Hanne Weisser
NORENSE funding: 25.000 NOK in 2017

Background and motivation
The medieval ballad Bendik og Årolilja belongs to a group of Scandinavian ballads dealing with various aspects of love and marriage. These ’love’-ballads are about betrothal and courting, faithfulness and deception in and outside of marriage, clandestine childbirth and the murder of infant. The ballads are from a period of transition in Europe and seems to mirror conflicts in religious belief, in the relationship between man and woman and in the individual’s duties towards family and relations when choosing a life partner. The project Bendik og Årolilja is a continuation of a long-term interest in folk songs and medieval ballads, which until now has resulted in different kinds of articles and a book with cultural historical essays about seven medieval ballads: Folkevisenes fortellinger – Helter, helgener, hverdagens hendelser, Gyldendal forlag 2006.

Research questions, methods, sources
In the research project the ballad Bendik og Årolilja will be studied and read in a social historical context, to see if and how the ballad reflects questions, ideas and mentalities related to a specific historical period. Bendik og Årolilja deals with romantic love, which became an issue in literature, poetry and songs in the 12th century. In this century, women for the first time became a judicial subject in matrimony law. A question will be: to which degree does the ballad reflect the conflicts that emerged when the church, in canon law in the 12th hundred, proclaimed that a marriage was legal only if the woman had given her consent? – Indirectly, a woman from now on, was in her right to refuse a marriage, this being a new right for her.
The storyline in the ballad will be discussed in relation to social conditions, moral laws and women’s legal position in medieval Europe as well and in premodern Norway. The text in the different variants of the ballad will be read closely, for the reason to find eventual coherence between the theme in the ballad and the social questions and dilemmas in society at the time the ballad was sung and orally transmitted. Extensive and interdisciplinary reading of literature and research will be necessary to substantiate and support points of view as to what the ballad’s major theme might be, and how this theme corresponds with changes in society.

Publication
Weisser, Hanne. (2019). Kjærlighetens kår. Tidsskrift for kulturforskning (1), 83-101. Link to pdf.