5 - ‘Better a valiant squire than a cowardly knight’: Gender in Guruns strengleikr (The Lay of Gurun)

Summary

<E>n bok þessor er hinn virðulege hacon konongr let norróena or volsko male ma hæita lioða bok. þui at af þæim sogum er þæssir bok birtir gærðo skolld i syðra brætlande er liggr i frannz lioðsonga. þa er gærazc i horpum gigiom. Simphanom. Organom. Timpanom. Sallterium. ok corom. ok allzkonar oðrum strænglæikum er menn gera ser ok oðrum til skemtanar þæssa lifs.

(This book, which the esteemed King Hákon had translated into Norse from the French language, may be called ‘Book of Lays’, because from the stories which this book makes known, poets in Brittany – which is in France – composed lais, which are performed on harps, fiddles, hurdy-gurdies, lyres, dulcimers, psalteries, rotes, and other stringed instruments of all kinds which men make to amuse themselves and others in this world).

Although it here names itself ‘Book of Lays’ (‘lioða bok’), the mid-thirteenth-century translation of French lais into Old Norse prose has been known, since the first printed edition in 1850, by a title derived from later in this passage: Strengleikar (the word appears in the dative plural in the above quotation and literally means ‘stringed instruments’, though it corresponds to ‘lay’ in titles of texts). Much of the scholarship on Strengleikar has compared the Norse tales with surviving texts of their French sources. This chapter sets out instead to illuminate the process of cultural transmission by looking at one of four lays in Strengleikar for which no French version survives: the narrative known variously as Gurun, Guruns ljóð, or Guruns strengleikr. Gurun is the eleventh of the twenty-one lays in Strengleikar. It is a short text, just over five pages long in a modern edition.

This chapter begins by examining the relationship of the Norwegian text to insular romance. It then explores gender issues in Gurun from two complementary perspectives. First, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theorisation of the homosocial provides a starting point from which to analyse the relationships between the text's four main characters: the knight Gurun, the woman he falls in love with, her dwarf-guardian, and the harper whom Gurun employs as a go-between. I then show how a single sentence in which the dwarf articulates an ideal of masculinity relates the text's gender ideology to a specifically Norse cultural context.