Introduction

This book explores how Old Norse literature negotiates the interplay of identity and change, human and nonhuman, body and world, focusing on texts preserved and transmitted in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland. It investigates how this literature wrestles with the question of what it means to be human – examining the features that define humanity and the processes through which it emerges. Replete with depictions of bodily fragmentation, flux and fusion, these texts compel readers to confront the conditions of their own humanity while encoding broader cultural concerns about the body’s openness to the world and its role as a seat of personal identity. While wholeness is aligned, at least lexically, with health and happiness in Old Norse (as seen in the semantic range of the adjective heill),2 See ‘heill’, ONP, https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?o32468 [accessed 21 September 2024]: ‘whole, healthy, cured, happy’. For further discussion of the normative body as impermeable in Old Norse texts, see C. Batten, ‘Spears and Spikes: Illness, Emotion and Bodily Invasion in Old Norse Abscess Narratives’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 8.1 (2024), 79–96 (p. 80). narrators often test this vision of a unified and securely bounded human through episodes of shapeshifting, limb-loss, bodily extension and consumption: acts in which boundaries fragment or blur, and the nonhuman environment is incorporated into the embodied self. This tension between boundary-making and boundary-breaking forms a central axis of the book’s inquiry.

Four groups of questions guide this exploration. First, is human identity depicted as fixed and essential, or fluid and contingent? What prompts the transgression of boundaries between humans and the nonhuman, and do narrators reject or embrace these entanglements? Second, how is the body conceptualised in these narratives? Is it portrayed as the primary locus of identity, and how vulnerable is it to transformation? What do narratives of injury and change reveal about ideas of autonomy, health and ability? Third, how do concepts of agency and materiality shape ideas of embodiment? Can identity extend beyond the physical body to include nonhuman materials that inflect human autonomy? Finally, how do textual traditions and intellectual frameworks shape these explorations? Do different text-types and genres offer distinct perspectives on human identity, and what frameworks – whether vernacular or continental and learned – inform literary engagement with these themes? By addressing these questions, this study seeks to deepen our understanding of the conceptual schemas of the Old Norse world and to illuminate the varied stylistic and aesthetic strategies that characterise its textual traditions.

Identity is a slippery analytical category.3 While this study is primarily concerned with human identity, aspects of personal identity are also relevant. In this respect, I use the term ‘personhood’ to refer to the state and condition of being a person, and ‘selfhood’ more as a reflexive capacity, emphasising the experiential aspect of personhood. On definitions of literary selfhood in a medieval context, see F. Brandsma, C. Larrington and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, ‘Introduction: Emotion and the Medieval Self’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 8 (2024), 1–7. While contemporary theory has taught us to think of it as fluid and in process,4 Phenomenology, for example, emphasises identity as rooted in embodied experience and shaped by ongoing interactions with the world (J. Čakep and S. Loidolt, ‘Phenomenological Approaches to Personal Identity’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (2021), 217–34). Critical theories associated with the ‘nonhuman turn’ challenge static and representational notions of identity, instead approaching it as emergent and deeply influenced by material relationships; on the ‘nonhuman turn’, see F. Cord, ‘Posthumanist Cultural Studies: Taking the Nonhuman Seriously’, Open Cultural Studies 6.1 (2022), 25–37. Meanwhile, intersectionality highlights the construction of identity at the intersections of social categories such as gender, age, race and disability (see P. Hill Collins and S. Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge, UK, 2016)). this study attends above all to how identity was imagined in Old Norse literature itself. Poets and narrators in this tradition portray the boundaries of the ‘human’ as mobile and negotiable, and even the basic vocabulary for ‘human’ in Old Norse registers this instability. The noun maðr means both ‘man’ and ‘human’, while its cognate adjective mennskr (human, belonging to a man) describes someone as specifically human, often in contrast with giants and other supernatural beings.5 ‘maðr’, ONP, https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?o51596 and ‘mennskr’, ONP, https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?o53766 [accessed 20 August 2024]. The phrase mennskr maðr (human man), at first glance tautological, thereby shows the broader semantic scope of maðr, perhaps better rendered as ‘sentient being’ or ‘person’, rather than strictly ‘human’?6 On terminology for humanity, supernatural figures and the divine in Old Norse poetry, see B. E. Schorn, Speaker and Authority in Old Norse Wisdom Poetry (Berlin, 2017), pp. 40–61. Animals in texts can also exhibit traits associated with personhood or, as Harriet Evans Tang puts it, ‘social maðr-ness’ (‘Reading Animal-Human Relations: Sámr and Gunnarr in Njáls saga’, Scandinavian Studies 95.1 (2023), 35–55 (p. 51)) – a theme I return to in Chapter 4. Later Christian usage introduced the noun manneskja,7 ‘manneskja’, ONP, https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?o52286 [accessed 20 August 2024]. derived from theological discourse to distinguish human from divine nature.8 A. M. Sturtevant, ‘Certain Old Norse Suffixes’, Modern Philology 26.2 (1928), 149–59 (pp. 151–2). The -(n)eskja suffix denotes something with the nature or characteristics of the stem to which it is attached: so, manneskja refers to someone who is human, just as flatneskja refers to something which is flat. This evolving lexicon suggests that the ‘human’ in Old Norse culture was never a given, but a category open to negotiation and redefinition.

Through episodes of dismemberment, entanglement and transformation, this literature illuminates medieval Icelandic cultural formations of the boundaries between humans and the more-than-human environment of plants, landscapes, animals and objects. These works provided audiences with platforms to navigate their own understanding of the human subject, simultaneously reflecting and shaping their experiences and self-conceptions.9 On the self-reflexivity of literature and the degree to which literature shapes historical discourse, see D. Clark and Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, ‘The Representation of Gender in Eddic Poetry’, in A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia, ed. C. Larrington, J. Quinn and B. Schorn (Cambridge, UK, 2016), pp. 331–48 (p. 338). Through analysis of the language, stories and poetic imagery of Old Norse literature, this book explores how these texts build a relational understanding of identity – one that resists interpretation through Cartesian identity paradigms,10 On Cartesian dualism as anachronistic in Old Norse contexts, see Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, Emotions in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge, UK, 2017), p. 8; M. Mayburd, ‘Objects and Agency in the Medieval North: The Case of Old Norse Magic Swords’, Sredniowiecze Polskie i Powzechne T.12 (2020), 42–68 (pp. 45–6); S. A. Knutson, ‘When Objects Misbehave: Materials and Assemblages in the Ancient Scandinavian Myths’, Fabula 61.3–4 (2020), 257–77 (p. 258); A. Kreager, ‘Lapidaries and Lyfsteinar: Health, Enhancement and Human–Lithic Relations in Medieval Iceland’, Gripla 33 (2022), 115–55 (p. 119). foregrounding instead the interconnectedness of bodies, identities and environments.