We have felled a great champion, and we have not found it easy

Another Njála bit. Gizur the White, who has just taken a part in the slaying of Gunnar, is now talking to Gunnar’s mother, Rannveig:

He went over to Rannveig and said, “Will you give us room on your land to bury two dead?
“Willingly,” she replied, “but I would have been even more willing to give enough room for all of you.”

No weak women on these pages, at all.

And yet–commentaries on the saga/Viking era persist in only grudgingly acknowledging the role of women in these tales–in this history–and can never bring themselves to put the women on an equal level with the men.

Here’s today’s bit that made me want to throw a book across the room–a chapter on saga woman I flipped forward to in David Roberts and John Krakauer’s Land of the Sagas:

With their grim battles and ideal deaths, their bouts of ale-drinking and bursts of scaldic eloquence, their wranglings at the Althing and wanderings through the wilderness, the sagas seem to postulate a world dominated by men. What, within this world, was the place of women?

The authors then go on to explain that women did in fact play a role in the sagas.

You think? Why do you even have to ask this question? Women are so very present in the sagas, how can you expect anyone familiar with them to doubt it? Or haven’t you noticed that women are major movers of events throughout?

It’s not just undergraduates who are guilty of seeing saga women–and all literary women, really–through their own biases, after all. Sometimes I think I must be reading different tales than they are, or, more likely, that I’m reading them through a different filter. I never for a moment had to wonder, “Hey, so do women have a role here?” They very clearly do.

This may all be part of a larger historical assumption, of course–a sort of default assumption that we’re not immune to even now that men moved history, and women didn’t. Which seems to also mean an assumption that women have to be proven to have been active participants, while men have to be proven not to have been. The default settings are different in many people’s minds: a woman who moved events is unusual; a man who moved events is just doing what men do.

What would happen, I wondered, if everyone started with an assumption of roughly equal influence by all parties instead, and set out to do all of their proving or disproving from there? Is it truly unintuitive to do so? Men and women have often (but not always) had very different roles from one another throughout history–I’m not arguing that at all–but they’ve always both influenced their societies and the events that take place within them. Assuming women weren’t present or didn’t have influence seems, well, blind.

At least once you learn to define “influence” as something other than “being the one who wields the axe and draws the blood.”