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Jenny Jochens. Old Norse Images of Women. Philadelphia: u Pennsylvania P, I996. Pp. xv + 326.
Gender studies have become a prominent theme in Old Norse-Icelandic studies. Indeed, Jochens's Old Norse Images of Women is preceded by no less than three such book-length studies in the1990salone: Judith Jesch's Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell, I99I), Helga Kress's Mattugar meyjar (Reykjavik: Haskolautgafan, I993), and Jochens's own Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca: Cornell uP, I995).
Whereas Women in Old Norse Society offers an historical analysis of ordinary women in medieval Iceland and is based primarily on the Sagas of Icelanders, the contemporary sagas, and legal texts, Old Norse Images of Women examines the portraits depicted of divine, mythic, and heroic women in Eddie poetry and their images elaborated in Icelandic narratives. As Jochens points out: "Women in Old Norse Society appeals to scholars concerned with social issues of ancient and medieval Iceland and Norway, such as the transformation of pagan marriage under the influence of churchmen and the importance of women's work in a pastoral economy; Old Norse Images of Women is directed to readers primarily interested in the female share in Germanic myth and poetry" (xiii).
Using the same organizing principles as the compiler of the Codex Regius, Jochens divides her book into two main parts: first she examines the mythological cosmos of divinities and then the heroic world of humans. The first part, "Divine Images;" comprises chapters two, "Ancient Female Figures," in which fertility goddesses, fetches, guardian spirits, valkyries, norns, sibyls, and land-spirits are treated along with a discussion of women's role and participation in the worship and cult of these ancient figures, and three, "The Classical Nordic Pantheon: Goddesses and Gender,"which analyzes female divinities and gender relations among the gods and goddesses. The emergence in this section of two distinctive female roles, the valkyrie and the sibyl, provides the bridge to the second section, "Human Images," which, in the remaining five chapters, treats four character types: the woman in war (IV "The Warrior Woman"), the wise woman (V: "The Prophetess/Sorceress"), the avenger (VI: "The Avenger"), and the whetter (VII: "The Whetter: Brynhildr" and vIII: "The Nordic Whetter"). The fourteenth-century recording of Norna-Gestr's retelling of continental Germanic legends in the tenth-century setting of...