Traffic of women in Germanic literature: the role of the peace pledge in marital exchanges.

In order to bind men together and ensure peace, Germanic women of the highest rank sometimes served as peace pledges and were trafficked in marital exchange. Analysis of the women in The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, Beowulf, and Volsungasaga elucidates the political implications of such exchanges. This essay answers anthropologist Gayle Rubin's call for further exploration of traffic in women in her 1975 article "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" and also acknowledges Karen Newman's challenge that feminists expand Rubin's paradigm to consider how women might function beyond the role of object. In fact, Germanic women had a number of possible responses to marital exchanges and could find ways to assert their influence as mothers and diplomats by king-making, or king-breaking, in their new husbands' homes. (CPJ)

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In her 1975 article "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," anthropologist Gayle Rubin explores the role of women across various cultures and times as objects of marital exchange. "The result of a gift of women is more profound than the result of other gift transactions," writes Rubin, "because the relationship thus established is not just one of reciprocity, but one of kinship" (173). Paving the way for subsequent research on the topic, Rubin concludes her work by requesting "a search ... which might demonstrate how marriage systems intersect with large-scale political processes like state-making" (209). This request has been granted by numerous scholars, notably Karen Newman, whose 1990 article, "Directing Traffic: Subjects, Objects, and the Politics of Exchange," challenges the acceptance of women as "objects only" and adds to Rubin's discussion several queries that "feminist criticism [using] the 'traffic in women' paradigm rarely address" (52n). Specifically, Newman objects to the fact that "analyses of women as objects of exchange ... too often participate in a discourse of oppression that produces women as victims" (50).

Both Rubin's and Newman's discussions are directly relevant to studies of the female characters in a wide range of Germanic literature, both in time and geographic origin, who are trafficked in marital exchange. In order to bind men together and ensure peace, Germanic women of the highest rank sometimes served as peace pledges. Usually the daughter of an important warrior or king, the peace pledge would be married off to a man of high status who might be perceived as a potential threat to her kin in hopes of forming an alliance, or at least preventing conflict. Tom Shippey describes the strategies governing such marital arrangements: "Queens could be used to set up a future alliance with strangers." (1) The union might be more tightly sealed if the bride's son were sent back to her own people to be raised by his maternal uncles and to live among maternal cousins. This marital arrangement fits Rubin's description of traffic as a gift transaction in which women, and sometimes sons, are exchanged to forge unions and prevent hostilities. The woman could become, in the best of situations, a sort of diplomat, participating actively in marital arrangements, advising her husband, and engaging, to some extent, in the negotiations of the mead hall. However, in a society that valued warfare, marrying off women as a means to ensure peace could turn out badly, in such cases emphasizing the woman's unfortunate plight as object of male exchange.

The Germanic woman who acts as peace pledge might contend with her situation in various ways, some of which open up Rubin's original queries about state making and confirm Newman's call for feminists to consider women beyond the role of "object, inert, passive, bearer of meaning" (49): (1) she may succumb to the role of an object and acquiesce to a marriage she does not desire; (2) she may be seen as a threat by her husband's family and find herself (and any sons from the marriage (2)) in a precarious position; (3) she may establish herself in her new husband's home and become a king maker, balancing her loyalties and using her diplomatic skills to forge peace; or (4) she may even rebel against the system of exchange, refusing to assume a diplomatic role in her new husband's home and seeking vengeance on him by allying herself with her own kin.

Although the practice of exchanging certain upper-class women for peace is documented in historical accounts, the focus in this essay is upon literary portrayals of trafficking? Such portrayals feature prominently in the following works: The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, both elegies that are preserved in the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book; Beowulf, composed some time between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century; and Volsungasaga, an Icelandic text recorded in the thirteenth century but concerned with material substantially older, some of which is preserved in the Old Norse Poetic Edda.

These works are recorded in different centuries and Volsungasaga in a different country, yet all reflect the shared literary legacy and common culture of the Teutonic people. The inclusion of Volsungasaga might appear to be a temporal stretch, yet the Beowulf poet himself shows knowledge of this saga in the episode commonly referred to as "the Sigmund digression" (874-97). Furthermore, a number of scholars have noted striking similarities between the Danish and Anglo-Saxon traditions. For instance, both Helen Damico in Beowulf's Wealtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition and Robert Luyster in "The Wife's Lament in the Context of Scandinavian Myth and Ritual" base their studies on similarities between Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon portrayals of women. Exploring similarities between Hildeburh in Beowulf and Signy in the Saga, Robert A. Albano writes that