Tracing the Human through Paradigms of Change

The first part addresses the relationship between bodies, identities and environments through the prism of wholeness, focusing on narratives and poetic modes in which bodies lose limbs, fall apart and are reconstituted through nonhuman matter. In Chapter 1, I explore limb-loss in mythic narrative, paying particular attention to the intersections between embodiment, gender and disability. I then turn to bodily fragmentation in skaldic imagery and in the eddic riddle sequence known as Heiðreks gátur. Together, these texts reveal a fascination with material fragmentation and the ‘dividual’ nature of the self – portrayed as distributed, unstable and materially contingent. I set these themes against contemporary Christian discourse on the resurrected and reassembled body, with its emphasis on bodily integrity.

Chapter 2 turns to the treatment of bodies in fornaldarsögur, focusing on Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana, in which one of the protagonists undergoes a sequence of radical bodily interventions – from limb-loss to prosthetic implant to surgical reattachment. This saga’s vivid experimentation with embodiment illuminates cultural preoccupations with vulnerability, enhancement and the limits of human form, shaped by contemporary frameworks and historical factors. In particular, I situate this saga in the context of theological concerns for wholeness and medical theories of the body, as well as the historical context of legal changes to corporal punishment and the rise of the cult of relics in Iceland.

Although the texts discussed in both chapters share a concern with the contingency and fragility of bodies and identities, they diverge in outlook. Mythological narrative and Old Norse poetics embrace a piecemeal and ‘dividual’ self, while Egils saga einhenda – despite experimenting with more-than-human forms of embodiment – ultimately reaffirms a model of biologically ‘intact’ humanity.

Part II shifts focus from the body’s internal coherence to its external relations with the material world, returning to mythological narrative and traditional poetics in Chapter 3. In the first section, I examine human and divine perceptions of materiality in Snorra Edda, using thirteenth-century continental theories of matter and cosmology as a comparative frame. The second section analyses the interplay between gods and their objects in Snorra Edda and the Poetic Edda, exploring how these interactions shape identity and distribute agency across more-than-human entities in the mythic world. In the third section, I investigate portrayals of materiality in skaldic verse and Old Norse riddles, highlighting poetic anthropomorphism and zoomorphism as prevailing modes of engagement with ‘inanimate’ things – natural and man-made alike. Across these analyses, I explore how identity extends into and is shaped by its wider environment, and explore why processes of entanglement and deception dominate mythic and poetic depictions of materiality.

Chapter 4 then examines the shifting boundary between human and animal identities in the Sigurðr-cycle (Poetic Edda, Snorra Edda and Vǫlsunga saga), using two case studies to explore how bodily forms and behaviours mediate identities. This analysis is grounded in medieval philosophical and religious thinking on species difference, and implements Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the ‘intimate caesura’ – the subtle but decisive internal break that humans construct to distinguish themselves from animals.1 G. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attell (Stanford, CA, 2004). The first case study explores characters who transgress species boundaries, examining humans who become animal-like through their social alterity, and animals who become human-like, through their adoption of cognitive and emotional capacities associated with personhood. The second case study turns to acts of consumption, including anthropophagy (humans eating human flesh) and the ingestion of animal flesh and plant matter that alter human cognition and behaviour. These episodes imagine the human subject as permeable and responsive to nonhuman materials, demonstrating the contested and mobile nature of the human–nonhuman divide. By tracing these motifs across prose and verse traditions, the chapter also illuminates the contrasting narrative strategies of eddic poetry and fornaldarsaga-prose, revealing divergent artistic and thematic priorities in their treatment of shared story-material.

Part III then directly addresses shapeshifting, analysing episodes of transformation across a broader corpus of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts, as test cases for medieval attitudes towards personhood, embodiment and humanity. Transformation-episodes can prompt scrutiny of the parameters of personal identity, as well as the ways in which humans categorise and perceive the surrounding world. However, how a narrator presents a transformation may be dictated as much by narratorial conventions within a given genre as by cultural attitudes towards the continuity of the self, and both aspects are discussed. Chapter 5 undertakes a detailed analysis of the Old Norse lexicon of transformation, revealing a broader and more nuanced vocabulary than has generally been recognised. Earlier studies have tended to concentrate on a small subset of terms, and this chapter builds on that foundation by expanding the lexical field through which shapeshifting motifs are expressed across the corpus. Through this examination of terminology, I further identify three distinct modes of depicting transformation, that engage with or resist the concept of change to varying degrees: metamorphosis, hybridisation and illusion.

Chapter 6 then zooms out from the lexical evidence to consider the recurring narrative motifs and features of transformation across the corpus. I highlight key patterns, such as the rarity of permanent transformations, the absence of examples of nonhumans becoming human, and the importance of volition and agency in determining whether a transformation is positively or negatively framed. A further point of focus is the motif of recognition and cognitive continuity: many transformation-episodes suggest a persistence of underlying identity despite physical change, thereby complicating notions of embodied selfhood. To contextualise this discussion, I explore Christian discourse on the body and soul in medieval Iceland, as well as medical-physiological models that interlink body, emotion and cognition. While shapeshifting-episodes often suggest a subtle disjunction between body and identity, contemporary medical and religious models of the time, by contrast, treat embodiment as integral to self and character.

Taken together, these analyses reveal a striking diversity of ways in which Old Norse texts imagined and explored human identity. Traditional and experimental ways of conceptualising the world, and the place of the human within it, were not supplanted by orthodox intellectual paradigms prevalent in other medieval European literary cultures, but coexist alongside them. Across genres, we find narrators and poets deeply engaging with the porous boundaries of self, body and environment, presenting the human as dynamic and mutable.

These questions remain with us. Today, evolving debates around the nature of the human – shaped by technological, ecological and ethical pressures – invite renewed scrutiny of long-held assumptions, compelling us to reconsider how we have historically framed our relationship to the world, and to ourselves. While the book does not seek direct analogies, it argues that medieval perspectives on human identity are not only historically significant, but intellectually vital. They remind us that our concepts of ‘the human’ have always been constructed, questioned and remade. In that sense, this study invites readers to engage with these works not just as historical artefacts, but as participants in an ongoing and unfinished conversation.