Disintegrating Bodies and Dividual Selves
In mythological narrative and traditional poetics, the unified embodied self is continually undone. Where the Christian doctrine of resurrection promised hope of re-assemblage and asserted the value of wholeness, these texts explore and play with the body’s fragmentation and its entanglement with the nonhuman world. Rather than eclipsing such perspectives, Christian treatments of embodiment existed alongside vernacular explorations that embraced bodily disorder, porousness and hybridity.
In neither myth nor poetry is the Old Norse body inviolable. Mythic male bodies are fragmented to maintain cosmic order and as a means of extending cognition. The æsir’s injuries and limb-losses are not stigmatised but serve to deepen mythic identities, and in both Snorra Edda and the Poetic Edda, the correlation between disability and impairment rests on social contribution. The cognitive advantages gained through bodily disintegration, as seen in Óðinn and Heimdallr’s deposition of body-parts in Mímir’s well, further point to an ongoing exploration of how body and mind might stretch beyond individual limits and into the wider environment.
This vision of bodily dispersal continues in skaldic poetry, where the human body appears fragmented – as base-words and determinants for kennings denoting human and nonhuman referents. Skaldic imagination resists a bounded, indivisible human figure: through kennings, the human emerges relationally, an open and morphing assemblage. This view departs from our modern understanding of individuality and is more reminiscent of archaeologist Chris Fowler’s construct of
dividuality, where personhood is ‘a state of being in which the person is recognised as composite and multiply-authored’
.1 The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach (London, 2004), p. 5. Fowler’s construct is developed through study of European prehistoric archaeology; for its applicability in an Old Norse context, see Mayburd in ‘Objects and Agency’, p. 45. Heiðreks gátur reflects a similar dividual logic, with its depiction of composite and impossible bodies, and destabilisation of anthropocentric frames of reference. Both poetic forms call attention to the categories we use to organise the world, highlighting the role of language in circumscribing and ultimately shaping how we perceive bodily and material realities.
While it is true that skaldic verse and the riddles purposefully obscure ‘reality’ as a form of linguistic play (as Edel Porter puts it, ‘the skaldic stanza is a place where reality becomes distorted, where the world can be turned upside-down’),
2 ‘Skaldic Poetry: Making the World Fantastic’, in The Fantastic in Old Norse/Icelandic Literature: Preprint Papers of the 13th International Saga Conference, Durham and York 6th–12th August 2006, 2 vols, ed. J. McKinnell, D. Ashurst and D. Kick (Durham, 2006), II, 789–97 (p. 789). this does not preclude such play from being culturally important: both these discourses offer spaces through which to examine categorical boundaries, to reimagine ontologies and to inspect the myriad relationships between humans and the nonhuman world. The ludic quality of these poetic modes is not a cause for us to trivialise the cultural work they perform.
Ultimately, neither skaldic verse nor the riddles present a stable, bounded human form. Instead, they portray humans as embedded in, and co-constituted by, the material world: as the surface on which a bow or a helmet sits; as nourishment to animals; or as an assemblage of human, animal, artefactual and environmental elements. These poetic discourses therefore construct a strikingly posthuman vision of embodiment and identity – distributed, relational and embedded within more-than-human networks (or ‘meshworks’)
3 To borrow a term from posthumanist discourse (J. J. Cohen, ‘Stories of Stone’, Postmedieval 1 (2010), 56–63 (p. 58)). that defy the notion of a fixed, self-contained human.