Grief, Gender and Mourning in Medieval North Atlantic Literature

256 Pages·2012·1.38 MB·English

by  Kristen Mills

Grief, Gender and Mourning in Medieval North Atlantic
Literature
by
Kristen Mills
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Kristen Mills, 2013
Grief, Gender, and Mourning in Medieval North Atlantic Literature
Kristen Mills
Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
2013
Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between grief, cultural constructs of gender,
and mourning behaviour in the literatures of medieval Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Iceland.
The Introduction situates my analysis within an ongoing conversation about the relationship
between gender and mourning in classical, medieval, and modern cultures. In the first two
chapters I consider the representation of mourning men in medieval texts, arguing that male grief
has been neglected as a field of study, and that male weeping and lament in these cultures are
incorrectly assumed by modern scholarship to have been considered effeminate. Through a
careful reading of primary sources, I argue that there was a broader range of mourning behaviour
available to men in these cultures than is typically assumed to have been the case.
My third chapter, “Perilous Grief,” is a comparative analysis of the gendering of death
from grief and suicide. I consider the portrayals of male and female deaths related to
bereavement, focusing on the contexts in which suicide and death from grief occur. I conclude
this chapter with a discussion of the relationship between emotional distress and the gendered
body, demonstrating that the somatic response to negative emotions is heavily gendered in
medieval Scandinavian texts. In female bodies the negative emotion remains centralized in the

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chest, often causing death by bursting, while male bodies swell outwards in their grief,
permitting release. The only men who die from grief in these texts are presented as old and
infirm. In contrast, medieval Irish texts show the same range of somatic responses to grief in
both women and men.
My final chapter, “Envisioning the Afterlife,” offers a sustained comparison of the
development of the idea of the afterlife and the otherworld in medieval Irish and Norse literature.
I argue that the connection between female supernatural figures, death, and the erotic is strongly
established in Old Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic texts, and that the pairing of the macabre and
the erotic in these traditions is related to a well-established association between female sexuality
and the pollution of death occurring in many cultures.

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Acknowledgments

First of all, I want to thank the School of Graduate Studies, which funded a large portion
of my graduate work through Open Fellowships and the Doctoral Completion Award. Many
thanks are owed to the faculty and staff of the Centre for Medieval Studies, especially to Grace
Desa, who consistently creates order out of chaos.
I would like to thank my parents, Christie and Charles Mills, my siblings, Charlie and
Hailey Mills, and my grandparents, Ethel and Charles Thomas, for their unwavering love,
support, and encouragement. I especially want to thank my parents for nurturing my childhood
love of books, and for paying the small fortune in late fees that I incurred at the local library (like
mother, like daughter...). I would also like to thank Elaine Meagher, whose friendship and
generosity I have been privileged to enjoy since we met on the playground at the tender age of
five.
I want to thank the wonderful community of medievalists at CMS. I am especially
grateful to Dan Brielmaier, “my friend in all things North Atlantic,” for countless hours spent in
some of the best coffee shops in Toronto, translating, writing, and (last but not least) talking,
about medieval literature and everything else. I want to thank Tadhg O’Muiris for countless
hours spent in some of the worst pubs in Toronto, and for his unstinting conversation, good
humour, and friendship. Along with many others, Jaclyn Piudik, Veronica Crookall, Colleen
Butler, Chris Landon, Emily Blakelock, and Steffany Campbell brightened my time in Toronto.
Thanks also to the current incarnation of the House of Cheese, Dan Brielmaier, Susannah
Brower, and Beth Watkins, for helping to keep me sane in the liminal period between submitting
and defending the thesis. Thanks also to the many new friends met in the last year.
I owe a special debt to Giselle Gos. Without her friendship, support, advice, and
encouragement, especially during the last two years of writing, I suspect this thesis would never
have been completed. If my thesis has a midwife, it is Giselle, although fairy godmother might
be a more appropriate designation.
Great thanks are owed the members of my thesis committee, David Klausner and Ian
McDougall, for the heroic levels of support, encouragement, and commentary they provided
during the planning and writing stages. Great thanks are also owed to my external reader, Joe
Harris, and my internal reader, Andy Orchard, for their insightful and helpful comments on the
thesis. I am also grateful to Tom Hill and Wayne Harbert for introducing me to the wonders of
Old English and Middle Welsh, and for their mentorship and friendship, both during and after
my time as an undergraduate.
Finally, I owe an incalculable debt to my supervisor. Ann Dooley’s kindness, generosity,
and guidance have been a constant balm during this long and arduous process. Her mentorship
went far beyond what could be expected, and I am grateful to have been her student and her
friend.

While writing on grief, loss, and change, the exchange between Caílte and Oisín when
they contemplate the disbanding of their company has been much on my mind:

These reminiscences caused a great silence to fall on them. Caílte then said, ‘Just
as painful for us as these memories is the fact that the eighteen of us, the only
survivors of that great and noble fellowship, must now part from one another.’

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Oisín replied, ‘I swear there will be little fight or strength left in me when the
others have gone.’1

Fortunately, technology has improved both communication and travel since Oisín and Caílte’s
day, and I may look forward to many future encounters with my friends and colleagues.

1 Ann Dooley and Harry Roe, Tales of the Elders of Ireland, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3-4.

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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................................................................II

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.......................................................................................................................................IV

GENERAL
 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................1

TAMING
 GRIEF...........................................................................................................................................................................1

OVERVIEW
 OF
 THESIS............................................................................................................................................................13

CHAPTER
 ONE.....................................................................................................................................................16

MOURNING
 MEN:
 MALE
 WEEPING
 AND
 LAMENTING
 IN
 MEDIEVAL
 IRELAND
 AND
 WALES.....16

MEN’S
 GRIEF
 IN
 MIDDLE
 WELSH
 TEXTS...........................................................................................................................18

Math,
 Owein,
 and
 Peredur..............................................................................................................................................19

Y
 Cynfeirdd............................................................................................................................................................................25

Y
 Gogynfeirdd
 a'r
 Cywyddwyr......................................................................................................................................29

TO
 WEEP
 IRISH:
 MALE
 WEEPING
 AND
 LAMENT
 IN
 MEDIEVAL
 IRISH
 SOURCES........................................................43

CHAPTER
 TWO...................................................................................................................................................67

MASCULINITY
 AND
 MOURNING
 IN
 MEDIEVAL
 SCANDINAVIA
 AND
 ANGLO-­SAXON
 ENGLAND67

WEEPING
 IN
 THE
 MYTH
 OF
 BALDR’S
 DEATH
 AND
 SCANDINAVIAN
 ROYAL
 FUNERALS.............................................66

MEN’S
 TEARS
 IN
 ANGLO-­‐SAXON
 TEXTS.............................................................................................................................95

Hroðgar’s
 Farewell............................................................................................................................................................96

Wolfish
 Weeping...............................................................................................................................................................108

CHAPTER
 THREE.............................................................................................................................................114

PERILOUS
 GRIEF.............................................................................................................................................114

GRIEVING
 WOMEN
 IN
 IRISH
 SOURCES..............................................................................................................................120

GRIEVING
 WOMEN
 IN
 SCANDINAVIAN
 SOURCES............................................................................................................130

GRIEVING
 MEN
 IN
 IRISH
 SOURCES....................................................................................................................................144

GRIEVING
 MEN
 IN
 SCANDINAVIAN
 SOURCES..................................................................................................................149

GRIEVING
 MEN
 IN
 ANGLO-­‐SAXON
 SOURCES...................................................................................................................159

WELSH
 DEATH
 FROM
 GRIEF..............................................................................................................................................163

DYING
 FROM
 GRIEF
 AND
 THE
 GENDERED
 BODY............................................................................................................166

CHAPTER
 FOUR...............................................................................................................................................175

ENVISIONING
 THE
 AFTERLIFE....................................................................................................................175

GENDER
 AND
 COMMUNITY
 AFTER
 DEATH.......................................................................................................................176

LITTLE
 DEATHS:
 DEATH
 DEITIES
 AND
 THE
 EROTIC......................................................................................................195

DEATH
 (AND)
 THE
 MAIDEN...............................................................................................................................................213

CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................................................229

BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................................................234

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General Introduction
Taming Grief

The emotional turmoil evoked by bereavement has long been the subject of social
controls. Like anger, grief can be powerfully disruptive, and its inevitable eruption into daily life
is channeled through systems, at times elaborate, of mourning behaviour. In 1969 Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross introduced her now famous theory of “Five Stages of Grief” to the North American
public.2 In its original conception, the theory dealt not with grief per se, but with the “5 Stages of
Receiving Catastrophic News,” which consisted of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and
Acceptance.3 Kübler-Ross’s research subjects were patients who were informed of their own dire
prognoses.4 In modern common usage, the Five Stages typically refer specifically to grief,
particularly to someone’s grief for someone else’s death. The Stages provide a roadmap for
grievers and observers, offering assurance that bereavement is traversed in the proper manner.
Recent research, however, calls into question the universality that has been attributed to this
theory of grieving.5 The Five Stages Theory may be seen as a modern attempt to structure the
mourning process, corral it, tame it, and the desire to impose this method reflects societal
uncertainty resulting from loss of traditional modes of grieving, due to erosion of religion in
daily life. As religion recedes and the handling of the physical reality of death is moved out of
the home and into the funeral parlor, there has been a significant shift away from pastoral

2 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Scribner, 1969).
3 Kübler-Ross, On Death, passim.
4 Kübler-Ross, On Death, 9-32.
5 For a survey of conflicting research, see Ruth Davis Konigsberg, The Truth About Grief: The Myth of its Five
Stages and the New Science of Loss (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

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counseling and traditions such as wakes as a means of coping with bereavement. The popularity
of this schema suggests not so much that all people require a set way to mourn and grieve, but
that societies are uncomfortable leaving “grief work” to an individual’s discretion.6
Cultural constructions of gender frequently associate lack of agency with femininity, and
to feel grief in response to the inevitability and irreversibility of death is among the most intense
ways in which an individual experiences his or her own powerlessness. Substituting action for
mourning permits the griever to engage in a fantasy of retaliatory strength, soothing anxieties of
helplessness and vulnerability. Judith Butler has analyzed the desire to replace grief with
aggression in political reactions to the 9/11 attacks: “President Bush announced on September 21
that we have finished grieving and that now it is time for resolute action to take the place of grief.
When grieving is something to be feared, our fears can give rise to the impulse to resolve it

6 The broad, multi-faceted nature of this topic would make a thorough literature review cumbersome in the
introduction. Here I provide a brief overview of some significant works relating to emotion, grief, and lament; other
relevant secondary works will be discussed where applicable in the body of the thesis. Emotions have increasingly
been a subject of study in literary and historical criticism. Barbara Rosenwein edited Anger’s Past: The Social Uses
of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), and followed this volume with
“Worrying About Emotion in History” American Historial Review 107 (2002): 821-45, and the book Emotional
Communities in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Since the publication of Margaret
Alexiou’s influential Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 2nd ed., rev. Dimitrios Yatromanolakis and Panagiotis
Roilos (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Rpt. of 1974 ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), the field
of lament studies has been robust, with a number of works looking at women’s lament in Irish, English, and
Scandinavian literature. Carol Clover’s “Hildigunnr’s Lament: Women in Bloodfeud” in Structure and Meaning in
Old Norse Literature: New Approaches to Textual Analysis and Literary Criticism ed. John Lindow (Odense:
Odense University Press, 1987), 141-83, draws on Alexiou’s work to illustrate the societal forces work in women’s
laments in medieval Iceland. Angela Bourke, Kaarina Hollo, and Patricia Lysaght have all made valuable
contributions to the understanding of women’s laments in medieval and modern Ireland: Angela Bourke (as Angela
Partridge), “Wild Men and Wailing Women,” Éigse 18 (1980), 25-37, “The Irish Traditional Lament and the
Grieving Process,” Women’s Studies International Forum 2 (1988), 287-91, Bourke, “More in Anger than in
Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry,” in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon
Radner (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 160-82; Kaarina Hollo, “Laments and Lamenting
in early medieval Ireland,” in Medieval Celtic Literature and Society, ed. Helen Fulton (Dublin: Four Courts Press,
2005), 83-94; Patricia Lysaght, “Caoineadh os Cionn Coirp:” The Lament for the Dead in Ireland,” Folklore 108
(1997), 65-82; Rachel Bromwich, “The Keen for Art O’Leary, its Background and its Place in the Tradition of
Gaelic Keening,” Éigse: A Journal of Irish Studies 5 (1948), 236-52. Grief and Gender 700-1700, eds. Jennifer C.
Vaught and Lynne Dickson Bruckner (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), considers the relationship between
grief and gender in medieval and early modern Europe, and Ann Suter’s edited collection Lament: Studies in the
Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) includes scholarship on classical
and ancient near Eastern cultures. Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, eds. Jane Tolmie and M. J. Toswell
(Belgium: Brepols, 2010), gathers a number of articles on medieval grief and lament.

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quickly, to banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss or return
the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantasy that world was formerly orderly.”7 This
displacement of grief with violent retaliation is also a familiar trope of the feminization of
mourning, aligning mourning with weakness and femininity, and validating action as the proper,
masculine response to emotional pain. While the President’s statement that now is the time for
resolute action ostensibly called upon the whole nation, the particular action involved took the
form of military invasion, and the US military is primarily conceptualized as the province of
men, even though this is not in fact the case. Thus he conflates grief with femininity and
passivity, and posits it as a state that must be transcended through masculine action.
A similar idea is expressed in two medieval Germanic texts. In Njáls saga, the character
Kári informs Morðr Valgarðsson of the burning that has killed their friend Njáll and his family.
The saga tells us that “when he (Morðr) lamented loudly, Kári said that there were manlier things
than weeping for the dead, and bade him to gather forces and bring them all to Holtsford.”8 (en
hann (Morðr) aumkaði mjǫk. Kári kvað annat karlmannligra en gráta þá dauða ok bað hann
safna liði ok koma ǫllu til Holtsvaðs.)9 In a similar fashion Beowulf chides Hroðgar, who
laments the death of his companion Æschere: “Do not grieve, wise man; it is better for each man
that he avenge his friend, than mourn too much.” (Ne sorga, snotor guma; selre bið æghwæm/
þæt he his freond wrece, þonne he fela murne.)10 While the Beowulf-poet does not explicitly
equate manliness with revenge as does the author of Njáls saga, his proverb declares vengeance,
the province of men, superior to more passive expressions of grief. While scholars of Icelandic
and Anglo-Saxon literature have often generalized the proverbial sentiments expressed by Kári

7 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, New York: Verso, 2004), 29-30.
8 Translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.
9 Einar Ól. Sveinsson, ed. Brennu-Njáls saga, Íslenzk fornrit 12 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1954), 339.
10 R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th Edition (Toronto, University of Toronto
Press, 2008), ll. 1384-5.

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and Beowulf to apply to the entire Germanic world in the ancient and medieval periods, this is a
simplification of the literary evidence, albeit one that is extremely attractive to many who want
to see a stoic sensibility pervading the culture.
My dissertation employs a number of coordinated critical approaches, which, taken
together, I would characterize as a cultural anthropology perspective, to examine the intersection
of grief, mourning, and gender in the textual traditions of medieval Ireland, Wales, Scandinavia,
and Anglo-Saxon England. This is the first study to look at grief and gender across these closely
related cultures, and it dialogues with current research in the history of emotions, while bringing
a literary perspective that allows a nuanced contextualization of emotions within textual
traditions. Rather than examining grief and gender against the background of modern concepts of
appropriate mourning, I juxtapose depictions of mourning in medieval Irish, Welsh, Old English
and Nordic literature across a broad range of genres. This allows the texts to speak for
themselves by being placed in dynamic contrast to one another. A major component of my study
is an analysis of the manner in which gendered social roles circumscribe and inform certain
modes of expressing grief, and my dissertation challenges the established sharp distinctions
between male and female expressions of grief and their cultural significance.
Even if women do have a special relationship to grief, either through biological impulse
or cultural imposition, an expectation by modern scholars that women in traditional cultures
carry out the majority of the important grief work on behalf of society at large has led to the
demotion of men’s grief to a position of unimportance as a subject of study. Whether or not
women were in fact the primary mourners in ancient and medieval cultures, the erasure or
obscuring of male voices that also express the vulnerability of bereavement does a disservice to
the complexity of the medieval cultures that produced the texts I examine. ‘Heroic’ masculinity

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