Paper short abstract:

Folk legends can be a great window into the past. This research looks at how women who break hegemonic ideas about femininity and take on roles and qualities more often attributed to men are portrayed in the Icelandic legends of the 19th and 20th century.

Paper long abstract:

Folk legends and narratives can be a great window into the past. They provide us with some information about the world view in the time they were written down but also about the ideas and ideology of the people who wrote them. This lecture focuses on narratives dealing with women who break hegemonic ideas about femininity in Icelandic legend collections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It looks at the portrayal of those women that are shown taking on male roles or qualities, either for a short period of time or more permanently and what the consequences are for them in the stories.

In the past gender was often perceived as running on a vertical scale. Women with male qualities were perceived as moving up the scale while men with female qualities moved down. Women that take on male roles or qualities for a short period of time are praised in the legends. However, women that do so more permanently and might appear as threat to patriarchal social order are often portrayed as dangerous. Their marital status and the question of class being another intriguing aspect of these particular legends. These dangerous women in legends often appear as sorceresses or outlaws, belonging to the liminal area between the supernatural and the natural, it being emphasized that they are somehow different from “ordinary” women.