Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Power of Giving
- 2 The Symbolic Constitution of the Giving Subject: William the Conqueror and Robert Guiscard
- 3 Violence and “Taking”: Towards a Generalized Symbolic Economy
- 4 Taking an Identity: The Poem of the Cid
- 5 The Sacred Kept
- 6 The Hero, Gratuity and Alterity: The Song Of Roland
- 7 The Supplemental Hero: Raoul of Cambrai
- 8 Female Integrity and Masculine Desires in The Nibelungenlied
- 9 Fractured Identities, and the Solution of Chivalry: William of Orange
- Conclusion: A New, Different Warrior Aristocracy
- Works Cited
- Index
8 - Female Integrity and Masculine Desires in The Nibelungenlied
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Power of Giving
- 2 The Symbolic Constitution of the Giving Subject: William the Conqueror and Robert Guiscard
- 3 Violence and “Taking”: Towards a Generalized Symbolic Economy
- 4 Taking an Identity: The Poem of the Cid
- 5 The Sacred Kept
- 6 The Hero, Gratuity and Alterity: The Song Of Roland
- 7 The Supplemental Hero: Raoul of Cambrai
- 8 Female Integrity and Masculine Desires in The Nibelungenlied
- 9 Fractured Identities, and the Solution of Chivalry: William of Orange
- Conclusion: A New, Different Warrior Aristocracy
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In classic gift theory, the most central gift of all is the woman, given by men in marriage exchanges. in theory, women would play the same symbolic role as other gifts – being symbolic rewards for internally-driven accomplishments, as well as symbols of ties between men. In The Song of Roland, Oliver essentially treats his sister Aude this way in his dealings with Roland. As a corollary to this claim, the most central danger in a classical gift economy would be that men would begin to desire women themselves, and to be diverted from their masculine-oriented world of symbolic relationships and accomplishments. The woman would move from object to subject, and men's actions would become motivated by externally-oriented desires.
This description is really a simplistic caricature of classic gift theory. Recent studies have shown the many failures of this simplistic model to explain social process adequately (Barraud et al. 1994:102–3; Gregory 1982:33, 63; Strathern 1988), and medievalists have likewise pointed out the ways in which the exchange of women is much more problematic than such theories would suggest, especially in that the women are hardly passive objects, but rather socially active subjects themselves (Kay 1995:15ff). But the caricature has a long history, not just in recent anthropological theory, but in the broader theories of culture expounded in some Western literature. In particular, medieval epics of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries presented – or at least attempted to present to their audience – just such a reading of the world of courtliness and the world of the romance genre.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Medieval Warrior AristocracyGifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred, pp. 134 - 152Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007