Right from the first line of Göngu-Hrólfs saga the modern reader is forced to acknowledge the cultural weight of men and masculinity. The ambiguity that the Old Norse word maðr (pl. menn) can refer to both a human being in general or a male specifically (but significantly not a female in particular) must be born in mind when we read in the prologue that ‘margar frásagnir hafa menn samat sett til skemmtanar mönnum, sumar eftir fornskræðum eða fróðum mönnum’ (men/people have composed many tales for the enjoyment of men/people, some based on old tales or the authority of wise men/people). Even if we imagine a mixed audience and even acknowledging that women played a role in literary endeavour, the phrasing pushes us to see the potentially unmarked human beings as men, and thus the genesis of the work – as presented in Göngu-Hrólfs saga – as one in which men compose for the entertainment of men on the authority of men (or texts composed by men). For this reason alone it would seem worthwhile to study the function and representation of masculinity in Göngu-Hrólfs saga, which is the aim here. The nuance with which different types of masculine power and powerlessness, or vulnerability, are portrayed in this particular saga provides further justification for such a study.

Any work considering questions of gender in Old Norse-Icelandic literature must acknowledge the importance of Carol Clover's 1993 article ‘Regardless of Sex’, which proposed a spectrum of power not intrinsically linked to biological sex as one of the dominant social binaries in early medieval Scandinavia. A wide array of work has entered into dialogue with its observations – see, for example, the introduction to this volume – so it is unnecessary to rehearse the various critiques here. Nevertheless, a couple of preliminary observations which contribute to the lines of investigation here may be apposite.

At the crux of Clover's argument we are told that the ‘“conditions” that mattered in the north […] worked not so much at the level of the body, but at the level of social relations’, thus biological sex is downgraded and we are presented with a system where the emphasis is on gender.