Gunnhildr, Mother of Kings, Was Written Badly

If you read the sagas in any translation for long enough, you will meet Gunnhildr. She is hard to avoid. The wife of Eric Bloodaxe, the mother of Harald Greycloak, the queen who — the saga writers tell us, repeatedly — was cruel, scheming, witch-taught, and monstrous. She reaches out of the page to curse Egill Skallagrímsson. She teaches her sons strategy that is barely distinguishable from treachery. She is, in the words one anthology uses, "the dark female principle in Norse historical memory."

I want to say, plainly, that a great deal of this is a hit piece.

What the sagas actually give us

The main sources for Gunnhildr are Egils saga (early thirteenth century), Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla (c. 1230), and a scatter of references elsewhere. All three were written a good two hundred years after she was alive. All three were written by Icelanders — men whose ancestors had fled or been exiled from the Norway she and her husband ruled. All three were written in a Christian century looking back at a pagan one, and particularly at the generation that converted.

What we know with reasonable confidence: she was the queen consort of Eric Bloodaxe, king of Norway briefly in the 930s; she accompanied him into exile in Northumbria after his expulsion; she was left widowed in 954 after Eric's death at the Battle of Stainmore; and she spent the next two decades trying to secure the succession for her sons, who collectively ruled Norway at various points between 961 and 976.

What the sagas add on top — the witch-teaching by the Sámi, the magical poisonings, the sexual menace — is the accretion of two centuries of hostile storytelling. Snorri believed some of it. The author of Egils saga (plausibly Snorri, or close to him) believed more of it, because Egill is his hero and Gunnhildr's feud with Egill is part of what makes Egill cinematic.

What the Icelanders had to gain

It matters who is doing the writing.

The Icelandic commonwealth was founded in large part by Norwegian families fleeing the consolidating power of Norwegian kings — including Eric Bloodaxe and his father Harald Fairhair. The Icelandic saga tradition was, in an underappreciated way, a literature of political exile. It had reasons to remember the Norwegian monarchy as tyrannical, and it had specific reasons to remember the wife of the most vivid Norwegian tyrant as monstrous.

A queen with political intelligence is inconvenient when the story you are trying to tell is that the king was a villain and everyone around him was either his victim or his accomplice. If Gunnhildr was shrewd — and the narrative evidence suggests she was very shrewd — then you have to choose: do you admit her shrewdness as a political fact, or do you recode it as witchcraft?

The sagas chose the second option.

What she probably actually did

Here is what a sober reading of the evidence suggests Gunnhildr actually did:

• Held the political position of queen consort during a period of extreme succession volatility.
• Preserved her sons' claim through her husband's exile, death, and the years of their minority.
• Negotiated with hostile powers (Athelstan of England, the earls of Lade, the Danish court of Harald Bluetooth) to keep her sons alive long enough to make claims on the throne.
• Used whatever instruments a tenth-century queen had — alliance marriages, hospitality, information networks, the management of her own wealth — to build a power base none of her male relatives had built for her.

This is not witchcraft. This is statecraft practised by a woman in a context that did not easily let women practise statecraft. She was, by the standards of her peers, successful at it. Three of her sons ruled Norway.

How to read the saga women now

What I want to suggest is a reading strategy, not a rehabilitation.

When you come across a saga woman described as fjǫlkunnig — "much-knowing," which is often translated as "practised in magic" — pause and ask: much-knowing about what? The word is not specific to the supernatural. It can mean wise, well-informed, politically aware. The translators who render it uniformly as "versed in witchcraft" are making a choice that the Old Norse is not making.

Similarly, when a saga woman is described as "skǫrungr" — a strong or imposing personality, from the same root as skera, to cut — ask yourself whether the translator has rendered this in a sympathetic register ("bold," "strong") or a pejorative one ("domineering," "fierce"). Very often the register is the translator's editorial, not the saga's.

The saga women were not angels. Bergþóra ordered killings. Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir goaded her husbands into feuds that destroyed them. Aud the Deep-Minded led a colonial expedition. These women were not soft. But neither were they the cartoons the worst translations have made of them. They were political agents operating under constraint, and the reading strategy that recovers them is the same reading strategy you would use on any other primary source: ask who wrote it, when, and for whom.

Closing

Gunnhildr died around 980, possibly murdered by agents of Harald Bluetooth — drowned in a bog, by one account. The saga writers describe her end gleefully. Bogs were where the gods' enemies went.

I do not want to make a saint of her. She was a queen consort in a blood-drenched century, and she did what queens in blood-drenched centuries have generally had to do. But I do want to say, every time her name comes up in a saga I am reading: the woman in the text is not the same as the woman outside it. The writers had reasons to make her monstrous, and we are not obliged to inherit those reasons uncritically.

Read the sagas. Read them closely. Read them against themselves when the evidence warrants it. The saga women are one of the great gifts of the Northern tradition, and part of the work of recovery is refusing to read them the way the hostile writers wanted them read.