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Sword-Prostheses and Grafted Limbs: More-Than-Human Embodiment in Fornaldarsögur
Bodies are not only historically variable objects shaped by culture, language and ideology;
1 I. Clever and W. Ruberg, ‘Beyond Cultural History: The Material Turn, Praxiography, and Body History’, Humanities 3.4 (2014), 546–66 (p. 547). they are the material site of human experience. As Thomas Csordas writes, ‘embodiment is our fundamental existential condition, our corporeality or bodiliness in relation to the world and other people’.
2 ‘Cultural Phenomenology. Embodiment: Agency, Sexual Difference and Illness’, in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, ed. F. E. Mascia-Lees (Chichester, 2011), pp. 137–56 (p. 137). Literary texts serve as a platform for representing and scrutinising the intricacies of lived experience – from sensory perception to bodily dysfunction – and can further reveal the various discourses shaping a culture’s understanding of the body. The postmedieval grouping of sagas known today as
fornaldarsögur exhibit a fascination with the plasticity and vulnerability of human bodies, twinned with a concern for the preservation of physical integrity (whether achieved through biological or artificial means).
3 ‘Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda’ (‘sagas of ancient times of the Northlands’); the term was coined by Carl Christian Rafn in 1829 (Fornaldar sögur Nordrlanda eptir Gömlum Handritum, 3 vols (Copenhagen, 1829)). Like many other saga sub-genres, fornaldarsögur are often prosimetric, though distinct in using eddic rather than skaldic verse-quotation. This aligns with the genre’s anchoring in Scandinavian prehistory; as Clunies Ross notes, ‘eddic poetry, particularly its dominant metre fornyrðislag, was considered to be an older verse-form than the main skaldic measure dróttkvætt’ (Cambridge Introduction, p. 77). There is some debate over the defining features of this literary genre (see, particularly, Quinn et al., ‘Interrogating Genre’). Nowhere is this so marked as in
Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana (‘The Saga of Egill One-Hand and Ásmundr Berserks-Killer’), a narrative which explores, with great relish, human embodiment and identity through episodes of injury and magico-medical procedures.
4 Some scholars estimate that the saga was composed in the early fourteenth century (Lagerholm, Drei Lygisögur, p. xlii; D. K. Fry, ‘Polyphemus in Iceland’, in The Fourteenth Century, ed. P. E. Szarmach and B. S. Levy, Acta 4 (Binghamton, NY, 1977), pp. 65–85 (p. 65)). Others estimate a mid- to late fourteenth-century date of composition (G. Jensson, ‘Hvað líðr nú grautnum, genta?” – Greek Storytelling in Jǫtunheimar’, in Fornaldarsagornas: Struktur och Ideologi, ed. A. Lassen, Ármann Jakobsson and A. Ney (Uppsala, 2003), pp. 191–203; C. Larrington, ‘Kerling/Drottning: Thinking about Medieval Queenship with Egils saga einhendar ok Ásmundar berserkjabana’, Saga-Book 39 (2015), 61–76 (p. 63)). The saga’s earliest manuscript attestations date from the early fifteenth century (AM 434 4to, AM 577 4to and AM 589 4to). Judging by the number of manuscripts preserving the text (sixty-nine), this saga was among the most popular of the fornaldarsögur (M. J. Driscoll, ‘Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda: The Stories that Wouldn’t Die’, in Fornaldarsagornas, ed. Ármann Jakobsson, Lassen and Ney, pp. 257–67 (p. 258)).Scholars argue that
fornaldarsögur (with their distanced spatio-temporal settings and penchant for the fantastic) provided a malleable space for medieval Icelanders to address contemporary socio-cultural, political and ideological issues. As Stephen Mitchell puts it, ‘the concerns they reflect, the themes they treat, and the world view they project can provide insights into the cultural and psychological dilemmas of their audiences’.
5 Heroic Sagas and Ballads (Ithaca, NY, 1991), p. 127. This approach to fornaldarsögur, first argued for by Torfi Tulinius (Matter of the North, p. 186) and Else Mundal (‘Fornaldersogene – vurderinga og verderingskriteria’, in Fornaldarsagornas, ed. Ármann Jakobsson, Lassen and Ney, pp. 25–36 (p. 32)) has become increasingly popular: Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir outlines how the genre allowed its audiences to imagine and debate social organisation (Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power (New York, 2013), p. 6); Carolyne Larrington argues that the portrayal of Arinnefja in Egils saga einhenda reflects contemporary ideas on gender roles and medieval queenship (‘Kerling/Drottning’); and Elizabeth Ashman Rowe identifies monarchist ideology in Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar (‘Absent Mothers and Sons of Fornjótr: Late Thirteenth-Century Monarchist Ideology in Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar’, Mediaeval Scandinavia 14 (2004), 133–60). Building on this stance, I use
Egils saga einhenda as a case study to argue that these kinds of sagas provided a valuable site for narrators and audiences to explore fundamental questions of embodiment and identity, such as: What does it mean to have or to be a body? How might this body be functionally impaired or repaired? And how might altered forms of embodiment modify the human subject?
By examining the bodily drama in Egils saga einhenda, we further uncover the extent to which fornaldarsögur-bodies are shaped by contemporary cultural frameworks: this saga engages in kaleidoscopic ways with Christian concerns for material continuity and the re-assemblage of the self, medieval physiological theories, and perhaps even legal changes following Iceland’s incorporation into the Norwegian kingdom. Fornaldarsögur are an indispensable (and largely untapped) resource for exploring beliefs and anxieties pertaining to concepts of body and personhood in medieval Iceland. This chapter demonstrates the cultural work performed by these texts, which could simultaneously offer audiences an escapist fantasy and attend incisively to social and ideological concerns, not least pertaining to matters of the body.
To provide a broader context for the following discussion of Egils saga einhenda, I begin by exploring how bodily trauma and physical abnormality are mainstays of the fornaldarsaga-tradition, and address existing scholarship on the body in this genre: I note how fornaldarsögur are rarely discussed in disability studies research and highlight how research that does analyse bodily difference in these sagas typically treats bodies more as abstract symbols than fleshy entities.