4 - Ragnhild Eiríksdóttir: Cross-cultural Sovereignty Motifs and Anti-feminist Rhetoric in Chapter 9 of Orkneyinga saga

Summary

Abstract

Brian Cook provides a clearheaded overview of the complications of text, transmission, and provenance evidenced in a major medieval Icelandic chronicle of northwest European politics, the Orkneyinga saga. Cook focuses on the connivances of the legendary queen Ragnhild and their impact upon North Sea islands and kingdoms. Is she a Norse reflex or importation of the Irish sovereignty figure? And, as deadly as it might be, does sexual association with such a figure endow her lovers with legendary cachet? These are among the questions Cook attempts to answer.

Keywords: Orkneyinga saga antifeminism, multicultural medieval Britain, Flateyjarbók, sovereignty goddess

In a series of narrative events that William P.L. Thomson suggests read more like folktale than history, the sons of Earl Thorfinn successively take both the Earldom of Orkney and Ragnhild Eiríksdóttir as wife. As I shall argue, the murder plots and serial marriages described in chapter 9 of Orkneyinga saga bear a striking resemblance to medieval Irish tales of a sovereignty goddess representing the land. In what follows, my intention is not to claim a genetic relationship between the two—that the sovereignty figure of medieval Irish literature is direct source for Ragnhild—but rather that chapter 9 of Orkneyinga saga has a narrative problem to solve concerning the succession of the earldom, and that the solution is reminiscent of the well-known sovereignty goddess motif.

A number of scholars have argued for the influence of medieval Irish literary culture on that of their insular neighbors, the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse. While degree and channels of influence generally require consideration on a case-by-case basis, William Sayers points out that

[w]hatever stand one takes on oral-traditional/literary influence from Celtic to Norse, no one disputes the overall historicity of the individual entries in Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) that ascribe birth or residence, and ties of kinship, marriage, fosterage or bondage originating in Ireland, the Hebrides and parts of mainland Scotland to about a fourth of the original settlers, and Norwegian origins to the remainder.

It is generally assumed by scholars that the Celtic settlers—however they made their way to Iceland—would have brought with them oral tales that influenced neighboring literary traditions by the time those traditions came to be recorded.