​Conclusion: Beyond Binaries and Between Boundaries

These findings invite us to question the usefulness of modern concepts such as the ‘bounded’ or ‘autonomous’ individual for understanding medieval Icelandic literary culture, and to move beyond Cartesian dualism in our approaches. Instead, deeper insight comes from tracing how texts depict the evolving connections between mind and matter, human and nonhuman, subject and object, nature and culture, active and passive. Across the case studies discussed (from dismemberment and bodily entanglement to episodes of shapeshifting), these narratives and poetic forms return time and again to the boundary between the human and the nonhuman world of objects, animals and environments as a key site for negotiating the construction of the self. In Old Norse literary culture, what it means to be human is to be inextricably part of the material world.

Narrators and poets investigate how human and nonhuman life are enmeshed on both material and categorical levels. In mythological narrative, materials and bodies converge to create life, cosmos and cultural resources, producing a world in which no entity can be accurately viewed as wholly distinct and unitary. Traditional skaldic poetics presents the self as dividual, dispersed across networks of bodies, objects and actions. Again, we encounter a focus on interacting parts and emergent wholes: the warrior becomes a painter of mail-shirts, a thirst-quencher of wolves; his arm is a yew-bow’s rest, his head, a helmet-support. Old Norse riddles likewise push us to rethink where one entity ends and another begins by envisaging ‘distinct’ beings as assemblages (as in Riddle 36, Óðinn riding Sleipnir) and by dissolving bodily wholes into parts (as in Riddle 29, cow). Meanwhile, in the Sigurðr-cycle, plant and animal matter alters human mind and mood, revealing a subject that is far from autonomous and self-contained: the human is conceived as an open system, in constant interchange with the nonhuman.

This material entanglement brings with it a conceptual entanglement. The Sigurðr-cycle, for instance, uses animality to both affirm and undermine human difference. While the figure of the animal is used to shore up human identity, the cycle also exposes the fragility and moral contingency of that identity: humans who violate its terms are themselves made animal. Through a dual process, the human is paradoxically drawn closer to the nonhuman: antisocial humans are habitually cast as animals, while transgressive human actions are attributed to the ‘corrupting’ effects of animal material. This proximity – Agamben’s ‘intimate caesura’1 The Open, pp. 15–16. – exposes a central dilemma of human difference: the very thresholds erected to keep categories apart also become points of contact and passage between them. Some texts attempt to close off these thresholds, betraying anxieties about loss of control (cognitive and corporeal), a concern for human separatism, and a desire for stable categories within a world of continual flux: a biological human hand is ultimately favoured over a sword-prosthesis; shapeshifting is usually temporary; and the more-than-human assemblages conjured through kennings dissolve once their referents are identified.

Even when texts do embrace human–nonhuman entanglements, a latent anthropocentrism persists: humans may understand the speech of birds or take on animal forms, but the reverse rarely occurs. Across the case studies, then, we see a tension: texts seek to define human difference while also recognising the futility of doing so in narrative worlds where human and nonhuman lives are deeply and productively interwoven. Cognitive and affective traits that in intellectual and religious discourse act as unique markers of humanity are not always the exclusive province of humans in vernacular texts: narrators often grant them to nonhuman figures,2 For instance, the talking birds of the Sigurðr-cycle; the speech of swords and emotive experience of trees in skaldic verse; the intelligence and language comprehension of Grani; the mourning of vegetable, mineral and microbial life for the death of Baldr; the extrasomatic expression of Óðinn’s cognitive processes as ravens. even as they strip them from human characters.3 Human–animal transformations can produce animalistic impulses, as when Sigmundr bites his son’s windpipe in the wolf-skin episode in the Sigurðr-cycle, while antisocial behaviours such as kin-slaying and oath-breaking also turn humans into wolves, either figuratively or literally. Additionally, the Sigurðr-cycle suggests that cognition and disposition can be influenced through the consumption of animal and plant matter, implying that humans are not entirely masters of their own minds.

Across these works, we encounter an enduring concern with the limits of human perception and our inability to conceptualise the world consistently through linguistic categories. Kennings and riddles nudge us into new ways of relating to the world, highlighting webs of shared connection between humans, animals, objects and plants. Likewise, deceptive materiality in mythic narrative, as well as transformations that are presented as sjónhverfingar, expose the unreliability of human perception, suggesting that categorical boundaries rooted in observation of the material world may ultimately be illusory (an issue likewise touched on in the Prologue to Snorra Edda). Identity is thus made inseparable from human modes of seeing and speaking, for language mediates rather than mirrors reality.

Both behaviours and bodies are instrumental in determining and communicating identities. Many texts emphasise function over essence: Egils saga einhenda approaches limb-loss in terms of use-value (such that a sword-prosthesis may surpass a human hand), while poetic modes focus on the behavioural likeness rather than essential difference between entities. Just as skaldic kennings unfold a world of fluid boundaries where one entity stands in for another on the basis of shared traits, so too the figurative language of eddic poets treats species boundaries as behaviourally, rather than biologically, determined. Yet the body remains central, as a medium through which ideas of personhood, family, health and ontological difference can be parsed. Because bodies are the material seat of cognition, emotion and character, their propensity to change makes them a flashpoint for negotiating the self, with some texts seeking out forms of bodily autonomy and integrity, and others embracing dismemberment and flux as opportunities for enhancement.

Mythological narratives in particular present the fragmentation of humanoid bodies as fundamentally productive, and depict nonhuman technologies as a means of extending bodily capabilities. Other texts exhibit a desire for wholeness (as in fornaldarsögur, where technologies can be used to ‘complete’ partial bodies) or autonomy (with transformation-episodes coded negatively when imposed against a subject’s will). Alterations to the body grant characters more-than-human abilities, but also generate anxieties about irretrievable change: this is seen both in Óðinn’s fears that his ravens (Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory) will not return, thereby fragmenting his own mind, and also in narratives of transformation where identity persists despite bodily change, suggesting that the stability of human identity rests less on bodily material than on the continuity of agency and psychology.

In addition to presenting personhood as not limited to the biological matter of the body, narrators also depict agency as distributed. Empowering relationships between objects and bodies (such as Þórr’s power-belt, which amplifies his god-strength; or Skírnir’s sword, which fights by itself) undermine the traditional dichotomy of passive tools and active users, suggesting that agency is not inherent in bodies, but rather arises through ‘relational enactments’. This view of agency, like the approach to personhood, entails both advantages and risks: while Chapters 3 and 4 highlight the benefits of an agency that is distributed across human and nonhuman entities (for example, the body–object networks of mythic narrative; and the use of mind-altering matter to alter human capabilities through consumption),4 For example, Fáfnir’s blood affording Sigurðr access to bird-speech or Guttormr’s wolf- and snake-meat emboldening him to murder. Chapters 5 and 6 explore a darker side, with agentive objects, like hamir, usurping human bodies and threatening identities.5 As in Vǫlsunga saga, Hrólfs saga kraka and Gríms saga loðinkinna.

The mode and generic tradition of a text significantly impact how concepts of human identity and ontology are broached. Poetic forms that rely on linguistic play, such as skaldic verse and eddic riddles, allow for a greater reconfiguration of the human, blurring human and nonhuman identities until they become almost indistinguishable. This is made possible by their ludic quality: the doubleness of kennings and riddles allows these poetic forms to simultaneously invoke and subvert specific visions of reality, challenging the listener’s cognitive framework. In contrast, fornaldarsögur take a more literal and visceral approach to self and body (a finding which reinforces the importance of treating objects and bodies in these texts as material entities rather than simply abstract symbols): Egill einhendi’s hand is regrafted to his arm; new skins – animal, bark and human – become attached to bodies; figurative eddic language is recast as material event in fornaldarsaga-prose. It is therefore essential to consider the wider literary and intellectual contexts that shape a text’s treatment of cultural concepts like identity, ontology, embodiment or agency. For instance, we cannot analyse the depiction of objects in Snorra Edda without considering the relationship between mythic narrative and skaldic praxis that underpins Snorri’s work; and we cannot investigate transformation-episodes in texts without considering how narratorial conventions (such as a preference for realism) and framing ideologies (such as Augustinian thought) may impact their presentation.

Across these chapters, I also traced the relationships between vernacular literary perspectives and theological and intellectual traditions, in which moments of convergence coexist with moments of tension. Chapter 1, for instance, mapped a fascination with bodily fragmentation across mythic narrative and traditional poetics, in contrast to Christian discourses that often stressed bodily integrity. Chapter 2, however, showed Egils saga einhenda critically engaging with Christian ideas of fragmented, animated and reassembled bodies – potentially in response to contemporary fascination with relic cults, saintly healing and bodily resurrection. Chapter 6, in turn, found that transformation narratives which preserve personal continuity despite physical change depart from contemporary theological and medical frameworks, which emphasise a unity of body and self. Some texts are more marked by a convergence of ideas: for instance, the Neoplatonist analogy of microcosm-macrocosm likely informed Snorri’s framing of mythology, but such ideas were nonetheless already compatible with existing mythological perspectives on materiality; likewise, Óðinn’s ‘metempsychotic’ shapeshifting in Ynglinga saga could equally be shaped by cultural memories of shamanic practices, as it could by Augustinian concepts of demonic illusion.

These findings reveal a richly heterogeneous literary record – varied in ideological influences, discursive modes and genres, and in approaches to human identity itself – underscoring the value of thematic research that reaches across the corpus. Some texts embrace human–nonhuman entanglements as productive, while others construct rules that militate against the perceived openness of the human. Crucially, these texts do not merely mirror cultural beliefs about human identity; they actively participate in the debates that shape and reconfigure such beliefs. The literature reveals an understanding of human identity in process: evolving, contested and continually reimagined across a diverse body of work. While discernible trends exist, no single, unified concept of human identity emerges, nor would such a totalising concept be accurate: instead, we encounter narrators and poets probing the limits of bodies, minds and selves, testing out the shifting contours of identity.

Old Norse literature offers valuable insights into the contingency of the category of the human, the fragility of human separatism, and the limits of human cognition – insights that resonate with our own contemporary debates across science, ecology and technology. Today, our understanding of the parameters of intelligence is evolving, both through research into the complexities of animal cognition6 The last decade has seen a proliferation of popular non-fiction works on nonhuman intelligence, particularly cephalopods (see S. Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness (London, 2015) and P. Godfrey Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York, 2016)). and through the kinds of intelligences, or simulacra of intelligences, that we are now creating. The rise of AI systems, whose operations elude our full comprehension,7 Many emergent behaviours of today’s large neural models remain largely inscrutable, even to researchers at leading AI organisations (see, for example, N. Al-Sibai, ‘Anthropic CEO Admits We Have No Idea How AI Works’, Futurism (4 May 2025), https://futurism.com/anthropic-ceo-admits-ai-ignorance). compels us to re-examine what we mean by intelligence, how it has been historically defined, and how we distinguish human from nonhuman faculties (extending and disrupting the longstanding Western project of asserting human exceptionalism through cognitive singularity).8 The opacity of machine learning in AI-assisted decision-making further fosters ‘agency laundering’, enabling human actors to deflect moral responsibility onto algorithms. A. Rubel, C. Castro and A. Pham, ‘Agency Laundering and Information Technologies’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22.4 (2019), 1017–41.

At the same time, advances in microbiology challenge the assumption of human boundedness, encouraging us to see ourselves less as autonomous individuals than as ‘holobionts’: as one study puts it, we are so well integrated with our microbiomes ‘that the individuality of human beings is better conceived as a symbiotic entity. Insofar as biological research is concerned, to be human is to be multispecies’.9 T. Hutter, C. Gimbert, F. Bouchard and F.-J. Lapointe, ‘Being Human is a Gut Feeling’, Microbiome 3 (2015), 9. The climate crisis too underscores our need to rethink human relationships with the environment: the decline in biodiversity alone, as Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, highlights the urgency of adopting a political imagination that recognises humans ‘as a species deeply embedded in the history of life’.10 The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (London, 2021), p. 127. This reorientation is also taking shape in law, with the emergence of ‘rights of nature’ conferring legal personhood on nonhuman entities, marking a shift from anthropocentric paradigms of ownership and extraction to principles of stewardship and ecological interdependence.11 The Whanganui River, for instance, was declared a legal person in 2017 (V. Kahui, ‘Granting Legal “Personhood” to Nature Is a Growing Movement – Can It Stem Biodiversity Loss’, The Conversation (25 April 2024), https://theconversation.com/granting-legal-personhood-to-nature-is-a-growing-movement-can-it-stem-biodiversity-loss-227336) and in 2024, Indigenous leaders in New Zealand and the Cook Islands signed a treaty recognising whales as legal persons (R. Evans, ‘What If Whales Took Us to Court? A Move to Grant them Legal Personhood Would Include the Right to Sue’, The Conversation (14 April 2024), https://theconversation.com/what-if-whales-took-us-to-court-a-move-to-grant-them-legal-personhood-would-include-the-right-to-sue-227335).

We can acknowledge how the poetic and narrative worlds of Old Norse literature resonate with contemporary discussions of human identity, agency and environment, without losing sight of the historical contexts that shaped medieval engagements with these concepts. These works continue to matter today: they illuminate the complexity of past thought while also speaking to the questions that still preoccupy us, reflecting our enduring curiosity, and urgency, in asking what it means to be human.