Putting Women in their Place? Gender, Landscape, and the Construction of Landnámabók

Abstract

This article attempts to gain a better understanding of the ways in which medieval writers used gender in their writing about the past. Taking Landnamabok as its case study, it discusses the depiction of Auðr in djupauðga and the other female colonists proposing that the variety of representations of female settlers (as colonists of varied statuses and in different places in the physical and human landscape) could be connected with the way in which Landnamabok itself was compiled and thus that varied (competing?) ideas existed in medieval Iceland about the status of women in relation to men.