Lexical Mutability and Evolving Perspectives

As the above survey shows, verbs (such as bregða(sk), verða and skipta) also play a crucial role in communicating transformation, offering different emphases and ways of conceptualising change. At the same time, the distribution of hamr, hugr and fylgja in the sources is more limited and context-specific than their prominence in scholarship might suggest.2 See, e.g., F.-X. Dillmann, Les magiciens dans l’Islande ancienne: études sur la représentation de la magie islandaise et de ses agents dans les sources littéraires norroises (Uppsala, 2006), pp. 244–5; Davidson, ‘Shape-Changing’; L. Hedeager, ‘Scandinavia before the Viking Age’, in The Viking World, ed. S. Brink and N. Price (London, 2008), pp. 11–22 (p. 13). Hugr (mind, thought, attitude) appears rarely in transformation contexts,3 Hugr has been linked to theories of transformation which posit shapeshifting as a person’s ‘hugr’ taking on a ‘hamr’ (see, e.g., Strömbäck, Sejd; J. de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1956); C. Raudvere, ‘Popular Religion in the Viking Age’, in The Viking World, ed. Brink and Price, pp. 235–45). Colin Mackenzie finds no evidence for this theory in the literature itself (‘Vernacular Psychologies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Glasgow, 2014), p. 89). and fylgja (fetch, attendant spirit) – though often interpreted as signalling an externalised or detachable aspect of the self4 It is associated with the soul, and thereby with processes of transformation; see Strömbäck, Sejd; E. Mundal, ‘Fylgjemotiva i norron litteratur’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oslo, 1974). – tends in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts to function as a metonym for a person’s qualities, rather than a key element involved in shapeshifting.5 See Zuzanna Stankovitsová, ‘“Eru þetta mannafylgjur”: A Re-Examination of fylgjur in Old Norse Literature’ (unpublished MA dissertation, University of Iceland, 2015), p. 48; and Bourns, ‘Animals and Humans’, p. 132. Hugr and fylgja remain relevant for understanding medieval ideas of selfhood, but they are less central to the language of transformation than has sometimes been assumed.

Even hamr, the term most frequently linked with transformation in secondary literature, displays significant semantic flexibility. As both a noun and the root of the verb hamask and various compounds (hamhleypa, hamfar, hamrammr, einhamr), it can signal shapeshifting, access to strength or shifts in emotional and cognitive state. These compounds evoke shapeshifting abilities particularly as an element of characterisation, and their meanings vary based on context. Hamhleypa (shape-leaper), for instance, can describe shapeshifters (as in Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar)6 Ch. 3 (p. 390). or figures riding on the backs of animals (as in Friðþjófs saga frøkna7 Ed. Larsson (p. 47). Friðþjófs saga was composed in the fourteenth century. and Jóns saga Baptista).8 Ed. C. R. Unger, in Postola sögur: Legendariske Fortællinger om Apostlernes Liv, deres Kamp for Kristendommens Udbredelse, samt deres Martyrdød (Oslo, 1874), p. 194. Jóns saga Baptista was composed in the fourteenth century. In many cases, the noun is merely used as a character descriptor, with no elaboration on what this identity entails.9 Bárð., ch. 7 (ed. Guðbrandur Vigfússon, p. 14). A different ambiguity colours the adjectives hamrammr (shape-strong) and (eigi) einhamr ((not) of one shape), as well as the verb hamask (rage, rampage). While being hamrammr does sometimes describe shapeshifting capacities,10 Ldn(H), ch. 309 (p. 109). it can also denote a person’s ability to temporarily access supernatural strength.11 Eg, ch. 27 (ed. Bjarni Einarsson, pp. 68–9). Egils saga was composed c. 1220–40. Meanwhile, einhamr and hamask often denote qualities and changes in mood and disposition, rather than physical metamorphosis.12 Eigi einhamr is used as a character descriptor in a range of texts composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, either for someone with a disagreeable personality (Háv., ch. 1 (ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson, p. 2)) and Finnb., ch. 29 (ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson, p. 299)), for a berserkr (Þórð., ch. 2 (ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson, p. 234)), or for someone with access to supernatural strength (GHr., ch. 8 (p. 261) and OStór. (ed. Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Unger, p. 524)). Hamask is more often associated with sudden rage (as in Frið. (p. 26) and GHr., ch. 30 (p. 322)) and violent movement (GHr., chs 6, 33 (pp. 257, 343), Eg, ch. 40 (p. 57)) than formal metamorphosis. These terms suggest an embedded connection between transformation and mood: perhaps entering into heightened states (especially rage) was understood as entailing an ontological shift from human-to-animal? In any case, hamr seems to have undergone some form of semantic change or broadening, involving metaphoric transfer between the fields of shapeshifting and heightened emotion.13 Novotná theorises this change less as a case of broadening and more as a split of an originally unified semantic field spanning the physical and the spiritual or mental, resulting in homonyms (Between Body and Soul, pp. 55–57). Novotná’s detailed work on the root ham- and the varied contexts in which it appears offers a helpful counterbalance to my overview here, which focused doggedly on the employment of terms solely in contexts in which they denote shapeshifting. The polysemy of hamr within and beyond descriptions of shapeshifting highlights the complexity of disambiguating the mental from the physical in acts of change (a topic returned to in Chapter 6).

The term hamr has thus cast a long shadow over discussions of the language of Old Norse shapeshifting, and not without good reason. Scholars such as Neil Price, who describes skipta hǫmum as ‘the Old Norse verb for shape-shifting’,14 Viking Way, p. 30. and Sarah Künzler, who refers to ‘the motif of corporeal change, usually termed hamhleypa […] or hamask’,15 Flesh and Word, p. 236. See also Dillmann, Magiciens, pp. 244–8; Su, Werewolves, p. 44; and Ármann Jakobsson, ‘Medieval Iceland Transformations’, in which his conclusions that transformations are both corporeal and spiritual in nature rests on an analysis of hamr and its compounds. have positioned hamr as central to how shapeshifting is conceptualised and expressed in this literature. This chapter, however, suggests that no single noun or verb dominates the lexicon of transformation. Skipta hǫmum, for instance, keeps company with other well-attested alternatives, including skipta litum (used in both prose and poetic contexts) and bregða(sk) í -líki (which is more common across genres than either skipta litum or skipta hǫmum). Process-oriented verbs (such as verða and bregða(sk)) are particularly favoured in prose, but are less common in the Poetic Edda and in Íslendingasögur: while eddic verse shows considerable lexical variation (likely a response to the restrictive demands of metre and poetic diction), the family sagas prefer verbs of sight and perception, consistent with their more realist mode and avoidance of explicit material metamorphosis. This divergence illustrates the extent to which modal differences and genre conventions shaped the language of transformation too, with mythological texts and fornaldarsögur embracing metamorphosis, while Íslendingasögur lean toward illusory transformation, to preserve narrative realism and comport with Christian orthodoxy.

In turn, it is also helpful to look beyond hamr at the other nouns (such as líki, litr, ásjóna, yfirlit and mynd) that narrators and poets might call upon when depicting change. Across the corpus, líki and hamr are the most frequent: the former is used for a wide range of human-, animal- and object-forms across a diverse array of texts, while the latter refers most often to bird-feathers or avian shapes, and is more prevalent in mythological and legendary texts than other genres. By contrast, the nouns litr, ásjóna, yfirlit and mynd occur chiefly in anthropomorphic transformations, where the emphasis falls on superficial appearance rather than physical form (in contrast to líki and hamr).

Taken together, the verbs and nouns surveyed in this chapter suggest not a single, unified model of shapeshifting, but a spectrum of linguistic strategies for marking change, ranging from verbs that stress process and becoming, to those that frame transformation as exchange, layering or even deception. This lexicon invites audiences to imagine change in multiple registers: as metamorphosis (where one form becomes another), as hybridisation (where forms are layered or combined) or as illusion (where change is perceptual rather than material). By tracing these choices of words across genres, we gain insight into how language itself shaped the imaginative possibilities available to medieval audiences, providing the conceptual vocabulary through which identity, embodiment and the boundaries of the human could be explored.

More broadly, this chapter has shown that medieval Icelanders possessed a flexible, nuanced vocabulary for envisaging change, one that made room for ontological fluidity without collapsing the coherence of the human subject. This conceptual groundwork sets the stage for the final chapter, in which we will explore narratorial features that recur in stories of shapeshifting, and consider what these patterns might tell us about medieval Icelandic conceptions of autonomy, selfhood and humanity’s place in the more-than-human world.