Abstract
Medievalists are acutely aware of the importance of widows; widowers, in contrast, have attracted little scholarly attention. Through examination of several widowers profiled in the Icelandic Egils saga, this article probes into the subducted experience of medieval Norse widowerhood. Saga authors largely observed a cultural mandate to ignore widowers. Nevertheless, clues can be detected to their awareness of the significance of widowerhood, as well as their anxieties over its disruptive potentials. Egils saga elucidates some of the ways Norse widowerhood might go wrong and some of the cultural mechanisms devised to control it; it may even allow us a peek into the affective lives of bereaved Norse husbands.
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