Gareth Lloyd Evans opens his monograph by declaring that "...this book interrogates the construction, operation, and problematization of saga masculinities" (1). Evans is as good as his word, enjoining us to re-read the Íslendingasögur (=sagas of Icelanders) through the representation and performance of masculinities in this limited textual sphere. Evans reads through hegemonic masculinity, a concept which emerges as ideas about gender, feminist critical studies, and men's studies converge and expand in the 1980s. Soon after, hundreds of academic articles with the keyword "hegemonic masculinity" are printed. The concept is quickly contested--and rightly so--and continues to grow. [1] Evans shows that he has rethought hegemonic masculinity, as it has ramified in theory and practice. Epitomizing a complex, developing theory is never an easy, and perhaps a thankless, task, but Evans is a deft explicator. Evans re-places hegemonic masculinity by aligning himself with critics of the concept's unitary, essentialist character, as well as supporting the working model "of a particular hegemonic masculinity for a particular literary chronotype" (21-22). It is intriguing to consider with Evans how to resist the totalizing "hegemonic masculine bloc," a phrase introduced by Demetrakis Z. Demertriou and discussed by Evans, while using hegemonic masculinites as a "framework" in which to investigate this genre of the Icelandic sagas. The metaphor "framework" is an intriguing one, for it is not clear that the figure has any operational value in Evans's readings. Of necessity, Evans limits what he treats within the vast subject of masculinities, even though setting such limits leaves him open to criticism of the limits themselves, a difficulty he acknowledges and returns to several times (see especially his remarks in the conclusion). Though Evans draws the boundaries of the present project legibly enough, one still might query the lines that isolate his subject for the present monograph. Nevertheless, these comments are aimed emphatically at encouraging Evans to expand this subject-matter in his next study.
Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders consists of front-matter (to which I will return), an introduction which thoughtfully contains an overview of the four chapters within the book, a concise conclusion, a bibliography, and an index. Evans makes his claims in a closely argued 147 pages. The carefully proofread book has an attractive, clean design, with--thankfully!--footnotes. These preserve the sanity of the reader--and, in the case of this monograph, one will want to consult Evans's informative comments and citations while taking in his argument. One could have done without the jacket image depicting Skarphéðinn about to hack through the head of a helmetless Þráinn Sigfússon (for this memorable fight on an ice slab, see Njáls saga, chapter 92). The 1898 illustration, taken from Nordahl Rolfsen's compilation Vore fædres liv : Karakterer og skildringer fra sagatiden (= Our Fathers' Lives: Characters and Depictions from the Saga Era) manages to be horribly wrong for this post-modern treatment of medieval Icelandic sagas, as well as horribly right in underscoring both the grave emphasis on contested masculinities in so many sagas of Icelanders and the long unspoken emphasis of scholarship on an ideal masculine reader. Yet, of course one sympathizes with why public-domain images are used by university presses, which labor in a meager marketplace to serve a vital common purpose.
In a preface, Evans sets out the "authorial position" from which he writes. He is composed of several identities: "a product" of the "embodied intersection" of markers including his education, ethnicity, gender, citizenship, practice of masculinity, and sexual choice. It is that particular reader of the sagas who speaks as the author of these analyses. Here, Evans also thanks Carolyne Larrington for her eye-opening 1992 reading "What Does Woman Want? Mær and Munr in Skírnismál". [2] Larrington declares in that article her "uneasiness" with the "reading position" demanded of the female reader of an Old Norse text in which "The normative world in the poem, against which deviations are contrasted, is the human, gendered world..." Hers was a brave statement in those brave and heady times, and it should not be forgotten now. Evans does not just revive, but re-thinks and re-uses Larrington here. It seems as unwise to ignore the force of this double origin story for Evans's work, as it would be to ignore the titulus of a medieval codex, where the hierarchy of script, coloration, and geneaology of the opening text tell the reader how to read the manuscript she has opened.
The limits Evans has decided on for this work are worth discussing in some detail. The first is the monograph's title, which tells the reader that Evans will bring "men" into contact with the topic of masculinities in the sagas of the Icelanders. Nevertheless, the second paragraph of Evans's introduction adduces examples from Njáls saga and Egils saga, and, in each of these sagas of the Icelanders, women are foundational to the masculinities played out by the male characters. Evans himself discusses discusses how crucial women are in performing typical saga-scenes of domestic abuse or goading, and how women are used to sustain the hegemony of certain masculinities against other gender identities (see, for example, p. 9). The concept of níð and of other sexual insults--and both keywords are helpfully indexed in this monograph--"rely on a notion of what is appropriate for a masculine subject" (24). Woman is part of what man must not be in order to hang onto manliness, and that female subject is comprised of, inter alia, being the "receiver" of sexual activity, fickleness, and perhaps the practice of certain forms of witchcraft. In his readings, Evans carefully follws the entangled relations between male and female subjects in the sagas of Icelanders, which are always in the process of becoming, and he never essentializes a simple dichotomy between woman and man. The use of "men" in the title of the monograph does not do Evans's thorough work justice. Further, one notes that "men" as the preeminent subject is also reflected in the book's index where, e.g., "homosociality" (166) and "masculinities" (167) are helpfully analyzed, while "women" (170) are not.
The second limit is the genre of saga on which he focuses, a choice which may be motivated in part by the genre's popularity with an Anglophone audience and in curricula that engage with medieval Scandinavia. Critical engagement with readers who may know medieval Icelandic texts in translation or who may use them evidentially within the greater world of Early Modern studies is a worthy goal, and both specialist and generalist are well-served by Evans's absorbing monograph. Evans begins by declaring that contemporary saga-readers are "struck by the highly gendered society constructed by these texts" (1). And struck by certainly applies the right kind of force to our stunned reception of the gender ideologies rehearsed in the sagas of the Icelanders, wherever we may locate our own identities and positions as readers. Yet, recent work done on masculinities by Carl Phelpstead or Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, to cite two prominent examples, demonstrates the necessity of adducing law codes, the compilation of wisdom poetry called Hávamál, and Snorri's Prose Edda--as well as the sagas of Icelanders--to witness arguments about manliness and hair or manliness and friendship. Evans surely considered the problem of imposing this limit, and that is a difficult snarl to untangle if the work's mode is to be compact and done within a lifetime. Chapter 2, "Homosocial Masculinities", in which Evans gives notice that he has "used secondary criticism sparingly so as not to detract from the exploration of the construction and problematization of masculinities in the sagas, as articulated by the sagas themselves" (27), offers a related difficulty. While it is not at all strange to read Evans's struggle to limit what he can undertake, it is strange, in a reader so attentive as Evans, to imagine a model in which the sagas somehow articulate themselves. Critical editions, dictionaries, and scholarly analyses--working through the stages of transmission and reception through which the sagas have passed--each voice a methodogically specific record of how a saga could have been heard and understood. Throughout its lifespan, the saga is produced by this operations.
One wishes Evans would have read just a bit further than the textual limits he has imposed on his study, even if one agrees to stick to prose (excepting the poetry in the sagas of the Icelanders). In his conclusion, Evans admits that the texts of the oldest skaldic poetry or the Poetic Edda "would provide interesting challenges to the method proposed in Chapter 1 for modelling masculinities in saga literature" (147). But surely relevant to the subject of hegemonic masculinities is the queer extra-generic Jómsvíkinga saga, a saga in which a brotherhood practices the manly arts of raiding and trading, while living according to the community's fantastic code of conduct. As this saga's genre is fluid, its addition would not quite be cheating. [3] Jómsvíkinga saga is crammed full of fabulous and unsettling masculinities, and it also offers a long, rich transmission history, as the two versions of the text and its Latin epitome suggest, through which the reception of chronotypically Icelandic masculinities could be studied over time, which possibility is also available to Evans if he looked at variant texts for some of the sagas of Icelanders.
In this saga, masculinities are also embedded in narrations of a Northern past and in the entertainment and literary values of telling the past's story. The brothers of Jómsborg perform at the literary extremes of hegemonic masculinity, and the ultimate example of this must be the scene between the triumphant Norwegians and the defeated Jómsvíkings following the battle of Hjǫrungavágr. Earl Hákon plans to asks each of the captive Jómsvíkings what he thinks about death before the Earl has him beheaded. Here, the threat of abjection is embedded in the "burden" of masculinities about which Evans theorizes. Abjection starts with the lack of agency which captivity is, definitionally, and rapidly assumes Kristeva's corporeal reality for the defeated Jómsvíkings. The requirements of discursive heroic stoicism meets the dramatic loss of control over bodily secretions that are consequences of this form of execution and the spectacle of a body that has violated its own borders by devolving into fragments in this scene. The saga plays this moment out with knowing exaggeration and self-critique, voicing and parodying the gallows humor and violence embedded in hegemonic masculinity. We will find out whether the Jomsvikings were as tough--that is, "as hard"--as was said ("hvort svo hart væri sem sagt var"), opines the author, after this final test. Yet, Finlay notes that the scene is capped by a "warn[ing] not to take the saga's heroic attitudes too seriously" (Finlay 2014, 75), for the words of the Jómsvíkings will be entertaining no matter the content of these speeches, says the narrator.
The entertaining content of Jómsvíkinga saga has long been a puzzlement (see, e.g., the magisterial remarks of Ólafur Halldórsson 1969, 1993), one made more difficult by the historical parts of the saga and by the role the Jómsvíkings play in Óláfr Tryggvason's life. Evans's theoretical work enables us to embed the spectacle of a hero's final utterance and its value as entertainment within a medieval Icelandic chronotype of hegemonic masculinities, structuring these literary acts not in opposition to each other but rather as constitutive of each other. Perhaps úlfhéðinn (= warrior in a wolfskin) or berserkr (= warrior in a bearskin; but much less certain etymologically) characters within the sagas of Icelanders (e.g., Úlfr and Kári in Egils saga), whose excess of violent masculinity exceeds the signifiers of the human body--and yet can also be written as oafish stereotypes--might produce similarly complex readings of hegemonic masculinities as well. A material representation is the shield-biting rook in the twelfth-century Lewis chessmen. The rook is a rendering of masculine furor, but with the wildness of his manliness limited to the moves he is allowed on a chessboard.
A third limit is the lexicon of "masculinity" in Old Norse that Evans uses. Acknowledging that "[n]o Old Norse text spells out the terms of the model of masculinity in operation at the time in which the sagas were written or, indeed, set," Evans writes that there are "...multiple Old Norse words that seem to fulfill a similar semantic function to Modern English 'masculinity'" (23). He lists drengskapr and karlmennska as words that model saga masculinity, even though drengskapr can also be applied to a courageous woman. Evans also develops theoretical and empirical analyses of male friendships, largely following the prompts of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on male homosocial desire in literature. Old Norse words which Evans discusses include vinur (=friend) and vinátta (=friendship). But friendship among men, with its protocols of generosity and protection, suggests power among many social ranks and implies many social roles. Why not comment on the word félagi, used of those who exchange gifts and who are in many complex kinds of partnerships? In a monograph of this scope, Evans is probably right not to discuss in any detail the problems that develop when relationships among kin and friends overlap and conflict, which Jón Viðar Sigurðsson covers brilliantly in Viking Friendship (English translation, 2017). Yet ought Evans to have left aside the difficulty of maintain that worthiest of friends with whom one is equal or a closer analysis of just how masculine bonds develop in the sagas of the Icelanders?
Evans writes very well indeed, and that clarity of style makes his monograph read like brilliantly delivered lectures that take the audience from sharply imagined probes of many important sagas of the Icelanders through reviews of pathbreaking studies of masculinity and gender in Old Norse literature. He includes thorough-going discussions of Preben Meulengracht Sørensen's (English translation, 1983) and Carol J. Clover's (1986, 1993), these grand interrogations of manliness and gender which remade our readings of Old Norse literature. For this century, Evans defines the masculinities in the sagas of the Icelanders by way of their contingency, their uneasiness, and their un-quiet shape-shifting presence throughout the saga-world. One is convinced that no saga is untroubled by the discourses of masculinity. Gareth Lloyd Evans does not say all that could be said of masculinities, and what he does write is sometimes less than perfect. For all that, Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders makes one long to ask more questions because of Evans's work. Perhaps that makes for the most perfect book of all.
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Notes:
1. See R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, "Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept", Gender & Society 19 (December 2005): 829-859 for a fuller discussion; article cited by Evans, p. 22.
2. Carolyne Larrington, "What Does Woman Want? Mær and Munr in Skírnismál," Alvíssmál 1 (1992): 3-16.
3. For an excellent discussion of this saga's genre, see Alison Finlay, "Jómsvíkinga Saga and Genre, Scripta Islandica 65 (2014): 63-79.