Document Type
Article
Peer Reviewed
1
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Abstract
This article analyzes a rape scene in the fourteenth-century Adonias saga, a critically under-examined text belonging to the equally under-examined genre of Old Norse-Icelandic riddarasögur (romance sagas). This rape is carried out using a “bedtrick,” a motif common to many literatures in which one sexual partner is substituted for someone or something else without the knowledge of the other partner, who is therefore denied what we would now label informed consent. This article examines how responsibility and blame are apportioned to the perpetrator and victim of this assault in Adonias saga, which is then compared with similar episodes in the saga’s possible sources. These sources include most notably the bedtrick of Brynhildr in the “Völsung cycle” and that of Igerna in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, known in Old Norse translation as Breta sögur. I argue that Adonias saga and, to a lesser extent, its immediate Old Norse-Icelandic source—the branch of Breta sögur represented by the manuscript AM 573 4to—emphasize the victim’s innocence and virtue to a greater degree than in their ultimate Galfridian model, demonstrating a remarkably sensitive conception of the importance of not only consent but of informed consent to licit sexual intercourse.
Keywords
Old Norse-Icelandic literature; riddarasögur; the medieval romance genre; sexual consent; informed consent; sexual assault; rape; bedtrick; Adonias saga; “The Völsung cycle”; Breta sögur; Historia regum Britanniae
Recommended Citation
Roby, Matthew "Female Sexual Consent and Culpability in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: The Bedtrick in "Adonias saga" and Its Sources." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 61, No. 1 (2026)
