In Chapter 35 of Laxdoela saga, a woman named Auðr is publicly accused by her husband Þórðr of having worn men's breeches ‘sem karlkonur’ (like masculine women). He uses this claim as reason and legal justification for divorcing her. As readers, we cannot know for certain whether this accusation is to be considered factually accurate or a complete fabrication. Before this chapter, Auðr's ostensible deviation from sartorial gender norms had not previously been mentioned in the saga; the issue is only raised at this point when Þórðr's love-interest Guðrún – who is also the woman he will marry following his separation from Auðr – asks him whether it is true that his wife ‘er jafnan í brókum ok setgeiri í’ (is always wearing breeches with inset gores) and also suggests that the name Bróka-Auðr (Breeches-Auðr) has come to be associated with her as a result. But regardless of its veracity, this claim of a transgressive gender performance is apparently – within the world of Laxdoela saga at least – a legitimate, and culturally intelligible, reason for the dissolution of their marriage.

Instances such as this one, in which cultural masculinity is ascribed to a female-sexed character, can be found in a number of the sagas of Icelanders. And in modern gender studies scholarship today, as discussed in the introduction to this volume, the idea that sex and gender are not coterminous is both commonplace and widely accepted. Judith Butler's influential theorizations of the socially-constructed and performative nature of gender allow for (and even demand) the radical uncoupling of gender from sex. The result of this radical disruption is that – to use Butler's words – ‘gender becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one’. Jack Halberstam, partially drawing upon Butler's theorizations and exploring extensively the implications of this radical uncoupling, has discussed the realities and representations of female-sexed women and characters who embody or perform modalities of masculinity.