Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

Appendix B

Descriptions of Feminine Beauty in Some Old Norse Sources

1

Descriptions of feminine beauty in the Elder Edda (Hollander trans.). Non-visual descriptions such as “good” and “loving” (e.g. “Hávamál,” p. 30: “the good maiden, in whose loving arms I lay”) are omitted. So are non-concrete visual descriptions such as “winsome” (“Helgavitha Hjorgarthssonar,” p. 170: “the winsome women of the war leader”).

ARMS (11 REFERENCES)

PHRASE: gleaming

SOURCE: “Skírnismál,” p. 66.

PHRASE: shining

SOURCE: “Lokasenna,” p. 94.

PHRASE: soft (2x)

SOURCE: “Svipdagsmal,” p. 151.

PHRASE: white

SOURCE: “Atlakvitha,” p. 290.

PHRASE: white

SOURCE: “Hábarzljod,” p. 79.

PHRASE: white

SOURCE: “Hávamál,” p. 40.

PHRASE: white

SOURCE: “Helgavitha Hjorgarthssonar,” p. 171.

PHRASE: white

SOURCE: “Helgavitha Hundingsbana II,” p. 201.

PHRASE: white

SOURCE: “Volundarkvitha,” p. 160.

PHRASE: white

SOURCE: “Volundarkvitha,” p. 161.

BROW (5)

PHRASE: brow brighter than whitest snow

SOURCE: “Rígsthula,” p. 125.

PHRASE: brow-white

SOURCE: “Hymiskvitha,” p. 85.

PHRASE: brow-white

SOURCE: “Sigurtharkvitha hin skamma,” p. 260.

PHRASE: brow-white

SOURCE: “Volundarkvitha,” p. 167.

PHRASE: fair-browed

SOURCE: “Brot af Sigurtharkvitha,” p. 245.

BREAST (1)

PHRASE: breast lighter than whitest snow

SOURCE: “Rígsthula,” p. 125.

COLOR IN GENERAL (6)

PHRASE: fair

SOURCE: “Volundarkvitha,” p. 161.

PHRASE: snow-white

SOURCE: “Alvíssmál,” p. 111.

PHRASE: sun-bright

SOURCE: “Hávamál,” p. 28.

PHRASE: sun-bright

SOURCE: “Helgavitha Hundingsbana II,” p. 200.

PHRASE: sun-bright

SOURCE: “Svipdagsmal,” p. 151.

PHRASE: swan-white

SOURCE: “Atlakvitha,” p. 293.

FINGERS (1)

PHRASE: dainty-fingered

SOURCE: “Rígsthula,” p. 126.

HAIR (2)

PHRASE: fairhaired

SOURCE: “Helgavitha Hjorgarthssonar,” p. 170.

PHRASE: fairhaired

SOURCE: “Rígsthula,” p. 126.

NECK (1)

PHRASE: whiter than whitest snow

SOURCE: “Rígsthula,” p. 125.

SHAPE (2)

PHRASE: slender

SOURCE: “Alvíssmál,” p. 111.

PHRASE: slender

SOURCE: “Hávamál,” p. 40.

CLOTHES AND ORNAMENTS (8)

PHRASE: blue-shirted

SOURCE: “Rígsthula,” p. 125.

PHRASE: brooch-breasted

SOURCE: “Rígsthula,” p. 125.

PHRASE: gold-dight

SOURCE: “Hábarzljod,” p. 79.

PHRASE: gold-dight

SOURCE: “Hymiskvitha,” p. 85.

PHRASE: gold-dight

SOURCE: “Helgavitha Hjorgarthssonar,” p. 175.

PHRASE: in golden weeds

SOURCE: “Fafnismál,” p. 231.

PHRASE: ring-bedight

SOURCE: “Helgavitha Hjorgarthssonar,” p. 171.

PHRASE: silver-dight

SOURCE: “Sigrdrífumál,” p. 239.

2

Descriptions of feminine beauty in Laxdaela Saga. Gudrid, the heroine, is never described in any specific terms. The hero, Kjartan, gets a good two sentences of description.

3

Descriptions of feminine beauty in Njal’s Saga. The heroine, Hallgerd, is frequently described when she makes her dramatic entrances onto the stage. The author devotes more description to her than to anyone else. I have omitted non-specific descriptions such as “a woman of great beauty.”

“She was a tall, beautiful child with long silken hair that hung down to her waist” (ch. 1, p. 39).

“She was very tall, which earned her the nickname Long-legs, and her lovely hair was now so long that it could veil her entire body” (ch. 9, p. 55).

“She had put on a woven blue cloak over a scarlet tunic and a silver belt. She wore her hair hanging loose on either side of her bosom and tucked under her belt” (ch. 13, p. 66).

“The one in the lead was the best dressed of all… Hallgerd was wearing a red, richly-decorated tunic under a scarlet cloak trimmed all the way down with lace. Her beautiful thick hair flowed down over her bosom” (ch. 33, p. 93).

POSTSCRIPT: A NOTE ON SOME NOVELS BY SIGRID UNDSET

That great twentieth-century envisioner of medieval Norway, Sigrid Undset, bestows upon us spacious treasuries of description, so that at first she seems to deny the Eddic tradition of understated love-doom. Here, for instance, is her most famous heroine, Kristin Lavransdattir: She was “small-waisted, with slender, fine limbs and joints, yet round and plump withal. Her face was somewhat short and round, her forehead low and broad and white as milk; her eyes large, grey and soft, under fairly drawn eyebrows. Her mouth was somewhat large, but it had full bright red lips, and her chin was as round as an apple and well-shaped. She had goodly, long, thick hair, but ’twas something dark in hue, almost as much brown as yellow, and quite straight.” A few pages later on, when Kristin is getting ready for a certain fateful dance, Undset has her “spread her masses of yellow hair out over her shoulders and back” — a simple, powerful act of much the same enthralling character as the display of a legendary heroine’s shining white arms. When at that dance Kirstin encounters Erlend Nikulaussön, who will be the love and torment of her life, the scene is underplayed with great skill. She smiles, gazes into his eyes; finally she accompanies him into the herb-garden in the darkness. She “knew that this was madness,” writes Undset. “But a blessed strengthlessness was upon her. She only leaned closer to the man and whispered softly — she knew not what.” At dawn they vow oaths to one another, although she was promised to another. After that, no one can pull Kristin back from the doom she craves, not even her sorrowing father, who is perhaps the most lovingly drawn of any character in either of Undset’s great trilogies. “She burst into weeping,” we read. “But she wept because she had felt in his caress and seen in his eyes that now he was so worn out with pain that he could not hold out against her any more.” He has himself been doomed by his compassionate love for his daughter, which overcomes his equally loving concern for her best interest as he sees it. As for Kristin, in her we find the resolution of an ancient Norse heroine, but overlain with Christian compassion and guilt. Her world remains in most respects the supernatural one of the Eddas. At the very beginning of the trilogy, when she is still a small girl, the reflection of a grey-eyed dwarf-maiden or elf-maiden bends toward her, seeking to lure her into the mountain with a wreath of flowers. Although this scene foreshadows the eventual tarnishment of Kristin’s bridal crown, it has been so skillfully realized that the elf-lady lives in her own right. She has been delineated in more detail than we would have found in the sagas, but even so, some reserve remains in the description; something is lacking or mysterious about her. She appears specific and even beautiful enough, but her reflected image must be wavering slightly in the dark pool; her form possesses less fixity than Kristin’s; she might be the reflection of bushes and a rock, and her nostrils strangely resemble a horse’s. This dangerous other world obtrudes itself upon us from time to time throughout the novel; and one of the last experiences Kristin has in her old age before entering a convent is hearing a stone roll and a door shut beneath the mountain. What would have happened had she followed the elf-lady? We never hear of the mountain letting anyone go; and at one point a mendicant monk informs us that the damned cannot be saved because they are addicted to their torment.

Certain dooms are more inescapable still. In the last volume of the trilogy, when Simon Darre, Kristin’s fiance from long ago, jilted by her and accordingly doomed to a loveless marriage with her sister, breaks up a fight and gets a knife-cut for his pains, his friend Vigleik dreams “an ugly dream” that Simon’s dead cousin Simon Reidarssön asks the injured man to come with him; and the next day the wound is infected, and Simon keeps seeing Simon Reidarssön. Then he understands that he is fey. And indeed he dies, although Kristin does her best to heal him. In this episode, doom expresses itself, as in the Eddas and sagas, with the neutral inevitability of a physical law. One thinks upon the ancient tale of Sigurd, who knows that he will slay the dragon, win the gold and the maiden, and after that be rapidly murdered. There is nothing to do but take his fate upon himself. And Simon Darre behaves with a similar clearsightedness, overlain with modern emotional explicitness, arranging the lives of his dependents as best he can, dying calmly, and sincerely speaking his heart. There is no vain and cowardly struggle against the end.

But in the second volume of the trilogy, when Kristin and Erlend have been married for several years, love-doom gets defined through quiet comparison with its changeling, for Erlend now embarks on a disastrous affair with another married woman, Lady Sunniva. At each step of his ensnarement, he persuades himself that he could not have done anything else. Sunniva and her maid are menaced in the street by a band of drunken Icelanders. Erlend approaches, his sword in his belt, and they fall back. Here the reader recalls that he and Kristin became acquainted when he saved her and a companion from being robbed and raped in Oslo. Erlend is a natural rescuer of women, a brave and skilful fighter, and the tragedy of his life, as was the case for Grettir the Strong, is that he was born too late to be a hero of the Saga Age. Sunniva simpers: “Can you believe it, Erlend? — old a woman as I am, maybe I like it not ill that some men think I am yet so fair, ’tis worth while blocking my way—” Undset pens the next sentence in calm irony: “There was but one answer that a courteous man could make to this.” She skips a line, then resumes: ‘He came home to his own house the next morning in the grey of dawn…” Here we have the doom of a man who is not in fact resolute, but impulsive.

In the Eddas, and to a lesser degree in the sagas, doom is written from the beginning, and the only choice people have is how bravely or loyally they meet it. In Undset’s trilogies, the two inevitable dooms of death and original sin have been laid upon us; but we are at times given grace to avert evils from ourselves and others. This grace is another better doom; we cannot will it into being, but we are free to basely reject it. Undset finally says, in words of half-equivalence to those of Odin the High One in “Hávamál”: “The good you have done cannot be undone; though all the hills should crash in ruin, yet would it stand—” As for the evil one has done, Odin and Christ differ as to whether that can be undone. In Undset’s novels, love partakes of any and all of these various dooms and their contingencies. The greatest compliment that I can pay her is that her work thus continues, and in a way completes, the effects of such great forerunners as Laxdaela Saga.