From Sinner to Saint: Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, Laxdæla saga , and the Lives of Women Penitents
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/21638195.95.4.01
ISSN2163-8195
Autores Tópico(s)Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies
ResumoIn 1953, Gabriel Turville-Petre wrote that the lives of the saints "did not teach the Icelanders what to think or what to say, but it taught them how to say it" (142). Traditionally, it has been assumed that, just as Turville-Petre concluded, the translated lives of the saints were the narrative starting point for the "vernacular" sagas that developed in Iceland during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This notion has carried through to more recent years; in his Eddas and Sagas: Iceland's Medieval Literature, Jónas Kristjánsson (1988) emphasized that the so-called heilagra manna sǫgur (sagas of saints) hold an important place within Iceland's literary history, since they "doubtless served in many ways as models for native authors" and "played some part in bringing the genre of Íslendinga sǫgur into the world and had some influence on their form and composition" (136). In her 2017 monograph The Saint and the Saga Hero: Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature, Siân Grønlie (2017) challenged this long-assumed "model of linear development from saint's life to saga" (31). Grønlie, who was influenced by Massimiliano Bampi's examination of the influence of translated romance on other genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature,1 argued for a new and more nuanced understanding of the relationship between translated hagiographic and vernacular saga literature. Using Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory,2 Grønlie (2017) demonstrates "the ways in which sagas engaged creatively with saints' lives over the medieval period," and has illustrated the various means by which saga literature adapts, challenges, and interferes with the saint's life, specifically with regard to the male saga hero (36). Indeed, as Grønlie points out, the sagas of saints and the sagas of Icelanders were often produced in the same scriptoria, by the same scribes, and for overlapping audiences; as such, the genres had important influences on one another that an application of Even-Zohar's polysystem theory brings to light (23).However, Grønlie was not the first to argue that the secular sagas interacted with hagiographic literature; in 2007, Shannon Godlove made an argument for the "'hagiographic' endings" for the main characters of both Njáls saga and Laxdæla saga, which were notably written in the mid- to late thirteenth century, around the same time as the "florid style" sagas of saints. With regard to Laxdæla saga, composed between 1250–1270, Godlove (2007) argues that "Guðrún's grief at the deaths of her husbands and remorse for her past sins turn her to a life of contrition and penance in her final years" (112). Godlove (2007) notes that while Guðrún's conversion may seem abrupt and even disingenuous, it is in line with hagiographic motifs that would have been well-known to the saga writer, and effectively "replaces demonized pagan femininity with an appropriate expression of thirteenth-century Christian female devotion through penance, compunction, and affective piety" (112). Godlove's observations on the character of Guðrún as a secular saint are, I believe, compelling and convincing, and signal the need to examine the character more closely within the context of those hagiographies circulating contemporaneously with the saga, and specifically those structural models and character motifs that could have influenced how Guðrún's story was written.This article draws upon Godlove's observations on how Guðrún was a kind of "secular saint" and uses Grønlie's comparative model in order to demonstrate the specific ways in which Laxdæla saga adopts the structure and rhetoric of hagiography through the character of Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir. I argue that Guðrún is not only a "secular saint" whose saga writer drew on hagiographic motifs, as Godlove concludes, but more specifically that her life may be said to reflect important elements from the lives of the four women penitents represented in Old Norse-Icelandic translated hagiographic literature, namely, Mary Magdalen, Pelagia, Thaïs, and Mary of Egypt. By demonstrating the themes, motifs, and structure common to both Guðrún's story line and those of the four women penitents by bringing these works into conversation with one another, it argues that Laxdæla saga—a vernacular, secular tale of a woman who sinned and, later, repented—can be argued to have adopted key elements from and to have served a similar function as specific works of hagiographic literature known to both the saga's author and its audience.Prior to turning to Guðrún and the ways in which she can be argued to have been modeled on a certain type of saint, it is important to outline clearly the type of saint her life's trajectory reflects: that of the penitent, and more specifically, the female penitent. The earliest of the Christian saints were the martyrs, who imitated the example of Christ and his crucifixion by dying often gruesome deaths in defense of their faith. After Constantine (c. 272–337) converted to Christianity in 312 and ended the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, holy men and women began to demonstrate their devotion to God and attempted to re-create the passion of Christ in new ways. In the early fifth century, a new kind of saint emerged. Unlike the men and women who died violent deaths at the hands of pagan rulers, these new kinds of holy men and women engaged in strict asceticism, for which there were ample biblical models. As Lynda Coon (1997) writes, these models included Jesus, who "like Elijah and Moses before him, purifies himself in the terrifying desert, and the wasteland of Palestine provides the battleground for Christ's warfare with Satan"; Moses, who "sojourns in the deserts of Sinai in order to receive God's written revelation to the Israelites (Exodus 34.28)"; Elijah, who "renews his spiritual potency in the wilderness around Mount Horeb, where angels nourish him while he rests under a broom tree (I Kings 19.4–8)"; and "John the Baptist, who dresses in the charismatic garb of the prophet Elijah, [and] preaches the urgency of repentance in the remote Jordan Valley before the looming eschaton (Matthew 3.1–17)" (Coon 1997, 71).The lives of the fourth- and fifth-century male ascetics, as Coon (1997) notes, tend to take on a militant tone, with the desert fathers "acting as militant guardians of humankind" who "purge the world of demonic influence" (71). Many of the so-called desert fathers imitated Christ by retreating to the wilderness and returning symbolically to the landscape described in Genesis before the Fall; in these ascetic dwellings (askesis) on hills, in caves, and in some instances, in constructed sepulchers, these holy men were corporeally and spiritually transformed through practices of militant self-abnegation and crucifixion (Coon 1997, 72–3). While they, too, might inhabit structures like the desert fathers and engage in similar practices of self-denial, the lives of women who aspired to this type of sanctity tended to focus less on supernatural spirituality and imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ) and more on penance; through their enshrinement, they atone for the sins of Eve on behalf of all humans. Coon (1997) writes that "the lives of desert men therefore reflect the supernatural spirituality of Christ and the prophets, while women's vitae humanize the militancy of desert asceticism and preach the necessity for universal repentance" (72). Coon (1997) also notes that "most holy women live in human-made structures, not in the open desert" as men did, and argues that, in general, "the hallowed lives of mournful women personify repentance and submission. They convey that female flesh can evolve allegorically from the fallen Eve to the immaculate Virgin" (75, 77).In her study, Grønlie (2017) looks "at how the lives of desert saints may have enriched the sagas of Icelanders through concepts of the wilderness: as a 'setting for eschatological drama,' as a 'site of contest with evil' and finally as a 'redemptive space' for the cultivation of interiority" (164), specifically by looking at examples from Gísla saga Súrssonar, Flóamanna saga, and Bárðar saga snæfellsáss. After he is declared an outlaw, Gísli Súrsson retreats to the metaphorical wilderness, where, like the desert saint, he has profound and transformative interior experiences at the outskirts of society (Grønlie 2017, 166). Using examples from hagiographic and visionary literature known within the literary world of medieval Iceland, Grønlie (2017) demonstrates how the good and bad dream women who visit Gísli can be understood "through the 'eschatological drama' of eremitic literature, in which devils and angels compete for Christian souls" (168). Flóamanna saga's Þorgils Örrabeinsfóstri "is stranded in the Greenlandic wilderness . . . in a desert of snow and ice where survival itself is a struggle, and in this frozen wasteland he undergoes a series of trials and temptations in which he must hold firm to his Christian faith" (Grønlie 2017, 182). Through his suffering, trials, temptations, and divine encounters in the wilderness, Grønlie (2017) argues, Þorgils—whose story is also, notably, related to the vitæ of his descendent, St. Þorlákr—may be read as an imitatio Christi (183–96). The Greenlandic wilderness is also "a place of demonic temptation and the religious frontier of Christendom" (Grønlie 2017, 196) in Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, where Gestr, the son of the eponymous hero encounters temptations, which Grønlie (2017) describes as "intensely psychological," prior to his baptism at the court of Óláfr Tryggvasson (205). Grønlie (2017) successfully demonstrates how the stories of these three male saga characters show clear parallels with and influence from the lives of male ascetics, and specifically the "desert men" who retreat to the wilderness in order to atone for the sins of humankind and to engage in an interior battle between divine and demonic forces, in doing so reflecting what Coon (1997) refers to as the "supernatural spirituality of Christ and the prophets" (72). However, as Coon notes, the lives of women ascetics differ in important ways from those of their male counterparts, particularly in regard to the nature of their sins and the penance with which they are expected to atone for them, thereby evolving symbolically from Eve to the Virgin Mary.Many of the women ascetics known from Latin hagiographic tradition are former harlots who converted to a life of self-abnegation to atone for their past sins. There are four whose lives are represented—in full or in part—in Old Norse-Icelandic, who can all be described in this way. The first of these is Mary Magdalen. The Old Norse-Icelandic legend of Mary Magdalen was not composed until the mid-fourteenth century, seemingly by Arngrímr Brandsson, but Árni Magnússon refers to "Mariu Saga Magdalenæ," which may be a separate, now-lost, and potentially earlier saga distinct from the fourteenth-century composite legend of Mary Magdalen and Martha (Mǫrtu saga ok Maríu Magðalenu) (Van Deusen 2019, 47). The medieval legend of Mary Magdalen as it was known in Iceland told that she was the sister of Martha of Bethany, that she repented of her sins at Jesus's feet, that seven demons were cast from her, and that after washing ashore in Marseilles following the resurrection, she converted the locals before retreating to the wilderness to further atone for her sins, which also included preaching. The saga was based on a variety of Latin and vernacular sources, but relied primarily upon Vincent de Beauvais's Speculum historiale.3The Old Norse-Icelandic life of Mary of Egypt (Maríu saga egipzku), whose story had important influences on the medieval composite legend of Mary Magdalen,4 survives in manuscripts dating from the second half of the thirteenth century. Mary of Egypt, a late fourth- and early fifth-century prostitute from Alexandria, joined a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to attract new clientele. While in Jerusalem, she found herself before an icon of the Theotokos (the Blessed Virgin Mary), at which point she converted and then retreated to the wilderness to do penance for her previously sinful life, where, a year before her death, the abbot Zosimus encountered her and heard her story. The saga is represented by three redactions, all of which are translations of a form of the saint's vita in BHL Suppl. 5417d.5 Mary of Egypt was also known within medieval Iceland through a tale that was included in the miracles of the Virgin Mary (Wolf 2013, 245–8).The final two, Pelagia and Thaïs, both appear in Barlaams saga ok Jósafats, which was translated from a twelfth-century Latin text relating to the life of Buddha (cf. BHL 979)6 during the time of Hákon the Young (d. 1257) (Wolf 2013, 245–8). Pelagia and Thaïs—who, incidentally, share the feast day of October 8—appear in the section of the saga containing seven interpolations that are otherwise unknown in Old Norse-Icelandic translation (Haugen 2009, 70–1; 1977, 232). The first included in the saga is the fourth-century dancer and courtesan Pelagia of Antioch, who repented of her sinful ways before Bishop Nonnus, confessed, and was baptized. After her baptism, she dressed in men's clothing and left Antioch for Jerusalem, where she spent the final years of her life disguised as a male recluse, doing penance in a cell on the Mount of Olives.7 The saga also contains excerpts pertaining to Thaïs, a fourth-century Egyptian courtesan who was converted by a monk, Paphnutius, who entered her chambers to convert her, only to discover she already believed in God. After the forgiveness of her sins, Thaïs entered a convent cell (pínslahús), where she did penance and served God for 3 years.At least three of the Old Norse-Icelandic lives of female penitents—Mary of Egypt, Pelagia, and Thaïs—are nearly contemporaneous with Laxdæla saga. But in addition to being written around the time as the lives of the women penitents to which Guðrún's story can be compared, the saga appears to have been composed close in geographical proximity to where some of these legends were written and disseminated, and where, in some cases, their Latin sources were located. It has long been speculated that Laxdæla saga was written in the west of Iceland, given the author's extensive knowledge of the region and of Breiðafjörður specifically (Laxdæla saga1934, xxiii). Maríu saga egipzku is similarly found in manuscripts and fragments from the northwest and the north.8 And while it was originally of Norwegian provenance, Barlaams saga ok Jósafats was known in a number of Icelandic manuscripts, some of which can be connected to the western and northern regions of the country.9 Furthermore, as Guðrún Nordal (2013) has demonstrated, Laxdæla saga and its audience were closely tied to the Norwegian court, where Barlaams saga ok Jósafats was translated around the same time (208).10Mǫrtu saga ok Maríu Magðalenu was probably produced at either Skálholt, Oddi, or (most likely) Þingeyrar, and the manuscripts whose provenance is known are either in the west or the north of the country.11 While the composite saga was compiled in the fourteenth century, this bears witness to the fact that the saga's Latin sources were available in libraries in this area. As previously mentioned, Grønlie (2017) reminds us that scribes in Icelandic scriptoria "worked across a range of genres, no doubt for overlapping audiences" (23). And even if the author of the saga did not somehow encounter one of these sagas in manuscript form, they would have been familiar with the lives of these penitent women saints from when they were read from the pulpit on their feast days or, in the case of Mary Magdalen, the Bible itself and homilies in the Old Icelandic Homily Book (Cormack 1994, 34; Van Deusen 2011, 89).Birte Carlé (1981) observes that the legends of repentant prostitutes such as Pelagia and Thais especially "ikke havde nogen social resonansbund, og derfor ikke noget publikum, på Island. . . . Det var imidlertid en ideologi, der lå det islandske hverdagsliv fjernt" (28) [did not have any social resonance, and therefore no audience, in Iceland. . . . It was, however, an ideology that was far removed from everyday Icelandic life]. While the institution of prostitution was perhaps not something the everyday Icelander could relate to, these texts carried broader messages of the possibility of redemption from serious sins and are about much more than harlotry. As I hope to demonstrate, these sagas did, in fact, have social resonance and an audience in Iceland, and this is seen more visibly in the example of Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir and her evolution from sinner to saint, from Eve to Mary, in Laxdæla saga.The life of Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir is central to the narrative of Laxdæla saga. However, as is somewhat typical for the Íslendingasǫgur, the main character does not enter the scene until well into the narrative. Guðrún is introduced in chapter 32, where she is described as "kvenna vænst, er upp óxu á Íslandi, bæði at ásjánu ok vitsmunum. Guðrún var kurteis kona, svá at í þann tíma þóttu allt barnavípur, þat er aðrar konur hǫfðu í skarti hjá henni. Allra kvenna var hon kœnst og bezt orði farin" (Laxdæla saga 1934, 86) ["the most beautiful woman ever to have grown up in Iceland, and no less clever than she was good-looking. She took great care with her appearance, so much that the adornments of other women were considered to be mere child's play in comparison. She was the shrewdest of women, highly articulate, and generous as well" (Saga of the People of Laxardal 1997, 43)]. Her life is governed by the pre-Christian notion of fate, which predicts (through a series of dreams) her four marriages, but not her life in widowhood. And her life follows the course of her dreams, up until the death of her fourth husband, after which she became a devout Christian: "Guðrún gerðisk trúkona mikil. Hon nam fyrst kvenna saltara á Íslandi. Hon var lǫngum um nætr at kirkju á bœnum sínum" (Laxdæla saga 1934, 223) ["Gudrun became very religious. She was the first Icelandic woman to learn the Psalter, and spent long periods in church praying at night" (Saga of the People of Laxardal 1997, 117)]. She "varð fyrst nunna á Íslandi ok einsetukona" (Laxdæla saga 1934, 228) ["was the first woman in Iceland to become a nun and anchoress" (Saga of the People of Laxardal 1997, 119)]. As Anna Sigurðardóttir (1988) notes, the saga provides very few details regarding Guðrún's time as a nun and an anchoress; specifically, "ekki er þess getið að Guðrún hafi ástundað sérstakt meinlæti í einsetunni, nema hvað hún vakti um nætur við bænagerð" (185) [it is not mentioned that Guðrún had practiced a specific form of self-chastisement while in her anchorite cell, except how she woke during the night for prayer].With regard to her occupation as a nun at the end of her life, there are some similarities between Guðrún's life and that of Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir from the so-called Vinland sagas. In these sagas, Guðríðr's Christian future was prophesied by her recently deceased husband, Þorsteinn Eiríksson. In Grænlendinga saga, Þorsteinn rose briefly from his deathbed to tell Guðríðr her fate, and that she would end her life as a nun in Iceland following a pilgrimage abroad: "Þú munt útan fara ok ganga suðr ok koma út aptr til Íslands til bús þíns, ok þá mun þar kirkja reist vera, ok munti þar vera ok taka nunnu-vígslu, ok þar muntu andask" (Eyrbyggja saga1935, 260) ["You will travel abroad, go south on a pilgrimage, and return to Iceland to your farm, where a church will be built. There you will remain and take holy orders and there you will die" (Saga of the Greenlanders 1997, 27)]. In Eiríks saga rauða, Þorsteinn came back from the dead and provided guidance on Christian practices to be adopted in Greenland; he did not mention pilgrimage, but did request that Guðríðr donate their money to the church or to the poor: "Bað, at hon legði fé þeira til kirkju ok sumt fátœkum mǫnnum" (Eyrbyggja saga 1935, 216–7) ["He also asked her to donate their money to a church or to poor people" (Eirik the Red's Saga1997, 10)]. The events in the Vinland sagas almost resemble a kind of Christian vision. In contrast, Guðrún's dreams do not predict her Christian future and her life as a nun and anchoress, although her third dream does predict a new "nobler" religion. However, the events of Guðrún's widowhood are even more critical to her story line; through the opportunity her conversion provides for acts of contrition, the final years of Guðrún's life stand in stark contrast to her earlier life, and arguably have major implications for how the audience judges her upon the saga's conclusion.Indeed, the character of Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir provides the author of Laxdæla saga with a unique opportunity to draw upon the structures and motifs of the lives of women penitents. Guðrún is exceptional among the other "sinful" women of the sagas because of the possibility of Christian redemption presented to her within the narrative, which allows her story to take on a different trajectory than that of, for example, Hallgerðr of Njáls saga, or Brynhildr from Vǫlsunga saga, whose stories bear a number of striking similarities to that of Guðrún, as demonstrated by Theodore Andersson (2012, 151–2, 189). However, Guðrún's situation is a unique one, because—unlike Hallgerðr and Brynhildr—she is given the opportunity to convert to Christianity, and does so. This provides her with an opportunity to more fully embody the penitent saint than these comparable female saga characters, who fulfill the sinfulness criteria of the saint type but not the penitential one.Guðrún is also unique in that Laxdæla saga in many ways focuses on her, to the extent that Jónas Kristjánsson (1988) writes that "if she had been a man, the saga would probably be named for her," and Judith Jesch (1991) comments that "many have thought it ought really to be called 'Guðrún's saga,' the only Saga of Icelanders to have a woman as its main character" (197). This both provides ample material to analyze a female character in the saga (to an unparalleled extent) and also creates a situation in which, as in the life of a saint, she is given central focus in the narrative, and the events of the saga revolve around her. In this way, too, she is comparable to Guðríðr of the Vinland Sagas, to whom (as previously mentioned) she can also be compared at the end of her life, as Guðríðr went on a pilgrimage and became a nun. Entering a religious house was not an uncommon kind of "retirement plan" for well-to-do elderly individuals in medieval Iceland, who entered monasteries, convents, and even bishoprics as próventufólk (prebenders).12 It was not uncommon for couples or siblings to become próventufólk, and to offer money and property in exchange for food, care, and accommodations, oftentimes for the remainder of their lives (Anna Sigurðardóttir 1988, 283; Gilchrist 1995, 226). Although the details of this part of her life are extremely brief by comparison to her years as a woman of marriageable age, what is clear is that Guðrún was not a próventukona (female prebender). Instead, she was a nunna—a nun who had taken holy orders—as well an anchoress—einsetukona—a particular kind of nun who lived a solitary existence in a cell apart from the religious community, typically devoting herself to prayer and contemplation (Mulder-Bakker 2005, 2–3).While Grønlie has demonstrated that Gísli Súrsson, Þorgils Örrabeinsfóstri, and Gestr Bárðarson all reflect different aspects of the lives of the desert fathers, Guðrún uniquely exemplifies the female penitent saint within the corpus of the Íslendingasǫgur. The general structure of the journey from severe sinfulness to extreme forms of repentance is an important way in which the saga mirrors the lives of the women penitents known; as outlined earlier, each of the penitent women whose lives were known in Old Norse-Icelandic translation were guilty of what were considered serious (and even deadly) sins, which account for and explain their strict and even seemingly excessive acts of atonement at the end of their lives.In his article on the husband Guðrún loved the most, Todd Michelson-Ambelang (2022) outlines the ways in which Guðrún is guilty of committing a variety of sins as outlined in Scripture, and in particular those in Proverbs 6:16–19. He writes that despite this, Guðrún may be seen positively by the audience specifically because at the end of her life, she converted and became sponsa Christi, or bride of Christ, who Michelson-Ambelang argues is the spouse Guðrún refers to in her mysterious answer to her son's question about which husband she loved the best, though she treated him worst (336–7). In his recent article, Thomas Morcom (2018) builds on this idea of Guðrún as a sponsa Christi at the end of her life and connects it to remorse, though not necessarily penance. Morcom writes that in contrast to the "accelerating action" of her life, during her old age, "she is borne backward instead into guilty recollection through her remorse for her deeds" as Iceland's first nun and anchoress (48). He further argues that "coupled with her status as an anchoress, Guðrún has enacted an inversion of her adult characterisation that is ironic in its opposition to her previous lifestyle: she is isolated from society, unquestioningly submissive to a male lord, and penitently weeping. Guðrún's penance may have been viewed by the saga's Christian author as an appropriate demonstration of remorse" (43). Similarly, in line with the general trends noted by Coon for female penitents, the four female penitents whose lives are extant in Old Norse-Icelandic tradition dedicate themselves entirely to Christ as their sponsa at the time of repentance, and atone for the ways in which they had sinned against him earlier.The sins of the four female penitents known within Old Norse-Icelandic tradition are all of a sexual nature. It is strongly implied that the demons Jesus drove from Mary Magdalen were related to her sexuality, and this sentiment is reiterated throughout her saga and the various other material pertaining to her that was circulating in Iceland in the Middle Ages (Jansen 2001, 148). The other three women were harlots before they repented, and are each described as being famous for having many lovers. Indeed, sexuality and promiscuity tend to be central to those sins for which female penitents need to repent, as demonstrated here in the extracts from the sagas that describe their sexually sinful ways. Mary Magdalen's manifold sins are described:13This becomes the primary sin for which Mary Magdalen, in the legend conflated with Luke's sinner, repents during the events that take place during Jesus's lifetime. Pelagia of Antioch's sins similarly are of a sexual nature, and describe how her beauty tempted many young men: Marger vngir menn fylgðu henní. hauvesker oc kurtteisir. er engi þottezt verða saddr. af asyn hennar fegrðar. oc skínannda bunaðr. er allavega sœmde hana oc pryddi. oc af ilm sœtra grasa er henní fylgði. með myklum hegoma. (Barlaams ok Josaphats saga1981, 77)(Many young men followed her, well-mannered and courteous, when none seemed to be satisfied by the sight of her beauty, and shining ornaments, which always honored and adorned her, and from the scent of sweet herbs which followed her with great falsehood.)In the same saga, Thaïs is described as being sinful and, more precisely, heretical because of her many lovers: Hana ælskaðu marger en hon syniaða fam síns vilia. af sinni villu. varð hon miok við fræg. (Barlaams ok Josaphats saga 1981, 80)(She loved many and she refused few their desire. She became very famous from her heresy.)Mary of Egypt states explicitly that she was a prostitute for at least 17 years, when speaking to Zosimus in the desert: Þat war þa mitt lif, ath ek war portkona, svo sem su er verst matti wera, .xvij. vetr edr nockuru meir. (Heilagra manna søgur 1877, 1:486)(That was my life, that I was a prostitute, as the worst could be, for 17 years or more.)These sexual sins become central to these women's vitae and constitute the primary sins for which they are expected to atone, and for which they eventually do penance, which aligns with the notion that women penitents, as Coon (1997) writes, "evolve allegorically from the fallen Eve to the immaculate Virgin" (77).Guðrún had multiple marriages and implied lovers outside of wedlock, most notably Kjartan, and her visits with whom made his father, Óláfr pái, uncomfortable, and he states that "Eigi veit ek . . . hví mér er jafnan svá hugstœtt, er þú ferr til Lauga ok talar við Guðrúnu" (Laxdæla saga 1934, 112) ["I don't know why your visits to the springs at Laugar to spend time with Gudrun make me uneasy" (Saga of the People of Laxardal 1997, 57)]. Óláfr states that he suspects that things will not go well in their future dealings with the family at Laugar, but the fact that "kært gerðisk" (Laxdæla saga 1934, 112) ["[there was] growing affection" (Saga of the People of Laxardal 1997, 57)] between Guðrún and Kjartan during the visits between their fathers, Ósvífr and Óláfr, must have raised other concerns as well between these two who were, evidently, so perfectly matched to one another. In an act also (though more tangentially) related to matters of sexuality, Guðrún used deception with particular sexual implications to end her marriage to her first husband, Þorvaldr Halldórsson, in order to marry another man, Þórðr Ingunnarson; Þórðr suggests that Guðrún make for Þorvaldr a low-cut shirt, which would constitute grounds for divorce, as Þorvaldr would be wearing clothing of the opposite sex: "'Gerðu honum skyrtu ok brautgangs hǫfuðsmátt ok seg skilit við hann fyrir þessar sakar.' Eigi mælti Guðrún í móti þessu, ok skilja þau talit" (Laxdæla saga 1934, 94) ["'Make him a shirt with the neck so low-cut that it will give you grounds for divorcing
Referência(s)