3
‘Allir hlutir væri smíðaðir af nokkuru efni’:
1 ProlSnE, ch. 2 (ed. Faulkes, p. 4): ‘all things were crafted from some material’. Materiality, Personhood and Agency in Mythological Narrative and Old Norse Poetics
How we understand the materiality of the world shapes our conception of human identity. Ideas about matter are key to questions of individuation, aetiology and ontology – in short, who we are, where we come from and the nature of our existence. Medieval thinkers were well attuned to these interconnections between materiality and ontological thought. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw cosmological conceptions evolve under the influence of Plato’s
Timaeus, a text that elaborately links the material substance of the world-body (macrocosm) to the human-body (microcosm).
2 Nordal, Tools of Literacy, pp. 273–4. The epistemological and material imbrication of man and world was further explored in the twelfth-century
Elucidarius, attributed to the theologian Honorius Augustodunensis (c. 1080–c. 1150), a Latin text translated into Old Norse in the same century.
3 The Icelandic Elucidarius survives in numerous fragmentary manuscripts, the oldest being AM 674a 4to (c. 1200). On manuscript dating, see K. Kålund, Katalog over Den Arnamgnæanske Håndskriftsamling, 2 vols (Copenhagen, 1892), II, 92. This cosmological stance went on to shape the conceptual frames for written and visual culture in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland, from Icelandic cartography
4 E.g., the Viðey maps, c. 1225–50 (see D. Kedwards, The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (Cambridge, 2020), p. 152). to vernacular works, including
Snorra Edda.
5 Nordal, Tools of Literacy, pp. 273–7. Interlocking theories of matter and cosmology were circulating in intellectual circles in Iceland at the same time as vernacular myths and poetic traditions, which offered their own platforms for exploring the physical relationships between humans and the natural environment, were being textualised.
The mythic world in the
Eddas is a profoundly material one, characterised by flux, conversion and inevitable destruction: the sun and the moon (Sól and Máni) are pursued through the sky by wolves who will eventually catch and devour them.
6 Gylf., ch. 12 (p. 14); Gylf., ch. 51 (p. 49); Vsp. 39; Grm. 39. The rainbow bridge Bifrǫst, which connects heaven and earth, will shatter at Ragnarǫk, as Hár forewarns, ‘Ok svá sem hon er sterk, þá mun hon brotna þá er Muspells megir fara ok ríða hana’ (‘And as strong as it is, it will break when Muspell’s sons go and ride it’).
7 Gylf., ch. 13 (p. 15). An awareness of the ephemerality of material life is sharpened in these myths by the gods’ repeated use of objects to safeguard themselves against their own impermanence.
These myths retained cultural significance in post-conversion Iceland, forming an implicit framework through which medieval Icelanders made sense of and represented human life and behaviour, both in the past and in their own time.
8 See M. Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society. Volume 2: The Reception of Norse Myths in Medieval Iceland (Odense, 1998), p. 23; U. Dronke, ‘Beowulf and Ragnarǫk’, Saga-Book 17 (1966–9), 302–25 (p. 310). In the following discussion, I treat the category of the gods as a heightened proxy for humans. Although the myths do draw a distinction between gods and men, the narratives represent a conception of reality that reveals underlying cultural approaches to the structure of the world, the operation of agency and the limits of body and self.
This chapter analyses the treatment of materiality in mythic prose narrative and traditional poetics. It begins with Snorri’s presentation of material properties in his Edda and his depiction of human and divine perceptions of matter. Two characteristic patterns of representation emerge: ‘material entanglement’, in which beings and environments are intricately interwoven, and ‘material deception’, where appearances conceal the underlying nature of things. The discussion then turns to the gods’ interaction with objects in Snorra Edda and the Poetic Edda (drawing on skaldic kenning-patterns), illustrating how materials themselves participate in the production of meaning, identity and agency within the mythic sphere. Personhood and agency appear not as self-contained, but as distributed across bodies and nonhuman matter, a view that invites a more relational understanding of material existence in Old Norse cosmology. Finally, these concerns with matter and perception are further developed in skaldic verse and eddic riddles, where anthropomorphism and zoomorphism animate the nonhuman world, granting plants and objects voice, emotion and perspective. Here too, the principles of material entanglement and deception underlie poetic expression, and both mythic narrative and traditional verse shift our attention to the relationships between language, perception and matter, underscoring the subjectivity of human experiences of the world and the critical role played by language in shaping these experiences.