Origins
The parentage and geographical origin of Gunnhildr konungamóðir are debated. Most medieval sources that comment on the question state that she came from Hálogaland, northern Norway. Heimskringla, Fagrskinna, Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum, Ólafs saga Odds, Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar and Njáls saga all identify her father as Qssur (or Qzurr), a hersir from Halogaland known by the bynames tóti and láfskeggr. Six accounts state her North-Norwegian origin explicitly; fourteen others mention her without commenting on it. Historia Norwegiæ, a Latin text from the second half of the twelfth century, is the only medieval source to make her a daughter of Gormr inn gamli, king of Denmark, and Thyra.
Before the nineteenth century, historians such as Gerhard Schøning, Tormod Torfæus and Niels Matthias Petersen followed the saga tradition and placed Gunnhildr in Hálogaland. The Danish hypothesis emerged only after Peter Andreas Munch discovered and edited Historia Norwegiæ in 1850. Sigurður Nordal and Halvdan Koht gave it its fullest argumentation, resting on the text's antiquity, the kinship they inferred from the name Gormr among Gunnhildr's sons, and the purported political value of a Norwegian–Danish marriage. Later exponents have, in the main, deferred to the Historia on the same grounds.
The probative value of this Norwegian synoptic has been predicated upon the perceived anteriority of the original, conventionally dated to the second half of the twelfth century, though estimates range from the 1140s to the early thirteenth century. However, with the composition of Ólafs saga Odds now generally placed c. 1170–90, Historia Norwegiæ can no longer be assumed to precede it: the two are roughly contemporary — the saga perhaps earlier — to which may be added the anteriority of Ólafs saga's extant copies, dating to c. 1250–1300 against the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts that preserve the Historia. To this may be added that the evidentiary weight carried by Norwegian and Icelandic records is also a consequence of her conspicuous absence from the Danish corpus. Gesta Danorum and its summary Compendium Saxonis mention Gunnhildr only in passing, and the Chronicle of Leire, the Lund and Ryd annals, and the early twelfth-century Chronicle of Roskilde do not mention her at all.
The proposition that she was a Danish princess has been difficult to reconcile with the dearth of attestation to her in the Danish sources. The incongruity is the more striking given her later significance as the wife of a king, the mother of several, and a dominant force among them. It has been proposed that memory of her eventually faded in her native Denmark, though this has been criticised as an ad hoc explanation and one that has never been adequately developed.
Turning to the onomastic evidence invoked in support of a Danish origin, the argument rests on the name Gormr, borne by a son of Gunnhildr in Historia Norwegiae and Ágrip, which was taken by Sigurður Nordal and Halvdan Koht as evidence of descent from his Danish namesake, with Guthormr and Guðrøðr treated as variants of the same name. The inference has been questioned on two grounds: the names in question rank among the commonest in Old Norse literature and cannot bear the evidentiary weight placed on them, and the argument assumes that names followed biological lines more rigidly than the sagas warrant, since sons might be named for foster-fathers, maternal kinsmen or patrons rather than ancestors. Perabo concludes that the naming evidence is too uncertain, and the names too common, to support the Danish case.
The political objection to a Hálogaland origin — that a king of Norway would not marry his heir to a woman from so remote a district — has been questioned on the ground that Hálogaland was neither remote nor poor. The region was the seat of families whose standing was established well before the Viking Age, and whose integration into the Norwegian kingdom ran through the jarls of Hlaðir, themselves based there for much of the period. Excavation at Borg in Lofoten has revealed a chieftain's hall of a scale and finish comparable to any in southern Scandinavia, a find that has been taken to show that the northern elite was in no way behind its southern counterparts in material culture.
The sorcery for which Gunnhildr is notorious across the corpus fits the same setting. The most repeated trope about her is that she was a skilled sorceress, a trope most readily identified with northern Norway in the sagas that mention her. Whether her acumen for magic is accurately recounted, or an inference the saga authors made because of her background, boils down to the same thing with respect to where she grew up. The sagas variously record her fosterage in the entourage of the Sami notable Mǫttul, instruction from two sorcerers in Finnmǫrk, among other details. The Sami people, who mostly lived (as they do now) in the far North, were identified with witchcraft throughout medieval and early modern literature, not only in Norse texts but in Latin and English accounts as well: Bartholomew Anglicus describes Sami weather magic in detail, and Ranulf Higden notes it more briefly. Norwegian law codes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries forbade consultation of Sami practitioners for divination, which suggests the practice was widespread enough to warrant legislation. Norse and Sami communities "north of Dovre" lived in close proximity and were in close contact — trading, taxing, fishing alongside one another — and in some contact zones buried their dead in the same ground, as the grave at Loppa in Finnmǫrk illustrates.
Recent work has accordingly reaffirmed that Gunnhildr was most likely Norwegian, with Titlestad defending Hálogaland as her birthplace and Perabo attributing the Danish hypothesis in part to Norwegian nation-building and to anti-Danish sentiments in Norway and Iceland during the High Middle Ages and later when Koht popularised the hypothesis.
