Corporeal Interventions in Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana

The saga’s structure foregrounds identity through recurring doubles: two heroes, two princesses (both named Hildr, the narrator pointedly notes),1 EgÁsm, ch. 1 (p. 325): ‘hét hvártveggi Hildr’ (Brynhildr and Bekkhildr). two giantesses. In turn, the relationship between name and narrative motivates storytelling: a kind of nominative determinism applies to the princesses (whose engagement in different domains of activity is reflected in their names),2 E.g., ‘Hún var kölluð Brynhildr. Kom þat til þess, at hún vandist við riddara íþróttir’ (ibid.: ‘She was called Brynhildr [Armour-Battle]. This was because she was trained in the skills of a knight’). while the nicknames of Egill and Ásmundr form the catalysts and narrative punchlines to their ævisǫgur: ‘Ok er nú lokit svá sögu minni at sinni […] at ek var þessi inn sami Egill sem nú hefi ek frá sagt um stund’ (‘and now the end of my story is that I am this same Egill now that I have been telling you about all this while’).3 EgÁsm, ch. 11 (p. 348). For the counterpart reveal of Ásmundr’s identity, see EgÁsm, ch. 8 (p. 341). This emphasis on identity dovetails with the saga’s interest in bodily change. Egill’s body, altered by loss, enhancement and restoration, becomes a limit case for exploring health, enhancement and human boundaries, with imagined prostheses serving to test out ideas around embodied experience.

Even before losing his hand, Egill’s story centres episodes that explore living with physical alteration and the ways that artefacts might reshape our body schemas. When Egill tries to escape from the giant who holds him captive as a goatherd, the giant punishes him by attaching rocks to his body:

The narrator quantifies the weight of the stones (as well as the length of time they are attached), details which facilitate the audience’s imagination of Egill’s physical experience. The narrator also describes how the stones are attached to Egill’s body, using the same verb (læsa) to describe how Egill’s sword-prosthesis is fixed to his arm,5 EgÁsm, ch. 3 (p. 328): ‘Er þar búit um eitt sverð, ok er þat dverga smíði, ok er því læst at fyrir ofan úlflið’ (‘there is a sword fitted there, which is made by dwarves, and it is fixed above the wrist’). suggesting the two alterations in bodily experience can be viewed in tandem.

Later, trapped in a cave with the now-blinded giant (more on this below), Egill attempts escape through animal disguise: ‘hann drepr inn stærsta hafrinn ok flær af honum belg ok ferr í sjálfr ok saumar at sér sem þröngvast’ (‘he kills the biggest goat and flays the skin from it, and he puts himself inside it and sews it up as tightly as possible’).6 EgÁsm, ch. 10 (p. 345). However, the giant detects Egill’s human identity beneath the goat-skin through tell-tale signs: Egill’s hooves make no sound, he moves slower than the other goats, and he is unusually broad around the shoulders.7 Ibid. (pp. 345–6). His human body refuses to disappear beneath the animal skin, underscoring a major theme of the saga – embodiment is inescapable, and identity is carried in the body’s own signals.

When Egill blinds the giant with a forked rod, the ruse that enables the blinding foregrounds the saga’s interest in bodily enhancement. One night, Egill finds a cat in the forest and smuggles it back to camp. The giant, impressed by Egill’s ability to herd goats in the dark, asks the source of his keen sight. Egill credits his ‘gullaugu’ (‘golden eyes’).8 Ibid. (p. 344). Intrigued, the giant asks, ‘áttu önnur augu en þau, sem ek hefi sét?’ (‘have you some other eyes, which I have not seen?’). Egill replies that yes, he does, but ‘Engum gagnast þau […] nema ek búi um’ (‘they are of use to no one, unless I fit them on’).9 Ibid.

To ‘prove’ the authenticity of his golden eyes, Egill lifts up the hem of his cloak (revealing the cat from earlier): across the fire, the giant sees the cat’s eyes, glimmering. Egill thereby tempts the giant with the prospect of enhanced vision (effectively, in modern terms, a pair of detachable night-vision contact lenses). The giant offers to exchange Egill’s freedom for the golden eyes, and Egill, now playing surgeon to the giant’s patient, outlines what the procedure entails:

This speech, disingenuous though it may be, articulates a medical and biotechnological framing for the prosthesis: it is a detachable device with real corporeal and sensory impacts, and specific operating requirements. The body, in turn, is treated as a ‘specimen’ for repair, modification and technological intervention.11 This term refers to ‘the body that medical encounters create’ (N. J. Jones, ‘Bioethics. Embodied Ethics: From the Body as Specimen and Spectacle to the Body as Patient’, in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, ed. F. E. Mascia-Lees (Chichester, 2011), pp. 72–85 (p. 74)). Once his shackles are removed, however, Egill ties the giant to a column and drives a forked rod into his eyes, violently blinding him rather than providing him with enhanced eyesight.

This episode resembles the Polythemus narrative in Homer’s Odyssey. While direct knowledge of the Odyssey is unlikely, scholars suggest the saga-narrator may have encountered the story through other written sources, such as the late twelfth-century Latin collection of tales known as Dolopathos (a version of the ‘Seven Sages’ cycle).12 Fry, ‘Polyphemus’, p. 81; F. Ferrari, ‘Possible Worlds of Sagas: The Intermingling of Different Fictional Universes in the Development of the Fornaldarsögur as a Genre’, in The Legendary Sagas: Origins and Development, ed. A. Lassen, A. Ney and Ármann Jakobsson (Reykjavík, 2012), pp. 271–89 (p. 281); G. Jensson, ‘Bishop Jón Halldórsson and 14th-Century Innovations in Saga Narrative: The Case of Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana’, in Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland. The Legacy of Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálholt, ed. Gunnar Harðarson and Karl G. Johansson, The Northern World 91 (Leiden, 2021) pp. 59–78 (pp. 64–7). If the giant-episode in Egils saga einhenda is ultimately based on Dolopathos, then a comparison may illuminate the saga-narrator’s specific thematic interests.

In Dolopathos, the giant’s eyes ache, and the hero, posing as a doctor, promises to heal them in exchange for his freedom. The giant agrees. The hero boils a toxic concoction and tips it over the giant’s head to blind him. While both narratives share the premise of a hero blinding a giant, Egils saga einhenda differs in two key ways: first, the Dolopathos giant’s eyes are already painful and require medical attention, whereas the fornaldarsaga-giant seeks enhancement, not healing (nowhere does the narrator suggest that his vision is already impaired). Second, the Dolopathos hero offers a medical salve, while Egill promises a surgical procedure to implant detachable lenses.

In Egils saga einhenda, then, the focus is on enhancing bodily function through surgical intervention rather than curing an underlying impairment with topical treatment. The promise of the golden eyes prefigures Egill’s later sword-prosthesis, as a non-biological, implantable device that expands bodily capabilities and enacts a form of more-than-human embodiment. Although the golden eyes are ultimately a deception, as a narrative proposition they nonetheless foreground themes of bodily functionality and the allure of biotechnological enhancement.

Following the injury, the text details Egill’s experience of physical trauma and his adaptation to a one-handed body. Wracked with pain (‘Egill fekk mikinn verk í höndina […] Gat Egill þá ekki borit af sér verkinn’ – ‘Egill felt great pain in his arm […] Egill could no longer stand the pain’),16 EgÁsm, ch. 11 (p. 348). he finds relief by bathing his arm in a woodland stream, where he meets a dwarf-child carrying a pail. Egill removes a gold ring from his hand using his teeth, and drops it into the pail. The child disappears, and a dwarf emerges from the rock and invites Egill inside. The dwarf bandages Egill’s stump, provides pain relief, and manufactures a prosthetic implant for him:

This prosthesis affords a new opportunity for embodiment that elides the boundary between body and weapon, creating a merger of animate human subject and inanimate object. The prosthesis substitutes effectively for Egill’s biological hand, at least in the arena of battle (‘var Agli svá hægt at höggva’), imagining an alternative form of bodily integrity (‘sem heil væri höndin’) that encompasses the organic and the artificial. The sword-prosthesis is not modelled on the lost limb but reconceives the sword as hand, prompting reflection on the boundaries between user and instrument. It asks how this boundary transgression might change a person, and answers, in part, for the better! When Egill first arrives in the narrative, Rǫgnvaldr describes him as a formidable foe precisely because of his sword-hand:

Merging body and object does not appear to cause anxiety for Egill over the renegotiation of personal or ontological boundaries: it is instead viewed from a practical standpoint, with Rǫgnvaldr’s laconic comment that ‘vinnr hann meira sigr með þeiri, sem af er’ highlighting the ironic utility of the prosthesis, in contrast to his biological hand. Bodily change in Egils saga einhenda is thus viewed more through the lens of functionality than essential state, and this resonates with contemporary legal definitions of disability, as in Jónsbók:19 It also resonates with the relationship between impairment and disability in mythic prose and verse, which, as discussed in Chapter 1, turns on social contribution. ‘þat er lemstrar saar er maðr er siðan werr færr en aðr’ (‘that is a disabling wound if the person is afterwards less capable than before’).20 Mannhelgi IV.20 (p. 69). Nonetheless, Jónsbók also suggests that a wound is considered disabling (lemstr) if it is always visible and cannot be covered by clothing or hair, implying that the concept of disability relates not only to the functional impact of impairment, but also to social stigma around bodily non-normativity.

Literary investigations into more-than-human embodiment are not limited to legendary narratives but appear across genres, including hagiography: questions of disability and more-than-human embodiment clearly had purchase across medieval Icelandic textual culture. For instance, the fourteenth-century Thómas saga erkibyskups recounts a miracle involving an interspecies organ transplant,21 The text appears to have been based on several earlier sources, including a now lost Vita by Robert Cricklade (Haki Antonsson, ‘Two Twelfth-Century Martyrs: St Thomas of Canterbury and St Magnús of Orkney’, in Sagas, Saints and Settlements, ed. G. Williams and P. A. Bibire (Leiden, 2004), pp. 41–64). which similarly disputes the idea of a closed, biologically singular body. Unlike Egils saga einhenda, the hagiographic episode adopts a surprisingly de-anthropocentric perspective on disability. In the miracle, Thomas Becket transplants a human eye into a falcon that has lost its own during a hunt, while the falcon’s eye is placed in the donor, creating a reciprocal exchange: ‘at maðr ok fugl skiftu svo, at vors Herra boði, at maðrinn hafði fugls auga, enn fuglinn þá aftr manns auga’ (‘the man and the bird changed in this way, that according to the Lord’s command, the man had the bird’s eye, but the bird then got back a man’s eye’).22 Thóm, ch. 97 (ed. Eiríkur Magnússon, II, 146).

The wider context of the miracle (and the cult of St Thomas) helps us to make sense of this episode: the falconer who brings the injured bird to the archbishop is accosted en route by a wealthy man, who questions why Thomas would care whether the bird has two eyes or one.23 Becket himself flew falcons, and is associated with numerous miracles involving birds; Oppitz-Trotman suggests these miracles operate as a sign of Becket’s worldliness within his hagiography (‘Birds, Beasts and Becket: Falconry and Hawking in the Lives and Miracles of St Thomas Becket’, in God’s Bounty? The Churches of the Natural World, ed. P. D. Clarke and T. Claydon (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 78–88 (p. 85)). That same man becomes the involuntary donor, receiving the bird’s missing eye in turn. A comparable miracle appears in William of Canterbury’s late twelfth-century Passio et miracula, in which Thomas heals a sparrowhawk (without the organ swapping);24 I cannot find an equivalent episode of organ swapping in the extant Lives of St Becket, and therefore the episode appears to be unique to Thómas saga erkibyskups (though it may have existed in Robert of Cricklade’s lost Vita). William explains why the saint bothered to heal the bird: he suggests that, by these small gifts, Thomas wishes to encourage petitioners to make greater requests.25 Oppitz-Trotman, ‘Birds, Beasts and Becket’, p. 86; J. C. Robertson, ed., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (Canonized by Pope Alexander III. A.D. 1173, 7 vols (London, 1876), I, 388–9.

The narrator of Thomás saga, like that of Egils saga einhenda, pauses on the question of how the transplanted organ affects the quotidian experience of both recipients. Each eye retains its original form and náttúra, and is recognisably distinct from the body which it now supplements:

While there is a moral and symbolic slant to the exchange (juxtaposing the indolence of the wealthy man with the vigilant activity of the hawk), a curiosity nonetheless lingers over what animal sight would feel like for a human, and vice versa – an interest in renegotiating personal (eiginligr) boundaries to include the nonhuman. In turn, the episode posits animal embodiment as a specific site of interest, both in that the falcon’s impairment is worthy of miraculous healing,27 Becket’s solicitude for the falcon may also reflect the social capital of falconry: perhaps other animals that do not serve humans and were not associated with the upper classes would not receive the same treatment from the saint? and in the concern for how the human eye impedes the hawk’s activity. Like Egill’s sword-prosthesis (and Egill’s fake golden eyes), the falcon-eye offers enhanced capabilities, but introduces drawbacks: the man’s eyesight is greatly improved, but his countenance is strange and his sleep is disturbed. Though the miraculous organ transplant is not biologically rejected by bird or human (since both survive), it is also not fully assimilated: the episode suggests a fundamental difference between the náttúra of animal and human body-parts. More-than-human embodiment is thus possible in a variety of genres, providing platforms through which to consider the nuances of lived experience and the bodily expression of ontological difference.

Though there are two spectators, Ásmundr and Egill, Ásmundr fades from view in this scene, and the narrator centres Egill’s perspective. Special focus is placed on the compelling horror of recognition (with repetition of the verb þekkja (to recognise, comprehend) throughout the scene), of witnessing a part of the embodied self beyond the self – detached but still alive, existing independently in the outside world.

In its new life, the hand is part of a larger collection of exceptional treasures (‘gripir’):29 Ibid. the body-part has been decontextualised from a bodily whole, and recontextualised as part of Arinnefja’s ‘féhirzla’ (‘treasury’)30 Ibid. a process which moves the hand away from the category of the human and towards the category of the object. Marianne Hem Eriksen, in her research on personhood and the deposition of human and animal crania in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia, employs the term ‘body-object’ to capture ‘artefacts that do not fall neatly into modern, Western categories of matter and agency’.31 ‘“Body-Objects” and Personhood’, p. 104. Egill’s detached hand could therefore be aptly dubbed a ‘body-object’, occupying an ambiguous ontological space between human and artefact. Though the hand has been dislocated from the bodily whole and ‘objectified’, it is still very much alive: like some Cronenbergian viscera, it is warm and steaming, with blood coursing through the veins.32 David Cronenberg is a Canadian filmmaker widely regarded as a pioneer of the ‘body horror’ genre, with films such as The Fly (1986) and Videodrome (1983) staging grotesque and visceral transformations as a means of exploring the human condition. It exhibits an autonomous vitality that destabilises the boundaries between body and object, animate and inanimate.

This sensational image of the hand reflects literary engagement with a matrix of ideas about human embodiment, likely drawn from both medical and religious frames of reference. The pulsating veins and rising vapour may simply be inventive touches on the part of a narrator who exhibits a continuing preoccupation with bodily matter; however, they also resonate with contemporary understandings of the vascular system, and therefore may serve to ground the hand in a recognisable medical framework for a learned audience. Widespread medieval belief held that while veins circulated blood (one of the four humours) around the body, arteries drew air into the body whilst expelling a vaporous residue.33 E. Ducasse et al., ‘Vascular Knowledge in Medieval Times was the Turning Point for the Humanistic Trend’, Eur J Vasc Endovasc Surg 31.6 (2000), 600–8; W. C. Aird, ‘Discovery of the Cardiovascular System: From Galen to William Harvey’, J Thromb Haemost 9.1 (2011), 118–29 Ingjald Reichborn-Kjennerud points to the Old Norse word for arteries, vindæðar (wind-veins), as evidence for this belief in medieval Scandinavia,34 ‘Vår eldste medisin til middelalderens slutt’, in Medisinens historie i Norge, ed. I. Reichborn-Kjennerud, Fr. Grøn and I. Kobro (Oslo, 1936), pp. 1–97 (p. 27). while Jesse Byock suggests that this understanding of arteries as air ducts explains the hissing of Brynhildr’s wound in Vǫlsunga saga.35 The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer (London, 2002), p. 120.

This physiological framing of the body in Egils saga einhenda is artfully blended with hagiographic motifs, associated with relics and miracle accounts. The uncanny warmth of the hand evokes saintly flesh, the failure of which to decompose manifests a person’s sanctity. Egill’s incorrupt hand both playfully marks him out as a saintly analogue of sorts (perhaps indicating that he is favoured by God?) and provides the audience with an unusual opportunity to ponder the implications of an autonomous, agentive limb beyond a religious setting.

Relics not only disturb concepts of mortality and decay (since relics were considered the ‘saints themselves, continuing to live among men’),36 P. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ, 1990), p. 152. but produce an intriguing if paradoxical view of bodily integrity through their simultaneous emphasis on fragmentation and preservation. As Karmen MacKendrick explains, the undecomposed flesh necessarily reminds us of decomposition, ‘its very wholeness, its freedom from corruption, is already partial – the body may not have (entirely) decomposed, but even so it comes to us in fragments; it is not quite composed either’.37 Fragmentation and Memory: Meditations on Christian Doctrine (New York, 2008), p. 124. Egill’s hand may have allowed audiences to address the conceptual challenges of relics more freely, through the distanced, secular setting of a fornaldarsaga.

In any case, the hand may have reminded audiences of their own knowledge of saintly relics, such as the preserved arm of Icelandic saint Jón of Hólar contained in a reliquary mentioned in máldagar (church inventories) of Breiðabólstaður in Fljótshlíð from 1332 and 1371.38 ‘Hond hins heilaga Iohannis holensis med armleggjum’ (Diplomatarium Islandicum. Íslenzkt fornbréfasafn, ed. Jón Sigurðsson and Jón Þorkelsson, 16 vols (Kaupmannahöfn, 1857–1972), II, 431): ‘the hand of holy Jón of Hólar, including the arm’. As Sofia Lahti observes, relics were generally ‘not directly accessible nor visible [to the public]; rather, their presence was mediated by their containers, the reliquaries’.39 S. Lahti, Silver Arms and Silk Heads: Medieval Reliquaries in the Nordic Countries (Turku, 2019), p. 5. Perhaps, then, the lurid description of the hand in the fornaldarsaga offered audiences a vicarious literary vision of what a relic might look like beneath its covering? There was little focus in medieval Iceland on relics before 1200, with interest burgeoning chiefly with the introduction of the cults of Icelandic bishops Þorlákr and Jón in the thirteenth century onwards.40 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, ‘Distribution of Reliquaries and Relics in the Bishopric of Hólar, c. 1320’, in Paint and Piety: Collected Essays on Medieval Painting and Polychrome Sculpture, ed. N. L. Wenger Streeton and K. Kollandsrud (London, 2014), pp. 67–74. Consequently, relics were not uncontroversial in Iceland,41 J. A. Skórzewska, Constructing a Cult: The Life and Veneration of Guðmundr Arason (1161–1237) in the Icelandic Written Sources (Leiden, 2011), p. 106. and the sagas feature several cases of scepticism towards their efficacy and authenticity: in the fourteenth-century A-version of Guðmundar saga, Guðmundr Arason (an ardent promoter of the cults of Þorlákr and Jón) is criticised for his promotion of relics by a man who questions whether the bones are human or equine.42 Guðmundar saga A, ch. 53, in Guðmundar sögur biskups, ed. Stefán Karlsson (Copenhagen, 1983), p. 89: ‘heilagra manna bein e(ða) hrossa bein’. The severed hand in Egils saga einhenda could respond to an increased interest in (and scepticism towards) the use of relics in Iceland, reflecting cultural fascination with and potential uneasiness towards relic-like phenomena.

The connection between the saga’s depiction of the severed limb and hagiography is strengthened by the narrator’s attributing of a pleasant ilmr (fragrance/smell) to the limb: the ‘odour of sanctity’ is a stock feature of the incorrupt saintly body, both in continental tradition and in Icelandic hagiography, as seen in a further episode in Guðmundar saga. Another relic-sceptic doubts the authenticity of a piece of Jón’s bone because of its blackened appearance. Guðmundr entreats those standing by to pray for a token of Jón’s sanctity: all those present, except for the sceptic, perceive the sweetest ‘reykelsis ilm’ (‘smell of incense’),43 Ibid., ch. 90 (p. 120). a fragrance affirming the relic’s true status and countering the sceptic’s unbelief.44 A sweet ilmr is also associated with St Ólafr’s exhumed body in Heimskringla and with the recitation of Geisli in Óláfr’s honour in Morkinskinna. Though the odour of sanctity and the undecomposed nature of relics in Christian belief by definition cannot have earthly origins (since they serve as miraculous signs), research shows that various methods were historically used to infuse relics with fragrances and to allow long-term conservation of tissues in the medieval period (P. Brazinski and A. Fryxwell, ‘The Smell of Relics: Authenticating Saintly Bones and the Role Played by Scent in the Sensory Experience of Medieval Christian Veneration’, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 1.1 (2013), Art. 11; P. Charlier et al., ‘The Embalmed Heart of Richard the Lionheart (1199 A.D.): A Biological and Anthropological Analysis’, Scientific Reports 3 (2013), Art. 1296). The spectacle of Egill’s hand thus taps into cultural concerns around embodiment and ontology, providing a literary counterpoint to the reverent opacity of Christian relics.

The application of hagiographic motifs to the figure of Egill (a viking marauder) is rather startling. It is possible that the narrator could be parodying stock literary motifs from miracle accounts,45 On the difficulties of detecting parody in medieval literature, see K. Willson, ‘Parody and Genre in Sagas of Icelanders’, in Á austrvega: Saga and East Scandinavia. Preprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference, Uppsala, 8th–15th August 2009, ed. A. Ney, H. Williams and F. Charpentier Ljungqvist, 2 vols (Gavle, 2009), II, 1039–46. introducing them into the world of the fornaldarsaga in a self-conscious disruption of the audience’s generic sensibilities.46 See Jensson (‘Greek Storytelling’ and ‘Bishop Jón Halldórsson’) for other learned, artistically self-conscious aspects of Egils saga einhenda. More plausibly, the narrator may have incorporated these motifs because of their probative narrative value: these motifs carry with them an epistemological framework which allows for the perceived reality of limb preservation and reattachment. As discussed below, a comparable episode of limb-loss and replantation in Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga is so far-fetched for the narrator that he includes an apologia, ultimately distancing himself from the narrative event. The Egils saga einhenda-narrator may have framed the severed limb in quasi-miraculous terms to bolster the credibility of his narrative. In any case, the deployment of hagiographic motifs in the saga demonstrates the complex and intimate relationship between genres, highlighting how saga-narratives were not produced in cultural or literary vacuums: narrators could readily borrow and reapply tropes and concepts from across genres.

After Arinnefja has shown Egill’s hand to him, she reveals her identity as the same giantess from Egill’s ævisaga. Arinnefja now continues the story of Egill’s severed hand:

Arinnefja’s use of herbs to protect the hand against the natural processes of decomposition parallels other accounts of embalming found in the literature of this period (Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga,48 Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga survives in around seventy partial or complete manuscript witnesses, from the fourteenth century onwards (P. Lavender, “Sumar eptir fornkvædum eðr fróðum mönnum ok stundum eptir fornum bókum”: Some Observations on the Sources of Göngu-Hrólfs saga’, SS 90.1 (2018), 78–109 (p. 80)). Ynglinga saga49 Ynglinga saga is the first part of Heimskringla. and Vǫlsa þáttr).50 A short tale preserved in a chapter of Óláfs saga helga in the fourteenth-century Flateyjarbók (GKS 1005 fol.). In Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga, Hrólfr’s feet are chopped off, preserved and later reattached, mirroring Egill’s experience (though Hrólfr does not benefit from prosthetic limbs, using a horse instead for transport). In Ynglinga saga, following a botched hostage exchange between the æsir and the vanir, Óðinn receives the decapitated head of Mímir, which he preserves and animates so he can ask it questions. In Vǫlsa þáttr, a severed horse-penis is preserved, animated and worshipped as a god in a rural, pagan household in Norway, which is visited and Christianised by King Óláfr. The shared and distinguishing features of these embalmed body-parts are summarised in Table 7.

The closest counterpart to the embalming episode in Egils saga einhenda is Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga: both texts envisage the herbal treatments as preserving the life of the severed limbs, whereas in Ynglinga saga and Vǫlsa þáttr, herbs are used to prevent the body-parts from rotting (rather than dying), with verbal invocations used to bring the body-parts to life.67 The medicinal use of herbs was not just a literary motif: archaeobotanical research into monastic gardens finds that medicinal herbs were cultivated at various sites in Iceland (P. A. Åsan, ‘Medieval Monastery Gardens in Iceland and Norway’, Religions 12.5 (2021), 317; Steinunn Kristjánsdóttir, I. Larsson and P. A. Åsan, ‘The Icelandic Medieval Monastic Garden – Did it Exist?’, Scandinavian Journal of History 39.5 (2014), 560–79); and the extant fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Icelandic medical manuscripts propose a variety of herbs for various pharmacological purposes (see Læknisfræði in AM 194 8vo, and the Book of Simples in Royal Irish MS 23 D 43). Nonetheless, Egils saga einhenda does share two features with Vǫlsa þáttr: the description of the magico-medical practitioner as a kerling (old hag), and the storage of the body-part in a chest. Ynglinga saga’s episode is distinctive in that its practitioner, Óðinn, is male.

The resurfacing of this motif in texts composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries suggests a genre-spanning fascination with the physical bounds of the body, magico-medical proficiencies and paradoxical (if partial) life after death. Nonetheless, the embalmed body-parts in Ynglinga saga and Vǫlsa þáttr are mobilised for specific ideological purposes by their narrators: Mímir’s pickled head prompts consideration of the exigencies of kingship, such as access to superior intelligence and good counsel,68 See K. Heslop, ‘Talking Heads: The Mediality of Mímir’, in RE:writing: Medial Perspectives on Textual Culture in the Icelandic Middle Ages, ed. K. Heslop and J. Glauser (Zurich, 2014), pp. 63–84. while the horse-penis can be seen as part of the þáttr’s deliberate antiquarianism.69 See C. Tolley, ‘Vǫlsa þáttr: Pagan Lore or Christian Lie?’, in Analecta Septentrionalia. Beiträge zur nordgermanischen Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte, ed. W. Heizmann (Berlin, 2009), pp. 680–700 (p. 692). It is in the two fornaldarsögur that the preservation and replantation of the limbs are used to directly explore concepts of bodily wholeness, identity and mortality.

The narrative focuses on Egill’s physical sensations, describing the re-embodiment of his hand in visceral terms. The narrator also documents Egill’s recovery: the functionality of the replanted hand is compared with that of the hand before it was severed. This parallels the earlier comparison between Egill’s biological hand and the dwarf-crafted prosthesis (‘ok var Agli svá hægt at höggva með því sverði sem heil væri höndin’, quoted and translated above).

The saga’s focus on embodiment and ability in Egils saga einhenda throughout the episodes of limb-loss, prosthetic extension, embalming and hand-replantation is significant given that many magical processes elsewhere in the saga are depicted as illusory and immaterial. For instance, Arinnefja’s magical mirror alters appearances at a superficial rather than bodily level: when Egill and Ásmundr use the mirror in order to assume disguises, the men ‘sýndust þeir þá svá stórir, at þeir váru tröllum líkir’ (‘seemed so big, that they were like trolls’).72 EgÁsm, 15 (p. 356), my emphases. The narrator thus implies these transformations are optical illusions (sjónhverfingar).73 I discuss sjónhverfingar in more detail in Chapter 5. In Egils saga einhenda, then, the narrator distinguishes between material changes to the human body, through violence and medical intervention, and illusory changes to appearance, through magical intervention: the former are thematically foregrounded in the text, whilst the latter serve as plot devices.

Egill’s limb reattachment invites comparison with similar episodes in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century fornaldarsögur, riddarasögur and hagiography (see Table 8).74 Limb-replantation also appears as a passing motif in Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar (ch. 20).

The most significant distinguishing feature between these representations of limb-replantation is their perceived truth-value. In Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga, a narratorial apologia directly follows the dwarf Mǫndull’s reattachment of Hrólfr’s feet, implying discomfort on the part of the narrator, who attempts to justify the inclusion of the episode even if the audience may doubt its credibility.85 This apologia appears in two fifteenth-century manuscript attestations of the saga. As Ralph O’Connor observes, the narrator argues that ‘the episode is the result of a previous redactor having misunderstood the nature of one of his sources’,86 ‘Truth and Lies in the fornaldarsögur: The Prologue to Göngu-Hrólfs saga’, in Fornaldarsagaerne: Myter og virkelighed, ed. A. Rey, Ármann Jakobsson and A. Lassen (Copenhagen, 2009), pp. 361–78 (p. 370). by interpreting figurative language literally.87 GHr, ch. 25 (p. 231). In Mágus saga jarls, the limb-replantation is explicitly dismissed as magical illusion (sjónhverfing): ‘svo sýnist sem þeir höggvi hendr ok fœtr ok leggi sik í gegnum, ok eru jamheilir sem áðr’ (‘it appears as if they [the sorcerers] strike off hands and feet, then place them together, and they are as whole as [they were] before’).88 Mág II, ch. 79 (p. 175). The epilogue is preserved in recension II, in AM 152 fol. (c. 1500x1525), a manuscript also containing Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga. As O’Connor notes, the demonic illusion argument ‘exonerates the reporters of such stories from the grave charge of lying’:89 R. O’Connor, ‘History or Fiction? Truth-claims and Defensive Narrators in Icelandic Romance-Sagas’, Mediaeval Scandinavia 68, 101–69 (p. 149). these explanations reflect the narrator’s efforts to reconcile fantastical elements with audience scepticism.

By contrast, Jóns saga helga presents limb reattachment as a credible, material act: proof of God’s miraculous intervention into the lives of men. A cleric, Brandr, nearly severs his finger while preparing St Jón’s coffin. After binding the wound in linen, he continues to work zealously to finish the mortuary preparations. After three nights, he uncovers the hand to find that it has completely healed: all that remains is a ‘red thread’, as in Egils saga einhenda. The red thread, like the odour of sanctity, is a common signum miraculi associated with saints such as Edmund90 The legend of St Edmund was known in Iceland, and may be the route by which the red thread motif found its way into vernacular literature (see M. Cormack, The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400, Subsidia Hagiographica 78 (Brussels, 1994), p. 94). and Winefride (whose decapitated heads are restored to their bodies, with a red line marking the site of reattachment).91 Saintly recapitation is also a common motif in Irish hagiography, with saints such as Berach and Ciarán re-attaching the heads of men (M. Johnson, ‘Preserving the Body Christian: The Motif of “Recapitation” in Ireland’s Medieval Hagiography’, A Journal of Early Medieval Northwest Europe 10 (2007)). The motif ultimately calls back to doctrinal ideas of wholeness and re-assemblage that we encountered in Chapter 1: as Augustine explains in his foundational treatise, The City of God,

Egils saga einhenda and Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga intersect in their use of organic treatment, but differ in that the former uses a cast and the latter a splint. Egils saga einhenda, Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga and Jóns saga helga all include the motif of a three-night recovery period (a motif found both in miracle accounts94 D. C. Whaley, ‘Miracles in the Biskupa sögur: Icelandic Variations on an International Theme’, in Samtíðarsögur: Níunda alþjóðlega fornasagnaþingið, ed. Sverrir Tómasson, Stefán Karlsson and Ásdís Egilsdóttir (Reykjavík, 1994), pp. 847–62 (p. 854). and in medical treatises),95 E.g., Læknisfræði in AM 194 8vo (Alfræði Íslenzk: Islandsk encyklopædisk Litteratur. I. Cod. Mbr. AM. 194, 8vo., ed. K. Kålund (Copenhagen, 1908), p. 74). but only Egils saga einhenda and Jóns saga helga have the red thread. Meanwhile, Egils saga einhenda, Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga and Mágus saga share a narratorial comment on the perceived functionality or appearance of the replanted limbs compared to before the procedure. And while Egils saga einhenda and Jóns saga both present their procedures as real, Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga and Mágus saga depict their procedures as false. These depictions of limb-replantations in medieval Icelandic literature reveal a tangle of ideas around bodily integrity, narrative credibility and the act of healing – whether through medical, surgical or divine intervention. They each share a concern with the partibility of bodies and reflect a desire for organic bodily wholeness, which is most extensively explored in Egils saga einhenda.

For in Egils saga einhenda, when the opportunity arises to have his biological hand reattached, Egill rejects the sword-prosthesis in favour of his own flesh: the saga, though experimenting with new forms of hybrid embodiment, thus prioritises the organic over the artificial, wholeness over partibility, human over posthuman ‘cyborg’.96 The term cyborg (‘cybernetic organism’) refers to the integration of the organic and technological into a single system, and was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline. Not only is the hand reintegrated into the body, but the sword-prosthesis, initially a hybrid extension of Egill’s body, is ultimately restored to the category of object: Egill has the socket removed from the sword and a hilt crafted for it,97 EgÁsm, ch. 17 (p. 36). declaring ‘var þat góðr gripr’ (‘that was a precious object’).98 Ibid. Nonetheless, the cicatrix remains, like a red thread, around Egill’s wrist, a lasting marker of his limb’s prior detachment.