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From Dualism to Posthumanism: New Approaches to Old Norse Identities
Little research has directly examined how Old Norse texts negotiate human identity in relation to the nonhuman environment through episodes of change,1 Tiffany Nicole White’s ‘Defining the Human: Skin, Shapeshifting, and Sin’, Scripta Islandica 75 (2024), 197–241, is a recent contribution to this emerging area, analysing skin-wearing and wolf-transformations through a Christian, postlapsarian framework to consider boundaries between human and animal identities. but recent scholarship reveals a growing interest in the human condition at large. Two areas of research, in particular, can be brought productively together. The first is archaeological and theoretical work on concepts of self, personhood and embodiment in Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia. The second comprises studies of the nonhuman world in Old Norse literature, including representations of animal life, natural environments, material objects, monsters, the paranormal and shapeshifting. Both fields emphasise the significance of embodiment and the environment in shaping human experience and identity, offering perspectives that challenge Enlightenment-informed views of the self-sovereign body, and lay a helpful foundation for approaching identity as a dynamic, relational process in Old Norse texts.
In Approaches to the Medieval Self, Stefka Eriksen, Karen Holmqvist and Bjørn Bandlien identify two major foci in previous research: the ‘inner self’ (defined by emotivity, cognition, intellectuality, spirituality or creativity); and the ‘social self’, which emerges through performance in various interpersonal contexts.2 ‘Introduction: Approaches to the Self – From Modernity Back to Viking and Medieval Scandinavia’, in Approaches to the Medieval Self: Representations and Conceptualizations of the Self in the Textual and Material Culture of Western Scandinavia, c. 800–1500, ed. S. G. Eriksen, K. L. Holmqvist and B. Bandlien (Berlin, 2020), pp. 1–20 (p. 7). As David Gary Shaw emphasises in his contribution to the volume, this latter concept of a self that shifts through communal participation and personal experience does not express itself solely through social relations, but through material networks of bodies and things.3 ‘The Networked Historical Self, Traveling Version’, in Approaches to the Medieval Self, ed. Eriksen, Holmqvist and Bandlien, pp. 21–40. This perspective resonates with recent archaeological approaches that treat personhood as processual and networked, contesting traditional Western distinctions between subject and object.4 See Marianne Hem Eriksen’s work on deposited crania in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia (‘“Body-Objects” and Personhood in the Iron and Viking Ages: Processing, Curating, and Depositing Skulls in Domestic Space’, World Archaeology 52.1 (2020), 103–19 (p. 104)); Sara Ann Knutson’s discussion of the role of swords and staffs in funerary contexts, which she interprets as evidence of an understanding of personhood extended beyond the biological body (‘When Objects Misbehave’, pp. 271–2); and Alison Margaret Klevnäs’s examination of grave disturbance practices, which she finds arise from underlying ontological structures connecting humans to artefacts (‘“Imbued with the Essence of the Owner”: Personhood and Possessions in the Reopening and Reworking of Viking-Age Burials’, European Journal of Archaeology 19.3 (2016), 456–76, p. 466). Although the archaeological evidence predates the textual sources, its theoretical implications remain instructive for literary scholars, inviting a re-evaluation of how materiality, embodiment and personhood are portrayed in Old Norse texts.
Mariusz Mayburd, for example, applies archaeological theory to the study of skjaldmeyjar (shield-maidens) and swords in saga literature, showing how implements of war redefine the parameters of the wielder’s self while exhibiting ambiguous agencies that trouble the borders of personhood.5 ‘Objects and Agency’; and ‘“Maðr þóttumk ek mennskr til þessa”: Rethinking “Female” (?) Warrior Figures in Medieval Norse Sources: Material Engagement, Composite Personhoods and the Value of Archaeological Theory for Literary Studies’, in Pre-Print Papers of the 18th International Saga Conference: Sagas and the Circum-Baltic Arena. Helsinki and Tallinn, 7th–14th August 2022, ed. Frog, J. Ahola, J. Barber and K. Kouvola (Helsinki, 2022), pp. 222–7. Mayburd further draws on the neuroscientific concept of the open body schema (which posits embodiment as an ongoing phenomenological entanglement between minds, bodies and physical environments) to explore the effects of meteorological events and revenant hauntings on characters in Íslendingasögur.6 ‘It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Haunted Saga Homesteads, Climate Fluctuations, and the Vulnerable Self’, in Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150–1400, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and M. Mayburd (Berlin, 2020), pp. 21–38 (pp. 23–4). These archaeological and literary studies alike approach the human as an open system, a framing further supported by research into concepts of health and emotion in the literature.7 Caroline Batten identifies an ‘invasive’ model of sickness in saga episodes, charms and medical texts, suggesting that somatic emotional responses and disease were treated as threats to the maintenance of the body as an inviolate whole (‘Spears and Spikes’; and ‘Sickness and Emotion in Old Norse Prose: Exploring Somatic Experience’, in Pre-Print Papers of the 18th International Saga Conference, ed. Frog, Ahola, Barber and Kouvala, p. 51). Kirsi Kanerva observes that excessive emotions in Íslendingasögur result in generalised disorders, manifesting as physical illness, erupting bodily fluids or increased susceptibility to malignant environmental forces (‘Disturbances of the Mind and Body: Effects of the Living Dead in Medieval Iceland’, in Mental (Dis)Order in Later Medieval Europe, ed. S. Katajala-Peltomaa and S. Niiranen (Leiden, 2014), pp. 219–42 (p. 221)). Cp. S. Künzler, Flesh and Word: Reading Bodies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Early Irish Literature (Berlin, 2016), pp. 61–5. In turn, Marie Novotná’s monograph on physical displays of emotions and changes of form identifies a spectrum of approaches to the body, from holistic, psychophysical concepts of man to a more pronounced distinction between body and soul, noting that in the older strata of Old Norse texts, the interior and exterior of a person are not yet differentiated.8 18 Between Body and Soul in Old Norse Literature: Emotions and the Mutability of Form (Turnhout, 2024).
Two key implications follow from this body of research. First, a strictly Cartesian approach to the self proves inadequate for interpreting Old Norse literature, both because emotive and intellectual functions are often portrayed as inseparable from bodily experience, and because the body is integral to personhood. Second, critical focus on the attributes of the ‘inner self’ (cognition, emotion, intellect, creativity and so on) must entail recourse to the wider matrix of social and material relations in which a person is enmeshed. In short, the modern divide between an ‘inner self’ and an external ‘social’ or ‘networked self’ is less applicable in an Old Norse context.9 This is also implied in Stefanie Gropper’s research into the emotive aspects of family life in Íslendingasögur, which finds that emotions are expressed in public spaces, functioning more as ‘social manipulators’ than expressions of interior feelings (‘The Human Condition’, in A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre, ed. M. Bampi, C. Larrington and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (Cambridge, UK, 2020), pp. 177–91 (p. 191)).
If identity cannot be understood in isolation from the material and environmental networks through which it is articulated, then research on the ‘nonhuman’ becomes essential for understanding how human identity is imagined in these texts. The archaeological and theoretical research can therefore be helpfully brought into dialogue with recent Old Norse studies on animals/animality;10 T. Bourns, ‘Between Nature and Culture: Animals and Humans in Old Norse Literature’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2018) and ‘Animal Emotionality and Selfhood in Old Norse Textual Culture’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 8.1 (2024), 97–115; E. A. Haley-Halinski, ‘Birds and Humans in the Old Norse World, c. 600–1500 AD’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2021); H. J. Evans Tang, Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas (Cambridge, UK, 2022); K. Jennbert, Animals and Humans: Recurrent Symbiosis in Archaeology and Old Norse Religion (Lund, 2011); L. Rohrbach, Der tierische Blick. Mensch-Tier-Relationen in der Sagaliteratur (Tübingen, 2009). monsters, alterity and the paranormal;11 R. Merkelbach, Monsters in Society: Alterity, Transgression and the Use of the Past in Medieval Iceland (Berlin, 2019); Merkelbach and G. Knight, eds, Margins, Monsters, Deviants: Alterities in Old Norse Literature and Culture (Turnhout, 2020); Ármann Jakobsson and Mayburd, Paranormal Encounters in Iceland, 1150–1400 (Berlin, 2020); M. Su, Werewolves in Old Norse Literature: Between the Monster and the Man (Turnhout, 2023). materials/materiality;12 C. Abram, ‘Kennings and Things: Towards an Object-Oriented Skaldic Poetics’, in The Shapes of Early English Poetry, ed. E. Weiskott and I Dumitrescu (Berlin, 2019), pp. 161–88; Knutson, ‘When Objects Misbehave’ and ‘The Materiality of Myth: Divine Objects in Norse Mythology’, Temenos – Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 55.1 (2019), 29–53; M. Mayburd, ‘Between a Rock and a Soft Place: The Materiality of Old Norse Dwarves and Paranormal Ecologies in Fornaldarsögur’, in Supernatural Encounters in Old Norse Literature and Tradition, ed. D. Sävborg and K. Bek-Pedersen (Turnhout, 2018), pp. 189–214; T. L. Waters, ‘Materiality and Myth: Encountering the Broken Body in the Eddic Corpus’, VMS 18 (2022), 179–205. and landscapes/environments.13 C. Abram, Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature (Charlottesville, VA, 2019); J. Ahola, ‘Arnarvatnsheiði and the Space for Outlaws’, in Stanzas of Friendship: Studies in Honour of Tatjana N. Jackson, ed. N. Gvorzdetskaja, I. Konovalova, E. Melnikova and A. Podossinov (Moscow, 2011), pp. 35–47; E. R. Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar and Gísla saga Súrssonar: Landscape in the Outlaw Sagas’, SS 82.4 (2010), 365–88; M. Egeler, ‘Geocriticism, Place and Landscape: Theoretical Perspectives on Space, Meaning and Memory’, in Dreaming of a Glacier: Snæfellsjökull in a Geocritical Perspective, ed. M. Egeler, and S. Gropper (Munich, 2020), pp. 17–42; Lethbridge, ‘The Icelandic Sagas and Saga Landscapes: Writing, Reading and Retelling Íslendingasögur Narratives’, Gripla 27 (2016), 51–92; M. Poilvez, ‘Access to the Margins: Outlawry and Narrative Spaces in Medieval Icelandic Outlaw Sagas’, Brathair 12.1 (2012), 115–36; I. Wyatt, ‘The Landscape of the Icelandic Sagas: Text, Place and National Identity’, Landscapes 5 (2004), 55–73. While the human is rarely the express subject of these studies, it often lingers in authors’ concluding remarks.14 See, for example, Bourns, ‘Animal Emotionality and Selfhood’, p. 115; Ármann Jakobsson’s afterword to Merkelbach and Knight’s edited volume, Margins, Monsters, Deviants (pp. 239–40); and Su’s Conclusion in Werewolves. An explicit focus on human–nonhuman interactions, then, allows us to see how human identity in Old Norse literature is articulated through networks that span (non)human bodies, objects, environments, ideas and social relations.
To further explore these interactions, this study selectively engages with contemporary theoretical approaches: posthumanism, new materialism and disability studies. Each of these frameworks interrogates, in different ways, the humanist legacy that defines the self as a rational, autonomous subject distinct from nature, matter and other beings. They offer, instead, ways of understanding embodiment, agency and relationality that can illuminate Old Norse literary depictions of transformation and the porousness of the human. My use of these frameworks is therefore heuristic rather than prescriptive: they serve as conceptual tools to enrich textual analysis, not as an interpretive grid imposed upon the texts.
Posthumanism, which emerged from anti-humanist, post-colonialist and feminist discourse,15 Posthumanism should not be confused with transhumanism, which promotes the transcendence of biological humanity through technology and reinforces a humanist perspective by centring the human and extending ideals of human perfectibility, rationality and agency (C. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism (Minneapolis, MN, 2010), p. xiii). Posthumanism does not reject humanity, but challenges a specific conception of the human – one that, as N. Katherine Hayles notes, has historically applied only to a privileged few with the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualise themselves as ‘autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice’ (How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL, 1999), p. 286). critiques the figure of the self-contained human and the dualisms that sustain it, such as culture/nature, man/machine, mind/body and information/matter.16 J. D. Bolter, ‘Posthumanism’, in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, ed. K. B. Jensen and R. T. Craig (Chichester, 2016), pp. 1–8 (p. 1). As Alison Ravenscroft observes, the ‘human’ in posthumanism often reflects the Western liberal subject (‘Strange Weather: Indigenous Materialisms, New Materialism, and Colonialism’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.3 (2018), 353–70 (p. 357)). This is partly due to the lack of scholarly recognition of Indigenous ontologies and knowledge systems that align with posthumanist thought (see K. TallBear, ‘Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms’, in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. J. Radin and E. Kowal (Cambridge, MA, 2017) pp. 179–202 (p. 187)). In medieval studies, posthumanist perspectives have often been used to highlight how medieval texts offer alternative models of identity that trouble modern Western paradigms,17 E. A. Joy and C. Dionne, ‘Before the Trains of Thought Have Been Laid Down So Firmly: The Premodern Post/Human’, Postmedieval 1.1 (2010), 1–9 (p. 6); J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis, MN, 2014), p. xvii. Medieval posthumanist research has predominantly focused on Latin, Old English, Middle English and Anglo-Norman texts (see, for example, the contributions to R. H. Godden and A. S. Mittman, eds, Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (Cham, 2019)). Notable Norse exceptions include Jessica Clare Hancock’s analysis of male identities in Vǫlsunga saga (‘Beyond Sorrow and Swords: Gender in the Old Norse Völsung Legend and its British Rewritings’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2014)) and Judy Quinn’s ‘Post-Human Perspectives on Old Norse Mythology’, in Res, Artes et Religio, ed. S. Walther, R. Jucknies, J. Meurer-Bongardt and J. E. Schnall (Leeds, 2021), pp. 479–90, which explores the resonance of Old Norse mythological texts with contemporary debates about the posthuman condition. akin to how some ecocritical work turns to medieval sources to inform contemporary environmental debate.18 C. Phelpstead, ‘Ecocriticism and Eyrbyggja saga’, Leeds Studies in English 45 (2014), 1–18 (p. 2); Abram, Evergreen Ash, p. 39. My approach is more historically situated: rather than using medieval texts to critique modern humanism, I explore how the texts themselves articulate identity within their own ontological frameworks (though the resonances with posthumanist thinking are, at times, inevitably suggestive).
New materialism complements posthumanism by shifting focus from the human subject to the agency of matter itself. Rejecting the notion of inert materiality, it emphasises the vitality of nonhuman ‘actants’19 The term ‘actant’, drawn from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, denotes any entity, animate or inanimate, that participates in agency (see B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2005)). and the entanglements through which human agency emerges.20 S. Frost and D. Coole, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. S. Frost and D. Coole (Durham, NC, 2010), pp. 1–46 (p. 3). The descriptor ‘new’ is in some ways misleading, since the new materialist focus on the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking central to many traditional Indigenous ontologies (see Ravenscroft, ‘Strange Weather’). While sharing posthumanism’s critique of dualism, new materialism attends particularly to the animate/inanimate divide and to the interdependence of humans and their material surroundings.21 While new materialist perspectives are gaining traction in medieval scholarship (see, e.g., J. J. Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable and Mineral (Washington, DC, 2012) and J. Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester, 2017)), most studies focus on Latin, Old and Middle English and Anglo-Norman texts. For approaches informed by new materialism in an Old Norse context, see Abram, ‘Kennings and Things’, p. 165; R. Cole, ‘Philology and Desire in Old Norse, between Stone and a Hard Place’, JEGP 117.4 (2018), 505–25; Mayburd, ‘Objects and Agency’; Knutson ‘Materiality of Myth’ and ‘Objects that Misbehave’; and Waters, ‘Materiality and Myth’. Here too my engagement is selective, with new materialism providing a vocabulary for thinking about the agency of bodies, objects and landscapes in Old Norse narrative and poetic worlds.
Disability studies likewise questions the universality of the ‘normative’ human. Though emerging from different intellectual traditions, it shares with posthumanism and new materialism a critical stance towards the ableist and universalist assumptions embedded in humanist models of personhood.22 D. Goodley, R. Lawthom, K. Liddiard and K. Runswick-Cole, ‘The Desire for New Humanisms’, Journal of Disability Studies in Education 1 (2020), 125–44. Research on disability in the Old Norse world has expanded significantly in recent years,23 For two recent publications that provide an overview of the field, see: Ármann Jakobsson, A. K. Heiniger, C. Crocker and Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir, ‘Disability before Disability: Mapping the Uncharted in the Medieval Sagas’, SS 92.4 (2020), 440–60; C. Crocker, Y. Tirosh and Ármann Jakobsson, ‘Disability in Medieval Iceland: Some Methodological Concerns’, in Understanding Disability throughout History: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Iceland from Settlement to 1936, ed. Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and J. G. Rice (London, 2021), pp. 12–28. moving beyond earlier tendencies to pathologise depictions of difference24 J. L. Byock, ‘The Skull and Bones in Egil’s saga: A Viking, A Grave, and Paget’s Disease’, Viator 24 (1993), 23–50; J. G. Høyersten, ‘Manifestations of Psychiatric Illness in Texts from the Medieval and Viking Era’, Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy 2 (2015), 57–60; P. Stride, ‘Egill Skallagrímsson: The First Case of Van Buchem Disease?’, J R Coll Physicians Edinb 41 (2011), 169–73; D. C. Whaley and D. Elliot, ‘A Medieval Casebook: Hand Cures Documented in the Icelandic Sagas of Bishops’, Journal of Hand Surgery 19B.5 (1994), 667–71. or to approach disability primarily as a narrative device,25 L. Bragg, ‘Disfigurement, Disability, and Disintegration in Sturlunga saga’, Alvissmál 4 (1994), 15–32; L. Bragg, ‘Impaired and Inspired: The Makings of a Medieval Icelandic Poet’, in Madness, Disability and Social Exclusion: The Archaeology and Anthropology of ‘Difference’, ed. J. Hubert (London, 2000), pp. 128–43; L. Bragg, Oedipus Borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Cranbury, NJ, 2004). and instead foregrounding the social construction of disability and its intersection with other discourses of power, gender and social belonging.26 E.g. Ármann Jakobsson, ‘The Madness of King Sigurðr: Narrating Insanity in an Old Norse Kings’ Saga’, in Social Dimensions of Medieval Disease and Disability, ed. S. Crawford and C. Lee (Oxford, 2014), pp. 29–36; K. Anderson, ‘Mediating the Other through Language: Medieval Icelandic Sagas and the Construction of Disability Discourse’ (unpublished MA dissertation, Háskóli Íslands, 2016); C. Crocker, ‘Narrating Blindness and Seeing Ocularcentrism in Þorsteins saga hvíta’, Gripla 31 (2020), 267–92; A. K. Heiniger, ‘The Silenced Trauma in the Íslendingasögur’, Gripla 31 (2020), 233–65; S. B. Lawing, ‘Victims of Maiming in Sturlunga saga’, Mirator 2.20 (2021), 54–72; M. D. Lawson, ‘Children of a One-Eyed God: Impairment in the Myth and Memory of Medieval Scandinavia’ (unpublished MA dissertation, East Tennessee State University, 2019); T. Michelson-Ambelang, ‘Outsiders on the Inside: Conception of Disability in Medieval Western Scandinavia’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015); M. S. Morrow, ‘Disabled Masculinity: An Intersectional Analysis of the Icelandic Sagas’ (unpublished MA dissertation, University of Oslo, 2020); J. P. Sexton, ‘Atypical Bodies: Seeking after Meaning in Physical Difference’, in A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Hsy, T. V. Pearman and J. Eyler (London, 2020), pp. 19–34. Drawing on this scholarship, I explore how health, impairment and normativity shape ideas of the human in Old Norse literature, considering how literary depictions of non-normative bodies function not only as symbolic markers (disability as ‘narrative prosthesis’),27 That is, the use of disability as a ‘prosthesis’ for characterisation and plot rather than as an authentic representation of disability (D. Mitchell and S. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000)). but as sites where cultural anxieties about the body meet the material realities of life in the medieval North.
 
1      Tiffany Nicole White’s ‘Defining the Human: Skin, Shapeshifting, and Sin’, Scripta Islandica 75 (2024), 197–241, is a recent contribution to this emerging area, analysing skin-wearing and wolf-transformations through a Christian, postlapsarian framework to consider boundaries between human and animal identities. »
2      ‘Introduction: Approaches to the Self – From Modernity Back to Viking and Medieval Scandinavia’, in Approaches to the Medieval Self: Representations and Conceptualizations of the Self in the Textual and Material Culture of Western Scandinavia, c. 800–1500, ed. S. G. Eriksen, K. L. Holmqvist and B. Bandlien (Berlin, 2020), pp. 1–20 (p. 7). »
3      ‘The Networked Historical Self, Traveling Version’, in Approaches to the Medieval Self, ed. Eriksen, Holmqvist and Bandlien, pp. 21–40. »
4      See Marianne Hem Eriksen’s work on deposited crania in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia (‘“Body-Objects” and Personhood in the Iron and Viking Ages: Processing, Curating, and Depositing Skulls in Domestic Space’, World Archaeology 52.1 (2020), 103–19 (p. 104)); Sara Ann Knutson’s discussion of the role of swords and staffs in funerary contexts, which she interprets as evidence of an understanding of personhood extended beyond the biological body (‘When Objects Misbehave’, pp. 271–2); and Alison Margaret Klevnäs’s examination of grave disturbance practices, which she finds arise from underlying ontological structures connecting humans to artefacts (‘“Imbued with the Essence of the Owner”: Personhood and Possessions in the Reopening and Reworking of Viking-Age Burials’, European Journal of Archaeology 19.3 (2016), 456–76, p. 466). »
5      ‘Objects and Agency’; and ‘“Maðr þóttumk ek mennskr til þessa”: Rethinking “Female” (?) Warrior Figures in Medieval Norse Sources: Material Engagement, Composite Personhoods and the Value of Archaeological Theory for Literary Studies’, in Pre-Print Papers of the 18th International Saga Conference: Sagas and the Circum-Baltic Arena. Helsinki and Tallinn, 7th–14th August 2022, ed. Frog, J. Ahola, J. Barber and K. Kouvola (Helsinki, 2022), pp. 222–7. »
6      ‘It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Haunted Saga Homesteads, Climate Fluctuations, and the Vulnerable Self’, in Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150–1400, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and M. Mayburd (Berlin, 2020), pp. 21–38 (pp. 23–4). »
7      Caroline Batten identifies an ‘invasive’ model of sickness in saga episodes, charms and medical texts, suggesting that somatic emotional responses and disease were treated as threats to the maintenance of the body as an inviolate whole (‘Spears and Spikes’; and ‘Sickness and Emotion in Old Norse Prose: Exploring Somatic Experience’, in Pre-Print Papers of the 18th International Saga Conference, ed. Frog, Ahola, Barber and Kouvala, p. 51). Kirsi Kanerva observes that excessive emotions in Íslendingasögur result in generalised disorders, manifesting as physical illness, erupting bodily fluids or increased susceptibility to malignant environmental forces (‘Disturbances of the Mind and Body: Effects of the Living Dead in Medieval Iceland’, in Mental (Dis)Order in Later Medieval Europe, ed. S. Katajala-Peltomaa and S. Niiranen (Leiden, 2014), pp. 219–42 (p. 221)). Cp. S. Künzler, Flesh and Word: Reading Bodies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Early Irish Literature (Berlin, 2016), pp. 61–5. »
8      18 Between Body and Soul in Old Norse Literature: Emotions and the Mutability of Form (Turnhout, 2024). »
9      This is also implied in Stefanie Gropper’s research into the emotive aspects of family life in Íslendingasögur, which finds that emotions are expressed in public spaces, functioning more as ‘social manipulators’ than expressions of interior feelings (‘The Human Condition’, in A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre, ed. M. Bampi, C. Larrington and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (Cambridge, UK, 2020), pp. 177–91 (p. 191)). »
10      T. Bourns, ‘Between Nature and Culture: Animals and Humans in Old Norse Literature’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2018) and ‘Animal Emotionality and Selfhood in Old Norse Textual Culture’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 8.1 (2024), 97–115; E. A. Haley-Halinski, ‘Birds and Humans in the Old Norse World, c. 600–1500 AD’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2021); H. J. Evans Tang, Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas (Cambridge, UK, 2022); K. Jennbert, Animals and Humans: Recurrent Symbiosis in Archaeology and Old Norse Religion (Lund, 2011); L. Rohrbach, Der tierische Blick. Mensch-Tier-Relationen in der Sagaliteratur (Tübingen, 2009). »
11      R. Merkelbach, Monsters in Society: Alterity, Transgression and the Use of the Past in Medieval Iceland (Berlin, 2019); Merkelbach and G. Knight, eds, Margins, Monsters, Deviants: Alterities in Old Norse Literature and Culture (Turnhout, 2020); Ármann Jakobsson and Mayburd, Paranormal Encounters in Iceland, 1150–1400 (Berlin, 2020); M. Su, Werewolves in Old Norse Literature: Between the Monster and the Man (Turnhout, 2023). »
12      C. Abram, ‘Kennings and Things: Towards an Object-Oriented Skaldic Poetics’, in The Shapes of Early English Poetry, ed. E. Weiskott and I Dumitrescu (Berlin, 2019), pp. 161–88; Knutson, ‘When Objects Misbehave’ and ‘The Materiality of Myth: Divine Objects in Norse Mythology’, Temenos – Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 55.1 (2019), 29–53; M. Mayburd, ‘Between a Rock and a Soft Place: The Materiality of Old Norse Dwarves and Paranormal Ecologies in Fornaldarsögur’, in Supernatural Encounters in Old Norse Literature and Tradition, ed. D. Sävborg and K. Bek-Pedersen (Turnhout, 2018), pp. 189–214; T. L. Waters, ‘Materiality and Myth: Encountering the Broken Body in the Eddic Corpus’, VMS 18 (2022), 179–205. »
13      C. Abram, Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature (Charlottesville, VA, 2019); J. Ahola, ‘Arnarvatnsheiði and the Space for Outlaws’, in Stanzas of Friendship: Studies in Honour of Tatjana N. Jackson, ed. N. Gvorzdetskaja, I. Konovalova, E. Melnikova and A. Podossinov (Moscow, 2011), pp. 35–47; E. R. Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar and Gísla saga Súrssonar: Landscape in the Outlaw Sagas’, SS 82.4 (2010), 365–88; M. Egeler, ‘Geocriticism, Place and Landscape: Theoretical Perspectives on Space, Meaning and Memory’, in Dreaming of a Glacier: Snæfellsjökull in a Geocritical Perspective, ed. M. Egeler, and S. Gropper (Munich, 2020), pp. 17–42; Lethbridge, ‘The Icelandic Sagas and Saga Landscapes: Writing, Reading and Retelling Íslendingasögur Narratives’, Gripla 27 (2016), 51–92; M. Poilvez, ‘Access to the Margins: Outlawry and Narrative Spaces in Medieval Icelandic Outlaw Sagas’, Brathair 12.1 (2012), 115–36; I. Wyatt, ‘The Landscape of the Icelandic Sagas: Text, Place and National Identity’, Landscapes 5 (2004), 55–73. »
14      See, for example, Bourns, ‘Animal Emotionality and Selfhood’, p. 115; Ármann Jakobsson’s afterword to Merkelbach and Knight’s edited volume, Margins, Monsters, Deviants (pp. 239–40); and Su’s Conclusion in Werewolves. »
15      Posthumanism should not be confused with transhumanism, which promotes the transcendence of biological humanity through technology and reinforces a humanist perspective by centring the human and extending ideals of human perfectibility, rationality and agency (C. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism (Minneapolis, MN, 2010), p. xiii). Posthumanism does not reject humanity, but challenges a specific conception of the human – one that, as N. Katherine Hayles notes, has historically applied only to a privileged few with the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualise themselves as ‘autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice’ (How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL, 1999), p. 286). »
16      J. D. Bolter, ‘Posthumanism’, in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, ed. K. B. Jensen and R. T. Craig (Chichester, 2016), pp. 1–8 (p. 1). As Alison Ravenscroft observes, the ‘human’ in posthumanism often reflects the Western liberal subject (‘Strange Weather: Indigenous Materialisms, New Materialism, and Colonialism’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.3 (2018), 353–70 (p. 357)). This is partly due to the lack of scholarly recognition of Indigenous ontologies and knowledge systems that align with posthumanist thought (see K. TallBear, ‘Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms’, in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. J. Radin and E. Kowal (Cambridge, MA, 2017) pp. 179–202 (p. 187)). »
17      E. A. Joy and C. Dionne, ‘Before the Trains of Thought Have Been Laid Down So Firmly: The Premodern Post/Human’, Postmedieval 1.1 (2010), 1–9 (p. 6); J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis, MN, 2014), p. xvii. Medieval posthumanist research has predominantly focused on Latin, Old English, Middle English and Anglo-Norman texts (see, for example, the contributions to R. H. Godden and A. S. Mittman, eds, Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (Cham, 2019)). Notable Norse exceptions include Jessica Clare Hancock’s analysis of male identities in Vǫlsunga saga (‘Beyond Sorrow and Swords: Gender in the Old Norse Völsung Legend and its British Rewritings’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2014)) and Judy Quinn’s ‘Post-Human Perspectives on Old Norse Mythology’, in Res, Artes et Religio, ed. S. Walther, R. Jucknies, J. Meurer-Bongardt and J. E. Schnall (Leeds, 2021), pp. 479–90, which explores the resonance of Old Norse mythological texts with contemporary debates about the posthuman condition. »
18      C. Phelpstead, ‘Ecocriticism and Eyrbyggja saga’, Leeds Studies in English 45 (2014), 1–18 (p. 2); Abram, Evergreen Ash, p. 39. »
19      The term ‘actant’, drawn from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, denotes any entity, animate or inanimate, that participates in agency (see B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2005)). »
20      S. Frost and D. Coole, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. S. Frost and D. Coole (Durham, NC, 2010), pp. 1–46 (p. 3). The descriptor ‘new’ is in some ways misleading, since the new materialist focus on the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking central to many traditional Indigenous ontologies (see Ravenscroft, ‘Strange Weather’). »
21      While new materialist perspectives are gaining traction in medieval scholarship (see, e.g., J. J. Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable and Mineral (Washington, DC, 2012) and J. Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester, 2017)), most studies focus on Latin, Old and Middle English and Anglo-Norman texts. For approaches informed by new materialism in an Old Norse context, see Abram, ‘Kennings and Things’, p. 165; R. Cole, ‘Philology and Desire in Old Norse, between Stone and a Hard Place’, JEGP 117.4 (2018), 505–25; Mayburd, ‘Objects and Agency’; Knutson ‘Materiality of Myth’ and ‘Objects that Misbehave’; and Waters, ‘Materiality and Myth’. »
22      D. Goodley, R. Lawthom, K. Liddiard and K. Runswick-Cole, ‘The Desire for New Humanisms’, Journal of Disability Studies in Education 1 (2020), 125–44. »
23      For two recent publications that provide an overview of the field, see: Ármann Jakobsson, A. K. Heiniger, C. Crocker and Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir, ‘Disability before Disability: Mapping the Uncharted in the Medieval Sagas’, SS 92.4 (2020), 440–60; C. Crocker, Y. Tirosh and Ármann Jakobsson, ‘Disability in Medieval Iceland: Some Methodological Concerns’, in Understanding Disability throughout History: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Iceland from Settlement to 1936, ed. Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and J. G. Rice (London, 2021), pp. 12–28. »
24      J. L. Byock, ‘The Skull and Bones in Egil’s saga: A Viking, A Grave, and Paget’s Disease’, Viator 24 (1993), 23–50; J. G. Høyersten, ‘Manifestations of Psychiatric Illness in Texts from the Medieval and Viking Era’, Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy 2 (2015), 57–60; P. Stride, ‘Egill Skallagrímsson: The First Case of Van Buchem Disease?’, J R Coll Physicians Edinb 41 (2011), 169–73; D. C. Whaley and D. Elliot, ‘A Medieval Casebook: Hand Cures Documented in the Icelandic Sagas of Bishops’, Journal of Hand Surgery 19B.5 (1994), 667–71. »
25      L. Bragg, ‘Disfigurement, Disability, and Disintegration in Sturlunga saga’, Alvissmál 4 (1994), 15–32; L. Bragg, ‘Impaired and Inspired: The Makings of a Medieval Icelandic Poet’, in Madness, Disability and Social Exclusion: The Archaeology and Anthropology of ‘Difference’, ed. J. Hubert (London, 2000), pp. 128–43; L. Bragg, Oedipus Borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Cranbury, NJ, 2004). »
26      E.g. Ármann Jakobsson, ‘The Madness of King Sigurðr: Narrating Insanity in an Old Norse Kings’ Saga’, in Social Dimensions of Medieval Disease and Disability, ed. S. Crawford and C. Lee (Oxford, 2014), pp. 29–36; K. Anderson, ‘Mediating the Other through Language: Medieval Icelandic Sagas and the Construction of Disability Discourse’ (unpublished MA dissertation, Háskóli Íslands, 2016); C. Crocker, ‘Narrating Blindness and Seeing Ocularcentrism in Þorsteins saga hvíta’, Gripla 31 (2020), 267–92; A. K. Heiniger, ‘The Silenced Trauma in the Íslendingasögur’, Gripla 31 (2020), 233–65; S. B. Lawing, ‘Victims of Maiming in Sturlunga saga’, Mirator 2.20 (2021), 54–72; M. D. Lawson, ‘Children of a One-Eyed God: Impairment in the Myth and Memory of Medieval Scandinavia’ (unpublished MA dissertation, East Tennessee State University, 2019); T. Michelson-Ambelang, ‘Outsiders on the Inside: Conception of Disability in Medieval Western Scandinavia’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015); M. S. Morrow, ‘Disabled Masculinity: An Intersectional Analysis of the Icelandic Sagas’ (unpublished MA dissertation, University of Oslo, 2020); J. P. Sexton, ‘Atypical Bodies: Seeking after Meaning in Physical Difference’, in A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Hsy, T. V. Pearman and J. Eyler (London, 2020), pp. 19–34. »
27      That is, the use of disability as a ‘prosthesis’ for characterisation and plot rather than as an authentic representation of disability (D. Mitchell and S. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000)). »