Old Norse Images of Women [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512802818

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. The Germanic-Nordic Continuum
DIVINE IMAGES
2. Ancient Female Figures
3. The Classical Nordic Pantheon: Goddesses and Gender
HUMAN IMAGES
4. The Warrior Woman
5. The Prophetess/Sorceress
6. The Avenger
7. The Whetter: Brynhildr
8. The Nordic Whetter
Conclusion
Appendix One: Sources
Appendix Two: Historiography of Norse Women–Paul-Henri Mallet and Laurits Engelstoft
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Old Norse Images of Women

University of Pennsylvania Press M I D D L E

A G E S

General RUTH MAZO

S E R I E S

Editor KARRAS,

Temple University Founding EDWARD

Editor PETERS,

University of Pennsylvania A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Old Norse Images of Women Jenny Jochens

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Publication of the book was aided hydrants from the Carlsberg Foundation and Towson State University

Copyright © 1996 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

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Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jochens, Jenny, 1928Old Norse images of women / Jenny Jochens. p. cm. — (Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references and index. I S B N 0 - 8 1 2 2 - 3 3 5 8 - 1 (alk. p a p e r )

1. Old Norse literature—History and criticism. Norse. 4. Goddesses. 5. Women—Mythology I. Tide. II. Series. PT7162.W6J6 839*.609—DC20

2. Women in literature. 3. Mythology, 6. Women—Scandinavia—History.

1996 96-11000 CIP

To MAUDE, NELL, J U S T I N , LUKAS, LAURA, E L I A S , and K A R E N M A R G R E T H E with love from FARMOR

Contents

Preface

xi

Introduction

i

1. The Germanic-Nordic Continuum

12

Germanic Migrations Religious Continuity Genealogical Connections

12 15 16

DIVINE

IMAGES

2. Ancient Female Figures

33

Fertility Goddesses Fetches (Fylgjur) Guardian Spirits (Disir) Valkyries (Valkyrjur) Norns (Nornir) Sibyls (Vglur) Land-Spirits (Landv&ttir) Worship and Cult

35 37 38 38 39 41 44 45

3. The Classical Nordic Pantheon: Goddesses and Gender

49

Procreation Desire and Sexual Behavior Marriage Two Goddesses: Frigg and Freyja Daily Life and Work Magic (Seidr)

51 56 62 65 68 72

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Contents

Pagan Misogyny Worship and Cult Snorri's Role for Female Images

HUMAN

75 78 8o

IMAGES

4. The Warrior Woman

87

Sigrdrifa/Brynhildr: War and Wisdom Shield-Maidens (Skjaldmeyjar): Sigrun and Svava Maiden Warriors Maiden Kings (Meykonungar) Characteristics of Female Warriors Women in War: The Historical Record

89 95 97 102 103 107

5. The Prophetess/Sorceress

113

Female Leadership Germanic and Nordic Human Prophetesses Magic and Gender

113 113 119

6. The Avenger

132

Twin Imagery Gudrun Signy Revenging Women in History?

132 135 155 158

7. The Whetter: Brynhildr

162

The Continental Whetter in Nordic Literature The Queens' Quarrel The Whetter in Continental History

162 167 171

8. The Nordic Whetter

174

Aristocratic Whetters Royal Whetters Ancient Icelandic Whetters Whetters in the Contemporary Sagas

175 179 182 194

Contents

ix

Male Reaction to Whetting Why Whet?

195 198

Conclusion

205

Appendix One: Sources

217

Latin Evidence Runes Northern Vernacular Writing

217 218 218

Appendix Two: Historiography of Norse Women— Paul-Henri Mallet and Laurits Engelstoft

234

Abbreviations

241

Notes

245

Bibliography

293

Index

321

Preface

T H I S STUDY OF FEMALE IMAGES brings t o term m y w o r k o n w o m e n in

the Old Norse tradition.1 Twenty years ago I began to offer courses in the history of medieval women and to "mainstream" women into my regular courses in the history department at Towson State University. In the early days of women's history the search for suitable candidates to include in such endeavors loomed large. Recalling my childhood reading of Icelandic sagas and later acquaintance with the Norse language during my student days at the University of Copenhagen, I decided to explore the strong Norse woman known from Eddie poetry and the Icelandic family sagas (or sagas of the Icelanders).2 Divine female figures, human priestesses, winged valkyries, impressive sorceresses, and persistent inciters or whetters fascinated me and my students alike. Family responsibilities and a heavy teaching load, however, prevented me from engaging actively in Norse scholarship until 1977, when I was granted my first sabbatical leave. By then I was ready to abandon my previous plan of returning to French history; instead I plunged into the Norse world. I knew, of course, that valkyries (and shield-maidens) had little relevance to the daily lives of Norse people, and as a historian I wanted to make ordinary women the focus of my work. A t first, therefore, I undertook a systematic search for women in the sagas of Icelanders, those seemingly realistic descriptions of the lives of Norwegian settlers in Iceland. Among the colonists and settlers women appeared: young girls who occasionally exercised the right to refuse or accept a suitor in marriage; housewives engaged in reproduction and production; divorcees who had initiated the legal proceedings and left their spouses; widows with substantial personal property; and impressive sorceresses. Nearly all these kinds of women performed as whetters, inciting men to bloody actions of revenge. As I expanded my reading to include three genres known as the chivalric, the legendary, and the contemporary sagas and added skaldic poetry to my knowledge of the poetic corpus, the spectrum of female portraits both expanded and contracted. On one hand, skaldic poetry confirmed the perceptions of goddesses and valkyries; the chivalric sagas added images of

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resplendent shield-maidens, powerful maiden warriors, and even maiden kings; and the legendary sagas provided troublesome giant women and fearsome female trolls. On the other hand, in the contemporary sagas striking and powerful females were largely absent. Instead, women in twelfthand thirteenth-century Iceland were engaged in the timeless tasks of family and work; even the female inciter was rare. As I assembled my material it became obvious that not only did the clearly imaginary figures such as the valkyries, the shield-maidens, and the female trolls belong to the realm of fiction, but some of the saga heroines from the seemingly realistic genre of the sagas of Icelanders—in particular many of the inciters—likewise did not represent flesh and blood women. They belonged neither to the pagan era in which they were situated nor to the Christian age of the sagas writers themselves. Rather, they were images formed in men's imagination. As the methodology of women's studies became more sophisticated, representations of women in literature were assigned to the study of gender, a concept that was not created until the mid-1980s. To pursue the insight into the distinction between historical women and female images I needed to acquire the evolving technique of gender analysis as well as to master the massive secondary literature that would enable me to sift fact from fiction in the Norse literature. When I published my early findings in articles, however, I did not realize that it would be more than fifteen years before the sources would begin to release their secrets about female existence in the Germanic North. It became clear that the Norse material did not yield a uniform figure of a proud pagan woman but offered multifaceted portraits of imagined and real women ranging from pagan goddesses to Christian milkmaids, conjured in multiple combinations and permutations by inspired poets and gifted prose authors. Meanwhile, conscientious historians and legal experts had preserved precious details about women's everyday life of marriage and work in pagan and Christian settings. Although women's own voices cannot be separated from this predominandy male chorus, the myriad female figures generated by male authors do divide readily into two groups. The first group includes portraits of divine figures and heroic women. The former are modeled on ancient religious perceptions common to all the Germanic peoples; the latter are based on historical events in Continental Europe during the period of migration. These images, initially created by male poets, were later elaborated by prose writers. The second group offers comparatively mundane descrip-

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tions of ordinary women in both pagan and Christian settings in Iceland and Norway. These pictures were constructed by thirteenth-century authors and historians from their observations of contemporary society and combined with oral tradition and deductions about the world of their pagan ancestors. The boundary between the two groups is, of course, permeable. At first I had hoped to accommodate both "female images" and "women in society" in the same volume, but the great wealth of these traditions made it necessary to separate my work into two studies. I found the group of ordinary women close to my historian's heart, and I decided to work first on the female settlers and their lives in the new colony, the subject of Women in Old Norse Society.3 Focusing on the continuity between Norway and Iceland, that book deals with quotidian aspects of women's lives, including marriage, reproduction, infanticide, and work, subjects I ferreted out from the two genres known as the sagas of Icelanders and the contemporary sagas and further corroborated from the perspective supplied by the laws. In this book I introduce figures far more impressive than the human women described in my earlier work. These divine, mythic, and heroic women were first depicted by Latin authors in writing and articulated by Germanic singers in oral lays, now lost, but preserved in Old Norse Eddie poetry and their images elaborated in Icelandic narratives. I pay particular attention to divine female figures as well as to four vivid images of human women: the warrior, the prophetess and sorceress, the avenger, and the whetter or inciter. Women in Old Norse Society appeals to scholars concerned with social issues of ancient and medieval Iceland and Norway, such as the transformation of pagan marriage under the influence of churchmen and the importance of women's work in a pastoral economy; Old Norse Images of Women is directed to readers primarily interested in the female share in Germanic myth and poetry. The richness of the Old Norse tradition about women in the Germanic-nordic world, however, becomes most fully apparent when both books are examined. Studies of gender and of women's history have evolved over the past twenty years to address not only men's images of women but also family history and women's work in relation to men's. My own work reenacts this development. In a recapitulation of the first stage of women's history, I add a few women to the roster of important figures from the nordic past previously overlooked or forgotten. Although the analysis of images withdraws these figures from the world of "real" women, as revealing male percep-

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tions of "the others," they offer important clues to gender. Read together, my two books attempt to do for Germanic/Norse women what the Dane Vilhelm Granbech did primarily for men in his monumental four volumes of Vor Folkeat i Oldtiden, translated to English by William Worster and in part rewritten and revised by Grónbech himself in the two volumes of The Culture of the Teutons* Citations in Old Norse are kept to a minimum. Translations are set parallel with the original and are my own unless otherwise indicated. The Old Norse phrases are required when single words are closely analyzed and when English lacks appropriately corresponding terms. Full sentences or stanzas in Old Norse have been provided occasionally to add clarification for specialists. I hope that the common base of Germanic languages will enable the Old Norse terms to stimulate the pleasure of linguistic recognition in readers of English and German. Personal names are rendered consistently in normalized Old Norse nominative forms, even when wellknown English equivalents exist. (Thus I shall refer to Óóinn, Sigurór, and Guórún, not Odin, Sigurd, and Gudrun.) After a few pages, readers unfamiliar with Icelandic letters should become accustomed to them; ô ("eth") is a voiced consonant pronounced as "th" in "mother"; its unvoiced counterpart J) is captured in the initial sound of the letter's own name "thorn"; Q is the normalizing way in which scholars render the later (and still current) o, and ae and oe have been conflated in oe. The completion of the book has required access to books and secondary works, time, institutional support, inspiration from colleagues and students, and sustenance from friends and family. I could not have done my work in Baltimore without the fine collection of Islandica in the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of the Johns Hopkins University assembled by Stefán Einarsson during his long tenure in the English Department. I am grateful to the library for the generous borrowing privileges I have enjoyed. Unfortunately, the library was forced to reduce Icelandic acquisitions since Stefan's return to Iceland in 1962, but I have been able to compensate by resorting to three major Icelandic collections, the Fiske Collection at Cornell University, the Arnamagna;an Institute at the University of Copenhagen, and Árnastofnun in Reykjavik. All three institutions have welcomed me with the greatest courtesy and helpfulness. My own institution, Towson State University, has supported me with sabbatical leaves, semesters of reduced teaching loads, travel grants to present papers at conferences here and abroad, and a grant-in-aid toward publication. I am grateful to the Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen for a generous subvention toward publication. In 1981 I received a National

Preface

xv

Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and in 1987-88 a Fellowship for College Teachers. While I was working at the Arnamagnxan Institute in Copenhagen during a sabbatical leave in 1984, the Danish National Bank made an apartment available to me in its building at Nyhavn 18. My colleagues at Towson State University have patiently and cheerfully listened to first versions of many conference papers and articles, and they have been unstinting in their encouragement of my work. My students have immersed themselves with vigorous enthusiasm in the Norse world and have offered valuable comments, questions, and papers. I thank them all. My most significant professional contacts have occurred at meetings, for the opportunity to present papers invariably resulted in constructive comments that provoked additional thinking and rewriting. The most important of these occasions have been the annual conferences of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study and the triennial International Saga Conferences. I am grateful to Roberta Frank and FrançoisXavier Dillmann who read earlier versions of some of the chapters. I wish to thank Theodore M. Andersson who read the original manuscript and two readers who read this manuscript for the University of Pennsylvania Press and offered valuable criticism. It has been a pleasure to work with Jerome E. Singerman and Alison A. Anderson at the University of Pennsylvania Press. I have again benefited from Barbara Dinneen's sure touch in copyediting my manuscript. I owe a debt of gratitude to Guônin Ingolfsdottir and Hallfireôur Ô. Eiriksson for having scrutinized my Old Norse citations. Some material in Chapter 1 has been adapted from Jenny Jochens: Women in Old Norse Society. Copyright © 1995 by Cornell University. I am grateful for the permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. My children, Peter, Ian, Birgit, and Christopher, and their spouses have on numerous occasions provided hospitality and access to their university libraries. As grandchildren appeared, visits became more frequent but the time spent in the libraries shorter. I owe special thanks to Aris Fioretos, my daughter's friend, whose support, friendship, and inspiration since her death have been invaluable. My greatest debt is to my husband, John W. Baldwin. He has patiently read and reread many versions of this book and helped me to clarify my thinking, sharpen my arguments, and improve my prose. By now he knows more about the Old Norse world than he ever wanted to and more than he thought possible when we first met in a seminar in medieval canon law in Paris some forty years ago. J E N N Y JOCHENS

Baltimore, Maryland

Introduction

LATE ONE DAY shortly before the turn of the first Christian millennium, a very old man named Gestr arrives at the court of Olafr Tryggvason, the Christian king of Norway (995-1000), and greets him politely. Thus opens Norna- Gests pdttr, a story written by an Icelandic author about three centuries after the events.1 The king offers Gestr hospitality, but since it is late he does not want to speak to him and hurries off to evensong. The next morning he wants to know whether Gestr is Christian. His visitor replies that he has received the sign of the cross {primsigndr), a preliminary step to baptism, but has not fully accepted the Christian sacrament.2 The reason for the king's question is undoubtedly that he noticed during the night that, while he was busy reciting his prayers, "an elf or some spirit"—a figure representing the old religion—had entered the house despite locked doors. It had stopped briefly by each bed but had talked with the newcomer at length. Although Gestr subsequendy adopts the habit of crossing himself every evening "like other men," he is still considered a heathen at court (1.1:308). To pay back the lengthy hospitality, Gestr entertains the king and his retainers by playing his harp, reciting songs, and telling numerous tales. Within his repertoire is the entire Nibelung legend. Gestr is intimately familiar with this story because—as he tells it—he has been the companion of Sigurdr the Dragonslayer (Fdfnisbani), its chief hero, during many of the exploits celebrated in the tale. The modern reader discerns easily that the author of Norna-Gests pdttr relies on a version of the Nibelung story closely related to the extant manuscript of the so-called Poetic Edda. Thus he allows Gestr to cite numerous stanzas and entire poems from this collection, among them the second half of "the lay of Reginn" (Rejjinsmdl). In this poem Sigurdr meets a mysterious stranger whose identity is not revealed in the poem but whom Gestr readily identifies as the chief god OSinn (1.6:317-21). In the end the king persuades Gestr to accept Christianity. The new religion is personified in the king, whose proper religious attitude is stressed throughout. Although the purpose of the story is clearly to celebrate Christianity, familiarity with paganism is patent.

2

Introduction

Equally striking is the audience's fascination with the story's heroic figures, especially the women. The Nibelung story centers on Sigurflr's heroic deeds, but it also includes his meeting with his first love Brynhildr and his marriage to GuSrun Gjukadottir. During thefirstevening of entertainment, Gestr—accompanying himself on the harp—performs "the old song of GuSrun's deceit" (GudrunarbrQtjd infornu), a poem unknown both to modern readers and to Gestr's audience (i.2:3ii). 3 When Gestr finishes the tragic denouement of the hero's death at the hands of his brothers-inlaw, a man at court queries: "How did Brynhildr take this?" Gestr responds by telling the story of Brynhildr's subsequent suicide, quoting all but one stanza of the Eddie poem "Brynhildr's Ride to Hell" (Helreid Brynhildar) (1.9:325-30). Transported from a supposed historical context on the Continent during the fifth century, to the tenth-century setting of the Norwegian court where the story was allegedly retold, and finally to its fourteenth-century inscription by an Icelandic author, this episode demonstrates a continued awareness of the pagan religion and celebrated Germanic queens. It serves further to evoke the continuum of Germanic-nordic images that the present study examines. My search uncovers images of divine female figures and mythic-heroic women in human settings. According to the reports of Latin and Norse writers, these women were honored, venerated, and worshipped. What significance should be attached to these images? It is inherent in religious and mythological figures that they are seldom perceived as possessing "reality" in themselves but rather are constructed by human beings—undoubtedly men for the most part—who abstracted them from their society and history in ways no longer easy to detect. Unless euhemerism—the process whereby divinities were turned into ancient kings—can be clearly demonstrated, mythological figures were thus twice removed from the society in which they were venerated: first, they were created in images or perceptions; next, they were given a life of their own and projected upon a divine universe. If the argument is weak for a social grounding of the female divine figures, it is hardly firmer for the human images I distill from the heroic literature. Perhaps for this very reason they include some of the most impressive femalefiguresfound anywhere in world literature, among them female warriors and rulers and ubiquitous whetters or inciters. In the early days of women's studies, scholars embraced any evidence of a female presence in the past in the hope that even literary images might reflect a social reality.

Introduction

3

As the methodology of women's studies becomes increasingly sophisticated, however, such figures are seen as more reflective of gender, that is, men's perceptions of women, than as representative of the actual female condition. The Norse evidence has been considered particularly important because the most impressive figures appear only in pagan settings and they were therefore thought to reflect a social reality more ancient and different than on the Christian Continent. Naturally, both the divine and the human images of female beings can be valued on literary grounds and can also afford vicarious pleasure chiefly to female readers, but they add relatively little to the history of women. As a rule, these portraits should be read from the stance of the "resisting reader" or with the insights gained from a "hermeneutics of suspicion."4 For the history of gender, however, these images are of great importance because they embody masculine fantasies about the female condition. My analysis of the human images is based on both poetry and prose. In most cases, because of the nature of the transmission of their sources, the images in poetry may be considered to be older than those in prose, and they reach back into the pagan past common to all Germanic tribes. I am therefore prepared to entertain the possibility that they emerged from social roles held by women in a distant past now retrievable only with difficulty. Three of the images (the warrior, the sorceress, and the whetter) may indeed have had a slim social grounding in the history of the Germanic tribes, but they quickly became mythic figures and one-dimensional characters exemplifying a single theme. That they were increasingly popular in the later literature—written when the corresponding social roles were no longer plausible—reinforces their image status. Precisely because of this popularity, however, I need to probe the poetry and other available sources for possible clues of comparable roles within human society. In short, I read the poetic sources with a historical and anthropological focus not always characteristic of literary scholars. Evidence for divine and human images is provided by both Latin and Norse sources. Among the Latin authors the most important is Tacitus, but I shall also rely on Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus.5 By far the richest source for the subject of Old Norse divine and human female images is the so-called Older or Poetic Edda, best known from a single manuscript, the famous Codex Regius. Based on several individual collections that plausibly reach back to the twelfth century, the manuscript was written in Iceland about 1270. Its appearance suggests that it received heavy use until 1643, when it fell into the hands of Brynjolfur Sveinsson,

4

Introduction

bishop of Skalholt (the see in the southern part of the country). Almost twenty years later Brynjolfur sent the manuscript to King Frederik III of Denmark, who placed it in his library from whose association it received its name. Presently comprising forty-five leaves, this small manuscript, not much larger than a hand, is the unique black diamond that has irradiated pagan mythology and Germanic heroic legend through the ages. Containing twenty-nine poems composed between the late ninth and the midthirteenth century, the manuscript is carefully divided into two parts, a mythological section of eleven lays and a heroic of eighteen. These and other mythological poems (now lost) were reworked by Snorri Sturluson in his so-called Prose or Younger Edda, an opus of four parts written sometime after his return from Norway in 1220. Snorri had a double purpose in mind: to show his gratitude to his Norwegian benefactors by writing a skaldic praise poem and to revive and preserve this ancient art with its elaborate kennings and circumlocutions fashioned from mythological information. He was successful on both counts, and in the process he quoted many stanzas and provided a survey in prose of the mythological lore known to and interpreted by him. Snorri's compilations preserve parts of a large body of skaldic poetry composed by 250 known poets between the early ninth century and the middle of the fourteenth. This genre provides a further source for mythological and heroic images, although it is difficult to exploit and furnishes fewer female than male figures. More than half of Codex Regius is devoted to heroic lays that treat nordic and German heroes. Thus the oldest and richest information about the Nibelung legend is found here. At one time the heroic section was even richer, but during transmission the manuscript lost a quire of eight leaves, the famous lacuna in which the crucial period of Sigurdr's and Brynhildr's married life was treated. Fortunately the manuscript was still intact when the author of Vqlsunga saga wrote a prose version of the entire SigurSr legend. The author not only used the missing leaves in the poetic manuscript but also extended the hero's story backward in time by providing a genealogy that connected Sigurfir with the chief god OSinn and continued his lineage forward into the Danish royalty through his and Brynhildr's daughter Aslaug. Vglsunjja saga belongs to the genre of heroic sagas (fornaldarsQgur), which constitutes another source for heroic female figures placed in historical as well as imaginary settings. Two of the human images (the wise woman and the whetter) are also found in the sagas of Icelanders (iskndingasqgur), the kings' sagas (1konungasqgur), the contemporary sagas (samtibarsqgwr), and the laws, including the Icelandic Grdjjds and various provincial laws from Norway.6

Introduction

5

The figures may have been grounded in society at some point, but since I consider their status as image more important, they are treated in this book not only when they appear in the poetry and the legendary sagas but also when they are culled from the more realistic literary genres and legal texts. Briefly stated, the poetry, various genres of narratives, and the collections of laws constitute the major sources for the study of images of divine and human females in the nordic world. 7 For this book I have used the same organizing principle in my pursuit of female figures as the compiler of Codex Regius, that is, to move from the divine to the heroic worlds. Chapter i establishes the cultural continuum between the Germanic and the Norse worlds emblemized in the story of Norna-Gestr. The chapter illustrates a nordic search for roots by focusing on biological links that produce genealogies—historical as well as mythical—connecting the contemporary Icelandic society of Snorri Sturluson personified in his mother Gudny Bpdvarsdottir and the distant Germanic world of Sigurdr's wife Gudrun. The next two chapters are devoted to divine images found in Germanic-nordic mythology. Chapter 2 treats the oldest stage of pagan religion, dominated by strong female powers who took the form of fertility goddesses and other shadowy figures and left relatively few traces in the written sources. Most important is the evidence of female powers of prediction and of women's role in an ancient cult. Bridging the world of the ancient female powers and the nordic pantheon is the mythical sibyl or vglva who is portrayed most powerfully in "The Prophecy of the Sibyl" (Vgluspd), the first poem in Codex Regius. Even the chief god OSinn must turn to her when he seeks to learn about the future. Chapter 3, focused on goddesses and gender relations, treats the classic nordic pantheon. The common vernacular names for the days of the week in northern Europe suggest that before the introduction of Christianity the same gods and goddesses were worshipped throughout the Germanic world. Information about the pagan religion from Continental and Anglo-Saxon vernacular sources, however, is meager compared to the rich details furnished by the Norse Poetic and Prose Edda. These sources reveal a pantheon in which female divinities were, though numerous, less important than male gods. Undoubtedly a human construct and dominated by a male ideology, this supernatural universe was imbued with myth makers' views of their own society. Although the divine cosmos is not a direct reflection of human society, an examination of gender relations among the divinities can nonetheless illuminate gender perceptions among humans. Eddie poetry provides even richer images of human women than of

6

Introduction

goddesses, and these images can be filled out from later prose accounts. In successive chapters I identify four separate and powerful female figures. Chapter 4 examines the supernatural valkyrie (valkyrja) who emerges from the world of mythology. In human form she becomes the female warrior, or xhcguerrière—to use a term that benefits from the capacity of the French language to articulate professional women. The oldest portrait of a woman warrior is Hervgr, described in HlgdskviÒa. Although this poem is not included in Codex Regius but is preserved only in a late saga, scholars agree that it is the oldest of the Norse heroic poems. The surrounding prose, corroborated by nomenclature, identifies Hervpr as a Gothic princess who, together with her brother, defended the eastern border of the Gothic realm against the invading Huns. In the subsequent literature, poetry as well as prose, Hervpr's image was multiplied and elaborated, thus rendering the guerrière a special nordic contribution to the literary gallery of female portraits. In the heroic poetry she appears as a supernatural winged valkyrie hovering over the heroes on the battlefield or as a human shield-maiden actively participating in the conflict. In the heroic prose narratives the shieldmaiden evolves into a maiden king who rules her country as well as any man, and on occasion assumes a male name. Chapter 5 explores the image of the wise woman—a sibyl or v