‘That which a hand gives a hand or a foot gives a foot’: Male Kinship Obligations in the Heroic Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga

Summary

Storytelling is a primary way that families are produced, maintained, and perhaps transformed […] Stories and storytelling both generate and reproduce ‘the family’ by legitimating meanings and power relations.

The heroic Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga foreground male kinship. These texts interrogate what it means to be a father, son, uncle, nephew, or brother, and what is then owed to the others in this relationship: support, vengeance, education, or love. In the opening of the Poetic Edda, Vǫluspá warns that fraternal conflict is a sign of imminent apocalypse, and the heroic Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga fully explore the consequences of breaking implied or explicit obligations, examining the prioritisation of conflicting responsibilities. These issues are also closely related to masculinity: the expression of a family identity intersects with the performance of gender. As male kinship forms a complex web of connections established by biology, marriage, and fostering, the texts also raise questions about the innate or acquired nature of identities. Addressing masculinity through the lens of male family relations is thus both a novel and productive approach to analysing gender in the heroic Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga, and to illuminating the possibilities for Old Norse masculinities more widely.

The Poetic Edda is a collection of poems, compiled in the Codex Regius manuscript (GKS 2365 4to), c. 1270, with the texts themselves thought to originally be oral compositions of different ages, and the earliest dating from the ninth century. A rubricated letter at 20r demarcates two parts of the Codex Regius: the first mainly concerns mythological characters and the second (the subject of this chapter) predominantly involves heroic, legendary protagonists. Völsunga saga, from NKS 1824 b 4to, c. 1400, retells, adds to, and removes narratives from the heroic Poetic Edda (which itself includes alternative versions of the same events in different poems); it is important to examine both together (something that has not been done in previous analyses of gender) as each can, in our current critical context, illuminate the other – demonstrating through similarity and difference the ways in which family and masculinity are constructed for male characters.