Dissolving the Human: Fragmented Body-Parts and Blurred Boundaries in Skaldic Kennings

Body-parts feature in skaldic kennings as referents (the thing being described), base-words (the central noun in the kenning) and determinants (the qualifying noun in the kenning that shapes its meaning), while kennings for whole bodies are conspicuously absent from the corpus.2 The kennings discussed are preserved in manuscripts dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the difficulties in ascribing dates to the poetic composition of skaldic stanzas, see K. E. Gade, ‘Dating of Poetry and Principles of Normalisation’, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, ed. Whaley, pp. xliv–xlvi. By attending to the mechanics and perceptual logic of these lexical figures, we can trace how skaldic verse constructs a subtly networked ontology of the human in relation to the world.3 I have benefitted from the use of the print and electronic editions of the Skaldic Project, a work which is still in progress. At the time of writing, ninety-six percent of the corpus has been published in print or entered into the digital interface. T. Wills, ‘Statistics’, Skaldic Project, https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=skpstatstable [accessed 15 September 2022].

In posing these kinds of questions, kennings explore the eðli (nature) of things, probing their visual and material qualities, as well as their shared and incongruous traits. By momentarily erasing categorical boundaries (in this kenning, blood appears as ale) they evoke an impression of ontological fluidity. Moreover, they illuminate the layers of meaning and interrelation between humans and their environment: in this kenning, the human activity of warfare is reframed as benefitting the animal world. In doing so, kennings can also resist an anthropocentric perspective: that is, the placing of the human at the centre of a worldview, assigning intrinsic value to humans alone, and elevating them above nonhuman things, which are simply regarded as resources that can be admissibly exploited for the benefit of humans. Instead of isolating humans from nonhuman life, kennings reveal a dynamic world where humans, objects, animals and nature are deeply entangled (both visually and semantically). The human body is never presented as a unitary whole, but appears fragmented and mingled with nonhuman matter. In skaldic poetry, neither the category of the human nor the human form itself exists autonomously, independent of the more-than-human world.

Yet, even as kennings envision a world of porous boundaries and fluid relationships, they can subtly reinforce categorical distinctions. In this dual role, kennings both resist and reflect taxonomies. Take the animal-kennings listed in Table 1, for example.

Animal-kennings often use another type of animal as a base-word, standing syntactically in the position of the referent: fish can be snakes or birds; an ox can be a bear, a horse or a reindeer; a snake can be a whale or a fish; a whale can be a boar; a wolf can be a horse. We can also detect a taste for the inversion of categories in the kenning-patterns for fish, oxen, snakes and whales, where land-dwelling animals are used as base-words for sea-dwelling animals, and vice versa.

However, two animal classes – birds and horses – do not participate in this pattern of substitution. For horses, poets can use the general term dýr (animal) as a base-word, but I am not aware of any kennings that employ animals from other taxonomic classes as base-words for horses.15 ‘Expressions for Horse’, Skaldic Project, https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=kenning &i=76 [accessed 24 October 2023]. Similarly, bird-kennings exclusively use other birds as base-words (osprey, hawk, gull, starling, falcon, grouse, swan etc.), without transgressing species boundaries.16 ‘Expressions for Raven/Eagle’, Skaldic Project, https://skaldic.org/m.php?p= kenning&i=89 [accessed 24 October 2023]. This could suggest a sharper distinction between birds and other animal classes, or it might simply reflect the larger lexicon of bird-names available to poets. Interestingly, bird- and horse-names are used as base-words in kennings for other animals, but the reverse is not true. This asymmetry highlights how kennings can both blur and reinforce taxonomic boundaries. As such, kennings encode cultural beliefs about the nature of things, serving not only as poetic ornamentation but as a means of expressing and understanding ontological relationships.

So, what becomes of the living human body in kennings? I now explore body-parts as referents, determinants and base-words, illuminating how skalds use poetic diction to embed humans in their surrounding world of objects, landscapes and animals to a critical degree. First, I examine kennings for body-parts in which other body-parts serve as determinants and base-words, and which therefore evoke the human body twice over. Next, I analyse kennings where human body-parts act as base-words for objects and natural phenomena; here, the human body temporarily substitutes for the nonhuman referent, before retreating when the kenning is deciphered. I then consider kennings for body-parts where the human does not feature as either base-word or determinant, with the human body emerging only at the final moment of interpretive clarity. Finally, I address three types of kennings for men and women, which infer bodily wholeness, and which reflect three progressive levels at which the human disperses into a wider agential and ontological network.

Body-parts feature both as base-words and determinants for kennings for other body-parts, a practice evident in verses composed from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. Typically, body-parts or bodily substances serve as determinants in kennings, grounding the base-words within a bodily framework (see Table 2).

Many of these kennings create architectures or landscapes around their determinant body-parts (halls, forests, cliffs, roof-ridges). This toys with a sense of scale, and initially further dislocates the body-parts from the bodily whole, granting them a degree of independence. However, the use of body-parts as determinants here ultimately has a clarifying effect, providing a clue for the physical location (and semantic field) of the referent.

Body-parts used as base-words in kennings for other body-parts create a different effect. This innovation, to my knowledge, is unique to the tenth-century skald Eilífr Goðrúnarson, in his depiction of Þórr’s combat with Geirrøðr in Þórsdrápa.29 The only other kenning-pattern I have identified with a body-part/bodily substance used as a base-word for another body-part is blood-kennings which employ ‘sweat’ as a base-word, as in ‘sveita sœfis’ (Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal 54, SkP III, 1163: ‘sweat of the sword [BLOOD]’). Eilífr repeatedly describes the weapon hurled between the foes (an iron bolt) as an ingestible morsel: ‘afli soðinn segi tangar’ (‘a hearth-boiled morsel of tongs’), ‘þungr rauðbiti þangs tangar’ (‘heavy red mouthful of the seaweed of tongs’) and ‘lyptisylgr síu’ (‘raised drink of the spark’).30 Eilífr Goðrúnarson, Þórsdrápa 16–18, SkP III, 111–15. The hands catching the morsel become mouths: ‘alinmunnr’ (‘forearm-mouth’) and ‘hrapmunnar handa’ (‘hurried mouths of his arms’).31 Ibid. 17–18, SkP III, 113–115. This interlocking network of bodily imagery momentarily scrambles the human form, creating confusion over what belongs to a human body and what is part of an object. The confusion centres on competing metaphorical mouths, as the iron jumps from one mouth (the mouth of the tongs, implicit in the kennings that frame iron as the morsel of tongs) to another (Þórr’s hands).

Body-parts also appear in nonhuman contexts, featuring as base-words in kennings for natural phenomena and objects. Most often, they are used to denote landscape features like rocks/stones, a convention prominent in tenth-century skaldic compositions, but which continues into the fourteenth century. Kennings that envisage the natural world in bodily terms resonate not only with philosophical conceptions of the cosmos and man’s physiology in learned texts but with the Norse creation myth, where the world is crafted from Ymir’s body. The relationship between bodies and landscapes is further extended in the myth in which first man and woman are fashioned from driftwood logs.32 134 Gylf, ch. 9 (p. 13); Vsp 17 (p. 295). In these cosmogonic and anthropogonic myths, there is a double blurring of body and environment: worldly matter is created from a gigantic body, and human bodies are created from this worldly matter. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that these kinds of narratives serve an epistemological function: in lending a bodily character to matter and cosmic elements, the world becomes ‘closer, more intimate, more easily grasped’.33 Rabelais and His World, trans. by H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN, 1984), p. 335.

We can see this imagined co-materiality at work in kennings too: in kennings where body-parts act as base-words for landscapes and other natural phenomena (Table 3), and in those where natural phenomena act as base-words for kennings denoting bodily phenomena. For instance, tears can be ‘regn augna’ (‘rain of the eyes’),34 Einarr Skúlason, Øxarflokkr 2, SkP III, 142. while rain can be ‘grátr ský*ja’ (‘tears of the sky’);35 Anon., Lausavísur from Ragnars saga 10, SkP VIII, 705. teeth can be ‘gómsker’ (‘gum-skerries’),36 Sturla Þórðarson, Hákonarkviða 29, SkP II, 721. while rocks can be ‘fentǫnn’ (‘fen-teeth’).37 Kormákr Ǫgmundarson, Sigurðardrápa 1, SkP III, 274. However, these sets of kennings evoking the coterminous nature of landscapes and bodies are just one of several modes of representing the relationship between the human and external world in kennings, and indeed are not the dominant mode.

When we consider the various ways in which human body-parts are denoted through kennings, the prevailing impression is of humanity embedded in a complex network of objects, animals and natural phenomena. While kennings are compatible with Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque world of becoming’ (in which ‘an object can transgress not only its quantitative but also its qualitative limits […] it can outgrow itself and be fused with other objects’),38 Rabelais and His World, p. 308. their effect therefore differs from his stated epistemological function of merging human bodies with landscapes. Far from making the world ‘more intimate, more easily grasped’, as Bakhtin suggested for body-landscape mergers, kennings defamiliarise concepts and images. Through categorical ambiguity and instability, they evoke a conviviality between animate and inanimate matter that aligns with posthuman perspectives, in which humans are ‘caught up in a range of assemblages’.39 Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human, p. xvi.

Body-parts also appear as base-words for weapons, specifically sword-blades, where the blade is envisaged as the tongue/mouth of the sword (Table 3). This attribution of bodily characteristics to swords persists through the tenth to the thirteenth centuries and aligns with their depiction elsewhere in the literary corpus as animate, vocal agents.44 See Mayburd, ‘Objects and Agency’, and S. Brunning, The Sword in Early Medieval Northern Europe: Experience, Identity, Representation (Woodbridge, 2019).

Some kennings for body-parts lack any visible trace of the human in either base-word or determinant. These fall into two main categories: those defining body-parts through a function serving objects or animals; and those in which body-parts become objects or natural phenomena. In this first category, the body-part is subordinated to the effect it produces for an object or animal (see Table 4).

These kennings orchestrate a shift away from a human viewpoint, and towards the imagined perspective of objects and animals: for the bow, the arm is simply the force that compels its movement, or the place that it rests itself; for the shield, the arm is the path along which it moves; for the ring, the arm is what supports it; for the hawk, the arm is its territory. For the wolf and raven, blood is a sustaining drink. For the helmet, the head is what holds it up. These kennings evince a playful awareness of the depersonalised role of humans for objects and animals, and persist in skaldic practice from the tenth to the fourteenth century.

The human recedes even further in kennings for body-parts or bodily substances which use objects/natural phenomena as base-words, which do not employ other body-parts as determinants, and which contain no trace of human agency or effect. The human is truly withdrawn from some kennings for blood, as in Guthormr sindri’s kenning ‘sund valbrands’ (‘channel of the slaughter-fire [SWORD > BLOOD]’).54 Guthormr sindri, Hákonardrápa 6, SkP I, 164. Here, the poet creates a discordant, elemental image, with the sword (‘fire of slaughter’) imagined as a flame at the same time as issuing from or dwelling in liquid (‘channel’). More common, however, are kennings for body-parts which, though eschewing other body-parts in their base-words and determinants, nonetheless incorporate an abstract human concept as their determinant (see Table 5).

These kennings intimate the social and emotional human (with determinants evoking fear, valour, spells and poetry) and usually denote body-parts associated with the production of emotion and speech. The effect of using emotive words as determinants is a temporary charging of the base-word – an inanimate object or an aspect of nature (rock, stone, smithy, seat) – with humanity, and this practice continues well into the fourteenth century in Christian compositions such as Pétrsdrápa and Kátrínardrápa. Just as the human body becomes object- or landscape-like in its interaction with objects (as a helmet-support or land of the hawk), so too can objects and landscapes become more human-like, housing speech and emotion. Kennings produce this sliding scale, where objects and landscapes are anthropomorphised, and where the human subject is objectified.59 On ‘anthrodecentrism’ and kennings, see Abram, ‘Kennings and Things’, p. 177.

The practice of denoting body-parts through kennings which do not feature any trace of the human body in their base-words or determinants extends to kennings denoting whole-bodied men/warriors and women. One common type of kenning denotes the human subject using a personal name (often a god/goddess or legendary figure) as base-word (see Table 6, Type 1). While such kennings elevate human actors to mythological levels, and do still envision the human in anthropomorphic form, they also strip their referents of personal identity, effectively anonymising them. To determine the identity of the individual described, the audience must already be familiar with the verses’ underlying narrative, thus enabling them to recognise ‘auð-Týr’ (‘wealth-Týr <god>’), for instance, as Skúli Bárðarson.

As we saw with body-part kennings which highlight the function of the referent in relation to animals and objects (Table 4), men and women can similarly be denoted through their impact on a more-than-human world. These kennings typically use agentive nouns as base-words, and animals/objects as determinants (see Table 6, Type 2). The use of agentive nouns as base-words is far more common for men/warriors than it is for women (whose base-words are typically trees or names of mythological women). While the man is bodily absent from these kennings, the energy or action his body generates is present: thus, human agency is retained, but it is experienced in a disembodied form, from the perspective of animals and objects interacting with the human.

Human agency is completely withdrawn from the final type of kenning (Table 6, Type 3), which uses trees as base-words and objects as determinants. These kennings create vivid images of trees laden with linen, kerchiefs, gold, swords, mail-shirts, ale. They rely on visual and mythological correspondences between referents and base-words,71 The use of trees as base-words for humans in kennings may have arisen through metaphor, or may be a reflex of the relationship between trees and humankind in Norse myth, in which humans are created from driftwood (Vsp. 17–18). and use human-associated objects as determinants to anchor the base-words in the semantic field of the human.

These three primary kenning-types denoting humans continued to be used from the ninth through to the fourteenth century, and were not revised or rejected post-conversion to Christianity. While it is unclear whether this continuity more broadly reflects a stable, enduring conceptualisation of the human, the fact that people-kennings were not altered in accordance with the new faith is notable, given that the conversion did usher in a new set of kennings for Christian referents (such as God, Christ, the Virgin Mary, priests etc.).72 In verses on Christian subjects, there is an increased usage of kennings for ‘mankind’ at large (e.g., ‘race/host/kinsfolk of men’), but these supplement rather than replace traditional kennings for men and women.

These kennings employ the fragmented human body as a versatile poetic resource, used both in base-words and determinants for human and nonhuman referents. Collectively, kennings create a flat ontology, where objects and landscapes become more human-like and human body-parts become more object-like, and where a focus is maintained on interacting parts and emergent wholes, rather than tiered categories of being. This ontology dislocates and depersonalises the human body, with skalds exploring the interaction between humans and nonhumans from the perspectives of humans, objects and animals alike.

As we have seen, there are no explicit kennings for the whole human body. Guðrún Nordal suggests that such kennings were avoided because ‘the human body was a sensitive subject for the poet, even bordering on indecency’:73 Tools of Literacy, p. 264. kennings, with their proclivity for ambiguity and innuendo, were an inappropriate lexical figure for describing the body. Instead, skalds used non-periphrastic heiti (for example, hold, ‘flesh’) to refer to the body as a whole. However, if cultural propriety excluded whole-body kennings, why not body-part kennings as well? After all, risqué images evoked through body-parts do appear in skaldic verse, such as Kormákr’s fixation on Steingerðr’s ankles and instep,74 Korm., ch. 3 (ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, p. 207). or Grettir Ásmundarson’s unforgettably graphic verses about his sexual potency when the size of his member is mocked by a serving-girl.75 Gr., ch. 75 (ed. Guðni Jónsson, p. 241). Indeed, Kari Ellen Gade observes that ‘the erotic imagery and sexual puns in skaldic poetry must have been familiar to the medieval audience and readily appreciated by listeners’.76 ‘Penile Puns: Personal Names and Phallic Symbols in Skaldic Poetry’, Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 6 (1989), 57–67 (p. 65).

An alternative explanation for the absence of whole-body kennings in the corpus is that the focus on body-parts rather than the bodily whole reflects the aesthetic strategy of skaldic verse, which, like its primary lexical figure, deals in parts rather than wholes. This approach shifts the focus from bounded entities and fixed states to relationships, processes and actions. Take, for example, the second verse of Snorri’s Háttatal:

Even once the referents are substituted in for the kennings, the poet’s gaze still pans across the subject’s body, actions and trappings. As Christopher Abram puts it, the warrior ‘becomes merely one object among many: he is not even in possession of his own body’.78 ‘Kennings and Things’, p. 174. This holds true for narrative stanzas too, where the focus is on relationships, actions and effects – gift-giving, commanding troops, brandishing swords, composing poetry, dispensing mead. In a poetics oriented around relationality and interactivity, the human body is treated as a constellation of parts, perhaps making whole-body kennings largely redundant.79 Novotná has also proposed an alternative hypothesis: she suggests that the absence of kennings for the whole body indicates that, at the time when kennings were being productively created, the abstract concept of the ‘body’ itself was not thematised. The proliferation of kennings for body-parts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by contrast, signals a shift towards a more differentiated view of the body, influenced by increasing anatomical awareness (Between Body and Soul, pp. 134–5).