Gender and Genre in Medieval Chivalric Rímur
The increasing influence of continental chivalric romances on medieval Icelandic and Norwegian literature had a profound effect on discourses of gender in Norse texts, reflected in the wave of romance translations and original romances created over the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. This thesis looks at how these questions of appropriate gendered behaviour continue to be negotiated in chivalric rímur (rhymed narrative poetry) of the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. There has been very little literary criticism of medieval rímur at all, and while aspects of gender in these texts are sometimes touched upon in studies of individual rímur cycles, there has yet to be a genre-wide study specifically of gender in rímur. The basis for this thesis is a corpus of twenty-three pre-Reformation chivalric rímur cycles, which has been used for both corpus-wide surveys of gendered kenning types and character introductions and as a source of case studies through which to examine recurring themes in these texts more closely. The first part of this thesis examines the evidence for the performance context of medieval rímur and how this may have influenced the development of the form, downplaying the moral messages that underlie many of the romances in favour of ever more spectacular battle scenes in an effort to keep the audience entertained. As well as affecting the types of stories told by rímur poets, these conditions of performance also influenced the poets’ conceptualisation of themselves as poets, an effect particularly visible in the introductory mansöngur verses that became an increasingly integral part of the rímur form. The next chapter looks at the construction of masculinity in chivalric rímur, using the portrayal of the stories’ pro- and antagonists to argue that the idealised form of masculinity in these texts is inherently aristocratic, white, heterosexual and able-bodied. While the Norse adaptions of courtly romances were influential in shaping new modes of behaviour, I argue that, in these texts, there remain strong links to aristocratic behavioural models seen in earlier texts such as the kings’ sagas. The third part explores the portrayal of women. As with the chapter on men, this section looks at women who are demonised and praised in their narratives to argue that idealised femininity in these texts is complementary to and interactive with hegemonic masculinity. Though there are fewer prominent female characters than male in rímur, the case studies examined in this chapter reveal the ways in which rímur poets used a conventional framework of femininity to construct characters with individuality and nuance. Overall, this thesis argues that rímur poets build on the constructions of courtly gender seen in the prose romances, which, while differing from older models of gender in many ways, were not the total break with the earlier tradition that they are sometimes imagined to be. However, as Iceland’s position as a Norwegian dependency became more established, and with it the status of the new Icelandic aristocracy, so too did the courtly behavioural model. The rímur genre, arising perhaps as much as a century after Iceland’s accession to the Norwegian crown, had less need than the early prose romances to introduce and reinforce this model, and rímur poets therefore felt freer to create exaggerated fantasies of it: fantasies of increasingly circumscribed roles, in which every male protagonist is the mightiest warrior and every female marriage-prospect is the most beautiful and skilled woman in the world. Yet the very existence of these formulaic patterns of behaviour gave poets scope to play with the limits of categorisation and, on occasion, subvert their audiences’ expectations entirely.
Old Norse, medieval literature, gender, chivalric literature, rímur, medieval Icelandic literature, poetry
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