Abstract
In Liber VII of the Gesta Danorum, an early thirteenth-century chronicle about the history of Denmark, the author Saxo Grammaticus pauses for a moment, after narrating the fantastical adventures of a swashbuckling female pirate named Alvhilda, in order to deliver a brief excursus about the shield-maidens that populated the Nordic world centuries ago.
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Notes
J. Olrik, and H. Reeder, eds., Saxonis Gesta Danorum, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1931), 1: 192.
On some historical, legal, and anthropological facets of the warrior woman figure in Old Norse see Carol Clover, “Maiden Warriors and Other Sons,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85 (1986): 35–49, to which I am indebted for much early inspiration on this topic. A broader focus on the topic of warrior women is presented in Megan McLaughlin, “The Woman Warrior: Gender, Warfare and Society in Medieval Europe,” Women’s Studies 17 (1990): 193–209. For a comprehensive and authoritative overview of women in Norse culture, see Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) and her other book, which might be seen as a companion volume to the first, Old Norse Images of Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Her chapter on “Warrior Women,” in Images, pp. 87–112, is essential reading. The most detailed look at Saxo and the shield-maidens is found in N.H. Holmqvist-Larsen, “Skjoldmodigressionen,” in Meer, skjoldmøer og krigere: En studie i og omkring 7. bog af Saxo’s Gesta Danorum (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 1983), pp. 40–73.
Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, eds., An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2d edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 79.
See Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1991). On the archaeological evidence see also Jochens, Images, pp. 107–8.
Stephen A. Mitchell, Heroic Sagas and Ballads (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 27. On the fornaldarsögur, see also Torfi Tulinius, The Matter of the North: The Rise of Literary Fiction in Thirteenth-Century Iceland, trans. Randi C. Eldevik, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, The Viking Collection, 13 (Odense: Odense University Press, 2002).
Else Mundal, “Kvinnebilitet i nokre mellomaldergenrar: Eit opposisjonelt kvinnesyn?” Edda 82 (1982): 349 [341–71].
See, for example, Kari Ellen Gade, “Penile Puns: Personal Names and Phallic Symbols in Skaldic Poetry,” Essays in Medieval Studies 6 (1989): 57–67.
Riti Kroesen, “Hvessir augu sem hildingar: The awe-inspiring eyes of the King,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 100 (1985): 41–58.
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© 2007 Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman
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Layher, W. (2007). Caught Between Worlds: Gendering the Maiden Warrior in Old Norse. In: Poor, S.S., Schulman, J.K. (eds) Women and Medieval Epic. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06637-4_9
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