Impaired, Enhanced and Abstracted: Bodies in Saga and Scholarship

This numerical cataloguing of wounds is reminiscent of the precise itemisation of injury categories in the medieval Icelandic legal compilations, Grágás and Jónsbók.10 Grágás preserves laws originating during the period of the Icelandic Commonwealth and is preserved principally in two thirteenth-century manuscripts (GKS 1157 fol.; AM 334 fol.); Jónsbók is the legal compilation issued for Iceland by King Magnús Lagabøte and adopted in Iceland in 1281 (preserved in AM 351 fol., c. 1360). The homicide and personal rights sections of both codes provide detailed descriptions of various injury types and their corresponding legal compensations: for example, Grágás (ch. 86) defines a brain wound as one where the skull is cracked or cut open, and a marrow wound as a bone broken asunder as far as the marrow (Grágás, Islændernes lovbog i fristatens tid, ed. Vilhjálmur Finsen, 4 vols (Copenhagen, 1852–70), I, 144–50). In Jónsbók (Mannhelgi IV.20–2), penalties are specified for blows with blunt and sharp parts of a weapon, scratches that bleed and injuries that bruise (Jónsbók: The Laws of Later Iceland. The Icelandic Text According to MS AM 351 fol. Skálholtsbók eldri, ed. and trans. J. K. Schulman (Saarbrücken, 2010), pp. 67–73). On the measurable body in Scandinavian lawcodes, see further C. Eckholst, ‘Value of a Thumb: Injuries and Disability in Swedish Medieval Law’, Mirator 20.2 (2021), 38–53. Perhaps the vivid descriptions of injuries in fornaldarsögur allowed audiences to interpret these injuries through a legal lens, and are reflective of a social reality (or, at least, the cultural memory of a social reality) in which bodily violence is commonplace and is culturally understood through the nexus of punishment and compensation. In any case, the sheer prevalence of body horror in these sagas suggests that this was something the audience found compelling, and came to expect, in these texts.11 This is supported by the wider thematic concern with bodily integrity across fornaldarsögur: bodies often resist breakage, either through supernatural outerwear (ǪrvM, ch. 19, p. 76) or through enhancements to the skin itself (ÞUxaf, ch. 10, ed. Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Unger, p. 258; GHr, ch. 3, ed. Guðni Jónsson, p. 169).

Although fornaldarsögur are rich in depictions of bodily change and non-normativity, disability studies – the field best positioned to address such themes – has thus far largely overlooked the genre, focusing instead on Íslendingasögur, and, to a lesser extent, on law codes, eddic poetry and Snorra Edda.12 E.g., Sexton, ‘Atypical Bodies’, and J. P. Sexton, ‘Difference and Disability: On the Logic of Naming in the Icelandic Sagas’, in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. J. R. Eyler (Farnham, 2010), pp. 149–64; Morrow, ‘Disabled Masculinity’; R. T. Conway, ‘Stumped in the Sagas: Woodland and Wooden Tools in the Íslendingasögur’ (unpublished MA dissertation, Háskóli Íslands, 2015); Michelson-Ambelang, ‘Outsiders on the Inside’; Anderson, ‘Mediating the Other’; K. Kanerva, ‘Porous Bodies, Porous Minds: Emotions and the Supernatural in the Íslendingasögur (ca. 1200–1400)’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Turku, 2015); S. B. Lawing, ‘The Place of the Evil: Infant Abandonment in Old Norse Society’, SS 85.2 (2013), 133–50; A. C. Eichhorn-Mulligan, A. C., ‘Contextualizing Old Norse-Icelandic Bodies’, in The Fantastic in Old Norse/Icelandic Literature, ed. McKinnell, Ashurst and Kick, I, 198–207. The underrepresentation of fornaldarsögur in disability scholarship likely stems from the genre’s poor modern reception, with fornaldarsögur and other later genres viewed as a cultural and literary decline from the golden age of Íslendingasögur and konungasögur.13 On the scholarly treatment of fornaldarsögur, see Mitchell, Heroic Sagas, p. 39. This view is a subjective reaction to the lack of realism of the texts included in this grouping, which was seen as distinguishing fornaldarsögur from the lauded Íslendingasögur and aligning them more with the continental romance tradition. However, these sagas were very popular during the medieval period and beyond, if the manuscript evidence is anything to go by: half of the narratives identified as fornaldarsögur are preserved in sixty or more manuscripts, an achievement which, Matthew Driscoll notes, ‘only a handful of sagas of any other type can boast’.14 ‘Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda’, p. 258.

Where scholars have examined bodily change or difference in fornaldarsögur, the focus has largely been on what this non-normativity represents, in socio-cultural or narrative terms. Joshua Wilson’s dissertation on leg-deformities and removals in fornaldarsögur examines the symbolic nature of these conditions, suggesting they serve as indicators of a character’s mental ability, physical prowess and masculine accomplishments.15 ‘Inter-Crural Relations: Abnormal Representations of Legs and Feet in the fornaldarsögur’ (unpublished MA dissertation, Háskóli Íslands, 2016), p. 2. Likewise, Helen Leslie-Jacobsen views Egill einhendi’s limb-loss in narratological terms, arguing that the bodily change acts as a supernatural marker that others Egill and thereby enables him to transgress worldly boundaries.16 ‘Border Crossings: Landscape and the Other World in the Fornaldarsögur’, Scripta Islandica 60 (2009), 119–35 (pp. 130–3). The body is also viewed as ‘narrative prosthesis’17 On this term, see the Introduction. in Philip Lavender’s article on Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga, in which he analyses the performance of Hrólfr’s masculinity in the context of his leg amputations, an act which, Lavender argues, provides an opportunity ‘for an arc of crisis and resolution’.18 ‘Vulnerable Masculinities and the Vicissitudes of Power in Göngu-Hrólfs saga’, in Masculinities in Old Norse Literature, ed. Evans and Hancock (Cambridge, UK, 2020), pp. 97–112 (p. 108). Each scholar offers credible readings of bodily difference in fornaldarsögur which nonetheless cause the material body itself to fade from view, beneath the burden of its significations. This pattern of analysis results in a generalised corporeal reductionism, the likes of which Mayburd has observed elsewhere in scholarship on Íslendingasögur.19 ‘Haunted Saga Homesteads’, p. 23.

This chapter has two intersecting aims: first, to demonstrate how Egils saga einhenda, a work which has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, is acutely attuned to questions of embodiment and human identity, around which the narrative is structured; and second, to argue for the use of fornaldarsögur as sources for understanding medieval Icelandic concepts of the body and self. In these texts, bodies are both thematic representations and material entities, and therefore to treat them solely in abstract terms is to engage only partially with their narrative import.