Male Impairment and Mythic Function in Snorra Edda and the Poetic Edda
The major written sources of Old Norse myth are
Snorra Edda and the
Poetic Edda. The former is a guide to the composition and comprehension of skaldic poetry, written by Icelandic polymath Snorri Sturluson in the early thirteenth century and preserved in fourteenth-century manuscripts.
1 The primary manuscript witnesses are Codex Regius (‘R’) (GKS 2367 4to, c. 1325), Codex Wormianus (‘W’) (AM 242 fol., c. 1350), Codex Trajectinus (‘T’) (Traj 1375, c. 1600; the manuscript that T was copied from is no longer extant, but was closely related to R and Codex Upsaliensis (‘U’) (DG 11 4to, c. 1300). While these witnesses exhibit variation in textual inclusions, wording, poetry quoted and ordering of parts, research identifies an affinity between R, T and W, and a distinction between RTW and U. R(TW) and U are considered the main versions of Snorra Edda, with scholars suggesting that U may derive from an abridged draft version and RTW from an expanded revision by Snorri. Faulkes, ed., Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, 2nd edn (London, 2005), p. xxx; and Heimir Pálsson, ed., Snorri Sturluson. The Uppsala Edda. DG 11 4to, trans. A. Faulkes (London, 2012), p. xliii. Snorra Edda comprises four parts: a Prologue, Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál and Háttatal (likely composed in reverse order to their textual presentation). The Prologue provides an intellectual framing for the work; Gylfaginning gives a chronological account of Norse mythic narrative; Skáldskaparmál discusses poetic diction (kennings and heiti) and relates several additional narratives that provide context for the comprehension of mythologically-motivated kennings; and Háttatal exemplifies the verse forms used in skaldic poetry. The latter is the name given to a manuscript collection of thirty-one anonymous, stanzaic poems composed in eddic metres and interspersed with prose links (GKS 2365 4to, c. 1270).
2 Eddic poetry is also preserved in the manuscripts of Snorra Edda (as verse quotations in Gylfaginning and appended to some manuscript compilations) and in fornaldarsögur (composed from the late twelfth to the fifteenth centuries), about seventy percent of which contain poetry, almost entirely in eddic metres. M. Clunies Ross, ‘The Transmission and Preservation of Eddic Poetry’, in A Handbook to Eddic Poetry, ed. Larrington, Quinn and Schorn, pp. 12–32 (p. 28). Eddic poetry can be narrative, dialogic or monologic, and likely served as an important vehicle for the preservation and performance of traditional knowledge and stories. In contrast to Snorri’s schematisation of myth, eddic discourse communicates these narratives in an allusive and tensile fashion. Though these sources may preserve traces of pre-Christian belief, their contexts of preservation indicate that the knowledge systems, themes and narrative traditions they encode continued to have purchase for later medieval Icelandic audiences – perhaps providing some conceptual underpinnings for cultural attitudes towards self and body.
3 See further M. Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society. Volume 1: The Myths (Odense, 1994), p. 23.In these stories, the injuries acquired by the
æsir present the male body as a kind of material resource, exchanged for cultural and cosmic advantage.
4 My focus here is on acquired injuries (as opposed to impairments that appear to be ‘congenital’, such as Hǫðr’s blindness and Víðarr’s muteness). They fall broadly into two kinds, based on their narrative valence: injuries the gods inflict upon themselves to gain knowledge, and those inflicted by others that necessarily avert catastrophe.
5 See Wanner, ‘Sewn Lips, Propped Jaws’, p. 4, who develops similar groupings of mythic injuries along the lines of benefit and self-imposition. Óðinn’s sacrifices belong to the first group: the eye he exchanges for a drink from Mímir’s well,
6 Vsp. 28. which Snorri describes as a source of wisdom and human understanding,
7 Gylf., ch. 15 (ed. Faulkes, p. 17): ‘spekð ok mannvit’. and his whole body, enigmatically offered in stanzas 128 of
Hávamál, ‘in exchange for an intellectual rebirth’, as Clunies Ross puts it.
8 Prolonged Echoes I, 156. Vǫluspá alludes not only to the placement of Óðinn’s eye in Mímir’s well, but to the concealment of Heimdallr’s ‘hljóð’ there too, a term which refers to sound and the act of listening/hearing itself.
9 Vsp. 25, Vsp(H) 23. How we interpret the term in its verse context is equivocal, though scholars often adopt the latter sense, and it is possible to understand
hljóð as an oblique reference to Heimdallr’s ear (the organ enabling hearing) itself.
10 E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavians (Westport, CT, 1975), p. 149. It is probably significant that the noun participates in alliteration (since this may have influenced word choice). Hljóð is also used as a determinant in an ear-kenning, hljóðgreip (sound-grabber), by Þjóðólfr Arnórsson (SkP II, 169–71). If so, Heimdallr’s dismemberment mirrors Óðinn’s, as a bodily organ placed voluntarily in the well to enable cognitive enhancement (perhaps explaining Heimdallr’s keen hearing: in
Gylfaginning, Heimdallr can hear grass growing on the ground and wool growing on sheep!).
11 Gylf., ch. 27 (p. 25).Other injuries serve a clearer, defensive purpose. Týr’s hand is bitten off by the Fenris-wolf, an act of dismemberment that enables the gods to bind the wolf, ensuring the temporary preservation of cosmic order.
12 Gylf., ch. 25 (p. 25), Ls 40. Another injury that serves as a means of restraint is the mutilation of Loki’s lips, which are stitched closed by dwarves after Loki loses a wager in
Skáldskaparmál.
13 Skm., ch. 35 (ed. Faulkes, pp. 41–3). The cosmic advantage of depriving Loki of speech is clear in those narratives in which Loki weaponises his voice: Baldr’s death, though effected by Hǫðr’s actions, is caused by Loki’s duplicitous speech;
14 Gylf., ch. 49 (p. 45). likewise, Loki’s barbed tongue instigates the drama of
Lokasenna, in which he wreaks havoc by systematically defaming the Norse pantheon.
15 The cosmic impact of this senna is hinted at throughout the poem, over which the shadow of Ragnarǫk hangs: Loki’s verses reference Baldr’s death and Freyr’s loss of his sword, while the prose framing in the Codex Regius manuscript includes a coda describing Loki’s binding by the æsir, an event occurring late in mythic chronology. Finally, straddling the two categories is Mímir’s severed head. While the
æsir are not responsible for the decapitation, they nonetheless turn the injury to their advantage: Óðinn embalms the head and endows it with the capacity for speech, affording access to Mímir’s wisdom and counsel.
16 Hkr., ch. 4 (I, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 13). Heimskringla is a collection of kings’ sagas, written by Snorri Sturluson, c. 1230.The body-parts detached or injured are not arbitrary, but rather stand in a synecdochic relationship to the deity to which they belong, emblematising a unique skill of that deity.
17 E.g., Loki’s mouth embodies his capacity for catalytic speech; Óðinn’s eye, his pursuit for perceptual knowledge; Heimdallr’s ears/hearing, his function as watchman of the gods; Týr’s right hand (the hand with which a sword is held), his role as the bravest god; Mímir’s head, his great wisdom. Each god paradoxically sacrifices that which he embodies in order to develop his mythic function or preserve cosmic order. The maintenance of bodily integrity, then, is not a prerequisite for the maintenance of self-identity. Rather, the sacrifice of body-parts supports the personal role played by each god within the mythic schema and advantages the wider community of the gods.
18 The principle of exchange underlying the æsir’s injuries is visible not only in symmetry between the narratives of mythic impairment, but also in lexical repetition, with the term veð (pledge, surety) applied both to Óðinn’s eye (Gylf., ch. 15 (p. 3); Vsp. 27–8) and Týr’s hand (Gylf., ch. 25 (p. 25)). Reciprocation emerges as a key mode of social interaction and cultural production in the mythic world (as suggested in Hávamál 145’s statement, ‘ey sér til gildis gjǫf’ (Eddukvæði I, 352): ‘a gift must always be repaid’): the divine male body was not exempt from this mode. These impairments are thus viewed as permanent sacrifices that are not stigmatising and do not lead to social disenfranchisement.
19 Loki does, however, taunt Týr for his one-handedness in Lokasenna 38, in which all the gods are derided by Loki. A similar (though inverted) framing of impairment in terms of social contribution appears in the eddic
Hávamál:
Haltr ríðr hrossi,
hjǫrð rekr handarvanr,
daufr vegr ok dugir;
blindr er betri
en brenndr sé;
nýtr manngi nás.
20 Hvm. 71 (p. 336).[The limping man rides a horse, the handless man drives a herd, the deaf man fights and shows prowess, being blind is better than being burnt, a corpse is useful to no-one.]
The causal relationship between impairment and social contribution in Norse myth is reversed in this gnomic stanza: in mythic narrative, body-parts are exchanged for cosmic advantage for the benefit of the community, while in the stanza, physical difference is not necessarily a barrier to social participation. Nonetheless, the overall interpretation of disability stays the same: impairment is not considered an inherent deficiency or liability if individuals could still contribute to society. This is supported by Michael Lawson’s research on impairment in Norse myth and memory, which finds that a person’s value was measured by their contribution to the larger group, with their capacity to benefit the collective taking precedence over their individual accomplishments.
21 ‘Impairment in Myth and Memory’, pp. 36–7.The motif of bodily sacrifice for cosmic benefit is further exemplified in the creation myth, in which the gigantic body of Ymir is dismembered by his descendants, Óðinn, Vili and Vé.
22 This narrative is preserved partially in the eddic and skaldic record, and systematised by Snorri in Gylfaginning. Masculine pronouns and demonstrative adjectives are applied to Ymir in Gylfaginning. Ymir’s component parts become the raw material for the ordered cosmos: his blood is the sea, his flesh is the earth, his bones are the mountains, his teeth and bone-splinters are the rocks, his skull is the sky, his hair forms the trees, his brain is the clouds, his eyelashes are the fortification of Miðgarðr.
23 Vm. 21, Grm. 40–1. Clunies Ross characterises this as a myth of ‘male pseudo-procreation’ (where male intellectual and spiritual creativity substitutes for female physiological procreativity) (M. Clunies Ross, ‘Pseudo-Procreation Myths in Old Norse: An Anthropological Perspective’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 1.2–3 (1990), 147–58; Prolonged Echoes I, 150–2, 216–18). However, Katherine Olley critiques how this concept has been applied in the Old Norse sphere, arguing that pseudo-procreation should not be viewed as an exclusively mythic or male phenomenon, and that Norse creation myths are better read in terms of female exclusion from the shared procreative process than in terms of male appropriation of female roles (‘Reassessing Pseudo-Procreation in Old Norse Literature’, Saga-Book 46 (2022), 93–118). The attentive reader will observe that this rather drastic example of the cultural productivity of the fragmented body again focuses on a male subject. Female bodies are largely exempt from this pattern of bodily sacrifice for cosmic gain. Indeed, as I have explored elsewhere, the female Jǫrð – who coexists with Ymir as a simultaneous embodiment of the Earth in the Norse schema – remains alive and whole, in contrast to the deceased and piecemeal Ymir.
24 See A. Kreager, ‘“Hvernig skal jǫrð kenna? Kalla Ymis hold ok móður Þórs”: A Study in Male Dismemberment and Female Integrity in Old Norse Myth’, in Women and Goddesses in Old Norse Mythology and Folklore, ed. Tommy Kuusela and Ingunn Ásdísardóttir (Brepols, forthcoming).The one narrative in which a goddess does lose a body-part (or at least, bodily material) reinforces this principle of female integrity in Norse myth, differing from male impairments on several counts. In
Skáldskaparmál, Loki chops off the goddess Sif’s hair with the express purpose of causing trouble, ‘til lævísi’ (‘for the sake of mischief’),
25 Skm., ch. 35 (p. 41). and Þórr forces him to commission a golden headpiece for Sif as a replacement. Unlike Óðinn’s eye or Týr’s hand, Sif’s loss is temporary: her hair is immediately replaced with a headpiece that is ‘holdgróinn’ (‘grown to her flesh’), restoring her bodily wholeness.
26 Ibid. (p. 42). This evocative term, along with the whole episode, is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. While Loki’s motivation for the assault suggests that this dismemberment was not intended as a form of sacrifice, the incident does nonetheless benefit the wider community of (male) gods: the dwarves who craft Sif’s golden headpiece also produce five other precious objects for Þórr, Óðinn and Freyr. Notably, it is Þórr, rather than Sif herself, who demands that she be made whole again, reflecting a male, spousal concern for female bodily integrity that accords with the largely peremptory treatment of
ásynjur by
æsir elsewhere in
Snorra Edda27 On the exclusion of goddesses from creative and recreative activities, see J. Jochens, Old Norse Images of Women (Philadelphia, PA, 1996), pp. 69–70. and which also highlights the importance of hair as an identity marker for women in Old Norse culture.
28 As Jenny Jochens observes, ‘since the law prohibited women from cutting their hair in male style, hair became the most important gender determinant’ (‘Before the Male Gaze: The Absence of the Female Body in Old Norse’, in Sex in the Middle Ages. A Book of Essays, ed. J. Salisbury (New York, 1991), pp. 3–29, p. 253). This episode illuminates the interplay of embodiment and social value in a mythic context, further highlighting how the literary treatment of material bodies is inflected by social categories, such as gender.
The development of this complex of ideas around male embodiment, ability and social function could reflect echoes of the outlook of a male-oriented Norse military community, with the element of bodily sacrifice resonating particularly for a warrior culture in which injury was a fact of life for many men.
29 See Anderson, ‘Mediating the Other’, p. 23; Lawson, ‘Impairment in Myth and Memory’, pp. 32–4. At the same time, the cross-textual pattern of bodily exchange for cosmic gain suggests that these impairments carry symbolic significance and constitute a form of ‘narrative prosthesis’.
30 On this term, see Introduction, footnote 37. In particular, episodes in which injuries occur invariably foreground the struggle between the culture of the gods and the entropic forces of chaos that threaten their world. Impairments are thus framed less as disabling events and more as necessary exchanges to safeguard the community against existential threats.
Those body-parts exchanged for augmented abilities (Óðinn’s eye and Heimdallr’s ear, the detachment of which appear to enable forms of clairvoyance and clairaudience) not only call to mind a specific reflex of narrative prosthesis, the ‘supercrip’ stereotype,
31 The ‘supercrip’ stereotype frames disability through a narrow lens, emphasising an individual’s ability to ‘overcome’ impairment, often by developing extraordinary abilities that compensate lost normative faculties – a trope frequently found in superhero fiction (see J. Grue, ‘Ablenationalists Assemble: On Disability in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 15.1 (2021), 1–17). but prompt questions of cognition beyond the body. As Quinn observes, we can view the deposition of Óðinn’s eye and Heimdallr’s hearing in Mímir’s well as biotechnological enhancements: the gods’ respective senses are made detachable from the bodily whole, but nonetheless remain operative in a new, non-bodily location.
32 ‘Post-Human Perspectives’, pp. 482–3. In this reading, the divine body is not impaired, but rather rearranged and updated, with cognition extending beyond the bounds of the body into the environment (Mímir’s well). Body and self are not viewed as autonomous and closed systems, but reach out into and combine materially with the world. This vision of the extended body finds compelling counterparts in the image patterns conjured through skaldic verse, where the human form is fragmented and combined with nonhuman materials.