Between Body and World, Human and Animal

Drawing on Agamben’s concept of the ‘intimate caesura’,1 The Open, pp. 15–16. the first case study explored how the figure of the animal is used to produce and police the boundaries of legitimate human identity, such that the ‘human’ is not possible without the ‘animal’. Animals in the eddic tradition function as semiotic stand-ins for humans and as metaphors for deviant behaviour, revealing a conceptual continuum between species in which identity is rooted more in behaviour than body. Lupine imagery in eddic verse, for example, is applied to humans who behave in transgressive ways, with wolfishness associated with kin-slaying and the ruthless pursuit of vengeance. In Vǫlsunga saga, such figurative language is literalised in an episode of wolf-transformation, likely developed from metaphorical imagery in Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’s senna. At the same time, animals across the cycle often display language comprehension and emotional intelligence – cognitive capacities that prop up human exceptionalism – highlighting how species-based identities exist on a sliding scale, with movement in both directions.

In the second case study, I examined how the boundary between humans and the material world is transgressed through acts of ingestion. Anthropophagy in the cycle levels humans with animals, exposing their shared vulnerability as flesh: much like the ‘intimate caesura’, this zone of indiscernibility between animals and humans emphasises the culturally manufactured nature of the divide.

Similarly, mind-altering victuals destabilise human agency and identity, revealing the human subject as fluid, influenced by nonhuman matter.2 Transformation through ingesting nonhuman matter is not unique to the Sigurðr-cycle: cases appear in Hrólfs saga kraka and Bósa saga (J. Hui, ‘Bad Beef and Mad Cow Disease in Bósa saga ok Herrauðs’, SS 90.4 (2018), 461–84), while the mythic mead of poetry can also be seen as cognitively transformative (H. Burrows, ‘The Mead of Poetry: Old Norse Poetry as Mind-Altering Substance’, in Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, ed. M. Anderson and M. Wheeler (Edinburgh, 2019), pp. 99–119). In learned texts too, dragon meat is said to improve mannvit (‘human intelligence’), a practice attributed to the inhabitants of Bláland in the fourteenth-century AM 194 8vo (Alfræði Íslenzk, pp. 39–40). Drawing on Tulinius’s observed ‘axis of intentionality’ in Vǫlsunga saga,3 Matter of the North, p. 158. I argued that mind-altering victuals in the saga serve to inflect our understanding of characters’ transgressions, resulting in a narrative world in which human agency is frequently surrendered. In Vǫlsunga saga, these substances directly impact how characters act, from Sigurðr’s consumption of harm-blended mead, to Guttormr’s eating of wolf- and snake-meat. By contrast, in Skáldskaparmál, the only substance that alters human cognition is Fáfnir’s blood. Psychoactive brews in the heroic Poetic Edda blend figurative and literal dimensions, while explicit comments on cognitive effects of food and drink appear chiefly in the prose frames and interjections, rather than the verses themselves (as in Fáfnismál, Guðrúnarkviða I and Sigrdrífumál). Although Guttormr does drink a concoction in Brot af Sigurðarkviðu before killing Sigurðr, the poet does not emphasise what effects it has on Guttormr’s disposition, and in Sigurðarkviða, he remains a willing and resolute participant in Sigurðr’s murder. Guðrún’s grimness in the eddic tradition is attributed to her psychological trauma from internecine strife, rather than a result of eating Fáfnir’s heart (in contrast to Vǫlsunga saga).

It is still possible that the absence of the óminnisǫl drunk by Sigurðr in the Poetic Edda is due to the manuscript’s lacuna. However, if this memory-drink was a feature in eddic tradition (for which we find little evidence in Grípisspá and Sigurðarkviða), it likely assumed less significance than in Vǫlsunga saga. As Robert Glendinning has remarked, amnesia-inducing drinks are at odds with eddic poetry’s recollective style, and the drink of forgetfulness consumed by Guðrún actually fails to work in the eddic tradition, with Guðrúnarkviða II centring entirely on Guðrún’s memory of the past.4 ‘Guðrúnarkviða forna: A Reconstruction and Interpretation’, in Edda, ed. Glendinning and Bessason, pp. 258–82 (p. 269). Where Vǫlsunga saga finds narrative utility in a drink of forgetfulness, the eddic poet has less use for it, with the emotional power of eddic verse resting on characters’ confrontation with memory rather than its erasure.

Throughout this chapter, we have also seen how Vǫlsunga saga literalises abstract and figurative eddic motifs. Metaphorical wolfishness is reworked into an episode of literal transformation, while the act of forgetting or breaking an oath becomes a tangible ‘ale of unremembering’, drawing on traditional associations between knowledge, performative speech, memory and drink. This transformation of motifs from the largely verse traditions of eddic poetry to the prose of the fornaldarsaga shows how narrators adapted inherited material to suit new narrative strategies, literary tastes and thematic concerns.

As this story tradition evolved across its retellings, its treatment of the human also changed. While eddic poets are more interested in the ethical upshots of deliberate human actions, and the motivations (however fraught) that underpin them, the Vǫlsunga saga-narrator strips agency from key characters at key narrative moments: memory, mindset and will become contingent on what is consumed. By attributing transgression to external agents – potions and animal flesh – the narrator’s prose not only rationalises culturally problematic acts such as oath-breaking and kin-slaying, but also challenges the bounded and autonomous nature of ‘the human’ by revealing its susceptibility to nonhuman influence. What began as a narrative strategy for explaining away moral deviation thus results in a reconceptualisation of the human.

Across the textual traditions of the Sigurðr-cycle, the body is depicted as materially continuous with the nonhuman world. Through ingestion, the embodied self incorporates external matter; through death, it enters a larger ecological cycle, as ‘úlfa krásir’ (‘delicacies for wolves [CORPSES]’).5 HHI 36 (p. 254). This material entanglement is accompanied by a conceptual blurring: rather than using the figure of the animal to affirm human difference, these stories instead reveal the ‘intimate caesura’ between the two categories. In doing so, they present a world in which the boundaries of the human are constantly shifting and incorporating the nonhuman, whether by exhibiting behaviours coded as animalistic, by changing physically into an animal, or by consuming animal and plant matter that alters cognition and disposition, challenging the inviolability of human skynsemð and skilning.