Gods and Giants: Gender Fluidity in Old Norse Myth by Grace Morey

In their book Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, Spencer-Hall and Gutt draw upon the pioneering study Transgender Warriors in which Leslie Feinberg writes: “I couldn’t find myself in history. No-one like me seemed to have ever existed”. Spencer-Hall and Gutt argue that current efforts to further transgender rights entail more than just tolerance and visibility, but full ideological existence, or in other words, the capability to imagine a transgender past, as well as a transgender future. In recent times, a number of scholars have explored the potential for queer readings of Norse mythology and the literature of early medieval Iceland and Scandinavia; however, the idea persists in the modern popular imagination that medieval Scandinavian society was a culture in which the lives of men were characterised by hypermasculine violence, and the lives of women confined to household tasks with no space to imagine an alternative to these restrictive, binaristic ideals. However, in Old Norse Eddic poetry and the Old Norse mythological material preserved by Snorri Sturluson in his Prose Edda, both gods and giants engage in behaviours that blur the boundaries between masculine and feminine. According to Ari Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók, Iceland converted peacefully to Christianity in ca.1,000, several centuries before the Islendigasögur were committed to vellum. Thus, it is important to remember that our understanding of the gender system in which Old Norse poems and stories were imagined, developed, and produced and the societies in which such practises may have taken place is limited in part by the nature of the evidence that remains and the culture in which such texts and stories were eventually recorded. In Iceland, at the edge of the habitable world, the Old Norse literary and mythological tradition was important to their sense of belonging and cultural heritage. Thus, though the roles played by the gods in the mythology does offer a clear picture of real life in early medieval Scandinavian society, the stories that were passed down and preserved by figures such as Snorri Sturluson can allow us a great insight into what was considered important. Gender roles in Old Norse and medieval Icelandic society appear to have been clearly delineated, as will be discussed in greater detail below. For that reason, it is interesting that the gods and giants revered within such a society frequently challenged the carefully constructed gender boundaries that characterised the everyday lives of medieval Icelanders and Scandinavians. Most of the behaviour that would have been considered particularly transgressive in medieval Icelandic literature is reserved for Loki, the ambiguous trickster god, who changes sex more than once, and even gives birth to a foal – Odin’s eight legged horse Sleipnir. However, some famous stories from Eddic poetry involve similar transgressions by other male members of the Æsir, such as Thor dressing as a bride and Odin living as a sorceress. In Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, women who play roles and display characteristics typically associated with men are applauded, but men who transgress into the realm of the feminine gender run the risk of being the object of ridicule. However, the entire Old Norse cosmos is born out of category confusion, from the hybrid body of the primordial giant Ymir, and though Snorri may have been uncomfortable with some aspects of the tales he was preserving in his Edda, the nature of the characters of the Old Norse mythological cycle to disrupt normative gender roles permeates almost every story and is impossible to escape entirely. Though Snorri’s views with regards to the transgressive behaviour the gods engaged are unclear, his purpose in writing the Prose Edda was to preserve the literary and cultural heritage of the Icelanders in as much detail as possible. Thus, it remains a valuable source in the insight it can give to the medieval Scandinavian imagination.

The giants of Old Norse myth are varied and complex in their presentation. Some – such as Angrboda who gives birth to the wolf who will swallow the moon and the Midgard serpent Jormungand – are rendered monstrous in their capacity for violence, destruction, and cross- species motherhood. Others are quite human on the surface, exhibiting human fears, desires, and vulnerabilities, and appear as helpers, and even spouses of the gods in the case of Freyr’s wife Gerd who is forced to marry him under the threat of violence, according to the Old Norse Eddic poem “Skírnismál.” In this sense, the giants embody Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s theory of the monster as the harbinger of category crisis in their inability to be clearly or easily defined. It is in this constant state of shifting between categories, or existing outside of them altogether, that the giants occupy a playful, alternative space in the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, sharing much with the anti-identity term “queer” in their resistance to a fixed and easily defined identity Giants and giantesses are generally depicted as powerful and even tyrannical in nature, with Edmund Burke once writing of them that “the ideas we naturally annex to that size are those of tyranny, cruelty, injustice, and every thing horrid and abominable” In studying the giants of the Old Norse literature, the image that emerges is not that of a simple dichotomy of the “powerful” male, naturally more inclined towards political and intellectual pursuits, and the “submissive” female, who is more passive by nature and better equipped for matters of the household. Such norms have pervaded western literature and culture for centuries, and though this biological determinist view of gender roles is in recent times much less common, it has not disappeared. Issues of a gender hierarchy and the gendered body as a social construct are important factors to consider in challenging binary ideas of sex and gender in texts such as Snorri’s Edda, as in western patriarchal societies – Iceland being no exception – gender hierarchies have existed throughout history and have played a crucial role in social organisation: a woman’s position quite often being determined by her relationship to men. The gender norms that result from such a system benefit some more than others, resulting in the sexual division of labour and power structures which have solidified women’s unequal access to economic resources in spite of their work in the household being not only difficult, but even (in the case of childbirth) life-threatening. Exceedingly rare in European mythology and early literature, the very presence of giantesses in the Old Norse mythological cycle challenges the idea that gender roles are fixed and natural, as they are almost exclusively hypermasculine beings in other traditions. This is not surprising in the context of a tradition which features maiden kings such as Nítíða of Nítíða saga and hypermasculine gods who dress as brides such as Thor in “Þrymskviða.” Though giantesses are rare in the literary traditions of other European cultures, they appear in over a third of the fornaldarsögur and have a prevalent role in Snorri’s account of the mythological material in the “Gylfaginning” section of his Edda. Female giants in medieval European literature are in fact almost entirely particular to Old Norse, and a limited number of crusader romances, and are often read as representing women of different ethnic origin or sexually transgressive women. Their bodies are often read as a portrayal of uncontrolled, voracious female sexuality that must be conquered by a male hero and therefore rendered submissive. The giantesses and indeed the giants of Old Norse myth are not so easily categorised, and the rich and varied roles they occupy as violent foes, mothers, and even goddesses are illustrative of a society that could imagine alternatives to the gender norms presented to it by an overwhelmingly patriarchal Christian religion.

In the Old Norse creation myth, the earth was fashioned from the flesh of the primordial giant Ymir – the mountain cliffs from his bones, stones and gravel from the bones and teeth that were broken, and the sea from the blood flowing from his wounds. The dismembered giant’s body and their bodily functions and liquids in many ways resembled the natural processes of the world and the violence of the landscape that the early Icelandic settlers found themselves subject to in its brutal cyclicity. The female body in particular is frequently tied to the natural world in its capacity for creation and in its inherently cyclical nature, which makes it all the more surprising that the primordial giant is described in the mythology as being specifically male. For example, in the story of Thor’s river-crossing in the “Skaldskaparmal,” Thor encounters the giantess Gjalp straddling the river Vimur, standing on cliffs at either side and exacerbating the violent flow of water with her urine. Taking large stone, Thor throws it at her to stem the flow of the river. The story is most often read as an expression of male fear surrounding female reproductive power and an anxiety of the separation from the maternal body. Though the liquid appears to be Gjalp’s urine in Snorri’s account, the flowing of the river has been linked to that of menstruation. Vilhelm Kiil assumes that the river runs with menstrual blood, an interpretation accepted by Margaret Clunies Ross who sees the blood as symbolic of Thor’s mother Jord, or Earth. She sees the flow of the river as symbolic of Jord’s menstrual blood. Regardless, what is interesting about this story is the connection that can be seen in Old Norse literature between the female body and the natural world. Therefore, Ymir’s body as rendered in the Old Norse creation myth - as being the origin point for the race of the giants – and the association of his body with the creation of the entire natural world, which as outlined in the story of Gjalp is most often closely connected with the natural processes of the female body, makes Ymir’s body quite hybrid in nature. In Old Norse myth, the space that the stories themselves take place in is a morally ambiguous, even amoral space, abounding with impossibilities. This is a space in which everything can be disavowed, the distinction between categories diminished, and norms as we understand them no longer relevant. Maternal bodies, in particular, are generally problematic and complicated sites of origin with myths and poems relaying stories of birth from hybrid-bodies, cross-species motherhood, and even instances of multiple, virgin mothers such as the case of Heimdall, the progeny of nine virgin sisters. Despite the idea of the giants body as something hyper-masculine and violent, it is clear from Ymir’s story as the origin point for the race of the giants shares much more with the feminine as a point of origin for the giant race, or the mother of the giants, despite being describes as male. In Snorri’s Edda, when the origin of the giants is described, it is said that as Ymir slept he took to sweating. Then, from under his left arm grew a male and a female, while one of his legs got a son with the other. From this, the giant race was born. In providing his scattered brains for the clouds in the sky and the rest of his body as the raw materials for the creation of life on earth, and his sweat and limbs for the creation of the race of giants, Ymir shares much with the maternal, as his hybrid-flesh serves as a point of origin. In addition, Heimdall, who will sound Gjallarhorn at the onset of Ragnarök, was born of nine mothers, all of whom were maidens. Loki’s three monstrous children with the powerful giantess Angrboda will play a crucial role in the destruction of the gods at the final battle at Ragnarök and are predicted from the outset to be troublesome due to their mother’s nature. There is also of course Loki himself, who transforms into a female body in order to give birth to Odin’s eight-legged horse. In Old Norse mythological literature, the body of the giant is creative and foundational. The entire world is born from category confusion, a fact that plays into many aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture with the giants occupying within the mythology a playful, queer space. Intriguing in the imaginative power that they signify, particularly in relation to questions of gender, Cohen points out in his Monster Theory that the monster oftentimes appears at points in history when the body was being “culturally demarcated,” fascinating and attracting as much as they evoke fear and disgust. The variety of roles assigned to the giants and giantesses indicates that they were a productive way in which Old Norse writers and their audience could deal with gendered topics and explore gender expressions that were more complex than the binary opposite of submissive female and powerful male, defying the idea of both a strict gender hierarchy and binary. In the case of Snorri’s Prose Edda in particular, giantesses represent possibilities for femaleness outside of such restrictive norms, which is particularly interesting when considering the Christian lens from which he was writing in comparison was other cultures. Though Snorri is often criticised for sharply curtailing the role of female characters in the Edda, it is clear that it was not necessarily his intention to strictly police normative gender boundaries in which women are seen but not heard in doing so, but rather the source material that he was drawing upon frequently depicted the body of the giantess as a site of targeted misogyny and gender-based violence. He does not entirely refrain from relating stories where men and women in particular step outside of the restrictive norms assigned to them in his retelling of the myths, but rather presents a rich and varied group of characters, challenging the idea of strictly demarcated gender roles and even allowing for the hybridity of bodies and the exploration of transgender identities. Overall, the giants in Old Norse mythology and literature are psychologically interesting in what they can relate to us regarding ideas of gender from the culture that produced them, and challenge the idea that narrow understanding of binary gender expressions can be imposed upon a medieval Norse past that clearly had the capacity to imagine other possibilities.