5 Words of Change: Old Norse Terminologies and Concepts of Transformation

Old Norse literature does not offer a single, consistent answer. In Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar, a curse transforms a princess: ‘þú sért þvílík at vexti ok yfirlitum sem Skellinefja, systir mín, ok allri náttúru þeirri, sem þú mátt bera’ (‘you will be just like Skellinefja, my sister, in size and appearance, and in entire nature, as far as you can assume it’).3 ÞorstVík, ch. 17 (ed. Rafn, p. 432). Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar was composed c. 1300. Although this transformation threatens to touch even the princess’s náttúra, the relative clause (‘sem þú mátt bera’ ) hints at a limit of conceivable change. These moments, in which traces of a person’s original identity seem to persist despite radical alteration, highlight an interesting tension within the Old Norse corpus of transformations: shapeshifting can both threaten to undo the self and paradoxically affirm its persistence.

Such episodes can also unsettle our confidence in the structure of reality: a transformed person might be misidentified, seen as beast rather than man (as when the kings’ men unknowingly kill the prince, Bjǫrn, in bear-form, in Hrólfs saga kraka).4 Hrólfs saga kraka was composed c. 1400 in essentially the form it now survives, possibly based on a thirteenth-century version. Or, like the unfortunate Otr in mythological-legendary narrative, a transformed person might defy categorisation altogether, hovering between beast and man.5 As in Reginsmál, Vǫlsunga saga (ch. 14) and Skáldskaparmál (ch. 39), where the gods kill and flay a man who has transformed into the shape of an otter; the man, named Otr (‘otter’), by all accounts lived and died as an otter, raising the question of which category of being he belongs to, if any. By forcing such interpretive dilemmas, shapeshifting narratives create fissures in the taxonomies by which we order the world.

While many transformation-episodes press on questions of identity, embodiment, autonomy and humanity, they also often serve more pragmatic narrative ends: enabling characters to disguise themselves, travel rapidly over large distances, escape danger and so on. This chapter analyses the language of transformation across thirteenth- and fourteenth-century prose and verse texts, exploring how narrators’ and poets’ choice of verbs and nouns guides audiences conceptually, whether the moment is more metaphysically inflected or narratively utilitarian.

What words are used to depict change? How might they shape audiences’ understanding of the process of change (and the concomitant understanding of identity as stable or fluid)? Does literary genre or mode impact the way in which – and the words with which – transformation is depicted? The analysis that follows addresses these questions by collating the language of transformation across genres and modes, showing that depictions of shapeshifting are shaped by interlocking factors, including cultural concepts of human identity and self-sameness, narratorial style and literary convention, and broader intellectual influences.

Previous research into Old Norse shapeshifting is characterised by two broader tendencies. Faced with the at times messy and contradictory nature of the source material, scholars have often organised transformations into binary categories: metamorphosis versus metempsychosis (soul-projection);6 In this binary, metamorphosis refers to the change of a body into another body, while metempyschosis is defined as follows: ‘when the soul, or an equivalent interpretation of the soul, leaves the body and inhabits another body or vessel’ (C. With Pedersen, ‘The Cursed and the Committed: A Study in Literary Representations of “Involuntary” Shapeshifting in Early Medieval Irish and Old Norse Narrative Traditions’, in Shapeshifters, ed. Barreiro and Russo, pp. 107–26 (p. 108)). See also S. Grundy, ‘Shapeshifting and Berserkergang’, in Translation, Transformation and Transubstantiation, ed. C. Poster and R. Utz (Evanston, IL, 1998), pp. 104–22 (p. 104); and G. Knight, ‘Categorizing the Werewolf; Or, the Peopleness of Shapeshifters’, in Margins, Monsters, Deviants, ed. Merkelbach and Knight, pp. 27–44 (p. 33). Metempsychosis is rarely found in the primary sources; its relative prevalence in scholarship, however, may reflect scholars’ interest in episodes of ‘metempsychosis’ as a reflex of a Norse wandering-soul belief, akin to that seen in Sámi shamanistic practices. See D. Strömbäck, Sejd; textstudier i nordisk religionshistoria (Copenhagen, 1935); N. Price, The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2019) and ‘The Archaeology of Seiðr: Circumpolar Traditions in Viking Pre-Christian Religion’, Brathair 4.2 (2004), 109–26; T. A. DuBois, Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (Philadelphia, 1999). voluntary versus involuntary;7 With Pedersen, ‘Cursed and Committed’; P. Orton, ‘Theriomorphism: Jacob Grimm, Old Norse Mythology, German Fairy Tale, and English Folklore’, in The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous, ed. T. Shippey, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 14 (Tempe, AZ, 2005), pp. 299–334; R. O’Connor, ‘Monsters of the Tribe: Berserk Fury, Shapeshifting and Social Dysfunction in Táin Bó Cúailnge, Egils saga and Hrólfs saga kraka’, in Kings and Warriors in Early North-West Europe, ed. J. E. Rekdal and C. Doherty (Dublin, 2016), pp. 180–236. virtuosic versus guardian;8 Virtuosic is where a human can transform into any animal; guardian is where a human transforms into a specific animal. Knight, ‘Categorizing the Werewolf’, p. 29. and form-changing versus skin-acquisition.9 Ibid., p. 38. See also S. Small, ‘The Medieval Werewolf Model of Reading Skin’, in Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. K. L. Walter (New York, 2013), pp. 81–97 (pp. 83–4), on an ‘overlay model’ of reading skin in the context of transformation. In addition, much of this work has focused on a small set of well-known episodes, such as Óðinn’s transformation in Ynglinga saga, the wolf-skin episode in the Sigurðr-cycle and Bjǫrn’s transformation in Hrólfs saga kraka.10 See, e.g., H. R. Ellis Davidson, ‘Shape-Changing in the Old Norse Sagas’, in Animals in Folklore, ed. J. R. Porter and W. M. S. Russell (Cambridge, UK, 1978), pp. 126–42; Knight, ‘Categorizing the Werewolf’; Price, Viking Way, pp. 30–9; Ármann Jakobsson, ‘Watch Out for the Skin Deep: Medieval Icelandic Transformations’, Arts 12.5 (2023), 1–8; With Pedersen, ‘Cursed and Committed’; Orton, ‘Theriomorphism’; Barreiro, ‘Fáfnir as Shapeshifter’; S. Higley, ‘Finding the Man Under the Skin: Identity, Monstrosity, Expulsion, and the Werewolf’, in The Shadow-Walkers, ed. Shippey, pp. 335–78; Bourns, ‘Animals and Humans’. Building on this foundation, I look at lexical patterns that cut across such dichotomies, and broaden the corpus under consideration.11 I examine Íslendingasögur, fornaldarsögur, riddarasögur, konungasögur, þættir, mythological texts, eddic and skaldic verse, and religious texts. All texts examined are either presumed to have been composed in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, or are preserved in manuscripts dating to that period.

While this kind of detailed linguistic survey admittedly doesn’t make for light reading, it aims to offer a more emic perspective on medieval Icelandic conceptions of transformation. By examining the words used by narrators and poets, I identify three overlapping modes of depicting change in the literature: metamorphosis, hybridisation and illusion. Metamorphosis denotes a transformation in which one entity becomes another, with little or no narratorial comment on whether the subject’s identity persists. Hybridisation describes cases where the text signals that some features of the underlying self remain despite outward change. This mode highlights continuity within change, whether by allowing human memory, consciousness or speech to persist, or by mixing human and nonhuman traits into a composite form.12 My usage of metamorphosis and hybridisation overlaps partly with Caroline Walker Bynum’s typology, developed in her magisterial Metamorphosis and Identity, which explores concepts of change in twelfth- and thirteenth-century European theological and literary works. Like Walker Bynum, I take metamorphosis to mean ‘go[ing] from an entity that is one thing to an entity that is another’; however, whereas Walker Bynum treats the hybrid (in her examples, an ox-man or bearded lady) as a static, visual ‘double-being […] a way of making two-ness, and the simultaneity of two-ness, visible’ (p. 30), in Old Norse texts hybridity is often presented as the result of a transformation process. In these cases, hybridity is defined less through visual simultaneity/paradox, and more by a narrative emphasis on identity’s persistence or intermingling beneath a changed exterior. Illusion refers to transformations that are visual deceptions (sjónhverfing), where the character appears changed but has not undergone ontological transformation; while not always recognised as such by characters within the story world, illusions are marked for the audience by specific terms and motifs. This typology is therefore grounded in the descriptive complexion of transformation-episodes: what matters here is what the narrator or poet chooses to communicate about the nature and limits of the change.

Rather than exhaustively cataloguing every occurrence of verbs and nouns used across genres, I will give key examples of each phrase to highlight the semantic nuances of these terms, tracing how change is conceptualised and communicated.13 In collating these lexical items, I have used a range of digital and print resources, chiefly ONP, the digital Lexicon Poeticum and Boberg’s Motif-Index. I have also conducted term searches of the HTML texts of Íslendingasögur available at https://sagadb.org/; of fornaldarsögur available at https://www.snerpa.is/net/forn/forn.htm; and of konungasögur, riddarasögur, heilagra manna sögur and biskupasögur available at https://heimskringla.no/wiki/Forside. Previous scholarship has concentrated on a relatively narrow set of terms (especially hamr and its compounds); this chapter brings into view a much wider lexicon. Medieval Icelanders did not rely on a single dominant model of transformation: rather, they drew on a heterogeneous set of terms and images that reflect multiple, sometimes conflicting, ways of imagining change. These findings not only fill a gap in the philological record but also underscore the imaginative range of transformation in Old Norse literature and its narrative and thematic significance.