Co-Emergent Life and Distributed Agency
Margaret Clunies Ross contends that mythic narratives reflect ‘the desires and limitation of humankind [… and] explore a number of basic ontological questions of fundamental interest to humans’.
1 Prolonged Echoes II, 24. The nature of materiality is one such question, a central medium through which these stories examine the relations between the human and nonhuman world. Through patterns of material entanglement and deception, Old Norse mythic narratives and poetics explore the interdependence of bodies, objects and environments, while exposing the limits of human perception and the fallibility of rigid systems of categorisation.
In Norse myth, environments and bodies comingle and exchange matter to sustain life and generate culturally valuable resources. Mythic materials not only connect bodies with environments, but bridge the worlds of gods and humans. By rendering the materials of the gods coterminous with those of humans, these narratives offer audiences a vision of shared ecological realities. This connectivity may also serve Snorri’s euhemeristic framing of Norse myth; in this respect, it is salient that aetiological explanations for environmental properties are far more common in Snorra Edda than in the Poetic Edda.
These narratives also explore the roles played by personal possessions in supporting identity and power, revealing a world in which objects are not mere tools or passive entities, but participants in the fabric of the æsir’s existence. Mythic objects underscore the limitations and vulnerabilities of the divine body: male gods, in particular, depend on their personal objects, with their absence threatening the gods’ mythic functions and identities. In Chapter 1, we saw how male bodies are frequently dismembered for cosmic gain; in contrast, stories about the gods’ personal possessions show how the loss of an object can drastically compromise a god’s mythic function. This distinction demonstrates how objects could be seen as more integral to personhood than even a body-part. Networks of interaction between bodies and nonhuman possessions – such as Þórr’s power-belt, Freyja’s falcon-skin or Óðinn’s ravens – further reconfigure personal boundaries and highlight an understanding of agency and cognition as distributed and relational, not confined to the body.
Old Norse poetics, too, explore objects as emotive, vocal and dynamic agents, resonating with new materialist perspectives on matter as ‘agentic, generative, active, and expressive’.
2 S. Oppermann, ‘From Material to Posthuman Ecocriticism: Hybridity, Stories, Natures’, in Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, ed. H. Zapf (Berlin, 2016), pp. 273–94 (p. 273). Skaldic kennings and
Heiðreks gátur use materiality as a means of knowing the world, and of forging unexpected connections between seemingly disparate things. While kennings use anthropomorphism as a poetic tool, bringing visual, kinetic, aural and emotive drama to stanzas, riddles employ anthropomorphism to obscure and subvert understanding, revealing how anthropocentric frameworks limit human comprehension of nonhuman things.
From kennings that foreground the agency of battle equipment to myths that invest power in objects as much as bodies, these texts underscore the centrality of materials to human experience. They challenge modern readers’ assumptions of objects as passive and dichotomous to the human subject, and they emphasise the relational nature of agency, presenting humans as deeply enmeshed with their environments. By resisting fixed ontological categories and habitually blurring boundaries between entities, mythic narratives and Old Norse poetics conceptualise the human as an open system, resonating with posthumanist thought, where the human is reconceived ‘in terms of co-emergence within a shared field of existence marked by the interdependency of life’.
3 Ibid., p. 276.