Reconstructing Humans and Recentring Bodies

The saga thus investigates corporeal selfhood in a posthuman register, where the subject emerges as an ‘amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components […] whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’.1 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 3. However, unlike the bodies of mythological narrative and Old Norse poetics discussed in Chapter 1, whose forms remain caught in continuing processes of flux, disintegration and connectivity, Egill’s body and subject are only temporarily opened up to the external world and integrated with non-biological materials: his body’s story concludes with the reattachment of his hand, the restoration of the humanae naturae figuram. This resolution exhibits a desire to seal off the perceived boundary between self and world, aligning with Christian ideals of spiritual and corporeal wholeness.

A cluster of motifs in the saga – the severed limb, its replantation, its odour of sanctity, the red thread, the three nights of healing – allude to Christian discourse on disability and the resurrected body, embedding these religious themes within a secular saga framework. This interplay underscores how fornaldarsögur could engage with contemporary concerns of identity, materiality and animacy while providing audiences with a space to reflect on their own cultural and spiritual anxieties. This specular quality of fornaldarsögur may explain why these texts had such cultural value for medieval audiences (as suggested by their popularity in medieval manuscripts). As Clunies Ross observes, the world of fornaldarsögur ‘provides a mirror, often distorted and exaggerated, but still familiar, in which Icelanders of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries could recognise themselves and their own society’, especially amid political, economic and social upheaval.2 ‘Fornaldarsögur as Fantastic Ethnographies’, in Fornaldarsagaerne, ed. Ney, Ármann Jakobsson and Lassen, pp. 317–30 (p. 320).

The saga’s focus on injury and healing may also respond to evolving societal realities, including the introduction of corporal punishment after Iceland’s loss of political independence to Norway in the late thirteenth century. Where Grágás includes no capital or corporal punishments for offences, the later Jónsbók is more severe. Here, several legal articles mention crimes punishable by loss of life or limb,3 Mannhelgi IV.17–18 (pp. 64–5); Þjófabálkr IV.22 (pp. 356–7). branding4 Þjófabálkr IX.1 (pp. 330–1). or an injury that fits the crime: for instance, a person who bites another person will have their front teeth knocked out,5 Mannhelgi IV.15 (pp. 58–9). and a person who has stabbed another may buy their freedom by submitting his own hand to the same knife.6 Mannhelgi IV.14 (pp. 56–7). Consequently, as Erika Sigurdson observes, around the middle of the fourteenth century, Icelandic annals begin to record instances of executions.7 ‘The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leeds, 2011), p. 19. Such developments must have sharpened questions of bodily wholeness, injury and ability for saga audiences (and infused the Christian doctrine of re-assemblage with new significance). Read in this light, Egils saga einhenda, and the fornaldarsögur more broadly, emerges not as mere escapist fantasy but as a form of cultural inquiry that grapples with ideas central to the human condition, in response to evolving religious, medical and legal frameworks.

As in the mythological material discussed in the previous chapter, Egils saga einhenda encodes embodiment through a gendered lens, again focusing predominantly on male experience. For instance, though Arinnefja experiences multiple injuries too, unlike Egill, the narrator does not consider how these injuries alter Arinnefja’s embodied experience. This asymmetry suggests either that the narrator is more interested in male than female embodiment, or that the ‘universal’ human subject is implicitly coded as male within fornaldarsaga-tradition. It may also reflect the fact that Arinnefja belongs not to the human world but to an Otherworld (‘Jǫtunheimr’), where embodiment carries different ontological weight. This disparity invites further investigation into how gender and alterity inflect representations of disability and humanity in fornaldarsögur.

In sum, Egils saga einhenda reveals a keen interest in bodily vulnerability, integrity and the interplay between human and more-than-human forms. Set against the backdrop of contemporary legal, theological and medical thought, its depictions of injury and repair suggest that fornaldarsögur performed vital cultural work, addressing enduring questions of what it means to be whole, and wholly human.