THE POLITICS OF SCARCITY: NOTES ON THE SEX RATIO IN EARLY SCANDINAVIA

Abstract

the subject of women, the Old Norse sources speak notoriously in two voices. One voice tells of proud and independent women who arrange their own betrothals, dominate their husbands, initiate divorce (and new marriages), spend extravagantly, play an aggressive role in the politics of feud, and so on. The other voice tells a different story: of women given in marriage without their consent, excluded from the judicial and legislative arenas, severely constrained in their use of what small property they are allowed, and so on. Generally speaking, the powerful women populate Eddie poetry and the sagas (chiefly the sagas of Icelandic families but also those of Norwegian kings), and the powerless women the laws and Sturlunga saga. With Sigurour Nordal's evaluation of the sagas as fiction and the concomitant privileging of the laws and contemporary sagas as history, the powerful woman was consigned to the realms of fantasy. If an earlier generation, more trustful of the Icelandic sagas as sources, construed her as the pagan original and the powerless woman as the degraded voice of Christianity, the generation of scholars after Sigurour Nordal has exactly reversed the priority. For them, the powerless woman is the real one, and the powerful woman a medieval fiction. Rolf Heller reads the powerful woman as a romantic throwback to the grand figures of heroic legend, while Jenny Jochens suspects her of having been cultivated by the Church as part of a campaign to stabilize consensual, monogamous marriage in the North (Consent and Heroine). Jochens' s statement of the problem is worth quoting at length:

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