Magnús son of King Magnús [= Jón], who
konungs. excels, much-bountiful, more
often than there are days.

82 Nefnðak áðr nær þrjátøgu Earlier I mentioned almost

tígna menn, tíri gœdda, thirty­distinguished men,
þrætulaust en þeir eru endowed with glory and
Jóans ættar allir jǫfrar. honour [i.e. whose existence
meant an increase in glory and
honour], and all those princes
are indisputably of Jón’s family.
The Habitual Aspect 133

83 Nú biðk Krist, at konungs spjalli, Now I ask Christ that the ­

hafi þat alt, es œskir sér, confidant of the king should
giptudrjúgr af goði sjǫlfum have all that which he wishes
allan aldr ok unaðs njóti. for himself; may the fortune-
gifted enjoy the favour of God
himself all his life.37

In style and diction, this song of praise is fairly typical of its kind. It is a prestige
product; to possess such a drápa already represented a major part of the habi-
tus of one of the greats. The skald Sighvat was reported to have openly declared
to King Óláf Haraldsson: “mátt eiga eitt skáld” (one must have a skald!),38 play-
ing on the fact that the ‘ethics of action’ require action to be seen and per-
ceived, preferably over long distances and periods. “He was considered …,” “he
was praised for …,” “many said that he was …” are the usual expressions through
which the sagas speak of human excellence. Abelard’s famous dictum about
Christ’s executioners not having sinned because they knew no better would
have made even less sense in this conceptual world than elsewhere in twelfth-
century Europe. The character of a man is not only proved in his deeds, but is
only in his deeds—or, more precisely, in the manner in which his deeds are
rated by general judgement, for some are granted fame for a deed which would
cost another all standing; it depends on the personal history and situation and
illustrates the variable, daily changing ‘market value’ of the individual men and
women who participate in the ceaseless agon.
The communicability of acts and words thus becomes a central concern for
all. How to ensure that not only direct witnesses of a great deed or a happy turn
of phrase were left with an improved opinion of the performer, but that the
tale spread—perhaps from Greenland to Novgorod? How to maintain control
over the form of the tale, and ensure that the message fulfills its purpose?
Here is one of the reasons for the eminent role of skaldic poetry, the highly
formalized language, its essentially unaltered form, and undiminished
­appreciation over four centuries.39 It was literally worth its weight in gold, and
to see the skald, richly rewarded for a song, as a salaried poet is to ­misunderstand

37 Skj i, 575–90, translation in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, ed. Gade, vol. 2 (2009), stanza 82
my own.
38 Skj i, 265; in OsH c. 43, stanza 34 (there in the variant “máttu eiga eitt skáld”—“you need
a skald”).
39 Cf. Von See, “Skop und Skald” (1964); von See, Skaldendichtung (1980/1999); Frank, Old
Norse Court Poetry (1978); Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og samfund (1977); Kuhn, Drótt-
kvætt (1983); Clover and Lindow, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (1985); Gade, “Dróttkvætt
Poetry” (1995); Clunies Ross, Poetry and Poetics (2005).
134 Chapter 2

the value of both the song and the gold. Beyond any material value of the gold
(which skalds appreciated as well as any other participant in the medieval re-
distribution economy), a little of the giver’s fortune (gæfa, hamingja) stuck to
the gold that was passed on; the song, in turn, was able to recoup this fortune,
or at least make it durable.40
This is what actually lies behind the maxim “one must have a skald”: with-
out songs of praise, the great are as helpless as they are without gold. And just
like the gold, its quantity, and the circumstances of its acquisition and its
distribution (“gold-squanderer” is a common kenning for “ruler”), the songs
can ­become the focus of agonistic attention. The indignation of the king who
discovers that a skald from his retinue had made a song in praise of a com-
petitor is not only rooted in the suspicion of disloyalty, an ever-present fear
for the powerful within a system of open competition. It is rather as if the
skald had given away his lord’s gold: broken open his reserves of fortune. The
skald Sneglu-Halli, faced with this accusation in the eleventh century, had to
assure King Harald Hardrada that the song praising his rival Harold Godwin-
son was inferior and contained two dozen formal errors.41 This did not simply
mean a second-rate performance (and by implication, a second-rate honour);
it means that the skald claims to have sabotaged the numinous power of the
words.
All these facets of the added value are somehow in Nóregs konungatal. On
some level the form and style of the song increase the chances of the final
prayer being realized: “May Jón Loptsson, the fortune-gifted, enjoy the favour
of God himself all his life”. What is more, they were in themselves already part
of its fulfillment.
Message, source, and testimony were also, on a different level, self-evident.
I once again refer to the famous prologue of Heimskringla, where Snorri em-
phasizes several times that poetry is a first-rate historical source, “if spoken
properly and carefully transmitted.”42 The kings’ sagas with their hundreds of
skaldic stanzas (there are 178 instances in the Heimskringla’s saga of Saint Olav
alone) are the best testimony to this practice. If Jón Loptsson therefore desired
a genealogical song of praise, one of several conceivable motives might be the
desire for a testimonial statement. The penultimate stanza states outright:
here are about thirty men who were called kings, each more glorious than the
last, all indisputably from Jón’s line. The adjective used here for “indisputable,”

40 Cf. Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 204–09.

41 In Sneglu-Halla þáttr, contained in some versions of Harald Hardrada’s saga; see Von See,
“Skop und Skald” (1964), 8.
42 Heimskringla, Prologue: “ef þau eru rétt kveðin ok skynsamliga upp tekin.”
The Habitual Aspect 135

þrætulaus (literally “objection-less”)43 has a juridical resonance: in the sagas,

the noun þræta is the kind of dispute that breaks out on the basis of a ­perceived
violation of rights, and would be resolved either through mediation, formal
litigation before the thing, or (mostly) through an escalation of acts of violence
with unforeseeable consequences. The corresponding verb at þræta in this
sense means on the one hand “to argue” but above all “to deny, dispute.”44 The
poem, therefore, is to make all its claims ‘in-disputable’: from now on, no one
will venture to deny that Jón Loptsson is actually of the same line as all the
kings. One can sense (and we also know from Heimskringla) how great this
doubt actually was.
The poem is unusual because of the role it ascribes to a woman. Nordic
songs of praise are usually only about men; women appear as mythological
decoration or are collectively invoked as choruses (witnesses or victims) of the
great acts depicted. But here Þóra, daughter of King Magnús and an unknown
frilla, is the first individual to be named and eulogized in the concluding Ice-
landic part of Nóregs konungatal. The “renowned man” who marries her is
named only five verses later. The names are consistently ordered in terms of
the royal line: first Þóra, then her son Jón, then (going back along the male line)
her husband Lopt and his father Sæmund. All the fame of the Oddaverjar rests
in their being “wholly adorned by the royal line” grafted onto it; that is, in Þóra
and the scion Jón growing out of her. It is certainly no coincidence that the
eulogy for Þóra—“of all she was son-blessed (sonsæl), who bore Jón”—has an
unmistakable resonance with Gabriel’s “Hail, Mary.”
By interweaving classical praise of rulers through comparison (“his fame ex-
ceeds the fame of all other famous people,” and so on) with the motif of blessed
birth into an inextricable strand, the finale of Konungatal proclaims that it is
no accident that the Oddaverjar are what they are. If there is now no one
among the prominent men of Iceland (who are called merkismenn “notewor-
thy men,” with an echo of “standard-bearer,” or afreksmenn “men who have
performed outstanding feats”) who wishes to enter into competition with Jón,
then this is precisely because he is konungs frændi “the king’s kinsman.” This
certainly hints at the very concrete support which the Oddaverjar hope to have
found in Norway—it is even hinted that Jón Loptsson is in regular contact with
King Sverrir on an equal basis.45 (This was a false hope, as would show in the

43 Here in the adverbial position with the adverb suffix -t.

44 Cf. Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. þræta: “þrætt mun vera í móti ef eigi vitu vitni áðr”
(“this will probably be contested if there are no other witnesses”).
45 One of the epithets attributed to him is konungs spjalli: “advisor, confidant of the king,”
with an emphasis on eloquence; spjalli is the agent noun for the verb spjalla, a poetic
word for “speak,” related to the Anglo-Saxon spell “narrative, story” (god-spell, Norse
guðspjall “gospel”).
136 Chapter 2

rash Orkney policy which was going to cost the Oddaverjar the king’s favour.)46
Above all, it explains the political fortune of the family as a necessary
­consequence of genealogy: a chieftain from Harald Fairhair’s stock cannot do
otherwise than tower over the best in the paritarian Icelandic polity, which
was then on the brink of disintegrating into a number of regional principali-
ties. Half a century after his death, Sturla Þórðarson—a member of a compet-
ing family group—wrote that Jón Loptsson was “the greatest chief Iceland ever
had, and the one with the strongest relatives.”47
The Oddaverjar are therefore more than ‘just’ an example of the habitual
meaning of polygyny. An event which was probably not unique in itself—
the marriage of the son of an Icelandic magnate to the daughter of a royal
­concubine—took on fundamental importance at a centre of the emerging
Nordic historical reflection: indeed, these magnates’ interest in the history is to
a great extent founded in this event.

4 “Very Susceptible to Love”: Jón Loptsson’s Women

Descent from the concubine’s daughter was not the only way the Oddaverjar
employed polygyny to support their chiefly habitus. Jón Loptsson had at least
eight children through at least five women. There can be little doubt that he
practised simultaneous polygyny. His relationship with one of the women,
Ragnheið Þórhallsdóttir (more on her below), lasted from his youth into old
age, and his first son Pál was born in 1155, scarcely a year after Jón’s first and
only son from his relationship with a certain Halldóra Brandsdóttir (he was
given the family name Sæmund, after his grandfather). This Sæmund Jónsson
(1154–1222), who assumed leadership of the Oddaverjar after his father, had at
least four women and eleven children, while his half-brother Orm—another of
Jón’s sons with his longstanding frilla Ragnheið, who was a farm owner and
goði of vital importance for the family power—three women and six children.
None of the women of either of Jón’s sons was a ‘wife.’ For Jón himself, the
situation is—apparently—different: one woman, the mother of the successful
son Sæmund, is highlighted. “Jón had a woman who was called Halldóra and
was the daughter of Brand,” reports the vita of Bishop Þorlák, which describes
him in detail, “her son was Sæmund.”48 There is nothing particular about Hall-
dóra or the vocabulary used to describe her—kona is the customary word for

46 See Helgi Þorláksson, “Snorri Sturluson og Oddaverjar” (1979), 63ff.

47 StS i, 51: “er mestr höfðingi ok vinsælastr hefir verit á Íslandi.”
48 ÞsH c. 22: “Konu átti hann sér er Halldóra hét ok var Brandsdóttir. Sonr þeirs var Sæ­
mundr.” The passage is commented upon at length below.
The Habitual Aspect 137

“woman” in the sense of “female adult” and has in itself no special significance
such as uxor—; however, many scholars have singled her out to have been Jón’s
one (and only) ‘wife.’ There are two arguments in favour of that view, both of
them problematic. One is the later eminence of the son, which is then e­ xplained
by the fact that he was Jón’s only ‘legitimate son.’ This is a circular argument;
I will return to it later. There is also a linguistic argument: the view that the
phrase “to own a woman” (eiga konu) is a kind of terminus technicus in light of
the vocabulary eiginkona “own woman,” hence “wife,” known from the law
books. This argument presupposes that the Norse expression is always and
only used as a translation of uxor in its canonical sense. Undeniably, it may be,
but not necessarily so. In this case, one typical marker of ‘marriage,’ namely
social rank, is notably absent: Halldóra is not a nobody (she has a father with a
name), but neither is she on a different level from Jón’s other women. Jón
maintained relationships with a number of other women during his ‘marriage’
with Halldóra, and although the details are sparse, all these women, including
Halldóra (her father Brand’s family of origin is unknown), are from the same
milieu of free farmers. Jón’s relationships were all hypogynous.
We are better informed about the background of the women of the next
generation. In all traceable cases, they are daughters of farmers from the Rangá
thing district, the zone that the Oddaverjar had brought under their control.
Auður Magnúsdóttir, the only researcher to have investigated the political
significance of Icelandic concubinage,49 takes the fundamental ­difference
­between married and other women for granted (the title of her work is Frillor
och fruar), and sees Halldóra as Jón’s (sole) “spouse” and Sæmund and Solveig
as their only “legitimate” children. As a possible reason for Jón ‘marrying’ a
woman while his sons only had frillur, she mentions the intensified recep-
tion of ecclesiastical sexual and matrimonial morality towards the end of the
twelfth century: multiple relationships without marriage remained ­tolerable,
but a marriage alongside other relationships, such as Jón Loptsson could still
live, was no longer acceptable. (In fact, canonical injunctions were by no
means intended to promote marriage at the expense of other forms of relation-
ship, but rather the requirement of monogamy: “Either uxor or ­concubina, just

49 Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), on the Oddaverjar esp. 47–59, provides
a detailed examination of the individual woman; see also the overview in Ebel, Konku-
binat (1993), 90–93. The most important source are the family trees (ættskrár) in Stur-
lunga saga, the compilation of several individual sagas about domestic Icelandic conflicts
between about 1180 and 1260 (ed. Jón Jóhannesson et al. [1946]; trans. Kålund, Sturlunga
saga [1904] (Danish) and now Boyer, La saga des Sturlungar [2005]; the German edition
by Baetke, Geschichten vom Sturlungengeschlecht [21967] only contains excerpts). On
methodology, see Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, “Kvennamál Oddaverja” (2001).
138 Chapter 2

not two—and certainly no more!” But of course Gratian was not necessarily
spelled out verbatim to the believers in the faranway province of ­Nidaros, nor
indeed anywhere; we will return to the subject shortly.)50 In general, Auður
Magnúsdóttir observes a tendency towards isogamy in the ‘marriages’ of
­Icelandic chiefs, while stressing the alliance aspect of such relationships. The
fact that frilla relations were so common and so generally accepted moreover
allowed the magnates, according to Auður Magnúsdóttir, to form “vertical alli-
ances” with the free farmers of their increasingly regionally organized spheres
of influence. These relationships were also consensual and public. These ob-
servations, which have already entered the textbooks,51 are sound, and Auður
Magnúsdóttir elaborates the political value of frilla relationships through nu-
merous concrete examples. What is less clear, in my view, is that we can sharp-
ly distinguish ‘marriages’ from frilla relationships, or can take for granted that
all contemporaries would have made such a distinction.
The practice of hypogyny and, at most, isogyny52 may incidentally have
scuppered a masterly coup by the Oddaverjar. Around 1200, Jón Loptsson’s son,
Sæmund, was in intensive negotiations to ‘marry’ Langlíf, daughter of Jarl
Harald Maddaðarson of Orkney, and probably still a minor at the time.53 Ac-
cording to Sturlunga saga, the match did not materialize because the Odda­
verjar and the jarl could not agree over where the wedding would take place—
which sounds a little like a pr ‘out’ for breaking off negotiations that had
stalled or were no longer of interest to at least one of the parties due to changed
circumstances, although certainly the sticking point itself was also of some
significance given the importance of place and respective distances in the
staging of important events.

50 Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 54 and 56; Decretum Gratiani, D 34.5, cited
after Caselli, “Concubina pro uxore” (1964–65), 178f.: “Christiano, non dicam plurimas, sed
nec duas simul habere licitum est, nisi unam tantum, aut uxorem aut certe loco uxoris, si
coniux deest, concubinam.” Cf. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society (1987), 245ff.;
297ff.
51 See Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), the chapter “The Social Effects of Concubinage,”
132–34.
52 “Hypogyny” is a relationship in which the woman has a lower status than the man (what-
ever ‘status’ may be in a given situation, e.g. social status); “isogyny” means equal status.
The “hypergyny” in which a man receives a woman of higher social origin from a higher-
ranking man, incurring obligations in the process, possibly even “a debt that can never be
repaid,” as the medievalist Josep Enric Ruiz Domènec (L’estructura feudal (1985), 51) ex-
presses it, would seem to be typical of the Latin European elites in the High Middle Ages.
53 Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 57; Helgi Þorláksson, “Snorri Sturluson og
Oddaverjar” (1979), 65. The link with Orkney existed for decades; Sæmund’s half-brother
Pál Jónsson, later bishop, was brought up in Jarlshof.
The Habitual Aspect 139

At any rate, the Oddaverjar seem to have overstretched themselves on this

occasion. The family tradition reflected in Orkneyinga saga, set down in
­writing at about that time,54 had it that the jarls of Orkney went back via Turf-
Einar (discussed in the preceding chapter) to Rǫgnvald, jarl of Møre, Harald
Fairhair’s most faithful friend. Now “Harald Fairhair’s succession law” said that
his sons begat candidates for the throne, his daughters produced lines of jarls.
The ­Oddaverjar, who saw themselves as descendants of Harald Fairhair in the
feminine line through the frilla’s daughter Þóra, therefore had reason to con-
sider themselves jarlsworthy, and an alliance with the Orkney jarls may have
been regarded as isogynous (that is, contracted between a man and a woman
of equal rank). This need not have been the view taken in Orkney—there is,
after all, the possibility that “Harald Fairhair’s succession law” is a historio-
graphical invention by the Oddi milieu. Negotiations conducted on these
premises were likely to run dry at some point.
Considered in this light, the consequence of successfully grafting the Odd-
averjar onto the royal line was that there was no alternative to polygyny with
women from their own sphere of power. The habitual meaning of the frillur for
the Oddaverjar was, therefore—besides the purely ‘Solomonic’ variety—that
under the prevailing circumstances the desire to win in the internal Icelandic
agon was best announced by the demonstrative renunciation of an isogynous
alliance: the marriage connection with Orkney would have entailed Sæmund
relinquishing his claim to the top position. For the Oddaverjar, this was too
great a cost for the Orkney alliance, even though on a ‘pragmatic’ level this
might have provided them the necessary edge to assert themselves in the inter-
nal Icelandic competition.
This interpretation runs counter to several opinions of twentieth-century
research. In the 1930s, the influential Icelandic historian Einar Ólafur Sveins-
son named the Oddaverjar as a particularly vivid example of how concubinage
and its consequences could “pull down” certain chiefly lineages.55 Mingling
with women of unknown (read: lower) origin “drained the power out of the
line,” whereupon the next two generations also lost the primacy of the family
in Iceland.56 Halldór Hermansson saw a marked contrast between Jón

54 It is even possible to locate this textualization in Oddi; cf. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Sagnari-
tun Oddaverja (1937); Simek and Pálsson, Lexikon der altnordischen Literatur (1987), s.v.
Oddi.
55 Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Sturlungaöld (1940), 68: “Ekki er ólíklegt að frillulífi með þeim
afleiðingum, sem það gat haft hafi orðið til að draga sumar ættkvíslir niður (t. d.
Oddaverja).”
56 Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Sagnaritun Oddaverja (1937), 10: “Sæmundur … átti börn með ým-
sum konum og flestum ókunnrar ættar, og er ekki annað líklegra en sú blöndun hafi
dregið afl úr ættstofni þeirra.”
140 Chapter 2

L­ optsson’s excellence as a politician and his “flaws” as a private man, while the
“­private life” of his son Sæmund revealed “the same indecisiveness” as his poli-
tics.57 In the mid-sixties, Egill Jónasson Stardal, in his monograph on Jón Lopts-
son and his descendants, still referred to Sæmund Jónsson’s “frillur’s sons of
different breeding” who were no longer able, by their own strength, to fly the
family flag in the way their fathers had done, and particularly deplored the
failure of the marriage negotiations between Sæmund and Jarl Harald Mad-
daðarson: “A marriage bond with a lineage as great as the jarls of Orkney would
have conferred a new glory on the Oddaverjar, and perhaps even yielded Sæ-
mund energetic descendants. His numerous illegitimate offspring, on the oth-
er hand, obviously sucked the strength and unanimity out of the family.”58 And
even in 1988, in his reassessment of the Oddaverjar Jón Thor Haraldsson had
occasion to devote a whole chapter to the theme of “Degeneracy, Concubi-
nage,” in which he did reject the older position—“in my view these claims do
not have the slightest foundation in the sources.”59 Yet rather than justifying
this in theoretical-methodological terms, he sought to establish defensively by
means of prosopographical sketches of the individual sons of frillur that de-
spite their birth they were in no way inferior to the married Oddaverjar in skill
and assertiveness.
Today, it is all too easy to point out how bound to their own time these
judgements were, and to mock their longevity. Maybe the view advocated in
this study, according to which the Oddaverjar’s “concubinage” was, on the con-
trary, of fundamental importance for its prestige and the stylization of its pow-
er, is for its part conditioned by an era marked by the ‘end of marriage’ and of
near-compulsory promiscuity. We may hope that it nevertheless does justice to
the Middle Ages in a decisive respect: as discussed above (Chapter 1), the social
origin of the woman plays a subordinate role in terms of the prospects of wor-
thy offspring to the woman’s personal qualities, which were considered inher-
itable. For Sæmund Jónsson, the jarl’s daughter was by no means a greater
guarantee of “energetic descendants” than a farmer’s daughter simply because

57 Halldór Hermannsson, Sæmund Sigfússon (1932), 15; 21: “If Jón thus towered above his
contemporaries as chieftain and citizen of the commonwealth, in his private life he
shared the failings of his family and his times … His [Sæmund Jónsson’s] private life re-
flects the same irresolution.”
58 Egill Jónasson Stardal, Jón Loftsson (1967), 83; 92: “… af frillum, sem ólu honum misjafnle-
ga velheppnaða syni, er ekki gætu í krafti ætternis valdið ættarmerkinu með sömu reisn
og feður þeirra og skorti þrótt til þess að gera það af eigin metnaði. … Mágsemdir við svo
stóra ætt, sem Orkneyjajarla var, hefði varpað nýjum ljóma á Oddaverja og ef til vill fært
Sæmundi tápmikla afkomendur. En hin mörgu óskilgetnu afkvæmi Sæmundar hafa að lí-
kindum dregið úr þrótti og einingu ættarinnar.”
59 Jón Thor Haraldsson, Ósigur Oddaverja (1988), the chapter “Úrkynjun, frillulífi,” 35–39.
The Habitual Aspect 141

of her rank; accordingly, he was not neglecting the future of his house through
his preference for the latter. Since we know nothing about almost any of the
Oddaverjar women, we are not able to assess the role played by the ‘generative
aspect’ in the choice of partner, beyond political and tactical considerations.
And the same holds true for that theme which is today handled like a hot iron
in histories of medieval couple relationships: love.

5 A Lovers’ Saga?

We only know the story of one of the Oddaverjar’s frillur, Jón Loptsson’s long-
time consort Ragnheið Þórhallsdóttir (around 1130–after 1180). It is one of the
best-known stories of the Icelandic Middle Ages in general. It is contained in
the younger vita of the holy Bishop Þorlák Þórhallsson of Skálholt (Þorláks saga
biskups hins helga B), which has a long excursus about his confrontation with
Jón Loptsson, the “Story of the Oddaverjar” (Oddaverja þáttr).60 Undoubtedly,
part of its appeal lies in the fact that the story speaks directly to modern sensi-
bilities. It would be a good romance novel too: we have a woman, a man, and
their young love which endures into old age (hǫfðu þau elskazt frá barnœsku
“they had loved each other from childhood”) at the intersection of church re-
form, aristocratic ambition, male friendship and violence, self-sacrifice and
perseverance, along with some dramatic and burlesque scenes. For all the
wealth of information in the Norse narrative sources about polygynous rela-
tionships, both the individualization as well as the contextualization of the re-
lationship of Jón Loptsson and Ragnheið Þórhallsdóttir in Oddaverja þáttr re-
main unparalleled. Bits and pieces of the lives of frillur crop up frequently in
other ‘contemporary sagas,’ but only incidentally, for instance in the Íslendinga
saga’s report how in May 1235, while guests at a farm, the friends Maga-Bjǫrn
and Þorkel Eyvindsson, in the skáli, the hall-like longhouse, “lay together in the

60 Þáttr refers to shorter saga-like narratives, recounting just one or a small number of epi-
sodes, rather than the tangled, decades-long narratives of most sagas. The edition of the
bishops’ sagas by Jón Helgason, Byskupa sögur, vol. 2 (1976), has now been superseded by
that of Ásdís Egilsdóttir, Biskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002). Overall, the episode comprises Chap-
ters 21–28 of the Þorláks saga B (= Biskupa sögur vol. 2, ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir [2002], 164–
81), containing two longer subepisodes which, while not dealing with Jón and Ragnheið
directly, are nonetheless part of the same narrative context. Their story spans eight and a
half pages in the edition.—Among others, see Egill Jónasson Stardal, Jón Loftsson (1967),
50–59; Sigurður Sigurðarson, Þorlákur helgi (1993), 96–104; Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor
och fruar (2001), 48–52; it can even be found in a handbook of European history: Borgolte,
Europa entdeckt seine Vielfalt (2002), 216.
142 Chapter 2

same bedstead; Bjǫrn’s frilla Jóreið Konálsdóttir lay between them.”61 The issue
here is not erotic generosity among friends on the road, it is not about Jóreið at
all; the scene is described only because at this moment the men’s enemies
break into the house, seize them, take them outside the house, and kill them
without further ado. The uncanny composure of the losers is reported with the
usual laconic acknowledgments (“Þórarin killed Björn, and he held himself
well and said little”),62 but how the woman experienced the event and what
happened to her is not even hinted at. The episode is sadly plausible in the lived
world, but no ‘story’ will come out of it. It is different with Jón and Ragnheið.
Their story is embedded as an interpolation into the more recent redaction
of the vita of the holy Bishop Þorlák Þórhallsson (bishop of Skálholt 1176–93,
canonized by order of the Althing in 1199). Its terminus ante quem is the mid-
dle of the thirteenth century, so its value as a report of events is, at least in this
respect, quite unproblematic, as some contemporary witnesses were definitely
still available at the time of writing, not least Snorri Sturluson († 1241). The
question of the internal source value of Oddaverja þáttr has been raised in re-
cent times, particularly by Ármann Jakobsson and Ásdís Egilsdóttir, its most
recent editors, who assume that Bishop Pál Jónsson—the son of Jón and
Ragnheið and successor of the holy Þorlák to the seat of Skálholt 1195–1211—
was a significant influence.63 However, for the question of the habitual aspect
of polygyny this is not a limitation, and if anything a simplification, consider-
ing that, as Stefanie Würth (now Gropper) has observed, the application of the
methods and insights of ‘New Historicism’ to the sagas is often so difficult be-
cause their allocation to a writer, time, or place is often not possible in princi-
ple, in light of the ‘variant’ character of these texts.64 The question of defectus
natalis of an incumbent bishop of the Roman Church around 1200 would be
enough of a ‘discourse’ governing one text, if, as Würth proposes, the task is not
to establish “that discourses are present in the literature, but analyze how these
discourses are incorporated into the literature.”65
The story is quickly told. Jón was the chief’s son, while Ragnheið, probably a
few years younger,66 was the daughter of an Oddaverjar client who had fallen

61 StS i, 383: “en þeir Björn lágu í innanverðum skála báðir í einni hvílu, en Jóreiðr Konálsdót-
tir, frilla Bjarnar, lá í milli þeira.”
62 StS i, 384: “Þórarinn vá at Birni, ok varð hann vel við ok mælti fátt.”
63 Ármann Jakobsson and Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Er Oddaverjaþætti treystandi?” (1999); Ásdís
Egilsdóttir, “Formáli,” in Biskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002), esp. xxxi-lii.
64 Würth, “New Historicism” (1999), with reference to Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante (1989).
65 Würth, “New Historicism” (1999), 197; emphasis in the original.
66 According to Snorri Sturluson (Heimskringla, MsBHG c.9), Jón was born in 1124, Þorlák in
1133; Jón and Ragnheið’s first known son was born in 1155. The likely period for Ragnheið’s
birth is therefore quite wide—between 1125 and 1135 would be plausible.
The Habitual Aspect 143

on hard times, so that Ragnheið and her brother had been raised at Oddi. Jón
and Ragnheið “loved each other from childhood.” After a presumably decades-
long, possibly off-on relationship, a problem arose when Ragnheið’s brother
Þorlák returned from studying in Paris and Lincoln, probably brought by the
Oddaverjar to the episcopal seat of southern Iceland, and in cooperation with
the archbishops of Nidaros, Eystein (1161–1188) and Eirík (1189–1205), took over
the campaign against the Icelandic proprietary church system, which on the
archiepiscopal side was conflated with other violations of church law, includ-
ing bigamy and adultery. In the course of a long, bitter controversy with the
bishop, in around 1180 Jón had to agree to separate from Ragnheið. After Þor-
lák’s death in 1193, one of their sons took up the Skálholt bishopric and pursued
the canonization of his uncle and predecessor.
How does the Oddaverja þáttr tell this story?
Jón Loptsson is introduced in the second chapter of the narrative. The first
chapter concerns the beginning of Bishop Þorlák’s campaign against the pro-
prietary church system in the Icelandic Eastland. A farmer named Sigurð Orms-
son, who possessed a stað (a farm with a parish church), had agreed to have his
new church building consecrated while Þorlák was on his visitation journey,
and, backed by archiepiscopal epistles, the bishop took the opportunity to de-
mand that the power to dispose of the church and its tithes be transferred to
the see of Skálholt. The dialogue that now unfolds, much like a prologue, al-
ready contains the theme of the later major confrontation with Jón Loptsson:

The bishop said that the provisions of the apostles themselves give him
power over all God’s property, without exception. “The holy Christian fa-
thers and the popes, successors of the apostles, have determined the
same and established it in canon law for all Christians. Now the pope has
also instructed Archbishop Eystein to introduce this in Norway, too, and
great progress has already been made there. And it is neither justifiable
nor tolerable that this poor country is not under the same law, as applies
elsewhere.”
Sigurð replied: “Norwegians or foreigners cannot take away our rights.”
The bishop answered: “The exception claimed by uneducated men
here, reserving the right to dispose of the property which earlier had
been given to God, was unlawful from the outset and cannot stand. And
if the bishops enforce this in a lawful manner, those who persist with
their insubordination will hardly be among the flock who can hope
for God’s aid. And all those who stubbornly keep hold of the tithes or
the property of a saint will be excommunicated after a legal warning
144 Chapter 2

if they are not prepared to reach an agreement and desist from their
injustice.”67

To appropriate the vocabulary of the New Historicism: what occurs here is the
‘negotiation’ between the speech of the bishop, which is obviously literally
based on canonical models, and that of the farmer, which, brief as it is, bears
all the hallmarks of saga speech. The language itself becomes an object of ne-
gotiation, when the bishop, as he strikes his blow, constructs a very unusual
gerundive in Old Norse: þeir eru bannsetjandi as an echo of excommunicandi
sunt.68 The style of the bishop’s speech is reminiscent throughout of the syn-
tactic idiosyncrasies of the preserved Norse letters of the archbishops of Nida-
ros to Icelandic recipients (one of which is addressed to Bishop Þorlák and Jón
Loptsson, among others);69 if such constructions are not wholly unheard of in
early Norse prose, they are nonetheless very conspicuous in the mouth of a
saga character. But the bishop becomes such a figure, with the words of the
epistles of the chancery in Nidaros literally placed into his mouth, as he ‘speaks’
them in his dispute with the farmer.
With the exception of the diction and content of the bishop’s words, the
conflict is reported as the typical beginning of a longer legal dispute between
saga figures. It is precisely for this reason that the logical consequence of the
canonical threat (and, textually, of the hagiographical topos of the urgent

67 ÞsH B c. 21: “Byskup sagði at skipan sjálfra postolanna gaf honum vald yfir ǫllum Guðs eig-
num fyrir útan alla grein. ‘Heilagir feðr kristninnar ok páfarnir, postolanna eptirkomendr,
hafa þetta sama boðit ok skipat í kirkjunnar lögum um alla kristnina. Svá ok hefir nú
páfinn boðit Eysteini erkibyskupi at flytja þessa sama ørendi í Nóregi, ok þat hefir þar
fram gengit. Er þat ok eigi rétt eða þolanligt at þetta it fátœka land standi eigi undir einum
lögum ok þar.’
Sigurðr svaraði at—‘norrœnir menn eða útlendir megu eigi játta undan oss vátum
réttendum.’
Þá svaraði byskup: ‘Sá skildagi sem ófróðir men hafa hér gǫrvan at skilja sér vald yfir
þeim hlutum sem þeir hafa áðr Guði gefit er af sjálfum lǫgunum ómáttuligr ok á eigi at
haldask, ok þar sem þetta mál verðr lǫgliga kært af byskupum eru þeir menn eigi í þeira
manna tǫlu sem hjálpar eigu ván af Guði, síðan þeir haldask í þeiri þrjózku, ok hverir sem
tíundir eða heilagra manna eignir halda með þrái, þeir eru bannsetjandi eptir lǫgligar
áminningar ef þeir vilja eige sættask ok af láta sínum rangendum.’” On the proprietary
churches, see Magnús Stefánsson, Staðir og staðamál (2000).
68 The adaptations of Latin models, namely the vitae/‘sagas of holy men,’ display such stylis-
tic and grammatical autonomy, that the construction here, otherwise almost unknown in
Norse prose, cannot simply be explained as the translators’ fidelity to the original; rather
the stylization of the bishop’s speech (which invokes the Fathers and canonists) must be
understood as a, probably conscious, imitation of “foreign” models in terms of both gram-
mar and content.
69 di i, no. 54; see similarly, no. 38.
The Habitual Aspect 145

e­ xhortation of an impenitent sinner), the conversion of the farmer Sigurð,

comes as a ‘non-event.’ Being the saga character that he is, he does not fall to
the ground weeping in repentance, and also does not blanch when faced with
the horrors of hellfire as detailed in the archbishop’s letters. No: “It was already
late in the day, and the farmer saw that nothing would come of the church
consecration if he did not abandon his position.”70 In other words: in the nar-
rative logic of the saga, Sigurð submits to the bishop’s blackmail threat to sim-
ply not perform the consecration, and thus seriously damage the reputation of
this “man of some importance and great worldly fame, rich and with excellent
family ties,”71 in the face the local crowd that had presumably gathered for the
occasion. This is not something he can afford, and so he is now ready to pay:
Sigurð transfers the right of disposition over the church to the bishop (málda-
gi) and takes it back as “in fief” (í lén), the ceremony can proceed, the bishop
departs to repeat his success in a number of further farm churches in the
Eastland.
But within the logic of the saga, the effect of Þorlák’s threatening posture
falls flat. A ‘proper’ saga conflict starts small: with abusive or mocking words,
readily clothed in somewhat convoluted subjunctive sentences, and frequently
spoken by representatives of the actual protagonists, their sons at play, say, or
their servants across a field boundary. The escalation towards the threat of
­submitting a matter to the thing (considered the ultima ratio and compelling
the other side to commit all their forces: either one appears at the judicial gath-
ering with dozens, perhaps hundreds of followers, or arms oneself and carries
out a deadly act of violence, accepting the counterattack) can sometimes last
for years. Bishop Þorlák, on the other hand, immediately deploys the apostles,
the church fathers, the pope, the archbishop, and excommunication—and the
war of nerves lasting just a few hours is sufficient to change Sigurð’s mind.72
The text of the bishop, transferred from the sphere of church law (as it was fa-
miliar to the Icelanders in content and form through the pastoral letters from
Nidaros and Þorlák’s visitation journeys) to the sphere of the saga, appears out
of place, ‘false’; it contradicts the narrative expectations created by the saga
style of the Oddaverja þáttr.
Even on the content level, the swift resolution of the conflict seems almost
disappointing, viewed in comparison with the numerous ‘investiture struggles’

70 ÞsH B c. 21: “Leið þá á daginn svá at bóndi sá at kirkjuvígslan myndi engi verða nema hann
léti af sínu máli.”
71 ÞsH B c. 21: “Sigurðr Ormsson, mikilsháttar maðr af veraldar metnaði, auðigr ok ættstórr.”
72 This does not, of course, mean that a historical Sigurð Ormsson—that is, the owner of the
staðir—was actually defeated so easily, or that fear of ecclesiastical chastisement was
such a small factor in his deliberations. The issue here is the narrative logic of Oddaverja
þáttr.
146 Chapter 2

of the European eleventh and twelfth centuries. The principles invoked here
are not small-scale either: On the one hand, the bishop essentially declares
that ‘Iceland cannot expect to be exempt from a rule that applies to all other
Christian countries: first, Christianity is universal, and second, Iceland is
poor’—on the other hand, Sigurð Ormsson insists: ‘no foreigner breaks our
law.’ Note the Norwegian emphasis: canonically, the spiritual leader of the
church province of Nidaros, Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson is by no means
more ‘Norwegian’ than ‘Icelandic,’ but he is here placed in proximity to all the
kings since Óláf Tryggvason who in saga historiography sought to subject Ice-
land. As a result, in his own vita Bishop Þorlák comes across as a “foreign” agent
who has designs on the rights and assets73 of honourable Icelandic men and
who does not even know how to escalate a conflict properly. Perhaps he had
simply not yet found the right opponent.

6 Portrait of a Competitor

Nonetheless, Þorlák was successful. After the first victorious confrontation and
a second similar takeover of a church, which is reported only summarily (“it
happened in much the same way”),74 the bishop prevailed through his entire
visitation journey in the southern Eastland, with only two exceptions, which
still existed at the time the report was drawn up. Now Þorlák set off towards his
episcopal see of Skálholt—and as every Icelander who had followed the story
up to that point knew, on the way from Eastland along the south coast he had
to travel through the Rangá thing district and pass Oddi:

At that time, Jón Loptsson commanded Oddi; he was the most powerful
chieftain in Iceland. He held the office of goðorð. He was well-versed in
the clerical arts; these he had learned from his ancestors. He had been
consecrated as a deacon, a great preacher of the Holy Church. He also
attached great value to furnishing the churches of which he was the pa-
tron with the best of everything. He mastered to perfection most of those

73 How great a share of the material basis of the chiefs’ power in Iceland was formed by the
church levies remains disputed, but if nothing else their regularity made them a signifi-
cant part of the chief’s income—all the more so, when all the staðir of an entire region
were held by one family, as in the case of the Oddaverjar. Cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chief-
tains (1999), 193; summarizing the economic basis, 101–19; Byock, Viking Age Iceland
(2001), 252–91.
74 ÞsH B c. 21: “fór ok mjǫk á einn hátt.”
The Habitual Aspect 147

skills [íþróttir] which were customary for men at that time. He was an
ambitious man, intent on pre-eminence as few others have been, for he
would not bend before anyone or relinquish anything he had taken.75

So it was an aristocrat accustomed to wielding both swords equally, “according

to the custom of the land and ancient tradition,” who would next confront the
bishop. Within the framework of Þorlák’s reformist campaign, Jón Loptsson,
who disposed of virtually all the patronages within his sphere of power, occu-
pied as it were the position of the greatest ‘Simoniac’ of them all. Considered
in this light, it is astonishing which shade of the figure of this adversary the
narrative emphasizes above all others. Jón is consecrated; he is learned; he is
an outstanding preacher (“great orator of the Holy Church”)—in short, he is
not only a model layman, like Adam of Bremen’s Abodrite prince Godeskalk,
who turned around at church to preach fiery sermons to his countrymen,76 but
he is alomost a cleric himself. He takes his duty of care for the churches he
controls very seriously, meaning that he conscientiously appoints and feeds
the priests and maintains the church buildings. Nothing can be said against
him in terms of his person or the performance of his duties. Indeed, it is re-
markable how much eulogical effort the vita expends to make the greatest
worldly adversary of the holy bishop appear as ‘clerical’ as possible.
Jón the churchman is a mirror image of Jón the chief. Origin, talent, and
ambition are the leitmotifs of both his ecclesiastical and secular excellence.
His mastery of formal clerical training corresponds to the remark that he had
almost completely mastered the skills customary among the men of his time.
These “skills” (íþróttir, sg. íþrótt) are something of a catalogue of the qualifica-
tions indispensable for the recognition of aristocratic eminence. In its com-
mon version, which has been transmitted with minor variations in various
sorts of texts, the catalogue is composed in the form of a ‘loose stanza’ (lausa­
vísa) in the prestigious skaldic meter dróttkvætt (courtly metre, governed by
very strict rules regarding staff and internal rhyme, and the number of syllables
and verses). A version in Orkneyinga saga (possibly edited in Oddi) reads:

75 ÞsH B c. 22: “Í þann tíma réð Jón Loptsson fyrir Odda, sá er þá var mestr hǫfðingi á Íslandi.
Hann var goðorðsmaðr. Hann var inn vísasti maðr á klerkligar listir, þær sem hann hafði
numit af sínum forellrum. Hann var djákn at vígslu, raddmaðr mikill í heilagri kirkju.
Lagði hann ok mikinn hug á at þær kirkjur væri sem bezt setnar er hann hafði forræði yfir
at ǫllum hlutum. Fullr var hann af flestum íþróttum þeim er mǫnnum váru tíðar í þann
tíma. Metnaðarmaðr var hann svá mikill ok kappsamr at varla varð meiri, því at hann vildi
fyrir øngum vægja eða af því láta sem hann tók upp.”
76 Adam of Bremen iii, 20.
148 Chapter 2

Tafl emk ǫrr at efla,  I am quick at playing board games;

íþróttir kannk níu,  I have nine skills;
týnik trauðla rúnum,  I forget runes slowly;
tíð er mér bók ok smíðir,  the book is a preoccupation with me
skríða kannk á skíðum,  I am able to glide on skis;
skýtk ok rœ’k, svát nýtir,  I shoot and I row so that it makes a
difference;
hvárt tveggja kannk hyggja, I am able to understand both:
harpslǫtt ok bragþǫttu.  harp-playing and poems.77

Although the number of these ‘fine arts’ (nine, like the Muses) looks suspi-
cious, the content, while undoubtedly belonging to a series which stretches
from kalokagathós to gentiluomo and ‘gentleman,’ is quite independent. Above
all, the emphasis placed on the practical/martial skills is striking: shooting and
rowing are not residual practices of a ‘leisured class’ but everyday life for the
Norseman í víking. While skiing plays no part on the Atlantic islands, it does in
Norway, primary point of reference for the Atlantic Norse culture. The desper-
ate winter passage of the Birkibeinar guerrillas around King Sverrir from Värm-
land to the Trøndelag, depicted with extraordinary intensity in his saga, is just
one example of political enterprises that really did depend on the mastery of
skis. Smithying also belongs to this sphere, for notwithstanding the cultural
subtext here—Sigurð and Völund the fornǫld heroes, as well as verse-‘forging/
smithing,’ an activity which the Middle Ages envisioned much more materially
than we do—the ability to repair a weapon or a ship can also be vitally impor-
tant. Each íþrótt/“art” held great agonistic potential, as highlighted by the nu-
merous saga narratives on the sociability of winter life in and around the halls
of the great men. In board games the analogy to combat and victory is drawn
explicitly (besides local games such as hnefatafl, which was presumably similar
to checkers, according to archaeological findings chess was already common in
the twelfth century); in the case of instrumental music and poetry, the com-
petitive character is implicit.78

77 Os c. 58; trans. Jesch in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, ed. Gade, vol. 2 (2009), 576–77. A lit-
eral translation which smoothes out the convoluted syntax—thus immediately doing a
disservice to one of the “arts” mentioned—might read as follows: “I am strong at tafl-play;
I know nine skills; I rarely forget runes; I am accustomed to books and blacksmithing; I
can ski; I shoot and row, and well; I believe I understand both string music and the art of
poetry [the latter in the form of a kenning: ‘the knowledge of the legendary first skald
Bragi’].”
78 Many sagas and þættir contain scenes in which the protagonists find themselves impro-
vising skaldic verses, sometimes even competitively, before a large and/or illustrious au-
dience. By contrast, harp playing occurs very rarely (we do not even know if Skaldic
The Habitual Aspect 149

“Runes” and “books,” that is, traditional contemporary literacy, is another

of the nine “arts.” By 1200, runes were traditional but by no means antiquar-
ian. There are thousands of later medieval and early modern wooden runic
inscriptions of widely different contents: business letters or appointments,
proofs of ownership, writing exercises, songs, dawdles, charms and spells,
mostly in Norse but also in Latin (with the occasional Hebrew thrown in) for
many centuries after the practice of putting up rune stones had ceased.79 For a
short while around 1200, runes even competed with the Latin script for use on
parchment. Runes, like letters, had more numinous uses too. In the thirteenth-
century sagas, the heroes occasionally use white magic (seið) with the aid of
runic incantations, and even minor slips could have fatal consequences.80 This
is part of the “invention” of a separate autochthonous prehistory, and more-
over always associated with saga characters from the pre-Christian era; still, it
is conceivable that an aristocrat of the time would have been able to cultivate
the ability to use ‘their’ old alphabet in the same way as a Claudian emperor
did the Etruscan. There was great interest in runic inscriptions; in the geo-
graphical introduction to his Gesta Danorum, one of the very few things Saxo
has to say about the easternmost Danish region, Blekinge, is that there was a
mountain there strewn with strange characters that no one had yet succeeded
in deciphering, although Valdemar i sent scribes specifically to make copies.81
It should be noted that all these abilities are acquired. Unlike the Roman
bona or the Occitan bons aips cortés of Jón’s own day,82 which assume a con-
nection between natural talent and favourable circumstances for their devel-
opment, the íþróttir are exclusively cultural skills, in principle open to anyone.
Yet these alone do not make a man, let alone the “most powerful chief” (mestr

­ oetry was recited with instrumental accompaniment) and may here reflect continental
p
or insular Celtic influence.
79 See, more generally, Düwel, Runenkunde (32001), 153ff.; on scripts in Norway: Hagland,
“Skrift i mellomalderen” (1998); Hagland, Literacy (2005). The runes found on wood in
Bergen harbour are edited in: Norges innskrifter, ed. Kjeldeskriftfondet (1980–90).
80 For instance, in Egils saga c. 72, where the eponymous hero, who is skilled in runes, heals
a girl who is bed-ridden due to a poorly-written spell, by making a flawless runic staff.
81 Saxo praef. 2,5: “rupes mirandis literarum notis interstincta”; on the afterlife and reliving
of the antiquarian interest in the Blekinge rock in the 19th century, see Kjær, “Risse und
Runen” (1994).
82 The Occitan expression is common in the troubadours, e.g. in Raimbaut de Vaqueiràs (fl.
1180–1205), quite close to Jón Loptsson in time and habitus: “Et ai de totz bos aips cor e
saber, E qand ren faill, fatz o per non poder” (And for all good qualities I have the predis-
position [‘heart’] and the skills [‘knowledge’], and if I err, it’s due to powerlessness) (Savis
e fols, humils et orgoillos, pc 392,28, The Poems of the Troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras,
ed. Linskill (1964), v. 7–8). Jón Loptsson would have responded that aristocractic demean-
our could by definition not be hindered by “non poder”: one who becomes úmagi (with-
out power) is no longer an aristocrat.
150 Chapter 2

hǫfðingi), as Jón Loptsson is in this story. Above all, he needs the disposition to
want to put his skills to use, and conspicuously so, whenever and wherever
possible and at the slightest provocation—“many times a day,” says Nóregs Ko-
nungatal of him.
There are two words in the saga to denote this disposition: “He was such a
great metnaðarmaðr and so kappsamr that there could scarcely have been one
greater.” The first epithet is a composite of the nouns -maðr “man” and metnað
“valuation, assessment; reputation, honour; pride, ambition; magnificence, os-
tentation.” The second is a composite adjective for kapp “zeal, energy; vigour,
belligerence, exuberance; dispute, contention.”83 We might translate the com-
posites as “valuation-man” and “contention-man” respectively. A modern gloss
such as ‘a competitive type’ seems too pale to do justice to this blending of os-
tentation, evaluation and honour, and contemporaneous terms such as super-
bia introduce a moral and negative tinge which is quite beside the point. Met-
nað is an abstract noun which is formed with the suffix -nað (it loosely
corresponds to “-ness”) to the primary lexeme met-, to which the verb meta, “to
determine (a price); to assess, gauge, evaluate, weigh up (according to the val-
ue),” related to Dutch ‘meten’/German ‘messen’ and the English noun ‘met’
“weight (for scales).”84 Etymologically, kapp corresponds to Danish and Low
Saxon ‘kamp’/German ‘Kampf’ (struggle, conflict); like the Old English cempa,
a kappi is a “fighter, duelist.” In Norse, kapp extended its use from the field of
war, attack, or battle, and specialized in the sphere of competition: k­ appdr­ykkja
is a drinking contest at a banquet, kappróð a boat race, kappmæli a verbal dis-
pute, a quarrel; several striking scenes in the sagas describe how an unresolved
question of status between two parties is negotiated after the parties cautious-
ly approach one another and finally resolve the issue—one way or the other—
through a kappsund, a swimming race between the protagonists.85
Both terms share the idea of the measurable, of matching oneself against
others. “In the society of the sagas, social status is something that a person has
at their disposal as a share of a common sum,” Preben Meulengracht Sørensen
comments, “if one obtains more, this entails a loss for others.”86 ‘Honour’ has
no given content such as integrity, fortitude, or reliability, which might be

83 Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. metnaðr; kapp.

84 Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. meta; met.
85 For example, the first encounter between the hero of Laxdœla saga (c. 40), Kjartan
Óláfsson—son of Óláf Peacock and grandson of the enslaved Irish princess Melkorka—
and King Óláf Tryggvason at Trondheimsfjord.
86 Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære (1993), 251, commenting on a quarrel over the
division of a stranded whale in Laxdœla saga (c. 29), where the formulation “eigi láta sinn
The Habitual Aspect 151

drawn upon to contend with rivals and opponents even under adverse circum-
stances if necessary; it is exclusively relational. If drawn upon, it diminishes,
therefore it must always increase—for example by way of having oneself and
one’s kin praised in Nóregs Konungatal and to make good on every single chal-
lenge, “many times a day” if needs be.87
Here, perhaps, is the driving force of that political culture, which Sverre
Bagge describes in his influential study on the kings’ sagas, and whose “Ma-
chiavellian” traits, the unconditional concentration on success by all available
means, he described as unique in the high Middle Ages.88 The equanimity with
which the sagas shrug off deeds that may look to us like the height of infamy,
but which earn the perpetrators nothing but a points win and no further com-
ment, often appears strange to modern readers, including (and especially)
those familiar with medieval history. The nocturnal encirclement and torching
of the opposing farmstead with all those sleeping inside (brenna) is a drastic
but not unfair occurrence. When two men, attacked by five others, point out
that the struggle is going to be uneven, the prospective winner replies that he
has no intention of losing his advantage. This suggests that ‘honour’ does not
actually exist in certain good deeds or the avoidance of certain evil ones, but
is rather a matter of triumph or defeat—that a metnaðarmaðr mikill like Jón
Loptsson, literally a “great measurement-man,” cannot do otherwise than tri-
umph day after day. Indeed, even the quality that we would call “ambition”
is itself suitable for an agon: “He was such an ambitious man, intent on self-
measuring like few others.”

hlut” (“let go of one’s share”) does not merely refer to the whale meat that was so impor-
tant for winter provisioning, but also figuratively to the concomitant loss of honour.
87 The other lexeme covering the sphere of “honour,” sœmd, has a distinctly tangible aspect
and means honours, accolades, and sometimes the gifts that go with them; the related
sómi primarily refers to something that brings someone ‘honour’: “þat er sómi hans” (that
is honourable for him); “sómafǫr” (a journey that brings honour).—Cf. Helgi Þorláksson,
ed., Sæmdarmenn (2002).
88 Bagge, Society and Politics (1991), esp. 85ff., sees the nexus between ‘honour’ and the “po-
litical game” the other way around: although ‘honour’ does dictate a certain response in
particular situations, the range of possible reactions is so extensive that a tactical, results-
oriented action is both possible and, indeed, the norm. Conversely, I would assume that
the exclusive commitment to the comparative, competitive ethos constrains men—and
some women—to act in a tactical, results-oriented manner in order to be superior in
­every contingent conflict situation. Political success is not the goal, rather the medium of
political action that is effectively ‘aimless,’ insofar as the primary motivation is to avoid
losses.
152 Chapter 2

7 Were There Wives?

The first facet of Jón’s character sketch in Oddaverja þáttr are his women. No
other sphere of action of this “greatest of all chieftains” is apparently regarded
as so instructive. And if we assume, in view of Carol Clover’s thesis about the
gender binomies of old Norse culture governed by ‘ability, empowerment’
(mega), that it was the ever-present possibility of falling into the “soft,” pre-
dominantly feminine category of (most) women, children, the poor, and the
elderly, by showing signs of ‘impotence’ (úmagi) which gave Nordic masculitity
its desperate edge, then the subsequent passage becomes a necessary conclu-
sion to the preceding one:

Jón had a woman called Halldóra, Brand’s daughter. Sæmund was their
son. Jón was very susceptible to women’s love, for he had many other sons
with different women: Þorstein and Halldór, Sigurð and Einar. Pál, who
would later be bishop, and Orm, who later settled in Breiðabólstað, were
his sons with Ragnheið Þórhallsdóttir, sister of Bishop Þorlák. She and
Jón had loved each other since childhood; but she also had children with
several other men. When Þorlák came to Iceland with the episcopal dig-
nity [1177], Pál and Orm, the sons of Jón and Ragnheið, were already
adults. Pál lived in Ytri-Skarð and Orm in Breiðabólstað [two strategically
important farms in the Rangá thing district]. Jón long had Ragnheið with
him at Oddi.89

Not quite “… maidens without number” like Solomon in Song of Songs, but an
impressive record nonetheless: two women mentioned by name, and in be-
tween a series of “different” women and, it can be assumed, still others who are
left unmentioned in the absence of notable male descendants. Three more of
Jón’s women are known;90 they are invariably—just as the frillur of the next
generations of the Oddaverjar, about whom more is known—daughters of

89 C. 22: “Konu átti hann sér er Halldóra hét ok var Brandsdóttir. Sonr þeirs var Sæmundr. Jón
var mjǫk fenginn fyrir kvenna ást, því at hann átti marga sonu aðra með ýmsum konum,
Þorstein ok Halldór, Sigurð ok Einar. En Páll er síðan varð byskup ok Ormr er síðan bjó á
Breiðabólstað váru synir þeira Ragnheiðar Þórhallsdóttur, systur Þorláks byskups. Hǫfðu
þau Jón elskazk frá barnœsku; þó átti hon við fleirum mǫnnum bǫrn. Váru þeir þá frum-
vaxti Páll ok Ormr, synir þeira Jóns ok Ragnheiðar, er Þorlákr byskup kom til Íslands með
byskupstign. Bjó Páll í Ytra-Skarði en Ormr á Breiðabólstað. Lǫngum helt Jón Ragnheiði
heima í Odda.”
90 They are named in Sturlunga saga; see Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001),
48ff.
The Habitual Aspect 153

farmstead owners in the region, with whom the magnates in this way conclud-
ed “vertical alliances,” as observed by Auður Magnúsdóttir in her study on the
political importance of non-marital relationships in Iceland.
How then do these alliances differ in form or status from a ‘marriage’? Do
they at all? It should not be assumed that a more “horizontal” (isogynous) re-
lationship must be categorially different from a “vertical” (hypogynous) one.
An alliance between groups of more or less equal importance was more care-
fully negotiated than the union of a chief with a farmer’s daughter; however,
the notion that in the one case it was a legally normative transaction, accom-
panied by a considerable transfer of property and other gifts, along with the
appropriate provisions (i.e. ‘lay marriage’), and in the other a more informal
and circumstance-dependent relationship which merely concerned the man,
woman, and sexual interest, is not convincing. Source terms such as lausabryl-
laup “loose wedding” for such a less substantial bond91 led earlier Germanic
scholars to the idea of ‘Friedelehe’ as a “free” consensual relationship halfway
between formal marriage (Muntehe) and concubinage: entered into by two
individuals instead of two kin groups, carrying no transfer of goods, and dis-
solved by mutual consent.92 This tripartite model has now been abandoned for
lack of evidence to support the idea of ‘Friedelehe,’ but only to be supplanted
by a binary model of full marriage on one side and ‘loose’ forms of all kinds on
the other.93 This model, however, presupposes that the ‘Augustinian distinc-
tion’ (“wife or concubine?”) was common to all societies and milieus. When
one looks at it, this is a sweeping assumption to make. For one, it is unclear
in how far (semi-)oral societies embrace categorial modes of thought at all.
Besides, in societies which make no fixed record of events (such as modern
registrar’s offices or their Roman or late medieval functional counterparts) it is
difficult, even if there was such a thing as a ‘wedding’ as distinct from all other
forms of entering into a relationship, for this event to petrify into legal status
(‘marriage’) for any length of time. Living memory is not only fallible, it is also
flexible and adaptable. In fact, fixed legal status may not even be in the inter-
est of all parties involved as it is, by its very nature, inflexible and thus tends to
curtail freedom of manoeuvring. Sometimes it might be expedient to be able
to ‘forget’ that a man and a woman had ever been ‘married.’ The lack of a ver-
nacular vocabulary for sexual status, as commented upon in the preliminary
chapter and discussed below, is quite indicative of this. So even granted that

91 Cf. Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 168ff.

92 The leading exponent of this view was Meyer, “Friedelehe und Mutterrecht” (1927), 198–
286; Meyer, “Ehe und Eheauffassung bei den Germanen,” vol. 1 (1940), 1–51.
93 For Norway, a recent monograph for this view is Holtan, Ekteskap (1996).
154 Chapter 2

some man–woman relationship were probably entered into with much ado
(feasting, guests, gifts) and some with nothing much, bryllaup need not be a
singular, once-and-for-all event—unless, of course, monogamy is enforced, as
it tended to be in some but by no means all thirteenth-century legal texts. The
prevailing state of affairs seems to have been that, just as with many other attri-
butions (fides, honor, nobilitas), male-female relationships were rather about
‘more-than’ than ‘either-or.’ Let us see how the Oddaverjar handled it.
A man like Snorri Sturluson could make his political fortune with isogamy94
and he certainly valued the women who brought him lucrative farms or titles
more than some of his other women. However, contrary to the common belief,
the accompanying transfer of more important goods is not a criterion for dis-
tinguishing a ‘(full) marriage’/Muntehe from a frilla relationship/concubinage.
Jón and Ragnheið’s son Orm, for example, had as frilla a woman named Þóra,
sister of a man named Kolskegg, whose epithet “the rich” (auðgi, referring to
material prosperity) already suggests that there was not much verticality about
this match. In fact, Kolskegg held a goðorð which would fall into the inheri-
tance of his sister and sole heiress, and thus to the expected Oddaverjar chil-
dren from her relationship with Orm Jónsson—and this may have been attrac-
tive to the chieftain’s son and bishop’s nephew, however appealing Þóra may
also have been. (Women could indeed hold a goðorð, but not exercise the as-
sociated competences in person, especially appearance before a legal assem-
bly.) In practice this meant that even during Kolskegg’s lifetime Orm could
dispose of his goðorð and possessions,95 which he had obviously secured for
the Oddaverjar just as reliably through the frilla tie as would have been possi-
ble through any more formal ‘marriage.’ Kolskegg, prosperous but without heir,
undoubtedly found himself under massive pressure until he was prepared to
become the client of the overbearing Oddaverjar—Snorri Sturluson treated
the families of his ‘wives’ with considerably more respect.96 But, again, this is a
relational gradation, not a categorial distinction.

94 Originally not very wealthy, Snorri Sturluson owed his later position as Iceland’s most
powerful chief to two ‘marriages’: with the first he acquired the farm Borg and the leading
role in the western district Borgarfjörður, with the second Breiðabólstaður (the farm
owned by Jón and Ragnheið’s son Orm in Oddaverja þáttr) and a comparable position in
the old Oddaverjar sphere of influence in the south. On Snorri’s alliances and the Stur-
lungs, see Jóhannesson, Old Icelandic Commonwealth (1974), 226–56; on Snorri’s frillur, see
Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 87ff.
95 StS i, 243; cf. Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 55.
96 If we are right to assume, on linguistic grounds, that Snorri is the author of Egils saga
(especially Hallberg, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar [1962]), then we might see this as an at-
tempt to register his marriage connection with Egil’s ancestors at Borg in a dignified
manner.
The Habitual Aspect 155

Jón Loptsson’s kona Halldóra is the first to be listed in the passage cited
above, along with her son Sæmund. Nothing is known of her origin and con-
nections besides her father’s name, Brand. There is no evidence that Jón’s ‘mar-
riage’ was any sort of “horizontal alliance.” On the contrary, the fact that we
know nothing about Halldóra’s family is more of an indication that—in the
Icelanders’ eyes, who frequently enjoyed pedigrees several generations long,
even for minor saga characters—there was nothing to know.

8 ‘Retrospective Marriage’

There is only one thing that distinguishes Halldóra from Jón’s other women:
her son Sæmund. He became head of the Oddaverjar after Jón’s death in 1197,
and remained so for a quarter of a century. This is usually interpreted as fol-
lows: as Jón’s sole ‘legitimate son’ Sæmund succeeded his father in office and
dignities, while the remaining sons were well looked after with estates and (in
the case of Pál Jónsson) the bishopric of Skálholt. Sæmund, on the other hand,
never married and consequently left behind only ‘illegitimate’ sons. No obvi-
ous successor emerged from among them, and the position of the Oddaverjar
crumbled. However, this argument rests on two assumptions, both of which
are questionable: namely that a categorial distinction was made between mar-
riage and non-marriage, and that the sons from the one form were, in princi-
ple, more entitled to inherit than others. The investigation of legal and narra-
tive sources in the preceding chapter has shown that the latter is not true; and,
as stated, there is no indication of the former in the text. On the contrary:
­Sæmund’s mother had no notable family.
What if we reverse the line of argument? There was no clear successor to be
found among Sæmund Jónsson’s sons after his death in 1222. Sturlunga saga
reports that the farmers in the Rangá thing district wanted Sæmund’s son Hálf-
dan as chief, “but he was not an ambitious man, and preferred to stay out of
others’ affairs.”97 Such a personal or rather character-motivated renunciation
was not an isolated incident, as Jón Viðar Sigurðsson has shown:98 some chose
to drop out of the agon. Jón’s grandson apparently was not, or at least not felt
to be, adequately endowed with the competitive ardour that had made his
grandfather the “great self-measurer.” On the other hand, a generation earlier
Jón’s son Sæmund was apparently thoroughly in possession of these qualities—
even to a degree that could be politically counterproductive, considering the

97 StS i, 345.
98 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 99f.
156 Chapter 2

story about the marriage to the daughter of the jarl of Orkney, Harald Mad-
daðarson (a “horizontal alliance” in the eyes of the Oddaverjar, though not nec-
essarily from the Orcadian perspective): Sæmund had presumed to “measure”
himself as the jarl’s equal. On the other hand, there is no doubt that within
Iceland Sæmund’s predominance among the Oddaverjar and his dominant po-
sition in their sphere of power (ríki) was generally accepted.
I would suggest that it was only Sæmund’s ambition and success that helped
his mother to eminence among Jón’s wives, ‘after the fact’ as it were, and led to
Oddaverja þáttr (which, according to Finnur Jónsson, was edited around the
time of Sæmund Jónsson’s death)99 singling her out before the others with
both her own and her father’s names. Sæmund’s subsequent leading role was
not based on a notion of ‘legitimacy’, and his mother Halldóra was no different
from Jón’s other women. It is the other way round: Halldóra owes her eminent
position in the saga, and possibly in real life (we do not know anything more
about her), to her son’s leading role. She found herself in a similar situation to
the Ottoman sultan valide, the Umayyad or Abbasid umm walad, or indeed
Bathsheba, who after David’s death had to raise their son Solomon to the
throne at any cost so that she could take her place next to him on the throne of
the king’s mother.100 None of Sæmund’s sons ever distinguished themselves
from the others in this manner, and so none of their mothers were retrospec-
tively promoted to Sæmund’s ‘wife.’101

9 A Vocable for the Ineffable: Elja

If medieval Northern Europe practised polygyny with women of gradually (but

not categorially) dissimilar status, could this be verbalized in a linguistic uni-
verse permeated by the Pauline requirement of monogamy and the Augustin-
ian distinction of uxor/concubina? There is one term for a sexual partner which
has so far defied lexical clarification: the feminine noun elja. It appears in sev-
eral sagas, and it is also highlighted in the second part of Snorri Sturluson’s
poetics (the so-called Snorra Edda or Prose Edda), the Skáldskaparmál (“Dis-
cussion of the Art of Poetry”). Snorri’s definition reads:

99 The debate over a possible later dating is outlined by Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Formáli,” in Bi­
skupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002), xviiif.
100 3 Kgs 2:19: “positus quoque est thronus matri regis quae sedit ad dexteram eius.” Cf. Häusl,
Abischag und Batscheba (1993).
101 On this model of ‘retrospective marriage’ in more detail, see Rüdiger, “Married Couples”
(2012).
The Habitual Aspect 157

Women who share the same man are known as eljur.102

In his collection of poetic periphrases (kenningar) of mythological figures,

Snorri uses the word several times in precisely this symmetrical way: Jǫrð, the
earth, to whom Odin is married in the mythological poetry of the high Middle
Ages (cf. Chapter 5), can be described, among others, as brúð (bride) Óðins
or as elja Friggjar ok Rindar ok Gunnlaðar. Of these three mythical women,
Frigg is Juno to Odin’s Jupiter, while Rind and Gunnlǫð are two giantesses with
whom he had affairs. In this flock, the personified earth is just one of many.
But conversely Frigg can be referred to as elja Jarðar. From a lexical point of
view, the relationships of the chief god to his various bedfellows is symmetri-
cal, although mythologically there are considerable differences between one
of the Æsir, the giantesses who have fallen victim to Odin’s cunning, and the
fertilized earth. In ‘Augustinian’ parlance, we would tend to say that Frigg is
Odin’s ‘wife’—the law books’ term for her would be aðalkona “first” or “main
woman”103—while Earth and the giantesses are his ‘concubines’/frillur. In
Snorri, though, all four are each others’ eljur. In Christian religious literature
elja is used in connection with polygyny among the patriarchs, but is also ap-
plied to New Testament situations; an interesting amplification of Leviticus
18:18 (the prohibition on lying with two sisters) in the Norwegian compilation
Stjórn (shortly before 1300) lists, among the women included in the prohibi-
tion, the elja of the sister, not mentioned in the Vulgate.104 “Co-wife” might be
a good translation of the word.105

102 Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, ed. Guðni Jónsson (1959) c. 84: “Þær konur heita eljur, er einn
mann eigu.” (-ur is the ending in the nominative plural feminine for singular -a.) It be-
longs to the common Indo-European word that is present in, among others, Latin alia
“another (woman),” altera “the second (woman),” and modern Scandinavian eller “or.”
103 A compound of aðal-, a cognate of Old English æðele, and kona “woman,” the word is used
in contexts of serial or simultaneous polygyny in the early 13th-century Older Law of West
Götaland (Ærfþær bolkær “Inheritance Rules” 5; 8; Äldre Västgötalagen [1965], 17), the Law
of East Götaland, and the three Danish laws of Jutland, Zealand, and Scania. See Rüdiger,
“Married Couples” (2012), 100f., for details and discussion.
104 Lv 18:18: “sororem uxoris tuae in pelicatum illius non accipies”; Stjórn, 320: “systur konu
þinnar skaltu eigi taka eða elju hennar” (“you shall not take the sister of your wife or her
elja”). The addition of elja might be construed as a contamination or mistranslation (peli-
catus “concubinage” rendered as pellex “concubine”), but this would seem to be an un-
necessarily complicated interpretation given the syntactic clarity of both sentences. It
rather looks like an intentional amplification in order to clarify the issue.
105 See the discussion of the term and the instances of it in Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 148ff.,
who translates elja as “Nebenfrau,” as did Andreas Heusler in Die Saga vom weisen Njál
(1914), 125. “Nebenfrau,” however, would seem to suggests that there is a “Hauptfrau,”
which is not what Snorri is saying, so the English word “co-wife” as used in anthropology
158 Chapter 2

Possibly the most famous occurrence of the word is in Njáls saga, edited
around 1280. In an emergency that cries out for revenge, Hróðný, mother of
one of Njál’s sons (described as laungetinn “fathered in secret,” a term used in
some legal texts to denote the children who qualify for the ættleiðing process),
hurries to the sleeping area of Njál, the head of the house, who is sleeping there
with the mistress of the house, Bergþóra. Throughout the whole extensive saga,
Bergþóra is the ideal-typical ‘wife and companion,’ very much a ‘main woman’;
she has brought her own property to the marriage, and she remains with Njál
until the bitter end in the flames of their farm. And yet Hróðný, trying to incite
Njál to avenge their son, cries: “Get up, out of bed, from my elja!”106 The essen-
tial meaning of the passage is perfectly clear: Hróðný thinks that Njál’s com-
mitment to her in this emergency situation takes precedence over the claims
of the co-wife. The term is only problematic once we see Bergþóra as funda-
mentally different from Hróðný, as ‘the wife’ versus ‘the c­ oncubine.’ Then the
word elja, used by the concubine for the wife, would be a faux pas, an insult.
This is hardly likely: even given the drama of the situation—a woman who
must prompt a man to act is ultima ratio—Hróðný, who stands to gain or lose a
lot, would have been ill-advised to use just this moment for an u ­ ncalled-for slur
of Bergþóra.107 We may therefore understand elja as a descriptive term, reflect-
ing a situation not unlike Jón Loptsson’s (or Odin’s, in Snorri): even where there
are considerable differences between a man’s women—as with Njál—they are
nonetheless all of them each others’ eljur. No opprobrium is attached to any of
them, only different fortunes. It is indicative for this lack of opprobrium that

is the best solution, as long as “wife” is not taken to denote “married woman,” which again
would not square with Snorri. Ebel also calls attention to the related Old High German
ella, Middle Low Saxon elle “Nebenbuhlerin, Konkubine.”
106 Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson (1954), c. 153: “Statt þú upp ór binginum frá
elju minni …”
107 It would hardly be expedient for Hróðný to sabotage her cry for help by insulting Njál’s
‘wife.’ Nevertheless, the important older dictionaries for Old Norse prefer accepting such
jarring inconsistencies to abandoning the monogamous ideal. The definition by Fritzner,
s.v. elja, “Kvinde der gaar en Ægtehustru for nær ved at leve i Kjærlighedsforstaaelse med
hendes Ægtemand eller være hans frille” is nonsensical in this context, since, as shown,
elja is not in every case only used for “women who offend a wife by having a love affair
with her husband or being his frilla” but also for the ‘wife’ (who can hardly offend the fril-
lur). Cleasby and Vigfússon, Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874), s.v. elja, adhere to the ‘ca-
nonical’ binomial and are thus forced to abandon the best textual witness: “it is wrongly
used” in Njáls saga. The new Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog (1995–2004), s.v. elja, by
contrast, provides the definition: “rivalinde, kvinde der deles om mand med anden
kvinde, medhustru,” i.e. in the sense proposed in the present discussion. The emphasis on
the “rival” is reinforced by the approximation to the aemula of the Vulgate (1 Sm 1:6 and
elsewhere).
The Habitual Aspect 159

the son of Jón Loptsson and Ragnheið eventually becomes a bishop (Pál Jóns-
son, 1195–1211) and that his saga placidly recounts the story of his parents with-
out a thought about defectus natalis.108 Jón knew as well as the next man, or
better, that there were different ways of living with a woman, involving degrees
of status, formality, ceremony, and possibly everyday markers like living quar-
ters or supply with finery. Only he did not move between the notional oppo-
sites of ‘marriage’ and ‘non-marriage’ but between ‘hidden’ and ‘not hidden.’109
Ragnheið lived openly with Jón at his farm in Oddi, and his kona Halldóra did
likewise—alongside all the other eljur.

10 The Brother-in-Laws’ Confrontation

The first encounter between the chieftain and his bishop took place at the
frontier. A storm had devastated two churches in Höfðabrekka, the ­easternmost
outpost of the Oddaverjar sphere of influence just before the impassable
Mýrdalssand lava sand desert.110 Jón had a new church built and wanted it con-
secrated by the passing Bishop Þorlák, a situation similar to the bishop’s earlier
conflict with the farmer Sigurð. It is quite possible that Jón still saw in Þorlák a
kind of client: a man whose parents had found shelter in Oddi when they had
fallen on hard times, who had grown up there with his sisters, who had come
into contact with secular and religious learning, and who had proved so prom-
ising that the Oddaverjar had paid for his studies in Paris and Lincoln. They
had also succeeded in securing him the succession of the highly respected
Bishop Klœng (1152–75) at Skálholt, achieving a double coup: not only would
their pupil succeed the bishop who had just erected the great new wooden
cathedral—an accomplishment that mutatis mutandis was not inferior to oth-
er great cathedral-building projects of the twelfth century, considering the
necessary resources and expertise involved—but it would be the first time that
the bishop in Skálholt was not a member of the rival group, the Haukdœlir.
Founded in 1056, Iceland’s first bishopric was essentially the creation of the
first bishop, Ísleif Gizurarson from the Haukdœlir lineage, who was educated

108 Páls saga byskups, in Byskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002), 295–332, where in c. 1 his parents are
named and characterized.
109 The term laungetinn does not simply translate illegitimus (“un-legally-come-about”) but
literally means “conceived in secret.”
110 The site lies at the eastern entrance of the narrow strip of coastland between the sea and
the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, so in terms of Icelandic topography it bears a certain resem-
blance to a mountain pass or an isthmus. On the boundaries of the Oddaverjar ríki, see
Helgi Þorláksson, Gamlar götur (1989), 129–38; Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 65f.
160 Chapter 2

in Saxony and had been consecrated by Archbishop Adalbert, thereby estab-

lishing Hamburg’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Iceland. He was succeeded by
four bishops from the same house (to which the bishopric was also to revert
after Þorlák and his nephew Pál Jónsson). Þorlák must have been an impressive
figure for the Oddaverjar to gamble on him, rather than one of their own sons.
It helped, of course, that together with Bishop Klœng he had established Ice-
land’s first Augustinian monastery at Þykkvibœr in the Oddaverjar sphere of
influence and become its abbot. His designation by his friend and predecessor
in the episcopal office must by then have been a foregone conclusion. But
these points merely show how far in advance his succession had been pre-
pared. He also attained consecration from the archbishop in Nidaros, appar-
ently without problems.
Jón was therefore hardly up to the surprise of encountering not the success-
ful Oddi pupil Þorlák, brother of his long-standing frilla, but a young Thomas
Becket. We cannot know how consciously the bishop, whose stay in Lincoln
approximately coincided with Becket’s rise to chancellor, whose elevation to
archbishop of Canterbury he could observe from Iceland, and whose martyr-
dom he learned about when he was abbot and bishop designatus, made that
role his own. The similarity in origin and career may have impressed Þorlák,
and there is every reason to believe that the new bishop’s act was really deter-
mined by the ideas of libertas ecclesiae absorbed in Western Europe, which the
dedicated Icelander embraced at the same time as his own metropolitan,
Eystein in Nidaros. Eystein’s support, if not commissioning, may have greatly
strengthened the self-confidence of Þorlák’s appearance which had given him
the first surprise successes in matters of ecclesiastical authority.
Did Jón Loptsson—who undoubtedly saw himself as the patron of not only
the churches, but also the bishop himself—expect Þorlák to pursue the same
course of action against him? In any case, the collision took place abruptly, in
public:

In the morning the bishop was preparing for the consecration of the
church; Jón and the men who were in his council went to the bishop, and
there was talk of who should hold the patronage of the church. The lord
bishop asked in accordance with the law, whether Jón had heard the
archbishop’s message about church property.
Jón answered: “I can hear the archbishop’s message, but I do not ­intend
to heed it. I do not believe that his intentions are better or more prudent
than those of my ancestors, Sæmund the Learned and his sons. Moreover,
I do not wish to condemn the bishops we had earlier in this country, who
were content with the custom of the land that laymen c­ ontrolled the
The Habitual Aspect 161

churches which their ancestors had given to God, reserving their regula-
tion to themselves and their descendants.”111

The bishop replied “the same as before and more besides”:112 Canon law over-
rides national custom. His predecessors were excused because they had not
been commanded by their superiors to enforce the law; but excommunication
now awaits any who still claim the tithe despite the injunction.

Jón replied: “You are free to excommunicate who you want, but I would
never voluntarily put what is mine in your power, my church or anything
else—the things which are mine to dispose of.”113

A public act of communication appears to have completely failed. A church

consecration festival with a great feast (veglig veizla) had been arranged, so
everyone knew that the words spoken on this occasion would matter. More-
over, Jón had arrived at the remote farm with an unusually extensive entourage
(ok margir mikilsháttar menn “with many great men of great importance”) to
await the bishop and his “travelling companions” (fǫruneytir). Clearly he was
going to press matters, turning up as he was only on the morning, when the
bishop was, so to speak, already putting on his chasuble. The encounter was
swift and massive. As with Sigurð Ormsson before, the bishop ignored the cus-
tomary course of controlled escalation and threatened not only the failure of
the planned church consecration, but also excommunication (bannsetning) in
the first round.
The parley thus reached an impasse. An agreement was reached on another
issue, addressing Jón’s desire to reduce the number of priests’ and deacons’ liv-
ings in an area partially devastated by lava outflow. “But in the more important
matter, each held to their own view, and it was already late in the day.” Bishop
Þorlák acted as he had often done so before, exploiting his secular opponents’

111 C. 22: “Um morgininn bjósk byskup til kirkjuvígslu, en Jón ok þeir menn sem í ráði váru
með honum gengu til byskups, ok var talat um hverr kirkjumáldagi skyldi vera. Herra
byskup spurði svá sem fylgjandi réttendum hvárt Jón hefði heyrðan erkibyskups boðskap
um kirknaeignir. Jón svaraði: ‘Heyra má ek erkibyskups boðskap, en ráðinn em ek í at
halda hann at øngu, ok eigi hygg ek at hann vili betr né viti en mínir forellrar, Sæmundr
inn fróði ok synir hans. Mun ek ok eigi fyrirdœma framferðir byskupa várra hér í landi er
sœmðu þann landssið at leikmenn réðu þeim kirkjum er þeira forellrar gáfu Guði ok
skilðu sér vald yfir ok sínu afkvæmi.’”
112 C. 22: “Byskup svaraði slíkum skynsemdum sem fyrr váru lesnar ok mǫrgum ǫðrum …”
113 C. 22: “Jón svaraði: ‘Þér megið kalla þann bannsettan sem þér vilið, en aldregi mun ek í
yðvart vald já minni eign undan mér, minni kirkju eða meiri, þeiri sem ek hefi vald yfir.’”
162 Chapter 2

prestige by simply neglecting to act until they relented. This time things went
differently: “Those who appeared as friends of both asked the bishop to aban-
don his position, and all those present also expressed their support for the old
abuse.”114
At that moment, Jón’s posse seemed to pay off. The bishop found himself
isolated and unable to withstand the pressure—a pressure that seems so
unanimous that we must wonder whether the whole process up to that point
had perhaps been orchestrated by Jón. If the chieftain had staged the encoun-
ter with the aim of halting the bishop’s libertas campaign once and for all be-
fore it reached his own ríki, we must acknowledge his excellent stage manage-
ment. With a small but impressive entourage to be presented to the bishop
only at the very last moment, then to raise the issue which he knows that Þor-
lák cannot but react sem fylgjandi réttendum, in accordance with (Church)
law—and not, say, by delaying or manoeuvring—and then risk the confronta-
tion with the Icelandic Thomas Becket, knowing full well that in the role of
King Henry he need not fear either a defeat or a martyrdom because of the
isolation of his opponent—such a course of events at Höfðabrekka should
have brought the desired triumph.
In this matter, at least, Jón’s plan was a success: “On this day, the bishop con-
secrated the church and sang Mass, although by no means willingly.”115 Jón’s
victory had far-reaching consequences, as, predictably, after this no other lay-
man wanted to relinquish his patronage over a church to the bishop, “and thus
this matter was settled for the rest of Bishop Þorlák’s days”116 and only revived
a century later.
Þorlák, however, hit the victor with a parting shot that may ultimately have
hit him harder than yielding in the issue of patronage would have done.

When Bishop Þorlák saw that he would not be able to assert his position,
these words spurted out (spruttu) from his mouth:
“While it may be unbearable, if one considers the issue justly and
­equitably, that you invoke the custom of the land to take the possessions
of the church from the bishops and for yourself. Still more unbearable is
that the bishops even fail to take away your whore women, whom you

114 C. 22: “En um ina fyrri grein helt hvárr á sínu máli, ok leið mjǫk á daginn. En þeir sem lé-
tusk vera beggja vinir báðu byskup leggja af sínu máli, ok ǫll alþýða dró þat sama sakir
forns óvana.”
115 C. 22: “Þenna dag vígði byskup kirkju ok sǫng messu, þótt þar yrði eigi hans vili
framgengr.”
116 C. 22: “… ok því fell niðr sú kæra um hans daga.”
The Habitual Aspect 163

retain against all customs of the land. It may be that you get away with
the greater issue when you succeed in the smaller, even though you
­desire evil!”117

Why this sudden change of subject, why does the bishop suddenly begin talk-
ing, or spurting, about polygyny? To the medievalist reader, accustomed to the
libelli de lite, the connection between simony and Nicolaism may be immedi-
ately apparent, although the latter is not actually mentioned here—Jón Lopts-
son was not a priest, and anyway priests continued to marry in Iceland far into
the thirteenth century, without any signs of a campaign against it (the absti-
nent Þorlák was the sole exception among the bishops of Skálholt in this re-
spect). However, Þorlák had the intellectual-rhetorical connection between
church freedom and prostitution at his disposal in the “Archbishop’s message,”
an epistle from Archbishop Eystein of 1173 (so before Þorlák’s episcopate) to
the two Icelandic bishoprics, which Jón proclaimed with a flourish that he had
heard, but would ignore. With a generous use of hellfire imagery, this pastoral
letter castigates the sins prevalent on the island: besides murder and man-
slaughter, “it has reached my ears that there are men here … who have aban-
doned their women (konur) and taken whore women (hórkonur) instead. Some
have both with them in the same house at once, and live such a loose life that
all Christians fall into sin.”118
Seven years later—roughly at the time of Bishop Þorlák’s confrontation
with Jón Loptsson—the archbishop sent a similar, even more sharply worded
letter to Iceland. What made it particularly aggressive was the fact that unlike
the letter of 1173, which had been directed at the two bishops and “all other
excellent men and the whole people,”119 it was solely aimed at Bishop Þorlák
and five named chiefs, among them Jón Loptsson and Orm, his son with
Ragnheið.120 The targets of the archiepiscopal attacks, explicitly named s­ everal

117 C. 22: “Ok er Þorlákr byskup sá þat at hann myndi eigi at sinni fram koma sínu máli þá
spruttu þessi orð af munni honum: ‘Þó at óþolanligt sé, ef fyrir rétta dómendr kemr, at þú
dragir kirkjunnar forráð undir þik eptir landssið ok undan byskupum, þá er miklu óþolan-
ligra þat er byskupar fá eigi frá þér tekit hórkonur þínar, þær sem þú heldr móti ǫllum
landssið. Kann vera at þú ráðir inu meira ef þú ráðir inu minna, þó at þú vilir verr.’”
118 di i, no. 38 (around 1173): “Mier er þat til eyrna komit. at hier sitia sumer þeir menn er …
hafa konur sinar latit. ok horkonur under þær tekit. sumer hafa hvarartveggiu. jnan hus
[med] sier og lifa so ogæzsku life. er alla kristna menn dregur til synda.”
119 di i, no. 38: “Ey[steinn] erkibiskup. sender kvediu. biskupum aa Jslande og so ollum
odrum agætis monnum. og allri alþydu.”
120 di i, no. 54 (um 1180). Jón and Orm are first and third in the list of worldly addressees. A
Sturlung and two Haukdœlir are named alongside them, also top-tier aristocrats.
164 Chapter 2

times in the letter, are Jón Loptsson and his counterpart in the neighbouring
Árnes thing district, Gizur Hallsson.121 Seven copies of the letter survive in Ice-
land alone,122 testifying to a wide and sustained dissemination. It addresses the
subjects of homicide and the peace of the church on the one hand, and forni-
cation and whoring on the other—and, as far as the exhortations against seiz-
ing women are concerned, the coincidence of both issues.
Archbishop Eystein’s attack on Jón Loptsson and the other chief is decid-
edly severe:

You are aware, Jón and Gizur, that there is an unavoidable matter we
must settle with you, for both your sake and ours. … Of all things, you
seem to us the most lacking with respect to the impure life of men and
their dealings with women (kvennafar). I hardly need to explain to you
the significance of the commandments from God’s own mouth. And the
greatest shame is that you, the noblest men, live like cattle, not recogniz-
ing marriage (hjúskap), the holy bond that no one can break. … But if the
chiefs have such a lifestyle on their conscience, they are in no position to
rebuke the people, and so the custom of the place deteriorates for all, to
a greater or lesser extent.123

By this time, archiepiscopal Nidaros had long been a centre of intensive li-
turgical, canonical, and hagiographical text production, specializing in the
translation and adaptation of the Latin European clerical culture to the condi-
tions of an ecclesiastical province which stretched from Oslofjord to Green-
land.124 The scribe engaged in translating the elements of the Latin pastoral
model into the vernacular is here faced with the problem of finding a word for
matrimonium/coniugium. His choice: hjúskap. It was, along with its etymologi-
cal cognates (hjónaband and others), a common choice; from a reformist point
of view, however, it was problematic in that it is derived from hjú/hjón “house,

121 Cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains (1999), 177. The episcopal seat of Skálholt is within the
Árnes thing.
122 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Formáli,” in Biskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002). xxxiv.
123 di i, no. 54, here 262f.: “Kvnnigt er yckur. Jon. og gizsurr. at naudsynia mal rædum vier vit
ydur. bæde ydvart og vortt. … En of engan hlut synest oss meira aa fatt. helldur en vm
ohreinlife manna hier. og kvenna far. er eigi þarf fyri yckur at skyra vm. hversv stadfest
bodord. er. af gvdz sialfs mynne bodit. En þier hafit þat med suivirding firrzt ener agætu-
stu menn. lifit bufiar life. rekit eigi hiuskap. ne þat helga samband er eigi ma slitna. … En
med þvi at hofdinngiar hafa slika ohæfv j sinne samviskv. og af þvi treystazt þeir eigi
hirtingar ord at hafa fyri alþydv. þa er þar komit at allra rad hallast j einn stad. ens meira.
og hins minna.”
124 Cf. Mortensen and Mundal, “Erkebispesetet i Nidaros” (2003).
The Habitual Aspect 165

household, servants” (+ collective suffix -skap “-ship”), highlighting the eco-

nomic aspect of the relationship, the shared economy. But this is not what the
archbishop had in mind, so it was necessary for him to explain that marriage
was not just “householdship” but a sacred and indissoluble union—rarely is it
so clear, right down to the wording, how revolutionary twelfth-century eccle-
siastical teaching on marriage was (and not only in Iceland). It is not easy to
bring a concept into a society that cannot even verbalize it: hjúskap just is not
a matter of two people, a couple; there are more men and women to a house.
The drastic comparison of Jón and Gizur to cattle, grounded in the New
Testament but effortlessly clear to the Icelanders, only piles on to the essential
fact: once they had seen the letter, Jón and Gizur must—and the Oddaverja
þáttr has Jón explicitly confirm this—consider themselves publicly challenged.
The archbishop’s letter touches upon the area of sexual defamation (ragmæli),
the consequences of which could be lethal. In Örvar-Odds saga, written down
around the mid-thirteenth century, an extremely aggressive agon with com-
petitive drinking and the exchange of poetic abuse culminates in the insult:
“But you lie at home dithering, with nothing but greed in your head, unable to
decide between the calf and the maid!”125 (The abuse aims less at bestiality
than at not being master of one’s decisions and desires.) Whether spontane-
ously or studied, by publicly taking up the archbishop’s fierce attacks on Jón
Loptsson at the celebration of the church’s consecration, in places even repeat-
ing them word for word,126 Þorlák in his exuberance escalated the conflict, al-
ready fierce, into something unprecedented.

11 What Was at Stake i: Bishop Þorlák

Why did Þorlák challenge Jón in this manner? And why did Jón have to re-
spond to this challenge so strongly? Instead of hypothesizing about individual
motivations of the two people involved (about, say, Þorlák’s ‘absolute convic-
tion’ or Jón’s ‘special affection’ for Ragnheið), this is a matter of explaining the
social roles in which the two act, and the constraints they are subject to.
Þorlák’s position appears simple. He is bishop of the Roman Church, subor-
dinate to the archbishop of Nidaros, and advocating against the proprietary
church system and the appropriation of tithing by laymen in particular is

125 Örvar-Odds saga c. 27: “en þú hallaðist / heima á milli / kynmálasamr / kálfs ok þýjar.”
126 Like the 1180 letter, his speech ends with the opposition meiri/minni “more/less”; the word
hórkona “whore-woman” (~meretrix?), otherwise virtually unknown in the sagas, is found
in the letter of 1173.
166 Chapter 2

v­ irtually part of his calling. Crucially, the archbishop is pursuing a similarly

harsh ecclesiopolitical course in Norway: his conflict with the new king Sverrir
is so acute that he is forced into exile shortly after Þorlák’s clash with Jón Lopts-
son. According to Oddaverja þáttr, “everyone in this country [Iceland] also
thought they could imitate what the people in Norway had recently done.”127
Newly appointed, Þorlák may have wished to follow Nidaros’s guidelines with
particular zeal, yet not even this was necessary to make the imposition on him
at the church consecrations appear intolerable to him, given his understand-
ing of office.
This may all be true, but it is overly institutional. Þorlák Þórhallsson ulti-
mately came from the same milieu as his adversary—in this case literally, after
all, they grew up in the same house, at about the same age (Jón was six years
older). For Þorlák, the son of impoverished parents “of good family” (we have
no details), who were unable to maintain their economic independence and
thus self-determination (sjálfræði), this meant being socialized at a court
where the competitive ethos was lived relentlessly to the extreme—“several
times a day”—but as a dependent client of the Oddaverjar, he himself could
never be one of the “enabled/capable ones” who participated in this, in prin-
ciple, paritarian agon. To exaggerate the issue with reference to Carol Clover’s
gender binary: Þorlák must have experienced himself as not completely ‘male.’
Returning from abroad to find both his sisters as frillur—a reprehensible
situation from a canonical point of view—was perhaps one of the most power-
ful experiences in this vein. Up to this point his vita is quite explicit; what it
does not say is that as an Icelandic man, Þorlák also had cause for indignation:
he was presented with a fait accompli, no one had consulted him, and there
was nothing he could do, given that Ragnheið’s man was the chieftain himself.
In Egils saga one adversary in a legal dispute says, “She has been taken as frilla,
and [that] without the consent of her relatives,” thereby hoping to prove the
dishonourable nature of the relationship.128 Þorlák could not perform his duty
as a brother. It was almost as if the woman had been abducted, and if only a
fraction of the tales which would shortly after make up the written saga litera-
ture were known in Oddi, he would remember dozens of wretched figures who
lost their wives, sisters, and daughters to the trickery of some passing adven-
turer or a giant’s threats.
Around the same time, he found an ‘out’ of his client relationship with
the Oddaverjar. Newly qualified as one of the few clerici in the diocese, he

127 “… þóttusk allir hér á landi mega þar eptir gera sem menn gerðu fyrir í Nóregi.”
128 Egils saga c. 32: “… en síðan tekin frillutaki, ok ekki at frændaráði …”
The Habitual Aspect 167

came into the ‘house’ of Bishop Klœng Þorsteinsson. A closeness developed

between the churchmen that would scarcely have been possible between the
foster child of the Oddaverjar and the Haukdœling otherwise. Although still
within the Oddaverjar’s sphere of influence, as the first abbot of the new Au-
gustinian monastery of Þykkvibœr, in 1168 Þorlák found himself in a com-
pletely new position of independence. At the same time, his relationship with
Oddi remained so good that he there found the support he needed to become
Klœng’s successor. As bishop of Skálholt, he now ranked highly enough to
attract attention at the great stock exchanges at which rank and reputation
were ­negotiated—above all at the gatherings of the thing—if he knew how
to get it.
As bishop of Skálholt he also entered into another competition, which he
had to win at any cost: that with his predecessor. Just as sons in the sagas are
always judged against their fathers and forefathers, the greater their ances-
tors had been, the more pressure they were under to succeed—this genera-
tional escalation is clear enough in the praise song Nóregs Konungatal, and it
should perhaps come as no surprise that some, such as Sæmund the Learned’s
great-great-grandson Hálfdan, ‘withdrew’ and stopped taking an interest in the
­affairs of others, to widespread indignation. A similar ethos must have pre-
vailed among church leaders, especially given that Þorlák was the first man to
hold office in Skálholt who was not a descendant of the founding bishop Ísleif.
In many ways, Þorlák’s position was not unlike the church equivalent of ætt­
leiðing, and he was the one from the brink who was admitted into the family
and expected to prove his mettle. The pressure to succeed was only increased
by the fact that he could not rely on the benefit of doubt. And, worst of all, his
predecessor had actually accomplished an ‘epic’ feat: the newly constructed
cathedral, begun in 1153. Its dimensions have been established archaeological-
ly, and its form extrapolated by analogy:129 Klœng’s cathedral may have been
the largest wooden church ever built. With a length of 50 metres, it was many
times larger than all known stave churches, surpassing a number of Danish
cathedrals of its day (Odense, Aarhus) and reaching the dimensions of the very
ambitious cathedrals of Slesvig and Roskilde. In the whole of Northern Europe,
it was probably surpassed only by the archiepiscopal churches of Bremen and

129 Kristján Eldjárn et al., Skálholt (1988); Guðmundur Óli Ólafsson, Skálholt (1989); Hörður
Ágústsson, Skálholt. Kirkjur (1990). The excavation campaign in 2002–2007 concerns the
churchyard area, which formerly lay to the south of the cathedral, with the episcopal seat,
rather than the church building itself.
168 Chapter 2

Lund, which each boasted a length of around 85 metres.130 Crucially, Skálholt

achieved the dimensions of Nidaros, the archiepiscopal cathedral of the new
church province that had been established the same year Klœng began his new
construction.
What that meant must have been clear to all—if we take the testimony of
Laxdœla saga seriously, according to which an Icelandic chieftain who had re-
ceived permission to export large quantities of lumber from the Norwegian
king was observed one morning before work began, high up in the beams of
the large new church under construction in Nidaros, measuring the main and
transverse beams. When challenged by the king, he admitted that he wished to
build his church in Iceland to the same scale. The king pressed him to remove a
cubit from each, whereupon the Icelander replied that if the king would like to
take back his wood, he was man enough to get more elsewhere, but he would
not have his construction plans interfered with.131 What the chieftain and king
did in the Icelandic sagas, Bishop Klœng did to Archbishop Eystein—who was
able to tolerate this, not least because his own cathedral building, which in
turn challenged Lincoln and Canterbury in size and form (and probably in
the personnel of its masons’ guild as well), was still in a completely different
class.132
How was Þorlák to demonstrate enough kappsemd—competitiveness, such
as the magnates were guilty of displaying—to surpass Klœng? His ideas may
have run along these lines: Klœng had built a church of (expensive imported)
wood, which could hardly be more magnificent—he, Þorlák, would restore the
church of God to its proper size out of living stones (2 Pt 2:5). In Norway, Arch-
bishop Eystein, with the friendly cooperation of King Magnús and the true
ruler, Jarl Erling, had already made good progress in asserting the libertas eccle-
siae (that this would only be temporary, and an insurgent named Sverrir would
inflict devastating blows on the archbishop shortly thereafter, was not yet ap-
parent in 1175); here was an opportunity to do for the entire diocese what

130 Johannsen and Johannsen, Danmarks kirker. Odense amt (1995–96); Johannsen and Jo-
hannsen, Sct. Knuds Kirke (2001); Michelsen and Fine Licht, Danmarks kirker. Århus amt
(1968–72); Moltke and Møller, Danmarks kirker. Københavns amt (1951); Ellger, Kunstdenk-
mäler der Stadt Schleswig, vol. 2 (1966); Nawrocki, “Der Schleswiger Dom in romanischer
Zeit” (1987); Dietsch, St. Petri zu Bremen (1978); Cinthio, Lunds domkyrka (1957).
131 Laxdœla saga c. 74. Although the story ends badly, with the ship sinking off Iceland to-
gether with its cargo and crew, the king’s anger remains powerless. And regardless of how
the episode is to be interpreted within the saga itself, it shows that the agonistic potential
of church building was present in high medieval Iceland.
132 Cf. Fischer, Domkirken i Trondheim (1965); Ekroll, ed., Nidaros domkirke og Erkebispegården
(1995).
The Habitual Aspect 169

Klœng had done for one building: to set new standards for Iceland, as Norway
had. Above all, there was undoubtedly the overriding model of the Canterbury
saint, who had proved that a churchman coming from a position of depen-
dency could not only speak with his secular lord as an equal, but with God
behind him, as a superior.
Þorlák’s whole life story is a reprise of Thomas Becket’s to such an extent
that we might be tempted to dismiss the Icelandic vita as derivative. But I sus-
pect something much more interesting is happening. It is not Þorlák’s vita but
his life which is ‘derivative,’ closely modelled on the example of the country to
which Þorlák owed his education and Eystein in Nidaros his architectural
ideas. England’s significance as the primary, perhaps only extra-Nordic cultural
point of reference (besides Byzantium, admired from afar) was still unbroken
in the Angevin period. And so Þorlák discovered that the faithful implementa-
tion of official ecclesiastical policy and scrupulous adherence to the English
model offered him a chance to restage the agon, which had been breathlessly
followed by the whole of Christendom ten years earlier, in Iceland.

12 What Was at Stake ii: Jón Loptsson

For Jón, the matter was less complicated. His role was clear from the outset: he
simply had to always and everywhere be the best. There were many opportuni-
ties to continually demonstrate this, as we have seen: in rowing and swimming,
through board games, in making and understanding verses, in combat, natu-
rally, in taking goods (here, the episcopal demand concerning the tithe was
galling twofold) as well as distributing them (“gold-squanderer,” Nóregs konun-
gatal calls him—as well as a ‘true’ king), in entertaining and providing (“the
Oddaverjar and the Haukdœlir have long been known for always hosting the
best feasts”),133 in producing memories of noteworthy words and deeds (in
this, Oddi is still considered unequalled eight centuries later)—and, among
many other things, in women too.
It is by no means the case that the sheer number of women whom Jón
“placed under himself” (to borrow the phrase his foster child Snorri uses in
relation to his ancestor Harald Fairhair) already constituted the competitive
performance, as proponents of sociobiological interpretations and anthropo-
logical constants (“mating success”) might be inclined to assume. In a society
which valued even abstinence as a highly commendable achievement in the

133 StS i, 483: “Hefir þat lengi kynríkt verit með Haukdœlum og Oddaverjum, at þeir hafa inar
beztu veizlur haldit.”
170 Chapter 2

battle of the chiefs—Kjartan Óláfsson impressed all Iceland by being the first
to rigorously fast, “so that there was now something else in which Kjartan sur-
passed all other men”134—Jón could also have scored as an uncompromising
monogamist. Sexual virility and willingness to parade it was not in itself a posi-
tive thing; quite the reverse, it carried the risk of uncontrollability. At best, fig-
ures who unthinkingly yield to their passions go uncommented, if the object of
their desire can be subjected without consequences—such as King Sigurð and
the mill maid or Hǫskuld, who buys “a slave for the bed” on his journey home.
In the worst case, the result of uncontrolled sexuality is the same as any kind
of uncontrolled action, a chain of consequences that leave its author’s general
standing, ‘honour,’ considerably ruffled, even if they survive—so, for instance,
Bjǫrgólf in Egils saga, who is assigned a charming farmer’s daughter as his
drinking partner (drekka tvímenning), an event which first flusters him and
then—because he applies unusual pressure to satisfy his desire—unsettles the
whole saga world.135
Once Jón had decided to be considered “very susceptible to women’s love”
(mjǫk fenginn fyrir kvenna ást), however, there was no question of giving up—
like King Sven Estridsen, who “ruled Denmark vigorously for many years and
had children with many women”136 or like Jón’s relative Magnús Erlingsson,
the ruling Norwegian king: “cheerful and joking, a very friendly man and great
man of women (kvinnamaðr mikill).”137 Or, like the Swedish magnates consid-
ered by Adam of Bremen, with close attention to the social implications: “Only
in their sexual relations with women do they know no bounds; a man accord-
ing to his means has two or three or more wives at one time, rich men and
princes an unlimited number.”138
In fact, the sheer demonstration of economic (and not sexual) potency is an
important part of the habitual function of polygyny: who can afford to feed
extra mouths, to enjoy the love of women on a grand scale? This must have
been even more important in the case of Iceland, an extremely precarious

134 Laxdœla saga c. 45.

135 Cf. Bredsdorff, Kaos og kærlighed (21995).
136 Chronicon Roskildense, in sm, vol. 1, 22; see above, Chapter 1.
137 MsE c. 37: “Magnús konungr var léttlátr ok leikinn, gleðimaðr mikill ok kvinnamaðr
mikill.”
138 Adam of Bremen iv, 21: “In sola mulierum copula modum nesciunt; quisque secundum
facultatem suarum virium duas aut tres et amplius simul habet; divites et principes abs-
que numero.” History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, ed. Tschan (2002), 203. In
scholium 132, Adam adds that not only did the Slavs—the Church of Hamburg’s other
problem children—suffer from the same vice but, according to Lucan and Sallust, so did
Parthians and Moors; in a word, it was typical of those waiting to be civilized. “Mulieres …
absque numero” is biblical (Song of Sol. 6:7).
The Habitual Aspect 171

s­ubsistence economy with a constant foreign trade deficit and a gradually

more threatening scarcity of resources partly due to ecological damage caused
by overcultivation, than in Adam’s Sweden. Thus a special grandeur was dem-
onstrated by saga characters like Hǫskuld, who bought a slave in passing on a
stop en route home from a long journey, impregnated her before they got to
Iceland, but then renounced further intercourse with her—and then gave her
a house of her own for support! His potency must have impressed.
Everyday practice may have been less exuberant but essentially similar. The
numerous frillur of the Sturlung-era Icelandic magnates that are mentioned in
passing would to some extent live ‘uxorilocally’ (or better, ‘mulierilocally’) on
one of the various dependent farms, meeting ‘her’ man there periodically in
the course of entertaining as circumstances required.139 According to the snip-
pets of women’s everyday life, others were part of chieftains’ entourages, living
alongside armed retainers, one or two skalds, and the crowd of relatives to
whom they sometimes belonged—like, for instance, Valgerð Jónsdóttir, one of
Jón Loptsson’s son Sæmund’s women and his second cousin. Polygyny appears
to have been commonplace, as a passing remark in the Sturlunga saga suggests:
“Þorvald was at home and seven of his men were with him. He lay in his bed-
closet with two of his frillur, Halldóra and Lofnheið, when suddenly …”140
In her study of the Icelandic frillur, Auður Magnúsdóttir points to a fur-
ther issue: one must be able to both take and keep them.141 Although formal
raptus did not generally play a role ‘at home’ in Iceland in the acquisition
of frillur, which was usually consensus-based (meaning that whatever pres-
sure was applied resulted in face-saving handovers), Þorlák, whose approval,
grudgingly granted by assent retrospectively, mattered very little in the for-
mation of his sister’s relationship with Jón Loptsson, was certainly not an
isolated case. Another casually related episode of contemporary topicality
runs as follows:

Gizur [Þorvaldsson, the most powerful chief on Iceland in around 1250

through the favour of the Norwegian king] rode with some of his people
westwards across the wasteland to Langadal in Geitaskarð to Gunnar
Klœngsson, and took his daughter Ingibjörg as his frilla and soon loved

139 See the survey in Ebel, Konkubinat (1993), 83–107, where the known frillur and their men
are listed according to their place of residence.
140 StS i, 295: “Þorvaldr var heima ok sjau karlar. Hann lá í lokhvílu ok tvær frillur hans, Hall-
dóra … ok Lofnheiðr …” The scene is described only because at that moment, enemies
burst into the house. Þorvald quickly grabs a women’s cloak, which enables him to es-
cape—a successful if not entirely elegant exit.
141 Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 90ff.
172 Chapter 2

her very much. She was an outstanding woman, and it was good to have
her on side in many things. She travelled home with him to Ás.142

We cannot rule out the possibility that this represented a real opportunity for
Ingibjörg, whose wit and vigour are registered by the adjective skǫrulig (“out-
standing” in comparison to others), given that some—not all—frillur in the
contemporary sagas are portrayed as belonging to the small group of women
who find their peers among men. And likewise the father, Gunnar, may have
been appreciative of the benefits the relationship could bring. The point, how-
ever, is that neither had much of a choice. For Gizur Þorvaldsson, his new
­acquisition was both a prize and a risk. For him, like all the other magnates
who had acquired women in this fashion on one or more occasions, it was not
just a question of ensuring a smooth, conflict-free process, but also of defend-
ing the women. The ‘mulierilocal’ distribution of frillur to different residences
could be an even greater difficulty (and challenge).
A handful of cases, which Jón Viðar Sigurðsson cites in his study of the ab-
duction of women in Iceland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,143 may
illustrate this. Around 1160—Jón Loptsson was just over 30 years old and Þorlák
was abroad studying—the elderly priest Þorgrim and his “beautiful” wife Álof
were staying at the chieftain’s farm Staðarhol. One of the followers (heima­
maðr “household man”) of the chief there was so struck by Álof’s looks that he
took her away from her husband, and declared that he could not stand that an
old man sullied so beautiful a woman.144 Heaping insult upon insult, the
henchman robbed the priest of his horse—“the best of all horses” (allra hesta
beztr), no less. At this, the priest had had enough and turned to Hvamm-Sturla,
founder of the Sturlung family’s power, for assistance. The magnate’s reaction
is interesting: he took up the case, and declared that he did not see any great
feat here.145 It was not the double robbery itself which was reprehensible, but
the rather inglorious fact that the victim was an ageing churchman. Still more
interesting is that Sturla does not blame the perpetrator but the chief to whose

142 StS i, 500f.: “… reið Gizurr vestr yfir heiði með nǫkkura menn til Langadals í Geitarskarð
til Gunnars Klængssonar ok tók til sín Ingibjörgu Gunnarsdóttur til frillu ok unni henni
brátt mikit. Hon var skǫrulig kona ok góð viðfangs fyrir marga hluta sakir. Fór hon heim í
Ás með honum.”
143 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, “Konur og kvennarán” (1997).
144 StS i, 78: “kvað þat aldri skyldu lengr, at gamall maðr flekkaði svá væna konu.”
145 StS i, 78: “kvað eigi sýnast mikilmennsku [literally, “great-man-ness”] í sliku.”
The Habitual Aspect 173

household the perpetrator belonged.146 Moreover, he immediately sent one of

his own people to kill the woman- and horse-thief. The attack was unsuccess-
ful, apparently to the relief of the chiefs on both sides, who were thus spared
the inevitable escalation. Not long after, Álof, the priest’s wife, appeared at
Sturla’s farm in Hvamm, and her husband took her back. Evidently, the wife-
snatcher’s lord, desiring deescalation, had been putting pressure on him. The
matter of the horse remained, for the accounts had to be balanced, and when
nothing further happened in this matter, Sturla “reminded” his protégé, the
priest, that while he had got his wife back, he had not retrieved his excellent
steed. It was clear to the priest that there was no way he could return to Hvamm
without a horse, and so he set off—and waited until he was able to take the
horse, unnoticed, in heavy flurry of snow. (Considered in the light of Clifford
Geertz’s Moroccan sheep rustlers or Werner Schiffauer’s Pontic peasants,147
the episode is a model case for social-anthropological research on conflict de-
escalation: the snowstorm arrived at just the right moment so no one would be
obliged to ‘see’ that the priest came to steal his own horse, and the matter could
therefore be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.)
The “Jóreið Affair” is another case of staking out claims by arrogating the
right to control a woman. In 1225, the widow Jóreið Hallsdóttir rejected Ingi­
mund Jónsson’s request for her hand and her fortune, explaining that she
wished to bequeath the latter to her daughter undiminished. The scorned
suitor complained to his patron Sturla Sighvatsson (a grandson of Hvamm-
Sturla from the previous episode), who was prompted to immediately set out
with his client, abduct the widow Jóreið, house her in his own farm, and there
put pressure on her to abandon her resistance. Now Jóreið’s brother Pál was
well-­positioned as a “very good friend” (mesti vinr) of the uncle of the opposing
chieftain, Þórð, and thus possessed, as it were, insurance to cover his legal costs.
The matter therefore became part of a larger Sturlung feud: the conflict be-
tween Sturla and Þórð, now brought to a head by the issue of w ­ omen, ­‘actually’

146 StS i, 78: “en kvað Einar þat illa gera at veita vandræðismǫnnum á leið fram ok leggja þar
við virðing sína” (“and said Einar [Þorgilsson, the goði] would be wrong to protect people
bent on trouble, and to link his honour to them”).
147 Cf. Geertz, “Thick Description” (1973), 3–30; Schiffauer, Bauern von Subay (1987), esp. 61:
since in extreme cases ‘political’ rationality (oriented around public profile and the “hon-
our reference system”) entails complete social and economic irrationality—multiple
deaths, prosecution, and economic ruin—all parties handle it with great care and delib-
eration; social and economic interests “can, by contrast, only be pursued in the back-
ground, unacknowledged, almost by stealth.”
174 Chapter 2

revolved around the office of goðorð and land. Snorri Sturluson, brother of one
of the rivals and uncle of the other, stepped in as a mediator, and the whole af-
fair was settled by means of considerable compensation. The actual abduction
of a woman would appear to have become a mere detail—if we did not know
that Sturlunga saga labels the entire affair as Jóreiðarmál, “the Jóreið affair”
or “the Jóreið dispute,” and creates the impression that it concerns an event
known throughout the country.
Incidentally, the abducted Jóreið decided her own fate: she went on hunger
strike until the powerful chief let her go.148 Here, too, it is important to con-
sider whether the ‘hunger strike’ did not suit the chief, now interested in a
settlement, but this should not distract from the fact that public opinion of the
widow conceded this degree of self-determination as a plausible course of
events, and the chief did not object to being ‘beaten’ by her in this matter. Of
course, he could afford to do so precisely because she was not to be taken seri-
ously as an opponent. But this was only to Jóreið’s advantage.

13 Resource Polygyny

If entering into a concubinal relationship with a woman (usually a daughter) of

the house was a sign of a clientele-type alliance with a local landowner, a man
like Jón Loptsson, building and maintaining the Oddaverjar’s ríki, was almost
obliged to practise simultaneous polygyny. But there is more to the ‘habitus’
value of the accumulation of women. In a study of the demographic gender
balance in early Scandinavia, Carol Clover has argued that literary sources—
the exposure of newborns (barna útburð), frequently referred to in laws, sagas,
and even accounts of Christianization—and archeological findings, such as
the ratio of male and female burials, suggest an imbalance brought about by
preferential female infanticide.149 Since dysfunctionality within society as a
whole does not necessarily lead to changes in individual decisions, the cultural
pattern in which it was more intuitive to expose girls than boys could last for
a long time, despite a worsening shortage of women. The intensified competi-
tion for women then led to their concentration in the upper classes and thus
to their relatively higher reproductivity, which in turn intensified the competi-
tion for resources and helped to shape the extremely competitive society of
medieval Iceland.

148 StS i, 309–11.

149 Clover, “Politics of Scarcity” (1988). See in general Guttentag and Secord, Too Many Wom-
en? (1983); for the Middle Ages, Herlihy, “Life Expectancies for Women” (1975).
The Habitual Aspect 175

In these circumstances, the rather obvious objection that a society with a

shortage of women is the least likely to develop a marked inclination towards
polygyny (thus acerbating the shortage for most men) is not sound. On the
contrary, the ‘accumulation’ of women becomes all the more powerful as a sta-
tus symbol, the scarcer they are overall.150 Moreover, Iceland was a ‘frontier’
society, which meant that the proportion of men among the first generations
of settlers may from the outset have been far above average.151 Many character-
istics of societies with an unbalanced gender ratio can be found here: intensi-
fied male competition for women and the key role of women in male status;
male homosexuality—which can scarcely be substantiated as such in medi-
eval Scandinavia and certainly not quantified, besides its great effect as an
­insult—; the relative ease with which relationships could be ended (and con-
sequently serial polyandry for women); but above all the extent to which wom-
en were imported, a fact famously established for Iceland at the end of the
twentieth century through serial genetic studies: according to these studies, of
the early Icelandic population, around 75 per cent of the men but only half
that of the women were of Scandinavian descent, while the majority of women
came from Celtic areas.152 The enslaved Irishwoman Melkorka stands on be-
half of very many other women. Taken alongside the high added value of wom-
en’s work (food and wool processing), the overall result is that in both material
and immaterial terms, women were a key resource.

14 Women and Plunder

A chieftain’s duties (and opportunities to win ‘status’) thus undoubtedly in-

cluded supplying not only himself, but also his followers, his ‘clients,’ with
women. Poul Holm has convincingly demonstrated this for the Irish kings of
the tenth and eleventh centuries, and also pointed out the connection be-
tween increased competition and increased interest in the enslavement of

150 Clover, “Politics of Scarcity” (1988), 171.

151 The Landnámabók, which records a significant proportion of the overall immigration
with its several thousand names, probably provides a distorted picture given its focus on
property rights. Nonetheless, the analogy with the USA, where in some western states
there was still a male-to-female ratio of 1.5:1 in around 1900, and a balance was not reached
nationally until around 1940, allows us to infer that an at least tendentially similar situa-
tion existed in the first Icelandic centuries.
152 Cf. Helgason, “Estimating Scandinavian and Gaelic Ancestry” (2000), 697–717; Helgason,
“mtDNA” (2001), 723–37.
176 Chapter 2

women for the purposes of profit or redistribution (in contrast to the tradi-
tional ‘hostage-taking’ of male opponents).153 While raids on enemy property,
such as the well-known Irish cattle raids (crech), were not the only way to ac-
quire women for distribution, as shown by slave-trading posts on Western Eu-
ropean coasts that operated for centuries, they were credited with additional
habitual prestige. The testimony of the Frankish sources on the abduction of
women, the rape of girls, and special attention for feminas quae formosae vide-
bantur154 fits so well with Nordic and Irish reports that there can be no doubt
that taking women as plunder in war had an important ‘habitual’ function in
maintaining a warband.
How this aspect of magnate excellence was celebrated by and for Nordic
audiences is impressively demonstrated by some of the two dozen skaldic
stanzas which the court poet Þjóðólf Arnórsson wrote about the struggle for
power between Norwegian king Magnús the Good and his rival Sven Estridsen
in Denmark around 1040 (and which Oddi pupil Snorri Sturluson used as a
basis for his kings’ saga two centuries later, citing them extensively). It should
be noted that Magnús himself was filius a concubina of Saint Olav, and his
mother Álfhild the “king’s handmaid” was, according to William of Malmes-
bury, an abducted noble Englishwoman (see Chapter 1). Incidentally, the same
chronicler claims that the sister of Cnut the Great had made her profit in the
luxury slave trade across the North Sea, “especially with girls who were particu-
larly valuable on account of their age and beauty.”155 Against this pattern, it
comes as no surprise that Magnús’s raids on the Danish islands in their poetic
form, probably first sung at some ‘concluding banquet’ of the war and then dis-
seminated throughout the Norse world, are narrated with relish:

One word told the Selund [Zealand]

woman who bore the standard;
it’s true, moreover, that many
men bore shields blood-reddened.
The treasure-twig was fated
to tiptoe through the forest;

153 Holm, “Slave Trade” (1986), esp. 339, who takes into account the fictional but nonetheless
revealing lists of provisions (tuarastal) for clients in Lebor na Cert (around 1100).
154 Adrevald of Fleury and Richer, cited after Zettel, Bild der Normannen (1977), 134f. On the
sexual exploitation of the unfree, see Chapter 1.
155 William of Malmesbury, gra ii, 200: “quod dicebatur agmina mancipiorum in Anglia
coempta Danemarchiam solere mittere, puellas presertim quas decus et aetas pretiosio-
res facerent.”
The Habitual Aspect 177

many who fled footed it

fast to Hringstadir.156

The kenning of the women as ‘treasure-twigs,’ that is, ‘wearers of jewelry,’ not
uncommon in skaldic poetry, makes the prey being hunted here doubly attrac-
tive. Moreover, the apposition of war banners and reddened weapons on the
one hand, and slender girls on the other hand makes for a compelling meta-
phor. The hunt ends in Ringsted, making Magnús’ victory complete, for the
central Zealand thing site is located in the middle of the island and is therefore
the last refuge when attacked from the sea. (Perhaps Snorri felt special suffi-
sance when using the old stanza about the place, which had in his day become
the liturgical centre of the Danish royal house—after all he was describing the
attack by the son of Norway’s royal saint on Sven Estridsen, forebear of the
Valdemars.)
From Zealand, Magnús crossed to Funen with his fleet and booty:

Men must, Frey of battles,

remember to get to know in Danaveldi
the weaving-Gefn of Sven’s soldiers,
since there were three encounters.
On Fjón one may look forward
to a fair girl; it’s good to redden
blades; let’s join the forefront
of the force in weapons’ tumult.157

Power over women is bound up with fighting and winning, amassing and dis-
tributing booty, and the reputation this entailed for the leader of the group, a
group held together solely through the self-interest of the participants and
which could rapidly disperse with the onset of failure—and all this condensed
into skaldic stanzas, as they were collectively consumed in the ‘thick’ moments

156 MsG c. 31, stanza 54: “Spurði einu orði, / ǫld blóðroðna skjǫldu, / satt es, at svá mǫrg átti /
Selunds mær, hverr vé bæri. / Auðtróðu varð auðit / yfir of skóg at spróga. / Títt bar tý-
margr flótti / til Hringstaða iljar.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 32.
157 MsG c. 32, stanza 59: “Menn eigu þess minnask / manna Sveins at kanna, / – víga Freyr! –,
síz vǫru, / Vef-Gefn, þríar stefnur. / Vǫn es fagrs á Fjóni / fljóðs; dugir vǫpn at rjóða. / Verum
með fylkðu folk / Framm í vápna glammi.” Gefn is one of Odin’s many women, “­weaving-
Gefn” is a women kenning following the conventional pattern of ‘mythological name +
concrete term.’
178 Chapter 2

under the roof of the princely hall. Wide-ranging campaigns of devastation of

the kind described above had moved further into the Baltic by Jón Loptsson’s
time,158 but the Icelandic feud cases cited above make it clear that on a smaller
scale, the abduction of women was also put to use in local ‘everyday’ competi-
tion. If Bishop Þorlák resolved to force Iceland’s most powerful chieftain (and
his own patron) to cave in on the question of women, then he had truly set
himself a goal that at least equalled the agonistic potential of his predecessor’s
church-building.

15 From Canterbury to Camelot

Þorlák had lost the major clash. His Life now pivots temporally and spatially to
the western quarter (one of the three regions belonging to the diocese of Skál-
holt which Þorlák had not yet visited in his libertas campaign) and reports a
seemingly unconnected case, the independently documented “dispute with
Hǫgni at Bœr” (Hǫgna-Bœjarmál),159 which, however, only takes Þorlák’s two
major causes, the freedom of the church and sexual morality, to a new battle-
field. The original Icelandic readers and listeners of Þorlák’s Life would surely
have drawn the correct conclusion: following his defeat against the greatest,
the bishop tried his hand against a lesser opponent. His new adversary, Hǫgni,
was “quite wealthy, albeit without great kin” and, moreover, ordained as a
priest.160 There were two problems: Hǫgni refused to have his church, preten-
tiously constructed with imported Norwegian timber, consecrated by the bish-
op as long as he maintained his position on the right of disposition, “and said
it would instead be the most magnificent stable in Iceland if he did not have
his way”161—crowning a spectacular performance in ‘conspicuous consump-
tion’ with an even more remarkable witticism.
The other matter was delicate. Hǫgni’s daughter Snælaug “lived unmarried
at home. She gave birth to a child who was generally attributed to one of her
father’s workers, Gunnar, who was known as ‘cow-bitch.’ Hǫgni did not take
this amiss, and he valued his daughter as highly as before.”162 This lone remark

158 Still, at the time of Jón and Þorlák’s dispute, Archbishop Eystein issued a ruling against
“men who take women while on campaign” (“men[n] þeir er konur taka med herfangi,” di
i, no. 41, around 1176).
159 StS i, 131ff.
160 C. 23: “prestr at vígslu ok mjǫk auðigr en ættsmár.”
161 C. 23: “ok sagði at þat skyldi skrautligast hrossahús á Íslandi ef hann réði þessu eigi.”
162 C. 23: “Hon fœddi barn þat er kennt var verkmanni fóður hennar er Gunnarr hét ok var
kallaðr nautatík. Ekki hataði Hǫgni hana fyrir þat, ok ekki helt hann nú dóttur sinni minnr
The Habitual Aspect 179

nevertheless provides a telling insight into the ubiquity of brief relationships

tendentially related to polygyny (and in this case probably polyandry as well),
whose key precondition—or consequence—was the medieval North’s disin-
terest in the physical virginity of women. Perhaps such situations were no
more common than in other parts of Europe, but the social semantics were
certainly different and the consequences for the women involved therefore far
less serious: the sexual act itself played almost no role; whether or not there
was injury and insult depended entirely on whether the act was understood as
an attack. This was clearly not the case here, probably because as cowherd of
the head of the house the child’s father bore no symbolical relation to a com-
petitor, and therefore was meaningless.
A problem arose only when the daughter—meanwhile ‘married’ (keypt,
“bought” consensually) to a priest—heard the news of the death of a certain
Hrein, who had lived in a valley further into Gilsbakki and had not returned
from a trip to Norway. She now stated that it had been in fact this Hrein, not the
herdsman, who had fathered her child. She had not wanted to make the fact
public during his lifetime out of fear of his family. Now Hrein and Snælaug’s
present husband were related to each other in the fourth degree, and Bishop
Þorlák promptly called for the couple to separate. They did not comply; inter-
dict and excommunication followed; and Þorlák personally appeared at the
althing to publicly annul the relationship (again hjúskap “common household”
for coniugium). Snælaug and Þórð, “who loved one another very much” (un-
nusk þau mikit), agreed to separate (but still went on to have three children
together), and the bishop was subsequently able to settle a number of other
tricky situations through his tenacity.
Þorlák now stepped up the calibre of his opponents. Among others, he
moved against one of the sons of the mighty Hvamm-Sturla, who had “put into
his bed” a close relative of his wife,163 and escaped armed retaliation only
through divine intervention. With these successes, the bishop had somewhat
made up for his earlier defeat, and the narrative could return to his chief
adversary:

Bishop Þorlák made many allegations against Jón Loptsson in Oddi, con-
cerning fornication and the unlawful appropriation of property, but es-
pecially that he kept his [Þorlák’s] sister Ragnheið in his household with

á lopt en áðr þetta gerðisk.”—All three individuals, including the shepherd with the curi-
ous nickname, are independently attested in Sturlunga saga.
163 C. 25: “Þessi maðr lagði í rekkju hjá sér náfrændkonu húsfrú sinnar.” The ‘wife’ is here re-
ferred to with the Saxon loan word húsfrú “house-lady.”
180 Chapter 2

open defiance and disobedience while his wife still lived. And although
Jón was prepared to accommodate the bishop in other matters, yet he
was on no account willing to negotiate a separation from Ragnheið with
him. In the end, it got to the point that the bishop excommunicated him.
Jón was greatly distressed at having to suffer the bishop’s attacks on ac-
count of his metnað.164

So the bishop went all out—and Jón felt obliged to retaliate. The first blows are
struck through others; in the vita his impetuous son prepares attacks on the
bishop, which miraculously fail (on one occasion thick fog conceals the bishop
and his followers; on another occasion the house is already surrounded, the
bishop steps out of the door, and Jón’s son’s ax remains unmoving in the air).
“At this, Jón Loptsson does not leave the matter unfinished, however”165 and
organizes an attack himself, which is thwarted in turn by fog; one wonders
whether this is a ‘deescalating’ fog, like the snowstorm during the horse theft.
Finally, it comes to a showdown. Jón arranges it at the churchyard of Ytri
Skarð—tellingly, the farm worked by his and Ragnheið’s adult son Pál. This
time there is no talk of lying in wait at the fords. Jón lines up his armed men in
two rows, and he himself waits at the church door at the end of the gauntlet
formation: it is the provocative inversion of the staging of a public repentance
ceremony. Everything is ready for Canossa or Canterbury.

The bishop hurried forward and told his companions not to be afraid, “for
this game has been prepared for me, not you.” He was the first to ride into
the narrow passage, followed by the priest Orm, his chaplain, and then
the all rest one by one, until the bishop reached the entrance to the
churchyard, came before Jón, and dismounted. They could not enter for
the entrance was full of men, and there was no more avoiding it, as the
crowd surged in from all sides. No one spoke a greeting.
The bishop said, “What are you thinking of, Jón, denying me the
church?”
Jón answered, “Right now, that’s entirely up to you.”

164 C. 26: “Herra Þorlákr byskup kærði marga hluti á Jón Loptsson í Odda, bæði um hórdóma
ok rangan fjárafla ok einkanliga þat at hann helt Ragnheiði, systur hans, heima hjá sér
með fullu þrái ok óhlýðni at lifandi húsfrú sinni. En þó at Jón svaraði at nǫkkuru hófi um
aðrar ákærslur byskups þá vildi hann þó til øngrar sættar ganga at skilja við Ragnheiði.
Kom svá um síðir at byskup forboðaði <Jón>. Jón angraði mjǫk at þola stríðu af byskupi
sakir metnaðar …”
165 C. 27: “Jón Loptsson leggr þá eigi niðr upptekinn óþokka.”
The Habitual Aspect 181

The bishop said, “Then it appears to me as if you were intent on decid-

ing this matter. But I want to know why you are doing this.”
Jón replied, “You have denied me the church for a long time [bannat
mér kirkju] and announced that you wished to excommunicate me [heitit
at bannfœra mik]. So I desired a meeting where I had the upper hand.”
The bishop said, “It is true that I have imposed an interdict on you [lýst
forboðum yfir þér], and with reason. But I always held back from excom-
munication, because I thought you were reasonable enough to abandon
your aberrations. But if you do not, you can be sure that I will not hesitate
to excommunicate you, and perhaps it would have been better if this had
happened sooner.”

And now an astonishing twist:

“I know,” said Jón, “that your ban is lawful and duly justified [at bann þitt
er rétt ok skin nóg]. I will accept your decision in such a way that I move
to the Þórsmark [an impassable area 70 km east of Oddi] or any other
place where no one will commit an offence by having dealings with me,
and be there together with the woman you care so much about [ok vera
þar hjá konu þeiri sem þér vandlætið um], for as long as I see fit [sem mér
líkar]. Your ban should not bring me out of my difficult situation [skilja
mik frá vandræðum mínum], any more than the pressure of any other
man until God breathes it into my breast to release her of my own voli-
tion [til þess at Guð andar því í brjóst mér at skiljask viljandi við þau]. But
let me tell you, I will ensure you can never render this service to anyone
else.”
At these words, the bishop remained silent for a while. Finally, he said,
“I am resolved in this matter to endure whatever lies ahead. Do whatever
you will, for I am determined not to put off the ban any longer, given your
threats.”
Jón answered, “If you mean to do as you say, then there is nothing more
to be said.”

The ax could now fall. But it does not: this is Canossa or Canterbury in the con-
text of Icelandic conflict society. If a conflict that has become hopeless through
the agonistic automatisms turned unproductive, then a mediator steps in. This
role is here assumed by the priest, who stands next to Jón and now steps in
front of the bishop. In a long speech, he appeals to the bishop not to allow Jón
to add a greater sin (the threatened killing) to the lesser one; in any case, the
Church would be damaged less by episcopal forbearance than if it now lost
182 Chapter 2

“you both.” The bishop, his martyrdom thwarted, “initially looked at him with
displeasure.” As it then gradually becomes clear to him that he risks losing his
moral advantage in the eyes of the audience, he stubbornly relents: “It’s like
last time all over again, Jón, you have your way and not for the better.” Þorlák
cannot even obtain a deadline for the promised separation from Ragnheið:
“The bishop must leave the timing to me, if nothing more is to happen here
today. The implementation is mine to decide.”166 The bishop does not insist
further, Jón and his men stand aside and ride away.
Fundamentally, the scene of the church consecration at Höfðabrekka, with
which the conflict began, is repeated here as an anticlimax: the bishop is out-
matched, urged to relent, and forgoes martyrdom with a few suitable words
which appear somewhat colourless when set against Canterbury. Northern Eu-
rope is perhaps no place for clerical martyrs. Instead, Jón Loptsson is a martyr
to worldly love, who keeps face during open confrontation and will not even
have a deadline set—to be able to have one’s way (ráða) is the non-negotiable
core of a ‘man’—but nonetheless effectively capitulates. A decent interval of a
few months is then long enough to prove to himself and others that he is the
one who will choose when the time is right. He then ends without further ado
his love affair with Ragnheið, which had lasted “from childhood.” Þorlák has
the bittersweet pleasure of absolving both. A little later, as is customary with
previous concubines, she is provided with a husband and household, “and they
had many offspring.”167 So far, so unromantic.
One passage unsettles this picture. It is Jón’s abrupt offer to enter the wilder-
ness. Þórsmark is the very end of the inhabitable regions, a small area, now
wooded, reached from the south and from Oddi by a valley of alluvial sand,
prone to flooding, and enclosed by glaciers on the other sides. Here he wished
to live with Ragnheið, as a hermit of love far from the world, until the Holy
Spirit himself might bring this worldly love to an end. In his next sentence,
when the bishop does not take up the issue, he makes a barely concealed death
threat.
The influence of contemporary views on lay aristocratic couple relation-
ships (‘courtly love’) is unmissable. The first glance speaks for Tristan and Isol-
de, the second for Chrétien de Troyes (Tristrams saga ok Isöndar, a faithful

166 “Heita hlýtr byskup biðstundinni ef atgørðalaust skal vera, en ek mun ráða verða
framkvæmðinni.”
167 “… ok kom frá þeim mart manna.” The man’s name was Arnþór; all we learn about him is
that he was from the east (austmaðr), which is probably to be understood as meaning
mainland Scandinavia, perhaps eastern Iceland. Either way, Ragnheið is removed from
the region—and this, too, was unusual for a former woman of a magnate. In the end, the
brother and cleric who had insisted on permanent separation prevailed.
The Habitual Aspect 183

a­ daptation of the Anglo-Norman models, was completed in Norway in 1226 as

part of Hákon Hákonarson’s campaign of cultural Europeanization): Qui a le
cuer, si ait le cors, “he who has the heart shall also have the body,” reads the fa-
mous principle in Cligès, with which the French poet introduced the principle
of marriage by consent into lay culture. Above all, the great parallel is to Lance-
lot and Guinevere: a very similar crescendo occurs in the great Lancelot prose
cycles of the period after 1220, when, shortly before the end of the Arthurian
kingdom, Lancelot offers to go into exile with his queen so that the impending
war between the knights of the Round Table can be averted and Arthur can
continue ruling without blemish. The offer comes to nothing, and Camelot
falls.
Whatever the case may be with Western European ‘influences,’ borrowings,
adaptations, the details of which must remain unverifiable: for a brief mo-
ment, the Jón of Oddaverja þáttr is a courtly lover from the same Anglo-French
sphere as his opponent, Thomas Becket’s double. However, Jón’s role is so in-
congruent that he cannot sustain it for anywhere near as long as Þorlák, who
comes quite close to martyrdom on at least a few occasions.
This incongruence is one of the reasons why the ‘source value’ of the Icelan-
dic romance of Jón and Ragnheið is sometimes rejected and often called into
question. The editor of the new standard edition in the Íslenzk Fornrit series,
Ásdís Egilsdóttir, makes use of very traditional arguments to do so: if Ragnheið
had two sons with Jón around 1155, she could hardly have then had further
children with a Norwegian she married thirty years later.168 The argument is in
itself not entirely convincing, for assuming an extreme case with the first birth
at fifteen years of age, another birth at just under 45 is perfectly possible with-
out requiring a Sarah. Crucially, however, the argument takes an all-or-nothing
approach, for a biographical impossibility may derail the chronological se-
quence without affecting the veracity of individual episodes. After all, some
really prominent figures were involved in the events which took place, accord-
ing to the most optimistic estimates, about fifty years before Oddaverja þáttr
was set down in writing, and according to the most pessimistic, around a cen-
tury earlier. We have no traces of earlier written versions of Oddaverja þáttr but
fragments of a Latin vita written on the occasion of Þorlák’s translation in 1198,
a ceremony presided over by Bishop Pál, the son of Jón and Ragnheið, whose
farm had been the site of the final encounter. There are therefore some good
reasons to expect a fair degree of factual evidence in Þorláks saga.
If we do not want the primacy of the text to turn into the tyranny of the text,
the historian may ask the question: did Jón and Ragnheið ‘really’ love each

168 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Formáli,” in Biskupa sögur, vol. 2 (2002), xl.

184 Chapter 2

other? From their childhood to old age, when the implacable brother and
churchman separated them? The question may be asked precisely in these
terms, for the words are there: elska (“to love”),169 unna (“to love,” cf. Old Eng-
lish unnan), ást (“love,” nominalization of unna).
The dossier: they have two sons together. This is the only non-lexical evi-
dence of their relationship, so we know that they had a relationship for several
years in the mid-1150s (Jón was 27; we can only speculate about Ragnheið’s
age). We only have the testimony of Oddaverja þáttr for its beginning, duration,
and continuity. It is possible to simply maintain that Jón and Ragnheið’s rela-
tionship only lasted for a few years around 1155 (after all, the text explicitly
states that Ragnheið also had children with other men, and even if the North
had a comparatively relaxed attitude towards such things, it is hardly likely
that an agonist like Jón could have afforded to share her with other men). The
bishop’s verbal outpourings would then merely be old grudges, which he (or
his listeners) used to accentuate his current denouncements of Jón’s polygyny.
To me, this seems possible, but implausible—Ragnheið plays too great a role in
the conflict in its literary form, and she would hardly be suitable as an a­ rgument
if she was just one of several probable ex-partners, and she would be, more-
over, a blot on Þorlák’s—not Jón’s—shield.
On the other hand, an actual lifelong love, which even prompts Jón’s of-
fer to enter the hermitage, before it tapers off so unspectacularly, is similarly
­implausible—precisely because it tapers off in this way. It seems far preferable
to assume that Jón never definitively separated from the mother of two of his
most promising sons over the decades, never ‘sent her away,’ that she was an
established part of the Oddi household and no one (besides Þorlák) thought
anything of it. There are less consistent lifelong partnerships.
Why the incongruence then, why Tristan and Cligès and Lancelot? The brief,
seemingly unmotivated introduction of a frame of reference wholly different
from the saga conventions, which immediately disappears again without con-
sequence, further ennobles the aristocrat. The Jón of action, once challenged
by Þorlák, must hold onto Ragnheið at any cost because he cannot afford to
lose her. (He renounces her in the end, but as part of a quid pro quo, ostenta-
tiously not a defeat, which for the moment can be dressed up as his own free
will: “þann tíma sem mér líkar.”) The literary Jón, however, would present a fair-
ly lacklustre figure if all he ever did was insist on his right to take and keep the
women he wanted. His counterpart, Bishop Þorlák, may already have chosen
Thomas Becket as a role model in the lived world, and ‘lived’ this model—the

169 Probably connected to the Indo-European *al- “grow; nurture” (Latin alere) with the suffix
-isk-, so “to nurture, nurse, care for (someone)”; see Collitz, “Old Norse elska” (1924).
The Habitual Aspect 185

literary Þorlák is, in any case, an Icelandic Becket; his vita even places the date
of his episcopal ordination on 29 December, St Thomas’ feast day. Only there
cannot be an Icelandic martyrdom.
It is similar for Jón. The fashionable garb of the courtly lay culture of conti-
nental provenance lends a contemporary ‘European’ gloss to his customary
polygyny. The ‘Camelot Jón’ honours his damsel, not because he cannot afford
to relinquish her in the face of her brother’s challenge, but because he ‘loves’
her. But like Thomas Becket, Lancelot founders on the reality of Icelandic con-
flict and consensus culture. In his ‘Lancelot’ speech, in which he offers self-
exile in the wilderness of lasting love, Jón does not declare—as we might ini-
tially think from a quick reading—that no one can separate him from Ragnheið.
What he says is: “Nobody can separate me from my difficult position” (skilja
mik frá vandræðum mínum). Elsewhere in the sagas, the ‘difficulties’ (van-
dræðir) such as that which Jón here calls his ‘love’ are a struggle against superi-
ority, a reckless attack without the possibility of retreat, a voluntary visit to a
wrathful prince, and the like.170 Honourable challenges, all of them. It is these
(við þau), and not the woman,171 which he will “divorce” only when the Holy
Spirit prompts him. In the end, it is the pronouns that betray what the whole
dispute over Jón and Ragnheið was actually about.
Cultural particularism once again leaves its mark on the saga, which is nei-
ther a vita nor a romance and therefore cannot glorify the bishop or demonize
his opponent who, in turn, can only be brave, not loving. But that does not
make the story of the chieftain, the bishop, and his sister an Icelandic excep-
tion. Some aspects of it are context-dependent, above all the fact that it was
written down, and how. Yet in Aquitaine and Francia, in Saxony and Swabia,
too, the powerful liked to be seen with others’ women, “two or three at a time,
whenever word got around of someone having a young and pretty wife or

170 Cf. Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. vand-: “difficulty, trouble,” in the plural (as here) also
“hostilities, discord”; a hopeless situation could be described as vandráðit (“difficult to
master”); a vandræðafélag is a partnership in hard times, vandræðakost a “difficult choice.”
Hallfreð Óttarson, who was court poet around the year 1000, first for pagan Jarl Hákon and
then for his successful opponent, the missionary king Óláf Tryggvason, was famous for
provoking his masters to the point where his life was in danger, which earned him the
respectful epithet vandræðaskáld “the poet who gets himself into trouble.”
171 “… at skiljask viljandi við þau” “to voluntarily separate from them”: skiljask is a reciprocal
form of skilja “divorce, separate”; þau the pronoun acc. pl. neuter., which refers to the
plural vandræðir “situations difficult to master.” The pronoun acc. sg. fem., referring to the
kona “woman” (Ragnheið) mentioned, would be hana. So the translation quoted above
(“until God breathes it into my breast to release her”) is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is
rather something like: “until God breathes it into my breast to give up the struggle against
adversity.”
186 Chapter 2

daughter; and those who would not be seduced were handed over by applying
pressure,” and they did not like to be reprehended for it by leading church-
men.172 And perhaps they, too, often acted out of quite different reasons than
passion or love—non libidine sed ob nobilitatem. The comparison with the his-
tory of Jón and Ragnheið allows at least the suspicion that while the sources
elsewhere in Europe are less explicit, the interests and conflicts there were per-
haps no less complex than in Iceland.

172 For example, the East Frankish king (and emperor) Henry iv in Bruno’s book on the Sax-
on war (1070/82), c. 6: “Binas vel ternas simul concubinas habebat; nec his contentus,
cuiuscumque filiam vel uxorem iuvenem et formosam audierat, si seduci non poterat, sibi
violenter adduci praecipiebat.” The pretty women and daughters of other men, according
to Bruno, came on top of Henry’s apparently more regular “concubines,” two or three at
any one time—a bad record indeed. Of course, Bruno is partisan (see Althoff and Coué,
“Pragmatische Geschichtsschreibung” [1992]), but comparison with Jón Loptsson’s Ice-
land may make it possible to concede a certain factuality to the reproaches instead of ei-
ther condemning Henry iv as wantonly libidinous or defending him from malicious slan-
der (cf. Struve, “War Heinrich iv. ein Wüstling?” [2004]).
 Chapter 3

The Agonistic Aspect

1 Snorri Takes a Bath

One evening, while Snorri was sitting in the bath, the talk turned to chiefs.
Some said that there was no chief like Snorri and none could match Snor-
ri in terms of kinship. Snorri agreed that his relatives were not insignifi-
cant people.1

Talk of competition followed the great men right into the hot springs, a pre-
ferred place for momentous conversations. Perhaps Jón, Ragnheið, and Bishop
Þorlák were also gossiped about in the baths. The charming thing about this
vignette from Sturlunga saga is that the chieftain bathing in admiration is
none other than Snorri Sturluson, whose authority as author of the great
chronicle of the kings and Eddic poetry sometimes makes us forget that he
himself was one of those magnates about whom—or more precisely, about
whose predecessors—he wrote. For him, relentless self-measuring was not a
studied cultural phenomenon but an everyday habitus.
His depictions of communicative processes are often strongest in such situ-
ations. Among the most famous is the “comparison of men” (mannjafnað) of
the kings and brothers Sigurð (r. 1103–30) and Eystein (r. 1103–23), sons of Mag-
nús Barelegs and Jón Loptsson’s maternal uncles. The episode provides a good
example for illustrating another aspect of medieval magnate polygyny, which I
would like to call the ‘agonistic.’ In the preceding chapter, the focus was on the
‘habitual’ aspect under the conditions of an extremely competitive society. I
suggest to differentiate the actual ‘agonistic’ aspect of polygyny from the prac-
tices illustrated above: the ‘habitual’ aspect refers to the significance which the
fact of polygynous behaviour has for the self-representation and perception of
prominent men. As has been shown, this behaviour can take on characteristic
traits under the conditions of an extremely competitive culture. However, in a
case such as that of Jón Loptsson, it is always about defending his reputation as
a “man of women” at all costs; the women themselves are not at issue (Jón and
Þorlák were not vying for Ragnheið). The ‘agonistic’ aspect is about individual

1 StS i, 319: “Þat var eitt kveld, er Snorri sat í laugu, at talat var um hǫfðingja. Sǫgðu menn, at þá
var engi hǫfðingi slíkr sem Snorri ok þá mátti engi hǫfðingi keppa við hann fyrir sakir mægða
þeira, er hann átti. Snorri sannaði þat, at mágar hans væri eigi smámenni.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_006

188 Chapter 3

women who become the subject of competition between men. The mannjaf­
nað of the kings Sigurð and Eystein offers a vivid example of this.

2 Mannjafnað—“Comparison of Men”

A Norse ‘comparison of men’ (mannjafnað) is a literary-rhetorical and presum-

ably also social-practical convention.2 It is encountered in sagas of all kinds, in
eddic poetry, and in Latin historiography,3 it appears prominently in Old Eng-
lish poetry4 and more generally from ancient Greece up to the ethnographical
accounts of present-day societies. It must therefore be emphasized that the
significance of “comparisons of men” in medieval Northern Europe is not r­ eally
the phenomenon as such but the fact that it is regularly seen as a central politi-
cal event. For example, the first ‘summit’ of the kings of Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden in Konghelle (Kungälv) in 1101 takes the form of such a comparison in
the saga accounts.5 Because of its rather variable context, course, and out-
come, the mannjafnað (“men-even-ing” from jafn “even, equal”) can hardly be
called a ‘ritual,’ but it is certainly one of the conventional means of staging ago-
nistic tensions. Thus Eystein says in the opening of his mannjafnað with his
brother Sigurð: “It has often been customary while drinking for men to make a
comparison of men, and so I would have it now.”6
At this point, the brothers’ shared rule has already been one long contest for
a decade and half (a third brother and co-king, Óláf, has died shortly before).
So it appears in Snorri’s Magnússona saga, and so it must also have appeared

2 Von See, Altnordische Rechtswörter (1964), 242–48, views jafnaðr as “the typical Norse con-
cept of justice.” Among its etymological counterparts are Middle Low Saxon eveninge, Latin
aequitas, Gothic ibnassus. Its typical use is ‘making even’ the shares of an inheritance and, by
extension, reaching ‘equitable’ settlements by arbitrage. Cf. Marcel M.H. Bax and Tineke Pad-
mos, “Senna–Mannjafnaðr,” in EMSc 571ff., with further references; Marcel M.H. Bax and
Tineke Padmos, “Verbal Dueling” (1983), 149–74; Swenson, Performing Definitions (1991),
49ff.—I agree with reservations raised by Bax/Padmos over the generic distinction between
senna (‘dispute’) and the actual ‘comparison of men,’ whose principal features are considered
the essential equality of opponents and the rule that the speaker’s individual remarks refer
only to themselves, thus precluding direct insults against one’s opponent. The source term
mannjafnað (jafn adj. “equal, the same; equal birth”; jafna v. “level; compare, equate”) already
implies the element of parity.
3 Saxo v, 3,17; the most in-depth analysis remains Svennung, “Eriks und Götvaras Wortstreit”
(1942).
4 Cf. Ong, Fighting for Life (1981) (methodologically based on findings from the present day);
Clover, “Unferþ Episode” (1980) (on Beowulf); Parks, Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative (1990).
5 MsB c. 15f.
6 Mss c. 21: “Sá ǫlsiðr hefir opt verit, at menn taka sér jafnaðarmenn. Vill ek hér svá láta vera.”
The Agonistic Aspect 189

to his contemporaries, considering the pair’s diverging but complementary

styles of rule. Over twenty chapters in Heimskringla, Sigurð is built up as dark-
haired, powerfully built, and taciturn, a stern protector of the law and attentive
to its form and custom, in contrast to Eystein, a mid-sized, light-haired, blue-
eyed gifted speaker and scholar, who was popular on all sides. A fraternal war,
such as had already threatened to break out in Norway on several occasions in
the past and would become the norm over the following century, is expected at
any moment, but this is precisely what does not happen: the dissimilar broth-
ers, who sometimes come close to war in the saga narrative maintain their
tension throughout a quarter of a century.
Naturally, mannjafnað begins at birth. According to Snorri the two brothers’
father, King Magnús Barelegs (r. 1093–1103), at the time of his ‘marriage’ to Mar-
grét, the daughter of the Swedish king Ingi,

had previously had some children that are named: a son of his was called
Eystein, and his mother was of low rank. A second was called Sigurð, and
he was a winter younger. His mother was called Þóra. The third was called
Óláf, and he was by far the youngest. His mother was Sigríð, daughter of
Saxi in Vík, a noble person in Trøndelag. She was the king’s frilla.7

The king’s (at least) four women are placed in a social continuum reminiscent
of Saxo’s treatment of Erik Ejegod’s women discussed in Chapter 1. At one end,
the nameless woman of “low rank,” at the other, the magnate’s daughter who
had previously claimed the first place and who was now being replaced by the
Swedish princess—without this granting the latter a different status besides
her prominence (hann fekk Margrétar dróttningar “he received of queen Mar-
grét’s”). That is already something, even if it is not ‘marriage.’ We have seen that
in the case of Jón Loptsson, whose mother Þóra was another of Magnús’s chil-
dren, and his heirs, the women seemingly owed their eminence to their sons,
whereas here the Swedish “queen” (king’s daughter) Margrét assumed the lead-
ing position by virtue of her origin and political importance, even though she
never had a son with King Magnús (after his death, she married the Danish

7 MsB c. 16: “En Magnús konungr átti áðr nǫkkur bǫrn, þau er nefnd eru. Eysteinn hét sonr
hans, ok var hans móðerni lítit. Annarr hét Sigurðr, ok var hann vetri yngri. Þóra hét móðir
hans. Óláfr hét inn þriði, ok var hann miklu yngstr. Móðir hans var Sigríð, dóttir Saxa í Vík,
gǫfugs manns í Þrándheimi. Hon var friðla konungs.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foul-
kes, vol. 3 (2015), 139. The bond with Margrét is denoted through the verb fá “get” + genitive
­(metonymically for the transfer of goods, conventionally understood as Muntehe), and her
arrival from Sweden with an “honourable entourage” (“vegligt fǫruneyti”): the maximum ef-
fort is made, moving Margrét into first place in the relational framework of the king’s women.
190 Chapter 3

king Niels and then stood at the beginning of a relatively unsuccessful line of
the royal house there), while all three named sons from other women jointly
succeeded their father in Norway. This indicates that the saga provides a mini-
mum catalogue here: as Þóra, the daughter married to the Oddaverjar, shows,
King Magnús had an unspecified number of additional children and probably
women beyond those “named” in later sagas.8
As things stand, one would in fact assume that of the three ruling sons of the
king, it would be Óláf, the son of the magnate’s daughter, who outshone his two
brothers from less prominent women. The opposite is the case. Although he
died aged seventeen, old enough for the usual eulogies, his characterization is
more colourless than any second-rate king in the Heimskringla. A few brief
words describe Óláf as an affable friend of the people whose death was regret-
ted to some extent; nothing is said about the deeds of his twelve-year reign.
The situation is quite different with the two ‘lower’-born brothers. They advo-
cate and practise different ‘styles of government,’ and at the end of their saga,
we find it impossible to tell which style is preferable, or even which one Snorri
wants us to prefer. We certainly cannot go by their respective origins: Sigurð is
somewhat higher-born but younger than Eystein. Anyway Óláf the highest-
born is also the least successful of the three; in fact, Snorri balances advantages
and disadvantages so finely that there must be method in it: a mannjafnað only
works when there are no handicaps either way.
The great scene is set shortly after Óláf’s death. It takes place when the trav-
elling kings cross paths: the pair are being entertained in farms situated close
to one another, and a joint feast is inevitable. The atmosphere is tense (Snorri
blames the bad beer), which provides Eystein, the more eloquent, with the
pretext to force the situation and ask his famously silent brother to commence
a “good-humoured conversation” (skemmtanarrœða) to improve the mood.
Sigurð refuses point blank (“speak as much as you please, and let me say noth-
ing for both of us!”) and then tries to evade Eystein’s ever more elaborate words
by waiting it out. But when Eystein becomes directly offensive—“Now then, I
call you, brother, my competitor (jafnaðarmann ‘the man I’ll be compared
with’)!”—Sigurð no longer has a choice.
The form of the mannjafnað requires that each allegation is accepted and
then returned with greater intensity. Eystein makes the first move: the brothers
are not only equal in rank and wealth, but also in terms of their origin and edu-
cation (this claim would appear to contradict Snorri’s authorial statement dis-
cussed above, so it is interesting he lets his Eystein make it). According to the

8 The genealogical survey ii/3, in Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, vol. 3, Appendix,
lists eight women.
The Agonistic Aspect 191

‘flyting’ convention, Sigurð cannot now simply assert the opposite, but must
outdo Eystein: although a year younger, he regularly knocked down his elder
when wrestling. The dialogue on children’s games continues for a few exchang-
es, but of course it is not ‘childish.’ Besides the fact that 13th-century saga audi-
ences knew well enough that children’s games could be serious to the point of
being lethal,9 the magi/úmagi gender binomial is transparent with a succinct
sexual posture: there was a time when Eystein lay on his back before Sigurð.
The undertone of sexualized aggression remains present. Some of the com-
monplaces of rulers’ qualities (íþróttir) are dealt with: rowing, skiing, but also
physical size and beauty. In terms of more original content, when Eystein cites
his legal knowledge and eloquence, Sigurð counters that he does not waste his
time on legal tricks (lǫgprettir, with the nuance “deceit, guile”), and that fine
words only have value if backed up; Eystein merely tells everyone what they
want to hear. Eystein must not simply disagree but has to return the challenge
with a vengeance: if it is the way of kings to want to please their petitioners,
and if he can please everyone, that certainly suits him—Sigurð prefers to snub
them all and let them expect the worst, but in that he can be counted upon.
From here on, they argue with sharp words. Sigurð claims that his journey to
Jerusalem—undertaken in coordination with Eystein, who temporarily ruled
alone—has brought him fame “while you sat at home as your father’s daugh-
ter.” Eystein is defamed as unmanly, and everyone waits to see how Eystein
will retaliate, all the more so because the fame of Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer
(Jórsalfari) was indeed largely based on the fact that he was one of the first
Northern European rulers to exploit the enormous habitual potential of cru-
sading.10 By 1230 the requisite episodes had long become standardized: fight-
ing with Muslims in the Mediterranean (Nordic cosmography makes them
blámenn “blue men”), visiting the holy places, swimming across the Jordan
(not much of a feat in fact but Northmen obviously envisaged the Jordan in
terms of the width and currents of Scandinavian rivers), acquiring relics, and
as grand finish, a sojourn in Constantinople, the Great City, receiving fantastic
honours from the “king of the Greeks.” Eystein gives what he admits to be an
answer he has worked out in advance: it had been, after all, he who had outfit-
ted Sigurð for his journey as if he were a sister (the ‘unmanliness’ defamation
is thus returned), and, besides, he built five new churches and a royal court,

9 Cf. the famous first homicide of the Icelandic saga hero Egil, aged seven, during a ball
game (Egils saga c. 40). The child’s age is supposed to be indicative of the eminence of the
later hero, much like his first composition of a skaldic stanza at the age of three. This
assumes, however, that such events were deemed commonplace among older children.
10 See most recently Krüger, “Rezeption von Pilgerreisen nordischer Herrscher” (2002);
Etting, “Crusades, Pilgrimages” (2004).
192 Chapter 3

constructed a harbour, and secured waterways by building beacons “while you

sent blue-men to the devil down there in Arabia, which I regard as of little use
to our kingdom!”11
With this sober assessment everything has been said about both kings’
reigns, and the escalation enters the next round. Sigurð now declares that
when he swam across the Jordan, he knotted a cloth into a bush, and spoke a
verse (formáli) over it that would strike Eystein if he did not go there and untie
the knot with his own hand. This is an open challenge, moreover one tinged
with another sexual defamation,12 so Eystein now needs to land a blow him-
self: if he had only desired it, he could long ago have placed his own “knot”
around the neck of his brother, who had returned from the East unaccompa-
nied and powerless, and it would have been one that Sigurð could never
untie.
The silence which now falls begins to feel ominous. But Snorri comes with
an anticlimax: the brothers part resentfully, “yet the peace between them last-
ed as long as both lived.”

3 Social Rhetoric: the Contest for Borghild í Dali

I have given some space to the kings’ mannjafnað to illustrate the extent to
which the agonistic political discourse itself is sexually coloured, even when it
is ostensibly about crusading or trade infrastructure. We may also assume that
this colouring is reflected in political practice. In the chapters building up to
the mannjafnað, Snorri and other kings’ sagas include the story of Borghild,
daughter of the prosperous Óláf í Dali of Østfold, an “extraordinarily beautiful
woman, wise and very knowledgeable.”13 We may be fairly optimistic about
transmission since the royal brothers were the uncles of Jón Loptsson, with
whom Snorri Sturluson grew up and who provided him with several eyewit-
ness reports, so I shall regard the concatenation of events as basically factual.

11 Mss c. 21: “… meðan þú brytjaðir blámenn fyrir fjándann á Serklandi. Ætla ek þat lítit gagn
ríki váru.”
12 On magic (seið), as is particularly characteristic of Odin in the mythological stories but is
also practised by many people in the sagas (usually women), and its contact with the
‘open’ gender boundary, see Grambo, “Problemer knyttet til studiet av seid” (1991); Jo-
chens, Images of Women (1996), 74; Strömbäck, Sejd och andra studier i nordisk själs­
uppfattning (2000) (contains Strömbäck’s 1935 dissertation and studies commenting on
it); Solli, Seid (2002).
13 Mss c. 19: “hon var kvinna fríðust ok vitr kona ok fróð mjǫk.”
The Agonistic Aspect 193

While King Eystein spends the winter in Viken (the Oslofjord region), Óláf í
Dali moves into the royal residence of Borg (now Sarpsborg) with his family,
possibly in the hope of increased proximity to the king in more ways than one;
at any rate, his daughter was with the king so often that people began to talk. If
Óláf í Dali had hoped for a royal grandson, he was disappointed; when Eystein
moved north next year, his “conversations” (the standard euphemism in saga
prose) with Borghild remained unfruitful. The following winter, it was King
Sigurð who pitched his winter quarters in the region, some two hundred kilo-
metres further south in his favourite town Konghelle. Meanwhile, “Borghild
Óláfsdóttir heard people spoke evil about her and King Eystein, about their
conversations and their friendship.” In other words, as King Sigurð assumed
control over the region, it seemed prudent to have never been in a fruitless li-
aison with faraway Eystein. Apparently the situation was considered extremely
serious. Borghild went to the central town of Borg “and fasted for the trial by
iron, and carried the iron in this matter, and became wholly pure.”14 This, how-
ever, had the effect of focusing Sigurð’s attention on Borghild and made it im-
possible for him to ignore her further. Combined with Borghild’s evident brav-
ery and already proven credentials as a king’s woman, the challenge was
irresistible. “When King Sigurð heard the news, he rode to Óláf í Dali’s farm in
a day, though it usually takes two days, and arrived that night. There, he took
Borghild as his frilla and carried her away with him.”15
Sigurð’s approach in this matter is as different from that of his consensual,
law-abiding brother Eystein as the rest of his reign. Once more, he proved him-
self to be just as harsh as Eystein accuses him of being in the mannjafnað cited
above. His approach looks like a regular abduction: formally, the word used
here, frillutak, is only the ‘technical term’ for establishing a relationship with a
frilla, but it has the semantic nuance of ‘robbery’ in the sense of ‘action without
the consent of relatives,’16 a nuance that is emphasized by the nocturnal intru-
sion. Sigurð also leaves no doubt about the state of things (unlike his brother,

14 Mss c. 19: “Borghildr Óláfsdóttir heyrði þann kvitt, at menn illmæltu þau Eystein konung
um tal sitt ok vináttu. Þá fór hon til Borgar ok fastaði þar til járns ok bar járn fyrir mál þetta
ok varð vel skír.”—The final adjective skír “clean” combines the literal sense (her wounds
were clean) with the figurative (she was ‘cleansed of suspicion’).
15 Mss c. 19: “En er þetta spurði Sigurðr konungr, þá reið hann þat á einum degi, er miklar
váru tvær dagleiðir, ok kom fram í Dali at Óláfs, var þar um nótt. Þá tók hann Borghildi
frillutaki ok hafði hana brot með sér.”
16 Cf. Egils saga c. 56, where a litigant in the central legal dispute casts doubt on his oppo-
nent’s claims to inheritance by claiming that their mother was “seized and later taken as
a frilla, and that without the consent of the relatives” (“hernumin en tekin síðan frillutaki,
ok ekki at frændaráði”). It is not the form of the relationship but the way it came about
that makes it lower status. See above, Chapter 2.
194 Chapter 3

who had left room for interpretation) but simply takes the girl with him. A son
is born to them in due course and receives the royal name Magnús. Sigurð does
not, however, send him to be raised with Borghild’s family, but instead to a
magnate family on Bjarkey in northern Norway, not far from modern Tromsø,
and thus as far away as possible from his maternal kin: again, he does every-
thing to satisfy his reputation as a hardliner in the royal office.
And yet this stylization does not completely cover the fact that the process
may actually have been consensual, despite King Sigurð’s staging it as a ‘rob-
bery.’ The reaction of Borghild and her family is not mentioned. In itself, this is
no indicator one way or another, and is moreover not uncommon in the sagas,
which tended to dispense with explicit commentary, preferring to incorporate
the reaction in the plot. In fact, the story stops here: Borghild and her father do
not appear again in the saga. The son Magnús is built up as the designated suc-
cessor of Sigurð, who became sole ruler after Eystein’s death but soon found
himself in competition with Harald gilli (Irish gille Críst “servant of Christ” for
christicola), who arrived from Ireland and introduced himself as the son of
Magnús Barelegs, alleging to have been fathered during Magnús’s last British
campaign. After Sigurð’s death, a conflict broke out between Borghild’s son
Magnús and the Irish pretender, which was won by the latter. Borghild’s broth-
er Hákon Fauk remained with the captured Magnús to the end, as one of his
last two followers: the consequences were dire for both.
This may go some way towards indicating that Borghild was not in fact
snatched away from her family; we might even speculate whether Sigurð’s ar-
rival was not highly welcome. To allow the valuable son that the relationship
produced to be raised in Norwegian Bjarkey, in one of the most powerful Nor-
wegian chieftain’s houses, by a man who had proved to be a faithful compan-
ion of King Magnús Barelegs, may have meant not deprivation, but security
and honour. And when, some twenty years later, we find Borghild’s brother as
the last companion of Magnús, loser in the power struggle, we see the frilla’s
son’s strongest support coming from his mother’s family. In other words, the
family group had good reasons to stake a lot on Borghild’s royal son to assert its
position which they owed to their proximity to the king, contrived, carefully
and not without setbacks, through their daughter.
However, the strategy of Borghild’s father Óláf í Dali could only succeed if,
besides the prerequisites—periodic geographic proximity to the competing
royal winter households, and, of course, a daughter suitable as a king’s woman—
the agonistic mechanism could be counted on to work. It is only a slight exag-
geration to state that the moment just one of the kings noticed Borghild, she
was bound to be taken by one of them.
The Agonistic Aspect 195

4 Women in Mannjafnað

It is tempting to read an episode like this as just one of so many examples of

the winner taking it all—a connection that might range from Troy and Plato
through ancient and Byzantine narrative traditions to Montesquieu, not to
speak of more recent instances.17 The Christian Middle Ages were certainly
alive to the model: “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before
us.”18
This side of the ubiquitous rivalry of men over women, the Middle Ages
have some famous stylizations of such rivalry: the lady as “prey” in the compe-
tition of landless knightly young men, be it in the game of courtly love or in the
harsh reality of the frustrating hope of a wealthy heiress as a wife, is a well-
known figure of scholarship on chivalry and feudal society.19 Even if the wom-
an is not the coveted prize in her own person—or enters into a system of sub-
stitution in such a curious fashion as in the tournament at the court of the
counts of Champagne, where the ladies had to present a pike to the victor20—
she is indispensable as a resonance body of great male deeds. Such rivalries are
also present in the Latin North, for instance in an episode from Saxo about a
Danish campaign against Sweden in around 1150:

Two nobles were so seized by desire at the reports of a Swedish maiden

that a fierce war of words broke out between them. The king claimed that
the right to gift her in ‘marriage’ belonged to him, and promised to award
this to whoever appeared the stronger after the conquest of Sweden. This
promise provoked a great contest between the two rivals.21

17 Plato, Politeia v, 460b, on the necessity of giving the best girls to the best young men (the
“guards”). According to Nicholas of Damascus (1st century b.c.), the Samnites, supposed
to be descendants of the Spartans, had the custom of choosing the best youth each year,
who then had first choice of girl, and so on. The theme would be taken up again in Con-
stantine Porphyrogennetos’s collection (10th c.), and later by Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des
lois viii, 16, as “Belle coûtume des Samnites.”
18 Hebr 12:1: “per patientiam curramus propositum nobis certamen.”
19 See the essential Georges Duby, “De l’amour que l’on dit courtois,” in Georges Duby, Mâle
moyen âge (21990), 74–82.
20 Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal (1986), 59.
21 Saxo xiv, 11,3: “Duo quoque ex proceribus eius ad opinionem unius Suetice uirginis libidi-
nis emulatione correpti magnis inter se iurgiis dissidere coeperunt. Cuius nuptias rex in
beneficio suo reponere par estimans capta Suetia fortiori connubium pollicetur. Quo
promisso libidinis emulis magnum uirtutis certamen ingessit.”
196 Chapter 3

The locus classicus for the ‘intrusion’ of women into the sphere of martial
fame and competition is probably the account in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
­Historia regum Britannie of the witty (facetae) women who, standing on the
wall, watched the martial games of the knights, “who for the sake of their love
grow ever nobler.”22 In a study on the apostrophes for women in skaldic poetry,
the American Norse scholar Roberta Frank has pointed out that this episode
from the founding text of high medieval Arthurian literature is indeed early in
a Western European context but that the literary figuration of female specta-
tors or even umpires in the great deeds of men starts at least a century earlier
in skaldic poetry.23 We thus encounter here early evidence for women playing
a central role in the staging of politically relevant agons.
These deeds need not be warlike in a strict sense. In the sixty-five stanzas in
the most prestigious of all skaldic metres, the dróttkvætt (“lord’s verse”) which
contain a direct address to one or more women, the formal addressees are told,
among other things, about a lucrative haul of herring or a successfully mas-
tered shipwreck. This only appears strange until we remember the íþrótt cata-
logues, which included quite practical skills for overcoming serious emergen-
cies in Northern ecological conditions, such as an acute famine. What mattered
was that such acts (and their translation into well-wrought words) also entered
the competition. The observing women were probably so well suited to be ref-
erees because they themselves were not involved in it.
Unlike, say, the envois of courtly poetry, these verses are not ‘addressed’ to
any particular woman. The salutation usually occurs by means of customary
kennings for women such as “goddess of beer” or “tree of gold rings,” rarely
simply as “woman,” “girl,” and occasionally collectively: “The proud women
should look out of the houses quickly, they will see nothing but our dust cloud.”
Such collective addresses are directed at society at large as represented by its
women. To modify a well-known theorem of gender studies, it is as though the
masculine deeds were being reported indirectly through ‘the female gaze’ in
order to be credited to the account of the respective hero. (Of course, the ac-
tual community which produced and consumed dróttkvætt verses was very
much a male one, but not exclusively so.24)

22 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britannie c. 157 (in Faral, ed., La légende arthuri­
enne, vol. 3 [1929], 63–303): “milites pro amore illarum nobiliores.”
23 Frank, “Why Skalds Address Women” (1990); cf. Frank, Old Norse Court Poetry (1978). Fi-
djestøl, “Ut no glitter” (1976), considers this phenomenon a residue of former invocations
of protective deities in battle (valkyries, etc.) that had faded into a literary convention,
and does not envisage any social relevance.
24 Cf. Lindow, “Riddles, Kennings” (1975); Ballif Straubhaar, “Ambiguously Gendered” (2002).
The Agonistic Aspect 197

The primary extra-textual addressees of these verses are, of course, their

male recipients—but there were others too. Women can only be plausibly
written into literature as a “supervisory body for safeguarding male standards”25
if they were supposed to perform a similar function in reality. Taken to its ex-
tremes, theirs is the function of the “whetter,” the woman who reminds ‘her’
men of unfulfilled duties of vengeance, using words or gestures of exquisite
ingenuity, occasionally to the point of rekindling a conflict when all the men
involved are willing to compromise.26 Carol Clover and Else Mundal in particu-
lar have convincingly argued for the plausibility of the ‘whetting’ role for wom-
en in actual society.27 According to them, women had the role of vicariously
formulating general opinion about the actions—or lack of action—of indi-
vidual men. The appeal to women in a dróttkvætt that narrated prestigious
deeds was the verbalized form of such assessment.28
Now these are not actually polygynous situations—even when a man
such as Sighvat Þórðarson, confidant of Saint Olav, calls upon the women
of the whole episcopal town of Skara in his ‘Verses on a Journey to the East’
(Austrfararvísur), which recount a daring diplomatic mission to the Swedish
king Olof Skötkonung. Yet the role of women in assessing the agon adds to
the pithiness of situations where the agon does directly involve women. In his
competition with his brother Eystein, King Sigurð had to be careful to succeed
in acquiring Borghild, not only in front of his brother and all their followers,
but also in front of Borghild herself and the group she stood for.29
Lack of success could have serious consequences and at times called for
elaborate balancing acts. Certainly, Eystein was not explicitly charged with in-
decision over Borghild. Yet despite all the balance in the discussion of ‘good’
kingship in the subsequent mannjafnað, where Eystein is indeed given credit
for his infrastructure measures, after his death in the sickbed the balance sheet

25 Frank, “Why Skalds Address Women” (1990), 75.

26 Heller, Literarische Darstellung (1958).
27 Mundal, “Kvinnebiletet” (1982); Mundal, “Position of Women” (1994); Clover, “Hildi­gunnr’s
Lament” (1986). Jenny Jochens’s reservations (cf. Jochens, “Medieval Icelandic Heroine”
[1986]; Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society [1995]) are not altogether convincing; cf. Rü-
diger, “Ein rechtes Kernweib” (2005).
28 Even if one were inclined, following Rolf Heller and Jenny Jochens (though not Else
Mundal and Carol Clover), to be cautious about the ‘reality’ of female judgements, the
argument remains valid, for to express deeds in noble verses and thereby turn to the wid-
est possible audience of competitors does indeed mean literarization—and there can be
no doubt as to the social potency of such an extensive and varied literature which almost
always takes the same theme.
29 For Icelandic conflicts over frillur with a fatal outcome for one of the men, see Agnes
Arnórsdóttir, Kvinner og “krigsmenn” (1990), 154.
198 Chapter 3

of the brother who loved consensus is paltry. Eystein’s last efforts to demon-
strate excellence remained fruitless: he had a warship built and magnificently
decorated after the dimensions of the unsurpassed Long Serpent on which Óláf
Tryggvason had sailed in his legendary final battle in 995, and constructed ship
sheds on a large scale in Nidaros. Yet he never took the new ship out of his new
harbour—an elegant simile to sum up his reign.
Eystein’s kingship was also lacking in heirs. Not least because of his ap-
proach to Borghild, he was one of only a very small number of Norwegian kings
to leave no offspring: a dead branch on the trunk of Harald Fairhair. With skil-
ful decency, Snorri says that his death was lamented like that of Magnús the
Good in 1047:30 that son of a concubine (and Saint Olav) had also distinguished
himself through goodness, died relatively early, and left no heir—except, that
is, for a half-brother and co-king, namely Harald Hardrada, the former leader
of the Byzantine Varangian Guard, who bears a striking resemblance to Eyste-
in’s surviving half-brother Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer, albeit he surpassed even
Sigurð both in terms of severity and Mediterranean lustre. And both fathered
abundant royal offspring.

5 Renegotiating Status Loss i: Saint Olav’s Lover

Not even the future royal saint, Óláf Haraldsson, was exempt from paying the
price of failure in the competition for a woman. Clearly the customary candour
about polygyny became a little trickier when the subject was Norway’s rex per­
petuus. Snorri Sturluson, who composed the most important sagas on Saint
Olav,31 is radical: Saint Olav, whose saga alone runs to a third of the overall
length of Heimskringla (which contains sixteen individual sagas), is the only
king who is barely polygynous. Certainly, Snorri is obliged to mention two
women, the prestigious Swedish princess Ástríð and the “king’s handmaid” Álf-
hild, indispensable as the mother of his only son, but that is where he stops.
By contrast, several other sagas about Olav contain more women. An out-
standing one is Steinvǫr, a woman with whom the young Óláf Haraldsson had
a relationship before his time in England with Cnut the Great and his own
subsequent seizure of power in Norway (c.1013/15). It has the merit of appear-
ing in several skaldic stanzas attributed to Óláf and thus apparently belonging

30 Mss c. 23.
31 Snorri’s so-called ‘separate’ or ‘independent’ saga about Olav (Saga Olafs konungs hins
helga) provides the basis for the abridged version, which occupies the middle section of
Heimskringla.
The Agonistic Aspect 199

to the oldest tradition.32 Several versions of the prose commentary recount

how Steinvǫr, after Óláf’s departure, became the wife of Þórvarð, a wealthy
man in Sunnmøre on the northwestern coast of Norway, and how Óláf, having
returned and become king of Norway, rejects his shipmates’ proposal to pay a
visit to his former lover. In Óláf’s long song praising his own part of the con-
quest of London in 1013—which incidentally is also addressed to a “woman” in
the manner discussed above33—Steinvǫr is mentioned by name and subse-
quently becomes a stock element of the heroic journey which will win Óláf his
royal power. However, this also established as a fact that Óláf had not been able
to hold on to Steinvǫr when he left Norway, or win her back when returned.
Óláf’s stanzas and the commentary on them in the later sagas hint at the
social cost of defeat. Indeed they are measures for damage containment: de-
spite everything, Óláf must get the last word on the successful competitor. On
the one hand, he already does this in his song of praise about his feats of arms
in London, by contrasting his own deeds—wholly in the form of an attack as
part of an exchange of insults in verse (senna)—with the inactivity of Steinvǫr’s
husband Þórvarð: “That warrior does not redden a sword in the morning!”34
The attack on the unwarlike, idle man—in itself abuse that comes close to
constituting níð, slander through words—conceals an innuendo which gives
the questioning of his rival’s masculinity its sting. In multiple places the song
turns to talk of war, women, and early mornings: sometimes the “talkative”
man, who has “taken care” of a girl, rushes into battle at dawn, sometimes
women see (or experience) reddened swords on the banks of the Thames in
the morning: the imagery conveys the equation of conflict and sexuality.

32 Mundal, “Heilagmann” (1984), argues convincingly on textual-strategic grounds for the

authenticity of the Steinvǫr stanzas, which have occasionally been dismissed as a late ad-
dition inspired by ‘courtly love.’
33 Legendarische Saga, ed. Anne Heinrichs et al. (1982), 48–53; the apostrophes are directed
to ilm “woman,” mær vitr “smart girl,” Hlǫkk horna “valkyrie of the drinking horns,” among
others. The addressees are not identical with the lover, who is identified with a transpar-
ent pseudonym (Grjótvǫr < grjót “pebble” as opposed to stein “stone”).
34 Legendarische Saga, ed. Anne Heinrichs et al. (1982), 48–53, stanza 10: “Ryðr æigi sa svæi-
gir / sara lauk i are / hinn er Griotvarrar (i) giæter / Gunnborz firir Stað norðan.” Literally:
“the shield-shaker [= warrior] who protected ‘Grjótvǫr’ north of Stad [the Norwegian
northwestern cape] does not redden the wound-leek [=sword] early in the morning.” The
half-verse is placed parenthetically in the description of a dawn attack on the Thames
bridge.—On the special significance of the leek, whose metaphorical associations were
already quite transparent (“a centerpiece of the regeneration of Odin as a mystery of poly-
theistic religion”) in the 13th-century runic formulas and the creation and fertility myths,
see Lamm et al., “Der Brakteat des Jahrhunderts” (2000), 28ff.
200 Chapter 3

Óláf expresses this in a verse that caused such headaches for high medieval
commentators that some modern researchers, baffled, missed the point.35 This
lausavísa (“loose stanza”) is placed in the saga text as follows: Óláf, now king of
Norway, travels northwards along the coast with his ship. Cape Stad, a difficult
waterway even in good weather, is carefully circumnavigated; Steinvǫr lives on
her husband’s farm a little to the north. His fellow travellers ask the king slyly
(með gamni “in jest,” one version says) whether the king would like to visit her.
Given the circumstances, this is quite a bitter provocation: it was already bad
enough when in England Óláf got the news through a merchant that another
man had got hold of Steinvǫr; to remind him of it in front of the whole crew of
armed men is the kind of speech which provokes action (eggjan), which it
takes a certain amount of ingenuity to refuse. King Óláf manages though, re-
plying with a stanza: “It is now more difficult than before to sail around Stad to
my gold-adorned woman—I yearn for her—for now, warrior, a barrier has
been poured across the front of the entrance to the harbour into which I was
accustomed to sail.”36
The allusion is manifestly not to a landslide that had made a formerly safe
anchorage unusable, as some modern commentators have assumed. The sexu-
al reading of the metaphor, obvious enough to us, caused some embarrass-
ment to thirteenth-century saga writers who had to comment on the saintly
king’s níð poetry about his former lover.37 Around 1220/1230, Styrmir Kárason
piously interprets the king’s words: “I will not go ashore here now, for it is more
fitting for me to do God’s will than to live by my evil desires.”38 Plain absti-
nence, however edifying, was not sufficient; Saint Olav was not Saint Louis.
Therefore, the commentator must add a scriptural allusion to how the king
here fights “manfully” against the “incitement” of the “foe” and defeats him;39
indeed the Bergsbók version uses the same word—eggjan—for diabolical
temptation that the sagas conventionally use for a provocation of the kind
voiced by Óláf’s companion, asking whether the king would like to “anchor”

35 On the following, see Mundal, “Heilagmann” (1984).

36 Skj i, 221; the translation smoothes out the kennings, and follows both Finnur Jónsson and
Ernst Albin Kock, the second translator of the skaldic corpus, who often diverges from
Jónsson. After Mundal, “Heilagmann” (1984), 54.
37 Styrmis Olavssaga: vinkona (~ amica); Bergsbók: “er hann lagdi elsku a.”
38 “Eigi skal ek nu her vndir land leggia sagdi konungr. af þui at mer somir meirr at gera vilia
guds hellr enn lifua eftir minni fyst rangri.”—Bergsbók, a composite manuscript created
before 1400, amplifies piously: “rather than always focusing on the evil desires of my body
and carnality” (“en ganga fram j ollum hlvtvm epter ravngvm girndum mins likama ok
holldzins fvstvm”).
39 “… hversu karlmannlega hann mundi strida sinum uvinvm”; cf. 1 Cor. 16:13: “vigilate, state
in fide, viriliter agite et confortamini.”
The Agonistic Aspect 201

with his former woman. It is the devil who incites Óláf to action through the
mouth of his joking comrades, and it is notoriously easy to yield to him. In this
moment, a true hero is therefore one who “manfully” (karlmannlega) refuses
the challenge.
Whatever induced the historical late Viking Age chief Óláf Haraldsson to
back down we can only guess. Insofar as any details are known about the bal-
ance of power around 1015/17, it appears he won important allies in both Roga-
land (southwestern Norway) as well as in Trøndelag and Hålogaland (northern
Norway), but not in the intermediate coastal regions. Thus near Cape Stad he
would have found himself in an area without support, perhaps reason enough
to let the occasion slip by. Even a question of ‘honour,’ of reputation and re-
nown does not compel an agonist into an automatism process. That day in 1015
Óláf Haraldsson may have decided, on consideration, that the risk was too
great. But now that his itinerary leads past Steinvǫr’s harbour, he cannot sim-
ply sail on; some form of reply is required. This takes the form of a níð stanza,
a sexual insult.40 We should not underestimate its impact and dismiss it as a
somewhat helpless, defiant gesture, for—setting aside questions about belief
in the effectiveness of the numinous powers invested in skaldic verse—insults
of this kind were considered to be most severe forms of attack, punishable by
law and practice.41
Whether it was enough to impress Óláf’s entourage—and the wider public
to which the episode and stanza became known—we do not know. Regardless,
the king subsequently ruled for more than ten years with some success. Yet two
centuries later, saga writers still considered it necessary to absolve their hero
from the suspicion of weakness. The argument that ‘resisting temptation
means showing true strength’ is recited with conspicuous effort and, most no-
tably, adapted to the terminology of the customary competitions: “King Óláf
often entered into physical battles here on earth, yet more often he engaged
foes spiritually; and just as he defeated his enemies physically, more often he
conquered the unclean spirit in the spiritual holmgang”—the true duel ac-
cording to the battleground demarcated beforehand. The king becomes “God’s

40 The precise aim of the insult that Steinvǫr was now useless for “anchoring” anyway is un-
clear and maybe also unimportant; the general meaning is: ‘While real men fight, you’re
just at home in bed, yielding to every conceivable carnal pleasure; accordingly, you are
disqualified as a competitor and no longer someone I need to consider. So I can carry on
my way.’ Sleeping with a woman, hardly suitable for defaming someone as unmanly in
most societies, can brand a man as completely ‘powerless,’ that is, indiscriminate and
inactive.
41 See, in summary, Meulengracht Sørensen, Norrønt nid (1980); on the stanzas about wom-
en (mansǫngvar), see Jochens, “From Libel to Lament” (1992).
202 Chapter 3

champion” (Guðs kappi) in the sense of a judicial duelist and drawn into the
semantic field kapp- that we have already come across with Jón Loptsson and
which characterizes the mentality of making an agon out of every conceivable
thing. The thirteenth-century editors of the sagas hoped to reinterpret Olav’s
restraint as a manly victory.
As suggested earlier, Snorri Sturluson was not convinced. He prefer to omit
the episode altogether, which meant he had to cut out any reference to Steinvǫr
from his portrayal of Óláf’s campaign in England, even the verses about the
capture of London, which ought to have been highly welcome to him as a skal-
dic (and therefore valuable) source. For this reason, it appears to me mistaken
to accept with Sverre Bagge that Snorri omitted the figure of Steinvǫr because
it was “without political relevance”:42 her relationship with the young Óláf may
have been without consequences, but the competitive situation in which Óláf
found himself on her account was obviously not. But the fact that this alto-
gether minor episode had the potential, almost two centuries later, to create
headaches among those whose secular and spiritual self-conception was in-
vested in the rex perpetuus hints at the significance the competition for
Borghild—and many others—must have had for those directly involved in it.
There was little room left for personal preferences: even the companion of a
winter residence was a ‘political affair.’

6 The Women’s Agon

And the women? We have seen Borghild and her willingness to clear her repu-
tation (and thus, in a political stylization, her continued availability) by under-
going a truth test that required great courage. After she followed King Sigurð,
we do not meet her again, but learn that she bore him a son who became king:
Magnús ‘the Blind’ (r. 1130–39). Perhaps she lived to see her son captured,
blinded, mutilated, and castrated by his rival for kingship, Harald gilli, the pro-
fessed king’s son who had come from Ireland, after her own brother had been
killed on the spot. In any case, we can assume that like her family, she remained
close to the king all her life. How many of Sigurð’s ‘co-wives’ she had to contend

42 Bagge, Society and Politics (1991), 292. Rather, I suspect that Snorri felt Óláf’s prudent but
perhaps less than impressive backing off was incompatible with ‘his’ report of a swift and
ruthless campaign. In contrast to the ‘hagiographical’ sagas about Olav from around 1200,
Snorri’s prospective saint completely withdraws behind the forceful, sometimes unduly
hard Viking king, so that unlike them he could not even refer to Olav’s triumph over the
tempter.
The Agonistic Aspect 203

with we do not know—and nor, therefore, do we know how many found them-
selves pushed aside by the birth of Borghild’s son.
Only one other woman is reported for Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer: Malmfrið,
whom he ‘married.’43 She ‘only’ bore him a daughter, Kristín: it was she who
later gave her son Magnús Erlingsson his questionable claim to the throne
which Magnús’ father and the archbishop tried to help along through conse-
cration and coronation (see Chapter 1). Malmfrið’s significance is made clear
by the reference to her relatives, which directly follows the Borghild episode:
she was the granddaughter of both the last Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwin-
son and the Swedish king Ingi, daughter of the Novgorod prince Mstislav
(r. 1125–32), related by marriage via her sister to Cnut Lavard in Denmark and
so to the royal line of the Valdemars. After Sigurð’s death Malmfrið appears to
have remained in Norway. It is perhaps possible to infer the relationship be-
tween her and Borghild, king’s widow and king’s mother, from the tensions
reported from the same constellation after the death of Saint Olav. The quarrel
between the two women at the court of the newly established son of Olav,
Magnús, expressed through questions of seating arrangements and tone of
speech, is reported by skaldic verse as an object of general interest around
1035/40.44
The competition became yet fiercer when several women had sons capable
of succeeding. The most famous case concerns the women of Cnut the Great:
Emma, widow of Cnut’s luckless Anglo-Saxon predecessor Æthelred, whom he
married after completing the conquest of England, primarily for her ties to the
Norman ruling family, and who, according to the Encomium Emmae reginae,
had previously sought to ensure that their children would enjoy an exclusive
right to succeed;45 and, besides her, Ælfgifu the daughter of a prosperous mag-
nate from the Danelaw who had marriage connections with Denmark.46 There
is nothing ‘second-rank’ about Ælfgifu, however insistently Emma had her
denigrated as a nameless concubina in the Encomium Emma reginae. As regent
she was considerably more independent politically than the regina Emma, us-
ing her sons as viceroys in Cnut’s sphere of influence among the Baltic Slavs
and in Norway, and after Cnut’s death in 1035, she launched her son Harold
with great success while Emma found only regional support. The unsuccessful

43 Mss c. 20: fekk “get” + genitive.

44 MsG c. 8; 10; see above, Chapter 1.
45 Gesta Cnutonis regis/Encomium Emmae reginae (in: sm, vol. 2, 375–426) ii 17f.
46 Her mother bore the Nordic name Wulfrun; for details and further references cf. Camp-
bell, “Queen Emma and Ælfgifu” (1971); Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983);
Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997); Stafford, “The Powers of the Queen” (1997),
3–26.
204 Chapter 3

queen, who had previously conspired in favour of her sons to no avail (while
her sons from her marriage with Æthelred, including the later Edward the Con-
fessor, seemed completely out of the game), subsequently saw herself robbed
of the crown jewels by Ælfgifu’s son Harold and sent into exile in Flanders.
Only Harold’s early death brought Emma’s son to the English throne and the
king’s mother back to England. We lose track of Ælfgifu around this time.
There is no direct report of the two women together during Cnut’s lifetime
or after. Yet in view of the systematic defamation of Ælfgifu in the Encomium
Emmae reginae, probably dating to shortly after 1040, in which Harold is de-
scribed, among other things, as the ailing concubine’s changeling son of a
household slave,47 there is no doubt about the bitterness of the rivalry between
the two women: first over influence over the man they shared, and then as
each attempted to assert their own son as successor. Moreover, Emma and Ælf-
gifu were seemingly the only women capable of competing in this agon, which
does not mean that Cnut the Great did not entertain relationships with other
women still. But whether motherhood alone provided the two of them with
this unique advantage, or whether it was more a result of the political weight
of their ties and origins, remains unclear, along with how the women other-
wise fought over the position of themselves and their children.
For the everyday life ordinariness of such an agon we have an instructive
episode from Snorri, concerning the winter camp of Harald gilli (the successful
pretender from Ireland who became the downfall of Borghild’s son Magnús) in
Bergen 1136:

On St Lucia’s Day, two men sat at the king’s table in the evening talking,
and one said to the king, “Lord, now you must decide a bet for us, which
we have sealed with two barrels of honey. I say that tonight you will lie
with Queen Ingiríð, your wife, and he says that you will lie with Þóra
Guthormsdóttir.” Laughing, the king replied, “You will likely lose your
wager.”48

47 Encomium iii 1: “eligentes sibi in regem quendam Haroldum, quem esse filium falsa aes-
timatione asseritur cuiusdam eiusdem regis Cnutonis concubinae; plurimorum vero as-
sertio eundum Haroldum perhibet furtim fuisse subreptum paturienti ancillae, inposi-
tum autem camerae languentis concubinae. Quod veratius credi potest.”—In some
redactions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later in Florence of Worcester, a craftsman
and a priest are identified as the fathers of Ælfgifu’s sons, for similar reasons; see below,
Chapter 4.
48 MsBHG c. 15: “Lúcíumessu at kveldi tǫluðusk við tveir menn, er þar sátu. Mælti annar til
konungs: ‘Herra, nú hǫfum vit skotit órskurð þrætu okkarrar til yðarra órslita, ok hǫfum
vit veðjat ask hunangs hvárr okkarr. Ek segi þat, at þér munuð liggja í nótt hjá Ingiríði
The Agonistic Aspect 205

This short exchange of words would probably not have been newsworthy if
nothing significant had come of it: even though at night the guards stood at the
queen’s chamber as always, nonetheless the two gambling companions were
well aware that the king slept elsewhere. The information obtained with this
trick was pivotal to the success of the assassination of Harald gilli that night.
Dazed from many drinks, the king mumbled in his sleep, “You are treating me
quite roughly, Þóra!” as the first blows struck him. “They treat you harshly who
wish you more harm than I!” she cried, but it was too late.49 The murder plan
had rested on the fact that the king’s sexual behaviour was a common topic of
conversation, and it was the subject of jest among his retinue to dicuss which
woman was currently in favour or disfavour.50
One may find the king’s answer to his tablemate’s bet a little strained, and in
this respect, the episode also casts a light on the pressure on the man at the
centre moderating the agon of his women in full view of his retinue. One could
ask the king this question and he had to answer it: the competition of the king’s
women was as open as that of the kings for a woman who had become the
object of agonistic efforts. There is little room for private passion in this
environment.

dróttningu, konu þinni, en hann segir, at þér munuð liggja hjá Þóru Guthormsdóttur.’ Þá
svaraði konungr hlæjandi …: ‘Eigi muntu hljóta veðféit.’”
49 MsBHG c. 16: “en konungr hafði drukkinn niðr lagzk ok svaf fast ok vaknaði við þat, er
menn vágu at honum, ok mælti í óvitinu: ‘Sárt býr þú nú við mik, Þóra!’ Hon hljóp upp við
ok mælti: ‘Þeir búa sárt við þik, er verr vilja þér en ek.’ Lét Haraldr konungr þar líf sitt.”—
Interestingly, the coup only half succeeded. Although the man behind it, Harald’s alleged
half-brother Sigurð slembi, son of another of Magnús Barelegs’ many women, already had
a part of the royal retinue behind him, his proclamation foundered the next morning, as
the people of Bergen were unwilling to acclaim a fratricide: “And if he was not your broth-
er, then your descent gives you no claim to the royal title!”
50 As indicated, I assume that the information in the kings’ sagas is largely factual when
dealing with the 12th century or important details, such as the death of a king. The essen-
tial features of the episode must have been widely known; cf. Saxo’s account for 1200 (xiv,
29,2: “Haraldum amandi gratia noctu castra latenter egressum in amplexu pellicis per in-
sidias interfecit”). Even if we were to cast doubt on the episode, the fact remains that the
murder plan was plausible in the context of the saga narrative of the early 13th century,
which only defers the argument a little.
 Chapter 4

The Expressive Aspect

1 Political Relations?

To say that the union of king Æthelred the Unready with Emma, sister of
­Richard ii, in 1002, served to establish or consolidate long-term good relations
between Wessex and the princes of Rouen would be something like a truism to
scholars and students of history today. So well-established is the knowledge of
the symbolic character of a marriage in old European societies, so well-worn
Maussian ideas on the ‘exchange of women,’ that an elaborate justification for
interpreting this marriage ‘politically’ is quite unnecessary. On the other hand,
if anyone claimed that Æthelred married Emma because he thought her irres-
tistably attractive, they would find themselves—to say the least—with a con-
siderable burden of proof.
The evidence would also be difficult to furnish. There are no indications of
Æthelred’s feelings for Emma, or vice versa, while the alliance between Wessex
and Rouen proved consequential and enduring. Similarly, Emma’s second
union with Cnut the Great (r. 1014/16–35), the victorious successor of her first
husband in England, can also be understood in light of his efforts to achieve a
good relationship with Normandy.
Emma’s rival for power, influence, and the succession in England, the concu-
bina Ælfgifu ‘of Northampton’ might be understood in a quite similar light. She
came from the Anglo-Danish elite of the Danelaw; her father, Earl Ælfhelm,
held an important position in Northumbria and the East Midlands.1 This would
seem sufficient to make plausible that the conqueror wished to negotiate back-
ing in this region by way of striking an alliance with the daughter of a fore-
most leader. If this was his aim, he succeeded. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle re-
ports that after Cnut’s death in 1035 “almost all thegns north of the Thames”

1 For “Ælfgiue Ælfelmes dohtor ealdormannes” see asc E, s.a. 1036, for Ælfhelm’s violent death
and the blinding of his sons by King Æthelred, see esp. s.a. 1006. Cf. Campbell, “Queen Emma
and Ælfgifu” (1971), 69. Timothy Bolton’s excellent study “Ælfgifu of Northampton: Cnut the
Great’s ‘Other Woman,’” Nottingham Medieval Studies 51 (2007), 247–68, was published
shortly after completion of this book. As with other subsequent publications, I refrain from
‘working them into’ this version so as not to give the impression of nicing up my previous
results ex post. I am, however, happy to direct readers to Bolton’s study for Ælfgifu’s back-
ground and career. Bolton’s assessment of her relationship with Cnut’s is similar to mine,
though we were unaware of each other’s work at the time.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_007

The Expressive Aspect 207

supported Harold, his son with Ælfgifu, as his successor, while his son with
Emma was only backed by the West Saxon heartland of the old dynasty.2 Hence
both of Cnut’s marriages, the ‘correct’ one with the Norman and the other with
the Anglo-Dane who was later slandered by her enemies as a “concubine,” per-
mit a ‘political’ interpretation, they express something—as had Emma’s earlier
union with Æthelred.
How do we interpret them today? Do we assume that since Ælfgifu ‘was’ a
concubine, Cnut’s designs on her were personal? At this stage of the study, that
sounds like a rhetorical question. Yet Saxo says that Cnut, “enchanted by the
extraordinary beauty of the woman, demanded intercourse with her.”3
­Although Saxo does comment on the political advantage of the connection in
the same sentence,4 he nonetheless presents feminine beauty and male plea-
sure as the driving forces of a relationship that would lead to the birth of a re-
gent of Norway and the Wends and a king of Denmark and England. It is much
the same in the most influential modern accounts: the ‘concubines,’ conceived
in contrast to the ‘wife,’ served sexual gratification or the fulfillment of emo-
tional needs, at best self-stylization in the sense of what has been here termed
the ‘habitual aspect’ of polygyny. The “attractive young women” appear as a
kind of collective which tends to have an unlimited number of members, who
are serially or simultaneously allocated to a man, and generally appear indis-
tinguishable and interchangeable: they are “the shoal from which the prince
fished partners, with whom he whiled away his time.”5 Even in studies explic-
itly ­devoted to the theme of ‘women and politics in the Middle Ages,’ concubi-
nage is understood as merely a “sexual relationship” as opposed to a marriage,
a “social affair” (Pauline Stafford), or dismissed out of hand: “There is certainly
no reason to seek political motives for amorous adventures of this kind, ­neither

2 asc E (F), s.a. 1035: “mæst ealle þa þegenas be norðan Temes 7 þa liðsmen on Lunden.” A cen-
tury later, in the radically united England of the Norman period, William of Malmesbury of-
fered an ‘ethnicized’ explanation: the Danes and the Londoners, already set apart by the bar-
barorum mores they had picked up during regular trade contacts, went in for Harald, while all
“Englishmen” wanted a son from Emma’s first or second marriage.
3 Saxo x, 14,5: “eximia matrone specie delectatus stupro petiit.”
4 Here, the otherwise unsubstantiated earlier relationship between Ælfgifu/Alwiva and Óláf
Haraldsson, which prompts Óláf, already frustrated with Cnut in other matters, to leave Eng-
land; see above, Chapter 1.
5 Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 277. Similarly, 277: “…while he [Richard i, duke of
Normandy], widower of the empress, sought his pleasure here and there”; 271: “the beautiful
‘girlfriends,’ with which princes amused themselves”; similarly Duby, “Die Ehe in der Gesell-
schaft des hohen Mittelalters,” in Duby, Frau ohne Stimme (1989), 7–31; Duby, “Was weiß man
über die Liebe im Frankreich des 12. Jahrhunderts?” in Duby, Frau ohne Stimme (1989),
33–51.
208 Chapter 4

for the solid nor the less permanent” (Sverre Bagge).6 Voices which at least dif-
ferentiate between the operation, meaning, and purpose of polygyny to some
­degree remain rare. In passing, Régine Le Jan mentions “sexual greed, the dis-
play of wealth and power, the attempt to increase connections and secure
succession”7—thus the ‘generative’ and the ‘habitual’ aspect. The women,
however, remain a collective: in principle these goals can be realized with any
woman. In short, what matters is that the prince is visibly with many women,
not who these women are.
If this were the whole story, medieval writers could have kept themselves to
remarks that more or less follow the Solomonic model. They could ascribe a
multitudo feminarum (mǫrg konur, moutes femes) to this or that great man, ex-
plicitly blaming or implicitly admiring him for it, and perhaps representing his
polygynous practices as governed by the contingencies of personal experience.
Such remarks are in fact frequent; in most regions of Europe they are the cus-
tomary or even the only way in which magnate polygyny is ever recorded. But
there are other, more detailed traditions; they name those involved, perhaps
their social background, the origins and course of the relationship, opinions
and reactions of the participants and observers. In the Scandinavian material,
such precision is frequent; in other parts of Europe, it is rare or wholly absent.
However, the comparative study must not be content with establishing this
imbalance and drawing conclusions from it. It also may reckon with the pos-
sibility, indeed make it a working hypothesis, that the verbosity of one region
also has something to say about another, more silent one. Perhaps the sources
are silent in this matter because there is nothing to report; but perhaps they
also refrain from reporting on what could be easily observed and could have
been communicated.
We already learn far more about the Norwegian kings and Icelandic chiefs
in terms of the ‘aspects’ treated thus far, the questions of offspring, stylization,
competition, victory and defeat, than we do about the West or East Frankish
rulers and the nobles of Burgundy, the Rhineland, or Flanders. The difference
becomes very striking when it comes to the individuation of the participants:

6 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983), 67; more nuanced in Stafford, Queen
Emma and Queen Edith (1997), 73ff; Bagge, “Kvinner i politikken” (1989), 23: “hverken de faste
eller de mer [sic] permanente” (neither the solid nor the more [sic] permanent
relationships)—I take this contradiction to be an editorial error and have corrected it in the
quotation in the text. In quoting only Stafford and Bagge, leading experts on English and
Norwegian history respectively, I do not aim at singling out these two for criticism but let
them stand as prominent examples of a widely held view.
7 Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir (1995), 272.
The Expressive Aspect 209

when the focus of the narrative is not on a great man’s polygynous behaviour
but rather on the women concerned. Here, the Northern sources are unparal-
leled in Europe in their prosopographical precision. From Gregory of Tours to
Jan Długosz, chroniclers report at best the name of a princely concubine,
loosely outline their origins, and perhaps name the father—a name that gen-
erally does not lead anywhere, as it is mentioned nowhere else. The course of
the relationship is reported, if at all, anecdotally rather than systematically,
and the anecdotes largely function according to the overall rhetorical
system.
There are two ways of understanding this difference. Either we understand
it as genre-related—in which case the social phenomena described in them
may well have existed elsewhere but have not been recorded in the absence of
a written tradition corresponding to the sagas. Or we explain it as an extratex-
tual difference—in which case other regions where the written narratives do
not mention or describe “concubines,” polygyny took different forms or was
absent as a socio-political phenomenon. As always, the sensible path lies
somewhere golden in the middle: it would probably be as much of a mistake
to assume that Jón Loptsson’s dispute with Bishop Þorlák could have taken
place in the dioceses of Worms or Orléans just as it did in the diocese of Skál-
holt, as it would be to claim that the Capetian Louis vii or the Salian Henry
iii never had occasion to frequent a chamber other than that of their respec-
tive queens, although no source reports anything of the jests and bets their
followers made about it.
For my part, I feel it is a safe bet to assume a number of basic similarities in the
socioeconomic framework of the political cultures between the Arctic Circle
and the northern fringe of the Mediterranean Basin.8 My hypothesis would be
that sexual behaviour is shaped by these similarities if not likenesses. As all hy-
potheses, this is a tentative one, and by stressing ‘basic’ similarities I do not wish
to give the impression that I consider the differences between, say, eleventh-
century Wessex or Flanders and Norway or Denmark ephemeral. But neither
are they on different continents, or even climate zones (not entirely anyway). I
will return to the subject of transferability in the last two chapters and I am
introducing it here mainly in order to be able to widen the perspective a little
beyond the Norwegian and Icelandic focus by drawing England in. The ‘expres-
sive’ aspect to be discussed in this chapter concerns the question of whether
there really is “no reason to seek political motives for amorous adventures of
this kind,” and to ask whether and to what extent the multitudo feminarum mat-
tered, who the women were, and how such unions were formed. If Cnut had

8 For this view cf. Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute” (1985/2006), esp. 247.
210 Chapter 4

merely been looking for a charming new bedfellow, her name would hardly
have entered the chronicles of England, Denmark, and Norway—at most she
would have remained the kind of footnote Emma’s party sought to reduce her
to: quaedam concubina regis.9

2 What Ælfgifu Means

Ælfgifu of Northampton is a good case in point. It makes perfect sense to us

why so much more is known about her than all Cnut the Great’s other concubi-
nae.10 Her political role and significance is so obvious that Pauline Stafford
approaches Cnut the Great’s relationship with Emma and Ælfgifu as one of the
few actual cases of royal bigamy in the High Middle Ages.11 Thus she resists the
suggestion of the sources which would make the latter a concubine, but pro-
vokes the question of why Cnut the Great stopped at bigamy. The answer can
only point to the contingent circumstances of his reign: as far as we know, he
had only two such important women at his side, but nothing automatically
precludes the possibility of there being a third or a fourth, only their sons did
not become kings.
In the English sources of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the binomy uxor/
concubina, to which Emma’s encomiast attached such value for tactical mo-
tives, finds almost no support. Although the terminology of ‘concubinage’ was
known, it was used in a seemingly arbitrary way. However, it appears arbitrary
only if we expect it to mirror a categorial classification. So it is initially striking
to find beneath thirty names in the witness list of a donation of King Edmund
(r. 939–46) to the cathedral church of Rochester: Ego Ælfgifu concubina regis
affui.12 The presence of “the king’s bedfellow” among those whose names give

9 Encomium Emmae reginae iii, 1: “just one of the king’s concubines.”—William of Malmes-
bury (gra ii, 179) even resorts to the classics to differentiate Emma from a successful rival
in the time of Æthelred, “Erat iste [King Edmund Ironside] non ex Emma natus sed ex
quadam alia, quam fama obscura recondit” (cf. Vergil, Aeneid v, 302). In this case, the
manipulation of rumour was successful: we know nothing about Edmund’s ignoble moth-
er, “hidden by her lack of renown.”
10 Adam of Bremen labels the mother of Cnut’s sons Sven and Harold as concubina, without
mentioning her name (ii, 74). The sagas do identify her by name, giving her no epithet
other than “mother of Sven/Harold.” On her policies as regent in Vinðland (the coastal
regions of the Polabian Slavs) and in Norway, especially her role in the translation of the
relics of Saint Olav, see OsH cc. 239, 243.
11 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983), 73.
12 S 514, in Charters of Rochester, ed. Campbell (1973), no. 28.—This Ælfgifu is unrelated to
the two Ælfgifus around King Cnut three generations later; like many compounds of ælf-
“auspicious power,” the name is widespread.
The Expressive Aspect 211

particular significance to this gift in nomine Dei summi to Saint Andrew, patron
of the church of Rochester, is further underlined by her placement: her name
is after the king, his brother and mother expressing their approval, the two
archbishops, and six bishops, but before five duces and 13 ministri, the king’s lay
entourage. The witness list was prepared with great care,13 and we must take
seriously the positioning of the concubina at some distance behind king’s
brother and mother, but above all the lay magnates. This distance, however,
also precludes seeing in the term concubina only the literal meaning of ‘the
one who shares the king’s bed,’ that is, his spouse, for she would have stood
alongside the king’s brother and mother, before the clergy. Now, the concubina
acting as a witness here is not just anyone, but a queen who would be buried
in the West Saxon royal abbey of Shaftesbury, and at whose grave “countless
miracles” soon occurred.14 In his chronicle, written thirty years later, the royal
kinsman, ealdorman, and diplomat Æthelweard calls her coniux regis and
­regina.15 The choice of words may be prompted by both the context and the
­circumstances—Æthelweard was editing the genealogical memory of the Es-
sen abbess Mathilde. A later document of King Æthelred likewise speaks of
Ælfgifu as the deceased coniux of King Edmund.16
Conversely, royal documents often refer to well-established queens of the
eleventh century, such as Emma of Normandy—wife first of Æthelred, then
Cnut—and Eadgyth, the wife of Edward the Confessor (who styled himself as
living in monastically inspired celibacy)17 as mea collaterana “the woman by
my side” rather than coniux or uxor, and equip them with a certain imprecision
which even encompasses the Garden of Eden.18 Elsewhere, however, it may be
politically advisable not only to call Emma nobilissima coniunx, but to also add

13 The verbs allocated to the various witnesses attest to this: the archbishop of Canterbury
responsible “signs,” the archbishop of York and the other bishops “agree,” and the two
women—and only they—“are present” (affui).
14 Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England (1984), 65, merely states that in one case, a concubina
regis has witnessed a document and skips over her identity.—I am very grateful to the late
Peter Sawyer, then at Uppsala, for his help and advice on this point.
15 Æthelweard, Chronicon, iv, 6.
16 S 850 (confirmation of donations to Shaftesbury Abbey): “coniugi sue Algife.”
17 William of Malmesbury, gra ii, 198: “Illud celeberrime fertur, numquam illum cuiusquam
mulieris contubernio pudicitiam lesisse.”
18 Thus S 923 and S 943 (Æthelred 1011 and 1006/11); S 957 (donation from Cnut and Emma to
Evesham Abbey, 1020): collaterana and regina; S 1011 (Edward 1045): Emma as “mater re-
gis,” Eadgyth as “collaterana regis”; different again in S 950 (donation by Cnut to Canter-
bury Cathedral, 1018): “petitione coniugis ac reginae Ælfgyfe” (= Emma, who bore this
royal name in England—though one wonders, of course). In several almost identical
arengae, Eve is referred to as Adam’s collaterana during the paradisiacal state: S 788 (972);
S 812 (around 970); S 948 (around 1015). DuCange, s.v. lateranus, merely mentions the
meaning of “agnatic relatives,” which is not relevant here. Certainly, Eve has been the
212 Chapter 4

an impressive courtship story.19 Conceptual history reaches its limits here:20

apparently Edmund’s saintly concubina and coniux, Æthelred’s and Cnut’s col-
laterana and regina, and Ælfgifu of Northampton, concubina, king’s mother,
and regent of Norway, move in a field of open relational positioning, undefined
by concepts, within which it is for them and their relatives, friends, and faithful
to secure the maximum achievable in any situation.
In 1014, the Danish king Cnut succeeded his father Sven Forkbeard to com-
plete the conquest of England. His willingness to cooperate with the key forces
in those parts of the island where he could hope for support could hardly have
been signalled more aptly than by entering into a relationship with the daugh-
ter of Ealdorman Ælfhelm and his Danish wife Wulfrun, prosperous landown-
ers in Northumberland and the East Midlands. The magnate for his part, along
with the group he represented, showed himself to be a follower of the new king
by surrendering or gifting his daughter to the conqueror—and nothing entitles
us to assume that Ælfgifu herself did not support this intention along with the
other central figures of this party.
However, this tells us nothing about the sexual element so central in mod-
ern research, or indeed any affective reactions of the two individuals, Ælfgifu
and Cnut. We can at least get an idea of the physical appearance of Cnut (albeit
from a very late source): unusually large build, hooked nose, fair skin, thick hair
(he was twenty) and “not very clever,” as Knýtlinga saga noted with character-
istic lack of décor.21 We know nothing at all about Ælfgifu’s appearance. Per-
haps together the two enjoyed what the sources of the time call dilectio or ást;
their two sons are born around ten years apart. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
the skalds, and the later histories and sagas instead report Ælfgifu’s origin

central antecedent of Christian monogamy since Tertullian; however, a certain ambiva-

lence is undeniable, just as concubina and collaterana are structurally not far apart.
19 Thus the Encomium Emmae reginae (ii, 16), where, after the completing the conquest of
England, Cnut sends messengers to every country to find a bride; only the virgo Emma,
holding back at first, is good enough for him. Her decade-and-a-half-long marriage to
King Æthelred is passed over both textually and terminologically.
20 Clunies Ross, “Concubinage” (1985), 19ff., points out that in the older Anglo-Saxon laws,
the word field hæman “have intercourse” and the corresponding noun hæmed are applied
equally to all forms of sexual unions. This changes towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon
period, especially in clerical texts (Blickling homilies, martyrologies), where unrihthæmed
“improper intercourse” is opposed to (riht)æw “(right) marriage” (for legitimum connubi-
um). This shifts results in hæmed tending towards designating all forms of canonically
or  moral-theologically felonious relations, even without prefixed qualifications such as
u­ nriht-. However, these changes were not immediately reflected in practice, or in the dip-
lomatic and historiographical material.
21 KnS c. 20.
The Expressive Aspect 213

(while the Encomium Emmae reginae, in the service of her rival, so pro-
nouncedly does not) because this was politically significant: not only ex post as
mother of successful sons, but on her own account. The political significance
of her relationship with Cnut ‘the Mighty’ may already have been just as evi-
dent to contemporaries as it was to later chroniclers, their audiences, and mod-
ern scholarship. It was understood what Cnut wanted to say by taking Ælfgifu,
and what Ælfgifu and her group meant when they let Cnut take her.

3 Polygyny as a Semantic System

This ‘expressive’ aspect of polygyny is certainly the most multi-faceted of the

five suggested in this study. For the multiformity of medieval polygyny allowed
its actors to use it as a system of signs that made ‘statements’ possible: quite
diverse statements according to time, place, context (so many ‘telling’ details),
audiences and, of course, the persons involved. For the ‘generative,’ the ‘habit-
ual,’ the ‘agonistic’ aspects of polygyny as presented in the preceding chapters
we still view, beyond the many individual instances, common concerns: suc-
cession, stylization, competition. This is not the case when we consider medi-
eval polygyny under its ‘expressive’ aspect, that is, as a system of social seman-
tics by means of which actors are able make statements.
When Cnut established his connection with Ælfgifu, he was in the first place
signalling something to her, along with her group (her house, her ‘network’),
and—as the news spread—other English magnates, the country’s clerics, his
own followers, perhaps his relatives, allies, and opponents in Denmark. But the
news was certainly also for the Æthelred’s widow and mother of Cnut’s rival for
the rule of England, precisely that Emma whom he would ‘marry’ some time
later, and for her brother, the Norman duke. Other recipients are conceivable—
and the meaning of the statement changed depending on whom it reached. For
Emma, the aggressive nuance may have been paramount: Cnut showed his
willingness to establish a ruling line anchored in the northeast of the country
and was prepared to risk a fundamental conflict with the Wessex dynasty. (His
association with Emma in 1017, however, indicated an attempt at amicable set-
tlement with the supporters of the defeated old line and their Norman and
Flemish allies.) For the powerful in Northumbria and Mercia, whose distance
from the Wessex dynasty had been repeatedly proved and could be expected to
continue, it may have signified the shift in the regional balance of power and
the promise of future proximity to the king that registered; in Denmark, a relo-
cation of the centre of power to England may have been construed as the most
important part of the statement.
214 Chapter 4

Ælfgifu is certainly a special case because of her outstanding importance;

few other royal concubinae have their own article in the Lexikon des Mittelal-
ters.22 But she is not unique. To remain in eleventh-century England, we may
consider the women of Harold Godwinson, the most powerful magnate of the
country during the rule of Edward the Confessor, and briefly his successor in
1066. There is Eadgifu ‘the beautiful’ (pulchra, faira, bella), with whom he was
probably associated for some twenty years. She was not quite of the same rank
as Eadgyth, widow of the Welsh prince Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, defeated and
killed by Harold, who then took her as his ‘wife’ in 1063 in a situation reminis-
cent of Cnut and Emma. While we do not know anything about Eadgifu pul-
chra’s family background, her considerable property—she was the greatest fe-
male landowner in England besides the wives of King Edward and Earl
Godwine—suggests that his connection with her may have been of great im-
portance for the rising Harold Godwinson. If we look at the regional distribu-
tion of Eadgifu’s goods, the parallel to Cnut’s rise around 1015 is even more
striking. Her own (probably familial) centre of gravity was in southeastern Nor-
thumbria and eastern Mercia; much like the foreign pretender Cnut, the West
Saxon Harold established support in the Danelaw through this relationship, or
conversely, Eadgifu and her group made use of the Godwinson on the rise. Ead-
gifu’s possessions in southern England, on the other hand, indicate transfer-
ence through Harold;23 though no sources provide direct information, it can
nonetheless be assumed that the geography of power played at least some role
in endowing this king’s woman, however faira.

4 Domestic and Foreign Policy: Harald Hardrada’s Women

Another case in point is Harold Godwinson’s unfortunate opponent at the Bat-

tle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066, King Harald ‘Hard-Ruler’ (harðráði)
of Norway (r. 1046–66), who almost became king of England as well. The half-
brother of (the later saint) Óláf had in his youth been among the losers in the
Norwegian power struggles of 1030 and spent many years in Byzantium with
the ‘Varangians.’ Here he learnt advanced politics and Mediterranean military
techniques, and here he also acquired the material and symbolic capital that
would bring him to power. In 1046, when he dared to seize the Norwegian king-
ship, he brought with him the daughter of Prince Jaroslav, Elizabeth/Ellisif,
from Novgorod/Hólmgarð. “He got exactly the kind of relations he wanted,”

22 N[icholas] P. Brooks, “Ælfgifu v. Northampton,” LdM, vol. 1, Sp. 179f.

23 I here follow Meyer’s account, in Meyer, “Women’s Estates” (1991), esp. 116–25.
The Expressive Aspect 215

commented his court skald, Stúf the Blind: “plenty of gold and a princess.”24
Along with a remarkable recklessness in changing sides (Harald initially sup-
ported the Danish king Sven Estridsen in Sven’s fight against Harald’s own
nephew, Magnús, forcing the latter to accept a division of power) and good
luck (Magnús died in an accident the following year), they made him sole ruler
of Norway. To secure this, a further step appeared appropriate to him:

King Harald received (fekk) Þorberg Árnason’s daughter Þóra the next
winter after King Magnús the Good died. They had two sons. The elder
was called Magnús and the second Óláf. King Harald and Queen Ellisif
had two daughters. One was called Maria and the other Ingigerð.25

The political value of that union was obvious: Þóra’s father Þorberg was one of
the seven sons of Árni of the Arnmœðlingar family group, who played the lead-
ing role in Trøndelag and Møre. He was based at Giske, near modern Ålesund,
and thus controlled the waterway between Trondheim Fjord and southern
Norway; his prosperous brothers were more powerful still in rich Trøndelag. At
the end of Saint Óláf’s reign they had chosen differently and faced one another
at the Battle of Stiklestad—Þorberg was among those who had fought there on
the side of King Óláf’s young half-brother Harald. The brother, who at that
point had been one of the winners, meanwhile found himself fleeing the coun-
try as a result of the restoration of 1035, as doing otherwise would have been
detrimental to the other sons of Árni, who enjoyed the favour of Óláf’s son
Magnús, the winner of the moment. And Þorberg’s wife—the mother of
Þóra—was a daughter of the southwestern Norwegian chief Erling Skjálgsson,
who had spent his entire life dealing with several successive rulers in his region
on an equal footing, and whose infamous murder following his capture by Óláf
Haraldsson had initiated the latter’s fall. As with King Cnut with Ælfgifu and
(presumably) Earl Harold with Eadgifu in England, Harald Hardrada, the new
man in the saddle, brought about both tangible and symbolic ‘expressive’ ef-
fects through his connection with the magnate’s daughter. Tangibly, he could
now address the powerful Finn Árnason, the brother of his new wife’s father, as

24 HsS c. 17, stanza 89: “Mægð gat allvaldr Egða / ógnar mildr, þás vildi: / gulls tók gumna
spjalli / gnótt ok bragnings dóttur.”
25 HsS c. 33: “Haraldr konungr fekk Þóru, dóttur Þorbergs Árnasonar, inn næsta vetr eptir en
Magnús konungr inn góði andaðisk. Þau áttu tvá sonu. Hét inn ellri Magnús, en annarr
Óláfr. Haraldr konungr ok Ellisif dróttning áttu dœtr tvær. Hét ǫnnur Máría, en ǫnnur In-
gigerðr.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 66, slightly adapted.
216 Chapter 4

“brother-in-law” and could expect appropriate solidarity.26 The ‘expressive’

was the signal to the Rogaland supporters of the still unatoned Erling Skjálgs-
son, to whose descendants the new king was now also related by marriage. The
sons that came out of this union, Magnús and Óláf, were designated as future
kings through their names, and went on to become kings—as did Ælfgifu’s
sons with Cnut in their day.27
In one respect, the ‘case’ of Harald Sigurðarson differs from the ‘cases’ of Cnut
the Great and Harold Godwinson. The latters’ exogamous marriages to princely
daughters postdated their relationships with daughters of regionally impor-
tant magnates, and, so to speak, represented the coronation and safeguarding
of the power they had gained. For Harald of Norway, the opposite is true: his re-
lationship with Elizabeth and what she stood for—besides “much gold” this was
above all the alliance with the Rus’, which already Harald’s two predecessors
would not have been able to rule without—belonged to his rise; the chief’s
daughter, socially a shade lower, sealed his victory. Once again the vocabulary
indicates no difference: Prince Jaroslav “gifted” (gipti) his daughter to Harald;
Harald “received” (fekk) Þóra, who is also referred to as his “woman” (kona). All
words denote the same kind of ‘high-end’ consensual form of attachment.28
The only difference lies in the epithet dróttning “lady,” which is ascribed to Eliza-
beth much as the word regina was attributed to Emma: her seniority is that of
her father over Þóra’s father.
Harald retained both women throughout the entirety of his twenty-year
reign. In the autumn of 1066, when he set out to invade England, Þóra and her
elder son Magnús remained in Norway, while Elizabeth and the daughters ac-
companied him and took up residence in the Orkneys, which were allied with
Harald. Harald also did not hesitate to make the close cohabitation of the two
women even closer by initiating a connection that was rather risky, at least in
canonical terms (Snorri reported it around 1230, unflinching and without com-
ment): Þóra’s brother Eystein—one of King Harald’s most faithful followers
and his standard-bearer at the Battle of Stamford Bridge—was to marry Mary,

26 Cf. HsS c. 45, where his mediation saves King Harald from a desperate political impasse:
“Mágr, ek vil nú senda þik…” Finn Árnason profited from the relationship in his turn
when, after unsuccessfully switching sides, he was captured by Harald and released into
exile; HsS c. 66. Of course, the same is true for most princely marriages in the Middle
Ages, however, only one major signal of this kind was possible at any one time, while po-
lygyny allowed far greater flexibility.
27 The names of Elizabeth’s daughters, Maria and Ingigerð, express the symbolic capital
their father had gained by virtue of their birth, namely, the link with Byzantium and with
the Swedish kings, from whom Elizabeth’s mother was descended.
28 HsH cc. 17; 33; 45.
The Expressive Aspect 217

one of Harald’s daughters with Elizabeth.29 Þóra’s sister, Jórunn, was “given in
marriage” to a companion from Harald’s Byzantine adventures, Úlf Óspáksson,
when Harald made him his marshal. “He and King Harald loved each other
very much,”30 and the marriage to the bigamously structured royal family was,
alongside the conferral of rank, a suitable sign of their love. Like King Harald’s
other brother-in-law (and his daughter’s groom), Þóra’s brother Eystein, Úlf the
marshal was, until his death shortly before the 1066 invasion, “the most de-
pendable and a man most attached to his king.”31
The cases of the (at least) bigamous rulers of the eleventh century consid-
ered here show no legal-lexical distinctions between the women involved,
making it very difficult to apply the classificatory labels ‘wife’ and ‘concubine’
to, respectively, Emma and Elizabeth, and Ælfgifu and Þóra, apart from a very
slight difference in their respective fathers’ positions. Of course it is generally
assumed32 that a concubine is of lower status than the man who takes her, in
contrast to the at least equal and often higher-ranking wife. This assumption,
however, is on the one hand circular, on the other useless: if the discussion is
about princely polygyny, by definition almost all conceivable relationships
that the man could enter into are hypogynous in nature; other than Emma and
Elizabeth, kings Cnut and Harald could hardly find women of the same ‘rank’
(if we indeed believe that ‘rank’ was something basically static, which we
might be well-advised not to do in discussing high medieval societies).33 Ælf-
gifu of Northampton or Þóra Þorbergsdóttir were scarcely ‘below’ them; one
may indeed wonder whether either woman was much impressed by the pedi-
gree of her upstart king and spouse.
Considering the lack of a formalized ‘class’ structure among the high medi-
eval aristocracy and, in particular, the fact that kings often owed their position

29 HsS c. 87: “Þá hafði Haraldr konungr heitit honum Máríu, dóttur sinni.” Our modern lan-
guage, unfamiliar with bigamy, lacks the vocabulary for this degree of kinship; Maria is a
kind of step-niece for Eystein.—The death of both men in the battle prevented the plan
from being executed, or possibly failing.
30 HsS c. 37: “Úlfr Óspaksson var með Haraldi konungi í miklum kærleikum. … Haraldr …
gipti honum Jórunni Þorbergsdóttur, systur Þóru, er Haraldr konungr átti.”
31 HsS c. 79 (King Harald’s eulogy for Úlf): “dyggvastr ok dróttinhollastr.”
32 Cf. Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001); Ebel, Konkubinat (1993); Esmyol, Geli-
ebte oder Ehefrau? (2002); H[ermann] Reichert, “Nebenfrau,” in rga, vol. 12 (2002), 18–31,
and many others.
33 Strictly speaking, Emma, daughter of Norman Prince Richard i, is not even of the same
rank as Cnut, the king’s son, but there is little doubt that her contemporaries regarded her
as such—even if the sagas attach importance to the formal subordination of the Rúðujar-
lar, the “jarls of Rouen,” who stemmed from a Norwegian magnate family, to the Norwe-
gian kings.
218 Chapter 4

to personal luck and skill rather than their family background,34 the political-
representational value of a ruler’s various women may have fluctuated a good
deal according to the situation. There is no evidence that Þóra and Elizabeth
faced similar status disputes to those reported about the seating arrangements
of Saint Óláf’s two women (cf. Chapter 1), and it is more likely that by and large
they maintained the balance between them. With social nuances as minor
as  those between Ælfgifu and Emma or Þóra and Elizabeth, it is possible—­
notwithstanding the fact that Cnut the Great and Harald Hardrada probably
had further relationships with various women—to speak of bigamy, assuming
the word is meant as a descriptive term (as opposed to a criminal offence in
contemporary church law). Alternatively, we might use the ethnological con-
cept of ‘co-wives’35 to a polygamous situation in which there are indeed social
distinctions within the group of women. On the other hand, the difference be-
tween these magnates’ daughters and the servant or peasant women with
whom their husbands also associated for a greater or lesser period of time, is so
substantial as to preclude subsuming them all under a category such as ‘concu-
bine.’ If the word at least has an indisputable, if limited, meaning in canon law
and moral theology, it does not really work well as a descriptive term for both
Ælfgifu and the mill maid. A man could establish relationships with higher
and  lower-placed women, and different social situations led to different
modalities.36
The formation of alliances through the handover of women is perhaps the
most obvious mode of operation of polygynous practice in its ‘expressive’ as-
pect. Auður Magnúsdóttir’s study of Icelandic politics and frilla relationships is
so well documented and so convincingly demonstrates the functioning of
chiefly polygyny from the point of view of local alliances that there is no
need  to go further into this ‘function.’37 However, with the greatest respect,
I would here like to formulate an objection. It does not apply to the study and

34 For example, Harald ‘Hard-Ruler’ was the son of wealthy free farmers (whose implausible
descent from Harald Fairhair was surely written up after the fact, cf. Chapter 1) and built
his claim to the throne solely on the fact that he was a maternal half-brother of Saint Óláf.
Repeated mention has been made in this study of the long line of gifted upstarts who laid
claim to the Norwegian royal title on the basis of a more or less plausible paternity claim,
sometimes successfully.
35 Cf. Bretschneider, Polygyny (1995), passim; White, “Re-Thinking Polygyny” (1988), 529–88.
36 Two essential social criteria, the consent of the relatives and—connected to this—­
possible transfers of property, only rarely show up in the sources. In the cases under con­
sideration here, however, both clearly existed for the ‘concubines’ as much as for the ‘wives.’
37 Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, “Makt och kärlek” (1997); Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar
(2001), esp. 72ff. (“vertical” relations in 13th-century Iceland, between territorial chiefs and
farmers, who had a form of client relationship with them); Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och
The Expressive Aspect 219

the findings of Auður Magnúsdóttir, but to a tendency that is perhaps stronger

in its Scandinavian recipients than in Auður Magnúsdóttir’s own work:38 while
the hypothesis ‘frilla relationships create alliances between families/factions’
is demonstrated convincingly, the fundamental identification of the sign (a
frilla relationship) with the signified (an alliance between groups) precludes
the possibility that polygynous relationships could generate different, possibly
widely divergent statements—depending on a number of circumstances, such
as the individuals involved, the manner in which the relationship came about,
its duration and dissolution, the role of relatives and possible offspring, and so
on—and that the actors knew perfectly well how ‘to set signs.’ In a word, we
ought to reckon with social polysemy.
By way of explanation, in what follows I take a look at around a dozen cases
of polygyny for their expressive potential and the various ways the parties in-
volved made use of them. This is quite an extensive series, which may strain
the patience of the meticulous reader. It is necessary, however, for this book to
provide them if the assertion, ‘Polygyny was, among other things, a sign system’
is to become more than just an assertion. If, according to the linguistic apho-
rism, a sign only has uses, not meaning, then as many uses as possible should
be considered. Those offered here are in any case only a selection.

5 A Successful Takeover: Harald Hardrada and Þóra Þorbergsdóttir

(1047)

When King Harald “took” Þóra Þorbergsdóttir in the summer of 1046 after his
royal elevation, Harald, Þóra, her father, and her father’s brothers (the sons
of  Árni) signalled their willingness to cooperate. The context in which this
statement became significant was as follows: in 1035—after five years under
Cnut the Great’s son Sven and his mother Ælfgifu of Northampton as regent—­
Magnús, son of Saint Óláf, had returned from exile in Rus’ and was generally
accepted as king. At first, however, contrary to expectations, he pursued a con-
frontational course, which among other things forced Kálf (the son of Árni
who had fought against King Óláf at Stiklestad, but had then backed Magnús’s
return) into exile in England, changing course only after massive pressure from
all sides. Against this backdrop, the alliance with the remaining sons of Árni

makt (2000), esp. 173ff. (“horizontal” relations between different magnate groups in 12th-
century Denmark); summarized in Byock, Viking Age Iceland (2001), 132ff.
38 Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt (2000), 174; Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar
(2001), 81.
220 Chapter 4

only became all the more important. When, in turn, Óláf’s half-brother Harald
came out of Rus’ and sought power, his relationship with Magnús remained
unsettled, despite their common rule being agreed just in time.
It is unclear whether Harald’s union with Þóra was initiated during Mag-
nús’s lifetime (he suffered a fatal accident in the same year). If so, the sons
present in the country may have seen this as guaranteeing the continuation of
their close and amicable relations with the king, and perhaps encouraged the
exiled brother Kálf to hope for a possible return;39 above all, however, King
Magnús and his followers must have viewed the union as a successful attempt
by Harald to break up and appropriate his nephew’s alliance system. But if the
bond occurred chronologically after Magnús’s death, then no such aggressive
statement is made, and it is mainly a question of signalling that the new sole
ruler wished to take over the alliance system of his predecessor intact.
Either way, much the same signal was sent to the southwestern region of
Norway, Rogaland, where the party of Erling Skjálgsson, killed by Óláf’s sup-
porters in 1028, remained alienated from Óláf’s successors. Since Þóra was a
granddaughter of Erling through her mother (and niece of his surviving sons),
Harald could not make a better choice to turn two potential opposition groups
into “royal kinsmen,” and, more importantly, to communicate it to the whole
Norwegian public in a way that provided for the dissemination of the message
that this public knowledge imposed restrictions on the future actions of the
two opposition groups.

6 The Near-Failure of a Party Formation: Eindriði Einarsson and

Sigríð Erlingsdóttir (c.1023)

A look at a related source, the ‘Story of Eindriði and Erling’ (Eindriða þáttr ok
Erlings) is included in a version of the saga of Saint Óláf,40 further shows how
nuanced statements could be made through the shape and form of couple re-
lationships. The time is 1023, the protagonists are Erling Skjálgsson, g­ randfather

39 Harald did indeed permit him to return; however, his death on one of Harald’s campaigns
shortly after appeared so suspicious that it led to the break with Árni’s son Finn; see HsS
cc. 51ff.
40 Eindriða þáttr ok Erlings, which is preserved in the 14th-century composite manuscript
Flateyjarbók, ed. Sigurður Nordal, vol. 2 (1944), 284–91. For a German translation, slightly
abridged, see Norwegische Königsgeschichten, trans. by Niedner, vol. 1 (1925), 157–63,
where the names of the protagonists are at times mixed up, which impairs understanding
somewhat. Titlestad provides an assured account of its value as a source for the political
situation around 1023—albeit not always the particulars—in Karmøy-konflikten (1996).
The Expressive Aspect 221

of Þóra Þorbergsdóttir, brother-in-law and respected opponent of King Óláf

Tryggvason (r. 995–1000), and the only remaining ‘autonomous’ rival to
Óláf Haraldsson (later Saint Óláf, r. 1015–28/30), and Eindriði, son of chieftain
Einar ‘Bowshaker,’41 the most powerful man in Trøndelag besides the sons of
Árni, who are not mentioned in this story.
The story goes as follows: Sigríð, daughter of Erling, was entrusted to be
raised by one of her father’s followers, to whom King Óláf has given a new bai-
liwick in northern Norway. Sigríð, wanting to return home, sees her chance
when one day a ship drops anchor. She begs the young shipmaster—Eindriði,
the son of the Einar Bowshaker—to take her with him, and he agrees. Although
the two youths pay careful attention to public propriety during the journey,
Eindriði’s father Einar is worried about the affront to Sigríð’s family, and in-
deed Eindriði, who brings the girl to Erling Skjálgsson’s farm as promised,
meets with harsh words on his arrival, and when he asserts that he has not
approached the girl improperly, he is compelled to undertake a trial by iron.
This, in turn, is taken as an affront by both Eindriði and his father (when he
finds out). Thanks to the mediation of Sigríð’s brother, an armed clash is avert-
ed at the last moment, and instead Sigríð is formally ‘given’ to Eindriði.
The key issue here is not whether every detail in the narrative is ‘factual evi-
dence’ for the course of events in the 1023 conflict. That the narrative is at least
questionable can be gauged by the fact that in Heimskringla Eindriði does in-
deed have a wife called Sigríð but she is the daughter of a rather second-rate
landowner, while Erling’s daughter Sigríð is married to the brother of another
northern Norwegian magnate, Þórir Hund, who like Erling opposed King Óláf
Haraldsson. Thus in the narrative material as it circulated two or three centu-
ries after the events, the allocation of the individual roles could vary, but put-
ting antiquarian accuracy to one side, the story was nevertheless ‘true’: in all
cases, it is about the most famous magnates who stood at a distance from or in
opposition to King Óláf Haraldsson.
What this story is about is the slow and halting development of a nation-
wide coalition against King Óláf, which would lead first to his overthrow and
then to his death (and subsequent sainthood) in 1030 during his failed attempt
to return. The negotiations were conducted in the idiom of polygyny, and it is
this process which we will now look at.

41 Þambarskelfir (Saxo x, 12,4: “sagittarius Enarus”); on alternative explanations of his slight-

ly obscure epithet, see Saltnessand, “Hva betyr tilnavnet Tambarskjelve?” (1968).
222 Chapter 4

The opening move is made by Eindriði, the chief’s son from Trøndelag. Di-
vested of its almost romantic cladding,42 the episode reads as follows: he takes
a ship to the unprotected place where he knows the daughter of Erling Skjálgs-
son of Rogaland to be, and ‘robs’ her. Whether or not this occurs with her con-
sent is not a consideration according to the judgement of this environment,43
and the reaction of Eindriði’s father Einar Bowshaker, to whose seat, Gimsan in
outer Trøndelag, Eindriði first travels with the girl, leaves no doubt about the
extent of his bravado: “You aim high with your frillur, my son, now that Erling’s
daughter is your frilla!”44
The problem is relational: the formerly more or less equal (and untested)
relationship between the two chieftains, Einar in the Trøndelag and Erling in
Rogaland, has become so unequal through Eindriði’s act that Erling has no
choice but to accept the challenge and retaliate. It is pointless to speculate
whether Einar Bowshaker,45 politically successful for decades under five differ-
ent regimes, really had not known about his son’s plan in advance, whether he
had second thoughts at the last moment, or whether he simply wanted things
to look as though his son was acting with independence, for the fiction of Flat-
eyjarbók’s narrative largely leaves Einar in the shade (Eindriði is forced by a
headwind to enter Trondheim Fjord and repair his ship with his father). What
is clear, however, is that Eindriði sets out again, this time to bring Sigríð back to
her father: an aborted abduction.
On Sola, Erling Skjálgsson’s base in southwestern Norway, near modern
Stavanger, the stage is being set for a well-orchestrated confrontation. Sigríð is
received, Eindriði is wordlessly feasted among armed men and then taken to
his chamber, where he finds a woman already lying in bed: the frightened Sig-
ríð. The impressive staging in front of a large audience (immediately after-
wards, Erling Skjálgsson, who has not yet appeared, enters the chamber with
his entourage) makes Eindriði a defendant. Although he solemnly asserted in
the form of a skaldic stanza, that he had kept “all the girl’s limbs remote besides

42 When Eindriði initially asks the ‘hitchhiker’ Sigríð for her name, he is too busy loading his
ship to hear her answer properly, and only repeats the question when they are already on
the high seas; only then does the explosiveness of the situation dawn on him.
43 Cf. the discussion above, Chapters 2 and 3; and the contemporary discussion of the paral-
lel case in Egils saga (cc. 32ff.), where the girl’s consent is made explicit.
44 Flateyjarbók c. 144: “Ekki hafi þér nú, frændi, lítit við um frillurnar, þar sem nú er dóttir
Erlings frilla þín.”
45 He began his ascent in alliance with the Jarls of Hlaðir, to whom he was related by mar-
riage, then maintained a respectful distance from Óláf Haraldsson, managed to remain at
sea during the critical months of Óláf’s fall, held his own with the representatives of Cnut
the Great and Magnús the Good, and only finally fell victim to an attack by Harald Hardra-
da, together with his son.
The Expressive Aspect 223

her mouth,”46 Erling refuses to accept these words and compels him to take a
trial by iron, which he formally (and successfully) undergoes.
That Eindriði, cleared of suspicion, now displays the behaviour of one who
has been mortally offended, appears unmotivated to the modern reader. We
should, however, recall that the situation in which he was coerced corresponds
to the juridical construction called “self-judgement” (sjálfdœmi): one party is
so weak that they leave it to the other side to pronounce the verdict. If the
other side then exploits the situation to impose a maximum demand instead
of demonstrating conciliation, as has happened here, this implies that they see
themselves in full possession of power. The sagas label men who behave as
Sigríð’s father Erling does ójafnaðarmenn, literally “un-even-men”: they let
pure power shine through, instead of maintaining even the appearance of par-
ity, thus leaving the other side with no option except to go all in, to victory or
permanent defeat.
They know in Sola what it would cost both sides if Eindriði, and inevitably
his father, go all in—and who would be left laughing, namely King Óláf. ­Erling’s
son Skjálg, the next-in-command as it were, and who has wisely kept, or been
kept, in the background, now attempts to mediate. It soon becomes apparent
that both sides are ready to back down, and realize that Eindriði must now re-
tain Sigríð to compensate for “extortion and degradation.”47 But negotiating
the actual terms proves very difficult: does Eindriði ask her father for her, does
Skjálg assume responsibility for offering his sister, or does her father Erling
­offer her to Eindriði? Ultimately, they agree upon the last, most honorific
­option. Once the settlement is reached, the formal public transferral of Sigríð
can take place, and Eindriði returns northward.
On the way he comes across an impressive fleet headed by his father, who is
already informed of the situation and has set out to “repay hot iron with cold.”48
Attempting to deescalate the situation, Eindriði describes the individual ele-
ments of the settlement point by point, but neither the initial monetary pay-
ment nor the transfer of Sigríð can at first dissuade his father from continuing

46 Skj i B 285: “Mér kom, mundar fúra, / meyjar hold í eyju, / fátt segir hit réttra, / fjarra allt
nema varrar.”
47 Þrǫngving from þrǫng “cramped,” that is, the fact that Erling Eindriði has been crowded
into a hopeless situation, losing the capacity to take the initiative (and so emasculating
him, according to Clover’s theory of gender hierarchy); mœða, actually “debilitation, fa-
tigue” (used in an unusual transitive construction here), which is done to Eindriði; sví-
virðing “shame-worth,” which—as Skjálg is saying—must be settled through an equiva-
lent virðing “worth.”
48 “Þótt þú hafir heitt járn borit ok brennt hold þitt, þá munda ek vilja, at sumir bæri kalt járn
í holdi sér.”
224 Chapter 4

his expedition; it is only when he learns that it has been Erling himself who has
offered his daughter to Eindriði that Einar changes his mind. The fleet contin-
ues on, primarily to demonstrate to the Rogalanders that Erling has made a
wise choice in compromising, but the signs now point towards an alliance
rather than a conflict—the alliance, in fact, that will initiate King Óláf Haralds-
son’s downfall.
The episode provides evidence for two things. On the one hand, it shows
how finely-tuned ‘statements’ could be made through the medium of polygy-
nous practice.49 The same course of action generated different, even contra-
dictory ‘statements’ depending on the actors and context; what began as a
challenge and went on to be a failed attempt at confrontation turned into an
alliance, which, however, elsewhere continued be understood as a conflict (by
Einar Bowshaker, who had not kept abreast of the latest developments). Which
interpretation prevailed could depend on fine details.
On the other hand, the episode shows that ‘speech’ through the medium of
polygynous practice was a very expedient form of communication. If the Mid-
dle Ages are a “gestural culture”50 then few other gestural processes are as suit-
able for underlining the significance of the messages made with them as those
centred on the women of a group. This is perhaps especially true of a culture
like the Nordic, which valued mastery in the epigrammatic rejoiner, and, at the
same time, perfected an art of differentiated wordlessness that pushed com-
portamental stoicism to extremes,51 and in which the sharpest form of gestural
expression was to do nothing at all (which inevitably meant that observ-
ing  those around you—the colour of their face or the swelling of the neck
­muscles—became an important survival technique). In such a culture, the fur-
ther development of not only verbal and gestural but also practical sign sys-
tems is perhaps more to the fore than elsewhere; however, the possibility of

49 While only one woman is mentioned in this episode, it is certainly possible to pursue this
thought and wonder whether there might be others besides Sigríð (this is made explicit
by Einar Bowshaker talking to Eindriði of “your frillur”). Not even the formal “wedding”
(brúðhlaup) in the end precludes competing relationships in the future, as King Harald’s
example shows.
50 Le Goff, La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (1964), 440.
51 As seen, for example, in the striking description of Halldór Snorrason, one of Harald
Hardrada’s companions to Byzantium (HsS c. 36): “He has been the one of the men that
had been with him that was least taken aback by sudden events. Whether it was deadly
danger or welcome news or whatever might turn up in the way of danger, then he was no
happier and no sadder, he slept and drank and enjoyed food neither more nor less than
was his custom.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 70, 71. The inculca-
tion of this ideal is also served by the numerous (in-)famous quips at the death or mutila-
tion of a friend or opponent; see Miller, “Emotions” (1992).
The Expressive Aspect 225

semantizing polygyny results from the central importance of women for the
group is certainly not confined to the saga North: all the participants and their
audience knew that things had become serious when they came into play.
Centuries later, when the episode of Eindriði and Sigríð had long become
history, it remained a productive conceptual tool as a representation of the
present. The kings’ sagas were current at a time when King Hákon Hákonarson,
after eliminating almost all competing pretenders in an attempt to consolidate
his sole rule, had to find an arrangement with the only remaining rival, Jarl or
‘Duke’ Skúli Bárðsson. The alliance held for a while, until tensions came to a
head after a long period of uneasiness. According to the ‘contemporary sagas,’
these conflicts were also occasionally staged through polygynous practices.52
If the sagas are not just textbooks for future ‘politicians’ but, in a broader sense,
interpretations of society’s current practices,53 then the tales about the elev-
enth century endowed the party struggles of the thirteenth century with a
timeless but not ahistorical meaning. Eindriði’s journey with Sigríð, Harald
Hardrada’s alliance with Þóra, and his foreign marriage with Elizabeth, stood
ready to be used by the recipients and actors of later epochs in new contexts.

7 An ‘Unproductive’ Communication: Valdemar the Great and

Helena Guttormsdatter (c.1200)

The ‘expressive’ aspect ought probably not to be read into every affair that we
know about. When King Sigurð entered into a relationship with the singing
mill maid, as short-lived as it was consequential, he obviously did not intend to
signal anything in particular except his royal presence and his right to be re-
ceived as a guest, with all that entailed. On the other hand, the ‘expressive’ as-
pect can occupy the foreground and push back all other nuances, indeed, an
intended statement can become so dominant that it virtually stifles the dy-
namics of the semantic system. In 1204, the Danish magnate Esbern Snare
died, as did his famous brother, Archbishop Absalon of Lund, both members of
the Hvide family (or ‘collective’), who had been the most important basis for
Valdemar i’s rise to become sole ruler. The Hvide collective’s alliance with the
royal line of Cnut Lavard was almost familial: Valdemar was the foster brother

52 For instance, HsH cc. 192f.: One of Skúli’s reeves took the woman of a trusted follower of
the king’s followers “by force” (tók konu nauðga). The king and duke acted equally out-
raged, but immediately afterwards, the king dispatched one of his followers, and several
deaths ensued.
53 For the first view, see Bagge, Society and Politics (1991), for the second, Meulengracht Sø-
rensen, Fortælling og ære (1993).
226 Chapter 4

of Esbern and Absalon. Esbern now left his third wife, named Helena, a widow.
She was a daughter of the Swedish jarl Guttorm, the godfather of Cnut (vi), the
eldest son of Valdemar i and his co-regent. Immediately after Esbern’s death,
the reigning king, Valdemar ii, took the widowed Helena as his frilla, before
entering into a ‘dynastic’ marriage with Dragomira/Dagmar, the daughter of
Otakar i of Bohemia, the following year.54
Formally, the case resembles that of the other bigamous kings examined
here, with the one difference that the Valdemars in Denmark had introduced
and rigorously implemented the principle of ‘legitimate birth’ as a prerequisite
for succession to the throne. So Cnut, the son from Helena’s relationship with
King Valdemar ii, had no chance of succeeding. But like his father’s ‘legitimate’
sons born after him, he was entrusted with goods, titles, and important politi-
cal tasks, among others in the newly conquered Estonia.55
However, the context is substantially different. Valdemar ii’s association
with the widow of his foster uncle did not bring him a badly needed alliance;
rather, it is likely to be a consequence of an alliance that had already existed for
decades. By entering into a kind of levirate concubinage, Valdemar ii was sig-
nalling, two years after his accession to the throne, that he was retaining the
alliance system of his dynasty. Considered canonically, his relationship with
Helena—who on the one hand was the daughter of his brother’s godfather
and, on the other, the widow of his father’s foster brother—was as daring as
the levirate marriage of the Old Covenant (Dt 25:5–10), prohibited by the New
Covenant. However, there is no indication that any of this created problems
with the church of Lund, though its new archbishop, Andreas Sunesen, made
his mark around this time in the intellectual elaboration of the current canoni-
cal trends, including in sexual theology.56 It is unclear whether Helena re-
mained in the vicinity of the king after he had married the Přemyslid princess,57
but the whole situation as well as her son’s prominent role makes it unlikely
that it came to a form of repudiation. In this case, the reception of Valdemar
ii’s relationship with Helena is clearly conditioned by the royal alliance system
and semantically ‘unproductive’ insofar as there could hardly be any doubt

54 Cf. Hans Olrik, “Helene,” in Dansk biografisk Leksikon (1887–1905), vii 288f.; Kræmmer,
Den Hvide klan (21999).
55 On the career of Cnut Valdemarsen, see Chapter 1.
56 See most recently, Nors, “Anders Sunesen” (1998).
57 Helena is known to have donated a benefice to Linköping Cathedral in Östergötland, the
region she originated from, and she may have returned there towards the end of her life.
But it is unclear when this was, and also when her son Cnut was born. In 1219, he was old
enough to be entrusted with the command in Estonia; thus we cannot rule out the possi-
bility that he was conceived during Valdemar’s marriage to Dagmar.
The Expressive Aspect 227

about this state of affairs. There is a certain correlation between the relatively
strong systematization of the structure of dominion in the Valdemar period:
there were no longer ‘open’ situations on a scale that called for constant nego-
tiation between many actors—and their communication through a seman-
tized system of practices—as there had been in Denmark until two genera-
tions earlier and was in Norway until around 1250.

8 Renegotiating Status Loss ii: the Bridal Journey of Óláf Haraldsson

(c.1017)

Any account of the ‘expressive aspect’ of Northern European polygyny ‘at work’
can only be illustrative: the expressive possibilities are too diverse to undertake
a comprehensive ‘grammar’ of this idiom. Looking at the bigamous kings of
the eleventh century has already shown how the same actions could be nu-
anced to convey alliance, challenge, or threat to different beneficiaries. The
story of Eindriði Einarsson and Erling Skjálgsson has shown the stages of the
negotiating process and the reinterpretation of the narrative in its various his-
toriographical permutations. A few more cases will further serve to illustrate
the productivity of the ‘expressive’ aspect.
What took place between Eindriði and Erling on the level of internal Norwe-
gian magnates can also be observed in the ‘foreign’ relations between kings
and kingdoms. The longest such episode in the sagas—it comprises twenty-
five chapters of the story of Saint Óláf in the Heimskringla and is itself longer
than most of the individual king’s sagas—recounts the king’s courtship of In-
gigerð, daughter of the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung (‘Tax-King,’ r. c.980–
1022), in around 1017/19. According to the not entirely consistent testimony of
Adam of Bremen and the kings’ sagas,58 Olof, lauded as the first Christianizing
king in Svealand and Götaland, had an Abodrite woman who received the Nor-
dic name Ástríð and was designated as his “wife” (Adam: uxor; legitima) and
“lady, queen” (Snorri: dróttningin) respectively. They had a daughter and a son,
Ingigerð and Anund, King Olof’s successor, who received the baptismal name
Jacob. Besides, King Olof had a number of other children with a concubina

58 OsH cc. 69–93; Adam of Bremen ii, 39; 59; iii, 15; Cf. Alf Åberg, “De första sveakonungar-
na,” in Carlsson and Rosén, Den svenska historien, vol. 1 (1966), 191ff.—In order to distin-
guish more clearly, I use the Old Norse form for the Norwegian Óláf Haraldsson and the
modern Swedish form for Olof ‘Tax-King’ (Skötkonung) < skattr ‘levy, tax, tribute; trea-
sure, wealth.’
228 Chapter 4

(Adam)/friðla (Snorri), including the future King Emund and the daughter
Ástríð.
Adam, obliged to provide at least in principle a monogamous account of the
‘good’ King Olof, had good reasons to choose the mother of the ‘good’ successor
Anund Jacob as uxor, which conveniently made the mother of the ‘bad’ Emund
(who in Adam’s account does not lapse into paganism, but nonetheless gains a
similarly sinister stature through his inclination towards Gniezno in ecclesias-
tical politics) the concubina. Snorri, following Adam, similarly declares the Slav
princess to be a woman seized in war as a means of creating the rhetorically
required distance between her and the queen, whom he identifies as Swed-
ish.59 Snorri also supplies a background: the concubine, called Eðla (“lizard,
adder”), was the daughter of a “Wendish jarl” (i.e. a prince of the Polabian or
Pomeranian Slavs), who had been abducted in the course of an expedition
(hertekin) and was called “the king’s handmaid” (konungs ambótt) like several
other royal bedfellows who became mothers of kings (cf. Chapter 1). The rank
and the origin of both women were therefore the same; the difference lies in
the manner of their acquisition—as, respectively, the outcome of an agree-
ment or the deployment of military superiority.
The difference did not reflect on the children: both sons succeeded their
father as kings in turn, and both daughters were given to neighbouring rulers:
Ingigerð (daughter of the uxor) to Jaroslav of Novgorod, Ástríð (daughter of the
concubina) to the Norwegian king Óláf. All the rulers and their respective suc-
cessors regarded themselves as kinsmen, with significant political conse-
quences. According to Snorri, even the group originating from the “robbed”
Slav Eðla was included in this alliance: “The king sent his son Emund to Wend-
land, and he was brought up there with his mother’s family, and he did not
observe Christianity for a long time. The king’s daughter Ástríð was brought
up  in Vestra-Gautland with a high-ranking man called Egill.”60 Here we en-
counter another usage of polygyny for expressive purposes: giving over a
child for someone else to raise brought them closer to the royal power (and the
close, evidently affective bond to one who would become an important man
or woman, which is frequently documented), but at the same time—at least
in  the sagas—it functions as a sign of the establishment of a hierarchical

59 OsH c. 94 (on the succession arrangements in Sweden): “annar er øðliborinn ok sœnskr at

allri ætt, en annarr er ambáttar sonr ok vinðverskr at hálfri ætt” (“one is of high birth and
a Swede on both sides, the other is the son of a bondswoman and half Slav”).
60 OsH c. 88: “Konungr sendi Emund, son sinn, til Vinðlands, ok fœddisk hann þar upp með
móðurfrændum sínum, ok helt hann ekki kristni langa hríð. Ástríðr konungsdóttir fœd-
disk upp í Vestra-Gautlandi at gǫfugs manns, er Egill hét.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and
Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 84.
The Expressive Aspect 229

­relationship: “it is a common saying that a person who fosters a child for some-
one is of lower rank.”61 Apparently, Snorri does not see any inherent contradic-
tion in the relatives of the royal handmaid, who had once been taken as a booty
of war, now raising their son.
Snorri’s real interest, however, concerns Eðla’s daughter Ástríð and her as-
sociation with King Óláf Haraldsson of Norway. On the basis of the “Verses on
a Journey to the East” (Austrfararvísur), the long skaldic poem in which Óláf’s
then-emissary Sighvat Þórðarson had described his mission, Snorri wrote a
veritable adventure and romance novel. The woman whom Óláf courts in this
story is, surprisingly, not Ástríð—who Óláf ends up with—but her half-sister
Ingigerð, whom Jaroslav of Novgorod was to marry and at whose court Óláf
was to live in exile after his loss of power in 1028 and before his fatal attempt to
return in 1030.
As so often with Snorri, none of the participants end up looking particularly
good. In Snorri’s tale, Ingigerð herself wants Óláf too, and those in favour of the
match manage to get the awkward and stubborn Swedish king to the point
that—yielding to the pressure of the assembled farmers of the Uppsala thing—
he gives his consent to her marriage to Óláf of Norway. Yet at the agreed meet-
ing point, Óláf waits in vain for the bridal procession and eventually learns that
Ingigerð has meanwhile been given to the prince of Novgorod. Faced with the
inevitable threat of Norwegian retribution to a snub of this magnitude, the
magnates of the West Götaland border region promptly arrange an alternative
solution: they offer Óláf the king’s daughter Ástríð, who is living in the region,
and “who, in the opinion of all men, in no way lagged behind her sister
Ingigerð.”62 The difference in rank—again measured by the origin and nature
of the mother, not the ‘legitimacy’ of the form of bond63—would be compen-
sated for in two ways: firstly, the regional chiefs would club together so that the

61 HsH c. 39: “Þat er mál manna, at sá væri ótígnari, er ǫðrum fóstraði barn.” Heimskringla,
trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 85. Cf. Ármann Jakobsson, Í leit að konungi (1997),
135ff.
62 OsH c. 91: “at þat mæltu allir menn þar, at hon væri at engum hlut verr um sik en Ingigerðr,
systir hennar.”
63 OsH c. 94: Ingigerð is from the Uppland Svear’s royal line on both sides, “the noblest in the
Northern lands, for this line is descended from the gods themselves” (“af Uppsvía ætt, er
tignust er á Norðrlǫndum, því at sú ætt er komin frá goðunum sjálfum”—a reference to
Yngling’s origin myth reported by Snorri), Ástríð’s mother is “a bondswoman, and more-
over Wendish” (“er ambótt móðir hennar ok þó vinðversk”). Like the parallel passage
about the brothers (note 59), the passage must be seen against the background of the in-
tensification of historiography propagating Nordic-Slavic antagonism in the era of the
Danish crusades in the Baltic region from about 1160. According to Adam of Bremen, In-
gigerð’s mother was (also?) a filia Sclavorum.
230 Chapter 4

dowry (heimanfylgja) that had originally been agreed could still be paid; sec-
ondly, as they sardonically suggest to Óláf, “We do not need to ask the Swedish
king for consent!”64
Óláf is satisfied with this opportunity to insult the bride’s father in return,
for it allows him to unexpectedly gain an attractive point in the agon of kings:
“I doubt the Swedish king imagines that I would dare take his daughter against
his will!”65 The festivities can begin. The Götaland jarl Ragnvald formally be-
troths (fastna) the king’s daughter, dowry (heimanfylgja, ‘what follows her
from her home’) and morning gift (tilgjǫf ‘supplementary gift’) are exchanged,
and “the wedding [brullaup ‘bride-run’] of King Óláf and Queen Ástríð was
drunk with all honour.”66
Óláf has accomplished the decisive thing: a wedding with the daughter of a
king. The insult inflicted on him by the Swedish king’s breach of the original
agreement has been repaid through the bruise received by the bride’s father.
Olof of Sweden feels the blow precisely as Óláf of Norway had hoped, and
wishes to have Jarl Ragnvald, who “went to Norway with my daughter and there
surrendered her to him as a frilla” (seldi hana til frillu, literally: “sold her as a
concubine”), hanged for this betrayal. But even in this he is thwarted; of all
people, the other daughter, Ingigerð, now “queen” in Rus’, instead makes
­Ragnvald a jarl in Staraja Ladoga/Aldeigjuborg, her dower from Prince Jaroslav.
We note in passing that to the Swedish king, his daughter has become merely a
frilla despite all the paraphernalia of ‘wedding’ and ‘dowry.’ The operational
factor, for him, is not the solemnity of the marriage ceremony but the fact that
he has not been consulted.
Seen in this light, Snorri’s use of the expressive possibilities of princely po-
lygyny proves congenial to agonistic chiefly culture with its ‘open’ conflict se-
quences, which are only ever provisionally solved. By choosing an episode
from the historical books of the Old Testament as the basic theme—Saul’s
promise to give the rising David his eldest daughter Merab as his wife, who is
then ceded to another, whereupon David receives the junior daughter Michal
(1 Sm 18:17ff.)—Snorri not only lends his own story, tailored to this purpose, a
certain degree of world-historical transcendence, but also reinforces his politi-
cal commentary by equating his actors with Saul and David, including the in-
evitable associations.

64 OsH c. 91: “Þá vætti ek þess, at um þetta ráð spyrim vér ekki Svíakonung eptir.”
65 OsH c. 91: “Eigi mun Svíakonungr þat hyggja, at ek myna þora at fá dóttur has fyrir útan
hans vilja.”
66 OsH c. 92: “var þá drukkit brullaup Óláfs konungs ok Ástríðar dróttningar með mikilli
vegsemð.”
The Expressive Aspect 231

9 A Woman in Reserve: the Icelander’s Booty and the Orkney

Alliance (c.980)

Compared to a monogamically structured system with theoretically perma-

nent, ‘once-and-for all’ bonds, polygyny as a social sign system is more flexible,
more adaptable to varying situations, allowing individual relationships to re-
main dormant, resume, or, if necessary, be terminated by an act such as send-
ing the woman home or handing her on. The Slav woman whom Olof Skötko-
nung captured and took as his “concubine,” and with whose kin their son was
later raised, established a lasting connection of the parties involved, which was
initially determined by antagonism, later apparently by cooperation without
the political tension being completely resolved.67 All sides expanded their re-
spective ‘networks.’ When King Valdemar ii made the widow of Esbern Snare
his bedfellow, he reaffirmed an existing network.
When, towards the end of the tenth century, the Vatnsdœlingar family in
Northern Iceland developed transmarine ambitions and sought contacts with
Orkney, the original handicap of the co-opted maid’s son Þorkel ‘Scratcher,’68
admitted into the kin group shortly after demonstrating his bravado with an
ornate ax, became an asset. Introduced to the entourage of the Orkney jarl
Sigurð through the intercession of a middleman, he gained the jarl’s attention
when talk finally turned to his family (“from now on Þorkel rose in the jarl’s
esteem”), and soon the jarl’s respect when, in the course of a military expedi-
tion to Scotland, he undertook an initiative that was as brave as it was lucra-
tive. Jarl Sigurð commented: “I believe you will be a source of honour to your
kinsfolk.”69
That put the seal on the successful establishment of the family link. It
hinged on the jarl’s willingness to recognize the newcomer’s mother—whom
the saga up to this point had only described as a frilla from Orkney named

67 It is no longer clear which 11th-century women Adam and Snorri’s contradictory state-
ments refer to; for Adam, there is an uxor, who is filia Sclavorum de Obodritis, and an un-
specified concubine; whereas Snorri has an unspecified “lady” and a distinguished Slav as
frilla. We might suspect that Adam’s “wife” and Snorri’s “concubine” are the same person.
But for the present purposes, the question is as unanswerable as it is inconsequential; the
subject of the discussion can only be the figures constructed in the particular accounts
and their contextualization. In this sense, “Eðla” is a Slavic woman of noble family who
was been seized and brought to the Swedish king.
68 Vatnsdœla saga cc. 37 and 42; see above, Chapter 1.
69 Vatnsdœla saga c. 43: “Jarl jók þá virðing hans … ‘Þess væntir mek, at frændum þínum
verði sœmð at þér.’” Sagas of the Icelanders (2005), 259. Among the “kinsfolk” is the jarl
himself, whom Þorkel has already referred to as frændi.
232 Chapter 4

Nereið—as a relative of his.70 The kinship thus concluded obligates the jarl to
give gifts to Þorkel on his homeward journey, including a gold ring weighing
half a mark, as an impressive payment for Nereið’s freedom as well as a com-
plete set of high quality women’s clothing and accoutrements “for the sake of
their kinship.”71 The investment pays off: there is no talk of Nereið’s immediate
return home, and, following the death of her ‘husband’ and former owner
shortly after, she may have acted as an enduring symbol of the overseas power
behind her son’s subsequent unstoppable rise to become a great chief in north-
ern Iceland. It was her good fortune that, at a crucial moment, the jarl of Or-
kney felt he had a reason to grasp the opportunity of building an alliance with
Iceland when it was offered to him.72

10 A Family on the Rise: Sigurð Haraldsson’s Woman (c.1150)

The formation of such networks was closely observed and, where necessary,
grudgingly acknowledged. In this respect, the sagas share the resentment,
widespread elsewhere in Latin Europe from the twelfth century onwards,
against those who suddenly rose in royal favour—against “men raised from the
dust” of diverse qualifications.73 Having a suitable woman to offer could be one
of these qualifications; we have seen that the farmer Símun, owner of a charm-
ing mill maid, found himself close to the king out of pure luck. This kind
of  ‘special relationship’ could, especially in times of war, afford effective
­protection.74 In normal circumstances, it signalled to friend and foe alike the

70 In Njáls saga (c. 89) Néreið appears as Jarl Sigurð’s sister.

71 Njáls saga c. 89: “Gullhring sendi hann Þorgrími [her owner, Þorkel’s father] til frelsis Ne-
reiði, er vá hálfa mǫrk. Nereiði sendi hann allan kvenbúnað góðan fyrir frændsemi.”
72 For correlations with the lived world of the 13th century, see the discussion of the Odda­
verjar’s Orkney marriage policy in Chapter 2. Rapprochement among the North Atlantic
Islands remained an issue up to the later 13th century—always with one eye on the pos-
sibility or reality of a direct takeover by the Norwegian kings. Naturally, we cannot even
begin to ascertain whether the contemporary public actually received the episode of
Vatnsdœla saga discussed here with reference to Sæmund Jónsson’s laborious marriage
arrangements with the daughter of Harald, jarl of Orkney.
73 On this 12th-century phenomenon, see Turner, ‘Men Raised from the Dust’ (1988).
74 Saxo xiv, 16,7: in the struggles for the Danish throne around 1157, it is assumed that the
educator of a concubinarii filii of King Valdemar, as the sole landowner in a region, had
nothing to fear from Valdemar’s looming invasion, even though he also acted as advisor
for the opposing king, Sven.
The Expressive Aspect 233

protection of the powerful man who had entered into a relationship with the
sister or daughter of the house in question.75
We should not see this ‘protection’ as an unqualified blessing for the house
to which it was granted. The topographical distribution of the houses in or from
which the individual Icelandic chiefs had their women seems to suggest that
here too the couple relationship is not so much a cause as a consequence—or,
better, a kind of formalization—of a situation of political and economic impar-
ity: the alliance ‘partner’ had a certain obligation to deliver. It is similar with
those ‘raised from the dust’ surrounding the Norwegian kings: it is impossible to
ascertain whether they came close to the king because the king had picked a
member of their family to be his bedfellow, or if he did so because he already
had a close relationship of trust with the family. Concerning King Sigurð ‘Broad
Shoulders’ (the king with the mill maid), the ‘Summary of the History of the
Kings of Norway’ (Ágrip af Nóregs konunga sǫgum), one of the earliest of the
kings’ sagas (c.1180), reports this episode from around 1150:

There was a man named Geirstein who had two sons, Hjarrandi and Hís-
ing, and a daughter who was the frilla of King Sigurð, and they were on
intimate terms with him. Geirstein was an unruly man and unjust. He
was in the king’s favour.76

The modern translation is a weak reflection of the original, in which some-

thing like a love affair develops between the father and brothers and the king
as the logical consequence of the fact that the daughter is the king’s frilla: ok
þeir í kærleikum við hann.77 Geirstein must have felt confident about the depth
of royal affection when he took the following initiative:

75 On Iceland, see Auður G. Magnúsdóttir, Frillor och fruar (2001), 47–98.

76 Ágrip c. 60: “maðr hét Geirsteinn ok átti .ii. sonu, Hjarranda ok Hísing, ok hans dóttir var
frilla Sigurðar konungs ok þeir í kærleikum við hann. Geirsteinn var óeirðarmaðr mikill ok
ranglátr, sat í trausti konungsins.” Ágrip af Nóregskonungasǫgum, trans. Driscoll (2008), 79.
77 Þeir “they” is the masculine pronoun third-person pl. nom. Old Norse uses the neuter
pronoun (3rd pl. nom. þau) for mixed-gender groups, so the daughter is explicitly not in-
cluded in the ‘love’ relationship here. Kærleik, which is used for example to translate cari-
tas in religious texts, has a more restrained character compared to ást (the more common
word for man–woman relationships, which also appears in this source later on). Above
all, its use in the plural (as here) often stands for an intimate closeness to the king. Cf.
Cleasby and Vigfússon, Icelandic – English Dictionary (1874), s.v. kærleik.—Other terms for
these men in Ágrip are ofstopamaðr “presumptuous man” and óeiramaðr “perpetrator of
violence” (literally, “merciless man,” one who starts and engages in quarrels).
234 Chapter 4

A short way away from him lived a noble widow named Gyða. Her sister
was Ragnhild, who was married to Dag Eilífsson from Vík in the east. She
was a woman of outstanding character [skǫrungr mikill—one of those
women who belonged to the ‘powerful gender’] and Geirstein often went
to see her and was eager to gain her love [ást], but she was unwilling. As
a result he went into a rage and said that refusing him would prove to be
a mistake.78

Now the chicanery begins, using every trick in the book: Geirstein drives his
cattle onto the widow’s pastures; he drives her cattle onto his pastures and
demands atonement from her; Gyða seeks assistance without success; only
one ‘good man of good family’ from the neighbourhood, a man called Gyrð, is
ready to help her. She gives him a spear, he seeks out an encounter with Geir­
stein, who taunts him—“that they had promoted slaves too highly if people like
him were to be measured against him”79—and then gets killed in the encoun-
ter. The irony of these words from the mouth of the one who owed his rise to
the king’s side to his daughter will not have been wasted on the public, and his
death will have been received with even greater satisfaction in consequence.
Back to the story: Gyða already has two horses ready: one for the escape of
her helper and the other also for him, “as remuneration” (við fé); she herself
stays on her farm. But more importantly, she also provides Gyrð with a place to
flee to: Gregóríús Dagsson. He is her nephew, the son of her sister with Dag
Eilífsson. Gregóríús at first hesitates to receive his aunt’s helpful neighbour (in
another version of the story he is Gyða’s foster son)80 but then protects him
from the king’s grasp and from reprisals by the sons of the slain; when it comes
down to it, he even kills them.
King Sigurð is now directly affected—and the symmetry of the escalation
inevitably drives Gregóríús Dagsson to the side of Sigurð’s brother and co-king
Ingi (we remember that from 1139 to 1155, the three sons of Harald gilli shared
a tense joint rule). The flare-up of this rivalry is indeed only a question of time
as the brothers come of age; Gregóríús Dagsson appears at just the right mo-
ment. His political skills soon become apparent, and through these he ­becomes

78 Ágrip c. 60: “Skammt í frá hónum bjó gǫfug ekkja er Gyða hét, systir Ragnhildar, er átti
Dagr Eilífssunr austan ór Vík. Hón var skǫrungr mikill. Geirsteinn ferr opt á hennar fund
ok vill gjarna fá hennar ǫst, en þat var ǫn hennar vilja, ok þá ylmðisk hann í móti ok segr
því munu vera misráðit.” Ágrip af Nóregskonungasǫgum, trans. Driscoll (2008), 79, 81.
79 “…at þeir hafa of dregit fram þræla, er slíkir skulu hónum jafnask.” Ágrip af Nóregs­
konungasǫgum, trans. Driscoll (2008), 81.
80 Mks c. 98. The rest of the episode is only known through the Morkinskinna, as the sole
manuscript for Ágrip breaks off here.
The Expressive Aspect 235

Ingi’s closest confidant and mastermind behind his rise to become sole ruler,
which will cost his two brothers and co-kings their lives. But it is noteworthy
that Ágrip, set down in writing only a generation later, chooses to clad the out-
break of the fraternal strife with polygynous trappings: not in the form of a
‘cherchez la femme’ episode, since the king’s frilla herself does not make an
active appearance, but rather in the form of an enquiry into the consequences
for the father and brothers of a suitable girl who suddenly find themselves
close to the king—and for those who make enemies of such social climbers.

11 A New Party: the Daughters of Saxi í Vík (from c.1095)

The story of the two daughters of Saxi í Vík towards the end of the eleventh
century is a case study of how much a relationship could ‘mean,’ in every sense.
Based in Vík (now Saksvik, 10 km east of Trondheim) on a promontory on the
south bank of Trondheim Fjord, Saxi, “a venerable man in Trøndelag,”81 con-
trolled the waterway and coastal path from the open sea to the rich agricultural
zones in inner Trøndelag. When in 1093 King Óláf ‘the Quiet’ (kyrri, the son of
Harald Hardrada and Þóra, the Árnasons’ sister from this very region) died af-
ter a long and exceptionally uneventful reign, his succession did not go entirely
smoothly. Although his only son Magnús ‘Barelegs’ (r. 1093–1103) was pro-
claimed sole ruler, Oppland decided on Hákon Magnússon, the son of the de-
ceased king’s brother, who had been brought up by a prosperous local chieftain
called Steigar-Þórir. The succession thus turned into a struggle between par-
ties, and probably, regions.
As was so often the case, control over Trøndelag was key. Hákon, who had
the shorter journey, reached Nidaros first and proclaimed himself king at the
Eyrathing. He gained the necessary support through sizeable tax concessions.82
Magnús, who likewise immediately travelled to Nidaros with a fleet, was as
angry about this precedent as he was about the overall situation, but faced
with local resistance he was forced to retreat and withdraw to Westland. The
imminent war was prevented by Hákon’s death by accident, whereupon Mag-
nús, now the sole surviving king, hounded Hákon’s followers out of Trøndelag
into Northland, where they were wiped out. This approach was unusually

81 MsB c. 16: “gǫfugs manns í Þrándheimi.” The verb for the adjective gǫfugr “distinguished,
respected” is gǫfga “worship, revere (in a religious sense).”
82 MsB c. 1: he abolished the land tax (landauragjald) and the payments in kind due at mid-
winter (jólagjafir) and renounced the royal share in many legal fines (réttarbœtr). Follow-
ing his success in Trøndelag, he continued this policy in other parts of the country.
236 Chapter 4

harsh even by Norwegian standards, especially when Magnús had the already
handicapped elderly chief Steigar-Þórir hanged—the first one to proclaim
Harald Hardrada king half a century ago, he must have appeared to contempo-
raries as a kind of living prehistoric monument. Given the already hostile at-
mosphere in Trøndelag, the king now had every reason to worry about allies in
the rich region. Saxi í Vík offered such an alliance for strategic reasons (and
perhaps other reasons, the details of which remain unknown to us), and Mag-
nús took his daughter Sigríð as a frilla.83
The ‘expressive’ interests of both sides are obvious: Saxi í Vík signalled to his
countrymen in Trøndelag that he—and with him, possibly a sub-region or at
least a larger group—gave up opposition and allied himself with the victor.
King Magnús signalled to the region (and moreover to the country as a whole)
that after the successful conclusion of an aggressive campaign, he now sought
friendship and offered the benefits of royal friendship. Of course, the ‘expres-
sive’ was not the only aspect in the matter. With Sigríð Saxadóttir as King Mag-
nús’ frilla, Trøndelag gained the opportunity to raise its ‘own’ pretender for the
first time in the history of Norwegian kingship.84 The son born out of this rela-
tionship received the royal name Óláf. In addition, secondary but by no means
unimportant signals emerge. One concerns the stylization of the victorious
king Magnús’s rule. He was himself a son of a frilla; the origin given his mother
varies, suggesting that the sagas wished to portray her as originating among free
farmers but lacked the details.85 Magnús grew up in his father’s retinue (hirð)
and, according to the later historiography, scarcely twenty years old he had al-
ready fathered several children with captured women—who were apparently
more or less indiscriminately at the disposal of the retinue at the royal court if
the prince did not expressly monopolize them as a “king’s handmaid”—and

83 MsB c. 16: “hon var friðla konungs.”

84 Óláf’s conception can be dated to 1097/98 based on information in Mss c. 1, the suppres-
sion of the opposition to 1095. At which moment within this remaining period the relation-
ship between Magnús and Sigríð began cannot even be pinned down in terms of relative
chronology, as the children of the king and their mothers are dealt with together in a single
passage (c. 16). I believe an early date is plausible, for the reasons set out above; and given
the sagas’ selective reporting, it is of course possible that the later (co-) king Óláf was not
the first child to come out of this relationship.
85 Snorri calls her Jóansdóttir, Morkinskinna and Fagrskinna name her father as one Árni
lagi, but say as little about him as Snorri does about Jón (see Chapter 2). Theodricus,
­Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium (in Monumenta historica Norvegiae (1880),
­1–68, c. 30): “ex concubina natus.”—King Óláf’s childless ‘main wife’ was Ingiríð, daughter
of the Danish king Sven Estridsen.
The Expressive Aspect 237

girls of low birth.86 The magnate’s daughter Sigríð was the first new woman at
Magnús’s side after he took power. A few years later, the king crowned his po-
lygynous course of honour with Margrét, wrested from her father the Swedish
king Ingi Steinkelsson by a massive threat of war. Her semantic function is al-
most overdetermined in her saga byname friðkolla “Peace Girl.”87
The relationship of King Magnús and Sigríð Saxadóttir had significant re-
percussions. The main beneficiary was Sigríð’s son from an otherwise unknown
relationship who would now enter the sagas as Kári ‘King’s Brother.’ With the
farm Austrått he controlled the entrance to Trondheim Fjord (a position that
was later updated with the latest military technology of the time, first by the
Danish kings and later the Wehrmacht during the Second World War), al-
though it is unclear whether the place belonged to the family or whether the
victorious king entrusted his newly acquired henchman with an important
royal demesne.88 Dag Eilífsson, father of Kári’s wife Borghild, was also part of
the nascent kinship group; he would be among the very last to leave the battle-
field in Ulster on 23 August 1103 where King Magnús fell.
The kinship group outlived the reign of the king around which it had formed,
and held on for several generations. The importance of Gregóríús Dagsson,
great-grandson of the Dag Eilífsson mentioned here and grandson of Kári
‘King’s Brother,’ for King Ingi’s rise around 1150 has been referred to above; his
grandson Jón, who also controlled Austrått, was involved in the struggles for
the throne in the thirteenth century and was related by marriage to Duke Skúli,
the protector of Snorri Sturluson—which, incidentally, is an argument for the
credibility of even the details about this family in the Heimskringla. Erling
skakki, effective ruler of Norway between 1162 and 1179, was also marginally

86 See above, Chapter 1. Ordericus Vitalis refers to the mother of the later king Sigurð the
Jerusalemfarer as “Anglica captiua sed nobilis.” In light of other insular reports of English
women who were seized and went on to be the mothers of ‘good’ Norwegian kings, we
might suspect this account of echoing a trope, but this does not make it altogether unre-
alistic: the trope may also have existed as a social practice, so the sons of ‘high-value’
English women enjoyed a certain prestige. Interestingly, Ordericus describes the king’s
relationship with the friðla Sigríð a “legal[e] conubi[um].”
87 MsB c. 15; on the name, see Heimskringla, vol. 3 (1951), 228 note 2. She had no children
with Magnús.
88 In favour of the latter, is the fact that Magnús’s opponents in the region were wealthy and
he may have acquired Austrått by seizing it. Given that Finn Árnason had possessed Aus-
trått a generation earlier, Harald Hardrada may already have done so. Finally, it is also
possible that, through Finn Árnason’s marriage connection with Jarl Orm Eilífsson, Dag’s
brother (see below), the estate came to Kári through Dag’s daughter Borghild; this hy-
pothesis is shared by Løberg, “Austråtts eiere gjennom 1000 år” (1963). In any case, it must
have been sanctioned by the king, if not initiated by him.
238 Chapter 4

connected to this group: he was related to Gregóríús Dagsson in the fourth

generation.89
Just one remarkable initiative among the party’s activities should be men-
tioned here. With the early death of ‘their’ King Óláf, Sigríð’s son, in 1115 the
Saxi group lost their most important asset, but given the continuing concord
between the sons of Magnús, who were in power from 1103 to 1130, they may
have retained the ear of the king(s). The real blow came in what would later
become known proverbially as the “warbands’ winter” (múgavetr) of 1134/35,
when Harald gilli, the alleged son of Magnús Barelegs from his expedition to
Ireland who had been accepted as co-king, overthrew his nephew Magnús.90
Now the time had come for the Saxi party to execute a plan that had long been
in the making. The king’s frilla Sigríð had a sister called Þóra, who had a son
named Sigurð with (it is said) a priest named Aðalbrikt, nominally a (Anglo-)
Saxon. The priest’s son had been “set to book-learning” and received lower or-
ders; however, he proved to be strikingly strong and contentious and acquired
the nickname “the troublesome deacon” (slembi djákn). In the face of Magnús’
defeat and Harald gilli’s triumph, the Saxi group made their move:

Then it got about concerning Sigurð that his mother says that his father
was Magnús Barelegs. So as soon as he became independent in his way of
life, he neglected the clerical life, then left the country. He stayed a long
time on his travels. Then he set out on a journey to Jórsalir [Jerusalem]
and reached the Jórðán and visited the holy relics, as is customary with
pilgrims. And when he got back, then he spent time on trading voyages.
One winter he was present for some time in Orkney. He was with Jarl
Harald at the fall of Þorkel fóstri Sumarliðason. Sigurð was also up in
Scotland with King David [I] of the Scots. He was regarded very highly
there. After that Sigurð travelled to Denmark and according to his own
and his followers’ account, he had there performed an ordeal about his
paternity and it was proved that he was King Magnús’s son, and there
were five bishops present.91

89 Although kinship alone was no guarantee of practical solidarity, the likelihood of frændir
working together was relatively high.
90 Magnús was the son of Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer and Borghild (who had undergone the
trial by iron, see Chapter 3). Maimed and blinded by the victors, he was imprisoned in a
monastery.
91 MsBHG c. 13: “var settr til bókar … Þá kom þat upp fyrir Sigurð, at móðir hans segir, at
Magnús konungr berfœttr væri faðir hans. Ok þegar er hann réð sjálfr háttum sínum, þá
afrœkðisk hann klerkasiðu, fór þá af landi brot. Í þeim ferðum dvalðisk hann langa hríð.
Þá byrjaði hann ferð sína út til Jórsala ok kom til Jórðánar ok sótti helga dóma, svá sem
The Expressive Aspect 239

We should not take the stylization of Sigurð’s career—which, incidentally, is

almost a mirror-image of the story designed by King Sverrir about his own
rise—as the personal initiative of an impetuous problem child.92 What we see
here is the careful training of a future pretender by his kin group. Although the
strict observance of the minimum age of 25 years for diaconal consecration
can hardly be assumed,93 it nonetheless provides a rough indication that Sig-
urð’s ‘launch’ began within the period 1120/30.94 His kin had thus kept him in
reserve for a remarkably long time, evidently because he was not required as a
king’s son while his “brother” Óláf lived and ruled. If anything, it might even
have been detrimental to the stability of the regime if the existence of another
son of Magnús with a claim to participate in governance had got about. There-
fore “he was known as” the son of an English or Saxon priest,95 until the right
moment had come.
From then on, little by little he acquired all the key qualifications. A well-
balanced mixture of expeditions for war and trade familiarized him with the
relevant forms of accumulation and redistribution; in the most important
North Sea countries, he established useful connections and procured the nec-
essary credentials per ordalium under favourable terms (all too favourable,
some found, who spoke of “lies and deception of the Danes”). Most important
was the pilgrimage to the Orient: following the First Crusade, Sigurð the Jeru-
salemfarer had ultimately made the trip to Jordan—because the river, not the
Holy City en route, is always the final goal in the sagas—into an accomplish-
ment that much enhanced royal dignity.96 In short, there was perhaps never a
more qualified frilla’s son to enter the race for the Norwegian kingship.
It is, of course, pointless to ask whether the king or the priest (or whoever)
‘in fact’ was Sigurð’s biological father. Two issues are key. Firstly, the choice of
a foreign cleric for alternative paternity is very adroit, insofar as it suggests a

pálmarum er títt. Ok er hann kom aptr, þá dvalðisk hann í kaupferðum. Einn vetr var hann
staddr nǫkkura hríð í Orkneyjum. Hann var með Haraldi jarli at falli Þorkels fóstra Sumar-
liðasonar. Sigurðr var ok uppi á Skotlandi með Dávíð Skotakonungi. Var hann þar virðr
mikils. Síðan fór Sigurðr til Danmerkr, ok var þat hans sǫgn ok hans manna, at þar hefði
hann flutt skírslur til faðernis sér ok bar svá, at hann væri sonr Magnúss konungs, ok væri
þar við fimm byskupar.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 182–83.
92 SvS cc. 1–6, written three or four decades before Heimskringla and Morkinskinna.
93 B[ernd]-U[lrich] Hergemöller, “Diakon, Diakonat, ii: Lateinischer Westen,” in LdM, vol. 3,
col. 941f.
94 Magnús Barelegs died in 1103, his son with Sigríð was born in 1098/99. For the sake of cred-
ibility, Sigurð must have been born around this time.
95 MsBHG c. 13: “Hann var kallaðr sonr Aðalbrikts prests.”
96 See above, Chapter 3. Snorri’s account of Sigurð’s trip to Jerusalem may be the least enthu-
siastic account of such a journey from the entire Middle Ages.
240 Chapter 4

nonentity in terms of networking (“Aðalbrikt” had no relatives and was prob-

ably long since out of the country), so the maternal kin had the pretender all
for themselves. Secondly, the claim that King Magnús was the father must have
had a modicum of plausibility, so the king having sexual relationships with
both sisters simultaneously must have been generally credible. The house of
Saxi í Vík was the focus of regional interest since Sigríð had become a king’s
woman; what happened there was noticed; we can therefore also “actually”
reckon with this possibility.97 Perhaps Saxi í Vík was safeguarding his new-
found proximity to the king with both his daughters.
The prohibition on sororal polygyny belongs to the core elements of the
canonical incest regulations and was received in Northern Europe around 1200
at the latest.98 Gregory of Tours had already condemned the practice among
the Merovingians, and under the influence of both Jewish-Christian and Ro-
man ideas, over the course of the Middle Ages it stabilized into a taboo.99 How-
ever, the practice seemingly did not constitute a problem in Norway around
1100. The fact that King Magnús had sexual relations with two sisters, probably
at the same time, is not insisted on, but neither is it concealed. Sigurð’s at-
tempt to seize the kingship, momentarily successful, failed completely, and his
torture by the victors is the most extensive cruelty in all saga literature. Yet
there is no indication that his opponents made any propagandistic use of his
(doubly) ‘sinful’ birth.100 Nor is the fact commented upon in the kings’ sagas of
the thirteenth century; Snorri reports on Sigurð’s conception with the same
composure he displays for all genealogical digressions. If Sigurð had remained

97 That does not mean that Sigurð was ‘actually’ the king’s son. Þóra herself may not have
been able to say with certainty who Sigurð’s father was.
98 For example, Older Gulathing Law §24; Older Frostathing Law iii §3: the maximum pen-
alty for intercourse with “systir konu manns” is outlawry. The age of the individual provi-
sions of the provincial laws is contentious, but they certainly existed around 1200. The key
thing for the discussion here is that in the Heimskringla King Hákon the Good (934–61) is
considered the legislator of these laws, thus in the narrative logic, Magnús Barelegs was
bound to the secular as well as the ecclesiastical prohibition.
99 Gregory of Tours, Historiae iv, 3; prohibition of sororal polygyny: Lv 18:18; Greco-Roman
culture’s fascination with incest is illustrated by numerous myths, including Caligula’s
vehemently rejected attempt to emulate the gods (and pharaohs) in this respect ­(although
Suetonius’s Caligula is admittedly more drastic than Gregory’s Chlothar and Snorri’s Mag-
nús). To my mind, the fundamental differences in context and presentation rule out any
suspicion that Gregory is directly echoed by Snorri.—As far as I know, there has been no
standalone treatment of the subject for the Middle Ages; the essay by Durkheim’s student
Granet remains stimulating and worth reading: Granet, La polygynie sororale (1920).
100 Strictly speaking, his opponents’ position rested on the claim that Sigurð was not a son of
King Magnús at all; but propaganda and defamation does not need to be consistent or
stringent.
The Expressive Aspect 241

an assistant priest—we may assume—his mother would not have been named
at all; she does not appear in the saga of Magnús Barelegs, but only in that of
her son. Yet even if this nonchalance is not a calculated opinion, this disinter-
est in sororal incest would in itself be remarkable: is this a difference in the
judgement of the societies or ‘only’ a difference between historiographers?

12 “And He Will Take Your Daughters…”: Magnús the Good and

Margrét Þrándsdóttir (c.1040)

In the interpretation suggested here, the two daughters of Saxi í Vík (and oth-
ers) function as a sign of the rapprochement of the king and the regional mag-
nates of Trøndelag after previous violent conflicts. In fact, we do not know any-
thing about the modalities of this alliance building. The assumption that it was
a question of a consensual process rests solely on the subsequent course of
events, the apparent continuation of the good relations between the Saxi
group and King Magnús and his line, and their hostility towards pretenders—
such as Harald gilli—who challenged Magnús’s descendants. The wording of
the source, however, is vague: “Óláf’s mother was Sigríð, the daughter of Saxi í
Vík, an eminent man in Trøndelag. She was the king’s frilla.”101 It does not say
how, precisely, she came to be his frilla. The same is true of the Icelandic alli-
ances examined by Auður Magnúsdóttir through frillur relations, where we
likewise learn about the participants and the fact that the relationship existed,
and through the wider source context learn which other (topographical, juridi-
cal, military) ties connected the parties involved, but almost nothing is said
about the modalities of starting the relationship. Strictly speaking, we do not
know whether King Magnús, having seized power, returned from his campaign
to eradicate the opposition in Northland and carefully sought out a discussion
with Saxi í Vík, or appeared at his farm armed with five longships at his back to
take the daughters of the house and “place them under him” as his fair-haired
ancestor had done. The argument for the former rests on the assumption that
the future association of the king and the Saxi party suggests a consensual
course of events, but that is a plausibility argument. All we know is that as a
result he got one (maybe two) of the chief’s daughters, and we have reason to
suspect that Saxi and his group did not harbour a grudge afterwards.
This means that we cannot rigidly separate the meaning ‘alliance/consen-
sus’ from other statements expressed through polygynous relationships. By
­taking the daughter (daughters?) of Saxi í Vík, before any nuances—in this

101 MsB c. 16, in the context of the king’s other women.

242 Chapter 4

case, (probably) the readiness for rapprochement—King Magnús made one

central message: he was the ruler. This common denominator ranges the con-
sensual case of Saxi í Vík within a continuum of more or less consensual and
paritarian situations right down to the other extreme, the undisguised or even
staged robbery of women. In principle, the prince could have as many women
as he required to negotiate and express their respective relations. Behind all
these contingencies there is always that core element of domination which
the Old Testament (1 Sm 8:11–18) sets alongside other essential characteris-
tics of hierarchical monarchical rule: “And he will take your daughters…”102 It
combines the story of Saxi í Vík and various polygynous episodes, superfi-
cially wholly different (recall the ‘abduction’ of Borghild í Dali discussed in
­Chapter 3), into a system in which all individual events refer to each other
and thus acquire additional meaning. In relation to the specific case this
means that the frilla relationship of Magnús and Sigríð only gains its specific
‘expressive’ value if placed in the context of the stored knowledge of theoreti-
cally similar cases in which the variables are arranged differently. The sagas’
readers/listeners—including the modern historian—can only interpret this
case as consensual by referring it to similar cases (the same ‘praxeme’: isol-
able courses of action which can carry meaning, such as ‘king arrives at house
and starts frilla relationship with woman from the house’) and comparing it
with them.
Morkinskinna, a kings’ saga manuscript more or less contemporary with
Heimskringla and often very similar in content, has an episode from the early
years of King Magnús ‘the Good’ (r. 1035–47) not reported by Snorri. A “respect-
ed district chieftain” in southern Norway named Þránd holds an autumn feast,
lasting several days and attended by landowners from throughout the region.
One afternoon, a magnificently equipped longship appears in the bay below
the farm. The assumption that the king comes visiting uninvited is soon con-
firmed. In the banqueting hall, Magnús shows himself to be in “good humour,”
and the potentially explosive situation develops into a good one—except for
the detail that Þránd’s daughter Margrét, “a woman who was very wise and very
beautiful” and who has not concealed her misgivings when the king’s ship had
first been sighted, keeps herself very much in the background.

102 “Filias quoque vestras faciet sibi unguentarias et focarias et panificas”: the labours enu-
merated for the girls whose service the king will require resonate with the “mill maid.” On
the approximation of concubinage and bondage, see the discussion in Chapter 1; on the
biblical context, cf. Schottroff, “Zugriff des Königs auf die Töchter” (1989), 268–85; Friedl,
Polygynie (2000).
The Expressive Aspect 243

This provokes a reaction from the king:

He asked Þránd who the fair woman was who preceded the others. Þránd
said it was his daughter. The king said: “And still she does not want to
greet us. She must certainly be well bred, and she is a beautiful woman to
boot. I wish to spend the night with her.”
“That does not befit you honour, sire,” said Þránd.
“This is nonetheless the way it will be,” said the king.103

Þránd informs his daughter, who finds her misgivings fully confirmed and only
hopes “not to love him first and then lose him immediately.” In other words,
she reckons that if she has to be one of King Magnús’s women, she would pre-
fer things did not turn out for her as they had for the mill maid, and she might
at least gain a position, reputation, and influence for a time as the king’s frilla.
The king is prepared to negotiate: “I am not generally reputed to be a scoun-
drel, and this can be done in a way that turns to her advantage. But there is no
fitting alternative to my deciding this matter.”
A bed chamber is prepared and Margrét gets ready. The episode now turns
into a miracle story: a stranger enters the room, promising her safety before
King Magnús’s arrival: “He then touched her breast and marked her for himself,
and she felt a cold shiver go through her.” The man instructs her to tell the king
that his relative Sigurð (a steward on a nearby royal estate) has been with her,
and leaves.
King Magnús arrives, and Margrét does as advised. The king jumps up indig-
nantly and sends for Sigurð immediately. No sooner has he been brought be-
fore the king than he must explain himself before Magnús’s wrath, but he is
ready to swear that he has never slept with Margrét. At this, the king summons
the girl, who now reports the strange event. Margrét must bare her breast; the
sign visible on it has the shape of a silver penny. “It turns out,” said the king,
“that my father does not wish me to lie with this woman. The man who visited
her was my father.” Saint Óláf, whose sanctity has become the basic consensus
of Norwegian politics in the shortest possible time, providing his son with the
necessary legitimatory advantage over his Danish counterparts, may not be
gainsaid. The king gives Margrét to his ‘relative’ Sigurð to marry, and continues
his journey.104

103 Mks c. 25: “En konungr spurði Þránd hver sú væri in fríða kona er fyrir gekk. Þrándr svarar
at sú var dóttir hans. Konungr mælti: ‘Ok ekki vill hon oss kveðja. Víst lætr hon vel, enda
er hon fríð kona ok hjá henni vil ek rekkja í kveld.’ ‘Eigi samir yðr þat, herra,’ svarar Þrándr.
‘Þat mun fram fara,’ segir konungr.” Morkinskinna, trans. Andersson and Gade (2000), 169.
104 Mks c. 25: “‘…ok þykki mér þat tungt at leggja fyrst ást við hann ok týna honum brátt.’ …
‘Ekki em ek kenndr við ódrengskap af flestum mǫnnum, en búask má svá um at henni
244 Chapter 4

Caution is required when reading a miracle story for its political content.
However, the décor of this and most of the other Óláf miracles embedded
in saga narrative may well be understood as encouragement to the benefi-
ciary to await the intervention of the royal saint in his very own domain—
royal ­politics—and to interpret salient events of everyday political life in
light of the holiness of the rex perpetuus Norvegiae. This entitles us to elimi-
nate the mysterious man’s performance from the narrative for a start, and to
read the remaining narrative as a process that, seemingly predictable, takes an
­unexpected—and therefore ‘miraculous’—turn.
King Magnús seems to have encountered a situation in which he must dem-
onstrate his authority, without any opportunity for lengthy preparation (time
and again, the topography of Norway means that the king on his itinerary is
faster than the news of his imminent arrival). The southeast around Oslofjord,
traditionally a zone of predominantly Danish suzerainty and whose affiliation
to the Norwegian kingdom remained contentious until the late eleventh cen-
tury, is particularly sensitive, as Magnús is locked in dispute with Sven Estrid-
sen over the right of succession in Denmark. Magnús cannot know for what
purpose Þránd has organized his lavish autumn feast. Therefore he comes un-
invited to check, meets Þránd with friendliness but nonetheless establishes
an unmistakable sign of his power: he demands the daughter. Þránd and Mar-
grét just manage to negotiate the form of an alliance rather than a showdown
­(recall Saxi í Vík, where precisely these modalities remain unclear), and the
king goes to bed to consummate his symbolic staging of power.
We might imagine that Magnús simply changes his mind and opts to de-es-
calate at the last moment, or that, once the bedchamber has been prepared
according to his wishes, and publicly so, consummation is no more necessary
(to abstain from it might then even count as a snub, which would make the
‘miracle’ a face-saving device). We might even imagine that the sight of a char-
acteristic birthmark on Margrét’s breast ‘miraculously’ signals to the king at
the last moment that he is about to commit incest.105 Either way, he must now

verði gæfa at þessu, ok engi hœfendi munu á ǫðru verða en ek ráða fyrir.’ … Hann tøkr
síðan á brjósti hennar, ok varð henni við kalt nǫkkut, ok merkti hana sér … ‘Er svá farit,’
segir hann, ‘at faðir minn vill eigi at ek tœka þessa konu til lags við mik. Faðir minn hefir
sá maðr verit.’”—On the “mark of adultery between her breasts,” cf. Hos 2:2 (God’s speech):
“iudicate quoniam ipsa non uxor mea et ego non vir eius, auferat fornicationes suas a fa-
cie sua et adulteria sua de medio uberum suorum.” In the thirteenth century, a minted
coin would have been the only visible and tangible remnant of an earlier kingship.
105 Sleeping with a woman who had previously had sexual intercourse with a blood relative
is a similar case to sororal polygyny and is treated as such in the provincial laws. However,
setting aside the canonical similarities, it is quite possible that from the point of view
of the men involved, it was a far more serious matter to take each other’s women away
The Expressive Aspect 245

make a substitute gesture of domination. He—and not her father, who is also
present—gives the girl to the royal bailiff Sigurð, who (as the episode is possi-
bly to be understood) has ‘known’ her once before and probably reported all
the details at the royal court, and continues his royal tour.
Princely polygyny—it is a polygynous episode in the sense that something
similar could, and sometimes did, occur at each farm throughout the rest of
Magnús’s journey—is thus a repertoire of signs, through which both the gen-
eral fact of existing royal dominion and its current character (from consensual
to confrontational) can be expressed. After all, intercourse does not ‘signify’
Magnús’s success in asserting his claim to power, but rather happens as part of
that success.
With a pinch of semiological salt, we may be justified in understanding the
(intended and nearly implemented) intercourse with Margrét as a sign with a
message. To do so, we must assume that Magnús does not demand to spend the
night with Margrét because he was swept away by the sight of her charms to
what the Latin texts call amor, and what the Norse texts (which only explicate
actions, not motives) never spell out.106 If we understood his demand as moti-
vated by sexual desire—as some medieval historiographers condemning lay
luxuria and many modern historians do—the sexual service demanded would
not be a sign but just another service which the subordinate owes the prince,
like other contributions in kind and, where appropriate, military support.107
Now, the practical demand of hosting the king is never solely motivated by
practical concerns (material supply of the itinerant royal entourage), but al-
ways has a ‘semiotic’ character. In the case of Margrét, however, I think it can
be assumed that the practical motivation (the king’s desire for exactly this
sexual partner) is wholly eclipsed by the sign ‘the chief’s daughter is demanded
and received’: the demand has a purely expressive function vis-à-vis her father,
her household, and herself. The king does not act out of sexual desire; that
sting cannot be ruled out, but neither can it be assumed. Furthermore, in order

within the same kin group than to take two women from the same outside group. Magnús,
at any rate, jumps up and shouts: “Then in no circumstances may I lie in this bed”: he does
not want to challenge Margrét’s ‘previous owner.’ There is also the difference in sources,
the composite manuscript Morkinskinna, in which an older collection of royal tales is
amalgamated with episodes incorporated into later redactions over the course of the 13th
century, and the consistent authorial performance of Heimskringla.
106 There is a comparable passage in Knýtlinga saga: “konungr leit ástaraugum til hennar”
(The king cast love glances at her).
107 The summary term for these services, veitsla “feast,” refers to their dominant aspect, tied
up with the supply of agricultural produce. Military service was usually only owed by men
tied to the king’s entourage, while general mobilization was a 12th-century innovation
with mixed results.
246 Chapter 4

to drive home the point Magnús must now—whether he wants to or not—­

indeed sleep with Margrét, and publicly, insofar as everything that does or does
not happen will become public knowledge because if no one else, Margrét her-
self is there as a witness. Literally, nothing short of a miracle can stop the king
now, and the king cannot let himself be stopped by anything short of a miracle
(which, expediently, happens). Any action on the king’s part must be calculat-
ed according to its consequences, and must never be left to the impulse of the
moment. Little remains of the purportedly thoughtless, impulsive men chas-
ing young women, if, in fact, they disciplined their sexual conduct in subordi-
nation to the same logic as their feuds, drinking habits, and speech skills.
It should have become clear in what way the interpretation of the polygy-
nous side of political culture as proposed here differs from other, anthropologi-
cally or sociobiologically motivated interpretations. Not the connection be-
tween power and sexuality, which is virtually negligible given its ubiquity and
evidence, but its operationalization under contingent conditions are the sub-
ject of historical analysis. Like the Merovingians,108 and doubtless many others
without literate observers, the Norwegian kings of the eleventh century took
advantage of the opportunities offered by their sexuality in particular ways for
particular purposes, and under the given circumstances developed an expres-
sive system that could be used for differentiated statements.

13 Danish Encounters

Fragmentary though they often are, traces of this system can be found in many
sources of different kinds and make it possible to bring these elements—­
otherwise all too easily dismissed as topical set pieces—into context. For in-
stance, in the thirteenth-century Knýtlinga saga, the Danish royal saint Cnut
(d. 1086), touring his kingdom in much the same manner as Magnús, likewise
breaks off an attempt to demand a night with his host’s wife.109 The episode

108 Chronik des sogenannten Fredegar iv, 59 for the year 630/31: “Anno 8. regni sui, cum Auster
regio cultu circuerit, quadam puella nomen Ragnetrudae aestrati sui adscivit…” [sic]
(“When, in the eighth year of his reign, he [Dagobert i] passed through Austrasia in a
royal manner, he took a certain girl named Ragnetrude to his bed”). This relationship
produced King Sigibert iii, and this alone is the chronicler’s occasion for mentioning
Ragnetrude.
109 KnS c. 31. Following the model of Heimskringla, centred around Óláf’s saga, the middle
third of the Danish kings’ saga is occupied by a Life of Saint Cnut, which is far closer to
hagiographical conventions than Snorri’s work.—No miraculous intervention is required
in this episode (unlike in the episode of Magnús and Margrét in Morkinskinna, cited
The Expressive Aspect 247

may in first instance be read against the backdrop of the motif of his monoga-
mous abstinence, established since his first vita.110 In the same context, how-
ever, it gains the additional nuance of the reference to Cnut’s “harsh” style of
rule, his nimia crudelitatis sevitia (Sven Aggesen), which was likewise well es-
tablished in the historiography, and which even in the hagiography was con-
sidered the cause of his fall. It encouraged the audience to see Cnut’s demand
for a night with the lady of the house as part of a whole series of actions which
included his outrageous tax demands and severe treatment of the opposition.
The situation is similar with the miraculous conception of (locally revered,
never canonized) ‘Saint’ Nicholas of Aarhus around 1150. Travelling around Jut-
land, Cnut Magnussen—one of three co-kings in Denmark sharing a fragile
common rule—has just reached Haderslev in South Jutland when an “astrono-
mer” prophesies the imminent conception that night of a man great before
God and man. “I want to be the father of that child!” exclaims the king, ­summons
a young noblewoman, and fathers the future saint.111 The well-established mo-
tif of ‘illegitimate’ miraculous conception, whose leading representative may
be considered Charlemagne, acquires, when read in an ‘expressive’ context, a
quite precise political nuance: Cnut wishes to make his precarious rule in South
Jutland—the former jarldom of Cnut Lavard, father of Cnut’s co-king and rival
Valdemar—visible in the most impressive way possible.
The Norwegian King’s Mirror (Konungs skuggsjá, around 1260), the first
parenesis of rulers in the North and thus already a testimony to the ‘European-
izing’ adaptation phase of the kingdom of Hákon iv, lists as one of the charac-
teristics of periods of unclear royal succession: “Some women are robbed and
raped and others gained with cunning and intercourse.”112 A similar observa-
tion is made in the law of the king’s retainers (Hirðskrá) from the time of Mag-
nús the Law-Mender (1263–80), c. 44: The ‘guests’ (gestir, the second rank of
the retinue) should, when undertaking a royal mission, always remember their
errand and as far as possible refrain from doing the following: plundering,

above), as the king himself is the saint; therefore, after a pastoral-sounding plea by the
woman, he himself leaves her be.
110 Ælnoth c. 8; see above, Chapter 1.
111 vsd 404: “Dicitur de Kanuto rege transeunte a plaga boreali Jutie uersus australem, quod
iuxta oppidum Hathersleuense de nocte dixit ei astronomus, quod illa nocte generaretur
puer magnus coram deo et hominibus. Dixit rex: ‘Vellem ego esse pater illius pueri’; et
fecit ad se uocari puellam nobilem, de qua genuit sanctum Nicolaum.”—On the political/
dynastic context, see above, Chapter 1.
112 KSs 53: “þa værda konor sumarr hærnæmðar oc nauðgar tæcnar en sumar velltar mæð
brogðum oc lægorðum.”
248 Chapter 4

theft, rash homicide, and “above all breaking women’s peace.”113 Reading the
saga of Hákon’s reign indicates that such practices were commonplace.
This ‘politicization’ and semantization even affects a seemingly ubiquitous
motif: the narrative sequence ‘brutalizer demands the surrender of girls for
sexual abuse under the threat of violence.’114 This is the motif of the pucelle
esforciee which, inter alia, provides a key scene in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain,115
allows Saxo to illustrate heroic deeds of the Norse in Rus’,116 and generated
powerful additional references through its affinity to the narrative pattern of
the legends of virgin martyrs.117 However, in the sagas the place of giants, sav-
ages, and prefects is taken by the usual actors, and their diabolically inspired
misdeeds reduced to the level of commonplace feuding between Nordic mag-
nates. The saga of Hávarð from Ísafjord (northwest Iceland), set in the early
eleventh century but surviving in a version penned around 1300, portrays a re-
gional ruler as follows:

He was of noble kin, a great chieftain, and very prone to flaunt his power
[literally, “he was the greatest man of no measure,” the term being ójaf-
naðarmaðr “un-even-man,” inequitable man] so that no one in the Ísa­
fjord dared to object to any of his demands. He took men’s daughters or
other kinswomen, and kept them with him for a while, then sent them
home again; he also took the dwellings of some, or drove them from their
land.118

113 Hirðskrá c. 44: “þeir eigu ok sjálfer vandlega at at hyggja, til hverju luta þeir ero sender …
ok minna á aðra, þá sem þeir sjá, at misgera, varazt við rán ok stuld ok allra helzt um
kvenna frið ok þeira fé, laupa eigi bráðlega til manndrápa…” Cf. Lunden, “Sagakvinner”
(1980/1991), 56.
114 See the survey of instances in Boberg, Motif-Index (1966), no.s R0-99 “Captivity” (esp.
R10ff.) and R100-199 “Rescue” (esp. R111ff.).
115 V. 3768–4305: Yvain saves some of Gauvain’s relatives from a giant who is besieging their
castle and demands Gauvain’s niece be handed over to his people; for an interpretation
from the point of view of textually constructed rape, see Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens
(1991), 45ff.
116 Saxo vi, 5,14: a warrior who is so sure of his power that he “illustrium uirorum coniuges
maritis spectantibus raptas ad stuprum pertraheret,” and is defeated by Starkad, return-
ing from Byzantium.
117 For example, in the Norse Margrétar saga (Unger, ed., Heilagra manna søgur, vol. 1 [1877],
475), where the jarl Olibrius wants to make Margaretha his frilla (~concubina). For Norse
versions of the virgin legends, see most recently Wolf, ed., Heilagra meyja sǫgur (2003), as
well as Gad, Helgener (1971); Carlé, Jomfru-fortællingen (1985); Carlquist, De fornsvenska
helgonlegenderna (1996), and as an important contribution to research on reception,
Lewis, “Model Girls” (1999).
118 Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings c. 1: “Hann var stórættaðar maðr ok hǫfðingi mikill ok inn mesti
ójafnaðarmaðr, svá at engir menn þar um Ísafjǫrð báru styrk til neitt í móti honum at
The Expressive Aspect 249

This negative model of an ójafnaðarmaðr, a man who refrains from preserv-

ing the paritarian consensus (jafnað/aequitas) even as a matter of form, gets
what he deserves in the course of the story, along with the brutalizers in
the  midst of society who behave “recklessly in the hunt for women and in
boasting.”119 ­Occasionally, this role falls to marginal figures such as the stan-
dardized ‘berserker’ who, in the sagas of Icelanders, is not a mythical figure but
a profit-driven professional duelist, presenting the farmers with the alternative
‘daughter or death’ before the hero takes him down.120 In such cases—much
like in Chrétien’s Yvain—social and sexual disgrace go hand in hand, making
for a transgressional element in a narrative that is ultimately affirmative: the
indignation over lowly brutalizers who take the daughters of honest people
suggests that access from ‘above’ to ‘below’ is less problematic. In the frame-
work of a saga of Icelanders where the local big man takes the place of the
‘berserker,’ the scandal consists precisely in the fact that a member of the pari-
tarian society, committed to the safeguarding or restoration of jafnað (even-
ness), shuts himself off from this basic consensus: the narrative parallels make
the magnate an antisocial ‘berserker’ whose death no one mourns.
The affirmative effect of transgression is central for the ‘prehistoric’ heroes,
who are always granted a little more than the men and women of the ‘histori-
cal’ period, which begins around the tenth century. These were not just any
heroes but, from the perspective of the high medieval recipients, the founders
of their own political universe, only slightly obscured by the fog of pagan pre-
history. The prehistoric sea king Helgi from the Dan dynasty—“it was uncer-
tain whether tyranny or lust burned more intensely in him”121—committed
the most famous rape of the Nordic heroes while pillaging in the Danish archi-
pelago, where he sent his people in search of “a suitable girl” for his pleasure
and they returned with a “baron” and his daughter.122 Helgi leaves her behind,
pregnant—and does not know that the girl he will claim, many years later on
his next landing on the island, is his own daughter conceived that night. The

mæla. Hann tók dœtr manna eða frændkonur ok hafði við hǫnd sér nǫkkura stund ok
sendi síðan heim; fyrir sumum tók hann bú upp eða rak brott af eignum sinum.”
119 Ljósvetninga saga c. 1: “óeirðarmenn miklir um kvennafar ok málaferli”; given the wider
sense of the term mál, “speech; litigation” the final word can also mean that they did not
shy away from a feud.
120 See, for example, Egils saga c. 64; Gísla saga c. 1; Similarly, Saxo (vii, 11,7ff.) reports of two
brothers, who “excellentis forme uirgines parentibus ereptas concubitu uiolarent.”
121 Saxo ii, 5,2: “ut ambigue existimationis esset, tyrannide magis an libidine arsit.”
122 This is the oldest surviving version of the legend in the Chronicon Lethrense from the mid-
12th century (sm i, 47): “carnali captus concupiscencia milites regi aptam quesituros pu-
ellam mittit. Qui cuiusdam baronis Rolfcarl filiam, nomine Thoram, prosequente patre
regi adducunt.”—Saxo’s amplificatio sets aside the realistic decor and focuses on the
moral implication of the incest resulting from this stuprum.
250 Chapter 4

boy born out of this father-daughter incest is the mythological King Rolf Krake
(Hrólf kraki, Rolpho).
From a European perspective, this is a not uncommon birth legend for a
somewhat superhuman hero. However, when transferred to the saga world by
Snorri (who could assume his audience’s familiarity with the material), the
story is completely integretated into the narration of early Nordic politics. In
Ynglinga saga Yrsa (the daughter from the first encounter) initially appears as
part of the loot brought back from a Viking expedition to Saxony by the king of
Uppsala; through her beauty, skill, and eloquence, she distinguishes herself
from the other captives, so that the king claims her for himself. Only now does
the Danish king Helgi appear, attack Sweden, capture Yrsa in her role as local
“queen,” and make her his wife. Rolf Krake is then born out of this relationship.
Thus far, this constitutes the customary story of a captive woman taken as the
victorious king’s bedfellow, only that this happens twice over. A few years later,
however, the queen of Saxland, apparently on a diplomatic visit to Denmark,
reveals to Helgi, who had impregnated her in the course of a previous plunder-
ing expedition to Saxony, that Yrsa is their child from that accounter. In re-
sponse to the news of Helgi’s parental incest, which remains uncommented,
Yrsa is left to return to Sweden and remains there as queen for the rest of her
life.123 Thus in the kings’ sagas, the same story which gives rise to stylistic-­
affective flights of epic or moralizing Latinity in other versions from around
the same time, is subordinated to the narrative principle of political rationality
in much the same way as happens with the scaled-down fiends of the Icelandic
saga.
It is this generalized practice—and not, say, in the fact of the incorporation
of mythical motifs in itself—that makes for the specific characteristics of
Northern European thought and writing of history around 1200. By seamlessly
integrating berserkers and incestuous mythical kings with crusading, harbour-
building, farming, conquering England, feasting in Constantinople, crossing
the Atlantic, and more farming, it endows the material of the genus grande
with the commonplace, and simultaneously furnishes the everyday with gran-
deur. Raiding the beaches of neighbouring shores and capturing beautiful
girls124 belonged to the everyday experiences of many recipients of these
stories,125 whose cultural socialization in this intrareferential system had

123 Ys cc. 28f.

124 Thus Snorri about Yrsa (Ys cc. 28f.): “var mær ein undarliga fǫgr.”
125 ‘Everyday’ may be an exaggeration for the 13th century, and the coasts of Saxony and the
British Isles had long been spared Viking-style attacks. However, both the internal con-
flicts in all Scandinavian countries and the crusades in the Baltic region continued to offer
opportunities for such practices.
The Expressive Aspect 251

­accustomed them to understand even such an action as laden with multifac-

eted meaning. Once again, we may wonder whether this was very different on
the coasts of Southern and Western Europe (and in the landlocked interior),
even if the local narrative worlds did not find their way into scholarly writing
in the same way.

14 The Emperor’s Daughter and the Elbe Frontier: Erik Ejegod and
Queen Bothild (c.1100)

Using women to designate martial superiority in conflict—the last, perhaps

most striking, way of semantizing polygynous practice to be discussed here—
is almost ubiquitous. The Judith of the Septuagint raises her voice to God:
“Punish the strangers who have loosed the girdle of a virgin to defile her, and
uncovered her thigh to put her to shame, and polluted her womb to disgrace
her … you gave up their wives for booty and their daughters to captivity!”126
The Anglo-Saxon versified Bible echoes: “Many a fearful, white-cheeked wom-
an must go trembling into a stranger’s embrace; mortally struck, the defenders
of women and rings fell.”127 And in Beowulf, the woman who sits at Hrothgar’s
side in the king’s hall and fills the hero’s cups is called Wealhþeow, “foreign
slave.” The annals of Inis Faithlinn reported for the year 1111 “a foray by
Muirchertach Ua Briain against the men of Bréifne, and he plundered and
brought their women and their cattle to Munster,”128 while at the other end of
Europe it was told of the capture of Antioch in 1098 that the crusaders there
“took their pleasure in the beautiful Saracen women.”129 It is no surprise in it-
self that victory and defeat were also expressed in Northern Europe in terms
of ‘war rape’; what we need to look at is whether the framework of the social-­
semantic system of polygyny discussed here also tinges the representation of
sexual warfare.
The Northern Europeans agreed with the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish chroni-
clers that ‘their’ Viking-era past was characterized by the belligerent seizure of

126 Jdt 9:2f. The Vulgate is abbreviated compared to the Septuagint: “in defensione alienige-
narum qui violatores extiterunt in coinquinatione sua et denudaverunt femur virginis in
confusionem … et dedisti mulieres eorum in praedam et filias eorum in captivitatem.”
127 “Sceolde forht monig / blachleor ides / bifiende gan / on fremdes fæðm; / feollan wergend /
bryda and beaga, / bennum seoce”; cited from Fell, Women (1984), 67, on Gn 34:29.
128 Annals of Inisfallen, s.a. 1111: “Cresc.sluaged la Murcerrtach .H. Briain i firu Bréfni coros airg
7 co tarat a mmná 7 a mbú co firu Muman…”
129 Chanson d’Antioche, v. 6413: “des beles sarrasines i ont fait lor delis.”
252 Chapter 4

women.130 But this does not look any different in the post-Viking, ‘recent past.’
Of the many detailed narratives about women being carried away in the high
Middle Ages—perhaps often similarly lost amid the stereotypical viros interfi-
cientes et mulieres captivantes of the Latin chronicle tradition131—I will focus
on two.
The first—an episode from Knýtlinga saga, the Danish royal history from
the mid-thirteenth century—concerns the conception of the later jarl of South
Jutland, prince of the Abodrites, ‘martyr’ and saint Cnut Lavard around 1096.
King Erik i (Ejegod, r. 1095–1103) has gone on a pilgrimage to Rome, and Henry,
“the emperor in Saxony,”132 seizes the opportunity to subjugate Wendland, un-
til now dominated by the Danes. The most powerful of the hǫfðingjar won over
by the emperor is Bjǫrn, who demands and gets Henry’s half-sister Bothild for
the risk he takes. Through her father, a Jutlandic magnate, Bothild stems from
the jarls of Lade; it remains unclear who her and Emperor Henry’s mother is
supposed to be. Returning from Rome, Erik successfully undertakes a retalia-
tory campaign, kills Bjǫrn, and from the spoils he keeps the emperor’s sister for
himself, with whom he fathers Cnut Lavard. The saga depicts the subsequent
separation of the king from his booty as follows:

When [Cnut] was still young, King Erik once said to Bothild: “You’ve been
here some time, but that’s over now, and I’ll have you escorted home to
your relatives.” She replied: “I believe that love was not a major factor in
our being together, and you lay with me more out of vengeance than love.
You will grant me, sir, that Cnut, our son, will go with me for my consola-
tion.” The king answered: “I will not remunerate your kin so highly that I
grant it to them that this boy grows up there, for I suspect that they and
many others will have honour through him.” Thereupon she was escorted
home to her relatives, and the king gave her a respectable entourage.133

130 The locus classicus is Dudo of St-Quentin (i, 3, based, in turn, on the Old Testament stan-
dards): “uxores a pluribus stuprate, ducuntur flebiliter aduenae; omnis puellarum sexus,
ab ipsis turpiter deuirginatur.” A collection of similar notices is in Zettel, Bild der Norman-
nen (1977).
131 Henry of Livonia, Chronicon Livoniae, 22,5—and countless others across Europe.
132 KnS c. 75: “keisari í Saxlandi.” Purely chronologically, this would have to be Henry iv. How-
ever, we should not expect the figure of the emperor to be individualized overly clearly.
Henry iii’s ‘Danish’ tie with Gunhild/Kunigunde, daughter of Cnut the Great (1036), is at
most a vague suggestion, given how far removed it is from the case being described here,
both temporally and factually. The same is true for the marriage of (W)Úlfhild, daughter
of Saint Óláf and Ástríð, to the Billung Ordulf at about the same time.
133 KnS c. 78.
The Expressive Aspect 253

The episode is already remarkable for the turn of phrase meirr af heipt en ást
(“more out of vengeance than love”), which the saga places in the mouth of the
victim of the political vicissitudes. Socio-historically, it offers a literary illustra-
tion of the powerlessness of women in Bothild’s position, however well-born,
vis-à-vis the man when it comes to dissolving the relationship, the woman’s
insecurity and lack of control over the children. The image is rendered even
more poignant by the matter-of-fact way it is recounted.
Politically, however, it is striking, as it conflicts with almost all points of the
historical knowledge about the parents of Saint Cnut Lavard of Ringsted, the
progenitor of the reigning Valdemar dynasty, long since established at the time
of the composition of Knýtlinga saga. Only Bothild’s paternal line is consistent
with the ‘Valdemarian’ version, but in all the chronicles, annals, and genealo-
gies, along with Saxo and his compilers, two circumstances are emphasized:
Bothild, the “queen of the noblest Danish stock,” is the one and only uxor le-
gitima of King Erik, and she accompanied him on his journey to Jerusalem—
the first by a Nordic king—and, like him, died and was buried there. In Saxo,
Botilda is an almost saint-like, faithful wife on account of her mildness, akin to
Rachel and Livia, to the point of adorning with her own hands her husband’s
concubines; reports of miracles at her grave on the Mount of Olives and that of
her husband on Cyprus complete the image.134
It remains completely unclear how Bothild’s mother, unnamed in the
‘Valdemarian’ version, could have been impregnated by a Salian either before
or afterwards. That King Erik should have sent Bothild back to ‘Saxony’ instead
of going on a crusade with her contradicts an otherwise consistent tradition.
As far as the factuality of the report is concerned, one must agree with Thyra
Nors’s verdict: the saga author “himself probably did not believe what he
wrote.”135 Yet Nors’s reference to the frequency of the motif of the captured
ancestress in the genealogical literature of the French lay aristocracy, while
undoubtedly correct as far as it goes, is not sufficient. It remains to be ex-
plained why in this case the ruling dynasty had opted so strikingly for another
version—­the mild uxor legitima from a native chiefly house—long before

134 Genealogy of Abbot William of Æbelholt, written around 1190 for submission in the pro-
cess of the marriage of Philip Augustus to Ingeborg of Denmark (smd i 180): Botilde “Re-
gina de nobilissima Danorum prosapia orta.” Chronica Sialandie, ed. Kroman, s.a. 1101:
“cum Botilda regina, uxore sua legitima.” Cf. Saxo xii 1,1; 3,6; correspondingly, Compendi-
um Saxonis (sm i, 386f.). Bothild appears as uxor in five other annals. The only exception
is Sven Aggesen, who does not mention Bothild in his Brevis Historia and sums up all Er-
ik’s children as “sprouting from different connections.”
135 Thyra Nors, “Bodil,” in Jytte Larsen, ed., Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon (Copenhagen:
2000–01) and online edition.
254 Chapter 4

the ­alternative version appears in writing in Knýtlinga saga. By the mid-thir-

teenth century, the Valdemarian monarchy with its twin pillars of agnatic suc-
cession and legitimate birth (in a canonical sense) was firmly established; a
change of course was nowhere in sight. The version of Knýtlinga saga thus re-
veals a considerable interest in the history of the Danes beyond direct involve-
ment (‘propaganda’) of the Danish monarchy, which would certainly not have
encouraged such a discordant version of the basis of its dynasty’s legitimacy.
Language and genre of Knýtlinga saga show that the subject was considered
interesting and relevant in Norway and the Atlantic world, and that at least
there—and probably elsewhere, too—other interests and interpretations
went around than the one that prevailed in the Valdemars’ Denmark.136
What ‘meaning’ does the rewriting of the quasi-canonized version of Cnut
Lavard’s birth acquire in this context? The emperor’s ‘awarding’ his sister
Bothild to Bjǫrn, the frontier zone turncoat magnate, and her subsequent
capture by the Danish king are both situated in the context of the fight for
Vinðland—later Eastern Holsten and Mecklenburg—which Knýtlinga saga
claims was originally (and rightfully) under Danish suzerainty, but was then
unjustly seized by the Saxons; the Danish king then restored the lawful state of
affairs and kept the emperor’s sister, whom Henry had given to his ‘margrave,’
for himself. Two possible political subtexts come into question: in the 1120s,
with the approval of the Saxon duke and emperor Lothar iii, Cnut Lavard—
whose conception the episode is about—achieved recognition as overlord
(knes’) of the Polabian Slavs, bringing Northalbingia into the Danish sphere of
influence after the end of Billung rule. Cnut’s murder in 1131, the youth and
exile of his son, the party struggles that broke out in Denmark in 1134, and the
(re-) appointment of the Schauenburg Adolf ii as count in Holsten and Stor-
marn in 1143 and his subsequent offensive against the Polabians returned
Northalbingia to Saxon overlordship.137 Sixty years later, Schauenburg control
over Northalbingia, such as it was, collapsed after the fall of Henry the Lion,
and Cnut vi and Valdemar ii accomplished the transition of the lands “beyond

136 There is no recent study on the political content Knýtlinga saga. The lively debate in the
1960s, concentrated on the issues of the sources and literary models as well as the ques-
tion of author. For various textual reasons, the authorship of Óláf Þórðarson hvítaskáld,
one of Snorri Sturluson’s nephews, seems possible, if ultimately unprovable. Crucially, a
primarily non-Danish, namely Norwegian-Atlantic context, can be assumed for both the
composition and its audience, at least in the present version. See in the introduction in
Danakonunga sögur, ed. Bjarni Guðnason (1982), and Rikke Malmros, “Knýtlinga saga,” in
EMSc 359f., both with additional references.
137 Cf. Hoffmann, “Sachsen, Abodriten und Dänen” (1986); Hermanson, “Danish Lords”
(2004).
The Expressive Aspect 255

the Elbe and Elde”138 from the empire to Denmark, first de facto and later for-
mally. However, the Battle of Bornhöved in 1227 and the reinstallation of the
Schauenburgs with the support of Hamburg and Lübeck once again separated
Northalbingia from Denmark.139
In a period when the question of the cultural unity of all “Northlands”
(norðrlǫnd) was much under discussion in learned circles (at least), this inde-
terminateness of the ‘frontier’ zone between the Elbe and the Baltic Sea took
on an importance that went beyond political issues in a narrower sense. For
the British Isles, the southern border of ‘the North’ could be moved to the Eng-
lish Channel, with reference to the long Danish rule in England and, after 1066,
to the alleged continued affinity of the ‘Northmen’ with their fathers’ lands of
origin—even Normandy could be included.140 In the east, the rulers of
Hólmgarð/Novgorod and Kœnugarð/Kiev, always tied to Scandinavian dynas-
ties, ensured that ‘the North’ reached as far as the great rapids on the steppe
borders on the way to Miklagarð/Byzantium. The critical part was the Frisian-
Wendish southern rim and in particular the isthmus between the North Sea
and the Baltic. The question of whether Saxony, as opposed to the ‘Frankish’
interior, was part of Norðrlǫnd was a matter of controversy in the thirteenth
century,141 and was apparently only resolved after the transition of the Nordic
monarchies from primarily sea- to land-based political formations towards
1300, whereby the North Sea and Baltic Sea took on a divisive character. The
initial orientation of Valdemar i towards Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony and
(to a lesser extent) Emperor Frederick i, soon to be replaced by the assertion of
Danish supremacy on the northern Saxon marches and Wendland, left a no-
tion of confrontation on the part of historians such as Saxo and the editor of

138 The so-called ‘Privilege of Metz’ of Frederick ii in 1214, in dd i, 5, no. 48.

139 For a reasonable evaluation of Holsten in the Valdemar era, see Hoffmann, “Bornhöved”
(1977); cf. most recently Wille-Jørgensen, “Ostseeimperium” (2003); Riis, Ostseeimperium
(2003); Lind et al., Danske korstog (2004); Rüdiger, “Helgenkongen” (2005); now also Rüdi-
ger, “Holstein” (2008); Rüdiger, “Framing the Frontier” (2009).
140 For example, Knýtlinga saga c. 19 refers to England as “the richest of all Northern lands
in  money”; a fortiori, Scotland, Ireland, and Northumberland are integrated into the
­Norwegian-Danish network of relations.
141 See von See, “Sonderkultur” (1999). The Latin Skjǫldunga saga and the Snorra Edda Pro-
logue include Saxonia/Saxland with Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Atlantic islands
(the Prologue even makes Saxony Odin’s first stop in the North), whereas Snorri does not
seem to, and Saxo certainly does not. It is needless to point out that the Saxland under
discussion is the ‘Old Saxony’ of Anglo-Saxon historiographers, the lowlands between the
lower Elbe, Weser, and IJssel, and not the modern Free State of Sachsen, the former mar-
graviate of Meissen, which came to be called ‘(Upper) Saxony’ through a series of dynastic
incidents.
256 Chapter 4

the Annales Ryenses which would decisively influence later Danish historiogra-
phy (and modern nationalism): whatever came from south of the Elbe was evil
and dangerous.
This view also characterizes the representation of the seizure of Bothild in
Knýtlinga saga. The issue here is the conflict over the border, fought out in the
Holsten-Mecklenburg area, which was treated as a glacis by both sides.142 Even
Bjǫrn, who was established in Danish historiography as a royal relative (in Saxo
he is a kind of Danish margrave over Holsten) and, as the founder of Rendsborg
on the Ejder borderline, is explicitly linked to the tradition of the early heroic
Prince Offa,143 is ‘inverted’ and, while retaining his almost emblematic Nordic
name, now holds the emperor’s Northern March against the Danes.
Bothild, Danish on her father’s side, close to the emperor on her mother’s,
appears similarly ‘inverted’: first Henry makes her a sign of his arrogated con-
trol over Northalbingia by giving her to its leader; then after the restoration of
order, Erik has her atone for the disturbance by exploiting her ‘imperial’ body
for the auspicious conception of their son, Cnut—that Cnut Lavard who, as
Knýtlinga saga reports in detail, will actually establish Danish rule in Wend-
land and acquire first a king’s and then a martyr’s crown. Although this presen-
tation is quite close to one of the tendencies in Danish historiography at the
time—claiming Northalbingia against the Schauenburgs—its means of repre-
sentation differs significantly from the ‘Valdemarian’ version. It thus hints at a
kind of Nordic public sphere, in which history is utilized as an argument,
where, from one version to another, while maintaining a certain core set of
narrative elements, it was possible to arrange and rearrange them into almost
arbitrarily disparate patterns of meaning.

15 The Cheese and the Anchor: Harald Hardrada’s Booty (1047)

The second episode is about the range of statements made, not in later
­appropriations and reassessments, but by the protagonists. It takes place in the

142 The word “glacis” is already used in Fritz Rörig, Schlacht bei Bornhöved (1927), 14, albeit for
Holsten and Slesvig. It seems to me that there is no question of a “glacis” situation north
of the Ejder/Eider and Slien/Schlei, and that Rörig, influenced by the ‘Schleswig question’
of the 19th and 20th centuries, draws back the line of conflict too far into the premodern
era. Until around 1840, it is Holsten rather than Slesvig which is the indeterminate zone.
143 Saxo xii, 3,6. According to Saxo, it is King Erik who gives one of his daughters ex concubi-
natu to the man who avenges the murder of Bjǫrn: further demonstrating how Knýtlinga
saga turns signs on their head, creating a new context from the familiar elements of his-
tory, but more congenial to the demands of contemporary meaning-making.
The Expressive Aspect 257

summer of 1047 in northeast Jutland. Harald Hardrada, the ‘bigamist’ from the
beginning of this chapter, has returned from Byzantium and Rus’ a few years
earlier and, initially in cooperation with Sven Estridsen, sought to undermine
the rule of his half-brother Magnús ‘the Good,’ who had succeeded to the Dan-
ish kingship after the death of Cnut the Great’s son Harthacnut in 1042, through
regular military expeditions along the Danish coast. Harald had already had
his skalds sing of these expeditions:

The crowd, sadly scattered—

Danes still living were fleeing
loitered, and lovely
ladies were captured.
A lock held the lass’s body,
lots of women to the warships
passed before you; bright fetters
into flesh bit greedily.144

This is clear enough in translation, although still not as drastic as the original.
While the verse contains no untranslatable kennings, some of the sophistica-
tion of the wording is nonetheless lost. In the final sentence, bitu fíkula fjǫtrar
hǫrund bjartir (“bright fetters into flesh bit greedily”), the metaphorical con-
notation of the gold rings which normally decorate maidens’ arms, is produced
through the adjective bjartr, which is usually chosen for yellowish lustre (sun,
gold) and denotes reflexes of light. It is not just that women are captured, but
the scopic focus of the stanza—addressed primarily at King Harald’s followers,
and secondarily at any other conceivable gathering of warriors in a festive
­setting—is on high-ranking women, now wearing arm rings of a quite different
kind. Since verses such as these are aimed at both the own retinue and the
prospective enemy, the Danish women wearing golden torques are themselves,
along with their menfolk, among those challenged by the metaphor.

144 HsS c. 19, stanza 95 (from Valgarð, probably part of a drápa, a longer song of praise):
“Dvalði daprt of skilða, / drifu, þeirs eptir lifðu, / ferð, en fengin urðu / fǫgr sprund, Danir
undan. / Láss helt líki drósar. / Leið fyr yðr til skeiða, / bitu fíkula fjǫtrar, / fljóð mart,
hǫrund bjartir.”—Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 55.—Cf. Turville-
Petre, Harald the Hard-Ruler (1968). An alternative English translation (Kari Ellen Gade
[ed.], Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From c. 1035 to c. 1300) reads: “The pitifully scattered
crowd was delayed; the Danes who were still alive fled away, but fair women were cap-
tured. A lock secured the girl’s body; many a maiden went before you to the warships;
bright fetters bit greedily into the flesh.”
258 Chapter 4

In 1047, Harald has taken over the kingship of Norway as sole heir of his half-
brother Magnús. He continues his annual military expeditions along the Dan-
ish coasts as the heir to Magnús’s claim to suzerainty over Denmark, only he
now attacks different regions than before. The imminent threat has been noted
in Jutland and the challenge taken up: in the house of the “great leader” Þorkel
the Fierce (geysa)145 at the mouth of the Gudenå near the later town of Rand-
ers, Þorkel’s two daughters undertake to respond to Harald: “They had made a
great joke the winter before about King Harald travelling to Denmark with
warships. They had carved an anchor in cheese, saying that it might well serve
to hold back the king of Norway’s ships.”146 With adequate dissemination, the
gestures of girls’ hands could be no less powerful a verse from men’s mouths.
Harald acknowledges the counter-challenge in a half-verse:

Lǫtum vér, meðan lirlar We’ll let, while the linen-oak

líneik veri sínum, lulls her husband, the anchor
Gerðr, í Goðnarfirði, grip in Gudenå,
galdrs, akkeri halda. the Gerð of incantation.147

And his court skald Þjóðólf Arnórsson adds, completing the half-verse and
thereby reworking Harald’s guidelines into a masterful overall metaphor:

Sumar annat skal sunnar, Further south next summer—

segik eina spǫ, fleini, I speak a prophecy—cold-nose
vér aukum kaf króki, shall fix with its fluke the vessel
kaldnefr furu halda. of fir; we add a hook to the ocean.148

145 His byname is actually a verb: geysa “surge, advance fiercely”; the related agent noun gey-
sir “the surger” has given the loan word “geyser.” In Morkinskinna (c. 31) Þorkel appears as
the mastermind behind Sven Estridsen’s royal elevation and so in real political terms be-
comes Harald’s main opponent. Snorri reports nothing more about him beyond the fol-
lowing episode.
146 HsS c. 32: “Þær hǫfðu gǫrt spott mikit áðr um vetrinn um þat, at Haraldr konungr mundi
fara til Danmerkr með herskipum. Þær skáru ór osti akkeri ok sǫgðu, at slík mundi vel mega
halda skipum Nóregskonungs.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 65.
147 HsS c. 32, stanza 100. The girls are designated through two women’s kennings: lineik “lin-
en-oak” (the linen-clad body like a tree) and Gerðr galdrs “Gerð [the name of a giantess]
of the song”; both kennings evoke the peaceful domestic sphere and generate a frivolous
scenario with the rare verb lirla “lull, hum, trill.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes,
vol. 3 (2015), 64.
148 HsS c. 32, stanza 101; note how both the insult brought back to the Norwegian court as well
as the two half-stanzas stem from the same verb, halda, “hold (on).”—In the different ver-
sions of the episode in the sagas (Heimskringla, Morkinskinna, various copies of Fagrskin-
na), the attribution of the half-stanzas to the two authors varies; Snorri’s solution is the
The Expressive Aspect 259

The first level of metaphor is directly accessible only to those familiar with a
Viking-age anchor (that is, the entire original audience). The shape is fairly
similar to modern anchors, but the upper end is connected to the anchor chain
with two adjacent rings.149 This is the “fluke” or “cold-nose” (similar in shape to
nostrils, but made of iron), which secures the “fir” (the wooden longship). Un-
derneath, the sexual aggression—keeping constantly to the anchor metaphor
and in doing so targeting Chieftain Þorkel’s daughters—generated by the im-
agery of “add a hook” and “fluke” is unmistakable. Finally, the anchorage chain
tethering the slender ‘fir’ refers back to the earlier stanzas about chained girls,
and thus to Harald’s past victories.
All that remained was to turn words into deeds. Morkinskinna explicates
what Heimskringla leaves unsaid (but amply expresses by the events them-
selves): “He [Harald] addressed his men … he said that he did not mind if they
put their hearts into the work in order to avenge the mockery of the Danes. The
whole army was eager to have the Danes pay a proper price.” In the summer,
Harald campaigns in Jutland and, of course, along the Gudenå. “Then they
burned Þorkel geysa’s estate … Then his daughters were led to the ships as cap-
tives … People say that an informant who had seen King Harald’s fleet said to
Þorkel geysa’s daughters: ‘You said, daughters of Geysa, that Harald would not
be coming to Denmark.’ Dótta replied: ‘That was true yesterday.’”150 A verse was
also circulated about it:

Skǫru jast ór osti Island-ring objects,

eybaugs Dana meyjar, anchor-rings, Danish maidens
þat of angraði þengil carved out of yeast-cheese;
þing, akkerishringa. that irked the ruler.
Nú sér mǫrg í morgin Now in the morning many

most compelling against the backdrop of skaldic poetry’s sociological setting.—Finnur

Jónsson has a somewhat variant text, especially kaldnets instead of kaldnefr, whereby the
‘cold nose’ (the anchor ring) becomes the genitive determination of the ship (‘of the cold
net’). This version does not appear very convincing to me.
149 A ship grave with a very well preserved, 1.36-metre-tall anchor on a 10-metre-long anchor
chain was uncovered in Ladby near Kerteminde on Funen in 1935; on the findings and
interpretation see most recently, Sørensen, Ladby (2001).
150 HsS c. 32: “Þá brenndu þeir bœ Þorkels geysu. … Váru þá leiddar dœtr hans bundnar til
skipa. … Svá segja menn, at njósnarmaðr mælti, sá er sét hafði flota Haralds konungs, við
dœtr Þorkels geysu: ‘Þat sǫgðu þér, Geysudœtr, at Haraldr mundi eigi koma til Danmarkar.’
Dótta svaraði: ‘Svá var í gjárna.’”—Dótta, here understood as a proper name, may be a cor-
ruption of dóttir “daughter.” Morkinskinna, trans. Andersson and Gade (2000), 194; Heim-
skringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 65.
260 Chapter 4

mær, hlær at því færi, a maid sees—fewer are laughing—

ernan krók ór járni a hefty hook of iron
allvalds skipum halda. holding the overlord’s vessels.151

The metaphor has become reality, the girls are Harald’s booty. Their father,
who escaped the attack completely unscathed, pays for their release with a
“tremendous ransom” (með ógrynni fjár), and the episode is concluded.
Harald Hardrada never succeeded in enforcing his claim to Denmark, but
would only conclude a truce with Sven Estridsen twenty years later. Politically,
the episode was thus the prelude to a prolonged failure,152 but if we approach
the conflict only in terms of words and gestures, Harald ends ‘in the black’—
and it is certainly conceivable that this propaganda success was more impor-
tant for the reputation of this fledgling monarchy than the precise balance of
pillage and conflagrations which the kings inflicted on one another across the
Skagerrak.
The two girls not only played a decisive role in this conflict, but an active
one; they are sememes of a symbolic system, but also its users. To a certain
extent, they perform a semantic act with themselves. This assessment arouses
critical suspicion: surely the whole episode is a (male) literary fiction, or rather
the genre-conditioned literarization of political events that certainly affect the
real Harald and the real Þorkel the Fierce, but at best allows his daughters to
appear as passive prey? Although the critical objection may be methodologi-
cally justified, I do not believe that it holds water. Unless one takes the stance
that women generally have little or no room for manoeuvre in a male society
such as this—a view I think is quite uncalled for—, there is no fundamental
reason to doubt the lived reality of the episode. It is at least as well supported
in terms of sources as most other events reported in the king’s sagas, and,
moreover, the account of the challenges is both particularly detailed and strik-
ingly unusual. We can at least extract the core of the stanzas—‘women express
an insult connected to the durability of Harald’s anchors’—and attempting to

151 HsS c. 32, stanza 103. Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 65. It is unclear
whether the words two verses apart, eybaugs “of the island ring,” a kenning for “the sea,”
and þing “thing, object” belong together (“sea object” to mirror “anchor ring”)—this is the
solution chosen by Finlay and Foulkes in the translation quoted—or whether they should
be allocated to the adjacent syntactic units (“the Danish maidens from the coast” and “the
matter irked the ruler”). Either way, nothing is gained or lost contentwise.
152 Snorri explicitly states (c. 34) that Sven’s attacks on Norway inflicted no less harm than
vice versa.
The Expressive Aspect 261

discredit them would require an excessive philological effort.153 It might just

be possible to argue that it was only with the saga writers of the thirteenth
century that the stanzas around the anchor metaphor (which mention Harald
and some Danish girls, but not any particular chief) were linked to Harald’s
raid on Þorkel. But this would be a secondary detail, because the important
thing is that an insult worked by girls, which according to the saga commen-
tary “incensed [Harald] beyond measure,”154 as well as its consequences are
integral parts of the exchange of verses. All the important thirteenth-century
kings’ sagas would incorporate the storyline established by this contemporary
tradition, and integrate it into their own narrative texture. So what we see here
is probably how high-placed women, alongside the men, take a hand (and
words) to make politics happen—accepting the risk alongside the men, or
more so.
In what sense is this a polygynous episode? There are no sexual actions be-
yond the metaphorical hook and eyelet in Þjóðólf’s skaldic verse. Certainly, it
concerns two girls, and if we consider the episode biographically we might
note that King Harald already had a wife (Elizabeth of Novgorod) at this point,
and was about to take a second (Þóra, the chief’s daughter), so the situation
was potentially polygynous. But in fact, whether it went as far as rape is irrele-
vant to the ‘expressive’ aspect of the episode. As soon as he had the girls on his
ship in chains, Harald could safely forget about them, given that neither virgin-
ity or its loss, nor the number and kind of former sexual partners in general
were decisive for the social rank, reputation, or future prospects of a woman.
What mattered was that he had brought them into his power and this had been
staged in a way that in some way answered their original (likewise gestural)
challenge. As soon as this was done, he could enter into negotiations with the
father—a wise course to take from the point of view of de-escalation. Harald
wanted to rule Denmark, not devastate it, and it was therefore advisable to fol-
low up the assertion of his authority with a certain consensus.155
In this way, despite all appearances, the girls are no longer victims, but ac-
tors in the episode. Like their father (who has lost wealth and his farm), they
come out with diminished status but substantially unscathed. Much the same

153 Besides the whole prose episode, the third verse cited here (“carved out of yeast-cheese
…”) would need to be explained as an unhistorical, late addition, which would leave the
punchline of the preceding two verses by Harald and/or Þjóðólf going nowhere.
154 Signalled by the use of the expletive particle of “so much, all too much” in the words “þat
of angraði þengil” (“that angered the prince beyond measure”).
155 In Morkinskinna, Þorkel concedes Harald sjálfdœmi, the right to judge his own case, there-
by acknowledging Harald’s victory. After the payment of the ransom money, interpreted
as a fine for the insults inflicted, the two depart, their conflict “settled.”
262 Chapter 4

applies to all active participants in saga conflicts, assuming they survive, but
the situation is quite different for those who are passively involved in these
conflicts: the house and farm, servants and followers, and often also the wom-
en, who are abducted and enslaved. Through their performance, Þorkel’s
daughters have escaped this role; they have—again in Carol Clover’s terms—
sided with the ‘powerful.’ Without thereby becoming socially ‘men’ in any way,
they use their semantic possibilities as women to make statements with
themselves.
The episode is necessary to avoid the impression that the interpretation of
polygyny under its ‘expressive’ aspect makes women signs in a discourse that
men conduct among themselves. For, in fact, women participate in this dis-
course in various ways: we would be doing an injustice to women like Ælfgifu
of Northampton or Sigríð of Vík if we assumed that they were only indifferent
or suffering tools of ‘their’ men, and did not take an active interest in the con-
cerns of their group. Morkinskinna says about Margrét the chieftain’s daughter:
“Her father would consult with her about almost everything.” And once again
we may ponder whether things were all that different in other parts of the me-
dieval West, where the Latin historical narratives almost only ever present
women collectively and as the grammatical patient. The warriors of King
­Henry IV of East Frankland, who according to a hostile Latin chronicler pub-
licly raped the Saxon women or took them back to their camps, “violating them
whenever they wished,” and eventually sent them back to the men,156 are con-
temporaries of Harald Hardrada and the daughters of Þorkel geysa. Often
enough, these things may have happened collectively, as ‘war rape.’ In other
cases they may have taken an individuated, ‘expressive’ aspect, though not all
women’s agencies and fates may have been the same. And even where they
were been recorded, such stories may have been told and retold, sung, and re-
membered, and the Saxon (and Frankish, Irish, and Aquitanian) women of the
ruling groups certainly also often demonstrated similar initiative to the chief’s
mocking daughters on the Kattegat—and risked as much.

156 Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, s.a. 1073: “Filias eorum et uxores consciis et pene aspicienti-
bus maritis violabant. Nonnullas etiam vi in castella sua raptas et, quanto tempore libido
suggessissent, impudicissime habitas ad ultimum maritis cum ignominiosa exprobatione
remittebant.”
 Chapter 5

The Performative Aspect

1 “Castles and Maidens”

Now and then medieval writers have stories of ‘political relationships’ that
leave us puzzled and disturbed. They seem to elude the purposefulness of gen-
erational opportunities, habitual needs, agonistic constraints, and expressive
possibilities presented in the previous chapters. When, according to the Aus-
trian rhyming chronicle of Ottokar of Styria, King Philip iv ‘the Fair’ of France
(r. 1285–1314) took the daughter of Count Guy of Flanders, imprisoned in the
Louvre, “with force and against her will” (mit gewalte und ân iren danc),1 this
was pointless in terms of desirable offspring, and rather counterproductive for
habitus and the stylisation of authority, given that the chivalrous ethos disap-
proved of the rape of noblewomen. The rape in prison can also hardly be under-
stood as an expressive act, since the count’s daughter Philippa was a hostage in
the Louvre as a result of a conflict her father had already lost, so all the neces-
sary signals had long since been sent. Even if one doubts the facticity of the re-
port, the question is whether the rumour as such had migrated from Paris to
Styria, or whether Ottokar drew a pointed conclusion from the circumstances
that had become known to him; ultimately, what is crucial is that the king of
France was thought capable of sexual violence against the imprisoned daugh-
ter of a ‘disloyal vassal.’
What, then, drove Philip the Fair, the political actor, or ‘Philip the Fair,’ the
royal figure in the Styrian rhyming chronicle, into Philippa’s dungeon? What
caused Swen Godwinson, returning from a martial foray into the Welsh fron-
tier in 1046, to have the abbess of the Mercian monastery of Leominster
“brought to him, and he kept her as long as he pleased, and then let her go
home”?2 Why, in 1002, did Edmund ‘Ironside’ deem it appropriate to supple-
ment the St Brice’s Day massacre by making his way to the wife of one of the
burned nobilissimi Danorum: “he beheld, desired, and took her?”3 A little later,

1 Ottokar i of Styria, Österreichische Reimchronik, v. 63,482f.; cf. Rieger, “Viol” (1988), 243.
2 asc C, s.a. 1046: “Her on þysum geare for Swegn eorl into Wealan 7 Griffin se norþera cyng
[Gruffydd ap Llewellyn, King of Gwynedd and Powys; he married a daughter of the earl of
Mercia] forð mid him, 7 him man gislode [he received hostages]. Þa he hamwerdes wæs, þa
het he feccan him to þa abbedessan on Leomynstre 7 hæfde hi þa while þe him geliste, 7 let hi
syþþan faran ham.”
3 William of Malmesbury, gra ii, 179: “Vxor Sigeferdi Malmesberiam in captionem est abduc-
ta, spectabilis nobilitatis femina; quapropter Edmundus, regis filius, dissimulata intentione

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_008

264 Chapter 5

Archbishop Wulfstan of York painted a picture in a sermon of how, “often ten

or twelve [Danes], one after the other, will disgracefully put to shame a thane’s
wife, and sometimes his daughter or close kinswoman, while he looks on, he
who considered himself brave and strong and good enough before that
happened.”4 On the one hand, these cases of war rape are part of a continuum
that extends (at least) from the ancient Near East—“the women were raped
according to the right of the warriors and the victors”5—to the present day. On
the other hand, as with all ‘historical constants,’ some variation is to be ex-
pected even behind the seemingly eternal formula, “Castles and maidens. Both
must surrender.”6 This is what concerns us here.

2 Abishag at the Court of Hákon Hákonarson

Is war rape, including Philip’s visit to the prison, not simply an extreme case of
the ‘expressive aspect’? Doesn’t it aim at making a point about victory and de-
feat, triumph and subjugation? Our twenty-first century has brought the sub-
ject painfully to the fore, and from the (seemingly) impregnable fortresses of
academia, scholars have increasingly stressed the importance of war rape to
warfare past and present. The overall image resulting from recent research is
all too obviously true to be commented upon here; we may take it as read and,
moreover, argue that mass war rape does not really fall within the range of re-
lationships, wide but not all-englobing, with which this study is concerned. To
reiterate what I have stated in the introduction: Not every sexual encounter
establishes a ‘relationship’ in the sense studied here (nor need, of course,
all man–woman relationships be sexual), though some may. I should like to

in partes illas iter arripiens, uisam concupiuit, concupitae communionem habuit.”—Even

more than with Philip the Fair, the level of detail prevents us assuming that general moral
condemnation is the sole aim of the episode: it took place in Malmesbury, the site of Wil-
liam’s monastery, and a place for which William could provide detailed reports about much
earlier events in its history; for the burning at St. Frideswide’s church in Oxford following the
(in)famous St Brice’s Day Massacre on 13 November 1002, which directly precedes this epi-
sode both logically and directly, William relies on a—preserved—documentary source in
archiuo.
4 Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (1014), in Bethurum, ed., The Homilies of Wulfstan (1957), no. 20, 267–75:
“oft tyne oððe twelfe, ælc æfter oþrum, scendað to bysmore þæs þegenes cwenan 7 hwilum
his dohtor oððe nydmagan, þær he on locað, þe læt hine sylfene rancne 7 ricne 7 genoh godne
ær þæt gewurde.”
5 Jgs 21:22: “rapuerunt eas iure bellantium et victorum.” cf. Jgs 5:30; 19:23ff.; 2 Sm 12:11. Latin ra-
pere is “rob” (i.e. abduct) as well as “rape” but the difference, in practice, is not a neat one.
6 Faust i “Vor dem Tor” (the soldiers’ song just before the Easter walk).
The Performative Aspect 265

­suggest that there may be an ‘aspect’ which is close to, but not part of, the ‘ex-
pressive’ as described in the previous chapter. I shall try to make the disctinc-
tion a little clearer by way, again, of biblical examples.
Absalom was pursuing an ‘expressive’ purpose when, after successfully en-
tering Jerusalem in the course of his revolt against his father David, on the
advice of his confidants he first “went in to his father’s concubines in the sight
of all Israel.” The hoped-for effect of David being “sullied” in such a manner
on the hesitant in the country is explicitly referred to.7 It is, however, less easy
to understand the following episode ‘expressively.’ Adonijah, another of Da-
vid’s sons, and one of several who were competing for a good position in the
run for succession, had sought to strengthen the advantage provided by his
relatively high birth through demonstrative generosity, but at the decisive mo-
ment he found his position challenged by Bathsheba, who used her proximity
to the dying king to launch her son Solomon. Adonijah, his claim apparently
deferred, carelessly asks Bathsheba, of all people, to make a request on his
part of the designated successor, Solomon: he would like to have Abishag the
­Shunammite—the bedmate of the ageing, already impotent David8—for his
wife (uxor). Bathsheba phrases the request in a way that makes Solomon reply
that not only Abishag is being demanded of him, but the kingship as well! Solo-
mon then invokes his God as his ally and has Adonijah slain (3 Kgs 2,19–25).
Solomon’s reaction has left some modern commentators at a loss.9 By
­contrast, at the Norwegian royal court circa 1250, there would have been no

7 2 Sm 16:22: “ingressusque est ad concubinas patris sui coram universo Israhel.” Absalom’s
advisor Achitophel explicates (16:21): “ut cum audierit omnis Israhel quod foedaveris patrem
tuum, roborentur manus eorum tecum.”—Recognizing its continued political relevance, the
Norwegian royal mirror (Konungs skuggsjá, ed. Holm-Olsen [21983], 109) closely echoed the
original text in its summary of the lesson, thereby emphasizing its public effectiveness: “Ab-
salon son hans gecc i augliti allz folks oc lagðez mæðr [sic] friðlum hans oc gerðe þessa skom
fæðr sinum firi allu folki” (“His son Absalon went before the eyes of the whole people and lay
with his frillur, and inflicted this shame on his father, before all the people”).
8 On the figure, see Häusl, Abischag und Batscheba (1993), who uses comparative linguistic ar-
guments to suggest the hapax legomenon s-k-n-t (today vocalized as sokènèt; the root skn
“bring benefit” with feminine suffix -t), translated verbally by the Vulgate as “foveat eum”
(King James Bible 1614: “let her cherish him”), be understood as an official title (such as “Head
of the King’s Household”). Adonijah would therefore be seeking to marry an influential figure
within the palace. While these considerations are undoubtedly valuable for interpreting the
biblical text, they are irrelevant in the present case where the Latin Bible was authoritative.
Here, Abishag is an “adulescentula[.] virg[o] … erat autem puella pulchra nimis / dormie-
batque cum rege et ministrabat ei / rex vero non cognovit eam” (3 Kgs 1, 2, and 4).
9 Häusl, Abischag und Batscheba (1993), 245ff. In support of her hypothesis, Häusl argues that
Solomon’s violent reaction would be incomprehensible if Abischag was ‘merely’ the old
king’s juvenile bedmate, rather than a powerful officeholder.
266 Chapter 5

­problems understanding, like Solomon, that in seeking his father’s last concu-
bine Adonijah was also seeking power. In the King’s Mirror (Konungs skuggsjá,
cf. Chapter 4) the story from the Israelite Book of Kings is interpreted as
follows:

Abishag was a young virgin, the fairest maid in the kingdom and of the
best and noblest family; she was brought to King David’s bed to lie close
to him and warm him and cherish him, in the hope that the king might
draw warmth from her soft and blossoming form. … And for this reason
Abishag won such great honour that she came to be regarded as the
first queen and she ranked above all the other queens in the eyes of the
people; and thus her dignity was sanctified [helgat] by David’s
embraces.
But Adonijah had a purpose in seeking this union after David’s death,
for he hoped in this way to obtain the kingship by deceitful intrigue; inas-
much as all the people would say, if he could get hold of Abishag, that he
was most worthy to sit on David’s throne who was most worthy to mount
his bed and lie in the arms which David had sanctified with his very self.
He also presumed, as seemed reasonable, that the brothers and all the
kinsmen of Abishag would rather have him as king, if she were his, than
a man who was not bound to them in this way.10

It seems astonishing that the Abishag story was worth such an extravagant am-
plificatio to the author of the Norwegian King’s Mirror at all. Its position in the
King’s Mirror is even more astonishing: it is treated as valuable knowledge for
future kings—the manifest (and indeed probably primary) addressees of this

10 Konungs skuggsjá, ed. Holm-Olsen (21983), 119f.: “Þa var abisag vng ok meyia fegurzt j
rikinu ok af ennj beztu ok stæstu ætt. Enn hun var leidd til sængur davids kongs til þess at
liggia ner honum ok uerma hann ok þiona honum. at david skylldi taka verma af blautu
hennar horundi. … Enn firi þat hlaut abisag suo mikla sæmd at hon uar uird hofud-
drottning jfir ollum drottningum j augliti allz lyds. ok helgadizt suo tign hennar af fadm-
lagi davids. Enn med þeiri athygli leitadi Adonias kuanfangs eptir andlat davids at hann
ætladizt suo at komazt at rikinu med flærdsamligri uel. þuiat suo mundi folkit allt mæla
ef hann fengi Abisag at sa ueri makligaztur at sitia i sæti davids er uerdaztr uar at liggia j
sæng davids. ok þess uar uerdr at liggia j þeim fadmi er david hafdi helgat med sialfum
sier. þat ætladi hann ok sem uera mundi, at brædr abisag ok allir frændr hennar mundi
betur unna honum rikis ef hann fengi hennar. helldr en þeim manni er ecki uar uid þa
leytum bundinn.”—With around 60 manuscripts dating back to the 13th century, the
King’s Mirror is probably the most widespread work of Norse treatise literature. See Lud-
vik Holm-Olsen, “Konungs skuggsjá,” in EMSc, 366f., with further references, and from a
historical perspective, see especially Bagge, “The King’s Mirror” (1987).
The Performative Aspect 267

treatise built up as a dialogue between father and son—and those around

them. Particular attention should therefore be devoted to deviations from the
Vulgate text, especially the linguistic adaptation through which the Israelite
priest (sacerdos) Ebjatar becomes a “bishop,” Adonijah’s conduct is labelled
with terms such as dróttinsvík “high treason” and níðingsráð “conspiracy of a
dishonourable man” we recognize from Norwegian legal and historical prose,
and the Old Testament concubines become frillur.11
In contrast to the exegetical standard readings of Abishag,12 the King’s
Mirror offers a purely literal, non-allegorical reading. Two points stand out
in particular. Firstly, Abishag’s kin group, unmentioned in the biblical ac-
count—which, on the contrary, gives the impression of a girl being plucked
out of the populace for her looks only (1:3)—are described as a political group-
ing to be reckoned with. Secondly, the relationship that evidently exists be-
tween Abishag and the regnum, nowhere explicitly explained in the Bible, is
explicated at several points13 in great detail and clarity: the girl “is sanctified”
­(helgaðizt) by David’s embrace, and this sanctification passes to the next man
whom Abishag, in turn, is to embrace.
Drawing conclusions about contemporary attitudes from biblical exegesis,
be it ever so close to the Norwegian court in setting and language, is not en-
tirely straightforward. Let us try to disentangle the passage. The ‘expressive’
aspect is unproblematic: Adonijah’s speculation about the support of Abishag’s
“brothers and relatives” must have been immediately comprehensible in light
of the career of Saxi í Vík (see Chapter 4), and for kingly brothers to compete
for power through the takeover of frillur was an idea thirteenth-century audi-
ences were familiar with, for example, through the mannjafnað of Sigurð and
Eystein over the young Borghild (see Chapter 3). In this respect, Adonijah’s at-
tempt to secure Abishag certainly has an ‘expressive’ component.

11 Konungs skuggsjá, ed. Holm-Olsen (21983), 109 (on Absalom, following 2 Sm 16:21): friðlur
(plural of friðla~frilla) for concubinae (Vulgate) or παλλακαί (Septuagint)/Hebrew pilagšim
(plural of pilègèš), probably a loan word from Greek.
12 Following Jerome, from at least Hrabanus Maurus (Comm. lib. Reg. iii, 1, in pl 109, col.
123ff.) the prevailing tendency was to interpret the figure of the Abishag purely allegori-
cally, and in particular to see Adonijah’s claims as a threat to the purity of the peaceful
kingdom promised to Solomon by God. For Petrus Damiani, she serves as an example of
the sentence ‘he who sins once and is not admonished (as Adonijah prepared his usurpa-
tion with generosity and hospitality) commits a second,’ in the fight against an ‘unworthy’
archbishop ( MGH Epp. Kaiserzeit iv,2, no. 88) or as an allegory of sapientia and intelligen-
tia (MGH Epp. Kaiserzeit iv,3, no. 135).
13 The amplificatio of Solomon’s angry response to Adonijah’s request, conveyed by his
mother, repeats the passage about the “suitable successor who lies in David’s bed.”
268 Chapter 5

But how did the author of the King’s Mirror arrive at the idea that through
his embrace David had “sanctified” the woman who would now help Adonijah
succeed? Ideas about regal fertility rites, and hence the thorny question of
‘sacral kingship’ (its possible existence in pre-Christian times; the possibility of
such notions lingering on)14 spring to mind but we are perhaps well-advised to
steer clear of that line of thought here. We should be wary of the idea of ‘tradi-
tions’ and ‘notions’ lingering on as though by themselves. This is a piece of
thirteenth-century biblical exegesis and ought to be approached on coeval
terms. Although there is something akin to ‘sacred kingship’ in some of the
sagas, especially in the recurrent phrase ár ok friðr “good harvest and peace,”
the absence of which would lead to the overthrow of ‘unlucky’ rulers—an idea
not limited to Scandinavia, of course—, there is no indication that royal ema-
nations as such were ever granted benedictory power. Much discussed for the
Viking Age, the question of Scandinavian sacral kingship in the Middle Ages
arises on the one hand with regards to the royal saints Óláf, Erik, and the two
Cnuts,15 and on the other with regards to the mythography of the kings’ sagas
and their depiction of pre-Christian sacral kingship. Neither route leads us to
David and Abishag. Óláf and his counterparts in Sweden and Denmark are
never shown to be thaumaturges during their lifetime, and their postmortem
protectorate over their respective kingdoms is conceived within the frame-
work of the visio beatifica and lacks any physical component. Ideas about the
beneficial effect of royal effusions are definitively displaced to pagan prehis-
tory (the much-quoted self-sacrifice of the early Uppsala king Dómaldi, for
one16) and there fulfill an ambiguous but rigorously ‘othered’ function. Not
even the blood of Christ’s campaigner and martyr Saint Óláf, spilled at Stikle­
stad, has an effect that goes beyond standard contact and healing miracles for
individual believers: it does not saturate the soil of his kingdom, but forms
pools in which a blind man inadvertently dips his hand, rubs his eyes, and re-
gains his eyesight.17 The remark in the King’s Mirror about the “sanctification”
of the successor by the predecessor through Abishag’s embrace, included with
explanatory intent and underlined by multiple repetitions, has more to do
with her than with him.

14 See, in summary, McTurk, “Sacral Kingship in Ancient Scandinavia” (1974–77); McTurk,

“Scandinavian Sacral Kingship Revisited” (1994–97); McTurk, “Kingship,” in EMSc, 353ff.
(with further literature); Steinsland, “Mythologische Grundlage” (1992); Steinsland, Den
hellige kongen (2000); Steinsland, Norrøn religion (2005).
15 Cf. Hoffmann, Die heiligen Könige (1975); Røthe, “Odinskriger” (1999).
16 Heimskringla, Ynglinga saga c. 15; see, in summary, Lönnroth, “Dómaldi’s Death” (1986).
17 The miracle is reported in, among others, OsH c. 236; Passio et miracula beati Olavi (in
Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, ed. Storm [1880]), ii 1.
The Performative Aspect 269

This “sanctification” obviously goes beyond the ‘expressive’ aspect of

Abishag’s embrace, it does not only ‘mean’ something, but rather ‘is’ something
in itself. By lying with Abishag, Adonijah would not merely signal his attempt
to claim the kingship, but already perform it.
In his theory of the speech act, J.L. Austin distinguishes between perlocu-
tionary and illocutionary speech acts. Perlocutionary acts are those ‘by which’
something happens, that is, utterances with consequences—the normal com-
municative situation. Illocutionary speech acts (‘in which’) are those that al-
ready have consequences through the fact of being spoken—Austin’s classic
example are the words “I hereby declare this bridge open.”18 Translated into
social semantics, this more or less corresponds to the difference between the
aspects discussed here. Adonijah’s desire to get Abishag is perlocutionary
enough (the consequences are drastic), but had he got her and been “sancti-
fied” in this way, this would clearly have been the practical equivalent of an il-
locutionary act.
Now intercourse is not a speech act, and therefore Austin’s terms, derived
from the word locutio, cannot properly be applied to it. There is in fact some-
thing frivolous in describing a sexual union, even one between biblical charac-
ters, in linguistic terms. (It is the kind of frivolity that often attaches to what
academics call ‘the linguistic turn’ in the view of some of their more conscien-
tious readers. Often enough, ‘culturalist’ readings of history carry the risk of
smoothing down the harsh facts of past human experience for comfortable
consumption in ivory tower reading chairs and conference rooms.) However, if
it is true that to attempt historical explanation is not to diminish the serious-
ness of past experiences to those who had to live through them, we may be
justified in carrying the analysis of polygyny in its various ‘aspects’ one step
further, as long as we keep in mind that social symbolics are not ‘just symbol-
ics’ but lose nothing of their immediacy if we try to understand what made
men and women act ‘symbolically.’ We also need a word for this fifth ‘aspect’ of
polygyny, and ‘symbolic’ might be one. But ‘symbolic’ would not be sufficient
(Abishag is clearly not merely a symbol of dominion). ‘Sacral’ would be restric-
tive (what Philip the Fair did in the dungeon was anything but sacral). With a
certain amount of embarrassment, I would like to call this aspect ‘performa-
tive,’ recognizing that even J.L. Austin rejected the term and instead introduced
the word pair ‘per-/il-locutionary,’ and hoping that the reader will not be put
off, tired at the sight of this well-worn cultural-studies cliché. Unlike ‘symbolic,’
the word ‘performative’ highlights the difference to the ‘expressive’ aspect.
The  ‘performative’ is not primarily aimed at external perception and effect

18 Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962).

270 Chapter 5

(­ Adonijah wishes to be perceived as a pretender), but unfolds its effect through

the performance itself (Adonijah aims at “sanctification” through his father’s
woman). That the act, once ‘performed’ (literally ‘carried out’), will also be
communicated and perceived is not precluded and is probably the rule, but
this comes later.
So if faðm er helgat (“the embrace is sanctified”), what does this mean?

3 Northern European Hierogamy?

Helgi “holiness, sanctity” and faðm “embrace” are the lexical equivalents of hie-
ros and gamos: the ‘performative’ aspect is nothing else than the question of
medieval hierogamy. Phrased so broadly, the question can of course be an-
swered in the positive: of course there is hierogamy in the medieval standard
exegesis of the Song of Songs as Christ’s marriage to the church, as well as its
concomitants, furthered by Pauline thought, such as the union of the individ-
ual soul to Christ, or the bishop’s marriage to his diocesan church at the mo-
ment of investiture.19 It is perhaps no exaggeration to claim that the medieval
sacramentalization of human marriage echoes these theological presupposi-
tions. So what we are asking is not whether there were ideas about sacred
unions with a transcendental side to them (of course there were) but whether
we can expect such ideas to have an influence on actual political culture in
particular settings.
At least in one of the cases alluded to at the beginning of this chapter,
­Margaret Clunies Ross has endeavoured to identify—though cautiously—such
connections. She compares Swen Godwinson’s assault on the abbess of
Leominster in 1046 with other notices in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle about nuns
being taken by a party leader in the course of a succession dispute or other
quarrels between magnates, and concludes that the sexual mastery of a conse-
crated woman from the country that will be or has been conquered is not only
indicative of, but synonymous with the victor’s “absolute power of disposition.”20
According to Clunies Ross, widespread lay guardianship over churches and
monasteries may well have led the cirican hlafordes (“lords of the churches”) to
assume that they were entitled to make sexual demands of the inhabitants of
these convents, much as the members of their own household were subject to

19 See the classic Ohly, Hohelied-Studien (1958); in summary, H[elmut] Riedlinger, “Hohe-
lied,” in LdM, vol. 9, col. 79ff.
20 Clunies Ross, “Concubinage” (1985), 31.
The Performative Aspect 271

their violence. By extension, these women thus become a suitable object of

symbolic domination by rivals of the respective hlafordes.21
With this in mind, I would like to supplement the observation that one of
the cases cited by Clunies Ross—the seizure of a nun by the ultimately
­unsuccessful pretender Æthelwold recorded for the year 900 in the Anglo-­
Saxon ­Chronicle—includes the information that the woman was ær to nunnan
gehalgod (“was already consecrated as a nun”).22 Certainly gehalgod is an obvi-
ous word to describe the entry into orders and may as such not seem very note-
worthy. However, given that Æthelwold abducted the nun at a critical moment
in the struggle for the throne from his own family nunnery of Wimborne, buri-
al place of his royal father Æthelred, we should consider the possibility that
ideas other than ecclesiastical consecration were associated with the term
halig. Belonging to the sphere of law as much as that of religion—if ‘spheres’ is
at all the word—the concept of hæle with its etymological cognates ‘hallow,’
‘holy,’ ‘heal,’ and ‘whole,’ belongs to the idea of what is in fact its lexical equiva-
lent, ‘integrity.’23 The pretender’s seizure of ‘his’ nun may well have been aimed
at the sanctity she had acquired through her consecration and resultant close-
ness to God’s ear—however loudly the bishop objected.24 But Æthelwold’s
own hæle, his integrity, was also in play: he had to show that, come what may,
he at least knew how to act as lord in ‘his’ own minster.25 Concrete, ‘expressive’
demonstrations of political clout and the search for the cultic sanctification of
one’s own actions are inextricably entangled in Æthelwold’s assault.
The laconic Anglo-Saxon Chronicle merely hints at motives. Later chroni-
clers are not always more explanatory. For William of Malmesbury, writing
around 1120, King Edgar (r. 959–75) was praiseworthy in many respects but an

21 Stafford, “Sons and Mothers” (1978), 97, argues from perspective of individual actors, as-
suming that nuns of the same kin may at times have been prepared to provide their
‘blood’ to allied pretenders; Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (2003),
153–59, does not mention the possible ‘sanctity’ of such unions.
22 asc A, s.a. 900; it concerns the succession of King Alfred the Great. The Anglo-Saxon
Lord’s Prayer reads “sanctificetur nomen tuum: sie þin nama gehalgod.”
23 Cf. Durrenberger, Dynamics (1992), 95: “In medieval Iceland, concepts of honor followed
from concepts of holiness. … To respect what was holy was to be honorable. Part of that
respect was to maintain one’s own sense of holiness, not to allow one’s self to be violated
by the actions of others.”
24 asc A, s.a. 900 states explicitly that the bishop’s intervention was futile, just as Æthel-
wold’s rival had been powerless in the contest for the kingship: “þæt wif þæt he hæfde ær
genumen butan cynges leafe 7 ofer þara biscopa gebod.”
25 Æthelwold’s attempt to seize the Crown of Wessex failed, yet after a desperate breakout
from a surrounded camp, he succeeded in being recognized as king in Northumberland—
a detail the ‘West Saxon’ version A omits, but which is expanded in D.
272 Chapter 5

exemplary polygynist, libidinosus in virgines.26 He demanded the surrender of

aristocrat daughters when their formae fama (“talk of her looks”) reached him,
and had children from a number of women, whom William makes an effort to
present as a series (and not as a shoal). But Edgar also fetched a beautiful maid-
en out of the monastery, “stole her chastity and took her into his bed more than
once.”27 Another girl, though not ordained, donned the habit to escape the
king’s advances but he “tore off the veil and laid her in the ruler’s bed.”28 In all
cases, Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury, the chronicler’s hero, makes a swift
appearance and puts the king in his place (in the latter case, for violation of the
habit). How much of William’s ‘Edgar’ is the default post-Gregorian prince who
respects the church walls as little as her commandments—and how much the
tenth-century politician making use of the tools available to him? To what ex-
tent is the penance imposed on the king by the archbishop for the abduction
of the beautiful nun, namely a seven-year penitentia during which the king was
not permitted to wear his crown, a mirroring of the crime? In short, what is the
mentality of the association of woman and authority?

4 Hákon Hlaðajarl

Instead of lining up single incidents such as these, more elusive in their ‘mean-
ing’ than those discussed in the previous chapters, I prefer to focus on a single
case study and examine it at some length: the story of the north Norwegian
jarls of Hlaðir/Lade in the late tenth century as depicted in contemporary and
subsequent poetry and prose. Any student of Norwegian history knows that
the Lade jarls are not just a ‘case’ but come at a pivotal point: The story of King
Óláf Tryggvason, and ultimately of the Christianisation of Norway, hinges on
them. To my knowledge, they have not before been studied with a view to their
women. The aim here is to argue that polygynous practices might be charged
with a meaning that was not (only) ‘expressive’ but ‘performative,’ and was not
dependent on the future reception of others for its effect, but rather already
unfolded it through the act itself.
The later jarls of Lade came from Hålogaland,29 probably from the island
of Andøy on the north side of the Lofoten archipelago. The material basis

26 gra ii 157; William himself labels the episode as “exempl[a] libidinis” (ii, 158).
27 gra ii 158: “Virginis Deo dicatae audiens pulchritudinem, uiolenter eam a monasterio
abstraxit, abstractae pudorem rapuit et non semel thoro suo collocauit.”
28 gra ii 159: “[Wulfthryth] quam certum est non tunc sanctimonialem fuisse, sed timore
regis puellam laicam se uelauisse, moxque eandem abrepto uelo lecto imperiali subacto.”
29 Hálogaland is the medieval name for the Atlantic coastal strip between roughly the 65th
and 69th parallel (more or less the present-day Norwegian ‘fylker’ of Nordland and the
The Performative Aspect 273

of life—and accumulation—was neither agriculture nor livestock farming

(although around 1000 the agricultural land certainly extended further north
than in the late Middle Ages and modern times),30 but fishing and seal hunting
and above all bartering with the nomadic hunters in the interior of Bjarma­
land, the subarctic taiga and tundra belt.31 This made the northern Norwegian
chiefs highly mobile and allowed Grjótgarð Herlaugsson, the first historically
tangible member of this kin group, to shift his land base further south towards
the middle of the ninth century and settle in Yrjar/Ørland, an arable peninsula
at the entrance to Trondheim Fjord. From this key position he controlled the
coastal sea route between its Northland resources and the North Sea region,
and had improved opportunities to directly participate in the burgeoning Vi-
king trade and pillage economies.
His son Hákon, a contemporary of Harald Fairhair, was already so powerful
that he has been described as “unifying Norway from another direction.”32 Both
King Harald’s concentration of power in the south and Hákon Grjótgarðsson’s
parallel rise in central and northern Norway were supported by the common
commercial interests of the coastal powers in norðveg.33 Harald’s alliance with
Hákon Grjótgarðsson, sealed or signified by the fact that Hákon gave his daugh-
ter Ása to the rising southern king Harald, helped the latter gain the support he
needed for his expansion towards the west, and at the same time secured
Hákon’s power in the north. Throughout the entire tenth century it remained
an open question whether Scandinavia west of the mountain range would be
organized into one or two realms. The Danish effort at gaining control of the
coasts of the norðveg allowed both Harald’s and Hákon’s offspring to use the
changing support of the Danish kings for attacks on the other side’s sphere of
influence.34

southern part of Troms). In the south, it bordered on Trøndelag and Namdalen, in the
north, it petered out in Bjarmaland/Finnmark, which was inhabited by nomads. The
Vesterålen and Lofoten islands would be regarded as part of Hálogaland. The modern
name form ‘Helgeland’ is used for the southernmost part of Nordland, while ‘Hålogaland’
is official for diocesan and legal administrative units.
30 Cf. Ulf Sporrong, “The Scandinavian Landscape and Its Resources,” in Helle, ed., Cam-
bridge History of Scandinavia, vol. 1 (2003), 15–42, 38ff.
31 A unique self-description of a Hålogaland “swyðe spedig man[nes]” (very wealthy man)
and his economy is contained in the ‘travelogue’ of Óttar/Ohthere, recorded at the West
Saxon court around 890 and transmitted in the geographical preface of the Old English
Orosius (The Old English Orosius, ed. Bately [1980]; now also: Bately and Englert, ed.,
Ohthere’s Voyages [2007]); cf. Hansen, Samisk fangstsamfunn (1990), and in general Zah-
risson, ed., Möten i gränsland (1997).
32 Krag, Norges historie (2000), 48: “rikssamling fra en annen kant.”
33 For this view, see above all Schreiner, Norges samling (1929), which remains relevant.
34 The idea that ‘Norway’ emerged as a result of Danish politics is represented most clearly
by Tøtlandsmo, “Vikingtidas ‘norske rikssamlingskamper’” (1996); cf. the critical synopsis
274 Chapter 5

With the dynastic seat relocated once more, this time to the interior of
Trondheim Fjord to Hlaðir/Lade (a promontory some eighty metres high with
excellent views across the fjord, controlling both the exit towards the Atlantic
and the route into the alluvial plains in inner Trøndelag), Hákon also effec-
tively took over land-based power in the most important agriculture zone of
Western Scandinavia, and in doing so fundamentally altered the older settle-
ment and power structures.35 Under Hákon’s son Sigurð, the relationship with
the kings from Harald Fairhair’s line deteriorated; in 962, Jarl Sigurð was at-
tacked and burned to death. His son Hákon took over the paternal heritage,
and, with a skill that identifies either Hákon or his chronicler Snorri Sturluson
as a master of Machiavellian intrigue, secured the backing of Harald Bluetooth
in Denmark, and destroyed Harald Fairhair’s grandchildren one after another.
From about 970 he held effectively sole authority over Norway for a quarter of
a century—and soon proved to Harald Bluetooth that the famous inscription
on the Jelling Stone recording the “winning” of Norway (sąr uan … ok nuruiak)
was somewhat illusory.
This Hákon Sigurðsson Hlaðajarl takes centre stage in the following discus-
sion. In the kings’ sagas, which may go back to a lost *Hlaðajarla saga,36 one
characteristic stands out above all others: Hákon’s pronounced paganism. In
Snorri, the Lade dynasty with its consistent adherence to the sacrificial cult
is  sharply contrasted with the Fairhair line’s wavering between acceptance,
practice, and tolerance of Christianity and paganism: the Lade jarl is inn mesti
blótmaðr, “the greatest sacrificer” or “the greatest idolater.”37 After assuming
power, Jarl Hákon provided for the restoration of the neglected cults and had
the fact recorded by skalds: “All Lone-Rider’s ravaged temple lands [hof] and

of research by Krag, Norges historie (2000), 216f., with reference to P.A. Munch (Det norske
folks historie vol. 1,1 [1852]) and Halvdan Koht (Dansk og svensk i norsk historie [1920]) as
early advocates of this line of thought.
35 Cf. Sognnes, “Trondheimen før Nidaros” (1998); Røskaft, “Trønderske maktsentra” (1999),
as well as the contributions of both in Trøndelags historie, vol. 1 (2005); crucially, in the
1990s, archaeological findings made it clear that, at least in terms of the geography of
power, Lade was a new foundation rather than an established chieftain’s seat. In contrast
to the older centres in Gauldal, Stjørdal, and Verdal, with their relatively extensive arable
land and long river valleys, at the mouth of the short Nidelv (at whose mouth the Eyra
thing would meet later in the Middle Ages, and the trading place Nidaros arose after 1000),
Lade has an insignificant hinterland, but is an excellent site for control.
36 Essentially continuing Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, “Formáli,” in Heimskringla, vol. 1 (1941), esp.
xcv and cv-cvii.
37 HsG c. 14. The term ‘idolater’ is not actually appropriate for the sagas’ often respectful
handling of the blótmenn, especially as conventionally the hallmark of paganism is never
faith and rarely the idols, but usually the cult practice (sacrifices). Pagan sacrifice (blót) is
not related etymologically to “blood” (blóð); we hear almost nothing about the actual pro-
cedures, besides references to sacrificial animals.
The Performative Aspect 275

sanctuaries of gods [vé] / Did the wise-hearted man, famed among armies, at
once make holy.”38 As Snorri Sturluson freely observed in around 1230, years of
famine then belonged to the past: “The first winter that Hákon ruled over the
country, herring came in all over the country, and the previous autumn corn
had grown wherever it had been sown. And in the spring people got seedcorn,
so that most farmers could sow their land, and there was soon prospect of a
good harvest.”39
In terms of the agrarian necessities of life, the rule of the last “great pagan”
was, according to the high medieval saga, a blessing for Norway. Politically, Jarl
Hákon was also on the right track vis-à-vis the Ottonians and their missionar-
ies: on behalf of Harald Bluetooth he inflicted a tremendous defeat on Otta
keisari and his Saxon-Frankish-Frisian army at the Danevirke,40 and while the
Danish prince nonetheless ultimately accepted baptism, Hákon took onboard
the “priests and scholars” destined for Norway but had them all wade ashore
before his departure. He subsequently held a “great sacrifice,” during which
two ravens flew past, “from which the Jarl concluded that Odin had accepted
his sacrifice and now was the right time to fight.” He then campaigned in Den-
mark and Götaland with great success, and returned home in triumph.41 One

38 From the praise poem Vellekla by Hákon’s court skald Einar ‘Scale-Tinkle’ (skálaglamm),
975/85: “ǫll lét senn enn svinni / sǫnn Eindriða mǫnnum / herjum kunn of herjuð / hofs
lǫnd ok vé banna.” Longman Anthology, trans. North (2011), 37. Quoted in Heimskringla
(OsTr c. 16, stanza 108), it receives the following prose commentary: “Jarl Hákon, when he
travelled from the south along the coast in the summer and the people of the country
submitted to him, then he ordered over his whole realm that people should maintain
temples and rituals, and this was done.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1
(2016), 148.—The hof was a locality emphasized by the traditional cult, which lent a cer-
tain eminence to its owners. Toponymic evidence has demonstrated that the hof was an
essential element of pre-Christian cult practice, and it is often seen as a prerequisite both
for the Icelandic goði system and for the early ‘proprietary churches’ (hægindakirkjur) in
Norway.
39 The passage immediately follows the quotations from the panegyric on Hákon’s restora-
tion of the cult: “Inn fyrsta vetr, er Hákon réð fyrir landi, þá gekk síld upp um allt land, ok
áðr um haustit hafði korn vaxit, hvar sem sáit hafði verit. En um várit ǫfluðu menn sér
frækorna, svá at flestir bœndr søru jarðir sínar, ok varð þat brátt árvænt.” Heimskringla,
trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 149.—This description of the farmers and fisher-
men’s new-found confidence in the future contrasts with the account of the preceding
hardships (HsGr c. 16): grain and fish failed to appear for years, things grew ever worse,
especially in the north, where it snowed at midsummer and the cattle had to remain in-
doors until July; the kings were blamed on all sides.
40 OsTr c. 26. Contemporary skalds name Saxons, Frisians, and Franks; see Chapter 4.
41 OsTr c. 27, following version K: “Gerði hann þá [probably in the skerries off Östergötland]
blót mikit. Þá kómu þar fljúgandi hrafnar tveir. Þá þykkisk jarl vita, at Óðinn hefir þegit
blótit ok þá mun jarl hafa dagráð til at berjask.”
276 Chapter 5

only needs to read a chapter from the biblical books of Kings or Chronicles to
see the parallels go far beyond language and style: the pagan period is some-
thing like the Old Covenant of medieval Christian Northern Europe, and Jarl
Hákon, described with complicit sympathy, is a worthy precursor to his great
successor, the Christian King Óláf Tryggvason—whose harshness and weak-
nesses, incidentally, the sagas point out with markedly less indulgence than
those of the “great sacrificer.”
Jarl Hákon went from triumph to triumph. He gained his greatest victory in
the three-day naval battle of Hjørungavåg off the coast of Møre in 985, consid-
ered in the sagas the apogee of Viking feats of arms. The victory was also ‘politi-
cally’ important: the autonomous warrior collective in the Jómsborg at the
mouth of the Oder, which for a long time had been able to evade incorporation
into suzerainties through skilful alliances with the Pomeranian and Polish hin-
terlands as well as through sheer military power, had been recruited by Harald
Bluetooth to weaken Jarl Hákon to the point where he resumed paying tribute
to Jelling. The recruitment took the form of a feast that would become famous
for its series of heitstrenging (agonistic oath-swearing)—sleeping with the
daughter of an enemy chief was inevitably among the war aims declared over
beer and mead.42 Hákon’s victory not only broke the military might of the
Jómsvikings, who had intimidated even the Danish kings, but also ended the
latter’s influence north of the Skagerrak for several decades.
It has never been entirely clear why, after twenty-five years, such a success-
ful regime suddenly crumbled and came to an embarrassingly modest end.
Snorri, normally not one to miss an opportunity to comment at large on the
political mistakes of the leaders whose fall he is describing,43 gives a descrip-
tion that falls a little short of his usual flourish:

42 The story was told and retold many times. In Snorri’s version, which is relatively straight-
forward, the pertinent word is heit (“vow,” the fifth in the series, OsTr c. 35), thus: “Þá
strengði heit Vagn Ákason, at hann skyldi fara með þeim til Nóregs ok koma eigi aptr, fyrr
en hann hefði drepit Þorkel leiru ok gengit í rekkju hjá Ingibjǫrgu, dóttur hans” (“Then
Vagn Ákason made a vow that he would go with them [the Jómsvikings who had already
committed themselves] to Norway and not come back before he had killed Þorkel leira
(Mudflat) and gone to bed with his daughter Ingibjǫrg”). Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and
Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 170.—Snorri takes away much of the lustre of the scene, so dear to
some 20th-century Germanomaniacs, by showing how the Danish king carefully inebri-
ates his guests, who on waking up the next morning come to think that perhaps they
spoke a little too much (“þóttusk þeir hafa fullmælt”).
43 The model example is the collapse of Óláf Haraldsson’s authority in 1028, which was fol-
lowed by his futile comeback attempt at Stiklestad in 1030.
The Performative Aspect 277

While Jarl Hákon ruled over Norway, there were good harvests in the
country and good peace within the country among the farmers. The jarl
was popular with the farmers for the greater part of his life. But as time
went on, it increasingly came about that he was unprincipled in his rela-
tions with women [um kvennafar]. This got so bad that the jarl had rich
men’s daughters taken and brought back to him and he lay with them for
one or two weeks, afterwards sending them home, and as a result he be-
came very disliked by the women’s kinsfolk and the farmers began to
complain bitterly, as the Þrœndir are accustomed to do about everything
that displeases them.44

The problem with this passage is that it is too obvious. It shows an ageing auto-
crat (Hákon was probably getting on sixty) becoming a tyrannus, and thereby
turning a community of free farmers against himself, a community cultivating
the ‘right of resistance’ which medieval Trøndelag is often seen to claim as a
regional particularity.45 In a word, the story fits well into two major medieval
narratives: the typology of dominion (unjust rulership, tyrannis) and the over-
throw of the haughty pagan by the Christianizing king Óláf Tryggvason, who at
this juncture is coming from England into Norway.46 On the face of it, Jarl

44 OsTr c. 45: “Meðan Hákon jarl réð fyrir Nóregi, þá var góð árferð í landi ok góðr friðr innan
lands með bóndum. Jarl var vinsæll við búendr lengsta hríð ævi sinnar. En er á leið, þá
gerðisk þat mjǫk at um jarl, at hann var ósiðugr um kvennafar. Gerðisk þar svá mikit at, at
jarl lét taka ríkra manna dœtr ok flytja heim til sín ok lá hjá viku eða tvær, sendi heim
síðan, ok fekk hann af því óþokka mikinn af frændum kvinnanna, ok tóku bœndr at kurra
illa, svá sem Þrœndir eru vanir, allt þat er þeim er í móti skapi.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay
and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 180.
45 The so-called right of resistance in the Frostathing Law (the provincial law of Trøndelag,
iv §§50–52), often interpreted as ‘Germanic’ and contrasted with the Christian, monar-
chical Middle Ages, according to which the Trønder may undertake atfǫr (resistance, op-
position) against a bad ruler, is easily recognizable as a variant of a common medieval
attitude to the limits of authority (cf. Isidore, Etymologiae ix, 3,4: “rex eris si recte facias;
si non facias, non eris”); cf. Hallan, “Den trønderske motstandsretten” (1976); Sjöholm,
Sveriges Medeltidslagar (1988); Sandnes, “Germanisches Widerstandsrecht” (1992). Still, it
is remarkable that a similar provision does not exist in any of the other provincial laws.
Since in the sagas Trøndelag is consistently portrayed as the stock region for great farmers
unifying against royal power, we are probably dealing with the successful self-portrayal
and public image of a politically quite independent region.
46 However, the suggestion of a processual automatism does a disservice to the saga authors’
awareness of historical contingency. Snorri certainly thinks in epochs: “And the chief
cause of it happening like this was, that then the time had come for heathen worship
[blótskaprinn] and heathen worshippers to be condemned [fyrirdœmask], and be re-
placed by the holy faith and proper morals” (c. 50). Yet the Christian king Óláf Tryggvason
does not return from long exile under a false name at the providential moment: rather, he
278 Chapter 5

Hákon, hitherto ever-victorious, falls at just the right moment, almost by him-
self as it were. This is the course of events as told by Snorri:

Jarl Hákon was at a banquet in Gauldal at Melhus [the first traditional

chieftain’s seat south of Lade], and his ship was lying out off Vigg [in the
fjord, 15 km from Melhus]. There is a man called Orm lyrgja (Loafer), a
rich farmer. He lived at Býnes [on the headland to the west of modern
Trondheim, a few kilometres from Melhus]. He had a wife whose name is
Guðrún, daughter of Bergþórr of Lunde. She was known as Lundasól (Sun
of Lunde). She was a most handsome woman.
The jarl sent his slaves to Orm with his orders to bring Orm’s wife
Guðrún to the jarl. The slaves delivered their message. Orm told them
first to come and have supper. But before the slaves had finished eating,
there had come to Orm’s many men from the district, to whom he had
sent word. Now Orm said there was no chance that Guðrún would go
with the slaves. Guðrún spoke, telling the slaves to tell the jarl that she
would not come to him unless he sent Þóra of Rimul for her. She was a
rich lady and one of the jarl’s mistresses.
The slaves say that the next time they came the farmer and his lady
would soon regret this, and made many threats and after that went
away.47

This is the beginning of the end of Hákon’s reign. Orm now does word for word
what the Frostathing Law says concerning the rights of the free man (he has
the “war arrow cut,” that is, he sends out a message to muster the farmers of the
region), and the jarl, whose way back to his ships is already blocked by the

is tracked down by an agent provocateur sent by Jarl Hákon, identified, and misled into
attempting to seize power prematurely by false information about purported unrest in
Norway. At best, it is providential that Jarl Hákon is no longer able to spring his trap, as
what was false information has since become true.
47 OsTr c. 48: “Hákon jarl var á veizlu í Gaulardal at Meðalhúsum, en skip hans lágu út við
Viggju. Orm lyrgja er maðr nefndr, ríkr bóndi. Hann bjó á Býnesi. Hann átti konu þá, er
Guðrún er nefnd, dóttir Bergþórs af Lundum. Hon var kǫlluð Lundasól. Hon var kvinna
fríðust. Jarl sendi þræla sína til Orms þeira ørenda at hafa Guðrúnu, konu Orms, til jarls.
Þrælar báru upp ørendi sín. Ormr bað þá fyrst fara til náttverðar. En áðr þrælar hǫfðu
matazk, þá váru komnir til Orms margir menn ór byggðinni, er hann hafði orð sent. Lét
Ormr þá engan kost, at Guðrún fœri með þrælunum. Guðrún mælti, bað þræla svá segja
jarli, at hon myndi eigi til hans koma, nema hann sendi eptir henni Þóru af Rimul. Hon var
húsfreyja rík ok ein af unnustum jarls. Þrælarnir segja, at þeir skulu þar svá koma ǫðru
sinni, at bóndi ok húsfreyja munu þessa íðrask skammbragðs, ok heitask þrælarnir mjǫk
ok fara brot síðan.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 1 (2016), 182.
The Performative Aspect 279

topographical conditions, must flee inland into the valleys. He separates from
his retinue, which is to reach the fjord through another valley, hides in a cave
for the night, and the next day reaches the farm Rimul, where Þóra—the mis-
tress of the house and “one of the most beloved” (ein af unnustum) of the jarl,
the one whom the unwilling Guðrún had ridiculed with her reply to the
­messengers—is to hide him. At this point, only his slave Kark is still with him.
To conceal themselves from the approaching pursuers, the two dig a pit in
a pigsty, cover it up, and wait for the next day, which the jarl—thrown into a
vortex of premonitory dreams and suspicions—will not live to see: in a fit of
panic, Kark cuts off the jarl’s head when he screams in his sleep.

5 Death in the Pigsty

This hideously spectacular episode has been exemplarily analyzed by the Liv-
erpool Norse scholar Andrew Hamer, who has mapped out in detail how care-
fully the sagas have crafted Hákon’s nightmarish journey, both topologically
(from the valley to the cave and then into a self-dug pit/grave [grǫf]) as well as
scripturally (Mt 8:28: the Gadarene pigs, see Chapter 1).48 Through correspon-
dence at different levels, Hákon and Kark gradually become fateful ‘twins’ and
ever more pig-like in their sty, while in the courtyard above Óláf Tryggvason is
already (implausibly) consulting with his allies. The composition, which was
perfected in Snorri’s work but similarly furnished with moral-theological or
political significance in other versions, has presumably contributed to the fact
that the episode’s account of events is now so unhesitatingly accepted. The
various twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources focus on elaborating on the
theme of the fall of tyrants; in historical interpretations from Gustav Heber to
Sverre Bagge, Jarl Hákon is nothing more than a greedy old man, who falls vic-
tim to hubris in his last sexual stirring.49
In what follows, I will try to establish an alternative interpretation, one that
shows Hákon Jarl to be a prince whose unswerving attention to the political
coherence of his actions were to be his undoing. To that end, let us first identify
the elements common to all or most high medieval adaptations of the story of
Hákon’s downfall, those that may be presumed to originate around or not long

48 Hamer, “Death in a Pig-Sty” (1992).

49 Heber, Harald hårfagre (1934), 86, on Harald Fairhair’s reportedly average sexual appetite:
“No, Jarl Hákon was something else entirely.” Bagge, “Mann og kvinne” (1992), 11f., adopts
the saga epithet of “woman-lover” (“en kvinnekjær mann”): Hákon’s problem was not his
age as such, but misjudging boundaries; similarly Bagge, “Det primitive middelaldermen-
neske?” (1990), 48f., 57.
280 Chapter 5

after the events. The otherwise unremarkable farm Rimul in Gauldal is one of
them.50 Somewhat more topical are the claims made on other men’s women
towards the end (and pinnacle) of Hákon’s reign, although if nothing else, this
study has shown that such ‘expressive’ actions were perhaps commonplace
enough in themselves. What is unusual is the causal connection between these
actions and the jarl’s fall.
The connection between triumph as a warrior, rulership style, and tyranny
is very explicit in the ‘Series of Norwegian Kings’ (Nóregs konungatal) from the
early thirteenth century:

After the battle with the Jómsvikings, Jarl Hákon reckoned he held com-
plete power [fullkominn til ríkis] as he had defeated such great chiefs, and
thought he never needed fear the Danes as a threat to his rule again. So he
became ever harsher with his compatriots and became stingy [that is,
abandoned ruling through largesse] and no longer respected the law. The
pinnacle was his boundlessness with women [literally: hann var ósiðar
maðr um konur “he was an un-customs-man about women,” one who
would not recognize the boundaries imposed by custom and rules], and
his people emulated him, and neither the relatives of powerful men nor
married women, powerful or not, were safe.51

Of Hákon’s death, the ‘Series’ only reports the place and the perpetrator (his
skósveinn “servant” Kark—it lacks the emphasis of bondage which makes Snor-
ri’s portrayal both powerful and somewhat unrealistic), while there is no men-
tion of the “mistress” and householder Þóra of Rimul and the demand for
Guðrún ‘Sun of Lunde’ which provoked the uprising. The saga of the Icelandic
monk Odd, dating back to the late twelfth century, has the same characteriza-
tion of Hákon’s reign and stresses the attacks on “virgins and the wives of great

50 The localities are half a day’s journey from Nidaros/Trondheim, where the first known
historical works about Norway were written in Latin and Norse.
51 Nóregs konunga tal, ed. Finnur Jónsson (1902–03) c. 20: “æftir iomsvikinga orrastu þottez
Hacon iarl fullcomen til rikis er hann hafðe sva mikla hofðingia sigrat. oc þottezk hann
ækki þurfa þa at rædaz Dane um sitt riki. þa toc hann at harðna við lannzmenn sina. oc
gierðez fegiarn oc rœkte ækki logen. en mest var at þui at hann var osiðar maðr um konor.
oc þar æftir gierðo menn hans. oc var hvarke þyrmt frend conom rikis manna. ne ægin
konom bæðe rikra oc orikra.” The saga work, compiled in the early 13th century, is called
“fair parchment” after one of the two manuscripts of Fagrskinna lost in the 1728 fire at the
University library in Copenhagen—to distinguish it from the strophic genealogy from the
circle of Oddi discussed in Chapter 2, also called Nóregs Konungatal.
The Performative Aspect 281

men”52 whom he sent home “defiled” (svívirðar) after weeks or months. In both
versions, the closeness to canonical standards is striking: it is the married
women and virgins which make Hákon’s actions worthy of being condemned
as saurlífi (luxuria), using a term borrowed from contemporary pastoral care,
while Snorri focuses solely on the aspect of the insult to the Trondheim mag-
nates; for him, it is thus not the women who are “defiled” by their temporary
concubinage, but the men to whom they are returned.
By contrast, the two Latin histories do not contain any diatribes against
Hákon’s immorality. The Historia Norwegiae (c.1220) offers a purely political
account of Hákon’s triumph and even refers to the legendary origin of his kin
(more below on this), but names idolatria as his only weakness and narrates
his death (with place and perpetrator) without any reference to women.53
Theo­doric’s Historia de antiquitate rerum Norwagiensium (before 1180) pro-
vides a relatively detailed account of Hákon’s last days, mentioning the farm,
the slaves, the pigsty and Hákon’s concubina Thora, but does not establish a
connection between the event and other stories about women.54 The ‘Epitome
of Norwegian Royal History’ (Ágrip af Nóregs konunga sǫgum) written around
1190 is closest to Snorri’s version in the details it provides; among others, it in-
cludes the names of the last woman coveted by Hákon (Guðrún Lundasól) and
his frilla Þóra who grants him his final hiding place.55
The variations in detail, however, are striking. The principal difference is
that in Ágrip Hákon is not slaughtered in his sleep, screeching like a pig, but
instead, like another Nero, asks his slave for the coup de grâce when he sees the
henchmen approaching. But the stories concerning women also display
marked idiosyncrasies: Guðrún “the sun of Lunde,” the woman demanded by
Hákon, lives on the farm Lunde (in Snorri that is where she comes from, but
now lives elsewhere) and she organizes help for herself when Jarl Hákon’s men
arrive. Unlike in Snorri’s and Odd’s versions, there is no mention of a man by
her side. Her retort to the jarl—she will come only when the messenger is Þóra

52 Saga Óláfs Tryggvasonar af Oddr Snorrason munk c. 20/14: “hann hafði við hond ser [at
hand = side] konur manna, oc stor ættaðar [even from men of great houses], oc margar
meyjar.”
53 Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, ed. Storm (1880), 111.
54 Monumenta historica Norvegiæ, ed. Storm (1880), c. 10: “ille vero derelictus a suis et in sola
fuga spem ponens devenit in quedam viculum, Rimul nomine, ibique cum solo servo suo,
Carke nomine, a concubina sua Thora in ara porcorum absconsus …” According to Adam
of Bremen (ii, 25), the Norwegians banish Hákon “from the kingdom on account of his
haughty behaviour” (“in Norveia Haccon princeps erat, quem, dum Nortmanni superbius
agentem regno depellerent …)”—from this point, Adam confuses him with King Hákon
the Good.
55 Ágrip c. 13.
282 Chapter 5

of Rimul, the jarl’s faithful frilla—therefore seems better motivated than in

Snorri, where she appears, as it were, to merely supplement her husband’s
words with feminine spite. The Guðrún of the Ágrip can voice her own
challenges.
What do these narrative variations tell us? First, Jarl Hákon’s death was firm-
ly anchored in the historical knowledge of the period around 1200 with some
core elements (the place, the murderer, the frilla/concubina as lady of the
house) and the general context (the revolt in Trøndelag). Second, there is a
general image of Jarl Hákon as an overly successful autocrat who suddenly
shows astonishing lack of judgement concerning women.
The circumstances are, according to almost all the sources, polygynous in
nature. Jarl Hákon would seem to exemplify all the ‘aspects’ outlined in this
study in one: his grandiose “demeanour with women” (kvennafar) begins with
the final triumph over the Jómsvikings and the Danish king at Hjørungavåg,
which puts him firmly among the greats (habitual); Guðrún’s demand that
she would only join the ranks of his women when he sent Þóra of Rimul as his
messenger—and thereby degrade Þóra in relation to herself56—suggests that
either Guðrún herself or the saga authors had a keen eye for the open competi-
tion within the relational system of Nordic polygyny (agonistic). Hákon’s
intensified demands for intercourse were universally understood as a change
of rulership style, as a revocation of consensus57—in the words of the Frosta­
thing Law, as atfǫr—and acknowledged accordingly (expressive), although the
summary description “the daughters of powerful men” leaves us at a loss to
know whom precisely Hákon was targeting. Finally, the generative aspect is
represented elsewhere: a woman with whom the jarl had slept while being

56 This interpretation is at variance with Driscoll’s translation of the passage in Ágrip: “nema
hann sendi konu þá er hann hafði er Þóra hét.” In Driscoll’s translation: “unless he sent
away the woman he kept as mistress, who was named Þóra”—it presumably appears nat-
ural that Guðrún would demand the departure of her predecessor before she herself con-
sented to a relationship with Hákon. I think that the verb senda “send out, send,” much
like its modern English counterpart, would require an adverbial complement to be under-
stood as “sent away” (Latin dimittere as distinct from the simple form mittere). The issue
in Ágrip is, I think, that Guðrún jeeringly demands her potential co-wife act as a messen-
ger, thereby establishing hierarchy in the public eye right from the outset. As long as one’s
own position was satisfactory, the plurality of women as such was not a problem, indeed,
in the agonistic sense, it might even appear attractive. Either way, however, the argument
relies on grammar and stylistics and would be for experts on saga style to decide.
57 He had seemingly already regularly demanded and received women while being hosted
in the past (HsGr c. 8: “Hákon jarl fór einn vetr til Upplanda ok á nǫkkura gisting ok
lagðisk með konu einni”), but these women had no significant relatives (“var sú lítillar
ættar”).
The Performative Aspect 283

feasted in Eastland later turned up at Lade with their son of that night; Hákon
gave him to be raised by a “friend” in Trøndelag, and thus kept him in reserve—
with reason, as it turned out.58
The last of what are here termed the ‘aspects’ of medieval polygyny—the
performative—eludes narrative representability. On the other hand, the sagas
leave an explanatory gap that indicates a further, missing aspect. It is not suffi-
ciently clear why, after a long reign and sometimes astonishingly skilful ma-
noeuvres, Hákon suddenly became a bungler. The events proceed so mechani-
cally that a man of Hákon’s skills ought to have anticipated them, yet he stumbles
on as though blindfold. As we have seen, both the tradition’s level of detail and
the variety of narratives constructed with it make it difficult to shrug Hákon’s
tale off as just another superbia parable. Even a simple explanation, such as Óláf
Tryggvason being the stronger of the two, will not wear because Óláf Tryggva-
son’s success is consistently presented as a consequence, not the cause, of Jarl
Hákon’s downfall. The jarl and the women remain an irreducible fact. A wholly
different kind of source assists with its interpretation.

6 Jarl Hákon and His Patron Goddess

Jarl Hákon kept conspicuously productive skalds—so much so that in his case
poetry can indeed be called “an instrument of propaganda.”59 The outstanding
work from this production is the Háleygjatal (“Genealogy of the Háleygir”) by
Eyvind skáldaspillir, datable to 985, and so influential that Snorri Sturluson
cites it as a prime example of a reliable source in the prologue of Heimskringla
and Adam of Bremen (ii, 25) makes use of its information. Only fragments of
the Háleygjatal have survived; however, the preserved elements and indirect
evidence allow a fairly reliable reconstruction of the substance of the work.60
Similar to Ynglingatal, the metrical genealogy of Harald Fairhair’s competing

58 HsGr c. 8. The father had little time for him at first, prompting the son Eirík to react with
the kind of bravado which the aspiring sons of frillur frequently made careers out of: he
provoked a quarrel with one of the jarl’s trusted followers, killing him, and then unilater-
ally pardoned the leading Jómsviking in the aftermath of the Battle of Hjørungavåg. In-
deed, in the following decades, Eirík would go on to become the last successful jarl of
Lade.
59 Ström, “Poetry” (1981). Large sections of several sizeable songs of praise and a number of
skaldic sagas, which give an account of individual poetic figures at Jarl Hákon’s court,
have been preserved, testifying to a lasting awareness of Lade as a centre of cultural pro-
duction around 1000.
60 Cf. Edith Marold, “Eyvindr Finsson skáldaspillir,” in EMSc, 175f.
284 Chapter 5

kindred, it traces Jarl Hákon’s ancestral line back through twenty-seven gener-
ations in the region of their origin in northern Norway, all the way back to the
dynasty’s founding pair: Odin and the giantess Skaði.61
Gro Steinsland has analyzed the Háleygjatal in her important study on "The
Holy Wedding and Old Norse Royal Ideology.” On the basis of a variety of lin-
guistic, ethnographic, and literary documents, she concludes that the court
skald Eyvind, in lining out the divine origin of the Lade jarls, was building upon
well-established traditional ‘knowledge’ about the hierogamous character of
the house’s early power.62 Replacing Odin as it were, Jarl Hákon is seen to sleep
with the whole country:

Þeims alt austr Under [Hákon’s] arm the bride of the

til Egða býs slaughter-god [Odinn] lies all
brúðr val-Týs the way east to the
und bœgi liggr. territory of the Agder.63

Literally “under the crook of his arm”: the jarl holds “the earth” (jǫrð, grammati-
cally feminine in the Nordic languages) firmly in his grasp. Lexicalized formu-
laically, this image is also regularly found in the sagas when a king wins power:
“He put the whole country under him.”64
The actual hieros gamos tradition of the Lade jarls, however, does not refer
all the way back to the primeval giantess of Háleygjatal (who in this constella-
tion could very well be a learned skaldic construction). A different female fig-
ure, more disparate and yet more widely recorded than the clean mythological

61 The fragments are edited in Skj B 1, 60–62.—Adam of Bremen (ii, 25): “Haccon iste crude-
lissimus ex genere Inguar et giganteo sanguine descendens …” Inguar (Yngvi–Frey) is the
divine progenitor of the Ynglings (the royal dynasty), not the Háleygir/jarls of Lade, and
Adam mixes up other figures in this passage as well. Still, the essential information
reached the competent metropolis of Bremen.—Krag, Ynglingatal og Ynglingesaga (1991),
even advocates dating Ynglingatal to the 12th century, whereby this royal genealogy would
be considered a replica of the earlier Háleygjatal.
62 Steinsland, Det hellige bryllup (1991), 214–26, Háleygjatal is here the only ‘historical’ poem
alongside three eddic songs.
63 Háleygjatal, in Skj B 1, 62. Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, ed. Whaley, vol. 2 (2012), 195; liter-
ally: “all the way eastward to Agder,” from the viewpoint of the sailor who, sailing out of
Trondheimsfjord from Lade, first turns southward along the Norwegian west coast and
then eastward to reach the southern Norwegian region of Agder on the Skagerrak.
64 Here HsHb c. 19: “lagði allt land undir sik.” Equivalents such as ‘subicere, unterwerfen,
soumettre’ and the modern Scandinavian ‘underkaste’ have a slightly different nuance
due to the notion of ‘throwing.’
The Performative Aspect 285

construction of the court poet, provides the nexus ‘woman~land’ for the Lade
jarls. In mythology she is known by the name Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð. She is fairly
comprehensively documented, being repeatedly mentioned in the Snorra
Edda (inter alia, in a list of names of recommended figures for use in skaldic
poetry), in several of the kings’ sagas and Icelandic sagas, as well as in Saxo’s
Gesta Danorum, and even in an example sentence in a grammatical treatise
from about 1150.65 Saxo, something of an outsider among the mythographers
of Nordic prehistory with no political commitments to northern Norway, nev-
ertheless supplies a detailed description of the courtship by Helgo, Halogie rex
(king of Hålogaland) of Thora, daughter of rex Finnorum Byarmorumque (king
of the Finns and ‘Bjarmalanders,’ the subarctic Finno-Ugric peoples so impor-
tant for the Hålogaland Lade jarls’ trading economy). Helgo (Hǫlgi in the Norse
texts66) is the eponymous royal father of the land of Halogia and appears as
the forbear of other prominent Hålogaland chiefly houses as well; his bride
Thora is close enough to Þorgerð, Hǫlga brúð (“Bride of Hǫlgi”).67 In a society
used to thinking in skaldic metaphors, even the basically ordinary personal
name ‘Þorgerð’ must have triggered the association “bedfellow-deity.” While
the personal name ‘Þorgerð’ is one of the common women’s ‘Thor-’ names in
Norway until the late Middle Ages, and as such not necessarily mythologically
motivated, Steinsland rightly observes that the second part of the name, -gerð
(widely used by skalds as a kenning for women) was also the name of the best-
known giantess associated with the Æsir.68 This Gerð is, in turn, inextricably
intertwined with the hierogamy motif as the sexual partner of the fertility god
Frey (the progenitor claimed by the Ynglings, and mentioned by Adam of Bre-
men in connection with the templum of Uppsala).
This overall construction is not the personal achievement of a twelfth-­
century intellectual with a penchant for etymology; on the contrary, Saxo uses

65 The first detailed study of the forms of her name was Storm, “Om Thorgerd Hölgebrud”
(1885); a comprehensive inventory of the documents is available in E.F. Halvorsen, “Þor­
gerðr Hölgabruðr,” in klnm, vol. 20, col. 382ff.; see also Chadwick, “Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr”
(1950) (for a cultic/religious interpretation); Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte,
vol. 2 (21957), 340f.; Motz, “Goddess of the North” (1997) (mythological); McKinnell,
“Þórgerðr Hǫlgabrúðr and Hyndluljóð” (2002) (for integration into the pantheon); Røthe,
“Þórgerðr Hölgabrúðr” (2007) (for the euhemerization of a revered matriarch).
66 Cf. Snorra Edda–Skáldskaparmál c. 42: “konungr sá, er Hǫlgi er nefnd, er Hálogaland er við
kent” (“Hálogaland was named after the king who was named Hǫlgi”).
67 Saxo iii, 2,6–8. For the references and especially the discussion of the phonetic-
etymological distinction Helgi/Hölgi, see Storm, “Om Thorgerd Hölgebrud” (1885).
68 Steinsland, Det hellige bryllup (1991), 221.
286 Chapter 5

the myth to promote his own narrative, but only provides a rough outline of
it ­because he assumed it was well known.69 That “Hǫlgi” was already known
as the progenitor of Hålogaland in the tenth century is attested, inter alia,
by Þorbjǫrn Hornklofi’s verse about Harald Fairhair’s polygyny (see the lim-
inary chapter), in which he enumerates the girls from the various parts of
Harald’s empire who were sidelined by Harald’s union with the Danish prin-
cess, among whom was one Hǫlga ættar “of Hǫlgi’s kin.” It was thus common
knowledge in Jarl Hákon’s time that his house and his power had arisen out
of his eponymous ancestor’s marriage to a female figure with slightly non-
human connotations.
This notion had significant political consequences. No less than Jarl Hákon’s
victory over the Jómsvikings at the Battle of Hjørungavåg in 985 was generally
ascribed to the intervention of Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð, understood as the jarls of
Lade’s tutelary deity—an idea strongly encouraged by the “propaganda” of his
court skalds. One version of the saga of Óláf Tryggvason reports that during
this day-long naval battle, the fortunes of war gradually shifted ever more in
favour of the Danish invaders until Jarl Hákon has himself rowed to a small is-
land and, reaching a clearing, kneels towards the north (that is, towards Hålo-
galand, his ancestral home) and calls upon Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð. He then sacri-
fices first an animal, then a man, and finally his son Erling. After these sacrifices,
a storm of snow and hail breaks out from the north, driving the Jómsvikings’
ships together and turning them into helpless victims of Jarl Hákon’s fleet.70
In other late medieval accounts, the jarl arrives instead at a temple in the
forest, furnished with glass windows and statues, resembling the numerous
chapels frequented by chevaliers errants in Arthurian literature and thereby
testifying to the integration of Jarl Hákon’s story into the basic narrative stock
of medieval Northern Europe. Therefore, even a historian like Snorri Sturluson,
who always prefers rational themes to supernatural ones, must deal with this
established knowledge. He does so with every sign of disgust, but he cannot fail
to mention both the storm—dismissed in passing as a mere ­meteorological

69 Characteristically, Saxo juxtaposes the courtship of the—formally human—King Helgi

with the god Baldur’s courting of the beautiful girl Nanna: a hierogamous story of a very
different sort, with a different textual strategic function, but nonetheless part of a similar
constellation.
70 OsTr c. 154 in Flateyjarbók; cf. Røthe, “Þórgerðr Hölgabrúðr” (2007), 4f. The byname of the
demonic deity in this 14th-century manuscript is Hǫrða brúð “Bride of the [Western Nor-
wegian] Hordalanders”; this phonetically minor but geographically significant lapse, non-
sensical in this context, suggests that the compiler was reproducing an older tradition
here without any particular agenda of their own.
The Performative Aspect 287

fact—and the sacrifice, which he tries to do away with as a hearsay post-

script (“people say that …”) after the end of the battle, the release of the most
­prominent prisoners, and the dissolution of both armies.71 Even more than the
explicit description of the son’s sacrifice—as a negation of Christ’s sacrifice,
as it were, the most repugnant manifestation of the devil’s work on earth
­conceivable—, the fact that a writer like Snorri who would prefer to do with-
out it feels obliged to at least reference the tradition allows us to conclude that
it was common historical knowledge about the jarls of Lade that they were in
direct contact with their eponymous protector, and were prepared to play off
this connection.
This is the background for the other great surviving song in praise of Jarl
Hákon, the Hákonardrápa of the Hallfreð Óttarson from around 990. This is
how it portrays the jarl’s rise to power in Norway:

Sannyrðum spenr sverða With the holy words of the swords

snarr þiggjandi viggjar the wind-steeds brisk partaker
barrhaddaða byrjar entices Third-Party’s [=Odin’s] fir-haired
biðkvǫn und sik Þriðja. waiting-wife beneath him.

Því hykk fleygjanda frakna And so I think the famed shower-

– ferr jǫrð und menþverri – flinger (Earth lies down for the man
ítra eina at láta who dispenses necklaces) is quite unwilling
Auðs systur mjǫk trauðan. to leave Auð’s gleaming sister alone.

Róð lukusk, at sá, síðan, The deal closed after that in such a way
snjallráðr konungs spjalli that the king’s eloquent intimate
átti einga dóttur took possession of the wood-covered
Ónars, viði gróna. only daughter of Onarr.

Breiðleita gat brúði The ravens’ jetty navigator [the lord of the
Báleygs at sér teygða battlefield = the jarl] has ably lured to him the
stefnir stöðvar hrafna broad-featured bride Of Furnace-Eye with
stála ríkismǫlum. the kingdom-building talk of steel blades.72

71 OsTr cc. 41f.: “Þat er sǫgn manna …”—namely, the sacrifice, the hailstorm, and the rever-
sal of the fortunes of war. Much like the infinitive + fertur used in the Latin chronicles, this
formula allows Snorri to distance himself from traditions he feels he has to record be-
cause they are old, but cannot accept.
72 Skj B 1, 147f., arrangement and translation based on the Longman Anthology, trans. North
(2011), 589–90, with changes made where I make or follow different interpretations of the
288 Chapter 5

We can see what prompted Hallvard Lie in 1957 to comment that in the Háko-
nardrápa, Hákon’s path to power became a kind of Viking woman’s abduc-
tion.73 The metaphor of the original, however, ensures that the conquest of
Norway does not “become” a woman’s abduction, but rather “is” one. Strictly
speaking, this is not an issue of the metaphorical in the classical sense, as the
kennings of this song do not transfer concepts from one field to another but
rather aim to reveal the coincidence of two only seemingly distinct fields:
Hákon’s conquest, accomplished with stála ríkismǫlum “power talk of steel
blades” (here with metonymy), of the land, the earth (jǫrð) is at the same time
the Allfather Odin’s successful courtship of Jǫrð, the giantess who is one of his
eljur “co-wives” (see Chapter 2).74 Moreover, the Earth/woman won through
struggle and political skill (snjallráðr “shrewd in council”) is barhaddað “fir-
haired,” viði gróin “wood-covered,” and breiðleit “broad-featured”: the very im-
age of the Norwegian highlands and fells, strange in light of the medieval can-
on of beauty perhaps, but no less compelling for that. The “Earth lies down
under” (ferr jǫrð und) the jarl, he “entices her beneath him” (snarr und sik): the
country submits to the victor, and not unwillingly.
This mythographic way of narrating the Lade jarls’ rise is, in its own way, no
less ‘meaningful’ than Snorri’s version of the cunning tactician and successful
warrior Hákon; both had their social place and their audience. The song of
praise—in comparison to the narrative prose of the saga, a far more formal-
ized language form which was consequently far richer in associations—
derives its specific effect from the fact that the connection between the Lade
jarl being praised and his guardian deity belonged to the inventory of retriev-
able associations of the discerning public.75 Beyond compelling language for

kennings. North has “barley-wimpled” rather than “fir-haired” for barrhaddað and “back-
wards-grown” rather than “wood-covered” for viði-gróin.
73 Lie, ‘Natur’ og ‘unatur’ i skaldekunsten (1957), 97.
74 In the Jarðarkenningar “phrases for ‘land’” section in the Skáldskaparmál, Snorri recom-
mends the designations “sister of [the giant] Auð,” “daughter of [the giant] Onar,” “bride
of Odin,” “co-wife of Frigg” or any giantess Odin had slept with. One of the authorities he
cites is actually Óttar and his Hákonardrápa.
75 In religious studies, it remains controversial whether Þórgerð Hǫlgabrúð should be inter-
preted as (1) a Vanir deity, (2) a giantess, or (3) originally a historical matriarch worshipped
as fylgja and/or dís (protective essence of a person and/or place). For the historian, this is
not the issue—although, in view of Jacques Le Goff’s research on the role of the fairy
Melusine for the genealogical self-invention of the Lusignans in twelfth-century Poitou
(Le Goff, “Mélusine maternelle” [1977/1999]), the latter hypothesis, proposed by Gunnhild
Røthe, appears convincing. In any case, early and high medieval sources credit the jarls
with lasting, potent contact with a female figure endowed with superhuman powers.
The Performative Aspect 289

­solemn occasions, this connection may also have been manifested in other so-
cial practices. Nora Chadwick, Folke Ström, Gro Steinsland, and most recently
Gunnhild Røthe have argued that Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð was an object of the cult
practised by the Lade jarls. Critical doubt about the descriptions of such cult
celebrations in late sources76 reflect on the details of the reports rather than
the overall assumption, borne out by the unanimous insistence of the sagas
and the evidence of early skaldic poetry, that the authority of the chiefs at Lade
was bound up with responsibility for the exercise of local-regional cults. In-
deed it would be hard to believe that rulers as power conscious as the Lade jarls
would have passed up the opportunity to be considered “the greatest sacrifi-
cers,” deciding yet another agon in favour of themselves.
The question of the concrete form of the cult, however, can only be dis-
cussed with great caution. Textual criticism provides a valuable clue. Among
the late medieval variants (“distortions”) of the epithet Hǫlgabrúð “Håloga
(land)’s bride” there are several compounds with hǫrga-. If we accept them
lexically rather than regarding them as corruptions, they refer to hǫrg “sanctu-
ary” (especially a small physical structure or burial mound) and thus possibly
to an impressive episode in the family tradition of the Lade jarls. The core of
this episode, reported in numerous sources, is the creation of a burial mound
by the last remaining members of the kin group residing in northern Norway,
and their subsequent voluntary self-interment.77 It is pointless to speculate
whether a new earth structure, reminiscent of the chthonic family sanctuary
in the north, was also created at the new ancestral seat in Trondheim Fjord (in
the landscape itself, the promontory of Lade evokes such an oversized mound)
because the jarls’ relationship to the earth of the founding father and mother,
tied into so many different strands, is sufficiently impressive to have a lasting
influence on the style of governance of their individual representatives.

76 Snorri provides a detailed account of the sacrificial feasts held by Hákon’s father Sigurð in
Lade (HsG c. 14); assessed as a source in, among others, Ström, “Hauptriten” (1966); criti-
cally Walter, “Opferfest von Hlaðir” (1966). Düwel, Opferfest von Lade (1985), sees Old Tes-
tament blood rituals, not Nordic cult practice as underlying Snorri’s description; qualify-
ing this: Hultgård, “Altskandinavische Opferrituale” (1993). The alleged sacrifice of his
own son can be explained by biblical (Abraham) and classical (Carthage) models, al-
though we can never be sure that at some prehistoric occasion someone did not ‘really’
sacrifice a child, however little we may believe it.
77 Snorri is careful to specify in his version (HsH c.8)—in which the self-demotion of the
former ‘kings’ to ‘jarls’ in the face of the approaching Harald Fairhair provides the basis for
the episode—that the mound is built with grjót “coarse debris.” The son of the buried
king, the first historically tangible Lade jarl in the vicinity of Trondheim, bore the name
Grjótgarð “debris-enclosed/secured.”
290 Chapter 5

7 Perpetual Hierogamy

Against this background, Jarl Hákon’s kvennafar, his “approach to women” ac-
quires quite a different shade. To my knowledge, the connection between
Hákon’s so-called gluttony in sexual matters, on the one hand, and his leading
position in a cult with hierogamous characteristics, on the other, has so far not
been pointed out. In arguing this hypothesis, it must first be acknowledged
that no Nordic source explicitly makes such a connection. According to the
skaldic songs, Jarl Hákon assumed the male role in a hierogamous union with
the earth, conceived as a woman. According to the sagas, Jarl Hákon was a cen-
tral figure in the practice of pagan cults and ‘immoderate’ with women. Noth-
ing is said about a possible cultic motivation for the latter. However, this is less
of a limitation than it may at first appear, as the sagas do not foster authorial
explications of correlations and motivations, but report actions, arguing ‘im-
plicitly’ with textual means such as the sequence of episodes, and lexical or
structural correspondence. A saga author would not say that Jarl Hákon
claimed the right to sleep with all the women in his sphere of influence be-
cause the cultic legitimation of his rule required it, even if that is what the au-
thor meant.
It is different in Ireland. (The comparison is meaningful, not because of pos-
sible cultural dependencies, but because of the structural similarities of both
early medieval societies.) In Irish narrative literature, it does happen that a
hero such as Níall Noígíallach, the son of a king and a slave descended from a
line of British kings, in acute competition over the succession with his better-
placed brothers, encounters a woman in the forest who suggests he sleep with
her—when he asks her name, he receives the blunt answer: “I am sovereignty.”78
The idea of Erin as a woman, whom the ruler must sleep with, lived on through-
out the Middle Ages (and well into the eighteenth century) in a way that is no
longer observable for Norway. Nor was this a matter of recondite anachronism.
In his first speech before parliament as king of England (and Ireland) and Scot-
land, in 1604 the Protestant James i/vi declared: “I am the Husband, and the
whole Isle is my lawfull Wife.”79

78 Echtra mac Echach Muigmedoin, c. 15: “‘Cia tusu?’ or in mac. ‘Misi in flaithius,’ or si.”—
The ‘Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid Muigmedón’ are transmitted in two late medieval
manuscripts, the text in its present form probably goes back to the 11th century. The hero,
Níall Noígíallach (‘of the Nine Hostages’), belongs to the late Roman period and was con-
sidered the progenitor of Uí Néill.
79 Speech on the opening of Parliament, 19 March 1604 (printed London 1604), quoted from
Mackie, History of Scotland (21978), 187. James’s goal was the union of the two kingdoms,
which he would champion over the following years against increasing resistance; his
The Performative Aspect 291

The disparity between the sources, not least the significant divergence be-
tween the rhetorical and stylistic structure of the Norse sagas and the Irish
narratives (unfortunately also sometimes referred to as ‘sagas’), makes the dif-
ference with Scandinavia appear greater than it must have been. Against the
backdrop of the hierogamous anchoring of his rule and the need for its cultic
perpetuation, Jarl Hákon was certainly under at least as much pressure as any
new high king in Teamhair/Tara, preparing for the inaugural banfheis, the ban-
quet that literally means “coitus-feast.”80
Tacitus’s dictum of polygyny non libidine sed ob nobilitatem appears more
applicable to Jarl Hákon than almost any other Norse magnate whose relation-
ships with women have been discussed in the course of this study. But do, per-
haps, the opposites meet here? Might not the libido of the jarl have been
spurred on, reliving his path to power, the victory at Hjørungavåg and triumph
over the Danish king, time and again in the “holy embrace” of the women of
the land—and, for a moment, to be embraced by the whole land in the arms of
a Þóra of Rimul?81 We have seen that it is short-sighted to dismiss polygynous
practices as motivated by individual, or ‘male,’ sensuality. But neither should
we go to the opposite extreme of viewing them as nothing but a social set of

point in the speech was that as a Christian king he could not be a “polygamist and hus-
band to two wives.”—Of course, this is not evidence for the persistence of Celtic, pre-
Christian myths, but it does attest to a productive hierogamous accent in early modern
political theology. Incidentally, following the death of Charles de Gaulle on 9 November,
1970, President Georges Pompidou opened his televised address with the words: “Fran-
çais, Françaises, le général de Gaulle est mort, la France est veuve …”
80 Cf. Byrne, Irish Kings (1973), 16ff., 50ff.; Jaski, Early Irish Kingship (2000), 143–71; on the
myth, esp. Ó Máille, “Medb Chruachna” (1928); Trindade, “Irish Gormlaith” (1986); Ní
­Mhaonaigh, “Tales of Three Gormlaiths” (2002).
81 From a mythological perspective, Nora Chadwick (“Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr” [1950]) has pro-
posed that the saga character Þóra be identified with the mythological Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð.
This presupposes a tradition surviving intact over two centuries, which is difficult to ar-
gue and impossible to prove. More plausible—if no more provable—would be to assume
that Þór-names were perhaps commonly used for daughters in the vicinity of the cult of
Þorgerð Hǫlgabrúð. However, ‘Þóra’ seems to be something of a generic name for princely
concubines in the kings’ sagas, so any interpretation based on this name is problematic.
The byname of Guðrún Lundasól, the woman who escaped the jarl’s grasp, may, however,
be enlightening. Ágrip and Snorri say that the name is derived from the farm Lundar. But
lundar is the plural of lundr “grove, copse” (the word that, in the singular, gave the name
of the Scanian thing site and later archiepiscopal seat of Lund). Guðrún’s epithet “Sun of
the (sacred) grove” may well have a religious aspect, though there is nothing to associate
the jarls of Lade with a solar cult. Tempting though a mythological interpretation is, we
ought to remind ourselves that it gets us into the realm of speculation. What we do know
is that the saga authors want us to imagine Guðrún as the radiant beauty of her
farmstead.
292 Chapter 5

rules of conduct and communication. And while allowing for libidinous plea-
sure (of whatever kind and composition) we should not forget that being a hi-
erogamist could be, at times, hard work.
But what, then, led to the jarl’s fall? Overfulfilling his hierogamous obliga-
tions, it seems. From a thirteenth-century perspective, the sagas say that he
no longer spared “even the women of the powerful.” This is the perception
of the observers three centuries after conversion (or “the change of customs”
as the sagas have it),82 accustomed to the operating principles of the ‘expres-
sive’ aspect in the political games of their own time. But as stated earlier, it
hardly seems credible that, after a successful reign of a quarter of a century,
the politically astute Jarl Hákon, would suddenly disregard elementary precau-
tions in dealing with the most important men in his core region. The opposite
interpretation is, however, quite plausible: Jarl Hákon, who “believed that he
had a uniform right to dispose of all women,”83 perhaps failed to notice that
times were changing and ever more people, both men and women, questioned
this cultic usufruct. The ease with which Óláf Tryggvason became sole ruler—­
arriving from England with only a few followers (albeit with powerful political
­backing)—allows us to take Snorri’s summary epilogue for Jarl Hákon literally:
it was time for a change.84 If the ruler’s polygyny was indeed as cultically con-
noted as the sources indicate, then Óláf Tryggvason and his English mission-
aries did not need the biblical identification of promiscuity and idolatry85 to
keep a sharp eye on these practices. “Should a noble sully himself on the lips
of many women and, like the dogs and the pigs, believe he can call as many

82 The literal meaning of siðaskipti, the usual term for the conversion to Christianity.
83 Ágrip c. 12: “at hann lét sér konur allar jamt heimilar.” The final word is a legal term: “dis-
posable, freely disposable; rightfully,” Baetke, Wörterbuch (51993), s.v. heimill. As an ad-
verb, it refers to the transfer “for usufruct”; the derivative noun heimild “rightful posses-
sion” plays an important role in Icelandic litigations in conflicts over claims to farms,
lands, or goðorð (cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains [1999], passim).—Cf. God’s words to
David (speaking through Nathan, 2 Sm 12:8): “dedi tibi domum domini tui et uxores do-
mini tui in sinu tuo.” Against this background, one could argue for a typological interpre-
tation of the saga passage based on the Old Testament; however, on the basis of the con-
temporary sources cited and the fact that Ágrip has no notable scriptural tendencies,
I think it is justifiable to link the passage not only to the remote verse of the Bible, but also
to the medieval Norwegian ideas of law and justice.
84 OsTr c. 50: “þá var sú tíð komin, at fyrirdœmask skyldi blótskaprinn ok blótmenninir, en í
stað kom heilǫg trúa ok réttir siðir.”
85 The central passage, on which the rest—particularly Solomon’s wavering in cultic matters
because of his wives’ influence (3 Kgs 11)—depend is Exodus 34:16: “fuerint fornicatae
cum diis sui …” (“their daughters who prostitute themselves to their gods …”).
The Performative Aspect 293

women his own as he is able to bind to his lust?”86 While Jarl Hákon “ended his
filthy life and his power in a dirty place,”87 Óláf Tryggvason began establishing
the new era, according to one version of his saga, by having the idol of Þorgerð
Hǫlgabrúð, his enemy’s “dearest beloved,” stripped and shattered before the
assembled people.88 The winner humiliating the loser’s bedfellow, however
divine or demoniacal: even the change of faith was represented in terms of a
sexual union.
Considering the ‘performative’ polygyny of north Norwegian magnates
around the turn of the millennium in a comparative perspective is more dif-
ficult than for the other aspects. Elsewhere in Christian Europe too, reges et
s­ acerdotes were responsible for ritual practice to a greater or lesser extent,
and were held accountable for it by the populace until the late Middle Ages
(and beyond).89 Yet as was briefly suggested at the beginning of this chapter,
hierogamy played a more indirect role, and when ideas about Christ’s rela-
tionship to the ecclesia or the anima to God drew on earthly sexual practices,
it was in the sense of biblical-patristic monogamism: polycoity is idolatry

86 Salvian of Marseilles, De gubernatione Dei iv, 28 (mgh Auct. ant. 1,1 41): “numquid multa-
rum uxorum labe polluitur et canum vel suum more tantas putat coniuges suas esse,
quantas potuerit libidini coniugare?” This would add another reference point to the in-
ventory of scriptural-patristic references in Snorri’s account of Jarl Hákon’s death in the
pigsty.
87 Ágrip c. 14: “lauk svá saurlífismaðr í saurgu húsi sínum dǫgum ok svá ríki.”
88 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta (iii 11f.): the king discovers the clothed cult figure in a
forest clearing, identifiable as Þórgerð hǫlgabrúð, “with whom Jarl Hákon had the most
intimate friendship” (“er Hakon jarl hafdi mest vinfengi vid”). He removes her clothes and
the gold and silver jewelry (votive offerings from Jarl Hákon), ties her to the tail of his
horse, and rides into camp. Here the statue is reclothed and placed on an altar, and the
gold and silver put into baskets. Now she is once more undressed in full view of the audi-
ence (“sidan bad hann afkleda hana”), then smashed with clubs, and the remains burned.
While the latter part represents the standard way of dealing with cult images in hagio-
graphical works (on the likely existence of pagan cult statues, cf. Olsen, Hørg, hov og kirke
[1966], 121; Røthe, “Þórgerðr Hölgabrúðr” [2007], 3ff.), the rather cumbersome sexual hu-
miliation which precedes it seems more idiosyncratic. Cf. Ez 23:29f.: “et tollent omnes la-
bores tuos / et demittent te nudam et ignominia plenam / revelabitur ignominia fornica-
tionum tuarum / scelus tuum et fornicationes tuae / fecerunt haec tibi quia fornicata es
post gentes inter quas polluta es in idolis eorum” (“and they shall deal with you in hatred,
and take away all the fruit of your labor, and leave you naked and bare, and the nakedness
of your whorings shall be exposed. Your lewdness and your whorings have brought this
upon you, because you played the whore with the nations, and polluted yourself with
their idols”).
89 See most recently summarized by Erkens, “Herrschersakralität” (2006); Erkens, “Heißer
Sommer” (2003).
294 Chapter 5

(and vice versa)—“we only know one marriage, as we only know one God!”90
But this side of transcendence it is still possible that under certain circum-
stances, in some places, and at some times, lay elites and their audiences
held less edifying views.91 This brings us back to the beginning of this chap-
ter: What did Philip the Fair do with the Flemish count’s daughter in the
dungeon, what did Swen Godwinson do in his monastery, and the many
conquerors in the cities? Was the contextual coincidence woman~land (city,
dominion) sometimes more than ‘merely’ symbolic? These questions should
be kept in mind throughout the final two chapters, in which the findings
from the Nordic material is tested on other European regions, actors, and
modes of expression.

90 Hos 1:2: “fornicans fornicabitur terra a Domino”; Tertullian, De monogamia i, 4: “Unum

matrimonium novimus sicut unum deum.” Tertullian is primarily concerned with serial
polygyny (remarriage, which he rejects); simultaneous marriage is ruled out anyway. Both
these stances were obviously a matter of contention. To those who invoked the example
of Abraham and the patriarchs in order to defend polygyny, Tertullian replies that Abra-
ham only became polygynous when he was circumcised, thereby making monogamy the
badge and essence of the new covenant.
91 Cf. Gießauf, “Feind in meinem Bett” (2005) on Central Asia; Groebner, “Mit dem Feind
schlafen” (2007) on the Mediterranean.
 Chapter 6

The Comparative View: Western Europe

1 In the Heartland of Medieval Studies

On the map of European history the middle part of its Atlantic fringe, the West
Frankish countries between the Bay of Biscay and the Rhine estuary plus Eng-
land, are to some extent the ‘ideal landscape’ of medieval studies. Research on
aristocratic society and sociability, on kinship, family structures, and their in-
teraction with economic circumstances, on the legal system and sense of jus-
tice, on faith, fear, and hope, and finally on political history, which it is (once
again) in vogue to interpret as ‘protonational’ and at the same time as a source
of strength for present-day Europe,1 all seem to have a strong focus on this zone
rather than, say, Asturia, Sicily, Bohemia, or indeed Norway. There are, of
course, excellent studies on those (and other) regions too, but they come with
a label. In studies and handbooks of medieval history tout court, one is apt to
find discussions of France and England rather than Poland or Spain. It may be
that the leading role which France assumed in international medieval studies
in the second half of the twentieth century, combined with the fact that Anglo-
American medieval studies traditionally focus on England and northern
France, contributes to this impression. What is certain is that international re-
search into the social history of kinship is shaped more by the conditions in
this zone than by any other part of the continent.2 The wealth of investigations
into the aristocratic maisonnées, canonized in the works of researchers such as
Georges Duby and Dominique Barthélemy and still going strong,3 would

1 A prominent example would be Le Goff, Geburt Europas (2004); for a critique, see the review
by Michael Borgolte (2004).
2 This position is rarely stated as clearly as in Mitterauer, Warum Europa? (2003); see my review
for a criticism (2003). It is nonetheless implicit when general accounts of medieval history
are primarily or exclusively based on material from this area, including the East Frankish
core regions between the Middle Rhine and Lake Constance; among many others, cf. Ennen,
Frauen im Mittelalter (31987); Goetz, Leben im Mittelalter (1986); Klapisch-Zuber, Geschichte
der Frauen, vol. 2 (1993); Aurell, Noblesse en Occident (1996); correspondingly, the relevant
study by Esmyol, Geliebte oder Ehefrau? (2002). If such works were primarily concerned with
material from Northern, Eastern, or Southern Europe, it would hardly be possible to omit this
fact in the title.
3 Three centres of French scholarship should be named: the Centre de Recherches Ar-
chéologiques et Historiques Médiévales (crahm) set up at the University of Caen, which is
home to Claude Lorren and Pierre Bauduin and their numerous activities, including the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_009

296 Chapter 6

­appear to make the lands between Flanders and Poitou the terre d’élection for
the search for high medieval polygyny.

2 Scholarship

“In this polygamous society,” as Georges Duby calls twelfth-century northern

France,4 the search is not in vain. Yet however numerous the “girls” who knew
how to “please [men] through their physical charms, their courtesy, and their
skill”5 might be, they are not considered a fundamental element of this society.
Martin Aurell, in his 200-page textbook La noblesse en Occident (ve–xve ­siècles),
devotes just eight lines to the subject. In their conciseness, they deserve to be
quoted in full:

… Par leurs divorces et remariages à répétition, des nobles s’adonnent

ainsi à une polygamie successive, sérielle.
Ils ne rejettent pas pour autant une polygamie simultanée. En Nor-
mandie, le mariage more danico, “à la mode danoise,” permet à certains
nobles d’entretenir une concubine à côté de leur femme légitime. En
Flandre, Lambert d’Ardres, chapelain et chroniqueur des comtes de
Guines, évoque les égarements de son maître Baudouin ii (†1169), “qui
corrompit plus de vierges que David, Salomon et Jupiter,” devenant le
père d’au moins vingt-trois bâtards. Faire ostentation de sa puissance,
s’assurer une descendance et obtenir de nombreuses alliances détermi-
nent la polygynie aristocratique.6

­online journal Tabularia; a school researching “feudalism” in southern France and northern
Iberia at Toulouse in the vein of Pierre Bonnassie; the ‘Mondes Plantagenêt’ team around
Martin Aurell at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale in Poitiers, which
has held several important colloquia (“La cour Plantagenêt (1154 –1204),” Thouars 1999 [pub-
lished 2000]; “Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154 –1224),” Poitiers 2002 [published 2003];
for a current synthesis, see Aurell, L’empire Plantagenêt [published 2003]).
4 Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 267. —Duby’s vast Dames du douzième siècle (1995;
English edition: Women of the Twelfth Century [1997]) has been published and republished in
one, two or three volumes. The German edition quoted is a one-volume reedition.
5 Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 286; for style critique, see the review by Doris Ruhe
(2001).—In this chapter, Duby’s research is often drawn upon to characterize certain views in
research, parte pro toto. This will, I hope, be taken as a tribute to a ‘maître’ whose books have
often been eye-openers for me, and whose clearly expressed, occasionally pointed but never
dull hypotheses invite debate and criticism—and he was never one to evade a debate. For an
appraisal, see Duhamel-Amado and Lobrichon, ed., Georges Duby (1996).
6 Aurell, Noblesse en Occident (1996), 66. Of the almost 450 pages of Judith Green’s compre-
hensive account of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, a total of eleven lines are devoted to
The Comparative View: western Europe 297

With just a few words, Aurell gets to the heart of aristocratic polygyny—­
moreover, he is one of the few medievalists to use this term. His keywords
“puissance—descendance—alliances” seem to correspond to at least the first
two ‘aspects’ of the present study. And yet the passage, embedded in the chap-
ter “Le mari et la femme,” is not subsequently expanded upon; polygyny re-
mains a peripheral ornament of a social structure based on the inseparable
unity of “marriage and power.”7 The famous trio of the knight, the lady, and the
priest of Duby’s book title only join forces for “the making of modern marriage
in medieval France,”8 however much the knight continues to behave like
­another Jupiter or Solomon.
This is certainly connected to the intellectual legacy of structural anthropol-
ogy and, moreover, conditioned by the focus on aristocratic ‘houses,’ with mar-
riage viewed as the “keystone of the social edifice,”9 while by their nature less
formalized bonds leave little trace. However, the disregard of polygyny in re-
search on medieval Western Europe is also to a great extent source-related.
A fundamental asymmetry of the sources informs research on kinship, includ-
ing polygyny, in Northern and Western Europe.
The principal difference is the wealth of documentary sources, which are
almost completely absent for Northern Europe. None of the great regional
studies, such as Bonnassie for Catalonia, Duby for Burgundy, Barthélemy for
the Vendômois, Lemesle for Maine, Fossier for Picardy, and Warlop for
Flanders,10 could be carried out even rudimentarily for Scandinavia—which is
why the transferability of their results is among the most discussed topics of

­concubinage (Aristocracy [1997], 356); Constance Bouchard’s account of French chivalry

(Chivalry and Society [1998]), despite strong social-anthropological tendencies, contains
no mention of concubinage or polygyny besides a few references to “bastard sons.”
7 Hence the title of Aurell’s major study, published around the same time: Noces du comte
(1995). Here, too, the wives belong in the political sphere, the concubines are a matter of
passion (424: “Comme aux siècles précédents, Catalans et Toulousains continuent [in the
twelfth century] de pratiquer la polygynie, répudiant leurs épouses au gré des vicissitudes
politiques ou prenant des concubines au rythme de leurs passions”).
8 Duby, Le chevalier, la femme et le prêtre (1981); full title of the English version: The Knight,
the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (first pub-
lished in 1983).
9 Duby, Knight, Lady and Priest (1993), 19. The German version has “Eckstein” (cornerstone):
Duby, Ritter, Frau und Priester (1985), 25. The French original has “la clé de voûte de
l’édifice social”: Duby, Chevalier, femme et prêtre (1981), 23. If you remove the keystone
from the arch, the building collapses.
10 Bonnassie, La Catalogne (1975); Duby, La société aux xie et xiie siècles (21971); Barthélemy,
Vendôme (1993); Lemesle, Haut-Maine (1999); Fossier, Picardie (1987); Warlop, Flemish No-
bility (1975–76).
298 Chapter 6

comparative European history in Northern Europe.11 Above all these sources

provide (alongside much else) rich information about ‘legal’ marriage accom-
panied by the transfer of goods, making it possible to investigate kinship sys-
tems, identify “marriage strategies,”12 and even develop “alliance theories.”13
Non-marital relationships, on the other hand, ‘concubines’ as scholarship usu-
ally calls them following the canonical classification of the time, are almost by
definition absent from this source material. In his one-thousand-page book on
the Vendômois, Dominique Barthélemy has precisely two occasions to men-
tion the topic of ‘concubinage’—which, moreover, does not necessarily have
anything to do with polygyny, but can denote a form of monogamy which in
one way or other falls short of ‘full’ marriage.14
The children of such relationships are more visible than their parents.
Though rarely mentioned (or identifiable as such), they have a certain place in
the documents because of their property.15 Against the generalizing view of
Jean-Pierre Poly and Éric Bournazel in their well-known study of ‘la mutation
féodale,’ according to which the exclusion of ‘bastards’ was one of the charac-
teristics of the fundamental restructuring of kinship relationships in the de-
cades after the year 1000, Barthélemy emphasizes that the inclusion or exclu-
sion of ‘bastards’ from the solidarity of aristocratic kin groups depended very
much on the particular case, but concludes that by and large only a second-tier

11 Cf. Paludan, Familia og familie (1995); Gelting, “Det komparative perspektiv” (1999); Lind,
“Europæiseringer i middelalderen” (2003); Hybel, Danmark i Europa (2003).
12 The term, commonly used in other periods and epochs, is used in the title programmati-
cally by Martin Aurell: Stratégies matrimoniales de l’aristocratie (2000).
13 For Catalonia—the only part of the West Frankish realm unaffected by the archival dam-
age inflicted during the revolutionary period—see the excellent study (mannerisms not-
withstanding) by Ruiz-Domènec, L’estructura feudal (1985), in which source-based re-
gional research is consistently conducted on the basis of structuralist theory, thereby
avoiding the danger (cited by Ruiz-Domènec) of “transforming historical scholarship into
a cabinet of curiosities” (František Graus).
14 A late 10th-century document, preserved in the cartulary of Saint-Père in Chartres, pro-
vides the following exemplary ‘definition’ of correct marriage as it was understood at a
regional level: “secundum legem salicam et secundum consuetudinem qua viri proprias
uxores dotant” (Barthélemy, Vendôme [1993], 545), to which the author adds the observa-
tion: “On ‘dote’ ainsi une femme légitime, mais non une illégitime. Ainsi, le douaire cou-
tumier n’est-il pas responsable, par contraste, de nombre de concubinages? Peu d’indices
sur ceux-ci …”
15 In his rich documentation for the county of Vendôme, Barthélemy (esp. 536–40) finds ten
‘bastards’ for the whole of the tenth century, all male, of whom four are labelled as such
and seven are explicitly named (thus one is identified both ways).
The Comparative View: western Europe 299

position remained to them from the eleventh century onward.16 Documentary

sources present an unbalanced picture, and the number of ‘bastards’ is likely to
have been considerably higher—but how much higher remains, at least for the
high Middle Ages, elusive. If we consider the offspring of the Norman king
Henry i of England (r. 1100–35), the ratio is 1:10 in favour of the ‘bastards,’ but
then the beau clerc was certainly viewed by contemporaries as an extreme
case, given his concupiscentia feminarum.17 The point is that numerical esti-
mates are simply impossible. In summary, although the documentary evidence
does indeed support the assumption that extramarital (and potentially polygy-
nous) connections may have been widespread, it tends to highlight marriage,
that “cornerstone.”

3 Sources

One more difference between Western and Northern Europe in particular is

crucial for the study of polygyny: the place of the vernacular. From the begin-
ning of literacy, Norse stood alongside Latin in the Atlantic North: it was culti-
vated with an extraordinary linguistic self-assurance, even on a theoretical
level, and it dominated the writing of history in large parts of Northern Europe,
while Latin chronicles and histories were rather small-scale (excepting Saxo, of
course). The situation is almost reversed in Western Europe. Latin dominates
not only in documents, but also in narrative sources; historical writing in Eng-
lish ceased by c.1150; Flemish was not used until the latter part of the thirteenth
century; and the French vernacular in its four literary dialects developed its
written form with constant reference to and dependence on Latin. Lars Boje
Mortensen’s dictum about literature in European vernaculars being mere foot-
notes to Latin up until 1250 undoubtedly holds true for French.18 Until the mid-
thirteenth century, its domain remained ‘courtly’ lay romance, including a

16 Barthélemy, Vendôme (1993), 540, on Poly and Bournazel, Mutation féodale (1980), 187; cf.
Barthélemy, Vendôme (1993), 536: “la bâtardise est un statut : la filiation est reconnue, mais
non légitime.” Barthélemy has also spoken out against the “mutationist” these associated
with Poly and Bournazel; cf. Barthélemy, La mutation de l’an mil (1997).
17 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, vol. 1, 3; cf. Ordericus Vitalis, he xi 23.
The Complete Peerage devotes a special appendix to Henry i’s children (White, Appendix
D [1949]), and lists two (possibly three) legitimate and 20 (possibly 22) extramarital chil-
dren; the sexes are almost balanced in both cases. Cf. Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal
Bastards (1984), 60–73.
18 Mortensen, “Medieval Latin Literature” (2003).
300 Chapter 6

rich, largely versified narrative tradition. Within the modern division of dis­
ciplines, this has earned these texts the label ‘literature’ and put them within
the claim of Romance philology, while the Latin prose of historiographers (in-
cluding occasional prosimetrum such as that of Dudo of Saint-Quentin) was
claimed by the discipline of history, and left Romance chronicles such as Be­
noît’s history of the Norman dukes or the life of William Marshal somewhere
on the fence, and Latin romance and drama to the ever-shrinking field of Me-
dieval Latin literature.19
French literature of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries developed
what is certainly the most well-known cultural formalization of polygyny: the
Amour courtois. Despite all misgivings, the term launched in the nineteenth
century has proved useful for describing the totality of cultural products whose
driving force is the relationship between a man, a woman, and amour.20
Historians’ attempts to include courtly love into their analysis are as diverse
as they are bewildering. If we decide to view courtly love as a sociopolitical
phenomenon, and to put psychosocial or emotional-historical interests to one
side, we have opted to take a partial view of the subject. Nor will we in the
course of the following discussion consider such topics as ‘love theory’ or ‘love
discourse.’ We are concerned with the manifold contingent uses of courtly cul-
tural practices. On the other hand, we must take these practices seriously, so as
to avoid the distinction, underlying some ‘social history’ approaches, between
romances and songs on the one hand, and the “real structure of social forces
and relationships”21 on the other—as if documents and chronicles were not
only different, but also ‘truer’ kinds of sources. In terms of cultural anthropo­
logy, the cortoisie of a region was always at once a model of and for society.22

19 The creation of the Centre of Medieval Literature at the universities of Odense and York
in 2012 has resulted in a number of impressive studies that aim at bridging those gaps (or
tearing down fences), especially with regard to Latin writing. It remains to be seen wheth-
er this redress of balances will prove to be sustained.
20 There are occasional indications that the best poets were aware of the trinitarian implica-
tions of the system; see, for example, Raimon de Miraval’s almost monothelete formula
(pc 406,2 v. 10f.: “Ma domna et eu et amors Eram pro d’un voler tuich trei” “My Lady and I
and Love were all three of one mind”).—Songs of the Troubadours and Trouveres, trans.
Rosenberg, Switten, and Le Vot (1998), 121. For an analysis of courtly poetry in light of
discourse theory, see Huchet, L’amour discourtois (1987), on its connection with other ‘dis-
courses,’ see Baldwin, Language of Sex (1994).
21 Duby, “À propos de l’amour que l’on dit courtois,” in Duby, Mâle moyen âge (21990), 74–82,
74: “… les correspondances entre ce qu’exposent ces chansons et ces romans et, d’autre
part, l’organisation vraie des pouvoirs et des relations de société.”
22 Cf. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973),
87–125, 93. For the concept of ‘courtly rites’ cf. Köhler, “Can vei la lauzeta mover” (1979),
348f.
The Comparative View: western Europe 301

Gadi Algazi and Rina Drory have described ‘Love’ of the Abbasid period as a
“rulebook of social competence,” and I have proposed that the Occitan fin’
amor be understood as a “grammar of mentality.”23 This does not mean that
other courtly cultures must be viewed in similar terms. I am not proposing a
similarly comprehensive theorization of the courtliness between the Loire and
the Scheldt (and the Irish Sea); I am of the opinion that cortoisie in Anjou, Nor-
mandy, or France played a wholly different, considerably less important role
than the totalizing cortesia of Tolosan Occitania.
Nevertheless, as a part of lay elite culture cortoisie is of some importance for
the understanding of aristocratic polygyny. In itself, of course, the courtly love
relationship is conceived as monogynous—the ‘lady’ suffers no other woman—
which would seem to align cortoisie much more with Christian law than with
the ‘feudal’ or seigneurial system which, according to some powerful interpre-
tations, it is supposed to mirror and mimic. In fact, the hallmark of ‘feudal so-
ciety,’ despite all attempts to restrict and perpetuate the bonds between men,
is precisely the real or potential multiplicity of bonds. But then the courted
woman too must always be aware that a failing on her part might lead to the
man transferring his homage (homenaticum) elsewhere. There is a whiff of po-
lygyny just around the corner of the courtly protestations of fidelity.
A second, more specific trait, reinforces the polygynous flavour of courtly
love in its French manifestation. In Occitan fin’amor the lady is guarded by
shadowy generic types such as the ‘spy’ or ‘observer’ (gelós) and the ‘slanderer’
(lauzengier),24 appropriated from Arab love poetry, while her position in
­everyday life as a daughter, sister, wife, and/or widow remains completely un-
addressed. The French amour courtois, by contrast, is inherently conflictual.
The ‘rights’ of the lovers collide with those which right and custom concede to
other men over the woman. In French cortoisie the ‘lady’ is generally married,
and sexual access to her is strictly privileged by ecclesiastical and secular law.25

23 Cf. Algazi and Drory, “L’amour” (2000); Algazi, “Hofkulturen im Vergleich” (2001), Rüdiger,
Aristokraten und Poeten (2001).
24 I commented on the connections between Occitan and Arabic-Andalusian poetry (in this
instance, the figures of raqīb/ḥāsid and wāšī) in Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 210–22,
and my view of selective appropriation has not changed since.
25 This aporia is likewise discussed in the early troubadour poetry of Aquitaine and Poitou;
Cercamon (fl. 1135/45) has a courtly trinity dedicated to hellfire: “Drut, moiller e marit, tug
tres Sias del pechat comunau … Non a valor d’aissí enan Cela c’ab dos ni ab tres jai” (Ab la
pascor [pc 112,1a] v. 27f., 36f.: “The lover, the wife, and the spouse, all three have fallen into
sin together … A woman who sleeps with two or three henceforth has no worth [personal
courtly quality] whatsoever”; see also Delbouille, “Tristan” [1966]). In the ‘classical’ trou-
badours, real life stops being mirrored to the extent that sex, lo plus, like an ineffable sin-
gularity is pushed beyond the ‘event horizon’ of all the laws of cortesia.
302 Chapter 6

This is not the place to go over the ‘courtly model’ once again, nor to discuss
what basis its stagings had in the lived world. Any positioning on the question
of whether men and women ‘actually’ lived as couples in a courtly manner
ends in aporia, just as much as the question, fiercely debated by nineteenth-
century philologists, of whether the famous courts of love presided over by
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie of Champagne, or other high ladies ‘actually’ met
and passed binding judgements.26 There is a fairly significant body of poems
with several voices debating questions of court etiquette,27 so that we can pre-
sume they were staged, or perhaps ‘only’ spoken aloud with distributed roles,
in front of courtly audiences; how far the practice of the courtly code influ-
enced the behaviour of those affected by it, not only eludes measurement, but
measurability. The same is true for the issue of how far ideas of courtly togeth-
erness shaped the behaviour of the individuals tangible in the chronicles and
(rarely) documents—at best, we can retrace their influence on the chronicles,
and occasionally in charters.28
Like its charters, the historiography of Western Europe was dominated by
Latin and all the linguistic, generic, rhetorical, and cognitive conventions
bound up with it. The reason why the women around a “David, Solomon, or
Jupiter” are never described as extensively as in the sagas has more to do with
the linguistic and rhetorical conventions of Latin than with any intentional
censorship by the hegemonic ideology of ‘clerical culture.’ The descriptions of
polygynous relationships in the narrative sources of the West, however fre-
quently alluded to, swiftly reach their limits. The disregard of polygyny as a
social phenomenon by scholarship is largely (though not exclusively) due to its
disregard in the sources.
The working hypothesis for this chapter is that the study of elite polygyny in
Northern Europe (Chapters 1–5) arouses the suspicion that the social signifi-
cance of polygynous practices in the West may have been greater than is often

26 The treatise De arte (honeste) amandi, written shortly after 1180 by Andreas Capellanus,
contains nearly two dozen ‘cases,’ in which disputes related to the rules of courtly conduct
were submitted to a court of justice composed of prominent women, and then argued
with much casuistry. The existence of these tribunals, equipped with the authority to es-
tablish norms, was argued by Raynouard in 1817, and given some weight by Stendhal in his
essay De l’amour (1822). However, the idea had already been rebuffed in 1825 by Friedrich
Diez, and gradually lost ground with the emergence of scientific philology. It might be
tempting to resurrect the idea of ‘real-life’ courts of love being staged by twelfth-century
men and women in the light of modern ideas of ‘deep play’; cf. Rüdiger, Aristokraten und
Poeten (2001), 304–20.
27 See Neumeister, Spiel mit der höfischen Liebe (1969).
28 On the possible influence of Cortesia phraseology on documents, see Rüdiger, Aris-
tokraten und Poeten (2001), 234f.
The Comparative View: western Europe 303

allowed for. Marc Bloch valued the comparative method for ensuring a vitaliz-
ing “choc mental.”29 On a case-by-case basis, I will ask whether comparison can
do still more: namely, whether the sources from Western Europe are open for
new perspectives if read with recourse to those of Northern Europe.

4 Figurations of Polygyny: Arthurian Literature

When the abbot speaks of God, the monks fall asleep. But if he then interrupts
himself and starts again: “Listen, brothers, listen, as I relate a great and new
thing to you: there was a king who was called Arthur …”30—then even the
snoring lay brothers wake up immediately, as the Cistercian monk Caesarius of
Heisterbach, around 1220, remarks bitterly in one of his most famous anec-
dotes. Lay elites too preferred to be told of the world and of God by way of the
chivalric world of the Round Table, and the Cistercians quickly came to wrap
their teachings into Arthurian romance.31 The Arthurian world mediates be-
tween the oral-vocal narrative world and historia, vernacular and Latin, prose
and verse, monastery and castle, meadow and forest and misty isle; it offers an
entry point on the way from the saga North to the romance West.
To a great extent, the Arthurian world is based on the multitude and variety
of available women, among whom the knights of the Round Table live out their
adventures, not always successfully. Its most dramatic moments are love trian-
gles: not only does Iseult stand between two men, her wedded royal legitimus

29 Bloch, “Histoire comparée” (1928/1963), 18. Programmatically, Bloch preferred local over
distant transcultural comparison: “étudier parallèlement des sociétés à la fois voisines et
contemporaines, sans cesse influencées les unes par les autres, soumises par leur déve­
loppement, en raison précisement de leur proximité et de leur synchronisme, à l’action
des mêmes grandes causes, et remontant, partiellement du moins, à une origine com-
mune” (ibid., 19). Western and Northern Europe were probably not “ceaselessly influ-
enced by each other” in the 10th–12th centuries but had “the same great causes” and “the
at least partially common origin.”
30 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum iv, 36: [Abbot Gevard of Heisterbach]
“verbum exhortationis in Capitulo ad nos faceret, et plures, maxime de conversis, dormi-
tare, nonullos etiam stertere conspiceret, exclamavit: ‘Audite, fratres, audite, rem vobis
novam et magnam proponam. Rex quidam fuit, qui Artus vocabatur.’ Hoc dicto, non pro-
cessit, sed ait: ‘Videte, fratres, miseriam magnam. Quando locutus sum de Deo, dormitas-
tis; mox ut verba levitatis inserui, eviligantes erectis auribus omnes auscultare coepistis.’”
Caesarius underlines that he witnessed the episode.
31 Around the time Caesarius of Heisterbach was writing, the Queste del Saint-Graal, part of
the so-called Prose Lancelot Cycle emerged, probably in Champagne. It contains numer-
ous eloquent hermits who bring the chivalrous religiosity of the Grail theme into line
with pastoral concerns.
304 Chapter 6

and his confidant and nephew, but Tristan too stands between two women,
both of whom are called Iseult, one of them beloved by him and the other one
wedded to him, almost in hypostatic union as it were. Time and again, the oth-
er knights of the Round Table conjure up similarly intricate if less numinous
situations, even Perceval, the ‘holy fool,’ who does not know when it is better
not to enter a noblewoman’s tent and her bed.32
Polygyny, under its ‘performative’ aspect, is at the very foundation of the
Arthurian kingdom. The so-called Elucidation, an early thirteenth-century text
prefixed to a manuscript of the Perceval romance, contains its sole known pre-
history. We learn that the original kingdom of Logres (Lloegr “England,” the
name of the Arthurian kingdom in the French romances) was a golden age
idyll, where no one was starving, and travelling knights were everywhere wait-
ed on with food and drink by the maidens of the well (puceles des puis)—until
a wicked king, not content with the service granted, “overpowered one of the
damsels and deflowered her at her well.”33 The wicked king’s knights immedi-
ately followed suit, affirming the collective character of chivalrous rule. The
fall, the transfer of this chorographic polygyny from latency into virulence,
makes the puceles disappear and the land desolate.34 Much later, after the
Round Table has been established and the land has experienced a renewed
agrarian upturn, in memory of this primal mistake the knights undertake to
restore the status quo ante through protective measures akin to the Peace of
God, “and certainly, for the sake of damsels, there have been many struggles in
this land.”35 But only with the recovery of the court of the Fisher King will the
original state be restored and the maidens of the well resume their service: a
remarkable equation of that ultimate goal of all questes, the Grail, which in its
standard version is the Chalice (the one relic they couldn’t steal in Constanti-
nople), with the multitude of primordial mothers of the arable land, the re-
source which provided the material base for the audience of the Arthurian
romance.36
Most Arthurian romances are less explicit, but time and again their plots
reveal the extent to which the string of adventures depends on the multitude
of available puceles who need saving or their rights defended against sinister
neighbours. Sometimes the adventures intersect: “Take, Sir Knight! Now you

32 Chrétien de Troyes, Le conte du Graal, v. 602–741.

33 Elucidation nach der Handschrift von Mons, in Chrétien de Troyes, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5
(1932), 417–29, v. 69f.: “Des puceles une esforcha Sor son pois le despucela.”
34 Ibid., v. 100 and 116.
35 Ibid., v. 155f.: “Por les puceles, ce m’est vis, Ot mainte batalle el païs.”
36 The Elucidation explicitly refers to the raped virgins of the well as “ancestors of us all”
(v. 189: “Tuit somes né des damoseles”).
The Comparative View: western Europe 305

have two.”37 The polygynous hero par excellence is Gawain, the king’s nephew.
Over the course of his career, from the epic hero in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Latin history of Britain around 1130 (in which he is still the undisputed paladin
of the kingdom, cheered by the women on the castle walls), to the school-
forming romances of Chrétien de Troyes, where, as a model knight lacking the
genius imparted by true (courtly) love, he always delivers a good second place
to the particular hero of the story, Lancelot, Yvain, or Perceval, until his inabil-
ity to escape women becomes constitutive of his character as the habitual ad-
venturer in the often burlesque situations of late romance. “Alas!” laments a
maiden whom Gawain has just come across combing her hair in a spring
meadow, deflowered after a charming conversation, and promptly abandoned
(Gawain is in a hurry): “Yet I know that he will have two or three before the end
of the month, who are fairer than me and who love him also!”38
If he for once pulls himself together, he soon risks his reputation: for the
purpose of breaking a male costume—the elimination of unjust innovations is
the noblest task of the knights of the Round Table39—two damsels urge him
to “choose which of us you prefer tonight.”40 Being on a Grail quest, he de-
clines the offer, and promptly gets to hear he is probably just an imitation:
“cist est uns Gavains contrefez!” If a life of serial polygyny—and simultaneous
polygyny too, given that the episodes often contain pledges to be faithful and
return—is a core characteristic for Gawain, the eternal nephew and iuvenis, he
only pushes to the extreme what most of his companions also exemplify. Even
with the sincerest intentions in the world, the chivalric hero, defined by multi-
ple behavioural codes, cannot avoid getting himself into impossible situations.
It is worst for Lancelot, who can only love one—the queen—while at the
same time owing all others every assistance they demand. When around
1220/30 the Arthurian kingdom lost its timeless otherworldliness in the ro-
mances of the so-called Vulgate or Grail Cycle, which gave Logres a telos (the
end of the Grail quest) and an apocalypse, it was precisely this situation which
was to lead to its downfall: Lancelot torn between his courtly commitment to

37 Lancelot du Lac (around 1225), 480: “Tenez, fait il, sire chevaliers. Or en avez deus.” The
knight and his squire cannot agree on who should “have” the two damoiseles trop beles,
who, after successful duels, they have just taken from a mysterious island and a grand tent,
respectively. Finally, they decide to send the women to Camelot as trophies.
38 The so-called second continuation of Perceval (anonymous, around 1200, in Continua-
tions, vol. 4 [1971]), v. 30,467ff.: “Je puis tres bien de fi savoir Que, ainz que soit passé li
mois, An avra il ou deus ou trois Qui plus belles de moi seront Et autant com je l’ameront.”
39 Cf. Köhler, “Rolle des ‘Rechtsbrauchs’” (1962).
40 Perlesvaus (anonymous, c.1210), cited by Busby, Gauvain (1980): “choisiroiz ennuit la quele
qui mielz vos plaira de nos .ii.”
306 Chapter 6

the demoisele d’Escalot and his reciprocated love for Queen Guinevere, which
proves even more devastating in its political consequences than Tristan’s for
Iseult. The bigynous aporia of the ‘best knight’ sets in motion a chain reaction
of dutiful action which leads to the collapse of the Arthurian kingdom. Given
how much the Logres of the Round Table was taken to be a foil of the Planta-
genet empire,41 there is no doubt that discussions about the right path for a
knight in the world by way of construing polygynous situations held a weighty
place in the aristocratic culture of their time.

5 Strategies of Representation: Under the Spell of Monogamism

Aristocratic narratives could therefore certainly play on the ‘expressive’ aspect

of polygyny—as long as events were acted out at a safe distance in Logres. Evi-
dence for a direct discussion of polygyny in a Latin Christian aristocracy is rare.
The calculated nonchalance of the Danish chronicles and Norwegian-­Icelandic
sagas is not found in the West. No history of an Anglo-French dynasty provides
straightforward reports about its noblest representatives’ numerous concubi-
nae. One way or another, any reference to such a relationship is invariably ac-
companied by a tinge of moral judgement indicating that the text responds to
a system that might be termed hegemonic monogamism.42

41 The ‘discovery’ of the tomb of Arthur rex quondam rexque futurus in 1191 in Glastonbury
Abbey, identified with Avalon, and the ruling house’s attempt to create a dynastic link
with the early British kings onomastically (Arthur, son of Geoffroy Plantagenêt, desig-
nated duke of Brittany and hapless pretender to the throne in 1199/1202) are two out-
standing moments of this appropriation. For this extensively discussed topic, see most
recently the study by Chanou, L’idéologie Plantagenêt (2001).
42 This term is intended to avoid ascribing the spread of marriage and denigration of other
forms of relationships to ecclesiastical teaching in the narrower sense, as if ‘the church’
was responsible for the advance of monogamy in a polygynous ‘lay culture.’ The concept
of hegemony makes it possible to identify protagonists and profiteers of a particular he-
gemonic mindset without needing to assume that ‘someone’ (actors, milieus, classes or
groups) had contrived a scheme to engineer social change. It allows for the acquiescence,
not to say complicity, of the ‘losers’ of an ideology-driven change. In this sense, even the
most powerful concubinarii of their time are on the defensive, and no amount of asser-
tiveness on their part (“David and Solomon”) can change this. Monogamism implies that
there is an ‘ideology’ (a widespread assumption which in itself seems convincing) tending
towards monogamy as the standard form of sexual relationships; it does not imply that
those who came to share the view necessarily organized their social practices accordingly.
Henry I was not monogamous, but monogamism was pervasive in the twelfth-century
Channel region.
The Comparative View: western Europe 307

One way of doing this is forward defence, as in the remark in the History of
the Counts of Guînes, cited by Martin Aurell, about the prince surpassing David,
Solomon, and Jupiter. This is the kind of chivalrous hyperbole known in poetry
as gap, the kind which allowed Duke William ix of Aquitaine (vii as count of
Poitou, r. 1086–1126) to boast of a polycoital week with two ladies (“a hundred
and eighty-eight times!”),43 without damaging his reputation as ‘first trouba-
dour.’ By contrast, William of Newburgh’s epilogue about King Henry i (r. 1100–
35) appears like an inverted gap. The Anglo-Norman ruler, a contemporary of
the Aquitanian troubadour-duke,

was adorned with many of the virtues fitting for a prince, nevertheless
[tamen], these were greatly obscured by his appetite for women, in which
he emulated the voluptuousness of Solomon. He also loved the rough
pleasures of the hunt more than appropriate, and went as far as treating
poachers on a par with murderers in public trials.44

And yet we might wonder how difficult it would be for an aristocratic audience
to simply replace the adversative signals (tamen) with additive ones, complet-
ing the image of an impressive ruler with women and hunting (a characteristic
sequence). The same king also received a different sort of praise for the same
behaviour: “His whole life, he was completely free from fornication and lust,”
says William of Malmesbury, a contemporary of Henry i: “For, as I know from
those closest to him, he would not pour into women’s wombs from unre-
strained lust, but for the purpose of conceiving offspring.” Mindful of his sover-
eign dignity, he always considered the effective use of the royal seed, “for he
subjected nature like a lord, and did not obey lust like a slave.”45 Those who
evaded this constant performance monitoring might even be applauded for
deviating from the polygynous norm, such as the Scottish kings and brothers

43 pc 183,12, v. 79f.: “Tant las fotei com auzirets: Cent et quatre-vinz et ueit vetz.”
44 William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, vol. 1, 3: “Homo multis quae decerent
principem bonis ornatus: quae tamen plurimum denigrabat in concupiscentia femina-
rum imitando petulatiam Salomonis. Feras quoque propter venationis delicias plus iusto
diligens, in publicis animadversionibus cervicidas ab homicidis parum discernebat.”
45 gra v, 412: “Omnium tota uita omnino obscenitatum cupidinearum expers, quoniam, ut
a consciis accepimus, non effreni uoluptate sed gignendae prolis amore mulierum gremio
infunderetur, nec dignaretur aduenae delectationi prebere assensum, nisi ubi regium se-
men procedere posset in effectum, effundens naturam ut dominus, non obtemperans li-
bidini ut famulus.” When eating and drinking, William continued, he would stop when he
was full.
308 Chapter 6

Edgar, Alexander i and David i, who, as good sons of their saintly mother Mar-
garet, besides excelling in diet, alms, and prayer, crucially also

avoided the domestic evil of the kings [domesticum regibus vitium] and,
as far as anyone knows, none other than their legal wives ever came into
their beds and their modesty was never sullied by concubines.46

There is also a slight whiff of sanctity around Baldwin vi, count of Hainaut and
later Flanders as well as first Latin emperor in Constantinople, who failed to
surround himself with the customary crowd of puceles, preferring demonstra-
tive monogamy with Marie, daughter of the Count of Champagne. Georges
Duby has, perhaps somewhat hastily, taken him to be an “original,” a “laughing
stock.”47 If Giselbert of Mons’s report is considered more than merely an at-
tempt to certify the crusader emperor’s morality by borrowing directly from
the Decretum Gratiani,48 it is quite conceivable that some observers regarded
the count as comical. However, at a time when courtly lay culture also con-
ceded some value to self-controlled orientation towards one ‘lady’ only, Count
Baldwin could be respected for his expedient restraint even while Henry i was
respected for his no less expedient promiscuity. The chroniclers’ most com-
mon way of dealing with princely polygyny, though, is to maintain a silence
which is only broken when there is no other choice—for example, when the
relationship produces a son or daughter who cannot be skipped over—and
this is the reason why direct observation of aristocratic polygyny in Western
Europe is often difficult.
Outside the Latin narratives we come across testimonies such as the lai
Eliduc by Marie de France (Anglo-Norman, around 1170/80), which in its un-
pretentious ruthlessness is an outstanding but entirely atypical representa-
tive of courtly literature. The lais—relatively short, episodic verse narratives,

46 gra v, 400: “ita domesticum regibus uitium euicerunt ut numquam feratur in eorum
thalamos nisi legitimas uxores isse, nec eorum quemquam pelicatu aliquo pudicitiam
contristasse.”—On dynasty building in the “polygamous society” of Scotland around 1100,
see Wall, “Queen Margaret of Scotland” (1997); on polygynous practice in Scottish society,
see Sellar, “Marriage, Divorce and Concubinage” (1978–80).
47 Duby, “Que sait-on de l’amour en France au xiie siècle?” in Mâle moyen âge (21990), 34–49,
44: “Un original. Ridicule.” For criticism, see Joris, “Un seul amour” (1992), esp. 198: Duby
fails to see that the implicit alternative is not ‘youthful’ promiscuity, but full-blown
concubinage.
48 Giselbert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense, 172 (the text is here identical to the edition by
Leo Vanderkindere, Brussels 1904, used by Duby and Joris): “ea sola contentus sit” echoes
Gratian’s Decretum D 34,4: “unius mulieris … sit coniunctione contentus.”
The Comparative View: western Europe 309

f­requently marvellous in character—share with the Arthurian world the

­Breton-British backdrop, with figures from the Round Table appearing in some
of them. Yet they are strikingly distinct from the bulk of Arthurian literature.
Eliduc tells the story of the eponymous hero, a married Breton knight who,
wrongfully banished from the country, takes service on the other side of the
Channel. There, love seizes him and Guilliadun, the daughter of his new lord.
Back in favour once more, Eliduc returns to Brittany with a heavy heart, prom-
ises his amie Guilliadun that he will return swiftly, finds a pretext to do so, and
abducts her with her consent. At this point she still does not know that he has a
wife called Guildeluëc in Brittany; she finds out by chance during the crossing
and collapses, apparently dead. Eliduc, heartbroken, lays her out in a chapel
in the forest and comes every day as a mourner. Inevitably, Guildeluëc notices,
finds her way to the chapel, understands the connection, and is overcome by
compassion for the dead girl. Guildeluëc’s renunciation is followed by the ap-
parently miraculous reawakening of Guilladun, upon which Guildeluëc, the
wife, retires to a monastery, to be joined by Guilliadun, the amie, after a few
years with Eliduc. At this, Eliduc also withdraws into the monastery newly cre-
ated for this purpose, in which all three pray for one another.
To us, the shadow of Abelard and Héloïse appear to hover over this Breton
story of human and divine love. It also contains one of the few explicit discus-
sions of polygyny in courtly literature. Initially Eliduc still reasons that he will
not fall in love dishonourably because he owes his wife his given word
(fei~fides), and moreover he is the ‘man’ of Guilliadun’s father.49 Soon he feels
helpless: “If I marry my beloved, that is against Christianity!”50 The sailor who
wants to throw Guilliadun overboard to calm the life-threatening storm ex-
presses it in more drastic terms: “You have a lawful wedded wife (leial espuse)
and now lead another woman home, against God and the law (lei), against
right (dreiture) and your given word (fei)!”51 Later, Guildeluëc expresses similar
concerns about the impropriety of the stuation but draws the opposite conclu-
sion, asking her husband to establish a new monastery so she can withdraw
there and he “can marry her whom he loved so greatly, for it is not good and

49 Eliduc (in Marie de France, Lais, ed. Karl Warnke [1990], 270–327), v. 473–76: “Mes ja ne li
querra amur Ki li aturt a deshonur, Tant pur sa femme guarder fei, Tant pur ceo qu’il est
od le rei.”
50 Ibid., v. 601f.: “S’a m’amie esteie espusez, Nel suffereit crestiëntez.”
51 Ibid., v. 835–38: “Femme leial espuse avez Et sur celi altre en menez Cuntre Deu e cuntre
la lei, Cuntre dreiture et cuntre fei.” Eliduc throws the mariner into the sea and takes com-
mand; Guilliadun falls into a coma.
310 Chapter 6

proper (bien ne avenant) to have two wives at the same time, and, moreover, it
is against the law (lei).”52
In both cases, “law” means Christian law. Lay ethics have different standards:
dreiture (‘right-ness’) expressed in terms of the fei (reinforced by the assonance
of the Pauline fides), the force of the given word. The wife uses the courtly
phrase bien ne avenant, meaning something along the lines of: “bigamy’s just
not on!” While hegemonic monogamism shapes even the literary artistry of the
lai, it allows Marie to exploit its semantics to her own end.53
Her concept of bigamy is astonishingly unorthodox. Canonically, there is no
way Eliduc could marry his amie after his first wife took her vows (and as long
as she was alive); if Guildeluëc nonetheless develops her plan to resolve the
dilemma and implements it without any apparent problems, this is done in
accordance with a coherent lay ethic which is only hinted at,54 clearly at peace
with religion, and whose goal—wholly in the Bernardine sense—is the envel-
opment of human love in the love of God.55
Given the subtle treatment of current ideas in the lais, it would be a mistake
to assume that what Marie is describing here is simply a survival of the pre-
reform custom of enclosing women who had become unwanted in convents.
The courtly monogamism knows how to be in accordance with the canonists’
teachings on marriage—consensus facit nuptias—without being dependent
on it. The view that ‘feudal’ marriage represents the triumph of the “ecclesiasti-
cal model” over traditional lay practice, best known through the work of
Georges Duby, has been repeatedly, and rightly, nuanced.56 We might go fur-
ther: in Western Europe, to a certain extent the intensification of sexual pasto-
ral since the eleventh century runs in parallel with changes in the familial

52 Ibid., v. 1127–30: “cele prenge qu’il eime tant; Kar n’est pas bien ne avenant De dos espuses
meintenir, Ne la leis nel deit cunsentir.”
53 For instance, the captain’s words “sor … menez” (“over and beyond (her) you lead
(another) home”) echos the verb superduxere “to lead home a second wife” used in the
documents.
54 In his treatise on love, the roughly contemporary Champagnian court cleric Andreas Ca-
pellanus does indeed compile a veritable law of love (ii 8: regulae/praecepta amoris) in
which several relevant passages are found, such as regula 3: “nemo duplici potest amore
ligari”; however, the satirical tendency of his work makes it difficult to take his codex as an
expression of the ‘courtly model.’
55 Ibid. v. 1177–79 (the closing words): “Mult se pena chescuns pur sei De Deu amer par bone
fei E mult par firent bele fin.”
56 For instance, Bouchard, Chivalry and Society (1998), 67ff.; see generally, Baschet, Civilisa-
tion féodale (32006), 753: “l’institution ecclésiale … est peut-être davantage que la colonne
vertébrale du système féodal : son enveloppe, voire sa forme même.” One can go along
with this assessment insofar as it refers to a regionally limited ‘feudal culture,’ that is, in
northern France and the surrounding regions.
The Comparative View: western Europe 311

structure of lay society, for which the fundamental and durable privileging of
just one woman and her children was likewise an innovation. Due to the coin-
cidence of individuals and interests, both ‘ruling classes’ arrived at forms of
monogamism that, while occasionally sharply diverging in their manifesta-
tions, were nonetheless fundamentally compatible; and polygyny caused prob-
lems for both. In this respect, the twelfth century perhaps did not invent love,57
but ‘the couple.’ Marie’s position is that of Fenice in Chrétien’s Cligès, who only
wishes to give her body to one who has her heart (and not to the emperor), and
of all the courtly poets who put themselves and their actions in the service of
the one, but hers is also the current ecclesiastical idea of consensus. In com-
parison to many of the lay elite’s other dispositions—including polygyny—,
French courtoisie was, as a version of Western European Christianity, relatively
close to the church, even and especially when it was not always in harmony
with the latest church doctrine in every detail.

6 The Invisible Women

There is no longer any place for plural women in this milieu. They are undoubt-
edly there, and their offspring are expected, but they cannot be ‘spoken’ of (in
a social sense). The History of the Counts of Guînes (a place near Dunkirk) is a
good example of this. Polygyny is omnipresent in it. From beginning to end,
the history is quite literally swarming with “countless sons and daughters of
various descent” (innumerabiles et multigenas);58 the daughters are given to
the lower nobility of the region, the sons are knights or canonici and, in Leah
Shopkow’s words, represent a “pool of talent,” to be drawn on as necessary.59
The position of the children of concubines in the Artesian-Flemish landed

57 The traditional formula, attributed to Charles Seignobos (probably wrongly), “L’amour,

cette invention du xiie siècle,” has been advocated in one form or another since Stendhal
and romantic philology; through Denis de Rougemont (L’amour et l’Occident [21956], 57)
and the ‘12th-century renaissance’ (see, for example, Morris, Discovery of the Individual
[1972]). It continues to shape the history of culture, literature, and emotions to this day;
see most recently, Schnell, “Historische Emotionsforschung” (2004).
58 Lambert of Ardres, Historia comitum Ghisnensium c. 89.—The ostensible founder of the
house of Guînes, Sigfred the Dane, takes the daughter of the count of Flanders with gentle
force (“sine vi ludendo vim intulit,” c.11); the chronicler’s source, Walter of Le Clud, is the
great-grandson of a lord of Ardres through a thoroughly ‘illegitimate’ tie.
59 History of the Counts of Guines, trans. Shopkow (2001), 15, with a reference to the limited
preservation of the legal rights of illegitimate sons even in the 15th-century Coutumes de
Guînes (cf. Espinas, Origines du capitalisme, vol. 4 [1949], 57).
312 Chapter 6

­aristocracy was shaped by familiarity and subordination.60 Some were more

resigned to being disregarded than others, who led plundering raids against
their brothers’ possessions with the aid of notorious professional warriors—a
common way of expressing legal claims and encouraging negotiations61—or
chose to express their outsider status rather more flamboyantly, as did Anselm,
son of the lord of Ardres and one of the three puellae impregnated by him
while he was staying in England. As the textbook ‘younger brother’ that he in-
deed was, he went in ultramarinas; there he was taken prisoner, converted to
Islam, and cultivated demonstratively “Saracen” attitudes even after he re-
turned home, going as far as eating meat on Fridays, offending everyone and
providing them with the opportunity to expel this returnee unwilling to reinte-
grate from the house.62 It is a pity that the History does not record whether he
sought to maintain Muslim marriage laws alongside dietary laws. Given the
customary practices in Guînes, attempting to emulate the polygynous Sara-
cens would presumably have missed the point of alterity.
By and large, in this twelfth-century landed aristocratic milieu the sons of
the numerous puellae appear to have come to terms with the limits their birth
imposed on their ambitions. The ‘bastards’ of the counts of Hainaut became
canons, provosts, chancellors of Flanders, and, insofar as they were de muli-
eribus nobilibus, were provided with bona quedam63 but they did not become
count on the Sambre and Scheldt or, for that matter, emperor on the Bosphorus.
Of the Anglo-Norman ruler Henry i’s eleven sons from concubines, not one
took the death of the only legitimate royal son who went down with the White
Ship as an opportunity to venture a bid for succession during the remaining
fifteen years of their father’s reign, which meant that Henry remained ‘heirless.’
And they did not lack ability: One of them at least, Robert of Gloucester,
­certainly knew as well as any pretender to position himself against Henry’s

60 Duby, Ritter, Frau und Priester (1985), 203ff., has already described a similar crisis in this
milieu—although his premise leads him to reach very different conclusions to those pro-
posed here.
61 For this characteristic of the “chivalric style of rule” cf. Barthélemy, “Les comtes” (1995),
453: “… tout repose sur des rapports de force socialement régulés et symbolisés, c’est-à-
dire sur les revendications, concurrentes es successives, par chacun de son droit.
L’équilibre social s’obtient par un travail social permanent, d’une manière qu’on ne doit
raisonnablement ni déprécier, ni idéaliser.” (Emphasis in original). From this perspective,
the very exclusion of the “bastards” from the paternal inheritance and their ensuing ag-
gression would actually signify their inclusion in the constantly feuding knightly class.
62 Historia comitum Ghisnensium c. 113.
63 Giselbert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense cc. 227, 72, 252; cf. Joris, “Un seul amour” (1992),
198.
The Comparative View: western Europe 313

­ ephew Stephen of Blois, the main competitor in the expected competition

n
over the unsettled succession. In the course of the solemn act by which Henry
hoped to secure his ‘legitimate’ daughter’s succession to the throne, “there was,
it is reported, a remarkable contest” between the two men on the question of
whether a son’s privilege or nephew’s dignity took precedence when swearing
oaths.64 But throughout the entire war of succession and until his death in
1147, Robert held up his half-sister’s cause as military commander without ever
reaching for the crown himself65—which would have been the first thing to do
for even the most implausible candidate during the contemporaneous Norwe-
gian power struggles. Given the devastation wrought by the so-called ‘Civil
War’ (or ‘the Anarchy’) between Matilda and Stephen in England and Norman-
dy, it is tempting to argue that the Norwegian open competition between the
sons of frillur was perhaps not the worse solution.
Shortly after his coronation in 1135, Robert and Matilda’s opponent Stephen
of Blois made his ‘concubine’s’ son Gervais abbot of Westminster Abbey, where
he represented his father’s interests so faithfully that despite the amicable suc-
cession of 1153, Stephen’s successor Henry ii had him removed soon after Ste-
phen’s death. Gervais’s gravestone in the cloister of the abbey proclaimed the
prelate’s descent as if the impedimenta were something that could be provoca-
tively ignored.66 Morgan, one of Henry ii’s many sons (the king’s relationship
with the mother, the wife of a knight, must have been fleeting), became pro-
vost of Beverley and bishop-elect of Durham, but at that point encountered
difficulties with Rome. Something similar happened to his half-brother Geof-
frey, whose mother Hikenai/Ykenai, probably from a knightly family but not
clearly identifiable, gained access to the English royal court with the three-
year-old immediately after Henry’s accession to the throne; she may already
have obtained a foothold in the circle of the count of Anjou and pretender to
the Anglo-Norman throne beforehand. For many years, Geoffrey then occu-
pied the bishopric of Lincoln without being able to obtain final consecration,
yet even without that, as chancellor of England and a successful army com-
mander—against his rebellious legitimate half-brothers, among ­others—he

64 William of Malmesbury, Historia novella c. 5: “Notabile fuit ut fertur certamen inter Rot-
bertum et Stephanum, dum emula laude virtutum inter se contenderent quis eorum prior
iuraret, illo priuilegium filii, isto dignitatem nepotis spectante.” William later claims in a
panegyrical context that Robert took the oath first; John of Worcester claims the opposite
(Chronicle of John of Worcester [1998], vol. 3, 178f.), but suggests that the issue was settled
amicably in order of age.
65 On Robert’s career, see Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 74–93.
66 Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 96: “De regum genere pater hic Gerva-
sius …”
314 Chapter 6

was a mainstay of his father, to whom he remained faithful to his deathbed at

Chinon in 1189.67
All in all, then, the ‘bastards’ were very well integrated into the system of
government of their fathers and brothers. In the light of the material gathered
by Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis, it seems that they were readily en-
trusted with ‘neuralgic points’ of Norman-Angevin rule: the southeastern bor-
der of Normandy on the one hand and the ‘Celtic’ marches on the other.68
Henry i twice gave away illegitimate daughters across the border, to the Breton
duke Conan iii and the Scottish king Alexander i (c.1110). The contrast with
Henry’s rebellious sons from his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine is striking—
it looks as though a Norman or Angevin king had to counterbalance the threat
to his authority posed by his legitimate sons with the help of his “less worthily
begotten” children.69 In this sense, William of Malmesbury, remarking that
Henry i always had the kingship in mind when deciding in which womb his
seed would be fruitful, captures the system accurately.70
Considering that the children had such prominence, the absence of the
women from the written narratives is all the more astonishing. Around 1140
Robert of Torigny, monk (and later abbot) of Mont-Saint-Michel, fascinated by
genealogies of all kinds and an enthusiastic interpolator of the Gesta Norman-
norum ducum—originally by William of Jumièges and already supplemented
by Ordericus Vitalis—compiled a detailed catalogue of Henry i’s “less worthily
begotten” descendants, but does not name a single one of their mothers. And
yet, the annalist’s terse references and the Pipe Rolls’ scattered information71
suggests that the Norman-Angevin rulers did indeed find their women with

67 Richard the Lionheart fulfilled his father’s wish and arranged Geoffrey’s election as arch-
bishop of York. Cf. Douie, Archbishop Geoffrey Plantagenet (1960); Lovatt, Geoffrey Planta-
genet (1975); Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 103–25; Turner and Heiser,
Richard Lionheart (2000), 77ff.
68 Turner and Heiser, Richard Lionheart (2000), 70ff.
69 gnd viii, 28: “de ceteris liberis Henrici regis, licet minus idoneo modo procreatis …” With
a variation a few lines later: “licet minus honesto, ut prediximus, modo progenitos.”
70 The children’s loyalty went so far that it could have disastrous consequences in an ex-
treme situation. In the catastrophic shipwreck of 25 November 1120, the legitimate heir to
the throne was already sitting in the rescue boat when his illegitimate sister Matilda,
fighting for her life, shouted for him to turn back. Overladen, the boat capsized shortly
after, and all the occupants drowned—leaving Henry i without a legitimate male heir.—
The policy failed just once, when Henry i’s daughter Juliana and her husband Eustace de
Pacy—who was, in turn, an illegitimate son of the Norman magnate William of Bréteuil—
rebelled against her father in 1119 due to disagreements over Eustace’s paternal inheri-
tance, which resulted in some of the most burlesque and some of the most brutal scenes
of Norman historiography. Cf. Ordericus Vitalis, he xi 4ff.
71 See White, Appendix D (1949), 105–21.
The Comparative View: western Europe 315

the diligence commended by William of Malmesbury; Kathleen Thompson

speaks of “affairs of state” and proves her point. Since both her article and Alice
Curteis’ and Chris Given-Wilson’s book contain extensive discussions of
them,72 I will keep their presentation to a minimum.
Henry i’s long-standing ‘concubine’ Sibylle Corbet was the daughter of a
Norman knight with land on the Welsh border in Warwickshire and Shrop-
shire. Nothing is known about the origin of Ansfride, with whom the king also
had a relationship for many years. But the background of her (already de-
ceased) husband, her documented property, and her burial place in Abingdon
Abbey point to the local aristocratic milieu in the upper Thames Valley. An-
other of Henry’s women, Edith, was the daughter of the magnate Forn Sigulfs-
son, based in Cumbria but also landed in Yorkshire, and a potential pillar of
Norman rule on the rim of the Irish Sea. Isabelle de Meulan, with whom the
king had a daughter of the same name around 1130, had Robert of Beaumont,
the first earl of Leicester and “one of the most powerful Norman barons,”73 as
her father; her grandfathers were Roger de Beaumont, probably the most im-
portant of William the Conqueror’s confidants, and Hugo the Great, count of
Vermandois. Doubtless, the king’s relationship with the virgin daughter and
sister of such a house was arranged with considerable care, and it is to be as-
sumed that none of the participants would have viewed it as a minus honestus
modus (as Robert de Torigny had it) of relationship.
In the political practice of the Anglo-Norman empire, not only the king’s
children but also his women, along with their fathers and brothers, had an
importance as yet largely unimpaired by monogamist ideas. After all, through-
out almost the entirety of his 35-year reign Henry i was ‘married,’ that is to say,
had more or less isogynous relationships with princely women (Edith/Matilda
of Scotland 1100–18, Adeliza of Louvain from 1121). A number of his children,
including Robert, the future earl of Gloucester, who is probably the most
prominent (his early epithet, ‘de Caen’ indicates his mother came from a Nor-
man, perhaps urban milieu),74 were conceived in the period prior to his sei-
zure of power in 1100, prior to which the youngest son of William the Con-
queror, without hereditary lands and provided only with movable goods,
appeared destined to a subordination such as his own sons would later experi-
ence. However, although we do not have precise details for any of these cases,
Henry clearly did not become monogamous during his union with the Scottish

72 Thompson, “Affairs of State” (2003); Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984).
73 R[obert]-H[enri] Bautier, “Beaumont-le-Roger,” in LdM, vol. 1, col. 1759. Cf. Crouch, Beau-
mont Twins (1986), the political biography of Isabelle’s brothers Waleran and Robert.
74 For Caen’s early urban boom in the 11th century, see Jean-Marie [sic], Caen (2000).
316 Chapter 6

princess (which he entered into only two months after his accession in Eng-
land, and in a sense constituted part of it), and the knights and counts who
consented to their ‘Solomonic’ king’s relationships with their daughters, sis-
ters, and wives did not object in principle: whatever the power relations may
have been in each individual case, we can rule out the application of brute
force in cases such as Isabelle de Meulan. Yet it is quite conceivable that estab-
lishing a relationship with the daughter or sister of an aristocrat was under-
stood as part of the king’s ‘friendship’ with them, investing them with a certain
special authority in important regions—with all the advantages and disadvan-
tages this entailed75—or of the reestablishment of lost ‘friendship.’ Isabelle de
Meulan may be a case in point. Her relationship with the king began roughly at
the time when her enterprising brother Waleran was released from five years
of imprisonment after his prominent involvement in a Norman rebellion
against Henry i, which had been quenched in the battle of Bourgthéroulde in
1124. David Crouch has surmised that Isabelle may have “offered her body for
her brother’s release” or that the king may on his part have offered Waleran’s
release “in return for her sexual favours.”76 Stripped of its overtones of ‘private’
desire and submission, there may be something to the surmise: for Isabelle to
become Henry’s amie might have been regarded as the sign and seal of the (re)
establishment of good relations between the king and the Meulans just as
much as Waleran’s release and subsequent readmission to the court, where he
soon became, together with his twin brother Robert, the head of a veritable
‘court party.’ We may assume that their sister played no lesser role than the
Beaumont twins in bringing this change about; at any rate it would be impru-
dent to credit her with any less agency than her brothers in managing and
maintaining the family’s fortunes.
At times, there may well have been an element of overt pressure, and en-
tering into a relationship a sign of submission. The allegations made against
Henry i in 1168 by Eudo iv of Porhoët, former count of Brittany—to have im-
pregnated Eudo’s daughter, who had been entrusted to him as a hostage—show
that such demonstrations were at least conceivable. A similar story was ped-
dled by Gerald of Wales and William the Breton, among others, about Henry
ii and Alice, the daughter of the king of France, who was betrothed to H ­ enry’s
son Richard at a young age and grew up at the Angevin court.77 The more

75 See, for example, Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), passim, for the accu-
mulation of alliances and subsequent endowment of the children from such relation-
ships with land in Devon and Cornwall, a region that had important metal deposits but
was difficult to secure.
76 Crouch, Beaumont Twins (1986), 25.
77 Cf. Warren, Henry ii (1973/2000), 119f.; Gillingham, Richard Löwenherz (1981), 110f.
The Comparative View: western Europe 317

c­ onsensual relationships, however, usually ended after a period of time—if

they ended at all—with the woman being married off. As far as we can observe,
nuances were carefully considered: Edith, the daughter of the Cumbrian mag-
nate Forn Sigulfsson, and Sibylle Corbet, the mother of numerous children,
were married to wealthy knights. Subsequent to her relationship with Henry
i (though strictly speaking we do not know that), Isabelle de Meulan became
the wife of Gilbert fitzGilbert de Clare, member of one of the Norman families
close to the dukes and part of the power elite of the Anglo-Norman empire.
Shortly after, as first earl of Pembroke Gilbert would become one of the main
stakeholders in the expansion into Wales, continuing into Ireland in the next
generation.78
All this ensured that the king’s children would find the necessary support
for their diverse duties and were provided with a network of other supporters
of the king. These supporters—or those the king hoped to turn into such—
gained reliable, durable access to the king’s ear through the king’s children
and, above all, his women. When King Henry i died suddenly while travelling
in late 1135, five counts were with him: his son Robert of Gloucester from his
time in Caen; Rotrou, count of Perche, widower of Matilda who had died in the
sinking of the White Ship; William de Warenne, who had expected to marry
another of Henry’s daughters a quarter of a century earlier until Anselm of
Canterbury had objected on the grounds of consanguinity; finally, the twins
Robert and Waleran, brothers of Isabelle de Meulan.79 At one momentous oc-
casion, we see the sons and brothers of concubines forming the king’s inner
circle.

7 In Comparison: the Generative Aspect

All of this gives the impression of a diverse and politically relevant elite po-
lygyny in Western Europe. This should make it possible to consider the West in
light of the five aspects derived from the analysis of the North.
The ‘generative’ aspect was obviously present, we might even say there were
more distinct variations of it than in the North, where generation appears to
have happened with less planning, and success or obscurity was determined
more by contingency. However, the principle that all sons had the capacity to
inherit, maintained in Scandinavia until the thirteenth century, meant that ev-
ery male descendant was considered to be competing against all his brothers

78 See Altschul, The Clares (1965).

79 See Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 73.
318 Chapter 6

and cousins in a potentially agonistic selection of the most suitable. By the

mid-eleventh century at the latest, this was no more the case in Western Eu-
rope, not even in Normandy, where the polygynous component in dynastic
succession was a central part of its political self-conception (see discussion
below). As we have seen, no ‘bastard’ sought a crown after 1066.
This was no hard-and-fast rule or even a societal norm. Around 1100 in the
Norman lordship of Bréteuil, the sole, illegitimate son of the previous lord of
the castle prevailed against two legitimate but more distantly related competi-
tors. Ordericus Vitalis commented with some satisfaction that the Normans
preferred “an illegitimate compatriot to a legitimate Breton or Burgundian.”80
And even if the crowned successors of William the Conqueror committed
themselves to legitimizing the royal line ‘monogamistically,’ they did not lose
sight of the expediency of well-begotten children. An observer such as Orderi-
cus Vitalis knew and explained the connection between polygyny, secularis
fastus, and political tactics: “Rich in money and pleasures, [Henry i] was very
fond of sensuality; from boyhood to old age, he sinfully submitted to this vice
and begat many sons and daughters with concubines.”81 But precisely because
‘bastards’ were no longer worth considering even in the case of unsettled suc-
cession (as in 1135), the Anglo-Norman rulers were able to “spill their seeds”
very purposefully and produce offspring who, depending on the situation,
were suitable as chancellors, bishops or abbots, military commanders, or
knightly companions and seneschals for their sisters, who in turn became
queens in neighbouring kingdoms or wives to specially important lords. Mo-
nogamist legitimacy thus merely provided for a hierarchization within the
crowd of half-brothers and half-sisters, in place of the open competition in
Norway (and among Anglo-Norman magnates as well). The women and chil-
dren of the Anglo-Norman kings also occupied key positions in the control and
use of resources—precious metal deposits, bishoprics, retinues of warriors—
and thus probably often had a substantial share in what we term, with decep-
tive clarity, ‘rule’ and what actually consisted of a permanent attempt by all to

80 he xi, 4: “sed Normanni Eustachium de concubina filium eius susceperunt, quia compa-
triotam nothum quam Britonem seu Burgundionem liberum praeesse sibi maluerunt.”—
For Eustace de Pacy, the favourable circumstance was royal protection, expressed above
all through his marriage to Juliana, daughter of one of Henry i’s concubines.
81 he xi, 23: “Diuitiis deliciisque affluens libidini nimis deditum fuit, et a puericia usque ad
senectutem huic uitio culpabiliter subiacuit; et filios ac filias ex pelicibus plures genuit.”
In what follows, Orderic outlines Henry’s strict hunting laws and other safeguards of the
new king, who has just prevailed at this point in the Historia, and attests that he was su-
perior to all the English kings in everything “quantum pertinet ad secularem fastum.”
The Comparative View: western Europe 319

keep one’s position and, if possible, improve it. That kingship itself now re-
mained outside the agon marks a significant, but not systemic, change.

8 In Comparison: the Habitual Aspect

The hyperbolic pomposity with which a chronicler like Lambert of Ardres pro-
claimed that, in the serial seduction of young girls, a border count from a pe-
ripheral area on the English Channel surpassed all the kings of the Old Cove-
nant and the Olympic gods can leave us with no doubt about the habitual
meaning of polygyny. Even more than the generative aspect (whose limited
significance for family succession in an agnatic society distracts from its many
other purposes), it is this aspect which has been particularly emphasized in
previous research. A certain way with women was as much a part of habitus as
feats of arms on the battlefield, or at least in the tournament, grandeur in eat-
ing and drinking, a largesce that convincingly overplayed income, a similarly
convincing abandon in strength sports (hunting and riding), and a sound rela-
tionship with the Almighty and his clerical entourage (best maintained from a
respectful distance up to a certain age). In the rhetorics of boastful gap, this
chivalric attitude to women is merely exaggerated, not travestied. A duke on
pilgrimage should perhaps not spend a week sequestered with two wanton
chatelaines and overexert himself until “I nearly broke all my reins and my
equipment.”82 Yet Andreas Capellanus’s advice that desire—inflamed, per-
haps, at the sight of a young peasant woman—should be withstood only as
long as it took to find a suitable place to satisfy it,83 however much a sarcasm
against courtly fashions on the part of an intellectual schooled in Ovid, would
not work as satire if it was not partly recognizable as common practice. In the
lyrical form of the pastourelle, the tryst with a shepherdess—consensual or
otherwise—is its own genre of Old French literature: it was good to hear of
such things and one did not hesitate to cultivate the impression that one would
like to join in.84

82 William ix of Aquitaine, pc 183,12, v. 81f.: “Que a pauc no·i rompei mos corretz E mos
arnés.” Longman Anthology, trans. North (2011), 821.
83 Andreas Capellanus, De amore i 11: “Si vero et illarum te feminarum amor forte attraxerit
…, si locum inveneris opportunum, non differas assumere quod petebas et violento potiri
amplexu.”
84 The almost two hundred known poems, each around four to seven stanzas long, are col-
lected in Rivière, ed., Pastourelles (1974–76). Perhaps the best study of the genre is Zink, La
pastourelle (1972); a critical reading focused on the stylization of rape as a game is pro-
vided by Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens (1991), 104–21.
320 Chapter 6

In the History of the Counts of Guînes, polygynous ostentation reminiscent

of songs, romances, and Andreas Capellanus meets with a wealth of real-life
details, which both the chronicler and his ageing informant relate as having
happened frequently around them. Rarely does a source make it so clear how
literary representation and practice interrelate. On their travels or in the fields,
the history’s heroes constantly come across puellulae who are then embraced,
impregnated, and abandoned to narrative oblivion. They are only named in
exceptional cases; and if they appear in the history at all, it is due to their
­offspring—suggesting that the puellulae without descendants did not even
walk away with this dubious posthumous fame or the more tangible benefits
of bearing the children of a count or knight.
Nothing is more characteristic of this habitual attitude, which always needs
the provocative contrast to hegemonic monogamism for its full impact, than
the sentence in which Lambert of Ardres reports his own conception, thereby
writing himself into his own history: “[Count Arnold’s] brother Baldwin, who
was also my father, had an affair (rem habuit) with a virgin—one is ashamed,
and yet behold! it is no shame to say it—, a girl by the name Adele, who was the
daughter of his paternal uncle, that is, canonicus Ralph.”85 The Latin sentence
structure suggests that the shame is caused not so much by the premarital de-
flowering as by incestuous proximity, but ultimately the question which of the
several violations of church law and mores is worst is a moot one: for several
decades, the chronicler has lived well off the fact that Count Baldwin fathered
him with his virgin first cousin, and now publicly displays his “shame that is
not” for the greater glory of his benefactors.
This passage highlights an essential distinction between Western and North-
ern Europe which is important for the way the habitual aspect worked in the
two regions: the West’s sustained interest, in line with Latin Christendom in
general but in contrast to a marked indifference in the North, in the issues of
incest and virginity. The seduction of a cousin could not in itself serve as a
proof of particular bravura if the prohibited degrees of relationship attracted
so little attention that in the accounts of such sexual relationships we do not
even encounter stubborn opposition to, but merely ignorance of, church law
on this point.86 Seducing the daughter of his own grandfather’s bastard son,

85 Historia comitum Ghisnensium c. 134: “Eodem tempore Balduinus, frater eius, qui et pater
meus, cum virgine quadam – pudet iam, et ecce non pudet dicere – patrui sui, Radulfi
scilicet canonici filia, nomine Adela, rem habuit; que concepit et peperit ei filium, ista
vobis referentem …” History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, trans. Shopkow
(2007), 168.
86 By and large, the provincial laws (for example, Gulathing Law §§24ff., Frostathing Law iii
§§1ff.) contain the conventional criteria for incest, and Kirsten Hastrup has described the
The Comparative View: western Europe 321

whose position as canonicus depended not least on the goodwill of the seduc-
er, was not an exploit that a Scandinavian in Count Baldwin’s position could
have boasted about—precisely because its habitual value rested above all in
aspects of the matter which meant nothing to Scandinavians. The difference is
even more blatant with regard to virginity. In the Nordic provincial laws, even
the distinction between the penalties for attacking virgins and other women,
so typical of equivalent legal sources in most European regions, is absent.87
The fascination with virginity, despite all speculation about the quasi-constancy
of this anthropological ‘fact,’ did not affect Northern Europe.88
This has significant consequences for relationships. For one, there was no
‘first night’ as a means of distinguishing precedence. The Roman univira ideal,
manifest in medieval figures such as Enide or Kriemhild, was greeted far less
enthusiastically in Northern Europe. On the contrary, the serial polyandry of a
heroine figure such as Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir in Laxdœla saga does her no dis-
credit but allows her to look back and rank her husbands (another agon) ac-
cording to categories wholly detached from the sexual, without the haut goût
which would undoubtedly cling to a female figure in Western European litera-
ture who had been through five relationships.89 The lack of interest in the

medieval Icelandic family structure on the basis of the information in the late 13th-­
century Grágás law collection (Hastrup, Culture and History [1985], 80ff.). However, the
fact that the relations described in the kings’ sagas are often incommensurate with these
provisions makes it possible, with Sjöholm, Sveriges Medeltidslagar (1988), to emphasize
the strongly ‘European’ character of such provisions and not intrepret them as a self-­
description of the local societies.
87 Perhaps most telling is that this difference in the leges even refers to maids who are on the
border between personal and property law: “si vero ancilla et virgo erat, cum qua quislibet
homo moechatus est” (Lex Frisionum tit. 9, 3 [mgh ll 3, 635–97, 665]), then the penalty
is higher, while the penalty decreases incrementally by one shilling each time she “prius
fuerit constuprata”; cf. Obermeier, “Ancilla” (1996), 250ff. Even if we do not accept such
casuistry as particularly true to life, it indicates that for the Frankish world, virginity is not
just about preserving the marriage value of the daughters of the ingenui—which in itself
already contrasts with the Scandinavia findings—but a comprehensive disposition.
88 There is as yet no comprehensive discussion of this issue. For now, see more generally the
account by Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (1995) and Jochens, Images of Women
(1996), as well as Sawyer, “Sköldmön och madonnan” (1997), particularly for the reaction
to the intrusion of religiously-inspired forms of virginity (the insistence on consensus;
nunneries).
89 While Laxdœla saga is undoubtedly influenced by Western European ideas of kurteis,
down to the vocabulary it employs (see Sävborg, “Kärleken” [2004], 75–109), I would sug-
gest that it is precisely in this encounter that the incompatibility of autochthonous fea-
tures becomes a matter for discussion.
322 Chapter 6

“temple of a virgin’s body” (Jerome)90 and corresponding lack of incentive to

desecrate it also shapes the way in which the habitual aspect of polygyny oper-
ates. A “great man for women” such as King Magnús Erlingsson (r. 1161–84)
could have agreed with his contemporary Baldwin of Guînes that a Solomonic
multitude of women was becoming to a prince, but the Norwegian would not
have seen why these should preferably be iuvenculae.
Another difference which emerges through the comparison of the regions:
King Magnús and Count Baldwin may have been in agreement; whether the
Norman-Angevin princes would have shared this view, however, is question-
able. None of them would behave as their Anglo-Saxon predecessor Eadwig
had in 955, according to William of Malmesbury, when “on the day of his con-
secration in the midst of a council meeting attended by many nobles, at which
the vital and serious concerns of the kingdom were discussed, he suddenly, as
if completely relaxed, sank onto a couch into the embrace of his playmate.”91
Even the harshest critics among the chroniclers could not have charged a Nor-
man or Angevin king of England with such a thing, because such ostentation
was alien to even those among them who, like William of Newburgh’s Henry i,
readily invited comparison with the “brashness of Solomon.” The idea that the
king more or less publicly having sex might aim at an effect not all that differ-
ent to that of the preceding consecration (sacratus fuerat)—a ‘performative’
effect, perhaps—was not a current one in William of Malmesbury’s time.
Twelfth-century rulers of the West as stylized by the chroniclers are in a
sense implicitly polygynous: their women’s more notable children become vis-
ible, but not the women themselves. This applies to the Anglo-Norman rulers
as much as to the extremely monogamist Capetians, whose two famous po-
lygynous affairs, Philip i’s ‘abduction’ of the Bertrade de Montfort in 1092 and
Philip ii’s liaison with Agnes of Meran instead of the sequestered Ingeborg of
Denmark in 1196, were certainly not conducive to the stylization of their rule.
It also holds true for the great principalities92 such as Flanders, Hainaut, and

90 Jerome, Ep. 23 (pl 22, col. 410): “Neque enim vas aureum et argenteum tam carum Deo fuit
quam templum corporis virginalis.” Later in the same letter, the ‘Assyrians’ plunder the
poorly-guarded ‘temple treasure,’ and King Belshazzar drinks from the stolen ‘vessels’ “in-
ter concubinarum greges” (cf. Dn 5:2).
91 gra ii 147: “Ipso quippe die quo in regem sacratus fuerat, frequentissimo consessu pro-
cerum, dum de rebus seriis et regno necessariis inter eos ageretur, e medio quasi ludibun-
dus prorupuit, in triclinium et complexum ganeae deuolutus.” Abbot Dunstan of Glaston-
bury, the later archbishop, pulls the “lasciuentem iuuenculum” out of bed, has the pellex
expelled, and thereby incurs the enduring enmity of the new king.
92 Cf. Barthélemy, L’ordre seigneurial (1990), 200, on the value of the concept of “principautés
féodales.”
The Comparative View: western Europe 323

Anjou, where rulers’ women are just as absent as in the histories of the Anglo-
Norman kings, or only emerge indirectly through their children or in episodes
such as the pronounced monogyny of Baldwin vi of Hainaut, quod in aliquo
homine raro invenitur (“such as it is hardly ever found in a man”). Polygyny as
the “domestic evil of the kings,” as William of Malmesbury puts it, is known
and presupposed, but preferably left unmentioned.

9 In Comparison: the Agonistic Aspect

Western European aristocrats did not need the Old Testament to get the notion
that rivalry between men could be played out through access to women. In
medieval history, there are few more impressive (or more widely discussed)
examples of political rivalry for women than King Philip i’s seizure of Bertrade
de Montfort, wife of the Angevin Count Fulk iv (1092), and Eleanor of Aqui­
taine’s switch from Louis vii to Henry ii (1152). Both cases also clearly indicate
that the women themselves were anything but the passive objects of male
rivalry.
These affairs—cases of ‘marriage’ insofar as they took place at the very high-
est levels of society and involved ostentatious ceremony—fitted well into a
polygynous mode of perception. Ordericus Vitalis’ presentation of the concu-
pita puella Bertrade de Montfort, whom the count (consul) of Anjou joyfully
receives after long negotiations, sounds like one of the counts of Guînes’s
young girls; anyway Fulk “married his third wife while two of his wives were
still alive.”93 (Bertrade was at least Fulk’s fourth, perhaps fifth ‘wife’; the first
was dead, the others divorced. As with the Oddaverjar, we wonder what it was
that earned precisely these five women the name of uxor, and in whose view.)
After a while, Bertrade begins to have misgivings that the same future might lie
in store for her as for her predecessors, and she would be treated “by everyone
as a cheap harlot” (cunctis ceu uile scortum). “Aware of her beauty and good ori-
gin” (conscia nobilitatis et pulchritudinis suae), she makes contact with Philip
i—whose complicity lands him Orderic’s damning predicate mollis princeps
(“weak” or “soft ruler”), even though his willingness to risk conflict with Anjou
would perhaps suggest the opposite to us—and goes through with switching

93 he viii 10: “Deinde Andegavensis consul concupitam puellam gaudens suscepit, et ui-
uentibus adhuc duabus uxoribus terciam desponsauit.” On Philip and Bertrade see Duby,
Ritter, Frau und Priester (1985), 7–28, though his interpretation differs from that suggested
here.
324 Chapter 6

husbands: “So the fugitive mistress left the adulterous count and remained
with the equally adulterous king until his death.”94
It is curious how the condemnation of Bertrade by the severe and subtle
Benedictine nonetheless intermingles recognition of her univiral fidelity to the
king, whose conduct, incidentally, appears reprehensible to Orderic above all
because his existing queen Bertha, ousted from her leading position by Bertrade,
had borne him an heir for the throne and a daughter, and therefore deserved
due respect. The image of Bertrade remains curiously ambiguous throughout
what follows. On the one hand, the crudelis adultera repeatedly attempts to
poison Louis, the heir to the throne; on the other, with womanly ingenium she
contrives the reconciliation of her two men, to the point where King Philip and
Count Fulk eat at the same table and sleep in the same chamber, while “she
attended them, as seemed appropriate.”95 It is almost as if the Anglo-Norman
rigorist did not want his recognition of a woman who takes the initiative like
a virago when the men prove to be molles to be completely drowned out by
mandatory condemnation. It is clear enough as it is how astutely Bertrade ma-
noeuvred in order to stay on top and outdo her competitresses.
Bertrade’s possible fate as yet another of the discarded uxores of Count Fulk
of Anjou is echoed by the Old French chansons de femme—songs with a female
‘voice’—about the precarious position of those young women whom Orderic
(and modern research) would call “concubines” and who in Old French are
called soignants. The nominalized present participle of the verb soignier “care
for; nurse” (< Frankish *sunnjōn) belongs to the sphere of domestic service in
the first instance; it is one of the rare lexical echoes of the everyday coinci-
dence of sexual and other duties which the chronicles and romances almost
never mention.96 Within the framework of courtly monogamism, the word is
used as the equivalent of concubina as opposed to uxor/mouillier; S­ olomon’s

94 he x, 20: “Sic peculans pelex adulterum comitem reliquit, adulteroque regi usque ad mor-
tem eius adhesit.”
95 he xi, 9; viii, 20: “prout placuit illis ministraret.” In fact, the settlement of the dispute was
finally staged in Angers in 1106.
96 Jean Renart’s verse novel L’escoufle (Picardy, around 1210) offers a rare portrayal of an eve-
ning in front of the hearth, where the count is resting his head in the lap of a “completely
ungirdled” (thus clad only in undergarments) bele pucele, waiting for his baked apples.
The girl is the heroine of the romance, while the count is the benefactor of the couple,
who will soon be miraculously reunited; in terms of textual strategy, there is no pejorative
intent underlying the description of the count’s favourite deduit. Cf. Rüdiger, Aristokraten
und Poeten (2001), 182–86.
The Comparative View: western Europe 325

seven hundred uxores quasi reginae and three hundred concubinae appear in
the French Bible as femmes cume reines and suinnantes respectively.97
In a French chanson de toile (‘cloth song,’ sung by a female voice in a setting of
domestic labour), such a fate is painted out in scenic detail. “Sabine,” the count
says to his wife’s chambermaid, “your beautiful body gives me an appetite, and
I want your love!” The pretty girl has reservations about “spending my youth
in concubinage” (soignentage). The count assures her of a ­lasting relationship
and is finally permitted to “take from her the sweet name of the maiden” (li a
tolu le douz non de pucele)—concupitam puellam gaudens suscepit, as Orderic
Vitalis says of Fulk and Bertrade. In the end, he keeps her with him for a long
time, until the now-grown sons of the count’s abandoned wife—­thinking of
their position and inheritance—broker a reunion. It is Sabine who loses out
from this, and she is “driven out of his lands with shame and disgrace”98—ceu
uile scortum, as Orderic’s Bertrade feared.
If the future prospects of the uxores of a count of Anjou were not essentially
different from those of the soignant of the song—what about the children? In
the song, the male heirs ensure their parents’ reconciliation at the expense of
their father’s mistress, but in political practice the contest could turn out dif-
ferently, as Bertha of Holland, the wife of Philip i, found out at her expense
when she lost out to Bertrade de Montfort despite her two royal children. Ber-
tha’s son Louis (vi) was raised to rex designatus in 1098 and for many years
ruled in cooperation with his father—the very man who had repudiated his
mother. Even a son legitimized in this manner did not ensure a mother’s secu-
rity. All this can only have intensified the agon among the women further.
In other cases, where the heirs had more solidarity with their mother, pre-
cisely this could escalate the conflict and have serious consequences for the
uxor, as Eleanor of Aquitaine discovered at her cost when she supported the
rebellion of her sons Henry and Richard against King Henry ii in 1173. Detained

97 The Latin gloss is focaria < focus “hearth” (cf. Greimas, Dictionnaire [21986]; Godefroy,
Dictionnaire [1881–1902], s.v. soignant). Norse legal language has similar words, for exam-
ple arinelja (“hearth co-wife” in the law books) and fylgikona “companion woman.” All of
them are reminiscent of the verbs used by the Vulgate for David and Abishag: “foveat
dormiebatque.”
98 Au novel tans pascour que florist l’aube espine, in Zink, ed., Belle (1978), no. 13: “Sabine, dit
li cuens, vos gens cors m’atalente” (v. 15); “Qu’en soignentage soit usee ma jovente” (v. 19);
v. 30; “Et Sabine a touz jours de la terre honie” (v. 124). This chanson de toile is attributed to
the trouvère Audefroi le Bâtard (Arras, early 13th century), an example of that ‘popular-
izing’ genre of courtly poetry, whose metrical text, mimicking a folk song, was put into the
mouth of a girl sitting in her chamber. In this song, Sabine is the chambermaid (sa pucele)
of the count’s wife; the wife protests against the concubinage, and is sent away as a result.
Her sons grow up to be knights and succeed in reinstating their mother.
326 Chapter 6

and held prisoner, she had to look on as the king stopped being discreet with
one of his mistresses and—demonstratively—brought her into the public
sphere.99 Walter de Clifford, an upwardly mobile castellan in the Welsh march,
who had acquired his fief around 1150 during the last stages of the ‘Civil War,’
must have been delighted at his daughter Rosamund’s ascent in the two years
following the royal couple’s split.
‘Fair Rosamund’ has become a favourite of English historical romance ever
since the first embellishments of her story in the fourteenth century. This is at
the expense of the historically tangible figure. To emotionalize Eleanor’s reac-
tion as ‘jealousy’ is to misunderstand the political explosiveness of the conflict—
which in no way means that the ousted queen or her followers could not actu-
ally have engineered Rosamund’s early death, as the legend would have it.
Stripped of its legendary embellishments, the story exhibits certain parallels
with that of Philip i eighty years previously. Bertrade’s origin in the milieu of
French castellans, in contrast to the princess Bertha, who had ensured legiti-
mate offspring, resembles Rosamund’s position vis-à-vis Eleanor. There are
­differences too: Henry ii’s open relationship with Rosamund remained an epi-
sode and never came to be, as Philip i’s had, a political issue that would divide
the kingdom’s magnates and bishops for a decade;100 Eleanor was still queen—
and when her sons Richard (r. 1189–99) and John (r. 1199–1216) finally ­succeeded

99 Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), De principis institutione, cited after T[homas]

A[ndrew] A[rcher], “Rosamond Clifford,” in: Dictionary of National Biography (1937/38),
vol. 4, 531–33: “[Rex] qui adulter antea fuerat occultus effectus postea manifestus non
mundi quidem rosa iuxta falsam et frivolitatissimam compositionem sed inmundi verius
rosa vocata palam et impudenter abutendo.” Gerald specifies the period of this open con-
nection: “biennali vero clade sedata.” Archer has traced the later development of the de-
tails about the labyrinthine pleasure-house at Woodstock where Eleanor finally tracked
down and killed her rival. It should not, however, therefore be dismissed as entirely leg-
endary: several complementary chronicle and documentary accounts concerning Rosa-
mund’s burial place in Godstow Nunnery (ten kilometres south of Woodstock, near Ox-
ford) make it appear at least plausible that Henry’s favourite may have lived at what was
one of the preferred royal residences in the 12th century, however elaborate its architec-
ture may have been at the time.
100 The case was the subject of much controversy, judging by the chroniclers’ varied com-
ments: William of Newburgh (Historia rerum Anglicarum iii, 26) defends Henry some-
what by specifying that the king had “made ample use of the queen in bed in her time,”
and only when she was no longer fertile did he yield to desire and father bastards (“regina
pro tempore sufficienter usus ad sobolem, ea desinente parere, sectando voluptatem spu-
rios fecit”). Ralph Niger, who paints Henry in the blackest terms, does not fail to mention—
topically and, at least some respects, accurately—that the debauched king, emulating his
grandfather Henry i, vented his illicit desires first on the wives and then the daughters of
the noblility; for the sake of whoring without inhibition, he had the queen shut in the
dungeon (“corruptor pudicitiae et avum sequens in flagitiis, primo in sponsas, post in
The Comparative View: western Europe 327

their father, Eleanor, aged almost seventy, remained the respected queen moth-
er until her death in 1204. Crucially, Henry and Rosamund’s relationship did not
produce a son who, like Bertrade’s son Philip, could have become a serious com-
petitor for the designatus (at the time, Henry the “young king,” Henry ii’s
and Eleanor’s eldest son, who died in 1183). But these differences should not
distract from the essential similarity of both cases, and the course of events
might have demonstrated yet more similarities in different circumstances—if,
say, Rosamund had lived longer. In any case, any legal distinction between Ber-
trade the uxor and Rosamund the amica was not among the decisive factors.
Only a few such agonistic constellations between men (King Philip i vs. Fulk
of Anjou, the Capetian Louis vii vs. the Plantagenet Henry ii) or women (Ber-
tha vs. Bertrade, Eleanor vs. Rosamund) have left any trace. They mark the es-
calation of tensions into open conflict. By contrast, no source tells us whether
a similarly agonistic situation existed between some (or all) of Henry i’s at
least twelve women or whether competition brought tangible consequences
for the women, their relatives, or their children. (Strictly speaking, we do not
even know whether and how many of Henry’s women competed at any given
time, though simultaneous relationships are likely, given what we know about
their children’s lives.) References to the women are so scanty that it is not even
apparent whether the women regularly accompanied the king as he travelled
his kingdom from the Maine to the Tweed, or lived ‘uxorilocally’ in their re-
spective countries to receive the king as occasions arose. What held true for the
knight’s daughter from the Welsh march was not necessarily true for the French
magnate’s daughter.
In light of the scantiness of the information and the consistent refusal to
narrativize rulers’ women, the comparative view might shed some light. Given
broadly analogous real-life circumstances, the findings from the North con-
cerning occasional, though not regular, fierce competition between women
may, as a hypothesis, be transferred to the West. Overly fierce competition for
the ‘resource,’ the king, as a source of material support and habitual future se-
curity would be less necessary and perhaps even counterproductive, as the
Norman and Angevin rulers were among the most successful accumulators of
material and immaterial capital known to twelfth-century Europe; the cake
was, so to speak, big enough for all, as long as the top position was not at stake.
Even at the level of the counts of Guînes and castellans of Ardres, at least a
number of puellulae and their offspring were permanently provided for.

f­ilias procerum illecebras exercens … Reginam, ut liberius stupris vacaret …, in domo

carceris inclusit”).
328 Chapter 6

Here, too, much hinges on the concrete details of the polygynous environ-
ment. If everything took place within the confines of the castle of Ardres or the
palaces of the Anglo-Norman kings, conflicts over rank of the kind described
by Snorri Sturluson between the king’s widow Ástríð and the queen’s mother
Álfhild could hardly be avoided; if, however, the women were dispersed geo-
graphically (or at least over several households), the latent competition is like-
ly to lose much of its sting. However, the underlying agon is always present
implicitly, affecting not only the women themselves but, where appropriate,
the groups behind them. The Beaumont twins Robert and Waleran must have
closely monitored whether their sister Isabelle held a fitting position in the
king’s favour or was being challenged by other amicae, perhaps of competing
origin. And the king, for his part, may not have forgotten the important role of
the Beaumonts in securing Normandy when he “purposefully spread the royal
seed” elsewhere.101 The strikingly wide geographical distribution of the origin
of Henry i’s women (in contrast to their subsequent endowment which, as
stated, was focused on strategically important zones) may indicate that the
king was anxious to minimize such conflicts.

10 In Comparison: the Expressive Aspect

If the agonistic aspect of Western European elite polygyny can, more often
than not, only be indirectly inferred, this is even more the case for the ‘expres-
sive’ aspect. The chronicles are as silent about public opinion on individual
relationships as the sagas are forthcoming. In Lambert of Ardres’ chronicle,
concubines of the Artesian aristocrats abound, yet the way they are discussed
leaves us completely in the dark as to what—besides the charm of “spotting a
particularly beautiful girl’s body” (invenit sibi prestantissime forme puellam)—
actually prompted the relationships. After deflowering his first cousin and fa-
thering the chronicler, Count Baldwin slept “with another young girl of out-
standing, truly exceptional forms and high nobility” (cum quadam alia emi-
nentis, immo supereminentis forme, generose nobilitatis iuvencula), his brother
Arnold “had an affair with a girl from Herchem called Helewide” (cum puella
quadam de Herchem nata nomine Helewide rem habuit) and, shortly after, “with
a certain girl from Ardres” (cum quadam puella in Ardee rem habuit). A puella
pulcherrima here, an eminentissimae pulchritudinis puella there, but we never

101 gra v, 412: “… ubi regium semen procedere posset in effectum.”; see the discussion above.
The Comparative View: western Europe 329

get to know them. It is easy to see why Georges Duby and others who deal with
northern French noble houses dismiss them summarily as “playmates.”
Did those lords have occasion to send ‘expressive’ signals with specific puel-
lae? It might be possible to localize relationships, plot them on a map of land
holdings or donation charters, and so make assumptions about whether sleep-
ing with a girl from a particular village could be interpreted as, for instance, an
act of territorial aggression or revendication. Material inducements, hopes of
social advancement on the part of the girls or their parents, the count’s compe-
tition with his brother about resembling Jupiter, or simply opportune circum-
stances may all have led to the formation of spontaneous relationships. The
comparative perspective does not answer these questions, but it does make it
possible to ask them in the first place.
Returning to some of Henry i’s relationships, however, we may be more san-
guine about assuming that all the king’s relationships that are known to us in
the first place held social significance, for we are dealing with a minimal cata-
logue, already reduced twice over: for one, the women are known to us only in
connection with their children, and not every royal ‘sowing’ bore fruit. Occa-
sionally we have chance supplementary details, such as an entry in the royal
accounts for 1184 for the delivery of garments to a woman called Bellebelle—
presumably a telling sobriquet—and the payment of £30 to another amica re-
gis.102 Such details are not available for Henry i, from whose reign only one
pipe roll survives, but they illustrate how fragmentary the narrative sources
are. On the other hand, even women with children may be unknown: these are
‘dark numbers,’ and we can barely even begin to guess the size of the figure.103
In some cases, it may have already been quite clear in advance which rela-
tionships would prove “officially” usable; the mutual benefit of Henry’s liaison
with Isabelle de Meulan from the French-Norman border region is obvious.
Similarly, Henry’s relationship with Edith, daughter of Forn Sigulfsson of Cum-
bria, meant—or signified—the alliance of the rex Normanglorum with a local
chieftain in the Norse-Celtic world of the Irish Sea. This was in itself already a
valuable asset, such as the English kings on the other side of the Pennines
would not previously have been able to establish on their own. The relation-
ship then acquired special significance in light of competing claims from Scot-
land. Alexander i, who had married another of Henry i’s illegitimate daugh-
ters, died in 1124. His brother David i—who had grown up at the court of Henry

102 Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 99f.; 127.

103 See Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards (1984), 63, the table summarizing Henry i’s
24 known “bastards,” some nameless, and their mothers (where known), as well as the
inventory in Appendix D (cf. note 16).
330 Chapter 6

i and was well acquainted with his political style—had previously ruled in
southern Scotland under Alexander. After Henry i’s time, he successfully en-
gaged in southward Scottish expansion, securing the earldom of Northumbria
from King Stephen.
Under Plantagenet pressure, David’s grandson William ‘the Lion,’ later king
of Scots, to whom David transferred the earldom of Northumbria in 1152, mar-
ried one of Henry i’s great-granddaughters through his Norman ‘concubine’
Isabelle de Meulan. We know of six children which William had outside this
relationship. As far as we can tell, the mothers were all the daughters of the
local Northumbrian aristocracy. In view of the fact that Henry ii deprived Wil-
liam ‘the Lion’ of the earldom in 1157 when he was around seventeen, it is rea-
sonable to assume that his polygynous activities south of the border were to be
understood as an assertion of his continued claims.104 Competition between
the English and Scottish kings for Northumbria and Cumbria/Strathclyde, act-
ed out through polygyny among other means, allowed local leaders and their
women some temporary room for manoeuvre—and miscalculation: “noble-
women and chaste virgins were abducted together with the other women and
prey. Naked and tied together with ropes and straps, they were driven forward
with lance and spears.”105
Things were similarly warlike, and ‘expressive,’ on the Welsh march. With
the death of Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr in 1093, Anglo-Norman ‘marcher lords’
began ruling de facto in Deheubarth/Suthwallia (south-west Wales). Several of
Rhys’ sons from different relationships were killed or fled to Ireland. His daugh-
ter Nest, who on her mother’s side was related to the royal family of Powys in
northeast Wales, was married off by Henry i to his follower Gerald fitzWalter of
Windsor, who was also entrusted with Pembroke on the southwestern tip of
Wales. Either before or during their marriage (the chronology is far from clear)
the king fathered a son with Nest. He received his father’s name—as far as we
know, the only one of his mistresses’ sons to do so, although others bore the

104 See Owen, William the Lion (1997), 67; 82. On Northumbria as an independent historical
region, cf. Musgrove, The North of England (1990); Rollason, Northumbria (2003).
105 Richard of Hexham, De gestis regis Stephani, 156 (of a Scottish invasion in 1138): “solas
nobiles matronas et castas virgines, mixtim cum aliis feinis et cum praeda, pariter abdux-
erunt. Nudatas quoque et turmatim resticulis et corrigiis colligatas et copulatas lanceis et
telis suis compungentes ante se illas abegerunt.” When the Picts tired of abusing the wom-
en “more brutorum animalium,” they either made the prisoners their ancillae or swapped
them for cattle with other “barbarians.” Richard’s account is complemented by contem-
porary observers, which suggest the Scots always acted thus in war, albeit even more than
usual in this instance.
The Comparative View: western Europe 331

family names of Robert, William, and Matilda—and was apparently initially

considered perfectly capable of succeeding.
Nest became a pressing political issue in 1106, when the local ruler in West
Wales, Owain ap Cadwgan, attacked Gerald’s castle of Cenarth Bychan, torched
several buildings, forced the lord to make an embarrassing escape, and seized
Nest with her children.106 We have no means of knowing whether the attack
was intended and/or construed as a direct attack against Henry i not only as
king, but also as Nest’s man (and therefore one of the losers in the agon with
the victorious attacker Owain). In any case, Henry arranged Gerald’s retaliatory
campaign to Ceredigion—a region of non-Norman Wales characterized by
“strong regional self-awareness”107—which would prove fatal for Owain and
earned Nest the epithet “the Welsh Helena.”
As in other cases we have seen, the context, brought to a head by the 1109
attack, is of considerable political relevance; moreover, Henry, Nest’s son with
the king, would in later years be actively engaged in the Norman-Angevin
Welsh campaigns (he died during the conquest of Ynys Môn/Anglesey in 1158),
and his two sons were among the most important leaders of the 1169/71 inva-
sion of Ireland, and holders of seized land afterwards. However, the only rea-
son we know about the relationship at all (besides a brief note in the Annales
Cambriae, where Henry is inaccurately described as the son of Henry ii), is due
to the works of Gerald of Wales, who mentions it because his mother was one
of the daughters of Nest and her husband Richard. Through her Gerald estab-
lishes his descent from Welsh princely houses, an argument to back his candi-
dacy for the bishopric of Menevia/St Davids.108 Had Nest’s grandson not by
chance been a prolific author and ambitious churchman, we might know as
little about her as the kings’ presumably many other women.

11 In Comparison: the Performative Aspect

The sources leave us very much in the dark about the final aspect, the elusive
‘performative aspect’ in which the generation of meaning is not subsequent to
the act (seizing Nest only becomes ‘expressively’ effective when the public and
King Henry i learn of it), but is inherent in the act itself (in one version of the

106 Brut y Tywysogion [“Chronicle of the Princes”], s.a. 1106. Various details are offered by the
different versions of the chronicle; this is the common core in them all.
107 J. B[everly] Smith, “Ceredigion,” in LdM, vol. 2, col. 1630.
108 Giraldus Cambrensis, De rebus a se gestis c. 1, 9, and passim; cf. Kightly, Medieval Wales
(1988), 7f.
332 Chapter 6

Welsh princely chronicle, Owain rapes Nest immediately on taking the

castle).109
Certainly the approximation and equation of ‘woman’ and ‘land,’ as sug-
gested by agrarian experiences and physiological-lexical ideas, was common in
Western Europe. At the beginning of the Norman chronicle tradition around
1020, Dudo of Saint-Quentin describes both conquered Normandy and Gisla,
daughter of King Charles the Simple—given to the conquering chieftain Rollo
as part of the settlement that established the Normans at the mouth of the
Seine—in mirror-image expressions as “desolate and untilled” (penitus deso-
lata… aratro non exercita) but fruitful when cultivated by men (si fuerit fre-
quentia hominum usitata, valde erit fertilis et uberrima). A century and a half
later, the Plantagenet version of the story by Benoît still exploits the grammati-
cal gender of terre and fille. Benoît has Norman magnates exhort Rollo on the
subject of “Pren la!” for a good hundred verses, with passages such as: “Let us
also think of populating the earth—and living off the fruits that she will pro-
duce for us.”110 While this is partly an echo of the Promised Land and the Ae-
neid, it is also a particular way of ‘feminizing’ the Norman settlement, a subject
to which we will return.
We never learn how all this was acted out on an everyday level. Still, we
may ask whether the balanced geographical origin of Henry i’s women—
a Norman from the old heartland, the daughter of a French magnate, some
Anglo-Norman and Saxon women from England, a Welsh woman, a Cumbrian
of Scandinavian descent, and so on—which Kathleen Thompson with good
reasons refuses to view as a conscious gesture of ‘ethnic’ integration111—might
have some such ‘performative’ resonance. With a view to aristocratic narra-
tives about the Otherland of ‘Logres’ such as the Elucidation with its story of
the abused maidens of the well we may feel entitled to ask the question; com-
parison with the polygyny of a Jarl Hákon may allow us to cautiously answer
in the affirmative.
It is ultimately a question of method. Even if one is not prepared to hy-
pothetize about ‘performance,’ the more tangible aspects discussed here
still suggest that—with some significant differences, particularly in relation
to inheritance rights—the aristocracies of Western and Northern Europe
shared fundamentally similar polygynous practices, which appear more dis-
similar than they might because of differences in the rhetorics of the narrative

109 Brut y Tywysogion, Peniarth Ms. 20, s.a. 1106.

110 Dudo of Saint-Quentin ii, 26; Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique, v. 8580ff.: “Penson de la
terre popler; Sin vivum des fruiz des or més Dunt ele nos rendra adés.” I discuss the Nor-
man chronicles in more detail below.
111 Cf. Thompson, “Affairs of State” (2003); the notion is clearly based on both the postmod-
ern and reawakened premodern interest in ethnicity.
The Comparative View: western Europe 333

s­ ources, i­ ncluding their language, and the uneven distribution of documentary

sources. In the West, magnate polygyny essentially eludes narrativization (as
opposed to ‘flashlight’ mentions). This phenomenon, shared by Benedictine
chroniclers and courtly poets alike, is part of the characteristic monogamism
of the high medieval West—that region in which the ‘secular’ and the ‘ecclesi-
astical’ models of marriage were developing in the later eleventh century and
onwards. For all the nuances in form and foundation, the two models had one
crucial thing in common: they both aimed at monogamy, either according and
subject to reinvigorated church law and pastoral of mores (the “ecclesiastical
model”), or in the sense of a privileged form of relationship which granted one
specific woman and her future children an immediate and durable precedence
which was no longer up for negotiation (the “secular model” with its differ-
entiation of legitimate and illegitimate children). Before moving on to a final
assessment, however, we must look at the one major exception: Normandy
before 1066.

12 Polygyny as Political Principle: Normandy

The peculiar self-representation of Norman polygyny is one of the many sides

of ‘Normandy before 1066.’ In an understandable reaction against the perpetu-
ation of the ‘Norman Myth’ cultivated especially in imperial Britain, scholar-
ship in the second half of the twentieth century tended, sometimes explicitly
so, to downplay the discontinuities of the Norman settlement and emphasized
the continuation of Carolingian structures and rapid assimilation of the Nor-
dic newcomers into existing West Frankish society.112 As a consequence, the
older inclination to explain Norman peculiarities—above all the expansionary
force demonstrated in England and Sicily, probably unparalleled in the history
of the European Middle Ages—in ethnic terms, highlighting some intangible
Scandinavian-Viking quality of the Northmanni, may now have been set aside
for good. On the other hand, the decision to consider the Norman history of
the tenth and eleventh centuries “entirely in its French context”113 and to em-
phasize the continuity of Carolingian structures even during the invasions,
now shrunk to a mere ‘event,’ may carry the risk of treating the statements of
the written testimonies—necessarily Latin/Carolingian—too much at face

112 For a clear statement of this view, see Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982), and more re-
cently, Lifshitz, “La Normandie carolingienne” (1998).
113 Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982), xviii. However, he also warns against the trend, cur-
rent at that time, of minimizing the Scandinavian influence in the tenth century (16).
334 Chapter 6

value. The debate over the ‘mutation féodale,’ likewise centred on the decades
around 1000 if mostly on other parts of West Frankland, has in any case shown
that documentary stability can be evidence for a desperate conservatism faced
with rapid change.114 In Norman history, ‘continuity’ no longer seems a safe
bet. It remains striking that around 900 the ecclesiastical structure suffered a
long-term collapse in large parts of what would be Normandy,115 and the re-
establishment of bishoprics and the refoundation of monasteries only got un-
der way around 1000.
David Bates’s formula of “heavy institutional continuity combined with a
drastic rupture in the personnel of the ruling classes”116 has been convincingly
questioned by Eleanor Searle, who in her 1988 monograph analyzed the par-
ticular political culture of Normandy with the avowed intention of producing
an ‘alteritizing’ account. Among many other points, Searle reevaluates Dudo’s
portrayal of a “deserted, unploughed, depopulated country,” much quoted by
those who accuse the chronicler of ignorance of the vigour of Carolingian
Neustria at the beginning of Norman settlement. In Searle’s view, the Norse
warbands arriving in the latter half of the tenth century coalesced with the
earlier, dispersed and rather weak Seine Norse to form a coherent group which
accentuated their ‘difference’ from surrounding Francia rather than the merg-
ing and acculturating that went on in the Loire and Rhine-Scheldt zones of
Norse settlement. This precarious coherence was secured through ‘predato-
ry kinship’ (the title catchword of Searle’s book) and the cultivation of a no-
tional together- and otherness which is reflected in Dudo’s work: in a sense,
the Normans would only ever reach ‘empty land.’117 Klaus van Eickels has pro-
vided a balanced description of the autonomous Norman political culture, il-
lustrating how concepts of masculinity not only became effective in political

114 Cf. White, “Feudal Revolution” (1996). Lifshitz, Norman Conquest (1995), draws attention
to signs of a profound ‘religious-psychological’ crisis reflected in hagiographical texts:
while the demons in texts from before the invasion are almost exclusively associated with
temptation or disease, in later texts they are disturbingly omnipresent, and whole ‘street
gangs’ of them throw Rouen into confusion.
115 Of the seven dioceses of the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, the bishop lists are inter-
rupted (or bishoprics abandoned) for Avranches 862–990, Bayeux 876 to around 1000,
Sées from 910, Coutances from about 900 to 1025.
116 Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982), 16.
117 Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), 242, contra Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982), 11, for
whom the claim that the region was (literally) devoid of population is “forever refuted” by
the work of Lucien Musset and Jean Yver on the agricultural and commercial structure.
Searle’s suggestion would seem to be that however densely populated Neustria was when
the Norsemen arrived, it was ‘empty’ in the sense that it was theirs for the taking, much
like Iceland, though there was no population there so it had to be imported.
The Comparative View: western Europe 335

­practice, but were also utilized for reflective self-description and differentia-
tion, especially vis-à-vis Francia.118 In much the same way, the polygyny of the
‘jarls of Rouen’119 is to be understood, not as a quasi-essential cultural ‘heri-
tage’ (least of all as an element inherent in some obscure ethnic Scandinavian
‘origin’), but as a cultural system developed and discussed under contingent
circumstances.
The key figure here is Gunnor/Gunnvǫr. Born around 950, she is central to
Norman dynastic history as the ‘concubine’ and later ‘wife’ of Richard i (r. 942–
96) and mother of Richard ii (r. 996–1026).120 For half a century (she died in
1031) she was at the centre of ducal power, as evidenced by the documents she
witnessed and particularly her position in them: she testifies after the duke,
overall on a par with her son Robert, the archbishop of Rouen, and before her
son’s wives.121 But her significance for Norman history goes far beyond this.
During the profound upheaval and renewal of the Norman leadership in the
second half of Richards i’s reign, either as a symbol or an actor she played the
decisive role.122

118 Van Eickels, “Domestizierte Maskulinität” (2002); Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens
(2002).
119 The sagas refer to the Norman princes as Rúðujarlar; cf. HsH c. 24, KnS c. 9. While the title
dux is used in Norman chronicles and documents before 1066, it is neither the most com-
mon term (which is comes) nor used consistently. However, the chieftains/rulers/princes
of Rouen are conventionally referred to as “dukes” and, as such, the term is used here.
120 Van Houts, “Countess Gunnor” (1999) offers a summary of the well-known biographical
data as well as a commentary on her possible literary patronage.
121 Van Houts, “Countess Gunnor” (1999), 17 (eleven documents overall). Half are originals,
the rest mainly survive in cartularies.
122 Searle, “Dudo of Saint-Quentin” (1984), and Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), assumes that,
faced with Frankish pressure, the threatened colonists in Rouen and Pays de Caux (the
coastal region between the lower Seine and the English Channel) were significantly
strengthened around 960/70 by the arrival of new warriors and settlers focused on Coten-
tin, much like the Norse settlements on the lower Loire and Scheldt. The readiness of the
newcomers to accept the ‘chieftain’ they encountered, along with his Christian cult,
marked the actual foundation of Normandy; Gunnor is to be understood as the daughter
of an exponent of these new arrivals, and her prominent position as a consequence. Even
if one was unconvinced by this hypothesis, Gunnor, whose “noble” and “Danish” origin is
emphasized in almost every text, would remain symbolic of the emphasis on Norman
particularity over the dukes’ Frankish marriages, which always remained genealogically
fruitless. Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (21999), 277, regards Gunnor’s ‘noble and Danish’
background as encomiastic and without factual basis, but does not explain why such an
origin would have been impossible in his view. On the documentary evidence for the
wealth of Gunnor’s forefathers in Cotentin, see Searle, “Dudo of Saint-Quentin” (1984),
135; Van Houts, “Countess Gunnor” (1999), 8f.
336 Chapter 6

Norman political culture was based on two principles: first, the princely
line was conceived agnatically, each ruler only had one son with the capac-
ity to inherit—wholly different to Scandinavia and most of Western Europe,
though quite similar to the Ottonians. Any further sons were either ignored
or provided with dioceses; the fact that such sons were successfully exclud-
ed from the succession in almost every case is testimony to the desperate
strength of group cohesion. Second, the entire ruling group regarded itself
as a cognatic kin group, with Gunnor—or her “noble Danish” parents, who
remained unnamed—chosen as the principal ancestor.123 When Dudo of
Saint-Quentin, a Frankish canonicus who held a benefice in Normandy, wrote
his groundbreaking history of the Normans (De moribus et actis primorum
Normannorum ducum) around 1015/26, two elderly members of the ruling
group supplied both information (huius operis relatore[s]) and cues. One,
Rodulf of Ivry, was the uterine brother of Richard i, son of one of William
Longsword’s (r. 930–42)124 former wives from a later relationship. The other
was Gunnor herself, “a treasury of memories with her enormous capacity to
remember the past.”125 Witness to six decades of Norman history, she was
singularly well qualified for the task that fell to matrons such as her: the
stabilization of the memoria of her house126 and therefore probably in large
parts its ‘invention.’

123 For details, see genealogical tables 1–7 in Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988); White, “Sis-
ters and Nieces” (1921), 57–65 and 128–32; various individual studies in Keats-Rohan,
Family Trees (1997); Green, Aristocracy (1997); fundamentally, Klapisch-Zuber, L’ombre
des ancêtres (2000). According to the information collected by Robert de Torigni in
the mid-12th century and interpolated into the Gesta Normannorum ducum, the du-
cal/royal house, along with the Warenne, Giffard, Mortimer, Beaumont, Montgomery,
Clare, fitzOsbern and numerous subsequently less important branches all stemmed
from Gunnor, her brother Herfast/Árnfast, two sisters, and five nieces. According to
this genealogical understanding, from around 1030 marriages within the Norman aris-
tocracy were overwhelmingly endogamous—even when the practice was damaging, as
in the case of Henry i’s failed attempt to marry a concubine’s daughter to Walter de
Warenne.
124 Dudo himself calls her (iii, 42) “a certain very noble girl of the most attractive appear-
ance,” and follows with a versified appeal by the magnates, that the martyr Clioneus de-
liver himself to her “lawful embraces” for the sake of the state. For Flodoard of Reims, she
is a Breton, presumably taken captive.
125 Dudo iv, 125: “capacisque memoriae et recordationis thesauro profusius locupletat[a].”
126 Cf. Shopkow, History and Community (1997); Van Houts, Memory and Gender (1999); Van
Houts, History and Family Traditions (1999; collected articles). On Gunnor’s role in literary
production, cf. Ziolkowski, Jezebel (1989); Van Houts, “Jezebel and Semiramis” (1992); Bate,
“Les normands et la littérature latine” (2000).
The Comparative View: western Europe 337

It is tempting to ascribe her commitment to the reestablishment of the dio-

cese of Coutances127 not just, as hitherto argued,128 to her probable familial
origins in Cotentin and local solidarities, but also in connection to the founda-
tion myth of the civitas reported by Orderic Vitalis. A kind of proto-Christian
due to his clementia and service to the cause of God, not least by consistently
eschewing the persecution of Christians,129 Constantius Chlorus founds a city
called Constantia in outermost Neustria. “In this province he had a concubine
named Helena, with whom he fathered Constantine the Great, the later found-
er of Constantinople.”130 Coutances thus becomes a first Byzantium on the
English Channel, and a good example of Norman readiness for hyperbole. If
the suggestive idea had already been launched a century before Orderic, at the
time of the refoundation of the cathedral, it is easy to see that Gunnor, erst-
while concubina of Richard i, and her son of the same name had particular
cause to repeat the story and thus imbue local polygyny with universal mean-
ing: the sons of concubines become rulers of the world.131
Something similar happens in the strand of historiography initiated by Gun-
nor and Rodulf, of which Dudo is our first witness. If the ‘Norman myth’ flour-
ishing after Dudo bears the characteristics of the story of the chosen people,132
then consistent extramarital succession is the will of God. Norman historiogra-
phy goes on to eleborate on this from Dudo (c.1020) via William of Jumièges
(around 1060) and his interpolators Orderic Vitalis and Robert de Torigni
(c.1110/50) to the French versifications of the Plantagenet era (Wace around
1150, Benoît around 1170). For once, Western sources serve us better than the
sagas, whose narratives cannot be traced further back than c.1150: The story of
the Normans was continued, adapted, and applied to changing circumstances
over almost two centuries. We can thus see how the different versions handle

127 Its bishops had been officiating in ‘exile’ for some time at a church in Rouen, but it was
not until 1025 that Coutances was reestablished as the episcopal seat in western Cotentin,
abandoned almost a century and a half before. Gunnor was present for the laying of the
first stone.—See Toussaint, Coutances des origines à nos jours (1979).
128 Van Houts, “Countess Gunnor” (1999), 8f.
129 HE v 9 (with reference to Eusebius): “homines multa clementia, erga Deum uero religione
utebatur maxima …”
130 he v 9: “et in ipsa prouincia concubinam nomine Helenam habuit, ex qua Constantinum
magnum conditorem postea Constantinopolis genuit.”
131 Ralph Glaber (Historiae iv 6) justifies the Norman “usus a primo adventu istius gentis” of
only making the sons of concubines princes with reference to the sons of Jacob and the
proto-Christicola Constantine. The Burgundian monk would not have been known in Nor-
mandy, so his view demonstrates that the consistent Norman system was recognized as
such elsewhere.
132 Cf. Davis, Normans (1976); Musset, “Idée” (1993).
338 Chapter 6

the same basic stock of polygynous situations to ever-changing needs and

ends.

13 The Spoils of the Conqueror: Rollo and Poppa

The author is Dudo, his hero is Rollo/Hrólf, the year of the story is c.890. Viewed
from Rouen and the lower Seine, where Rollo’s band are establishing them-
selves, Bayeux, the episcopal city in the fertile limestone plain of Bessin, is the
key to western expansion—the only option landwards, as Frankish pressure in
the east and south is overpowering.133 The riches of Bessin are the first to at-
tract attention: a shortage of supplies affect the plundering campaigns up the
Seine and interrupt the attacks on Robertine Paris (the land of the Normans’
‘natural enemies’ in the works of Dudo and his successors). But Bayeux, de-
fended by the brave comes Berengar, is no easy target; the Frankish defenders
even capture the Norman leader, Rollo’s faithful companion Botho, and the
Normans are forced to accept a one-year truce for having him returned. This
allows them to focus on Paris again, but once the deadline had passed, Rollo
leads the Normans west again, “attacked Bayeux, and took her by force.”134

Moreover, it pleased Rollo to take with him (secum laetus adduxit) a

maiden called Poppa, very beautiful, from a proud line, the daughter of
the mighty Berengar; and he took her to marriage (sibi connubio ascivit)
and had a son with her named William.135

The city taken, the girl taken—no one could be in any doubt about what kind
of connubium this was. In the view of the leading circles a century later, the sec-
ond duke of Normandy was not merely “from noble stock through his D ­ anish

133 The term ‘expansion’ does indeed disregard the reality of the first decades of Norse con-
quest, which was far more defensive than the jeremiads of the Frankish annalists suggest.
It would be better to say that, faced with Frankish pressure, Rollo had to secure at least the
west as a refuge and supply base. See most recently, Bauduin, La première Normandie
(2004); on the toponymy, most recently Lepelley, “Trace” (2002).
134 Dudo ii, 16: “Baiocas petit, eamque violenter cepit …” Classically, petere translates as “to
attack,” and Dudo’s classicizing Latin bears this out. But Dudo also knew that petere might
mean “ask for, demand”—in some respects, this amounts to the same thing from a Roman
general’s or a warband leader’s perspective.
135 Dudo ii, 16: “Quin etiam quamdam Popam virginem, specie decoram, superbo sanguine
concretam, praevalentis principis Berengarii filiam, secum laetus adduxit eamque sibi
connubio ascivit, et ex ea filium nomine Willelmum genuit.” For contextualization, see
Bauduin, “Chefs normands” (2005).
The Comparative View: western Europe 339

father, namely Rollo, and his Frankish mother, namely Poppa”136—he was also
the son of a Norse conqueror and a Frankish captive. It helped preserve the
political proportions vis-à-vis Francia.
Some thirty years after Dudo, William, monk of Jumièges Abbey, just a cou-
ple of bends of the Seine downriver from Rouen and already favoured by Wil-
liam Longsword, set about to retell Dudo’s ornate epic with Benedictine sobri-
ety. In William’s account, there is no struggle for the city and woman extending
over several years: Bayeux falls, carnage ensues, and

there Rollo also caught a very noble girl named Poppa, the daughter of
the outstanding Berengar, and tied her to himself in the Danish style
(more Daniso sibi copulauit) a little while later. He fathered William and a
very beautiful daughter named Gerloc with her.137

Even the monk does not forego the obvious word pair urbs capta–puella capta,
which the Normans, so notorious for abducting women in the Frankish and
English annals,138 happily incorporated into their own self-representation, and
which Dudo had already done justice to with his unambiguous-ambiguous
language.
His face-saving invention of the “relationship according to the manner
of the Danes” (puellam … more Danico sibi copulauit) has been immense-
ly successful. Wary of blatant warrior polygyny, the Benedictine sought to
both ennoble and pardon his lords’ seizure of young women by referring
to their origin. This attempt not only succeeded among his medieval suc-
cessors, but also prompted modern scholarship to construe a specifically
Norman variant of the so-called Friedelehe.139 William wrote roughly in the

136 Dudo iii, 36: “ex prosapia insigni, patre Daco, scilicet Rollone, matre Francigena, videlicet
Poppa …”
137 gnd ii, 6: “in qua [sc. urbe = Bayeux] quamdam nobilissimam puellam nomine Popam,
filiam scilicet Berengerii illustris uiri, capiens non multo post more Danico sibi copulauit.
Ex qua Guillelmum filium genuit filiamque nomine Gerloc ualde decoram.”
138 Cf. the collection of documents by Zettel, Bild der Normannen (1977), 133ff.
139 “Mariage et concubinage légal” (1952), a study published by Elizabeth Eames in the lead-
ing historical periodical for Normandy, was very influential here, with the idea that what
William of Jumièges, and after him other chroniclers, called a relationship more Danico
was in fact the “Friedelehe” then dear to German legal historians, according to which a
friðla/frilla was a comrade-like partner in a free, consensual relationship. Many authors
since, taking William’s remark at face value, have similarly assumed the existence of a
peculiar early Norman institution of ‘free marriage.’ Although the “Friedelehe” concept
has long been refuted, it seems to survive, along with the early Norman dukes’ “Danish
340 Chapter 6

period 1060/70,140 just as the councils of the church province of Rouen were be-
ginning the reception of the Reformist sexual morality,141 and, with reference to
the customs of recent converts (in William, Frankish marriages are con­cluded
Christiano more), he found a formula which made it possible to apply to ‘his’
dukes the rules on the tolerability of concubinage for a given affectio, duration,
and exclusivity, which had been customary since late antiquity. However well
the formula dovetails with both medieval and present-day assumptions about
ethnicity and cultural heritage, there is no indication whatsoever that such an
institution existed in the lived world—unless, of course, the accumulation of
women as a matter of course may indeed have appeared as a mos danicus to
a monastic observer from an abbey proud of its Merovingian tradition.142 But
Poppa, or rather the actual, real-life girl in an analogous situation to the ‘Poppa’
of Dudo’s and William’s chronicles, would in any event have been one of the
women who owed her retrospective promotion to quasi-spouse to the selec-
tion of her son as Rollo’s successor—much as in the case of Jón Loptsson (see
Chapter 2). Indeed, William of Jumièges has his ‘Poppa’ disappear as soon as
Rollo has married the ‘Lavinia’ figure of Gisla, daughter of Charles the Simple,
Christiano more following the so-called agreement of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in
911. Only after she dies childless, (William says without so much as a trace of
a wink), did the duke reestablish his relationship with the abandoned Poppa,
who had already given him a son, William, now fully grown.143 Canon law is
satisfied to the letter.
A few decades later, the situation had changed. The gradual integration of
Lower into Upper Normandy, by no means complete in 1050, lost much of its

marriages,” in Norman history as well as in general handbooks (cf. Otis-Cour, Lust und
Liebe [2000], 120f.).
140 Gesta Normannorum ducum (1998), xxxii.
141 Lisieux in 1055 (the deposition of Richard i’s ‘illegitimate’ son Mauger as archbishop of
Rouen) and Rouen in c.1060 contain provisions on priestly concubinage, and the elabo-
rate canons of Rouen, 1072, and especially Lillebonne, 1080, also touch on issues of divorce
and incest; see Foreville, “Synod of the Province of Rouen” (1976), 19–39. More on Mauger
below.
142 Founded in the seventh century, the abbey was abandoned during the invasions and only
reestablished in the early eleventh century.—Besides the collection Jumièges. Congrès
scientifique du xiiie centenaire (1955), which remains essential, and the survey by Le
Maho, L’Abbaye de Jumièges (2001), for the history of the monastery during the invasion
see now Keats-Rohan, “Francs, Scandinaves ou Normands?” (2005), and for prosopogra-
phy, Gazeau, Normannia monastica, vol. 2 (2008), 14370.
143 gnd ii, 15: “Per idem tempus morte preuenta uxor eius absque liberis moritur et dux re-
pudiatam Popam ex qua filium nomine Willelmum iam adultum genuerat, iterum repen-
tens, sibi copulauit.” Dudo says nothing about this recurrence.
The Comparative View: western Europe 341

significance in light of the conquest of England. Bayeux was no longer Rouen’s

antagonist144 but the diocese of William’s half-brother Odo, one of the key
players in the establishment of Norman rule in England. When a cleric named
Wace, born in Jersey and raised in Caen, began his Roman de Rou around 1160
at the court of Henry ii Plantagenet, the emphasis of the ‘Poppa’ story was
quite different:

Count Berengar had a very beautiful daughter. She was called Poppa and
she was a very noble girl. She did not yet have a bosom, not even the buds
of breasts; there was no nobler woman, nor a nobler girl. Rou [= Rollo],
who greatly desired her, made her his lover [amie]; she bore William,
nicknamed Longsword.145

There is no longer any trace of the mos Danicus: the object of desire resembles
the pucelles and amies of other aristocratic campaigns of conquest in every
detail. Considering that much of the change of tone is caused by the change of
poetic language (French verse instead of Latin prose), we should not underes-
timate the finesse with which the Norman clerc works his literary models. He
reuses the identification of taking girls and castles, as found in Dudo and Wil-
liam of Jumièges, but judges them too crude for a courtly age. So he conceals
it behind a biblical intertext: “She is still small and without breasts … ‘I am a
wall, and my breasts are towers!’”146 Rollo thus becomes a new Solomon in a

144 In Dudo (iv, 68), William Longsword has his son Richard sent to Bayeux to study the Da-
cisca eloquentia, to complement the Romana he had acquired in Rouen. This remark has
prompted much argument about the survival of Norse in Lower Normandy and its early
extinction around Rouen, though as becomes apparent in Dudo’s sequel—especially the
famous nine-day palaver with the pagan Danish chieftains—the point was not primary
language acquisition but eloquence and the practice of the specific political rhetoric of
the independent chiefs in the West. The purported expansion of Rouen’s rule to the whole
of later ‘Normandy’ in 924/933 is a later fiction, concerned with territorial/familial cohe-
sion. In fact, the west, especially the Cotentin Peninsula—a landscape neatly separate
from the plain around Caen and the lower Seine valley—long maintained a notable dis-
tance from the entourage of the princes. It hardly participated in the conquest of Eng-
land, but was soon far more involved in Sicily.
145 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 2, v. 591–96: “Li quens Berengier out une fille moult bele, Pope
l’apeloit l’on, moult ert gente pucele, N’avoit encor eu sain ne triant ne mamele, Ne savoit
l’en plus gente dame ne dameisele. Rou en a fait s’amie, qui moult l’a desiree, De li‚ fu nez
Guillaume qui out non Longue Espee.”
146 Song of Sol. 8:8;10: “soror nostra parva et ubera non habet … ‘ego murus et ubera mea sicut
turris.’”
342 Chapter 6

further, exquisite way. His descendants need not be ashamed of their origin—a­
sensitive issue in view of Henry ii’s great-grandfather William ‘the Bastard,’
who was usually best left unmentioned in the king’s presence.147 Such an amie
merits the top position herself, once the princess Gisla had died childless: “Af-
terwards, Rou married Poppa and kept her for a long time.”148
Wace’s successor as courtly historiographer of the Plantagenet court, Benoît
de Sainte-Maure, did little to change his model, but did develop Wace’s six
lines in Alexandrine metre into forty-two octosyllabic verses. In the process,
the prepubescent trouvaille becomes a courtly beauty matching the standard
descriptio puellae of the day, with an only slightly daring emphasis:

Rou saw her so pleasant, so beautiful, and so wonderful to look at: such
beautiful hair, such a beautiful face, fresher than rose and lily; such a
beautiful mouth, such beautiful eyes, which contained no falsehood or
pride, such a well-formed figure and such beautiful arms—more words I
dare not make.149

Benoît apparently did not wish to dispense with the older model entirely, how-
ever, and subsequently repeats the sentiment that at the sight of her face and
beautiful breast “the duke was overcome by desire.”150 But what consumes the
duke is ‘courtly love,’ fine amor, which brings the couple together in ethnic
­solemnity—reinstated by Benoît for the occasion:

147 An episode in the Magna vita of Hugh of Lincoln (iii, 10) describes how the bishop, sum-
moned to the king in a tense situation, forces himself into the circle of the king’s hunt-
ing companions resting in the forest despite a massive show of royal wrath. After a few
minutes of nervous silence, the bishop murmurs to the king, who is picking at a finger
dressing with needle and thread: “How you remind me of your family in Falaise” (“quam
similis es modo cognatis tuis de Falesia”). The king can scarcely believe that someone
dares to allude to the rumoured lowly origin of the mother of William the Conqueror, and
collapses in a fit of laughter. The few who heard Hugh’s words hardly trust their ears: “mi-
rantur enim supra modum sub tali articulo tale improperium tanto principi ab homine
tali fuisse intortum.” Once the king has composed himself, he even explains the joke at his
expense.
148 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 2, v. 1289: “Donc espousa Rou Pope, qu’il tint puiz longuement.”
149 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Histoire, v. 6295–6302: “Cele vit Rou si agraable, Si bele e si tres
remirable, Si tres beiaus chés, si tres biaus vis, Plus freis de rose e flor de lis, Si belle boiche
e si beiaus oiz Ou n’apareist mau ne orguiz, Si bien fait cors e si beiaus braz. Autre parole
n’os en faz.”
150 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Histoire, v. 6313–16: “Quer de si tres grant beiauté fine Mire son vis
e sa petrine Que de voleir, ce li est vis, En a tot le coraige espris.”
The Comparative View: western Europe 343

He took her as a wife with great solemnity, with great joy and merriment,
according to the custom and the law that the Danes have in Denmark. He
held her in much honour.151

William of Jumièges’ century-old invention suggests itself at just the moment

in the romance when listeners begin wondering just what difference there is
between Pope, the courtly lover of the ducal ancestor Rou, and Bellebelle and
the others who adorned the account books and bed of the reigning king—but
whose sons did not rise to become sole heir. The lay monogamism that regu-
lated succession in the Angevin empire may have been an even more sensitive
issue than its ecclesiastical counterpart which William of Jumièges had had to
come to terms with a century earlier. Just in case the costume and lei of the
Danish forebears do not suffice in the long run, Benoît also has the lovers come
together in proper consensual church marriage following the expedient death
of the Frankish wife: “When she was dead, he took Pope back again and mar-
ried her [l’esposa] because he loved her the most. He had expelled her, without
malice, for the daughter of the king of France, but never had he forgotten the
great love [amor] he had for her.”152 The woman seized by Vikings has, over the
course of a century and a half, become the heroine of a romance novel. There
is just one only constant in the many shapes of ‘Poppa’: the legitimacy of Wil-
liam, second ruler of the Normans, conceived in a relationship which could be
just about anything except a regular marriage.
Once established, the ‘Poppa’ figure goes serial: In the next generation of
Norman rulers, Sprota, consort of the second and mother of the third duke,
likewise appears a “very noble girl, who was joined to the duke in the Danish
fashion.”153 There are just two variations on the precursor couple Rollo-Poppa:
Unlike the conqueror Rollo, William Longsword, Numa Pompilius to Rollo’s
Romulus, has to be urged to think about women at all by a justifiably worried
assembly of magnates. The son subsequently conceived is praised by Dudo as
“born of a saintly mother, heir of a line of integrity”—although this does not
prevent the duke from immediately replacing the saintly mother with the
daughter of Count Herbert of Vermandois.154 William of Jumièges follows his

151 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Histoire, v. 6323–27: “Son la costume e son les leis Qu’en Dene-
marche unt li Daneis L’a prise a fenne a grant haustece, A grant joie e a grant leece. Moct
la tint honnoreement.”
152 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Histoire, 10,128–34: “Mais aprés ce que fu fenie Reprist Pope, si
l’esposa; Ce fu la riens qu’il plus ama. Gerpie l’oct sanz mauvoillanze Por la fille le rei de
France. Porquant ne mist pas en obli La grant amor qu’il oct od li.”
153 gnd iii, 2: “nobilissima puella sibi Danico more iuncta.”
154 Dudo iv, 46f.: “Pollens iste puer, matre satus sacra / justae progeniei …”
344 Chapter 6

model Dudo, albeit tersely (iii, 2f.): before William could undertake the return-
exchange, the chronicler records his untimely death. Wace omits the Sprota
figure entirely, while Benoît declines authorial responsibility by quoting his
Latin predecessor: “He took a noble and beautiful girl, Sprote, and loved her
greatly, but wanted to have her in the Danish manner and not otherwise: so
says the Historia, which does not lie.”155 The third duke’s mother could be
passed over if necessary, but on no account could she be an uxor.

14 Mother of the Nation: Gunnor

Gunnor’s case proved more complicated. If Poppa and Sprota belonged to the
legendary early period, Gunnor was at the centre of the ‘reboot’ of Norman
rule around 970/80 on which all later Norman history was based. She was the
mother of Duke Richard ii, of Emma, queen of England twice over, and of
Archbishop Robert of Rouen. She also became a kind of passepartout ancestor
for all members of the Norman leadership group, the specifics being fixed only
with the genealogical interpolations of Robert of Torigni in the mid-twelfth
century, as the constitution of the Anglo-Norman elite came to a close. Both
alive and dead, she was therefore a sensitive figure to deal with. Writing under
Gunnor’s own supervision, Dudo chooses the grand style: borrowing from
Martianus Capella and others, he adopts an almost anagogical tone in telling
how Emma, Richard i’s Frankish wife (daughter of Hugh the Great), is predes-
tined to be childless, but “with divine aid one day a heavenly girl will come, of
Danish descent, noble, mild, … whom the just margrave, Duke Richard, will
choose as one among many and will join with her …”156 Emma dies childless,
of course. Richard, plagued by “itchy weakness” (also taken from Martianus
Capella), fathers four children with concubinae, but then the prediction be-
comes reality, and Gunnor proves equal to the deceased Emma in terms of
charms, lineage, and wealth. Richard “took her in love and concluded a forbid-
den union with her.” His subjects call on him to marry her properly, since the
providence of the supreme deity has brought them together “so that the heir

155 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique, v. 11,039–44: “Por c’en prist une franche bele, Sprote,
qui ert jentis pucele. Icele ama moct e tint chiere, Mais a la danesche maniere La voct
aveir, non autrement, Ce dit l’estoire qui ne ment.”
156 Dudo iv, 102: “Verum, divino numine nutus, / coelestis virgo proiet olim / stirpe Dacigena,
nobilis, alma … quam dux Ricardus, marchio justus / pluribus sibimet eliget unam, / jun-
gens connubio, foedere, pacti …”
The Comparative View: western Europe 345

may have a Danish father and a Danish mother.”157 And thus, over time, the
providential princely couple have five sons and three daughters together.
Had Dudo and his readers at all been concerned about legitimacy in the
sense of coniugium legitimum, it would have made no sense for him to allow
the widowed duke to initially enter into a “forbidden union” which only later
became a marriage through public pressure. The objection that Dudo’s con-
temporaries still remembered the course of recent events well enough seems
to miss the point given his liberality with the facts elsewhere. The point is that
Dudo rather insists on, not simply allows for, the “forbidden union” to have
providently preceded “marriage.” Dudo’s chronicle is about the coherence of
historical sense, not a sequence of haphazard events, a fact that has earned
him black marks with modern positivist critics.158 In this case, historical
sense demands that the heir to Normandy simply must always emerge from
the paternal polygynous relationship which proves best; it must be culturally
(certainly regionally, in this situation also ethnically) endogynous; a later
transformation into a marriage of the “Christian sort” is possible but cannot
happen at the the beginning of the relationship, as for Norman rulers such re-
lationships are always politically exogynous and must therefore remain with-
out issue (especially if the woman is from Francia). For Dudo, a duke born out
of a ‘legitimate’ marriage would be near-illegitimate if providence did not see
to it that the question never arises.
William of Jumièges has different notions of legitimacy. For the Benedic-
tine, the more Danico model, though acceptable for the early dukes, clearly no
longer seemed a viable excuse for a figure of ‘contemporary history,’ a woman
who had lived to see the reigning duke William the Conqueror grow up. His
solution is strict serial polygyny:

157 Dudo iv, 125: “se connexuit, eamque prohibitae copulationis foedere sortitus est amica-
biliter … Providentia summae Divinitatis, ut remur, hanc tibi Dacigenam, quam modo
refoves, connexuit, ut patre matreque Dacigena haeres hujus terrae nascatur …”
158 Anyone hoping for a reliable account of historical events from Dudo will be sorely disap-
pointed, and this has led to remarkably harsh assessments of an author who is stylistically
difficult to tolerate for those unaccustomed to the genus grande, and yet highly respect-
able, given his holistic historical scheme: “a thoroughly untrustworthy document, a bom-
bastic and rhetorical text, embroidering a long and frequently tedious discourse around a
very small number of facts” (Bates, Normandy before 1066 [1982], xii f.); “l’emphase rhéto-
rique, le goût des mots rares et la pédanterie la plus insupportable dominent sa prose
comme ses vers. Malheureusement ce détestable auteur est la seule source d’information
directe dont on dispose sur le premier siècle de la Normandie” (L[ucien] M[usset]/G[illette]
T[yl]-L[abory], “Dudon de Saint-Quentin,” in Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, vol. 1
(21992), 393f.).
346 Chapter 6

At this time [Richard i’s] wife Emma, daughter of Hugo the Great, died
without children. But a little later he married a very beautiful maid-
en named Gunnor, from the noblest Danish family, in the Christian
manner.159

Without actually deviating from Dudo’s chronology—first Emma dies, and

later the duke marries Gunnor—he silences any thought of an initial ‘forbid-
den union,’ just the thing Dudo had asserted so insistently. The terminological
precision (in matrimonium Christiano more desponsauit) is almost uncharac-
teristic for the laconic Benedictine, and makes it clear that for William the era
of acculturation is over. Following this passage, he lists Richard and Gunnor’s
children, thereby suggesting a chronological posteriority that the monk at
Jumièges, along with the rest of Normandy, must have known to be untrue.
Nor did his version last long. Seventy years later, his continuator Robert de
Torigni corrected William’s Gesta on this point, and furthermore described
in some detail how “some people” drew the duke’s attention to the fact that
canon law ruled out making his and Gunnor’s son Mauger archbishop, since
his mother was unmarried (ideo quod mater eius non fuisset desponsata). The
monk of Mont-Saint-Michel even uses the same term as the monk of Jumièges
(desponsauit/non desponsata) to state the opposite. In Robert de Torigni’s ver-
sion, the duke belatedly marries Gunnor in a “Christian” manner (more chris-
tiano sibi copulauit) in order to see his plan through. During the ceremony, the
parents and their children are covered with a cloak—the only Norman evi-
dence for this form of retroactive legitimization—whereupon the second son
can become archbishop as planned. By that time, Richard’s and Gunnor’s rela-
tionship had been going on for at least a decade and a half. In the same spirit,
Robert de Torigni expands William’s list of Richard and Gunnor’s ostensibly
legitimate children with the omitted children ex concubinis and their scarce-
ly less prominent offspring. The attempt to align the Norman dukes with the
monogamous model has failed. Gunnor’s polygynously established eminence,
through which the members of the leading group could legitimize their affili-
ation with the ducal kin group, remained indispensable for the constitution of
the Norman elite.
When Wace and Benoît rendered the story into courtly French, versified it
and made it palatable for courtly consumption, they no longer needed Gun-
nor to be the radiant creature of providence created by Dudo. The glory of the

159 gnd iv, 18: “Qua tempestate Emma eius uxor, filia Magni Hugonis, moritur absque liberis.
Ipse uero non multo post quamdam speciosissimam uirginem nomine Gunnor, ex nobi­
lissima Danorum prosapia ortam, sibi in matrimonium Christiano more desponsauit.”
The Comparative View: western Europe 347

­ ormans was by then obvious enough without that. The magnates between
N
the Loire and the Irish Sea were content with having their ancestress depicted
as a highly qualified noblewoman from the palace, “Danish on both sides,” wel-
coming and friendly by nature, and “as well-versed in women’s work as any
woman. The count loved her and made her his lover.”160 Her Danish origin re-
mained important to the Anglo-Normans: as the barons say to Richard, “It is
God’s will that after you we will have a lord with a Danish father and a Danish
mother; this is why the Frenchwoman never had children!”161 Under general
pressure (the clergy’s “requests” and the “advice” of the barons) the duke even-
tually marries her, for

it would be an evil and a hideous lack of courtliness, for a prince such as

that which God has made you, if your heir were not born of a wife accord-
ing to the law given by God and established by the Holy Church.162

Formal justice is done to the requirements of the time, while the polygynous
political culture is acknowledged by the remark that legal form actually does
not matter: Anceis e puis l’a bien amee—“he loved her before, and afterwards
too.”163
For Gunnor the woman, however, everything had changed. Wace dedicates
around thirty verses to describing her wedding night, in one of the most empa-
thetic portraits of the lived experience of an aristocratic amie. “I used to lie in
your bed and only fulfill your wishes,” she says, and turns her back to him for
the first time, “now I lie in my bed and lie down as I please.” And then the cri de
cœur of the woman who prefers not to recall that a married woman like ­Eleanor

160 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 3, 235–45: “El palaeis out une pucele, Gunnor out nun, si fu mult
bele, Bien afaitie et bien curteise, De pere e de mere daneise, De nobles Daneis esteit nee,
De dous parz bien enparentee; Debonaire iert e amiable, Large forment e honurable, De
ovraigne de femme saveit Quantque femme saveir poeit. Li quens l’ama, s’en fist sa amie.”
161 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique, v. 27,053–56: “Que Dex par sa sainte douçor Vect
qu’après tei aion seignor De pere et de mere daneise: Por ce n’enn oct nul la Franceise.”
162 Benoît, who follows the text of Wace’s description very closely, combines the beginning of
the relationship and the marriage, which are quite far apart in Wace (340 verses, which
corresponds to about twenty minutes’ fast reading aloud), into one long scene (106 verses
out of only eleven of Wace’s + 9 extra octosyllables). With Benoît, it is the barons—not
the clerics—who present the cited justification for their demand that Richard take Gun-
nor en mariage (v. 27,077–81: “D’iteu prince cum Dex t’a fait Sereit maus, vilanie e lait Que
tis eirs ne fust d’esposee Sum lei que Dex a commandee E en saint’ iglise establie”). Court-
ly monogamy prevails, with almost the same justification as that provided by Marie de
France in Eliduc—who may have been living at the same court at this time.
163 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 3, 246.
348 Chapter 6

can also end up imprisoned: “Never have I felt safe as I lay here, never was I
without fear. Now, at last, I am safe.”164

15 The Henchman’s Daughter: Herleve

When Dudo formulated the concept of extramarital legitimacy, he could not

have imagined to what heights this system would lead his Normandy. The
chronicler may perhaps have noticed that around the time he was finishing the
Gesta, Gunnor’s grandson Robert (the second son of Richard ii) had a son with
a young girl from his entourage, but if so, this was not something he incorpo-
rated into his work. At this point it could not be foreseen that, following Rich-
ard iii’s suspiciously premature death, Robert would succeed only to abandon
the title shortly after, preferring the Holy Land.
The birth of William, ‘the Bastard,’ ‘the Conqueror,’ is the crowning moment
of Norman polygyny. Successive Norman chronicles made various claims
about his mother Herleva, and inattentive reading has somewhat impaired un-
derstanding of the episode,165 so to round off the picture of Norman poly­
gynous succession it may be useful to try to place Herleva in her context. First
of all, her story continues the traditional systematic succession practice, in
which the duke’s prestigious exogynous relationships, generally with the
daughters of Frankish princes or kings, had to remain heirless, while the rela-
tionship with the successor’s mother was endogynous and hypogynous. In this
respect, Herleve was a good choice. Orderic Vitalis, the earliest witness, de-
scribes the mother of the later conqueror king on an unrecoverable erasure
“the daughter of the chamberlain (cubicularius) Fulbert.”166 This is by no

164 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 3, 635–38: “Je soil en vostre lit gesir E soil faire vostre plaisir, Ore
gis el mien, si me gerrai Sur quel cost‚ ke jeo voldrai …”; v. 643–45: “Unkes mais aseüre n’i
jui Ne sanz poür od vus ne fui, Ore sui aukes aseüree.” Benoît completely omits this epi-
sode. The “security” spoken of by the former ‘concubine’ could also refer to the end of the
sinfulness of her actions, as suggested by Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), 280f. But
the emphasis on self-determination in her words and body language suggests a more
secular interpretation.
165 In Lexikon des Mittelalters, Karl Schnith describes the king as the son of “a girl of lower
status” (K[arl] Schnith, 2nd article, “Wilhelm i. ‘der Eroberer,’” in LdM, vol. 9, col. 127).
Approaching the issue from a philological perspective, Elisabeth van Houts, “Origins of
Herleva” (1986), assumes that Herleve’s father was some form of gravedigger or one who
prepared the dead for burial (pollinctor).
166 gnd vii [3]: “Fulberti cubicularii ducis filia natus.” Of course, Fulbert may have risen only
as a result of his daughter’s relationship with the duke, however, this is not suggested by
the wording. For source criticism, see Gesta Normannorum ducum (1998), vol. 2 96 n. 1.
The Comparative View: western Europe 349

means a ‘low’ origin but a safe choice, as it were, from his own household. Or-
deric also provides the famous account of the siege of Alençon in 1049: the
defenders up on the walls, defying William and his men who are besieging the
town, brandish and beat hides and skins. Orderic has only the gesture, no even-
tual shouts and insults to go with it, but supplies the authorial comment that
the gesture aimed at William’s maternal ancestors who had been pollinctores, a
difficult word to i­nterpret—it has to do with handling (fleecing, tanning) the
skin of dead bodies. Wace renders it as parmentier and Benoît as peletier. These
readings in turn provide the basis for the idea that the slight of Alençon meant
that William came from a family of tanners, and hence, that William’s mother
was of lowly or even despicable origin.
I feel that this reading of an elaborately designed and executed insult during
a prolonged siege seems too literal and therefore too innocuous. Taken literally,
the message “tanner’s son!” meaning “son of lowly origin!”—that is, “concu-
bine’s son!”—does not seem to cover William’s extreme reaction: After the cap-
ture of Alençon he “cut off the hands and feet of the mockers before all the
inhabitants.”167 The extraordinary harshness, commented upon in all accounts,
makes little sense in terms of his mother’s background alone, which was an
open secret throughout his life.
I suspect that flogging the skins and furs, along with Orderic’s comment that
William’s parentes were ultimately pollinctores has a more metaphorical and
overtly political meaning. Alençon, situated in the western part of the lands
ruled by the Bellême, was something of an outpost of Francia in the border-
land with Normandy and Maine; over years of repeated conflict, the staging of
cultural difference (in themselves minor) is likely to have hardened and be-
come exaggerated. From the perspective of this French outpost, the Normans
were, firstly, those with curious concepts of kinship and, secondly, cruel bar-
barians. The Normans themselves fully shared this view, though of course with
a positive slant.168 In my view, Herleve’s origin was common knowledge among
the entourage of Robert ‘of Falaise’; even if her father Fulbert had only risen to
the rank of cubicularius after the fact, which is possible,169 he would previously
have been part of the duke’s son’s entourage, and while in his service would

167 gnd vii 8: “illusores uero coram omnibus infra Alentium consistentibus manibus pedi-
busque priuari iussit.” William does not say what this mockery consisted of.
168 See Van Eickels, “Hingerichtet, geblendet, entmannt” (2005).
169 Cf. Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), 127, on the rudimentary official titles at the ducal
court found in the documents. Searle rejects (154f.) all ‘professional’ interpretations for
Fulbert, including “washer of the dead,” suggesting that the insult (“tanner!”) essentially
means “the very lowest of births!” given the low prestige of this malodorous industry, pol-
luted through its contact with cadavers.
350 Chapter 6

have participated in those acts of war which were regarded by the Franks—
who may well have practised war in much the same manner as the Normans,
but tended to overstate the few differences there were and endow them with
cultural significance—as particularly repugnant. So when they bludgeoned
skins and hides on the walls, and thereby declared that William’s family con-
sisted of pollinctores, this amounted to saying: “thugs and hyenas.” His paternal,
ducal line was no better than his maternal, the henchman’s line. Understood
this way, William’s reaction following his victory is no longer inexplicable, but
depressingly consistent: he showed them how right they were.
There is no need to go into Herleve’s later career in Norman historiography
here.170 The historical Herleve was well endowed by the duke before he de-
parted to the Holy Land, and given in marriage to Herluin de Conteville, a re-
spectable landowner on the Seine estuary. This relationship produced two
sons, Odo (who would become bishop of Bayeux) and Robert (who would be-
come count of Mortain): together, they shored up William’s grip on western
Normandy, although after 1066 they proved not always equally reliable. If Her-
leve is the last and most glorious bearer of extramarital legitimacy in Norman
history, which lost its practicability with the takeover of the English Crown,
then in their closeness to the king and supporting role, Herluin and his sons
already correspond to the fathers, brothers, and (subsequent) spouses of the
concubines of later Norman kings. Aided by the efforts of writers such as Rob-
ert de Torigni, Wace, and Benoît to adapt the material, the Anglo-Norman aris-
tocracy was able to simultaneously celebrate its polygynous origin story, con-
tinue its polygynous political practice, and make occasional use of monogamy
in high spots.
We have seen that in most of ‘the West’ the fragmentary nature of the infor-
mation about polygyny precludes definite statements about the ‘aspects’ of
polygyny save the ‘generative’ and the ‘habitual,’ which seem obvious enough.
On ‘agonistic’ and ‘expressive’ uses of polygynous relationship we often lack
explicit material, and some of the conclusions drawn in this chapter are infer-
ences reinforced by arguments based on comparison with the North. The ‘per-
formative’ aspect remains similarly elusive in the North and in the West. In a
word, much remains implicit.
Normandy before 1066 is the only exception to this picture. The Norman rul-
ers’ numerous recorded women—for each tended to have many ­competitors,

170 Duby, Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert (1999), devotes a separate chapter to the literary ‘Arlette’
(287–99).
The Comparative View: western Europe 351

even if only one (the mother of the successor) emerges from the agon—are
the central bearers, almost the engine, of the narrative. This reflects that pe-
culiarity of Norman politics which Eleanor Searle terms ‘kinship by choice.’171
By means of polygyny and the control of progeny through selection dictated
by political contingencies, a newly crystallized leadership group tended to as-
sume from the end of the tenth century that the dukes and the major magnate
families stemmed from the ancient nobility from the settlement period, and
ensured its continued cooperation through periodic intermarriage. Searle sug-
gests we instead talk of a family fiction that completely embraces the Norman
upper class, according to which all those who were integrated into this remark-
ably tight leadership group conceived of themselves as a clan. If we conceive
kinship as resulting from, rather than in, group solidarity and the need for com-
mon action, doubts emerge about a ‘fact’ consistently emphasized by the Nor-
man historiographers, namely that all the (Frankish) marriages of the Norman
rulers were without issue.172 Retrospective selection and kinship construction
around polygynous relationships appear to have been basic principles of Nor-
man politics.
Yet precisely the strict structuring of the Norman polygyny system means
that even such a striking personality as Gunnor cannot escape predetermina-
tion: on the one hand, the ‘generative’ aspect is (of course) important, because
all the dukes’ women only appear as the mothers of their sons and (rarely)
daughters. On the other hand, they are marked by the ‘expressive’ aspect: “Pop-
pa” signifies victory over the Franks in Bessin, “Gunnor” the alliance of the
older and newer groups of settler-warriors originating in Scandinavia. Since
the ruling polygyny also encompasses the Frankish uxores, we might continue
and state: “Gisla” signifies the negation of the ‘generative’ aspect and is virtu-
ally reduced to its ‘performative’; from Dudo to Benoît she is described as basi-
cally identical with the agrarian landscape.
Therefore, as much as polygyny is in the foreground—the limelight, even—,
the Norman chronicle tradition nonetheless presents a reduced account. An
‘open’ social-semantic system, such as the sagas describe in Northern Europe,
is based on polysemy. When a Norwegian king or Icelandic chieftain enters a

171 Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), title of Chapter 3 and esp. 94ff.
172 Searle, Predatory Kinship (1988), 94: the Frankish marriages were “were artificially, offi-
cially, infertile, whatever they may have been biologically.” This pattern was likewise clear
to contemporary observers; Ralph Glaber noted (Historiae iv 6): “Fuit enim usui, a primo
adventu ipsius gentis in Gallias …, ex hujusmodi concubinarum commixtione illorum
principes exstitisse.”
352 Chapter 6

relationship with a woman it can generate very different, sometimes compet-

ing, meanings depending on the circumstances. The fragmentary evidence
gathered here about the women of kings and magnates in the West permits us
to conclude that, even if we lack coherent textualizations, these societies
­similarly if not equally made use of the many possibilities offered by elite po-
lygyny, though the conceptual frame of coherent written narrativization came
to be marked by monogamism.
 Chapter 7

The Comparative View: Southern Europe

1 “Unbearable Heat”

Looking from England or Normandy, or Norway for that matter, the South is
first and foremost what they are not. “No future age will ever be able to praise
them sufficiently, if it judges rightly,” William of Malmesbury writes of the cru-
saders, “those men who came out of the bitter cold of Europe and plunged into
the unbearable heat of the East!”1 Climatic differences shape the encounter of
‘tribal Europe’2 with the Mediterranean3—William of Malmesbury speaks of
Constantine the Great’s relief at having found a site on the Bosphorus which
was favoured by northerly winds, to found a world capital suited to his tem-
perament, “since he was born in Britain, he hated the embers of the sun”4—
and influenced the course of events more than once. The battle on the Horns
of Hattin in 1187 was perhaps the most important, but by no means only, con-
flict in which the July heat was a decisive factor against the Europeans who
came out of the cold.5
The climatic is a necessary, but certainly not sufficient criterion for the defi-
nition of a ‘Southern,’ Mediterranean area in a work on aristocratic polygyny.
Over the centuries, repeated attempts have been made to explain particular
sexual characteristics of individual regions in terms of climate. Medieval
Northern Europe’s disinterest in the scopic display and enjoyment of women’s
bodies has been discussed in terms of the sheer volume of heavy fabric that the
women wore, in contrast to Ovid’s Rome6—which, if we pursue this argument,

1 gra iv, 372: “quorum titulis nullas umquam affiget metas postera, si rectum iudicet, aetas;
uiri qui ab extremo Europae frigore in importabiles se Orientis calores immerserint.”
2 Robert I. Burns, historian of the crusader kingdom of València, describes England, Germany,
and (northern) France as “the tribal north” and “fringe” in contrast to the Mediterranean
centre of the medieval world.
3 Besides Braudel’s pioneering historical geography in the first chapter of La Méditerranée
(1949) and its essay-like epitomization in Braudel, ed., Die Welt des Mittelmeers (1987), its
most compelling portrayal is found in the Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea (2000)—con-
ceived as part of a larger work, but already an overwhelming history of the Mediterranean in
its current form.
4 gra iv, 355: “quia enim in Britannia natus fuerat, ardoris solis exosus erat.”
5 See for a recent assessment Van Eickels, “Schlacht von Hattin” (2005).
6 Jochens, “Male Gaze” (1991), 21. Though Jochens’s observations on this disinterest and the
transposition of the perception of beauty onto clothing are convincing, her climatic explana-
tion is perhaps less so. Pindar’s and Sappho’s “beautiful-armed virgins” and the eddic beloved

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_010

354 Chapter 7

raises the question of everyday clothing in medieval Damascus or Troyes. But

since elite polygyny is more concerned with the contingencies of political cul-
ture than with its structural bases, we will refrain from discussing climate,
physical geography, soil quality, and cultural boundaries marked out by, say,
the inclination of roofs or the use of butter and oil. Nonetheless, the demo-
graphic and political characteristics which are at least codetermined through
such longue durée phenomena also play a role in that much-described bundle
of different, but generally coinciding boundaries that separates the Mediter-
ranean basin and its rim from the “tribal north.”
One of many differences may be seen in the fact that in the South, auto-
cratic monarchy as a model of world order was not merely a dead letter in
manuscripts of the Corpus iuris, but a living tradition. ‘Rome,’ that is, Byzan-
tium, dominated not only the imagination (as in the North and West) but also
political practice. Over the centuries, the kosmokrator on the Bosphorus was
joined by imitators, first in Damascus, then Baghdad, Cairo, and Córdoba, and
finally dozens of smaller centres such as Seville, Zaragoza, Palermo, Ikonion,
or Tripoli. In a Mediterranean context, its northwestern edge, partly touched
by Frankish rule, was in a kind of ‘frontier’ situation characterized by, among
other things, the vivid presence of autocracy as a representational option and
the simultaneous practical inability to imitate it. Occitania developed an
acephaly with an exaggerated sense of parity, in itself not all too dissimilar to
the agonistic ethos of the North or the segmented group competition of “au-
thentic feudalism” in ‘Grand Anjou,’7 but which became the sole principle on
the northwestern edge of the Mediterranean. This final comparative analysis
is focused on polygyny as a way of negotiating Mediterranean autocracy and
its acephalous counterpart.8

2 Concubinage at the Highest Level: James i and Aurembiaix of

Urgell (1228)

On 23 October 1228, in Agramunt, in the southern, flat part of the Catalan

­Pyrenean county of Urgell, a hundred kilometres northwest of Barcelona, a

of the gods, with “her bright arms illuminating heaven and earth” (Skírnismál 6), are no more
than thirty degrees of latitude apart, and Ovidian verses about the beauty of a puella in the
midday sun—“ignibus calesco”—were also carved into runestaffs in Norway (cf. Düwel,
Runenkunde [32001], 166ff.)—cf. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois xvi, 2: the law of monogamy
matches the “European climate,” polygamy the Asian.
7 The expression is Dominique Barthélemy’s: “Note sur le ‘maritagium’” (1992), 19.
8 On paritarian acephaly on the northwest edge of the Mediterranean, cf. Rüdiger, “Mit Worten
gestikulieren” (2000); Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001).
The Comparative View: southern Europe 355

d­ ocument was drawn up which has survived until today,9 and has been rightly
described by Odilo Engels as an “astonishing concubinage contract.”10 The con-
tracting parties were James i, king of Aragon, count of Barcelona and lord of
some minor counties and principalities both sides of the Pyrenees (r. 1213–76),
and Aurembiaix, heiress of Ermengol viii (r. 1184–1209), last of the line of the
counts of Urgell which stretched back to the tenth century; both were around
twenty years old at this point.11 The affair is peculiar in two respects: firstly,
sexual unions between a ruler and a nobilissima of his country are by no means
uncommon, but rarely ever reach the princely level that existed at least de iure
between Aurembiaix, the countess of Urgell, and James, the count of Barcelo-
na.12 Secondly, they are not normally recorded in a formal charter—not even
in the northwestern Mediterranean, where administrative writing had for long
been far more common than in the West, let alone the North. We must there-
fore ask whether this case is not merely strange, but unique, or how far it cor-
responds with common polygynous practices.

9 Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, perg. 389 Jaume i, edited in Soldevila, “Fou Aurembiaix
d’Urgell amistançada del rei Jaume i?” (1926), 408–10, and Soldevila, Els primers temps
(1968), 298–300.—The county of Urgell, like other Pyrenean principalities, has an elon-
gated north-south form as a result of the expansion of the dominions established in the
late Carolingian period from the mountains into the Muslim-ruled Ebro plain. Its heart-
land around the episcopal city la Seu d’Urgell [<sedes] borders on Andorra; its southern
expansion zone extends to the cities of Balaguer and Lleida (conquered in 1148) some 150
km southwest. On the history of the county, see Diego de Monfar y Sors, Historia de los
Condes de Urgel (this 17th-century work leaves the following case uncommented, al-
though the document is used for other purposes); Bertran i Roigé, ed., El comtat d’Urgell
(1995); on the individual counties and vice-counties of northern Catalonia, see in sum-
mary Sobrequés i Vidal, Els barons de Catalunya (41980), with further references. I have
dealt with the significance of the case for the regional political culture in Aristokraten und
Poeten (2001), 324ff., and draw on that account to some extent in the following.
10 Engels, “König Jakob I. von Aragón” (1989), 253; similarly Engels, “Der Vertrag von Corbeil”
(1989), 217: “… on the basis of a very strange service in return.”
11 James i was born in February 1208; no birth date is known for Aurembiaix. Her early en-
gagement (1210) with James suggests a rather young age; something similar occurred in
James’s engagement with Amice, daughter of Simon de Montfort, the following year. The
date of birth given of “around 1196” in Jordi Morelló i Baget, “Aurembiaix d’Urgell,” in Dic-
cionari d’història de Catalunya (21993), 78, is unexplained and lacks foundation. It may be
based on the assumption that Aurembiaix must have been of age at the time of her en-
gagement and the subsequent Castilian marriage (1212). In my view, the course of events,
particularly the fact that Aurembiaix only claimed her right to succeed very late—almost
two decades after her father’s death—rather suggests a correspondingly late date of birth.
12 Like Barcelona, Urgell nominally belonged to the West Frankish Crown; James was only
king in neighbouring Aragon. The de facto level difference between the count-kings of
Barcelona-Aragon and all other counts in Catalonia as well as north of the Pyrenees was
a different matter.
356 Chapter 7

Following the death of the last count of Urgell from the Ermengol line in
1209, succession to the county, which had become economically attractive in
recent decades as a result of southwards expansion, was unclear. Guerau de
Cabrera, head of an expansive magnate family based in the eastern Pyrenees
and a maternal grandson of the penultimate count, Ermengol vii, was the
­latest aspirant. Count-King Peter ii of Barcelona-Aragon saw an opening for
himself and had the widow Elvira de Subirats immediately transfer all rights
to the county against a payment of 7000s and in the following year struck a
marriage agreement for their children, James—at the time still named ‘Peter’
in the documents—and Aurembiaix.
Meanwhile, north of the Pyrenees, the ‘Albigensian Crusade’ was raging. Pe-
ter ii was involved as dominus of several of the viscounts attacked by the cru-
saders. Early 1211 saw a successful rapprochement between the military leader
of the crusade, Simon de Montfort,13 and the Aragonese king, as a consequence
of which a future marriage was agreed between the Aragonese-Catalan heir
and the daughter of the French crusader and putative viscount of Besiers and
Carcassona. Peter’s earlier arrangement with Urgell was thereby tacitly an-
nulled; consequently, Elvira de Subirats entered a new marriage with Guillem
de Cervera, who was also from a line of northern Catalan viscounts. In 1212,
Peter ii switched back to the Occitan-Tolosan camp and confirmed this
through a double marriage, according to which Raymond vi, count of Tolosa,
and his son and heir, Raymond vii, each married a sister of the king—in itself
a remarkable undertaking given the incest rules of the time.
The king’s death at the Battle of Muret (12 September 1213) against the cru-
saders, however, fundamentally changed the situation. The five-year-old heir to
the throne, James, remained in the custody of Simon de Montfort as a pledge of
the alliance agreed in 1211—that is, in the custody of the man to whom his fa-
ther had just lost the war and his life. Through the intervention of his mother,
Maria of Montpelhier, the little king was handed over to the Aragonese Tem-
plars the following year. Nonetheless, the lands of the Crown of Aragon, under
a regency led by an ageing uncle of the young king from the Provençal branch of
the house of Barcelona, effectively fell into the hands of competing factions of
magnates, in one of which the Cabrera played a leading role. The county of
Urgell had de facto passed to Guerau de Cabrera, who had already previously
provided for the heiress Aurembiaix to be married off to his Castilian r­ elations.14

13 The best account of the details, particularly the diplomatic aspect, is Roquebert, L’épopée
cathare i (1970); see also Ventura, Pere el Catòlic (1960).
14 The sister of Aurembiaix’s husband Álvaro Fernández (or Pérez) de Castro was the wife of
Guerau de Cabrera himself. The Toledo-based Castro were descended from one of the
The Comparative View: southern Europe 357

Both sides subsequently recognized the status quo, whereby Guerau de Cabrera
accepted arbitration by the count-king in advance, in the event that Aurembi-
aix should ever assert her claim—something Guerau de Cabrera obviously
viewed as purely theoretical.
Yet this is precisely what happened in the summer of 1228. In late July, her
Castilian marriage void—we do not know whether it took place at all, and if so,
who annulled it—, Aurembiaix appeared in Lleida before James i, who had
freed himself from the tutelage of his aristocratic counsellors over the previous
two years. Her main advocate was her stepfather, Guillem de Cervera, who had
lost his hold on Urgell after the death of Elvira de Subirats in 1220. Just two days
later an agreement was reached: Aurembiaix relinquished her rights to the
county to James i, who took her in feminam (that is, as the female equivalent of
a homo who paid him ‘homage’), returned the county to her in feudum (keep-
ing nine key castles), and pledged her concilium, auxilium et valensam bona
fide de placito et guerra.15 In form, the agreement is a typical convenientia of the
kind common in Catalonia and southern Occitania, and whose central impor-
tance for aristocratic (‘feudal’) relations has been much commented upon.16 As
an additional guarantee, it contains Aurembiaix’s pledge not to get married
without his explicit consent (quod non contraham matrimonium sine expressa
voluntate vestra). James then took up the campaign against Guerau de Cabrera
on her behalf, and within two months had seized the entire county with the
exception of two castles. This was how things stood when, in October 1228,
James and Aurembiaix concluded their second agreement, preserved in the
Agramunt document.
The notarial document (instrumentum publice confectum), nearly three
­pages long in its printed edition, comprises firstly a reiteration of the act of two
months previously, the donation and reenfeoffment of the county, with some
minor changes—the difference being that the county was now actually back in

daughters of Ermengol vi, Aurembiaix’s great-grandfather. One of them—it is unclear

whether the father or the brother of the two siblings—was married to the daughter of one
of King Alfonso vii’s concubines.
15 Soldevila, Els primers temps (1968), 279ff.
16 For Tolosan Occitania, see the essential article by Ourliac, “La ‘convenientia’” (1959). For
Catalonia, see Bonnassie, “Conventions féodales” (1969), which has inspired numerous
studies; see most recently, Kosto, Making Agreements (2001), which argues, however, that
the structuring significance of the convenientia should be regarded as merely residual by
the end of the 12th century. For Occitania, I find myself in disagreement with Pierre Bon-
nassie or rather his students such as Hélène Débax regarding the ‘feudal’—that is, impli­
citly characterized by personal bonds—character of the convenientia; cf. Rüdiger, Aris-
tokraten und Poeten (2001), 275ff., as well as the review by Débax in Annales: Histoire,
Sciences sociales 58, 2003, 1396ff.
358 Chapter 7

their hands. The crucial passage for the ‘concubinage’ is the following state-
ment by the countess:

… et quod vos teneatis me honoratam et non possitis me relinquere nisi

duceritis uxorem cum qua haberitis regnum vel tantam quantitatem pec-
cunie que comitatui Urgelli merito posset equiparari.
… and you shall hold me in honour and cannot leave me, unless you
take a wife who will bring you a kingship or an amount of money equal to
the value of the county of Urgell.17

This statement is remarkable enough, providing as it does for a temporary sex-

ual union between the countess and the count-king, to be terminated upon a
royal marriage of equal or higher status. The fact that a sexual union is envis-
aged is explicit in the provision for the children they may have together (proles
comunis nostra et vestra); moreover, Aurembiaix reserves the right to designate
one among her future sons with James (illum filium comune nostrum et verstum
quem eligero) as the heir to her county, so there is nothing clandestine about
the union. The fact that the union is not a marriage is obvious from the above
passage, as well as another one further down in the document about the con-
sequences of an eventual marriage by Aurembiaix against James’ wish—of
course a marriage contract could not provide for what happens when one of
the partners marries next. So what we have is apparently that rare bird, a con-
cubinage contract at the highest level. Can this be true? Ludwig Vones has tried
to argue that this document, “often erroneously interpreted as a concubinage
agreement,” is in fact the renewal of the original marriage contract of 1210.18 In
October 1228, James i was still married to Eleanor of Castile, his second cousin;
the negotiations to annul the marriage were already underway in Rome, how-
ever, and were approved six months later. But if, as Vones thinks, Aurembiaix
here commits the king, in writing, to the earlier plan until the declaration from
Rome arrives (‘You honour me until you can marry me’—the uxor envisaged in
the above passage would thus be her), why not say so? Why, at the crucial pas-
sage, switch from the first to the third person? Why use nisi, a conditional, in-
stead of a temporal subjunction such as donec? Why give a definition of the
third-person future uxor which stipulates the one condition Aurembiaix can

17 Archives of the Crown of Aragon, perg. 389 de Jaume i, ed. Soldevila, Els primers temps
(1968), 298–300.
18 Vones, Geschichte der Iberischen Halbinsel (1993), 159. Ferran Soldevila introduced the
term “contracte de concubinatge” in various publications since 1923, which has been
widely accepted in scholarship; while Engels, König Jakob i. (1979), 253, makes use of the
term, he also refers to the marriage contract of 1210.
The Comparative View: southern Europe 359

never fulfill, a kingdom (cum qua haberitis regnum); why the roundabout way
of saying the uxor must bring the county’s worth in cash? It is very hard to see
how Vones can at all believe that the putative future uxor is Aurembiaix her-
self, unless he excludes from the outset the possibility for a woman in Aurem-
biaix’s position of ever formally entering into concubinage.
In the context of the present study, all these difficulties can be resolved. We
have seen that ‘concubinage’ happens at the highest levels: Aurembiaix would
be in a position comparable to Harald the Hard-Ruler’s Norwegian chieftains’
daughter and sister Þóra Kálfsdóttir, Cnut’s Ælfgifu, and Henry i’s Isabelle de
Meulan or Nest ferch Rhys. Although we can never expect a Norman or Norwe-
gian archive to hold a written agreement about any of those relationships, we
recognize a number of traits: anxiousness about status and permanence, provi-
sions for the woman herself and the children, attempts to fend off future com-
petition. To describe the relationship which James and Aurembiaix immedi-
ately enter into, and for which she transfers the county to him, there are no
nominal expressions like matrimonium (or for that matter, concubinatus), but
rather verbal paraphrases: “…quod vos teneatis me honoratam et non possitis me
relinquere.” The first expression echoes the frequent vernacular formula: “que
vos me tengatz honrada.” The verb honorare/honrar from the large semantic
field of honor belongs to the vocabulary of the convenientiae as well as that of
the troubadours; in it, the tangible, material and the immaterial side of honor
are intertwined: “That you honour me/provide for me properly.” In the Romance
texts, this is a common formula for a concubine (soignant, amasia) who has
gained a reasonably future-proof position. Moct la tint honnoreement, “he kept
her much honoured,” Benoît says about Duke Rollo, who has just taken the cap-
tured girl Poppa “in the Danish manner.” The second expression also has a pre-
cise equivalent in the Latin and vernacular documents associated with conflict
resolution and courtly oratory: “e non me laissetz miga”—“and you must not
leave me at all,” meaning “you are not allowed to unilaterally terminate the
agreement.”
To live honourably and not be sent away—these are, as was shown in the
previous chapter, the principal concerns of princely concubines. One might
argue that the same was true for the uxores—as James’s own mother had expe-
rienced and his Castilian uxor Eleanor was now discovering. Yet the relevant
legal and Latin vocabulary for marriage (uxorem ducere, matrimonium) is in-
deed present in the document. It is used several times for James and Aurembi-
aix’s potential future marriages to others; only their own relationship is not
described in those terms or otherwise given a legal noun, but denoted solely
through verbal paraphrases.
What we have here is about the most comprehensive written formalization
of a non-marital relationship possible. It is not merely accidentally polygynous
360 Chapter 7

(James was still married when he concluded this agreement with Aurembiaix),
but fundamentally so: Aurembiaix can only be assured of the duration of the
relationship, not its exclusivity. She does not rule out competitors, only assures
her rank as best she can: possibly she will some day have to make way, but only
to a royal woman or to one who proves at least equal in rank (merito posset
equiparari) and monetary value (quantitatem peccunie).
Why all this? Scholarship has essentially focused on the ‘private,’ emotional
aspect: two young people of the same age, a handsome king in the ascendant,19
weary of his first wife,20 on the one hand, a “young and beautiful”21 disinher­
ited orphan, on the other. For a love story, however, the end is a bit sobering.
Not a year later, Aurembiaix—clearly with the approval, if not at the instiga-
tion of James—married the Infante Peter, son of Sancho i of Portugal and un-
cle of the ruling King Sancho ii, thus gaining him possession of Urgell. If James
and Aurembiaix’s alliance had been the renewal of a marriage contract, as
Vones argues, it was broken quickly indeed: The annulment of James’s first
marriage had hardly arrived when she married, not James but a Portuguese
Infante, who was moreover related to both Aurembiaix’s first husband and
their main opponents in the area, the Cabrera.22 Even if Aurembiaix was not
cheated, she had no reason to be particularly happy.
The relationship had been an unequal one from the start. Though James i
was formally ‘only’ a count in Catalonia, just as Aurembiaix was a countess,
there could have been no doubt who was the stronger—and all the more so
given that Aurembiaix had come as a petitioner. James had a unique trump
card at his disposal, namely the role already granted to him by Aurembiaix’s
opponent Guerau de Cabrera to be the arbitrator of the Urgell succession

19 The conventional descriptions in the chronicles are less revealing than the account of his
confrontation with the Aragonese magnate Pero Ahones two years earlier, which degen-
erated into a wrestling match won by the 16-year-old (Llibre dels Feits c. 26).
20 Thus Bisson, “L’època dels grans comtes-reis” (1997), 302: “Sabia ja [Aurembiaix] que
Jaume estava tip de la seva muller?” A number of broadly biographical and psycho-
historical interpretations are based on James’s early marriage to Eleanor of Castile and
the initial inability of the twelve-year-old boy—which the king himself ‘confesses’ in his
autobiography—“to do with her what men do to women” (Llibre dels Feits c. 19); see
Brachfeld, Doña Violante de Hungría (1942).
21 Soldevila, Els primers temps (1968), 273; similarly Soldevila, Jaume i, Pere el Gran (31980), 9;
Bisson (as note above): “young and attractive.” Soldevila’s description, while completely
unfounded in physical terms, is nonetheless quite accurate in a ‘medieval’ sense: a woman
in Aurembiaix’s position was beautiful by definition.—On Aurembiaix, see most recently
Domingo, A la recerca (2007), which was not taken into account for this study.
22 Peter’s half-brother, Martin, the son of one of Sancho i’s concubines, was the first hus-
band of the sister of Aurembiaix’s first husband Álvaro Castro, who later married Guerau
de Cabrera; cf. Sobrequés i Vidal, Els barons de Catalunya (41980), 67 and 119, note 10.
The Comparative View: southern Europe 361

­dispute. When Aurembiaix and her backer Guillem de Cervera decided to as-
sert her rights in 1228, they knew that James i would be in a position to demand
just about anything he wanted for his coming down on their side. The short
period of time between Aurembiaix’s visit in July and the document contain-
ing the first agreement in August suggests that no long negotiations took place,
and that it was not even considered necessary to pretend they did.
To quote Ferran Soldevila, James carried out “a dual mission, both amorous
and political”23—though the liberal master of Catalan historiography prob­
ably thought both spheres were neatly separate. In the light of what has been
argued in the course of this study about the ‘expressive’ and the ‘performative’
aspects of polygyny, we cannot view the young countess’s “charms”24 as just
an accidental bonus of James’s politics. When the count-king made her case
his own and went as far as appointing his own notary, the Bologna-trained
legist Guillem sa-Sala, as her advocate (raonador),25 it must have been clear to
­everyone—not least the opposing party—that James sought to seize posses-
sion of the territory.
Besides the legal forms, which James relished at length, summoning the op-
posing party three times, to form a relationship with the young countess was
another means of demonstrating the new situation to everyone concerned.26
It cannot be determined when James and Aurembiaix first consummated their
relationship, but future children are already envisaged by the time the docu-
ment of 23 October 1228 was drafted. As in many similar cases, it is impossible
to pin down the extent to which James, Aurembiaix, or the inhabitants of
Urgell considered the cohabitation to be a mere signal of the royal takeover, or
its implementation.
Politically, the count-king had prevailed against both contenders for the
county, Aurembiaix and Guerau de Cabrera: one was now his “honoured” con-
cubine, the other the loser of a military campaign. Irrespective of any per-
sonal feelings between the two lovers—and nothing entitles us to deny that, if

23 Soldevila, Història de Catalunya (21963), vol. 1, 211: “una doble empresa amorosa i
política.”
24 The term is also used by Soldevila, Els primers temps (1968), 275: “als encisos mateixos
d’Aurembiaix …”.
25 In royal service from at least 1219, the legista was rewarded for his efforts in the Urgell case
with an extremely lucrative income in the city of Lleida, which had been ceded to the
king; see Soldevila, Els primers temps (1968), 279; Soldevila, ed., Les quatre grans cròniques
(21983), 214.
26 At the siege of the capital Balaguer, Aurembiaix was sent (with protection) so close to the
walls that her “not so loud female voice” (“que dona és e no pot alt parlar”) could be
clearly heard. Her personal plea gave the defenders occasion to conclude the ongoing
handover negotiations (Llibre dels Feits c. 42).
362 Chapter 7

­ othing else, the political situation may have felt exciting—the relationship
n
ended in much the same way as for, partibus pro toto, many of Henry i’s concu-
bines: with honourable marriage to an attractively affluent partisan.
One final aspect of the ‘concubinage agreement’ is worth commenting
upon, namely the endowment set aside for any possible children. Aurembiaix
postulated that one son from the relationship—whom she was to select if
there were several—would receive as their common inheritance her county of
Urgell, which he would ‘hold from’ James or his successor, with the addition of
Cerdanya, Conflent, and Berguedà, three territories which bordered Urgell to
the east and were already in James’s possession.27 As far as I know, the possible
strategic purpose of this provision has not yet been discussed in scholarship. In
light of the numerous comparable cases from Denmark and the Anglo-­Norman
region where the descendants of concubines were preferred for vulnerable
borders or future zones of expansion, the geographical value of the small coun-
ties joined together in this way is striking: together, they controlled all Catalan
passages across the Pyrenees.
By the time the unborn son of the couple might have found himself en-
dowed in this manner, the ‘Albigensian Crusade’ had entered its final stage. The
war of attrition pursued since 1226 by the French king—who had, with the as-
sent of Rome, taken over the claims of Simon de Montfort’s heir—reached its
peak in June 1228, and months of ‘scorched earth’ in the middle of the harvest
season had the desired effect. In the autumn of of 1228, Count Raymond vii
made contact with Paris through Cistercian middlemen. Like everyone, James
i knew that just north of the Pyrenees a Capetian victory and takeover was im-
minent (it was formalized by the penance ceremony of Raymond vii in Paris
on 12 April 1229); what he did not yet know was what kind of relationship with
his new neighbours he would have. After all, James’ father had died fighting
against the crusaders, and some of the magnates who had been with him at
Muret formed the inner power circles of Catalonia-Aragon in the 1220s. More
to the point, the count-kings had, before the Albigensian War hit Occitania,
spent decades establishing a network of rights and loyalties north of the Pyre-
nees, some of them both substantial and remunerative. They all were seriously

27 “… revertatur ad illum filium comune nostrum et vestrum quem elegero.” This is a further
argument against Vones’s interpretation of a marriage (pre-)contract, as a legitimate son
of the couple would enjoy full inheritance rights at the discretion of his father alongside
James’s elder son—the division of hereditary lands remained customary in the house of
Barcelona until the late Middle Ages—and not be limited to four Pyrenees counties in
advance; on the other hand, for a ‘son of a concubine,’ this is a useful precautionary mea-
sure in terms of the all-important paternal will. On princely marriage strategies in Catalo-
nia in general, cf. Ruiz-Domènec, L’estructura feudal (1985); Aurell, Noces du comte (1995).
The Comparative View: southern Europe 363

impaired by twenty years of warfare; many allies had died or been driven into
exile, and the moment a settlement would be reached in Paris, young James’
agenda would be filled with any nunber of loose threads to pick up. The pledge
of allegiance Count Raymond vii had once given King Peter ii was only the
most obvious issue to kindle possible conflict with the Capetians. Whether in
defence or with a view to a future revival of the Catalan-Occitan alliance: ei-
ther way, it was worthwhile making the Pyrenean crossings a ‘marcher lord-
ship’ of sorts under the command of a concubine’s son, as the Anglo-Norman
and Danish kings had done in similar circumstances in Normandy, Wales, and
Southern Jutland.28 In this respect as well, the liaison between James and Au-
rembiaix is similar to practices of the West and North in essential features.

3 Ornamental Mediterraneanness: Christian Princes and Moorish

Maids

It is precisely this normality that is striking and surprising. In his relationship

with Aurembiaix, King James was not all that different to any Norman, An-
gevin, or Knýtling. However, in sharp contrast to them, he ruled over a king-
dom in which Christians accounted for perhaps three-fifths of the population.
The remainder were Muslims (30 per cent) and Jews (10 per cent).29 And just as
James and Aurembiaix concluded their concubinage agreement, the king was
about to begin the conquest of Mallorca, ruled and inhabited by Muslims,30

28 As far as we know, James and Aurembiaix had no children. Aurembiaix died in 1231; a few
years later, ahead of the planned conquest of València, James i was forced to cede the
county to the reinvigorated Cabrera, who held it for a century. In the 1240s, Tolosa and
Aragon made several futile attempts to ward off the Capetian grasp by dynastic means;
James i did not, however, wish to directly participate in the Occitan rebellions of 1240 and
1242 and came to terms with Louis ix in the 1259 Treaty of Corbeil, agreeing the reciprocal
waiver of rights north and south of the Pyrenees respectively.
29 Burns, Muslims, Christians, and Jews (1984), 138, following the estimates in Dufourcq,
L’Espagne catalane (1966). The numbers refer to Aragon in the narrower sense; Christians
were predominant in the more populous Catalonia, and even more so in the territories
north of the Pyrenees (the proportion of Muslim slaves, however, is completely unquan-
tifiable). See Guichard, Les Musulmans de Valence (1990–91).
30 He promised to attack the last two castles controlled by the Cabrera, which he did not
have time to take, within thirty days of returning from Mallorca (“post reversionem istius
exercitus quem facitis contra Maiorichas, statim elapsis triginta diebus, guerram ad
meam voluntatem facere incipiatis pro dictis duobus castris mihi reddendis”). Prepara-
tions included the staging of consensus among different groups, as reflected in the well-
known feast of Tarragona, at which a Barcelonan merchant held forth on the island’s vir-
tues. The fleet finally put to sea in early September 1229.
364 Chapter 7

which would be followed by the conquest of Eivissa in 1235. The year after saw
the beginning of the long campaign to conquer the kingdom of València and
ultimately of Múrcia. Ten years after the concubinage with Aurembiaix, James
ruled over a conglomerate of kingdoms where the Christian may have held a
slim overall majority, but with marked regional imbalances: half a century after
the conquest, a predominantly Christian Catalonia stood in contrast to Valèn-
cia which remained predominantly Muslim, with Christians barely a quarter
of the population.31 Intensive research on the “crusader kingdom” of València
by Robert I. Burns and others has demonstrated the flexibility of King James’s
government in responding to the economic, religious, linguistic, and other
conventions of the remaining majority population, insofar as this did not af-
fect the interests of its own Aragonese-Catalan hinterland.32 For James’s self-
reinvention as a monarch33 was greatly augmented by the opportunity to
merge local customs, the diverse and sometimes conflicting political cultures
in Aragon and Catalonia, and selective use of Roman law, into a new type of
monarchic regime which made València a remarkable tertium within the
Crown of Aragon.
There can be no doubt that James ‘the Conqueror,’ who demonstrated his
mastery in utilizing stories about women as author of his own gesta, had a
keen eye for the various polygynous practices of his multifaith conglomerate
kingdom. For himself he completely renounced the use of these possibilities
(in narrative, that is). There is an element of stylization in the pronounced Oc-
cidentalism of King James’s stories about women, or lack of them, as in many
other aspects of his rule. His contemporary, Emperor Frederick ii, king of Sic-
ily, dealt with a similar situation quite differently—we might even say in the
opposite manner. On the one hand, Frederick ii’s polygyny and its narrativiza-
tion follows the ‘Western’ variant we have encountered elsewhere: numerous
concubines are mentioned accidentally, as a matter of course as it were, and
their sons are purposefully integrated into the ruling system (some of them

31 According to Dufourcq’s estimates cited in Burns (see note 29), around 50,000 Christians,
10,000 Jews, almost 200,000 Muslims. The figures refer to the late 13th century, when the
Muslim population had already declined markedly through several major waves of emi-
gration and eviction, while the Christian had increased through repartiment (redistribu-
tion of agricultural land). We must therefore reckon with a significantly higher proportion
of Muslims for the middle of the century. The numbers are used here with all due meth-
odological caution and serve more to illustrate the basic situation than quantify it.
32 Burns, Muslims, Christians, and Jews (1984); Burns, Negotiating Cultures (1999).
33 On this issue, which is referred to several times in the following, see for now, Rüdiger,
“Herrschaft und Stil” (2005); the detailed investigation of the self-invention of rulers
through narrativization should be reserved for a future study.
The Comparative View: southern Europe 365

rose to positions of power unequalled in the West since William the Conquer-
or’s days).34 On the other, he added a special touch. Reports of his ‘harem’—
the “flock of pretty women” maintained by this “extravagant devotee of femi-
nine embraces”35—spread northwards and may have gained much by retelling,
though they are frequent and consistent enough to be factually credible. When
dealing with Western European princes, the stupor mundi consciously played
up the sensual exoticism of his court. On his return home, Richard of Cornwall,
a son of King John and brother of King Henry iii, reported to the English that
what he enjoyed most about the court festivities laid on for him by Frederick
in 1241 was the dance of “two Moorish girls with delightful bodies.”36
The ostentation on display at Palermo and other palaces of Sicily was care-
fully organised. In his Liber physionomiae, dedicated to the emperor, Michael
Scotus, Frederick’s translator and cultural mediator set out the criteria for the
best choice of girls for the harem. To him, deflowered girls of twelve or a little
older seemed advisable.37 The scholar, who had previously worked in Toledo,
was adapting a standard theme of Arabic treatises. A dictum attributed to
Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān, which circulated in Andalusia, ad-
vised choosing a Berber woman for sensuality, a Persian for comely offspring,
and a rūmiyya (‘Roman,’ i.e. Christian woman) for obedience.38 In one of his
pseudo-philosophical treatises, the Abbasid polyglot and arbiter elegantiarum
al-Ǧāḥiẓ discusses the relative merits of the love of boys and girls, without
wishing to express a final view.39 Stripped of any topicality it may have had in
its original context (the question of the inclusion of banāt al-ʿaǧām, “barbar-
ian,” i.e. non-Arab women in the shoal of concubines was a serious aspect of

34 Cf. Rösch/Rösch, Kaiser Friedrich ii. (1995); Sperle, König Enzo (2001). There is no need to
connect the ‘Norman’ heritage of Sicily with Frederick’s concubinage. After all, in Sicily
the Staufer encountered a Hauteville king who was the son of Duke Robert of Apulia and
a palace maid (Alberic of Trois-Fontaines) or a “nobilissima matre ad quam dux ipse con-
suetudinem habuerat” (Hugo Falcandus, Liber de regno Siciliae), depending on the incli-
nation of the source; cf. Reisinger, Tankred von Lecce (1992), 9ff.
35 Riccobaldo of Ferrara, Compendium Romanae historiae, 727: “Mulierum amplexuum ama-
tor nimius, nam venustarum feminarum gregem servabat.”
36 Matthaeus Parisiensis, Chronica maiora iv, 147, cited by Bumke, Höfische Kultur (1986),
303: “Inter quas novitates obstupendas, unam magis laudavit et admirabatur. Duae enim
puellae Sarracenae, corporibus elegantes … [a detailed description of the artistic-mimic
dance follows] Et sic mirabile spectaculum intuentibus tam ipsae quam alii joculatores
praebuerunt.” On Muslim dance, cf. Shiloah, “Danse artistique musulmane” (1962); Pérès,
Poésie andalouse (21953), 389ff.; Pérez Higuera, “Danzaderas” (1986).
37 Quoted from Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexualité (1985), 197f.; cf. Lett, “Corps” (1996), 65.
38 Reported in Abu l-Faraǧ, Kitāb al-nisaʾ, cited after Pérès, Esplendor (1983), 288.
39 Kitāb mufāḫarat al-ǧawārī wal-ġilmān “Book of competing praise for young slave girls and
boys,” trans. in Kabbal, Éphèbes et Courtisanes (1997).
366 Chapter 7

the debate about the integration or segregation of the Spanish majority popu-
lation, known under the term šuʿūbiyya),40 and transferred into the ostensori-
um of Arabic scholarship which was made to enhance Frederick ii’s fame, the
motif was exquisitely suited to achieve that same mystifying effect on the Oc-
cident that had not failed to have an effect on Richard of Cornwall when he
watched Frederick’s beautiful slave girls dancing.

4 Iberian Renunciation—Llibre dels Feits and Primera Crónica

General (c.1250)

There is no evidence that James i, who would have had ample opportunity dur-
ing his fifty-year reign as conqueror of three Muslim kingdoms, ever indulged
in similar pleasures. This does not mean that he did not, of course. But unlike
Frederick ii, he and his Castilian contemporaries preferred to forego the ‘ha-
bitual’ possibilities of doing so. The references to James i’s concubines are as
incidental as with the Anglo-Norman kings, and there is no need to reiterate
them here.41 His own first-person chronicle, the Llibre dels Feits (‘Book of
Deeds’), has hardly any women in it; even Aurembiaix, whose name is men-
tioned only once, is nothing more than la comtessa in whose name men argue
and fight. To judge from the chronicle, one would never guess that the two
were planning to have children. As to the interior of the peninsula, its enor-
mous vernacular history, the (Primera) Crónica general de España, compiled in
the mid-thirteenth century in the milieu of Alfonso x of Castile, is only a little
more explicit. King Vermudo II of León (r. 981–99) is one instance of many: he

40 Cf. The Shu‛ūbiyya in al-Andalus; Larsson, Ibn García’s shu‛ūbiyya Letter (2003).
41 See Bernat Desclot, Crònica c. 100 concerning some of the illegitimate sons of James i and
his successor Peter iii; James i’s will mentions a probable concubine, Sibília de Saga, see
Desclot c. 142 and note 1; one of James’s sons, Jaume Sarroca, became bishop of Huesca
(he has even been credited with drafting the Book of Deeds: De Montoliu, “Crònica d’En
Jaume i” [1917]) and another, probably a canon in Lleida, see Llibre dels Feits c. 563 and
notes 7 and 8; James confesses his misconduct with a cousin of Alfonso x of Castile,
Berenguera Alfonso, Llibre dels Feits c. 426 and note 4; for her sake, he even wished to
formally separate from his third ‘wife,’ Teresa Gil de Vidaure, giving leprosy as the reason
to Clement iv—a request that the pope rejected indignantly. On the putative identity of
the adolescent king’s first concubine around 1224/25, see Soler i Palet, “Vida privada de
Jaume i” (1909), and in summary Burns, “Spiritual Life” (1976). In almost every case, those
mentioned are only identifiable as the king’s sons or women in archival documents.
The Comparative View: southern Europe 367

is attributed “two amigas of very high birth,” sisters no less,42 in addition to his
two “consecrated wives” (mugeres a bendicion), one of whom he divorced. The
Crónica also notes that a famine struck his country “because of his great sin.”43
For Alfonso vi of León and Castile (r. 1072–1109), conqueror of Toledo and one
of the great figures in Castilian historiography, five mugieres a bendicion and
two amigas are reported, one of whom is mentioned chiefly on account of her
daughter who married Count Raymond iv of Tolosa, one of the leaders of the
First Crusade. The imperator Alfonso vii (r. 1126–57) had two wives, “one after
the other” (as the Crónica sees fit to emphasize), as well as a “very beautiful
daughter” through a “very high-born girl.”44
It is worth taking a closer look at Alfonso vi’s second amiga: “la Mora Zaida,”
la Çayda (al-sayyida “the lady”), daughter of Abenhabet/al-Muʿtamid of Seville.
Quite in line with the French chansons de geste—in which the noble Moorish
maidens, Roland’s Bramimonde or Orable in the Chanson de Guillaume, are
only waiting to be conquered, loved, and baptized—, the Crónica general does
not treat the daughter of the defeated Abbadid as the Toledan conqueror’s
spoils of war: “she was not the king’s concubine (barragana), but his secret
wife.”45 The epic is further embellished by a courtly motif, the ‘love from afar’;
the troubadours’ amor de lonh for a beautiful and renowned stranger is, how-
ever, reversed for reasons of religious proportionality: the Moorish woman falls
in love with a man she has never seen “because of his good reputation and
great virtue, which increased every day.”46 In fact, given the intricate politics of

42 Primera Crónica general c. 746: “Este rey don Vermudo ouo por amigas dos duennas de
muy grand guisa, et segund dize don Rodrigo arçobispo de Toledo, eran hermanas.” The
son of one and the daughter of the other are listed with their other descendants.
43 Primera Crónica general c. 756.
44 Primera Crónica general cc. 847; 975: “ouo ell emperador estas dos mugieres, una empos
ell otra … fizo ell emperador don Alffonsso en una donzella muy fijadalgo, que dizien
donna Maria, una fija que dixieron Esteuania, donzella muy fermosa.”
45 Primera Crónica general c. 847: “non fue barragana del rey, mas mugier uelada.” On Span-
ish concubinage (barraganía), for a legal-historical perspective see, Winterer, Rechtliche
Stellung der Bastarde (1981), 74–78, and for a social-historical view, Dillard, Daughters of
the Reconquest (1984), 127–47. Dillard’s account, largely based on the fueros (local laws)
and documentary sources, provides a good illustration of the variety of forms of sexual
relationship in the ‘frontera’ situation, though she perhaps endows those dynamic settler
micro-societies and their ever-changing circumstances with too much institutional
systematization.
46 Primera Crónica general c. 883: “se enamoro dell; et non de uista ca nuncal uiera, mas de
la su buena fama et del su buen prez que crescie cada dia et sonaua mas, se enamoro dell
donna Cayda.” The vocabulary is taken verbatim from standard troubadour-style formu-
las. On the term pretz in Occitan and Andalusian love rhetoric, see Rüdiger, “Der Preis der
Frau” (2008).
368 Chapter 7

conflict and alliance in the late taifa period, the Leonese king’s relationship
with a close relative of the Sevillan ruler may well indeed have come about in
a spirit of consent.
The ‘secret’ (velada “veiled”) marriage looks suspiciously like an annalistic
invention, the Andalusian equivalent of the Norman “marriage in the Danish
fashion.” So may baptism, though we cannot really tell. At any rate, the Marian
thirteenth century allows itself a smile at its forebears. The king is vehemently
opposed to ‘Mary’ as the baptismal name for his beloved, “because he did not
want any company with a woman of that name, for she had given birth to God.”
But la Çayda insists on being baptized ‘Mary,’ saying that the king could call her
whatever he wanted afterwards. In the end, the priests baptize her ‘Mary,’ but
tell the king that she is now named Elizabeth.47 Apparently the idea of postfig-
uring John the Baptist’s father was more agreeable to the king than the theo-
logical aporia he would have suffered while sleeping with a Mary. He fathered
the heir to the throne Sancho with her, along with several other children.
However, according to the Crónica general, the relationship had serious con-
sequences for both ‘Elizabeth’s’ father and the whole of Spain, namely the in-
vasion of the Almoravids, to whom it seemed intolerable that al-Muʿtamid
“had given his daughter to a Christian to be his wife, and they believed that he
himself was a secret Christian because he had such a good understanding with
King Alfonso.”48 Translated into the epic-courtly idiom of the beautiful Moor-
ish woman, the narrative demonstrates some understanding of the religious
differences between the rigoristic Almoravids and the Andalusian taifa king-
doms two centuries earlier.
While the presence of a Sevillian emir’s daughter at the royal court in León
may have been a special case, it was not an isolated one. Nor can there be any
doubt that the Christian upper classes in the north of the peninsula and in the
southern Occitan hinterland of the frontera exploited the various possibilities
of acquiring beautiful Moorish women. This is evidenced by indications as

47 Primera Crónica general c. 847: “et quando la yuan a batear, dixo el rey quel non pusiessen
nombre Maria, ca non querie ell auer compannia con mugier que assi ouiesse nombre,
porque nasciera della Dios; et ella dixo quel pusiessen nombre Maria, et despues que la
llamasse el rey como se el quisiesse; et los clerigos que la batearon pusieronle nombre
Maria, pero dixieron al rey que Helisabeth auie nombre.”
48 Primera Crónica general c. 883: “porque diera su fija por mugier al cristiano, et tenien
otrossi que el cristiano era encubiertamientre [!] pues que tan grand amor auie con el rey
don Alffonso.” The background to the invasion is quite complicated here, but is based on
the purported alliance of Alfonso and Abenhabeth, while there was in fact an under-
standing between al-Muʿtamid and Yūsuf b. Tāšufin in 1088/90.
The Comparative View: southern Europe 369

­diverse as the customs and import tariffs for the slave trade over the Pyrenees,49
the reports of Arab chroniclers concerning the capture of Barbastro on the
Aragonese border in 1064 (“fifteen hundred girls” for the Norman leader of the
expeditionary force, “seven thousand” for the Rūm emperor, along with the
drunk knight who had a slave girl dance and sing in the city palace he had just
requisitioned),50 and the account of an Andalusian embassy from the court of
the king of Navarre, who had a number of highly trained singing slaves (qiyān)
gifted to him by the caliph in Córdoba, and whose daughter was surrounded by
captive maidservants “of great beauty.”51
Like other women, Muslim slaves became victims of triumphalist gestures
by the victors, especially if acquired in contexts less peaceful than trade or gift-
giving. In this, the Arabic descriptions of Barbastro do not differ from the
Frankish annals on the Viking campaigns up the Rhine or Seine, William of
Malmesbury’s report on the St Brice’s Day massacre of the Danes in England in
1002, Dudo’s sham complaints about the repeated violation of Frankish wom-
en and the “desecration of the entire virgin sex,”52 or the skaldic verses about
Harald Hardrada’s military expeditions. Such extreme forms of polygyny—
which might remain momentary but could become more durable if the wom-
en were taken as booty—were not confined to Christian-Muslim Iberia,53 but
also shape other ‘crusading’ situations and their representations, the “beautiful
Saracen women” who delighted the conquerors of Antioch or indeed the
“beautiful woman heretics” of the Albigensian War who were thrown into the
flames.54
However, apart from the story of King Alfonso vi and the daughter of his
defeated Sevillian opponent al-Muʿtamid, the royal chronicles of the peninsula

49 The relevant documents are collected by Heers, Esclaves et domestiques (1981), 27.
50 Chronicle of Ibn Ḥayyān; the passages are collected in Dozy, Recherches, vol. 2 (31881),
335–53, here 343f., 348f.; for a more detailed discussion, see Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Po-
eten (2001), 214–22. The basileus, of course, had nothing to do with this action, which was
essentially an Aquitanian initiative, but making the attackers as strong as possible was a
means of helping the Andalusians recover from the shock of this first serious ‘crusade’-
style foray.
51 Ibn al-Kattānī, quoted from Vernet, Spanisch-arabische Kultur (1984), 302. The episode
and report both stem from the 1020s.
52 Dudo i 3: “omnis puellarum sexus ab ipsis turpiter devirginatur.”
53 On the connection between sexuality and violence between the majority and minority in
Aragon after the establishment of Christian rule, see Lourie, “Anatomy of Ambivalence”
(1990), 69ff.; Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (1996), 127–65.
54 On Antioch, see above, Chapter 5; William of Tudela, Cançon de la Crosada 14,8: “e manta
bela eretga ins en lo foc giter.” On the sexualization of an episode of the Albigensian War,
the capture of the castrum Lavaur in May 1211, by the participants and in chronicles
throughout Europe, see Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), 397–410.
370 Chapter 7

refrain from depicting such drastic expressive and symbolic acts. According to
his Llibre dels Feits, James i only takes a city by force unwillingly, and never a
woman, but prefers instead to allow the former, at least, to “ripen like a fruit
one wishes to eat.”55 He also dispenses with the habitual potential of Mediter-
ranean-style polygyny, to a degree which, as the case of Frederick ii shows,
goes far beyond the limits set by the various religious laws.56 This does not
necessarily mean abandoning the practice, but strictly curtailing its semantic
potential. Clearly the king could not use Muslim slave women for socially rel-
evant ‘generative’ purposes. The aristocratic hybrid from such encounters, as
configured in literature by Percival’s half-brother Feirefiz, the Arthurian knight
Palamedes, or the idea that Saladin’s mother had been a Christian, remained a
representational aporia as well as a canonical monstrosity; and none of the
kings of Aragon is seen to provide for a varius filius (the etymology of ‘Feirefiz’)
from a Muslim woman in the same way as they did for their children from
other concubines, who became bishops and military leaders. In the (self-)nar-
rations, at least, James i and his peers rejected the expressive and performative
aspects almost without exception—whatever the female population of Mal-
lorca or València may have experienced in real life. The agonistic aspect was on
no account permitted to come into play in the royal chronicles, since their
main aim was to portray the king’s authority as indisputably, more or less ex-
plicitly God’s will—in the case of James i, this idea runs throughout his whole
life, from the moment of his conception57—and to elevate it far above the

55 Llibre dels Feits c. 206, on the intention to increase pressure on València: “que així la madu-
raríem con fruita qui la vol menjar.” Like Dudo and William of Jumièges on la terre, James i
exploits the fact that most town names are grammatically feminine in Romance to equate
“castles and maidens” (see Chapter 5); cf. Le Goff, “Krieger und erobernde Bürger” (1990).
56 This is not the place to outline the differences in detail. In Christianity, the Pauline com-
mandment to be monogamous (1 Cor 7f.), consolidated in patristic writings (Tertullian,
De monogamia, Augustine, Confessions iv) and canon law, is binding; in Islam, tetragamy
as well as polygyny with slaves is defined in the revelation (Sure 4,3) and supported by
tradition, especially concerning the wives of the Prophet (cf. W. Montgomery Watt, “ʿĀʾiša
bint Abu Bakr,” in EI, vol. 1, 307f.; Charles Pellat, “ʿĀʾiša bint Ṭalḥa,” in ei, vol. 1, 308; Charles
Pellat, “Ṣafiyya bt. Ḥuyyay b. Akhṭab,” in ei, vol. 8, 817). Cf. Bouhdiba, La sexualité en Islam
(1975; use with a degree of caution); Lutfi a-Sayyid-Marsot, Society and the Sexes (1979). On
medieval Jewish law, which refers to the Talmudists and ultimately the first three books of
the Torah, but unlike Christian and Muslim law is not bound to a scriptural foundation,
cf. Epstein, “Concubinage” (1934–35), 153–88; Epstein, Marriage Laws (1942); Epstein, Sex
Laws (1967); various authors, “Concubine,” in ej, vol. 5, 862ff.; on Mediterranean practice
Goitein, “Slaves and Slavegirls” (1962), Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (1978), esp. vol. 3.
57 In the chapter on his conception and birth, the king tells how his father, Peter ii, already
“no longer wished to visit” his mother Maria of Montpelhier, but once, when lodging near
that city, allowed himself to be persuaded by an intimate to make a courtesy visit, “and the
The Comparative View: southern Europe 371

sphere of open competition, such as defined the Norwegian kings’ authority at

every moment (which made polygyny such a convenient instrument for them),
and which the Anglo-Norman kings had, with difficulty, just come to grips
with. To exclude any thought of the fragility of the basis of each individual
monarch’s authority, even struggles as fierce as James’ ‘race’ with Alfonso x of
Castile to conquer Múrcia in 1265/66 had to be described as an example of
majestic justice and self-restraint.58 Not even a swallow nesting in the king’s
tent could be expelled, “since she had come under my protection,” as the king
explained to his servants when, upon their departure, he ordered them to leave
the tent for the swallow and its brood.59 Justitia and clementia were the pro-
gramme of the Conqueror in the Muslim territories, and any expressive gesture
against a woman of the country had to be avoided as much as one against the
fauna.

5 Ornamental Europeanness: Polygyny in Andalusia

In contrast, the Umayyads of Córdoba and the mulūk al-ṭawāʾif after them had
always enjoyed the full spectrum offered by polygyny. There is no question
about the ‘generative’ aspect: Muslim Andalusia resembles Scandinavia more
than any other region of Europe in terms of arranging succession through open
competition between the ruler’s male descendants (in practice usually the
sons). There are relevant differences, such as the fact that the women and sons
of an Andalusian prince were under the control of a well-run household, which
thus excluded the possibility of pretenders suddenly appearing from abroad,
as Eystein (1142) and Sverrir (1177) had done. They do not, however, alter the

Lord wished us to be begotten that night.” The legendary circumstances of James’s con-
ception, which certainly appeared ‘miraculous’ to contemporaries, became ever more
embellished over the following centuries; cf. Delpech, Histoire et légende (1993); Riquer,
Llegendes històriques catalanes (2000). Similarly ‘willed by God’ were, among other things,
the intonation of the Te Deum at precisely the moment the newborn was carried into a
nearby church for an emergency baptism, and the failure of an attack on his cradle dis-
guised as an accident.
58 Llibre dels Feits c. 451ff. On the rhetorization of rule under James i, see Cawsey, Kingship
and Propaganda (2002).
59 Llibre dels Feits c. 215 (before the capture of Borriana, at the very beginning of the Valen-
cian campaign in 1233): “e manam que no en llevassen la tenda tro que ella se’n fos anada
ab sos fills, pus en nostra fe era venguda.” In the original, the words “she and her sons” are
even more directly associative.
372 Chapter 7

fundamental similarity of the situation. The sheer number of competitors—

the second Abbadid ruler of Seville, al-Muʿtaḍid (r. 1042–69), was attributed
about forty children and seven hundred women (a somewhat suspicious figure
in light of the example of Solomon), his second-born son and successor al-
Muʿtamid went up to 170 children60—made victory significantly more difficult,
the position of the “mother of the boy” (umm walad), that is, “mother of the
new ruler,” more important, and, where relevant, the elimination of co-wives
and half-brothers more urgent.61 The principle of open competition within a
well-defined group is nonetheless the same as in the North, and as in the North,
the practice allows, in special circumstances, for the success of outsiders, who
are integrated into the system with the help of a small but important violation
of the norms. The parvenu al-Manṣūr and his patroness at the Umayyad court
in Córdoba around 1000, the Gascon slave, umm walad, and master politician
Ṣubḥ,62 are mirrored in Norway by Erling the Crooked (see Chapter 1), who
secured his son’s succession through the female line by marrying the king’s
daughter Kristín and gaining the support of the archbishop of Nidaros.
Neither can there be any doubt about the ‘habitual’ value of acquiring and
possessing as many women as possible. Muslim law was decisively more forth-
coming in this respect than Christian law, which had, from Pauline times,
made monogamy one of its tenets, while the Qurʾān, sūra 4 al-nisāʾ (“on wom-
en”), ayā (‘verse’) 3, famously allows (or limits the number to) four. Further-
more, sūra 23 al-muʾminūn, ayā 6 exempts both wives and dependants (“those
whom one’s right hands possess”) from the prohibition of zināʾ (illicit sexual
intercourse). In practice, this made slavery-based elite polygyny viable, al-
though as with most forms of symbolic capital, it depended at least as much on
quality as impressive numbers. This was the basis of the job description of the
muqayyin, instructor, trainer, and trader of qiyān (sg. qayna), “singing girls,” a
synecdoche for the highly qualified, comprehensively educated female slave,
whose conviviality enabled the aristocratic style ideal of adab to be lived out
optimally.63 In this way, aristocrats were catered for by ever more beautiful and
subtle experts in astronomy, philosophy, grammar and poetry, song and dance,

60 Al-Muʿtamid, 14f. (reported by Ibn Ḥayyān); 48.

61 It is perhaps indicative that there is no equivalent to the symmetry of the Old Norse word
elja “one of several fellow co-wives/women” in the languages of Christian Europe, but this
is echoed in the Arabic ḍarra and the corresponding Hebrew ẓara (with the primary
meaning “plight, distress, worry”).
62 See Marín, “Una vida de mujer” (1997); Ruggles, “Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty” (2004).
63 Cf. Charles Pellat, “Ḳayna,” in ei, vol. 4, 820–24; Charles Pellat, “Les esclaves-chanteuses”
(1963, with a partial translation of the treatise by al-Ǧāḥiẓ, Risālat al-qiyān); Sicard,
L’amour (1987), Cheikh-Moussa, “Figures de l’esclave-chanteuse” (1996).
The Comparative View: southern Europe 373

whose number, moreover, could be increased according to the law of the

Prophet as much as luck and means would allow.
Ambition was the only limit, meaning this form of polygyny was well suited
to agonistic purposes. Reports of the quality and price of the most famous
qiyān spread throughout al-Andalus and potentially the Islamic world at
large.64 If the glory of the highest bid was not sufficient, the agon could also be
stepped up into direct competition, with the potential for escalation. When
news of the death of a Cordovan vizier who had owned several famous slaves
circulated in around 1050, the rival dynasts of Seville and Badajoz sent their
buyers to the metropolis. Al-Muẓaffar of Badajoz, who had already been de-
feated militarily by al-Muʿtaḍid of Seville several times, now also lost the ‘back
bet,’ and to make matters worse it was only with difficulty that al-Muʿtaḍid was
prevented from capturing, on the journey back to Badajoz, the two second-rate
slaves which al-Muẓaffar’s emissary had been able to acquire instead.65
Al-Muʿtaḍid’s son and successor al-Muʿtamid, who has already been men-
tioned a number of times, took a particularly witty slave from a member of the
Banū Ḥaǧǧāǧ, who were also politically sidelined by the Abbadid rulers. Ac-
cording to the anecdotal version which circulated about the incident, the
prince of Seville was taking a stroll along the riverbank with Rumayk b. al-
Ḥaǧǧāǧ. The prince spoke a hemistich—which meant a poetic challenge to his
interlocutor who then had to complete the verse in the correct metre and with
a successful punch line. There was an embarrassing pause. Then both heard a
girl who was washing clothes down on the riverbank complete the verse. Dis-
graced twice over, all Rumayk could now do was present the girl as a ‘gift’ to the
prince.66 She received a new name, Iʿtimād—a grammatical variant of the rul-
er’s name al-Muʿtamid67—and the nisba (origin-name/epithet) al-­Rumaykiyya
“she from Rumayk,” perpetuating the memory of the agonistic confrontation
of her successive owners, and went on to start her career at the Sevillian court.
She became the lifelong favourite of al-Muʿtamid, recipient of his poetry, and

64 Ávila, “Las mujeres ‘sabias’” (1989), has 106 short prosopographical portraits of learned
women in al-Andalus, predominantly from the 10th–11th centuries, most of whom were
slaves.
65 Pérès, Poésie andalouse (21953), 388, following Ibn Bassām, aḏ-Ḏaḫīra (around 1110).
66 ‘Gifts’ of this kind, which portray the previous owner as impotent, are a recurrent motif in
the episodic life stories of famous female slaves; see, for example, Ávila, “Las mujeres ‘sa-
bias’” (1989), no. 66.
67 Iʿtimād “self-supporting; reliance” to muʿtamid “on whom you can rely” (a theophoric
name), root ʿ-m-d. I am grateful to Daniel König, now at Konstanz, for discussing this
topic with me.
374 Chapter 7

companion in his exile in North Africa following his removal by the ­Almoravids.68
With her, the prince could stage potlatch-like performances, such as the day
when she wanted to wade in mud as the common people did (and she herself
had once done), whereupon al-Muʿtamid had a courtyard of his palace flooded
with rose-water and essences. But he would also address acrostics to her, parad-
ing his mastery of the poetic word and world and simultaneously demonstrat-
ing that he was at the height of the subtle nuances of the Platonic love discourse
of his time.69
And yet Andalusian polygyny, which appears so much more impressive
than the Scandinavian in many respects, is ‘incomplete’ as a social-semantic
system: it lacks the expressive nuance. It is precisely its ubiquity and ease, its
accordance with the laws of God and of men, its banality even in ostentation
that leads to the fact that its expressive possibilities are overdetermined. Any-
thing a man might do with his women had already been done in centuries of
practice, along with the accompanying conceptual reflection and poetic repre-
sentation. Certainly, Al-Muʿtamid could compose a poem in which he por-
trayed his takeover of the old caliphal city of Córdoba as the groom’s entry into
the house of the bride: his love rivals are outfought with sword and lance and
tremble with fear, while the bride, who had long been dressed in rags (an allu-
sion to the Umayyad caliphate destroyed a few decades earlier), dresses in jew-
elry and beautiful robes upon his arrival.70 However, there was nothing he
could do about the fact that this imagery was so firmly established that it was
almost obligatory for the victor of the day, and that the best he could hope to
do was handle the material in a particularly elegant fashion. He could not pos-
sibly bring his listeners to interpret his “marriage” to the city of the caliphs as
real hieros gamos, as Hallfreð Óttarson had done for Jarl Hákon and Norway
just a few years earlier in his Hákonardrápa. Andalusian aristocrats could cul-
tivate their predilection for the fair-skinned Christian women among their
slaves to the point where a poetic genre developed around it, based on a­ dopting

68 Cf. Dozy, Geschichte der Mauren in Spanien, vol. 2 (1874), 317–404 passim; Souissi, Al-
Muʿtamid ibn ʿAbbād (1977), 58ff. and passim; Mascari, Al-Mùtamid (1981), 29ff. and pas-
sim; Al-Muʿtamid, 39–47 and passim; Valencia, “Presencia de la mujer” (1989), 131f.; Ávila,
“Las mujeres ‘sabias’” (1989), no 53.
69 The acrostic Iʿtimād is printed in Arabic and Castilian in Al-Muʿtamid, 74f.
70 Al-Muʿtamid, 94f., in the Castilian version (v. 3–8): “Pedí en matrimonio a Córdoba, la
bella, cuando había rechazado a los que la pretendían con espadas y lanzas; Cuánto tiem-
po estuvo desnuda!, más me presenté yo y se cubrió de bellas túnicas y joyas; Boda real!
Celebraremos nupcias en su palacio, mientras los otros reyes estarán en el cortejo del
miedo.”
The Comparative View: southern Europe 375

the poetic voice of a girl who spoke a Romance language or mangled her words
in some other way.71 Yet precisely because Christian women from the north of
the peninsula were available in almost inexhaustible quantities, no Andalu-
sian war leader could publicize or perhaps symbolize the conquest of a Chris-
tian-ruled area through corresponding sexual acts—after all, a few days later,
the women in question were on sale in his hometown for any interested party
to repeat this act at will. Unlike any other European region, Islamic Andalusia
knew polygyny as a pronounced social phenomenon; however, in contrast to
the Latin European North, essential aspects of this polygyny had been desys-
tematized as a social-semantic phenomenon.

6 Paritarian Polygyny—Autocratic Abstinence

Against this background, we can conclude by returning to James i’s represen-

tational abstinence, so striking in contrast. Of course, to a great extent this
contrast is a result of the tendency to overemphasize cultural difference,
brought about by the tendency to conceptualize Iberian politics in terms of
religious warfare which first made itself felt towards the end of the eleventh
century (the time of la Çayda and the Cid) and had won the day by the time of
James the Conqueror. A Christian king who set out to conquer València or Cór-
doba in the form of a crusade was well advised to do what they could to avoid
resembling those whose Otherness provided the casus belli. This may provide
part of the explanation for the contrast between Frederick ii’s ‘Mediterranean’
stylization and James i, for unlike James i the Hohenstaufen king of Sicily did
not want or need to conquer any Muslim country. However, in my view there
are deeper factors, tied up with the internal dynamics of Catalan-Aragonese
rule.
This is perhaps best explained by setting James i against his father Peter ii
‘the Catholic’ (r. 1196–1213). According to his son’s judgement, Peter was a hom
de femnes—an expression that precisely corresponds to Snorri Sturluson’s
near-contemporary remark about King Magnús Erlingsson being a kvenna-
maðr mikill. The verdict of Llibre dels Feits, however, is clearly negative: “And
because they knew he was a man of women, they always took his judgements

71 In the zaǧal, a metric poem with a refrain (the ḫarǧa) in Romance, vulgar Arabic, or a
macaronic mixture, representing the girl’s song, whose unwieldiness contrasts with the
elegance of the high Arabic verses. See Zwartjes, Love Songs from al-­Andalus (1997), and
with respect to the transfer of songs and female singers Rubiera Mata, “Relacions” (1989).
376 Chapter 7

and twisted them however they wished.”72 ‘They’ are, at this point in the Book
of Deeds, a group of Occitan aristocrats in the early summer of 1210, the second
year of the Albigensian war. Faced with the imminent threat of being defeated,
killed or exiled by the crusaders, they hope to negotiate help from King Peter,
appealing to his nominal suzerainty over the viscounty of Carcassona. (The
negotiations failed, and the following year the king instead concluded an
agreement with Simon de Montfort.) The issue here is not the political signifi-
cance of this episode, which I have commented on elsewhere.73 But since poli-
tics is here conducted by way of polygyny, it must be summarized. According
to James i’s account, which is based on three high-placed eyewitnesses, the
Occitan noblemen sent “their wives and daughters, and the most beautiful
women they could find among their relatives” to the king in order to provide
fresh impetus to the negotiations over whether king would garrison the sup-
plicants’ castles, which had stalled.74 The Llibre dels Feits reports nothing more
about the progress of the negotiations, thus suggesting that the king had al-
lowed himself to be swayed (which was not in fact the case; Peter’s alliance
with the Tolosan side only materialized two years later). Worse was to come: At
the very eve of the decisive battle of Muret, when all odds seemed to be in fa-
vour of the vastly superior Catalan-Occitan forces, the king “slept with a lady”
and when morning came he was so weak that he hardly kept himself up in the
saddle. It was his way with women that lost Peter ii his life and jeopardized the
future of the Crown of Aragon.75 As the successor of such a libidinal weakling,
James, conqueror of three kingdoms, only appears all the more virtuous. The
narrative pattern also dictates that the royal first-person narrator omit any sug-
gestion that he himself might also be a hom de femnes—although his life of-
fered sufficient material to do so.
Both stylizations—the polygynous Peter and the agynous James—might be
adequately explained within the rhetorics of the Book of Deeds, if it were not
for the indications that the stylization of Peter the Catholic as a “man of wom-
en” goes in fact back to Peter himself. A witness who is beyond suspicion is his
temporary ally and ultimately mortal opponent, Simon de Montfort. In early

72 Llibre dels Feits c. 8: “E quant sabien que ell era hom de femnes, tolien-li son bo propòsit e
faïen-lo mudar en ço que ells volien.” Cf. 3 Kgs 11:1–3: “rex autem Salomon amavit mulieres
alienigenas multas … et averterunt mulieres cor eius.”
73 See Rüdiger, “Herrschaft und Stil” (2005).
74 Llibre dels Feits Ch. 8: “E mostraven-li llurs mullers, e llurs filles, e llurs parentes les pus
belles que podien trobar.” On the existential challenge this request, which on the face of
it seems innocuous enough, represented for the political mentalité of Occitan aristocrats
see Rüdiger, “Mit Worten gestikulieren” (2000).
75 Llibre dels Feits c. 9.
The Comparative View: southern Europe 377

1213, when Peter ii has decided to back the Tolosan camp, Simon listens to the
concerns of his followers about the imminent Aragonese intervention:

At these words Montfort took a letter out of his purse and said, “Read
this.”
It was a letter in which the king of Aragon greeted a nobleman, the
wife of a baron from Tolosa, and assured her that, for the sake of her love,
he would come to drive the French out of the land, and more blandish-
ments of this sort. When the sacrist had read this, he responded: “What
do you say to that?”—“What would I like to say? By God, that I fear no
king, who would turn up against the will of God for a whore!” And he
carefully replaced the letter.76

Peter’s courtly epistle was certainly not intended “for a whore,” even if it
pleased the straightforward crusader hero to use such a word to dismiss the
courtly manners of his opponents and future subjects, which were as incom-
prehensible to him as they were repugnant. In fact, Peter’s message may well
have resembled that offer of assistance, cloaked in the form of a troubadour
verse with well-chosen sexual undertones precisely marking the boundary be-
tween courtly decency and chivalrous bravado, that Savaric de Mauleon, King
John’s seneschal in Aquitaine, had sent to the Tolosan count the year before—
not, of course, addressing it to him but to his wife, Countess Eleanor, sister of
Peter ii: “Just send us a message with your wishes; the saddle is on, we are al-
ready mounted!”77 Cortesia as a political system was so dominant in Occitania

76 William of Puylaurens, Chronica § 20: “Qui ad hanc vocem protulit litteras de sua almo-
neria, dicens: ‘Legite istas litteras.’ Quas cum legisset, invenit in eis quod rex Aragonum
quandam nobilem, uxorem cuiusdam nobilis Tholose diocesis salutabat, persuadens
quod ob amorem eius ad expellendos de terra Gallicos veniebat, et alias blandicias con-
tinebant. Quibus lectis respondit ei sacrista: ‘Quid vultis dicere propter istud?’ Qui ait:
‘Quid volo dicere? Sic Deus me adiuvet, quod ego regem non vereor qui pro una venerit
contra Dei negotium meretrice!’” William wrote his chronicle about fifteen years after the
episode, but as a chaplain close to several outstanding actors on the crusaders’ side, he
would have had access to first-hand witnesses. This does not preclude literary stylization
but confers overall credibility.
77 pc 432,1, v. 7–8: “E mandatz nos la vostra volontat, C’ar montarem, qe tot avem celat.” The
verse would have gained wide currency, not least as its metre is a calque on a famous
troubadour song. It should therefore be understood as a piece of ‘war propaganda’ from
the fourth year of the Albigensian War. It advertised not only the military fact of the
promised Aquitanian-Angevin support but also the fact that by using the customary form
of communication the seneschal—much like Peter ii—presented himself as a ‘native’
joining the coalition against the French crusaders, who used a completely different form
of communication.
378 Chapter 7

that even during the Albigensian War the actors drew on its idiom, the fin’
amor, to signal common ground and reliability to one another.
In semantic terms, the Occitan fin’ amor, in principle a representative form
of polygyny, had been completely grammaticalized78 from the mid-twelfth
century and detached from its signifiers. In contrast to the unity of cultural
practice, its literarization, and the integration of literarization into practice,
which characterized ‘love’ in the classical Arabic court culture of the Abbasid
era as a “code of social competence,”79 the Occitan fin’ amor was separate from
the polygynous practices of those who make use of it as an idiom of social
communication. The real-life concubines of the Occitan magnates had noth-
ing to do with the ‘ladies’ who serve as symbolic vocabulary in their rhetorical
acts.80 Because the fin’ amor is a comprehensive behavioural code, its expres-
sive possibilities are not limited to the composition of verses that can be inter-
cepted by an indignant crusader. Given the absence of sources, however, it is
difficult to assess the performative element, so we do not have a clear picture
of the role the pretty daughters and cousins are likely to have actually played in
the negotiations between Peter ii and the region’s aristocracy in 1210. (It was
certainly not the one which first springs to mind because of the account in the
Llibre dels Feits, for the crux of the negotiations was the non-occupation of the
offered castles.) Nevertheless, it is obvious that what James wants to depict as
his predecessor’s libidinal weakness actually implies virtuoso mastery of the
customary political forms of the region, and hence his predecessor’s skill.
James certainly understood this, for he had grown up in this milieu and had
witnesses on hand. But he wished to muddy the issue for his own purposes. For
as suggested earlier, the Llibre dels Feits is more than just the account of an ex-
traordinary reign; in some ways, the king—who began the chronicle around
1240, shortly before completing the conquest of València, and updated it short-
ly before his death at nearly seventy81—conceptualizes his own reign while
and by narrating it. His father’s death at the Battle of Muret in 1213, his own long
reign, and the forced reorientation of Catalonia from the Occitan north to the
Muslim south obliged him to start afresh in several essential points. One such
issue was the impossibility of continuing the style of rule employed by James’s
predecessors Alfons ii (r. 1162–1196) and Peter ii, which was rooted in p ­ aritarian

78 See Melis and Desmet, “Grammaticalisation” (1998): “La désémantisation ou le déve-

loppement du sens grammatical à partir du sens lexical par un méchanisme de générali-
sation ou d’abstraction est en général considéré comme le processus essentiel de la
grammaticalisation.”
79 See Algazi and Drory, L’amour (2000).
80 For an explanation of fin’ amor as a ‘grammar of the mentality,’ I refer to Rüdiger, “Das
Morphem Frau” (2000), and Rüdiger, Aristokraten und Poeten (2001), esp. 223–38.
81 Cf. Soldevila, “Prefaci al Llibre dels Feits,” in Les quatre grans cròniques (21983), 7–64.
The Comparative View: southern Europe 379

cortesia politics, into the new era after the Albigensian War.82 Nothing better
illustrates the older style than the following episode, taken from the near-con-
temporary razó (commentary) attached to a song by Raimon de Miraval, a less-
er lord of the Carcassés and an associate of the Tolosan Count Raymond vi:

Raimon de Miraval fell in love with Lady Asalaís de Boissason, who was
young and noble and beautiful and greatly concerned about glory and
honour and praise. And as she knew that Lord Miraval could bring her
more praise and honour than any other, she was very pleased when she
saw that he probably wanted her, and she prepared the best reception for
him and she spoke the most obliging words to him, those that a lady
should only speak to a knight.
And he promoted her (la enanset) in songs and speeches, as he was
able, and composed many good songs about her praising her glory and
worth and courtesy, and gave her such great honour that all the great
lords of the region fell in love with her (entendion en ela): the viscount of
Besiers [Raymond Roger Trencavel] and the count of Tolosa [Raymond
vi] and the king Peter of Aragon, to whom Miraval had praised her so
much that the king, without having seen her, fell completely in love with
her and sent her messages and letters and jewels, and was dying of desire
to visit her.
Miraval worked hard to ensure the king wished to visit her, and in-
cluded a verse about this in the song, called Now with the Violence of the
Cold:

If the king holds court in Lomberts

“joy” will always be with him

and if he has been a fortunate man before,

his fortune will be twofold:

For the courtesy and serenity

of the beautiful Lady Asalaís,

the fresh colour, the bright hair

make the whole world rejoice.

Thereupon the king travelled to Albigés, to Lomberts, for the sake of

the Lady Asalaís, and Miraval came with the king and begged him to act

82 For clarification, see Rüdiger, “Herrschaft und Stil” (2005).

380 Chapter 7

as his advocate with Lady Asalaís (qu’el li degués valer e ajudar, a legal
expression). The Lady Asalaís grants the king a particularly honourable
and generous reception. And the king had scarcely settled down beside
her when he begged her for love (la preguet d’amor), and she immediately
answered that she would do whatever he pleased. So that night the king
had all that he desired from her. And the following day everyone in the
castle and all in the royal entourage knew of this.83

The king comes, sees, and takes—and this is something he must not do, for
within the social framework at work in this episode (and whose disruption it
describes), he is not the king, but one of several contenders for the favour of a
much-coveted lady. For King Peter to exploit his preeminence is outrageously
bad taste from a courtly point of view—and indeed the whole point of this
cultural concoction is to impress this group. It is the ‘agonistic aspect’ of po-
lygyny in its purest form: none of the three leading contenders (who politically
were locked in a similarly fierce, long-term competitive situation) had ever
seen the woman, but all three realized that they had to win her once a com-
petitor also sought to do so. Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer behaved in a similar
fashion when he rode through the night to make a girl his frilla, knowing that
his brother and co-king Eystein had endeavoured to do so. And al-Muʿtaḍid
and al-Muẓaffar behaved likewise when they heard that there were some pres-
tigious slaves for sale in Córdoba: it is unlikely that either of them knew the
women, but both knew the other would want them.

83 Biographies des troubadours, 392f.: “Raimons de Miraval si s’enamoret de N’Alazais de

Boisazo, qu’era joves e gentils e bela, e fort volontoza de pretz e d’onor e de lauzor ; e quar
ella conoisia qu’En Miravals li podia plus dar pretz et honor que nuils hom del mon, si fo
molt alegra, quar vit qu’el li volia ben ; e fes li totz los bels semblans e dis li totz los bels
plasers que dona deu far ni dire a nuill cavalier ; et el la enanset en cantan e en comtan,
aitan com poc ni saup ; e fes de leis maintas bonas chansos, lauzan son pretz e sa valor e
sa cortezia ; e mes la en si gran honor que tuit li valen baro d’aquela encontrada entendion
en ela: lo vescoms de Bezers e·l coms de Toloza e·l reis Peire d’Arago, als cals Miravals l’avia
tan lauzada que·l reis, senes vezer, n’era fort enamoratz e l’avia mandat sos mesatges e sas
letras e sas joias ; et el eis moria de volontat de leis vezer. Don Miravals se penet que·l reis
la vengues vezer, e·n fes una cotbla, en la chanso que ditz ‘Ar ab la forsa del freis’: S’a Lum-
bertz corteja·l reis, / per tostems er jois ab lui; / e si tot s’es sobradreis, / per un be l’en venran
dui: / Que la cortezi’ e·l jais / De la bella N’Alazais / E·l fresca colors e·ill pel blon / Fan tot lo
setgle jauzion. Don lo reis s’en venc en Albuges et a Lombertz per ma dona N’Alazais; e·N
Miravals venc ab lo rei, preguan lo qu’el li degues valer et ajudar ab ma dona N’Alazais.
Fort fo ereubutz et onratz lo reis e vegutz volentiers per ma dona N’Alazais. E·l reis, ades
que fo asetatz apres d’ela, si la preguet d’amor; et ella li dis ades de far tot so qu’el volia. Si
que la nueit ac lo reis tot so que·ill plac de leis. E l’endema fo saubut per tota la gen del
castel e per tota la cort del rei.”
The Comparative View: southern Europe 381

For James i, this is an unacceptable model. ‘His’ king is not competing with
any other member of a courtly meritocracy who can also compose poetry and
express themselves elegantly. The political style which obligated Peter ii (and
Alfons ii before him) to present himself as par among pares, even when every-
one knew he was at least primus—indeed, that he had to make a special effort
to allay any suspicion that he might present himself as the primus that he
was84—might have made James’s predecessors unusually successful rulers. In
1230 or 1240 this was no longer an option for the ‘conqueror.’ What Peter ii,
master of the political style of cortesia, could have made of the situation sur-
rounding the hereditary title of Aurembiaix of Urgell! A woman desired by all,
a courtly competition—the antagonist of the case, Guerau de Cabrera, was a
prolific troubadour—finally the beauty (and her land) won by merit. Of course,
sheer force of arms would have been concealed behind this victory, but it
would not have been permitted to show. This was also true of James’s account
of the matter in Llibre dels Feits, but otherwise it is a completely different story.
In terms of labels, his is not ‘paritarian,’ but ‘monarchic.’ James does not appear
as a suitor, but as a just and clement king, one who grants the widowed and
orphaned woman her rights.85 There is not the slightest suspicion in the Book
of Deeds that James had a contractually regulated sexual relationship with the
orphan; if not for the document of 1228, Aurembiaix would appear merely as
the beneficiary of the king’s sense of duty and capacity to assert royal law
against troublesome aristocrats. Such a monarch does not participate in any
agon—not even in a rivalry among kings in which the prize is the Muslim
lands of València and Múrcia.
In this respect, the Andalusian principalities of the eleventh century resem-
ble the conditions on the northwestern Christian edge of the Mediterranean
Basin before about 1200, before James’ time. However brilliant individual rul-
ers might appear, overall, these were acephalous polities in which even the
most powerful, on the basis of a perhaps not quite even but nonetheless open
competition, contended with the other members of the leading group. In both
regions, polygyny could remain functional in at least some aspects (particu-
larly the ‘agonistic,’ of which a number of select cases have been examined
here). By contrast, an Umayyad caliph would not send out his buyers to win a
particularly desirable qayna for himself—or rather: if he chose to do so instead
of waiting for her to be ‘gifted’ to him as a gesture of subordination, he ­certainly

84 See the tençon of Guiraut de Bornelh with King Alfons ii of Aragon (Be me plairia, senh‘ en
Reis, pc 242,22=23,1a) on precisely this problem, commented on in Rüdiger, “Kann ein
Mächtiger” (2008).
85 Llibre dels Feits c. 34: a repeated appeal to royal “dretura e mercé”/justitia and clementia.
382 Chapter 7

would not have to reckon with the possibility of rival bidders. If the emperor in
Constantinople needs a companion, he does not go courting himself, but has a
list of the desired qualities compiled, and whoever in the empire has a suitable
daughter must deliver her to the City.86 This is the proper form of polygyny for
true monarchs, based on the immobility of the ruler—ultimately aspiring to
the ideal of being an earthly figuration of the unmoved mover. Al-Muʿtamid of
Seville depicts himself in a poem as the “moon king,” unswervingly making his
way among the shining stars like the prince on earth between warriors and
young girls, both glorious and beautiful.87 With a keen sense of nuance, the
malik al-ṭaʾifa foregoes the image of the sun which could only belong to a ca-
liph, just as only the cosmocrator was entitled to it among Christians.
Yet this immobility is ambivalent. It is not exactly the most reputable em-
peror who would secure a wife in this manner; the biblical model of King Aha-
suerus, who was pulled to and fro between good and evil advisers (Esther 1–3),
is even less edifying. This may not have been a concern for the true autocrats,
but for an upstart king like James of Aragon, who has only just got his own coun-
tries under control and is thinking of large-scale southern expansion, even the
‘monarchical’ model in its classical form cannot apply. The autobiographical
James i is in constant motion, his life is a ‘book of deeds’ like that of another
primus inter pares, yet he was also a monarch, albeit incompletely. Such a ruler
cannot sit back in his palace and have girls brought to him from the provinces
like an emperor or a caliph; but he also cannot contend for them, seek them out,
perform gestures with them like any count. That is, he can and he does (as in the
case of the Aurembiaix of Urgell), but this is not something he can narrate.
Ultimately, polygyny as a productive social-semantic system in the Europe-
an thirteenth century fell victim to this situation. Its full functionality only un-
folds in a paritarian open competition. In other settings it becomes residual.
This is not necessarily detrimental to polygynous practice in day-to-day life. In
the late Middle Ages and early modern period, concubinage and polygyny, also
and especially among princes, were famously much-practiced and much-­
discussed phenomena. They could, however, no longer be a constitutive part of
political communication.

86 Cf. Hunger, “Schönheitskonkurrenz” (1965); Treadgold, “Bride-Shows” (1979), as the most

instructive sources the Life of St. Philaretos (ed. Fourmy and Leroy [1934]) and the tradi-
tion about the poet Kassianē and her epigrammatic verbal exchange with Emperor
Theophilos (r. 829–42; see Rochow, Studien [1967]). The motif of the Byzantine custom of
selecting the emperor’s wife in this way was known in the West and adopted for polemical
purposes; see Guibert of Nogent, Dei Gesta per Francos, i 5.
87 Al-Muʿtamid, 82–85.
Polygyny and Europe
By Way of a Conclusion

One midwinter towards the middle of the eleventh century, a young Icelander
made his fortune at the Norwegian royal court. Evening after evening, as was
expected of newcomers, he had entertained the followers of King Harald
Hardrada, gathered for Yule, with tales and sagas. After a dozen days, the mid-
winter festival was nearing its end, just as the aspirant’s stock of tales also ap-
peared to be running out. The king asked him why he was so taciturn. He re-
plied that he only had one story left, one he had heard earlier that year from an
eyewitness at the Icelandic althing; but he did not know whether it would be
advisable to tell it, for its protagonist was the king himself. Of course, the king
reassured the Icelander, who then recited King Harald’s útferðarsaga, the ‘tale
of his voyage out.’ By the time he had finished, his future was assured.
Harald Hardrada’s delight at having his exploits in Byzantium—for no other
place than the Great City was a worthy location for a tale of deeds abroad—
presented to his Norwegian followers in a polished form was certainly further
increased by the news that his old comrade Halldór Snorrason had rendered
him the same service in Iceland—not entirely altruistically, of course, for in
doing so Halldór inscribed himself into the most glorious cultural contact that
the medieval North knew how to narrate.1 The saga reported Harald’s exile af-
ter the death of his older brother Saint Olav at Stiklestad, which, thanks to
fraternal family ties, initially led him to Novgorod, where he and the daughter
of Prince Jaroslav came to an understanding. He then reached the Great City,
where, epitomizing Nordic superiority, he effortlessly outshone the Greeks,
even the emperor’s own kin (frændir), in masculine matters such as warfare,
and became an indispensable pillar in the Greek empire’s battle against Ital-
ians, Bulgarians, and other barbarians. No wonder “Queen” Zoē’s eyes were
drawn to him. She even asked him for a lock of his hair, to which he responded
that she could give him one in return—from her pubic hair, no less.2 This re-
mark will certainly have drawn cheers at a royal court in the North, where the
art of the sexual slur had been honed to perfection. But it also cost Harald his
rank, and almost his life as well. Fortunately, his sainted brother intervened

1 The most detailed account of Harald’s time in Byzantine service remains Blöndal, Varan-
gians (1978), 54–102; on the cultural contact aspect, see Bagge, “Harald Hardråde i Bysants”
(1990).
2 Mks c. 33 (ms Z): “hár úr magaskeggi þínu.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_011

384 Polygyny and Europe

and miraculously freed him from a prison full of beasts and the skeletal re-
mains of earlier victims, including, in some versions of the saga, a snake pit.
(According to Saxo, the knife Olav gave to Harald to escape with later came
into the possession of Valdemar the Great of Denmark, who held it in high es-
teem, even though it was already badly rusted.3) Harald avenged himself fit-
tingly: he blinded the emperor who had had him thrown into the darkness of
the dungeon,4 and shamed the empress, whom he had spurned, even further:
he kidnapped her young niece from a summer palace on the Bosphorus and
then executed a brilliant escape from the Golden Horn, secured with a chain,
and only set her ashore when he reached the Dniepr, with a message for Zoē to
“consider how much power she had over Harald, and whether the queen’s au-
thority had in any way prevented him from being able to get the young lady.”5
Nevertheless, Harald did not return from his útferð without a princess. On his
way back, he acquired Elizabeth of Novgorod to be his first queen. Back in Nor-
way, he went for the kingship and made the daughter of an important party
leader, Þóra, his other queen, upon which he went off hunting Danish women.
It is a long way indeed from Constantinople to Þingvellir. Perhaps it seems
longer to us than it did to an eleventh-century audience. We automatically be-
come distrustful: things just could not have happened that way, could they?
And if there was anything factual about the incidents reported, the Norwe-
gians had got it all wrong. First of all, the empress could never have wanted to
have Harald “as her man”6—or could she? Michael Psellos reports how when
Zoē first met a newly appointed chamberlain, “in furtive intercourse of the
eyes she was impregnated with love for him,”7 and subsequently wooed him
like Ovid’s young Romans wooed their puellae or the knight the shepherdess in

3 Saxo xi, 3,1: “Hunc cultellum Waldemarus rex res gestas cognoscendi ac referendi cupidissi-
mus rubigine exesum uixque secandi sufficientem ministerio familiaribus sepe monstrabat.”
4 Lönnroth, “Man-Eating Mama” (1998), 46ff., points out that it was not Constantine Monoma-
chos, but his rival Michael Kalaphates, who was blinded during Harald’s time, but that the
mercenary Harald could well have done this deed. On the theological justification of the
blinding of emperors as severing contact with the divine light, see Ducellier, “Byzance”
(1992), referring to Lampsides, Ἡ ποινὴ τῆς τυφλώσεως παρὰ Βυζαντινοῖς (1949).
5 HsS c. 15: “bað hana þá segja Zóe, frændkonu sinni, hversu mikit vald hon hafði á Haraldi eða
hvárt nǫkkut hefði dróttningar ríki fyrir staðit, at hann mætti fá jungfrúna.” Heimskringla,
trans. Finlay and Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 52. With Snorri, who prefers things to be plausible,
Harald robs the jungfrú (a Saxon loanword that he never uses in a Nordic context) from a city
palace and sets her ashore before leaving the Bosphorus. The Morkinskinna’s “palace over the
sea” which could be accessed from below between its columns, also appears in other stories
about Byzantium, and may reflect astonishment at Byzantine architecture.
6 HsS c. 13: “Zóe dróttning vildi sjálf hafa Harald sér til manns.” Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and
Foulkes, vol. 3 (2015), 51.
7 Chronographia iii 18: ἐξ ἀρρήτου μίξεως τὸν ἐκείνου ἐνεκυμόνησεν ἔρωτα.
Polygyny and Europe 385

the ­pastorals, only with gender roles reversed. (The chamberlain went on to
become her husband and emperor Michael iv.) The idea that at some point
Empress Zoē became aware of a certain muscular Northman among her guards
would have made as much sense to Psellos and his contemporaries—insofar as
they took any notice of the subordinate mercenary and tax collector Haraltes
at all—as to Harald’s Yuletide companions. However, they would have attrib-
uted Zoē’s optical intercourse less to Harald’s irresistible appearance than to
the empress’ deplorable asélgeia, her lack of the capacity for self-control in
those carnal things which in excess would lead to sin.8 Like the young func-
tionary Michael, Harald would have appeared merely a passive victim to them,
just as helpless against the eros of the empress as the Greek princess Maria and
other girls were against Harald’s triumphal progress in the sagas.
As one of the most conspicuous cases of polyandry in the Middle Ages, Zoē
doubtless plays a special role. But she is by no means unique. Anna Komnene’s
blatant or rather demonstrative curiosity expressed by the description of Rob-
ert Guiscart’s physique in her Alexiad9 is another indication that the difference
between the purple-born and the barbarians was enough to completely super-
sede the usual gender scheme: the Roman woman in the imperial palace looks
and enjoys, and the barbarian must suffer it. Muscular men from the West are
playthings to imperial women in the Centre.
Harald himself had no part in this construction; his experiences in Byzan-
tium were turned into a narrative with a very different message. This drastic
example illustrates what the preceding chapters have been about: Medieval
polygyny as a system of social signs is not only very diverse, it is not even ‘a’
single sign system. In the case of real-life Harald and Zoē (if ever there was
such a case), symbolic communication does not even fail: there is no commu-
nication at all. The Rhōmaîos and Norwegian systems of meanings do not meet
in this case, even if we suppose that Haraltes really had a sexual relationship of
some kind with Zoē (which I think is quite likely, though it might have been
any ‘Harald’). This encounter is an extreme example. But even in the context of
the variants of elite polygyny examined in this book, within the broadly analo-
gous sociopolitical frameworks of North, West, and Southwest Latin Europe—
relatively fragmented and resource-poor agrarian societies dominated by a
patchwork of warlords—the social semantics of polygyny can vary greatly,

8 Cf. Laiou, Mariage, amour et parenté (1992), 71. Cf. Garland, “The Eye of the Beholder” (1994);
Garland, “Conformity and Licence” (1995). Hill, Imperial Women (1999), can only be accepted
with reservations; the psychologizing approach of Connor, Women of Byzantium (2004), on
Zoē: 207–37, fails to convince.
9 Alexias i, 10.
386 Polygyny and Europe

even be contradictory. To briefly compare King Harald’s military campaigns in

Denmark with King James’s military campaigns in València: both made it clear
that they were the better rulers, but one did so by catching and taking women
(or claiming to have done so), and the other by refraining from women (or
claiming to have done so).
Throughout this study, the discussion has been focused on diversity and dif-
ference. Let us therefore conclude by asking some sum-up questions about
medieval elite polygyny and its place in medieval history at large. History is an
“inventory of differences” (Paul Veyne)—differences to the present, but also
differences within itself—yet it should be an inventory, not a “cabinet of curi-
osities” (František Graus).10 In this sense, what generalizing ‘messages,’ if any,
can be had from this inventory?
There is a ‘white elephant’ in the book. We have seen a lot of women having
relationships with a lot of men, but we have very rarely seen them ‘get married’
to one another. Of course this has been intentional, and I have explained at
large (and I hope not too tediously) why I think that in many works on medi-
eval history, ‘getting married’ looms rather too large. But setting records straight
is a double-edged pleasure, not only because it tends to make one feel smug,
but also because there is a danger of simply tipping the scales in the opposite
direction, convincing nobody. So it may be useful, at the end of a study that has
pronouncedly not been about getting married, to address the white elephant
and reiterate what has been said, or sometimes implied, about ‘marriage’ in
light of this study. What of the “keystone of the social edifice” (Duby)?
Marriage has been viewed here, not as the notional opposite of polygyny,
but as one of its subsets. It is a means of formalizing the maximum within a
relational continuum of tendentially sexual relationships of the same man. It
is not necessarily there, but once it is there, it turns (or is expected to turn) a
bond into a binding form. In other words, formalization is supposed to entail
reliability and durability, and to remove contingency and flexibility. This is a
functional approach; it is also a problematic one: What conditions must be
met for us to call a certain relationship ‘a marriage’? Do we have a checklist of
characteristics: publicity, familial assent, transfer of goods, certain ceremo-
nies? Do we ask for a certain stock of vocabulary in the sources? Do we imagine
‘marriage’ to be an event or a state? Perhaps ‘marriage’ is one of the historical
concepts which we tend to take too much for granted. Not that I am saying it
did not exist; I am only saying we cannot take for granted that it did.

10 Cf. Veyne, Wörterbuch der Unterschiede (1986); on Graus, see above Chapter 6.
Polygyny and Europe 387

In the first instance ‘marriage’ is a subject of conceptual history. We have

seen the Roman-Latin vocabulary around matrimonium/coniugium ‘at work’
and observed how it was often cumbersome in vernacular contexts—how
events, that is, social practices (nuptiae ~ brúðhlaup) but not legal states were
translatable, and how even (and especially) the designations of the persons
involved, above all uxor and its canonical counterpart concubina, had very dif-
ferent approximations in various contexts.11 We have also seen that in some
circumstances and regions, the question is whether there was any notion of a
certain privileged kind of man–woman relationship that was categorially dif-
ferent from all others, whereas in other circumstances and regions, the con-
cept of marriage could have a marked influence of all other kinds of relation-
ships. To say that ‘marriage’ is first and foremost an object of conceptual history
is therefore not to minimize its impact.
To work with concepts is to generalize, even to abstract. As such, ‘mar-
riage’ is, secondly, a matter of intellectual history, the history of theology and
dogma,12 and ecclesiastical and secular law. In the Introduction, I set out why
I wanted to largely do without examining legal sources (although it would
have been impossible to omit them entirely); the principal reason was that
very thorough and comprehensive studies already exist on the subject of “le-
gal marriage”/matrimonium legitimum, based primarily on juridical (in the
broader sense) or perhaps I should say prescriptive material: council and syn-
od canons and their compendia, penitentials, leges, municipal and provincial
laws, individual legal cases, and so on. I wanted to take a different approach
in this work, preferring to deal with narratives (sagas, chronicles, Arthurian
romances, and similar). Such material does not define concepts, but tells tales.
This does not mean that the argumentation in a history could not be just as
shrewd as in a juridical treatise (time and again, Snorri Sturluson or William of
Malmesbury demonstrate how subtly the “argument in the episode”13 can be
worked), but more space remains for those grey areas where social manoeu-
vring and negotiation take place. That said, manoeuvring and negotiation do

11 And even where the ‘Augustinian antinomy’ does shape the account, it need not be ex-
pressed in terms of matrimony. Helmold of Bosau (c. 51) distinguishes between filius no-
bilis and filius de concubina when looking at the elite of along the southern Baltic coast. In
distinguishing ‘noble sons’ (or properly, ‘noteworthy sons,’ nobilis < nosci) from ‘concu-
bine’s sons,’ he is closer to the Nordic laws’ rank distinction (aðalkona ‘first woman’ or
‘noble woman’), or indeed ethnologists’ functional distinction (‘principal wife/secondary
wife’), than to canon law.
12 On this field, completely disregarded here, see most recently the synoptic d’Avray, Medi-
eval Marriage (2008).
13 See Althoff, “Geschichtsschreibung in einer oralen Gesellschaft” (2001).
388 Polygyny and Europe

of course also occur among the producers and users of ‘legal sources’; as sug-
gested in Chapter 1, legal ‘discourse’ differs from the narrative sources above
all in terms of rhetoric. ‘Marriage’ can also enter the narrative sources, signify
political and cultural antinomies, and occasionally even become a matter of
religion14—something it clearly was not for the Norwegians around 1200, and
was only for the Anglo-Normans in their more scrupulous moments. Neither
set of sources is ‘more valuable’ or permits more reliable conclusions; they only
lead to different nuances.
Whether Harald Hardrada had one, two, or no ‘wives’ at all is thus a matter
of interpretation. The question may also be a futile one. The narrative sources
merely tell us that he had lasting relationships with two politically and habitu-
ally different, but equally significant women. The Danish women he captured
are relatively remote from Þóra and Elizabeth in this continuum. The differ-
ences in the duration of the relationship, the circumstances of its formation,
and (presumably) its lived reality are obvious. However, they reflect contingen-
cies, not categories. The question must now be whether the participants and
their environment—as well as the saga writers and their audience, which is a
separate matter—knew a form of man–woman relationship such as ‘marriage’
and whether it found its way into the narratives. The findings are mixed: the
chroniclers and saga writers in the early thirteenth century must have been
aware of the concept of a monogamous, exclusive, and lasting relationship; the
extent to which they integrated it into the narrative is genre-dependent and
sometimes varies greatly from work to work. But what all have in c­ ommon—
and this, in my view, makes it possible to claim that ‘marriage’ as social practice
was only a minority phenomenon up until but not including the thirteenth
century—is that even at those points in the narrative where we might think
‘marriage’ and the authors occasionally even explicitly mention it, the prac-
tices described do not correspond to the categorial world of the ‘Augustin-
ian distinction’ between legitimum coniugium and a “pact of libidinous love.”
The women of Harald Hardrada and all the others interact with one another,
their man, and—most importantly—their environment within the frame-
work of a dynamic system of mutual positioning. Status, including legal sta-
tus, is not once acquired and then retained, but continually negotiable. As the

14 Adam’s Hamburg-Bremen mission field is full of Nordic pagans with their “countless
wives” (iv, 21). Like the Phoenicians, they relieve the self-inflicted demographic pressure
caused by polygynous excess through maritime expansion (i, 3 after Sallust, Bellum Iu-
gurthinum 19,1). So by analogy with Roman history, he is saying that the Northern princes,
if handled properly, will one day bend their necks before ‘Rome.’ For the representation of
Christianization as the end of a polygynous style of rule, see Chapter 5, for relationships
Danico/Christiano more in the Norman chronicle tradition, see Chapter 6.
Polygyny and Europe 389

­13th-­century Jutish Law has it: legitima is the woman who has kept hold of the
housekey for long enough.15
This is not a Scandinavian peculiarity and certainly not a residue (least of all
of a ‘pagan’ past), but the practice of a high medieval Christian society. At the
time we see it at its most vigorous, Northern polygyny, incorporating marriage,
is ‘traditional’ in the sense that society traces it back to the Viking age. But it is
first and foremost the social practice of medieval Christian societies. The fact
that it is described in such comprehensive detail in the written sources known
to us, is more of a cultural particularism than what is actually described.
What is conspicuously true for Scandinavia can be translated to other re-
gions of Christian Europe as well (and certainly not only the regions consid-
ered here). In Western Europe, we can observe the widespread practice of not
only polygynous relationships but also their semantic valorization, much like
what we see in Northern Europe, except for the essential characteristic that
it was this region which developed a form of monogamy that became hege-
monic over the course of the twelfth century. The new monogamism, contrary
to a widespread view, cannot be understood as the assertion of a more recent
‘ecclesiastical’ model of marriage over an older ‘lay’ model, but instead repre-
sents the coincidence of two new ‘marriage models’: one theological-canoni-
cal, the other founded on social practices changing under economic pressures.
It is perhaps less than surprising that in a period as marked by accelerated
demographic and economic change as the Western 10th/11th-century ‘boom’ or
‘take-off,’ well-established models became incompatible with changing prac-
tices, and consequently dysfunctional as a semantic system. Isolated aspects
of polygynous relationships could still be utilized centuries after the estab-
lishment of hegemonic monogamy; however, these no longer amounted to a
coherent generation of meaning. In the South of Latin Europe, on the border
with the Muslim part of the Mediterranean, polygyny was inextricably tied up
with the problem of resemblance to the religious Other, which led to disjunc-
tive strategies such as the development of a completely desemantized system

15 Jutish Law (a royal law of Valdemar ii of Denmark promulgated around 1240): “Hwa sum
hauær slækæfrith i garth mæth sik. oc gangær opænbarlich mæth at souæ. oc hauær laas
oc lykki. oc søkær atæ oc dryk mæth. opænbarlich i thre wintær. hvn skal wæræ athalkunæ
oc ræt hwsfrø.” (Stockholm, Royal Library ms. NkS 295,8°, early 14th century: “Anyone who
has a slækæfrith in his house with him and openly goes to sleep with her, and she has a
lock and key, and he eats and drinks with her openly for three years, she shall be athalkunæ
oc ræt hwsfrø.”) Latin versions have concubina for slækæfrith (“sleeping-companion”; mod-
ern Danish form slegfred) and legitima for athalkunæ oc ræt hwsfrø (“first [or ‘front’] wife
and rightful lady of the house”). On the term aðalkona “principal wife/woman” as a Norse
approximation to the legal term uxor, see Chapter 1.
390 Polygyny and Europe

of ­polygynous speech (the fin’ amor) alongside polygynous practice and simul-
taneous representational ignorance of that practice.
A hundred years after Snorri Sturluson and James i, ‘systematic’ aristocratic
polygyny was a thing of the past. The concubines of the late medieval elite, il-
lustrious as they could sometimes be—for instance, Sibil·la de Fortià at the
court of Peter the Magnificent of Aragon in the fourteenth century, or Philip
the Good’s series of concubines in Flanders and Burgundy in the fifteenth—
appear reduced to their habitual aspect, caricatured in the chronicles with ob-
vious expressive intent—such as the Jewesses of Casimir iii in Poland and the
‘Jewess of Toledo’ associated with the imperator Alfonso vii in Castile in the
fourteenth century.16 Such instances can, with some justification, be described
as ‘residual.’ From the thirteenth century, monogamism, rather than monoga-
my, prevailed in Christian Europe: a manner of representation in which the
plurality of ties could no more be conceived except as a deviation from the
singular.
The preceding chapters have set out the ‘uses’ of polygyny, the diverse ways
in which it was employed by various actors, both men and women, in the
leading milieus of the different regions considered here. So the question is:
Why did Europe bid farewell to polygyny as a social-semantic system at the
beginning of the late Middle Ages at all? Not to polygynous practices as
such—this has never happened—nor to the stylization of some aspects of
polygynous practices; the favourites and mistresses of the following centuries,
and indeed in many respects those of present-day Europe (think of such dif-
ferent leadership figures as François Mitterrand and Silvio Berlusconi), were
hardly insignificant. What took place over the course of the thirteenth cen-
tury was something different: from a pattern of behaviour that structured po-
litical culture, elite polygyny became an ornament. But if polygynous prac-
tices and representations were so versatile across so many regions, and if the
restriction to monogyny must have seemed almost dysfunctional for many of
its aspects—diminished anchorage in the regions, reduced possibilities for
expressing alliances or victories, fewer notable contests, less room for ma-
noeuvre in entering or ending relationships—then the success of monogamy
is by no means as inevitable and logical, even less culturally predetermined,
as it often appears in the grand narrative of European history. Rather, it would
appear to be an astonishing, in many ways an absurd, cultural choice. So the
question is: why?

16 Cf. Boscolo, Sibilla de Fortià (1970); Cirot, “Alphonse le Noble” (1922); Lambert, “Alphonse
de Castille” (1923); Jan Długosz, Annales, s.a. 1356.
Polygyny and Europe 391

Giving a reason for a specific historical change is always uncomfortable. The

success of Christianity as a popular religion, which is often associated with the
assertion of ecclesiastical teachings on marriage, is another facet of the same
change rather than its cause. Treating the greater effectiveness of the means
for enforcing a dominant morality in the “persecuting society” (R.I. Moore) as
a cause entails overstating the interest of those with the ability to enforce mo-
nogamism in doing so. As is well known, the debate over the pros and cons of
polygamy also continued among princes, lawyers, and reformers, and reached
a climax in the decades after 1500, with polygamy at times even appearing as a
real option for society in the future. Indeed, it was only in the late eighteenth
century that the subject became the exclusive domain of social theory17—to
once again become a major social issue in the twentieth century in a different
guise.
Nonetheless, referring to the numerous fundamental changes of the thir-
teenth century probably takes us in the right direction. In many other respects
the political culture of the so-called feudal age is now viewed as ‘open,’ flexi-
ble, fragmented, and small-scale, the “classical feudal system” was by no means
that system worked out in minute detail by François-Louis Ganshof and many
others. The lord-vassal relationship, in particular, regardless of how elaborate-
ly it was staged, commented upon, and observed by the participants, was usu-
ally far less exclusive and binding than used to be assumed; multiple relation-
ships were the rule rather than a problem; agreements were easily struck and
just as easily broken again; the game never stopped.18 The correspondence to
polygyny is almost suspiciously obvious. But perhaps there is nothing so very
suspicious about it. Polygyny was, after all, part of the same political culture,
everyday life, and conceptual world—which is in itself an interesting thought,
if, in light of recent research on the ‘feudal age,’ we reflect on how important
it was for the individual vassi and/or domini to preserve their room for ma-
noeuvre and to keep the form and content of their respective relationships as
loosely defined as possible. A formula from the Anglo-Norman legal code of
Henry i from around 1115, made famous by Stephen D. White, reads: Pactum

17 For an overview, see the accounts by Cairncross, After Polygamy (1974); Mikat, Polygamie-
frage (1988).
18 Ganshof, Was ist das Lehnswesen? (71989), 65: “Between the tenth and the thirteenth cen-
tury, feudalism attained its classic expression.” For revision, see, crucially, Reynolds, Fiefs
and Vassals (1994), and the contemporaneous debate on the ‘mutation féodale’ between
Thomas Bisson, Stephen D. White, Dominique Barthélemy, Timothy Reuter, and Chris
Wickham in Past and Present (142, 1994; 1996, 155, 1997). On the issue of multiple vassal-
age, see Van Eickels, “Zwei Herren” (2005).
392 Polygyny and Europe

legem ­vincit et amor iudicium,19 which loosely translates as: “a deal is better
than the law and mutual understanding better than a court’s judgement.” This
formula fits well with the polygynous situations discussed over the preceding
chapters—even those which were closely concerned with lex and iudicium,
such as the provisions in Norwegian provincial laws or James i’s intervention
in the county of Urgell. And it applies even more to the many polygynous ma-
noeuvres of the Scandinavian, Anglo-French, and Iberian magnates, whose
perennial concern was certainly not lex, but pacta. In fact, St Augustine him-
self uses the same vocabulary in his famous antinomy: legitimum coniugium
versus pactum libidinosi amoris. In this sense, polygyny is the form of sexual
relations congenial to the feudal age: amor vincit omnia—even the juridifica-
tion of political culture.
Perhaps it then becomes more comprehensible why polygyny no longer
functioned to its full effect at a time when kings, churches, and communities
began to use leges and iudicia effectively. Opportunities were redistributed,
change produced new winners and losers; some aspects of polygyny were
no longer fruitful. ‘Illegitimate’ birth had increasingly tangible consequences.
A new generation of Norwegian chieftains’ sons felt compelled to acquire nov-
el social competences to secure a place in the world: it was now possible to
learn how to behave before the king from a book,20 and daring agons over
neighbours’ daughters were no longer part of the formula for a successful habi-
tus. Elsewhere, too, after the Fourth Lateran Council, the Liber extra, and their
sweeping implementations, new connotations—and risks—arose when dis-
cussing a magnate and his concubinae. Indeed, at a fundamental level, even the
advance of the written word may have played a role in semi-oral society, when
the typically episodic, action-centric manner of ‘narrating’ polygynous plural-
ity and endowing it with infinitely variable meaning gradually gave way to an
increasing interest in quasi-conceptual categorizations even in the lay world. If
“love” used to work better than “law,” this was not as true by 1250 as it had been
a century and a half earlier.
To speak of an ‘Aristotelianization’ of Europe in the narrower sense is, from
the perspective of the history of philosophy, a platitude. In a broad sense, the
fundamental change in disposition towards the taxonomization of the tangi-
ble that distinguishes thirteenth-century Europe may help explain why aristo-
cratic polygyny, like so many other things, changed so profoundly. The elev-
enth and twelfth centuries were considerably better at tolerating the
coincidence of differences; viewing the polygyny of his Norman princes as at

19 Leges Henrici Primi (c. 49 and 57); White, “Settlement of Disputes” (1978), 308.
20 Konungs skuggsjá, ed. Holm-Olsen (21983), 44.
Polygyny and Europe 393

once legitimate and illegitimate did not cause any difficulties for Benoît de
Sainte-Maure. Later, the “regulatory spirit”21 would only be able to maintain
and justify one or the other. The aut … aut Europe strove to turn the grey areas
into black and white: human or animal, orthodox or heretic, Orient or Occi-
dent, wife or concubine, true or false … tertium non datur; dantur minime
plura.

21 Moore, Revolution (2001), 176.

Appendix

Overview of Norwegian kings (11th–13th centuries)

Óláf Tryggvason 995–1000

Óláf Haraldsson (Saint Olav) 1015–1028/30
Magnús the Good 1035–1047
Harald the Hard (harðráði) 1046–1066
Óláf the Quiet (kyrri) 1066–1093
Magnús Barelegs (berfœtt) 1093–1103
Sigurð the Jerusalemfarer (Jórsalafari) 1103–1130
Eystein Magnússon 1103–1123
Óláf Magnússon 1103–1115
Magnús the Blind 1130–1139
Harald gilli 1130–1136
Sigurð slembidjákn 1135–1139
Ingi Haraldsson 1136–1161
Sigurð Haraldsson 1136–1155
Eystein Haraldsson 1142–1157
Hákon Broad Shoulders (herðibreið) 1157–1162
Magnús Erlingsson 1161–1184
Sverrir 1177–1202
Hákon [iv] Hákonarson 1217–1263
Magnús the Law-Mender (lagabœtir) 1263–1280

Based on Krag, Norges historie (2000), 267f. The list is merely for orientation and does not
include all kings and pretenders. The dates indicate reigns, although the extent of their actual
rule varied greatly.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, | doi:10.1163/9789004434578_012

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Index
Words beginning with Þ, Æ or Å are listed
after z.
Abbad II al-Muʿtaḍid, ruler of Seville 372f,
380
Absalon, Archbishop of Lund 62, 225f
Adam of Bremen, author 13, 50, 52, 54–58,
61, 64, 67–69, 89, 108, 147, 170f, 210f,
227–29, 231, 281, 283–85, 388
al-Muʿtamid ibn ‘Abbād, ruler of
Seville 367–69, 373f, 382
Alfonso VI, King of Castile 367–69
Alfonso VII, King of Castile 357, 367, 390
Alfonso X, King of Castile 366, 371
amasia 19, 359
ambátt 83, 89, 108
amica 327–29
Andreas Capellanus, author 89, 302, 310,
319f
Ari Þorgilsson the Learned, author  concubina 53–55, 61, 67, 70, 137f, 156, 176,
77, 80
Arthur, [imaginary] King of Britons 14, 109,
183, 196, 286, 303–06, 309, 370, 387
Augustinus, Bishop of Hippo 5f, 153, 156f,
160, 370, 387, 388, 392
Aurembiaix, Countess of Urgell 14, 355–64,
366, 381f
Avaldsnes, Norwegian royal seat 24
Baldwin VI, Count of Hainaut 308, 320–23,
328
barragana 8, 19, 367
Bayeux, town and diocese in
Normandy 334, 338f, 341, 350
Benoît (de Sainte-Maure), author 43, 332,
337, 342–44, 346–51, 359, 393
Bergen, town and diocese in Norway 51, 149,
204f
Bertrade de Montfort, French
magnate 322–27
Bothild / Bodil, Queen of Denmark 70f,
251–56
Canterbury, town and archdiocese in
England 58, 160, 168f, 178, 180–82, 211,
272, 317
Cnut I Sweynson the Great, King of Denmark
and England 48, 50, 53f, 61, 67, 85,
104, 176, 198, 203f, 206f, 209–19, 222, 252,
257, 359
Cnut IV Sweynson the Holy, King of
Denmark 48, 56, 58–61, 63, 66f, 246f,
268
Cnut VI Valdemarson, King of Denmark 62–
64, 69, 226, 254
Cnut Lavard, Danish magnate 62f, 65, 71–73,
203, 225, 247, 252–54, 256, 268
Cnut Valdemarson, Duke of Estonia 65, 226
Charlemagne, King of the Franks,
Emperor 14, 57, 119, 247
Chrétien de Troyes, author 182, 248f, 304f,
311
concubinage 2, 4–7, 11, 14f, 17, 19, 56, 71, 75,
137, 139f, 153f, 207, 210, 226, 281, 298,
325, 340, 354f, 358f, 362–64, 382
203, 210–12, 214, 227f, 282, 306, 324f, 337,
344, 346, 387, 392
Constantinople/Byzantium 15, 98, 124, 169,
191, 195, 198, 214, 216f, 224, 248, 250, 255,
257, 304, 308, 337, 354, 382–85
Córdoba, town and principality in
al-Andalus 354, 369, 371f, 374f, 380
Coutances, town and diocese in
Normandy 334, 337
David I, King of Scots 238, 308, 329f
Dudo of Saint-Quentin, author 31, 50, 81,
252, 300, 332, 334, 336–41, 343–46, 348,
351, 369f
Edward the Confessor, King of England 204,
211, 214
eiginkona 29, 103, 105, 137
Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine 302, 314, 323,
325–27, 334, 347
Elizabeth, Princess of Rus’ 31, 214, 216–18,
225, 261, 384, 388
Emma, English queen 53f, 203f, 206f, 210–14,
216–18, 344
Erik I Ejegod, King of Denmark 67, 70–72,
189, 251–53, 256
Index
Erik IV Plovpenning, King of Denmark 61,
65
Erling Skakki, Norwegian magnate 101–05,
128, 130, 168, 237, 372
Erling Skjálgsson, Norwegian magnate 215f,
220–24, 227
Eystein I Magnússon, King of Norway 130,
187–194, 197f, 267, 380
Eystein II Haraldsson, King of Norway 94,
99, 117, 371
Eystein Erlendsson, Archbishop of
Nidaros 101–04, 127f, 143f, 146, 160,
163f, 168f, 178
Falster, island in Denmark 76
Flanders, County 59f, 204, 208f, 296f, 312,
322, 390
Frederick II, King of Sicily and Teutony,
Emperor 65, 364–66, 370, 375
Friedelehe 6f, 30, 153, 339
frilla 9, 13, 19, 22, 26f, 29, 39f, 49, 57, 64f,
69, 76, 84f, 97f, 105, 107–09, 124, 126,
135–42, 152, 154, 157, 160, 166, 171f, 189,
193f, 197, 218f, 222, 226, 230f, 233, 235f,
238f, 241–43, 267, 281–83, 313, 339,
380
Fulk IV, Count of Anjou 323–25, 327
Funen, island in Denmark 89, 177
Geoffrey of Monmouth, author 196, 305
Gerald of Wales, author 316, 326, 331
Gisla, Frankish princess 31, 332, 340,
342, 351
Gorm the Elder, King of Denmark 22, 45, 67
Götaland (Väster- and Östergötland), region
in Sweden 32, 91, 101, 157, 227, 229f,
275
Gregory of Tours, author 48, 50, 52, 58, 209,
240
Guînes, county in Northern France 312,
322f, 327
Gunnor, Duchess of Normandy 335–37, 344,
346–48, 351
Guy of Dampierre, Count of Flanders 263
Gyða Eiríksdóttir, Norwegian magnate 22,
24–27, 29f, 39–41, 46, 80, 82
Haderslev, town in Denmark 247
Hákon II Sigurðsson herðibreið, King of
Norway 87f, 90–92, 100, 105, 128
449
Hákon IV Hákonarson, King of Norway 27,
43, 47, 49, 85f, 92, 99, 118, 183, 225, 247f,
264
Hákon Grjótgarðsson Hlaðajarl, Norwegian
magnate 82, 272–74
Hákon Sigurðsson Hlaðajarl, Norwegian
magnate 83, 274–84, 286–88, 290–93,
332, 374
Hálfdan the Black (svarti), King of
Norway 23, 44–47, 127, 129
Halland, region in Denmark 64f, 76
Harald I Fairhair (hárfagri), King of
Norway 13, 22–31, 36, 40–49, 53, 59f,
77–84, 86, 91, 101, 107, 115, 125–27,
129–31, 136, 139, 169, 198, 241, 273f, 279,
283, 286, 289
Harald III Sigurðarson harðráði, King of
Norway 31, 36, 48, 68, 125, 134, 198,
214–20, 225, 235–37, 256–62, 359, 369,
383–86, 388
Harald IV gilli, King of Norway 94, 99, 194,
202, 204f, 234, 238, 241
Harald I Gormsson Bluetooth, King of
Denmark 45f, 48, 89, 274–76
Harald IV Kesja, King of Denmark 71–73, 76
Harold II Godwinson, King of England 203,
216
Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony 254f
Henry I, King of England 52, 299, 307f,
312–18, 322, 327–32, 336, 359, 362, 391
Henry II, King of England 162, 313f, 323,
325–27, 331, 341f
Henry III the Lion, King of East Frankland,
Emperor 50, 54, 61, 209, 252, 254–56
Henry IV, King of East Frankland,
Emperor 186, 252, 262
Hólar, diocese in Iceland 126
Holsten, county 64, 254, 256
Hordaland, region in Norway 28, 83
Ingeborg of Denmark, Queen of France 253,
322
Innocent III, pope 102, 121
Isabelle de Meulan, Norman magnate 315–
17, 328–30, 359
James I, Count of Barcelona, King of
Aragon 14, 354–64, 366, 370f, 375f,
378f, 381f, 386, 390, 392
Jelling, Danish royal seat 41, 45f, 276
450
Jón Loptsson, Icelandic magnate 122, 124,
126–44, 146f, 149–52, 154–56, 158–66,
169–72, 174, 178–87, 189, 192, 202, 209,
236f, 340
Jutland, region in Denmark 27–29, 32,
62–64, 69f, 76, 78, 157, 247, 252, 257f,
259, 363
Kálf Árnason, Norwegian magnate 219f
Lade, seat of magnates in Trøndelag,
Norway 82, 252, 272, 274, 278, 283–89,
291
Leo I, pope 5
Linköping, diocese in Götaland 226
Lolland, island in Denmark 65, 76
London, town and diocese in England 199,
202
Louis VII, King of France 209, 323f, 327
Lund, town and archdiocese in
Denmark 66, 69, 168, 225f
Magnús I Olafsson the Good (góði), King of
Norway 54f, 83–86, 91, 105, 176f, 198,
215, 219f, 222, 241–46, 257f
Magnús III Olafsson Barelegs (berfœtt), King
of Norway 57, 87, 124–28, 130–32, 135,
187, 189f, 194, 205, 235–42
Magnús V Erlingsson, King of Norway 100–
05, 127f, 168, 170, 203, 322, 375
Magnús VI Hákonarson the Law-mender
(lagabœtir), King of Norway 2, 32, 43,
94f, 247
Marie de France, French author 308, 310f,
347
marriage 3–12, 15f, 19, 27, 29f, 49, 52, 54, 56f,
59, 63, 65, 67–69, 73f, 76, 101, 125,
136–40, 153f, 158f, 164f, 183, 189, 195,
203f, 206f, 216f, 225f, 229f, 237, 266, 270,
286, 294, 297–99, 310, 312, 314, 323, 330,
333, 338, 343, 345, 350, 356–60, 362, 368,
374, 386–91
marriage, ‘retrospect’ 155f, 340, 351
Matilda, Queen of England, Empress 52, 59,
313
Møre, region in Norway 94, 107, 139, 215, 276
Nest ferch Rhys, Welsh magnate 330–32, 359
Nidaros, cf. Trondheim
Index
Niels, King of Denmark 63, 73, 190
Novgorod, town and kingdom of the
Rus’ 133, 203, 214, 229, 255
Oddi, seat of Icelandic magnates 122–24,
126, 129, 139, 143, 146f, 152, 159f, 166f, 169,
176, 179, 181f, 184
Odense, town and diocese in Denmark 56,
58, 60, 63, 167
Óláf I Tryggvason, King of Norway 36, 108f,
125, 146, 150, 185, 198, 221, 272, 276f, 279,
283, 286, 292f
Óláf II Haraldsson (Saint Olav), King of
Norway 27, 36, 44, 48, 54–56, 67, 84f,
87, 91, 95, 103–05, 125, 133f, 176, 197–203,
207, 210, 214f, 218–24, 227–30, 243f, 252,
268, 383f
Óláf III Haraldsson the Quiet (kyrri), King of
Norway 87, 126f, 235
Olof Skötkonung, King of Sweden 55, 84,
108f, 197, 227f, 230f
Orderic Vitalis, author 314, 318, 323–25, 337,
348f
Orkney Islands 34, 98, 107, 109, 127, 136,
138–40, 156, 216, 231, 238
Peter II, Count of Barcelona, King of
Aragon 356, 363, 370, 375–81
Philip I, King of France 322–27
Philip II Auguste, King of France 127, 253,
322
Philip IV the Fair, King of France 263f, 269,
294
polyandry 2, 3, 9f, 175, 179, 321, 385
qayna (pl. qiyān) 369, 372f, 381
Ragnheið Þorhallsdóttir, Icelandic mag-
nate 136, 141–43, 152, 154, 159, 163,
165f, 179f, 182–87
Ragnhild, Queen of Norway 27–31, 42–48,
82, 86, 127
Raymond VI, Count of Tolosa 356, 379
Raymond VII, Count of Tolosa 356, 362f
Rendsborg, town in Holsten 256
Richard I, Duke of Normandy 207, 217,
335–37, 340f, 344, 346f
Richard II, Duke of Normandy 206, 335,
344, 348
Index
Rogaland, region in Norway 28, 201, 216, 220,
222, 224
Roger de Beaumont, Norman magnate  378
315
Rollo, Duke of Normandy 31, 53, 107, 332,
338–41, 343, 359
Roskilde, town and diocese of Denmark 29,
69, 73, 167
Rouen, town and diocese in Normandy 206,
217, 334f, 337–41, 344
Saxo Grammaticus, author 13, 46, 51, 62f,
65–74, 78, 108, 149, 189, 195, 207, 248,
253, 256, 285f, 384
Scania, region in Denmark 32, 62, 66, 70,
157, 291
Slesvig, town, diocese and duchy in
Denmark 61–64, 72, 76, 167,
256
Seville, town and principality in al-
Andalus 354, 372f
Sigurð I Magnusson the Jerusalemfarer
(Jórsalfari), King of Norway 101,
187–94, 197f, 202f, 238–40, 380
Skálholt, diocese in Iceland 122f, 126,
141–43, 146, 155, 159, 163f, 167f, 209
Skara, diocese in Götaland 197
Snorri Sturluson, author 13, 23–25, 27, 29,
33–47, 52, 59, 74, 77–79, 81–83, 85–87,
91, 94, 102–04, 123, 125–28, 134, 142, 154,
156–58, 169, 174, 176f, 187–190, 192, 198,
202, 204, 216, 227–31, 236f, 239f, 242,
246, 250, 254f, 258, 260, 274–76, 277–79,
281–83, 286–88, 289, 291–93, 328, 375,
384, 387, 390
soignant 19, 324f, 359
Stephen of Blois, King of England 52, 313,
330
Sven Aggesen, author 46, 65f, 74, 129, 247,
253
Sven I Forkbeard, King of Denmark and
England 89, 212
Sven II Estridsen, King of Denmark 48, 50,
55–58, 60, 62–64, 66f, 69f, 76, 87, 103f,
170, 176f, 215, 236, 244, 257f, 260
Sven III Grathe, King of Denmark 63, 73,
232
Swen Godwinson, English magnate 263,
270, 294
451
Sverrir, King of Norway 27, 34, 49f, 92,
99–102, 105, 130f, 135, 148, 166, 168, 239,
Sæmund Jónsson, Icelandic magnate 127,
136–40, 152, 155f, 171, 232
Sæmund Sigfússon hinn fróði (the Learned),
Icelandic magnate and author 124–
26, 129, 132, 135, 160, 167
Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canter-
bury 160, 162, 169, 183–85
Trondheim (Nidaros), town and diocese in
Norway 53, 55, 82, 101, 127, 138,
143–46, 160, 164–66, 168f, 198, 235, 278,
281, 372
Trøndelag, region in Norway 32, 82, 87, 94,
103, 148, 189, 201, 215, 221f, 235f, 241, 274,
277, 282f
Urgell, diocese and county in
­Catalonia 354–58, 360–62, 392
uxor 5, 12, 31, 56f, 61, 76, 79, 120, 137, 156, 171,
210f, 227f, 253, 265, 323–25, 327, 344,
351, 358f, 387, 389
Valdemar I the Great, King of Denmark 60,
62–66, 68f, 71, 73, 75f, 86, 149, 177, 203,
225–27, 247, 255, 384
Valdemar II the Victorious, King of
Denmark 64f, 68f, 73, 75, 86, 177, 203,
226f, 231, 253f
València, town and kingdom 363f, 370, 375,
378, 381, 386
virginity 22, 179, 261, 320f
Wace, author 337, 341f, 344, 346f, 349f
William I Longsword, Duke of
Normandy 336, 338f, 341, 343
William II the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy
and King of England 43, 45, 53, 59,
103f, 315, 318, 341f, 345, 348–50, 365
William IX, Duke of Aquitaine 307
William of Jumièges, author 314, 337, 339f,
341, 343–46, 370
William of Malmesbury, author 59, 84, 89,
176, 207, 210, 263f, 271f, 307, 313–15, 322f,
353, 369, 387
William of Newburgh, author 299, 307, 322,
326
452
Zealand, island in Denmark 32, 60, 62, 65,
71, 157, 176f
Þorlák Þorhallsson, bishop of Skálholt 136,
141–47, 152, 159–63, 166–69, 171f, 178f,
182–85, 187, 209
Ælfgifu ‘of Northampton’, English
magnate 53f, 67, 203f, 206f, 210–19,
262, 359
Index
Ælnoth, author 46, 48, 50, 57–59, 62, 66
Æthelred II the Unready, King of
England 203f, 206f, 210–13, 271
Aarhus, town and diocese in Denmark 63,
167, 247