Human, Object and Animal Assemblages: Cognitive (Re-)Orientations in Skaldic Kennings and Heiðreks gátur
It might be argued that because a kenning must ultimately be resolved to its referent, this imposes order on the mutable world evoked through skaldic imagery. But this perspective underestimates the cognitive and aesthetic work kennings perform. The visual and sensory associations of base-words and determinants do not vanish from the verse once the kenning is ‘solved’, instead continuing to resonate and play out in our mind’s eye. Indeed, the kenning-patterns described by Snorri as
nýgǫrvingar (a term denoting the creative expansion of imagery from one kenning into further kennings within a stanza) suggest that poets deliberately harnessed this capacity for images to bleed beyond their immediate referential frame.
1 Háttatal, ch. 6 (ed. Faulkes, pp. 6–7). For further discussion, see M. Clunies Ross, ‘The Porosity of Kennings and Kenning Patterns’, in Die Faszination des Verborgenen und seine Entschlüsselung – Ráði sár kunni, ed. J. Krüger, V. Busch, K. Seidel, C. Zimmermann and U. Zimmermann (Berlin, 2017), pp. 85–94.Kennings reflect a cultural willingness to challenge and subvert categorical and conceptual boundaries; they are at once a playful acknowledgement of, and a
poetic exploitation of, the deep entanglement between humans and the material environment. This view of kennings aligns with scholarship on the cognitive function of medieval riddles. Patricia Dailey, writing on the Exeter Book riddles, argues that ‘the mystery in a riddle need not be dissolved with an answer – it may equally sustain interpretation and responsiveness beyond the manuscript page’.
2 ‘Riddles, Wonder and Responsiveness in Anglo-Saxon Literature’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. C. A. Lees (Cambridge, UK, 2013), pp. 451–72 (p. 460). While riddles and kennings do differ – in structure, function and textual tradition
3 See further J. Lindow, ‘Riddles, Kennings, and the Complexity of Skaldic Poetry’, SS 47.3 (1975), 311–27 (p. 312). While skaldic poetry is chiefly composed in dróttkvætt, and preserved in sagas and poetic treatises, Old Norse riddles employ eddic metres (ljóðaháttr, fornyrðislag and málaháttr), and are primarily preserved in a single text, Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks. – both invite audience participation, implicating the audience in the creation of meaning within the text. Both forms are linguistic puzzles that juxtapose incongruent images to obscure and reveal, reorienting human perspectives on the material world and our place within it.
In light of these parallels between kennings and riddles, and building on the above analysis of body-parts in kennings, let us turn to humans and bodies in
Heiðreks gátur.
4 These are among the only riddles found in the Old Norse corpus. They comprise an eclectic group of thirty-eight stanzas in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, extant to different degrees in the three redactions of the fornaldarsaga: H (represented chiefly by Hauksbók (AM 544 4to), c. 1302–10), R (represented by GKS 2845 4to, c. 1400) and U (represented by Upps UB R715x, c. 1650). See Burrows, ‘Introduction’ (SkP VIII, 410). The riddle-contest, conducted between King Heiðrekr and ‘Gestumblindi’ (Óðinn in disguise), is what is known as a ‘head-ransom’, with Gestumblindi’s life hanging in the balance: if Heiðrekr is unable to solve one of Gestumblindi’s riddles, then Gestumblindi may live. Hannah Burrows argues that the riddles share linguistic and thematic elements with eddic wisdom poetry,
5 ‘Wit and Wisdom: The Worldview of the Old Norse-Icelandic Riddles and Their Relationship to Eddic Poetry’, in Eddic, Skaldic and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway, ed. M. Chase (New York, 2014), pp. 114–35 (pp. 133–4). and I find that they also share features with skaldic kennings. Both employ aesthetic strategies that challenge hierarchical human/nonhuman relationships, manipulate fragmented and rearranged bodies, and that bring into focus how we come to know and make sense of the world.
Although many of the riddles describe natural phenomena, they also address man-made objects and mythological beings. Despite this nonhuman focus, humans and body-parts appear frequently in
Heiðreks gátur, featuring in twenty-four of the thirty-seven riddles. Nonhuman entities often take on human characteristics, with animals, natural phenomena and man-made objects depicted as humans from various social strata – ‘jarlar’ (‘jarls’), ‘þegnar’ (‘thanes’), ‘snótir’ (‘ladies’).
6 Heiðreks gátur 33, SkP VIII, 447; ibid. 32, SkP VIII, 446; ibid. 21, SkP VIII, 433. In Riddle 35, dead men also stand in for a falcon, through homonymic wordplay. At the same time, humans do appear as humans, in riddles which describe their solution in terms of its impact on human life.
7 Riddle 1, Riddle 5, Riddle 6, Riddle 22, Riddle 23, Riddle 27. For example, Riddle 1, through repeated agentive nouns, considers the various effects of ale on humans:
lýða lemill,
orða tefill,
ok orða upphefill.
8 Heiðreks gátur 1, SkP VIII, 410.[disabler of men, hinderer of words, and yet instigator of words.]
More beneficially, Riddle 6 envisages an anchor saving men whilst grappling with the earth;
9 Ibid. 6, SkP VIII, 415. while Riddle 27 gives a threefold reminder of the importance of the shield in preserving human life:
Hvat er þat dýra,
er Dönum hlífir,
berr blóðugt bak,
en bergr firum,
geirum mætir,
gefr líf sumum,
leggr við lófa
lík sitt guma?
10 Ibid. 27, SkP VIII, 441 (my emphases).[What is that creature, who protects Danes, bears a bloody back, but saves men, meets spears, gives life to some, lays his body against men’s palms?]
Whereas the kennings in Table 4 highlight the significance of humans in the lives of objects, these riddles invert that perspective, foregrounding the impact of objects on human lives. Yet this human-centred perspective is unsettled in riddles that depict a cosmos indifferent to human primacy, as in Riddle 5 (fog):
Hverr er sá inn mikli,
er líðr mold yfir?
Svelgr hann vötn ok við;
glygg hann óaz,
en gumna eigi.
11 Heiðreks gátur 5, SkP VIII, 414.[Who is that great one who glides over the earth? He swallows waters and wood, he fears the wind, but not men.]
When bodies and body-parts appear in the riddles, they can belong to humans, animals or objects (or indeed a mixture), with the riddles engaging in varied imaginative strategies for constructing bodies, from anthropomorphised objects to implausible anatomies and composite organisms. Some riddles envisage objects with or as bodies, a tactic that animates the object and affords us greater empathy (through a kind of corporeal affinity) with the object. Describing an object in bodily terms anthropomorphises it, as is the case with Riddle 27’s shield, which has a body (‘lík’) and a bloody back (‘blóðugt bak’).
12 Ibid. 27, SkP VIII, 441. But it can also scramble the human body as we know it: Riddle 4’s hammer has ‘munna tvá’ (‘two mouths’), with which it nonetheless engages in a human activity, kissing firmly (‘fast kyssir’);
13 Ibid. 4, SkP VIII, 413. while Riddle 8’s leek has an inverted body, with its head (‘höfði sínu’) pointing to Hel, and its feet (‘fótum’) towards the sun.
14 Ibid. 8, SkP VIII, 417.Yet more disconcerting are the animal-riddles that depict images of seemingly ‘impossible’ bodies, such as Riddle 14’s spider, with eight feet, four eyes and knees above the belly (‘fætr hefir átta,/ en fjǫgur augu/ ok berr ofar kná en kvið’).
15 Ibid. 14, SkP VIII, 424. This riddle only works if the listener has never paused to consider the spider, and if the default reference point for bodies is that of the human: for a human, carrying one’s knees above the belly is an impossibility; for a spider, it is an everyday fact of life. This riddle also works because many of the other riddles with impossible bodies actually refer to composite images, with solutions that are a collection of connected bodies; thus, there is ambiguity created in the spider riddle as to whether we are observing one body, or more. This is also the case with Riddle 29, which asks where the boundary of one life-form ends and another starts:
Fjórir hanga,
fjórir ganga,
tveir veg vísa,
tveir hundum varða,
einn eptir drallar
ok jafnan heldr saurugr.
16 Ibid. 29, SkP VIII, 443.[Four are hanging, four are going, two are pointing the way, two are warding off dogs, one is loitering after, and [is] always rather filthy.]
This riddle tricks us into thinking we are looking at a composite scene, made up of different, independent actants. What we are really contemplating are the component parts of a cow, broken into their various properties and functions: the udders hang, the legs go, the eyes point the way, the horns ward off dogs, and the dirty tail hangs behind. As in those kennings for humans and body-parts which focus on the behaviour of the referent (for example, man as a ‘sword-reddener’; see Table 6, Type 2), the emphasis falls on action rather than state.
Whereas Riddles 14 and 29 depict seemingly composite bodies that resolve into single creatures, Riddles 12 and 36 describe bodily assemblages whose solutions are genuinely plural. These riddles undermine a fixed notion of bodies as bounded and unitary: the pregnant sow of Riddle 12 is imagined through a kind of grotesque multiplication of body-parts, with ten tongues, twenty eyes and forty feet;
17 Ibid. 12, SkP VIII, 422: ‘tíu hefir tungur,/ tuttugu augu/ fjóra tigu fóta’. the creature in Riddle 36 with ten legs, three eyes and a tail is the one-eyed Óðinn riding on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir.
18 Ibid. 36, SkP VIII, 450: ‘tíu […] fætr/ augu þrjú, ok einn hala’. This riddle plays with the instability of the body on two levels: first, by presenting a non-normative humanoid body (one-eyed Óðinn), and second, by commingling this body with an animal, merging horse and rider into a single, hybrid organism.