Transformation and Identity in Old Norse Literature

The Human and Beyond
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-84384-808-0
Verlag: D.S.Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 17, 258 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 401 g

Reihe: Studies in Old Norse Literature

Investigates how Old Norse myth, saga, and poetic traditions imagine human identity through encounters with animals, materials, and environments.

What happens to the category of the "human" in a world where bodies shift shape, objects fuse with living beings, and identities slip between species? This book explores how thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic texts confront this question, treating transformation not just as a narrative device, but as a way of thinking about what people are and how they inhabit the world.

From the fragmented and reassembled bodies in Snorra Edda to the intricate play between humans and things in skaldic verse and eddic riddles; from mind-altering acts of consumption in the Sigurðr-cycle to the sequence of limb-loss, prosthetic substitution, and reattachment in Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana - these works reveal a culture keenly attuned to bodily contingency and material entanglement. Tracing episodes and images of change across the corpus, including the wider lexicon of shapeshifting, the author presents a vision of medieval Icelandic thought creatively alive to the instability of human identity in its running negotiation with the nonhuman world.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND. Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Dorothea Coke Fund.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kreager, Adèle

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Skandinavische Literaturen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

ContentsIllustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Note on Conventions

Introduction
Part I: Dismemberment and Re-assemblage
1. Wholeness and Partibility: Bodily Fragmentation in Mythological Narrative and Old Norse Poetics
2. Sword-Prostheses and Grafted Limbs: More-Than-Human Embodiment in Fornaldarsögur
Part II: Entanglement and Transgression
3. 'Allir hlutir væri smíðaðir af nokkuru efni': Materiality, Personhood and Agency in Mythological Narrative and Old Norse Poetics
4. Humans, Animals and the 'Intimate Caesura': Transgression and Transformation in the Sigurðr-Cycle
Part III: Shapeshifting
5. Words of Change: Old Norse Terminologies and Concepts of Transformation
6. Tales of Change: Narrative Patterns and Thematic Functions of Transformation
Conclusion: Beyond Binaries and Between Boundaries

Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Kreager, Adèle
ADÈLE KREAGER gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, where she has also taught classes in Old Norse language, poetics and textual criticism, and lectured on eddic verse and saga literature.