‘The Woman Causes Me Grief’ An Old Norse Formula and Concept of Passion DANIEL SÄVBORG This study aims to give a contribution to the history of passion as a motif in Old Norse literature. It will be done by an examination of a distinct and clearly defined phenomenon: love-sickness. The material will primarily be a distinct literary type: the Old Norse poetry. A specific formula type, her called ‘the woman causes the man grief’, which has so far not been thoroughly investigated, will be in focus. The main purpose is to map the motif in the material and to examine its characteristics. The study will also try to establish its origin and its relation to courtly European tradition. During the last decades there has been an increased interest in emotions, not least love, in Old Norse research. 1 The distinct motif of love-sickness has, however, only been rarely examined and the focus in those studies has been less on poetry than prose. 2 * In European courtly poetry from the Middle Ages it is common with descriptions of love, usually the awakening of love, as primarily a suffering which causes the loving person pain, sorrow, crying, sobbing, trembling, sleeplessness etc., not because of unhappy conditions for the love or the possible relationship, but because of the emotional power of the passion itself. The phenomenon is well attested in courtly romances and lyrical poems from the European High Middle Ages. It has become known as love-sickness. Love-sickness constitutes a central element in the love descriptions in the courtly poetry, but it was not only a literary motif. It is present in the medieval view of love. We find it in the 1 Monographs include Sprenger 1992, Sävborg 1997, Bandlien 2001, Sävborg 2007, Gunnar Karlsson 2013, and Sif Rikhardsdottir 2017, articles include Cook 2012, Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir 2015, and Støa 2015; cf. also Brandsma 2015, and Larrington 2011 and 2015, although they seem unaware of the previous research and mainly repeat the discussions in the earlier works without knowledge of the observations and results given there. 2 Love-sickness in the Eddic poem Skírnismál is investigated in Heinrichs 1997, and in skaldic poetry by e.g. Bjarni Einarsson 1976, pp. 87 and 116; 1961, pp. 38 f.; Poole 1985, p. 130; Finlay 1995, pp. 120–127; Bandlien 2001, p. 95. Love-sickness in Old Norse prose literature is discussed in e.g. Heinrichs 1988 and 1999, Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir 2015, pp. 360–396, Kaiser 1998, Sävborg 2007, and Støa 2015, pp. 138–141.