‘I Don’t Want Realism: I Want Magic!’—Magic and Queerness in Later Íslendingasögur

In scene nine of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), an ageing southern belle, Blanche DuBois is confronted by her new suitor, Mitch. He insists that he needs to be ‘realistic’ to which Blanche retorts: “I don’t want realism – I want magic! […] I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth”. For Blanche, magic offers a way to refuse an unacceptable reality. The 1990 queer adaption of Streetcar, Belle Reprieve, alters this scene, with the cast reminding a drag-queen Blanche that: ‘as gays and women, realism works against us’. For Blanche, ‘magic’ offers a way to refuse the cruel realities of the ‘straight’ world and a means to imagine an alternative. This chapter moves from A Streetcar Named Desire to the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas to theorize the intersection between queerness and magic, as well the desire for alternative relationalities inherent to both. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century Íslendingasögu (family sagas) are often lauded for their ‘realism.’ Yet scholarship has perceived a supposed ‘decline of realism’ in the so-called postclassical sagas: the Íslendingasögur presumably composed after the collapse of the independent Icelandic commonwealth in 1262–1264. Despite recent interrogations of whether the ‘postclassical’ sagas are measurably more fantastic than earlier Íslendingasögur, this chapter asks whether the postclassical sagas might, like Blanche, embrace magic as a particularly queer form of critique, animating a dialogue between these texts, Blanche DuBois, and the queer theorist Jóse Esteban Muñoz. What Muñoz in Cruising Utopia (2009) names as the ‘queer utopian impulse’ echoes what Blanche calls ‘magic’: both offer a way to ‘[reject][…]a here and now and […][insist] on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’. Anchored by a pivotal scene in Króka Refs saga, this chapter moves between this theoretical formulation, the postclassical sagas and medieval Scandinavian law to consider first, how magic and queerness intersect in the medieval Icelandic imagination. From there, I turn Gunnars saga Keldungsfífls—to propose that magic, as a literary device, encodes a queer utopian impulse that refuses what is, and instead imagines an alternative. This reading contends that regardless of whether the postclassical sagas are more magical than other Íslendingasögur, these texts employ ‘magic’; to momentarily refuse hegemonic understandings of gender and sexuality and imagine queerer and more desirable alternatives.