#ragr

The truth is that argr/ragr really very often does not have anything to do with sexuality; it might suggest purely cowardice without any sexual implication (betri er hraustr skjaldsveinn en ragr riddari ‘a brave squire is better than a cowardly knight’). In modern Icelandic it means something like ‘easily incited to anger’ and given that ragr-coded people in the sagas are given to both disproportionate anger and proclivity to sensual pleasure I think it’s reasonable to believe that the underlying meaning was always an inability to control one’s emotions (possibly with fear being originally primary and hence the ‘cowardice’ meaning), with semantic shift to socially unacceptable sexual desire being secondary.

According to the one-gender model of Old Norse gender ideology, promoted by scholars like Carol Clover, what you’re asking about is impossible because according to that theory, femininity (which is less valuable than masculinity) is nothing other than an absence of masculinity. So a woman with an abundance of masculinity would be closer to being valuable; this would be the opposite of ergi up to and including a rise of honor rather than a decrease.

I am very emphatically not a proponent of the one-gender model (not because as a recon heathen I would object to reconstructing it, even though that is true, but because I just think it’s factually incorrect). I think figures like Gefjun for example can only be explained if we propose a positive femininity for the Old Norse worldview, separate from an “absence of maleness.” This is, in my opinion, best articulated by Margaret Clunies Ross in Prolongued Echos.

The word argr/ragr is applied to women (in which case declined to rǫg or ǫrg), and in a context where it does refer to sexuality, it means she is outrageously horny to the point of it being disruptive or leading to bad decision-making. For example in Hauksbók Venus (Icelandicized to Vena) is described as being so ǫrg that she slept with all the gods including her father. There is a medical book with a treatment that is “good for ergi and lostasemi (‘lust’).” Though ragr/argr is not used as often as you might think in a sexual context, this does seem to be the primary meaning of ergi (the noun describing either a ragr act or the overloading of the senses that causes the ragr act). However I have been unable to find an instance where it applies to a woman taking a masculine-coded sexual role.

I am not aware of a word to describe women taking on a male sexual or social role, but I doubt that it would be as pejorative as the other way around. When attempting to conceptualize what the pagans thought of these things, we need to think about the way the Christians who transmitted the stories that we use as sources conceptualized them as well. Women who dressed as men (and even used the male pronoun… even the narrators of their sagas use male pronouns; Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar even has King Þorbergr, who is biologically female; note also that Hrólfr himself is accused of “dare(ing) not to speak to women” which is interesting and maybe read-into-able) were probably seen as valuable by pagans without qualification, for the same reasons they valued any warrior. In later sagas which are more likely influenced by Christian ideas, the trope of the female warrior becomes an object for the male hero to conquer (this is especially clear in Saxo and in Hrólfs saga kraka, which while having very ancient roots was only recorded very late), and so those sagas still tend to build them up positively even if it is only for sinister reasons, to build the male hero up even more in his conquest.

I can’t think of any examples where a woman taking up a male persona is associated with sexual subversion; usually in those stories they end up getting married and becoming women again (in one case a woman picks up a male persona multiple times as the situation calls for it, but my impression is that if, while going by a man’s name and wearing men’s clothes, they had slept with a woman, it would have been considered heterosexual (not that they thought in these terms, but my point is that nobody seems to have cared what was in Hervǫr’s pants).

I am also not aware of any unambiguous mentions of female homosexual attraction in Norse literature (whether the women are both socially recognized as female or not). The social world of women is generally underrepresented in the sagas. Someone who knows of an example can of course feel free to correct me. It has certainly been suggested, but obviously if we could identify a term with which to answer your question we would also be able to provide a positive ID on a lesbian relationship (though not necessarily the other way around).

The entire complex of ergi as presented in the sagas is firmly rooted in medieval Christian medical ideology wherein a male wanting male sex was a product of physical imbalances or irregularities inside the body, such as the balance of humors. It isn’t so much that the male attraction itself was seen as problematic but that it was a symptom of an underlying condition that also caused other problems. This is why we are able to identify argr figures in the sagas without anyone using that word or without any mention of homosexual attraction – we know what the saga authors considered to be cues. We have really very little idea of whether or not heathens thought the same thing, or what exactly they thought about it. The only recurring theme already present in literature that probably provides a glimpse of heathen conceptions intersecting with the Christianized ergi that is more easily accessible (such as Sinfjǫtli’s flyting with Guðmundr) is loss of control (note also the word sorðinn/stroðinn, another sexual insult, with strong implications of both domination and beastiality, and Sinfjǫtli calling Guðmundr ‘bride of Grani (a horse)’). It might be reasonable to argue that both ragr and sorðinn, the two outlawed insults mentioned in Grágás (the third is stroðinn which is the same thing as sorðinn) both involve loss of control, the former internally from the person’s own lack of self-control, and the latter from external forces.

I think something that needs to be understood about the Christians relaying these stories is that the medical ideology of the time was an inextricable part of their worldview and the lens through which they themselves would be receiving and interpreting stories that to them were already old and likely formed according to a completely different worldview. They could not possibly help seeing a saga figure who is characterized by sensual immoderation and magical ability (two things that inevitably go together in this trope complex) as wanting to get boned by a dude and more than we can accept the sun revolving around the earth. That’s why saga descriptions of ergi are so unreliable.

In conclusion, for a cis-woman to reclaim ergi in a way that maintains close continuity with the way the word is used in the saga age, it would be protesting slut-shaming rather than something related to orientation. However, that is only the case because of a constellation of attributes related to gender and sexuality that we no longer recognize as actually existing, and may never even have been a part of heathen thought to begin with. It’s hard to say what to do with the actual word itself, other than study the history of its use and especially the major problems caused by our presuming to know things that we don’t. I actually think that, strictly speaking, an irrational emotional response to someone’s sexual orientation -- that is, behavior exhibited by homophobes -- comes closer to a saga-age use of ragr than homophobia.