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Wholeness and Partibility: Bodily Fragmentation in Mythological Narrative and Old Norse Poetics
Bodies in texts are encoded with diverse cultural meanings, expressing a web of ideological and social concerns that are often felt most keenly in the context of physical change. Take the hagiographic Magnús saga lengri, for instance, which closes with a visceral miracle performed by the eponymous saint, after a man has been consumed by wolves:
Spýja þar upp öllu, sem etið höfðu af hans holdi ok beini, ok hverfa eptir þat í skóginn. Ok er lítill tími er liðinn, lítr hann heilagan Magnús til kominn, ok blessar með sinni hægri hendi allt samt, spýju varganna ok beinin; verðr þá því næst af þessu alheill líkamr.
1 Magn, ch. 35 (ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, p. 383). Magnús saga lengri, an account of the twelfth-century St. Magnús, earl of Orkney, survives in an eighteenth-century paper copy of a vellum manuscript written c. 1400. It was probably composed in its present form at the beginning of the fourteenth century.[There they [the wolves] vomited up everything they had eaten of his flesh and bones, and they turn back afterwards into the wood. And when a little time had passed, he sees holy Magnús come, and Magnús blesses with his right hand everything together, the wolves’ vomit and the bones; as a result, the body becomes entirely whole.]
Underlying this episode of regurgitation and reconstitution are medieval conceptions of matter, change and human identity, informed by Christian doctrinal debate. The episode reveals a concern for the material continuity of one’s self-same body at the Resurrection of the Dead, a continuity which some theologians worried would be impacted by anthropophagous animal digestion:
2 K. Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus, OH, 2011), p. 25. in short, if a person’s body were consumed by an animal, would that person be able to materially resurrect? Such anxieties are also evident in stipulations for the burial of body-parts in Icelandic law codes, which similarly reflect debate over the re-assemblage of the body at the Last Judgement.
3 S. B. Lawing, ‘The Burial of Body Parts in Old Icelandic Grágás’, in Paranormal Encounters, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Mayburd, pp. 131–50. See also the motif of regurgitation on the Bjarnastaðahlíð panels (c. 1200), discussed in Selma Jónsdóttir, An 11th Century Byzantine Last Judgement in Iceland (Reykjavík, 1959). Questions of embodiment and identity, conceptualised through religious doctrine, mattered to medieval audiences.
Human bodily integrity is privileged not only in episodes which reflect Christian eschatological concerns: miracle accounts in which an injured or non-normative body is made
alheill (‘entirely whole’) in order to prove a religious figure’s sanctity also invoke a correlation between bodily restoration and spiritual redemption. For instance, in the Latin
Passio et miracula beati Olavi, a boy, wrongfully accused of a crime, has his tongue cut out.
4 A collection of legends about Saint Óláfr (c. 995–1030). The manuscript containing the longer Passio (Oxford, Corpus Christi College 209) dates to c. 1200 (C. Phelpstead, ‘Introduction’, in A History of Norway and the Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Óláfr, ed. C. Phelpstead, trans. D. Kunin (Exeter, 2001), p. xxix). Having fallen asleep at the martyr’s sepulchre, the youth sees a handsome man (cue St Óláfr) approach and open his mouth:
lingue truncate partem que remanscrat tanta uirtute extraxit et extendit, ut uiolenciam conaminis adolescens ferre non ualens in somnis clamare cogeretur.
5 Passio (ed. Metcalfe, p. 80).[he [Ólafr] pulled out the remaining part of the boy’s tongue and stretched it out with such force that, unable to endure that violence, the boy was compelled to cry out in his sleep.]
When the boy wakes, his tongue is fully whole, and he is able to speak again. The boy’s injury is conceptualised as lack or absence, with the saint healing the youth by literally extending matter from matter, forcing the tongue to grow anew.
6 This rhetoric of physical wholeness and spiritual health is paradigmatic of the broader Christian approach to disability, which largely separated impaired individuals from the general community (through segregationist charity) or interpreted impairment on a divine level (through the notion of virtuous suffering, the equation of sin with impairment, or through curative miracles wrought by saints). See Lawson, ‘Children of a One-Eyed God’, p. 103. Bodily differences are viewed as monstrous defects and deviations from what Augustine called the
humanae naturae figuram (the true form of human nature), achieved at the Resurrection.
7 Enchiridion, ch. 87 (ed. Evans, p. 96): ‘ita et cetera quae singuli quique partus, uel amplius uel minus aliquid habendo, uel quadam nimia deformitate, monstra dicuntur, ad humanae naturae figuram resurrectione reuocabuntur’ (‘other births, which because they have either an excess or a defect, or because they are much deformed, are called monstrosities, [and] will at the resurrection be restored to the true form of human nature’). The resurrected body is thus by definition the ‘normate’ body, a term with which Rosemarie Garland-Thomson refers to the theoretical body from which all ‘disabled’ bodies deviate (Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, 1997), p. 8).While the concept of the humanae naturae figuram held normative force in medieval Iceland as a Christian nation, vernacular literary culture often takes a more exploratory approach to bodily wholeness. The concept of a stable, unitary body diverges from what we find in mythological texts and Old Norse poetics – works which often test the boundaries between humans and a more-than-human world. The fragmentation of humanoid bodies recurs throughout Snorra Edda and the Poetic Edda, and it is embedded within the aesthetic logic of skaldic kennings and the vernacular riddle tradition. Bodily integrity is neither presented as a divine ideal, nor envisaged as reality in the oscillating imagery of skaldic verse and riddles.
This chapter explores limb-loss in mythic narrative alongside the fragmentation of bodies in skaldic poetry, with comparative analysis of
Heiðreks gátur, the riddle sequence preserved in the thirteenth-century
fornaldarsaga Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks.
8 On the date of composition, see O. Pritsak, ‘Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs’, in Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Pulsiano and Wolf, p. 283. The saga survives in three versions, discussed further below. From the one-eyed Óðinn and one-handed Týr, to the body-less head of Mímir, the physical injuries of the
æsir (gods)
9 On the meaning of the term æsir, commonly applied in scholarship to a categorical grouping of gods (and often counterposed against vanir), see J. Lindow, ‘Vanir and Æsir’, in The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures, ed. J. P. Schjødt, J. Lindow and A. Andrén (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 1033–50; and Frog, ‘Æsir: An Obituary’, in Res, Artes et Religio, ed. Walther et al., pp. 141–75. are central to the narrative and symbolic economy of Norse myth. We encounter them in extended prose narratives (such as the loss of Týr’s hand in
Gylfaginning), and embedded in poetic allusion, as when the ninth-century skald Þorbjǫrn hornklofi refers to Óðinn using the kenning ‘eineygr faðmbyggvir Friggjar’ (‘one-eyed embrace-occupier of Frigg’).
10 Haraldskvæði 12, SkP I, 107. While these motifs have attracted increasing interest from scholars of disability,
11 A. Lassen, ‘Höðr’s Blindness and the Pledging of Óðinn’s Eye: A Study of the Symbolic Value of the Eyes of Höðr, Óðinn and Þórr’, in Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society: Proceedings of the 11th International Saga Conference 2–7 July 2000, ed. G. Barnes and M. Clunies Ross (Sydney, 2000), pp. 220–9; W. Sayers, ‘“Ok er hann einhendr”: Týr’s Enhanced Functionality’, Neophilologus 100 (2016), 245–55; K. Wanner, ‘Sewn Lips, Propped Jaws, and a Silent Áss (or Two): Doing Things with Mouths in Norse Myth’, JEGP 111.1 (2012), 1–24; Lawson, ‘Impairment in Myth and Memory’; Michelson-Ambelang, ‘Outsiders on the Inside’; Kolfinna Jónatansdóttir, ‘“Blindur er betri en brenndur sé.” Um norræna guði og skerðingar’, in Fötlun og menning: Íslandssagan í öðru ljósi, ed. Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir, Ármann Jakobsson and Kristín Björnsdóttir (Reykjavík, 2013), pp. 27–49. the gendered dynamics of bodily loss have received less attention: as explored below, male bodies are often dismembered for cosmological ends, while female bodies remain largely intact.
I use this analysis of fragmentation in mythic narrative as a broader conceptual backdrop against which to examine the presentation of the body in Old Norse poetics.
12 Previous discussions of the body in skaldic verse include Guðrún Nordal, Tools of Literacy: The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Toronto, 2001), 271–308; E. Osborne, ‘Grund gulls [ground of gold]: The Trope of Woman as “Land” in Skaldic Poetry from the Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries’, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies 22 (2015), 26–51; Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘The Head, the Heart, and the Breast: Bodily Conceptions of Emotion and Cognition in Old Norse Skaldic Poetry’, VMS 15 (2019), 29–64. In skaldic imagery, the human body is not whole: it disintegrates into constituent parts, blending and merging with objects, animals and landscapes. The Old Norse riddle tradition likewise produces an ecological imaginary of coalescent bodies and shifting ontologies. Within both poetic discourses, the human is envisaged neither as a fixed nor bounded figure, but rather an open assemblage of materials and relationships, constantly reshaped by its context. These texts reveal an enduring fascination with the material fragmentation and partibility of the self, offering an intriguing counterpart to the Christian emphasis on bodily integrity. These different attitudes towards wholeness coexist in the textual culture of medieval Iceland, suggesting that audiences had access to, and perhaps appetite for, heterogeneous models for conceptualising the embodied self.