Gender and Power in the Mythology

Old Norse mythology contains strong and autonomous female figures alongside a pronounced male dominance, and modern scholarship has examined how gender, power, and ritual competence interact in the mythology.

Völvur, valkyries, and Freyja's autonomy

The völva in Völuspá speaks with an authority that has no direct parallel among male divine figures: it is she who sees and remembers the history of the world, and it is her words that establish the frame for the cosmology. Jenny Jochens has shown how völvur in saga literature are perceived as potentially dangerous but indispensable ritual specialists, whose knowledge of fate and ability to communicate with the dead give them social power outside the normative gender system.

Valkyries oscillate in the texts between autonomous warrior-women with their own names and wills and passive instruments of Odin's will. The early skaldic depictions of valkyries as more bloody and fierce beings differ markedly from the later romanticized gatekeepers of Valhalla. Carol Clover has analysed how this domestication of the valkyrie in the age of the manuscripts may reflect changed attitudes toward the warrior-woman ideal.

Freyja is the goddess who most clearly retains traits of independence and agency. She weeps tears of red gold when Óðr is away, she sleeps with four dwarves to obtain Brísingamen, and she demands half of those slain in battle. These traits do not fit the image of a passively waiting goddess, and they have been interpreted as memories of an older, more powerful goddess tradition.

Seiðr, ergi, and the gender coding of magic

Seiðr is in the Norse sources primarily associated with female practitioners and with Freyja as its original teacher. That Odin practises seiðr is attested but problematized: Loki mocks him in Lokasenna for having engaged in a practice coded as unmanly (ergi). The gender coding of the magic types, seiðr as female and runic oracle as male, has been interpreted by Preben Meulengracht Sørensen as a reflection of deep structures in the Norse gender system.

Carol Clover's analysis of the concept of ergi (social shame linked to passive sexual role and to magical practices) shows how gender in Old Norse society was performative rather than biologically fixed. A man who practised seiðr threatened his social standing because he assumed the feminine subject position.

Neil Price has argued in The Viking Way that seiðr practices had a broader social context than the selective picture of the literary sources suggests. Archaeological finds of staffs and ritual objects in graves of varying gender point toward a more permeable boundary between male and female ritual competence in practice than the normative texts imply.