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“The Trollish Acts of Þorgrímr the Witch: The Meanings of Troll and Ergi in Medieval Iceland,” Saga-Book 32 (2008), 39–68.
... Unearthed in 1860 from the Vimose bog, the Vimose plane (or rather plane stock) was discovered broken into three pieces, only two of which survive, and many of its letterforms are difficult to make out with much confidence today. Made of ash, the plane was deposited in the sacrificial moor as part of an Iron age votive ritual which saw a great number of military accoutrements similarly broken and then cast into the Vimose bog, the woodworking tool belonging to one of several ritual military depositions evidenced at the site (engelhardt 1866, 1867, 1869, Pauli Jensen 2003, 2008, 2009, 2010. The difficult bog find seems to have been used to make spear-shafts and appears to date to the third century (Ilkjaer 1996:73, Christensen 200:7). ...
One of the most difficult of the early runic inscriptions is that which appears on the Noleby stone. First published in the late nineteenth century, the early Swedish text has been subjected to a wide range of interpretations and accounts. The opening line of the Noleby inscription seems clear enough, featuring a collocation reflected later in Old Norse, but the meaning of most of the rest of its text has long remained obscure. The runestone’s early Swedish seems to include two reflections of a Proto-Germanic verb *rehaną, but even the proper interpretation of this form has proved controversial. A broader assessment of the comparative evidence, however, sheds new light on the morphology and semantics of this otherwise lost Old Germanic strong verb.
... Old Norse vocabulary which described homosexuality and homosexual acts (nið, ergi, ergask, argr) equated those acts with sexual perversity, passivity, cowardice, effeminacy, and weakness (Gade, 1986;Jochens, 1996b, p. 381-390). Based on these facts, scholars have projected these homophobic attitudes backwards into Norse society during the Viking Age (Sørensen, 1983;Jochens, 1996b;Ármann Jakobsson, 2008), working under the assumption that the homophobia of post-conversion Norway was matched by a pre-conversion homophobia. ...
The Æsir, the gods of the Norse myths, are not a cis-heterosexual monolith, despite the traditional interpretations of the myths. Over the past thirty years scholars have exposed or teased out the queerness within the pantheon and the myths. I use a queer theoretical framework to interpret the gods’ actions and characters and to locate them within a queer context. I then show how their transgender elements belong to a tradition of transgender deities which began among the people of the Corded Ware Culture (ca. 2,800 B.C.E.). I turn to the specific cultural influences of the Germanic tribes which influenced Norse society in their regard of queer and transgender behavior and individuals. After discussing some of the anticipated objections to my arguments, I then demonstrate how several of the major gods of the Norse pantheon are either queer, transgender, or both.
... All these examples are taken from Ármann Jakobsson (2008), and further cases can be found in the online dictionary of the Arnamagnaean Commission, Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (= ONP online). matarium Islandicum 1857-1872:2; see Lára Magnúsardóttir 2022). ...
Rætt er um tvö tilvik í Njáls sögu þar sem tröll eru ákölluð til að greina betur merkingu blótsins, tilgang og hverjir blóta. Eins er rætt um trúskiptin, stöðu hjátrúarinnar og seiglu fornra yfirnáttúrulegra vætta í nýkristnu samfélagi.
Old Norse magic has been the object of considerable and composite historiography, discussed in various contexts in premodern Scandinavian studies. The concept is still subject to discussion, as reflected by the different issues addressed in this volume. The term ‘magic’ itself is loaded with meanings and interpretations, and its Old Norse counterparts (fjǫlkynngi, trolldómr, seiðr…) do not make its definition easier. Since antiquity, magic has been regarded as an Othering discourse, an illicit and disruptive power knowledge that is intrinsically antisocial, and which, with the rise of Christianity, has also come to be correlated with demons and pagan worship (Flint 1991; Bailey 2006; Meylan 2014). The study of magic frequently intersects with gender studies, particularly in the Old Norse field, for the narrative sources explicitly gender the practice of magic, as illustrated by the famous excerpt from Ynglinga saga: ‘but this magic, when it is practiced, is accompanied by such great perversion that it was not considered without shame for a man to perform it, and the skill was taught to the goddesses’ (Finlay and Faulkes 2011).
In this chapter the evidence and literature around the tenth-century cremation burials of mounds 59:2 and 59:3 in Klinta, Köpings sn., Öland will be examined using a queer theoretical framework based on Jack Halberstam’s (1998) “scavenger theory” as a queer theoretical approach. The importance of applying queer theory in to study the Viking Age and how this can deconstruct restrictive patriarchal, heteronormative and cisgender assumptions of the period as well as the need for reparative scholarship for queer scholars and queer communities will be the underlying principle of this chapter. The remains under examination are Viking Age cremation burials in two mounds close together, originally identified in 1957 as the remains of one male and one female with grave goods suggestive of a high status and have been theorised in previous scholarship to be the result of a complex burial ritual for practitioners of magic. A discussion on the challenges of building on early scholarship as well as heteronormative bias in scholarship will form a part of this reinterpretation of these burials. The grave goods contained in both mounds have nonetheless traditionally been associated with the opposing gender and therefore raise many questions about the original identity and gender expression of these individuals. Through this chapter the available evidence of the identity of these individuals will be examined and an alternative queer interpretation offered, suggesting they occupied a more fluid place in gender whilst linking to text sources on the nature of magical practice and gender expression. This chapter will also highlight the importance of a long, cross-cultural past for modern queer communities to see themselves reflected in and connect with.
The article focuses on studying the concept of fate through the prism of Gísla saga Súrssonar. The concept of fate was an integral part of medieval Icelanders’ perception of the world. Fate, according to their ideas, is a fundamental driving force that determines the life of every person, and is always a stable and unchanging constant. It cannot be bypassed or deceived, and even knowing one’s fate, a person cannot influence it in any way. It was assumed that this is a certain fate that each individual approaches during his life path, with which he can only come to terms. Fate must be faced with courage and dignity, but it is useless to run away from it or try to change it – even mythological stories testify to this. Gísla saga, in this context, most fully reveals the conceptual meaning of fate and its influence on everyday life and decisions. It depicts the problem of the inevitability of fate which determines the life path of an individual. It is accompanied by manifestations of the inevitability of fate in the cyclical nature of events, which one by one form a closed circle of inevitability of how and why everything had to turn out exactly the way it did. Reflecting a special perception of fate, Gísla saga, thus, becomes the source that allows a visual analysis of the worldview peculiarity of the Icelanders, which they preserved even after conversion to a new faith. The plot of Gísla saga is built around a conceptual idea that has either received little attention or has been completely overlooked by researchers. The determination of fate formed the basis of the text and conditioned its structure, and our goal is to highlight as clearly as possible how and in what way this determination manifested itself and to what consequences it led. Based on the text of the saga and the experience of previous research, we analyze the plot as a complete picture, all elements of which are inextricably linked with each other. Thus, we offer a new perspective on the content of the saga and its reinterpretation.
The thesis analyses the construction and narrative function of the usage of monstrosity within
selected eddic poems – Lokasenna, Þrymskviða, Vǫluspá, Vǫluspá in skamma, Hymiskviða,
Skírnismál, Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, Helgakviða Hiǫrvarðssonar, Reginsmál, Fáfnismál, and
Sigrdrífumál – and systematizes the findings into categories, which are used for comparative
analysis. It uses Klaus von See et al.’s Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda (7 volumes, Heidelberg:
Winter, 1997–2019), which provides a comprehensive edition and commentary for all texts
commonly considered eddic poems, as the basis for this analysis. The author argues that eddic poetry
uses elements of both social and inherent – meaning based in immutable characteristics –
monstrosity mainly to provide fittingly strong and dangerous antagonists, and as part of verbal fights.
Methodically, the thesis follows Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theory laid out in Monster Theory :
Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.) and build upon by Rebecca
Merkelbach’s Monsters in Society : Alterity, Transgression, and the Use of the Past in Medieval Iceland
(Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, 2019.) The thesis expands on existing research, which has largely
focused on analysing single types of monster in eddic poems and monstrosity in prose texts, by
providing a general, systematic overview of monstrosity in eddic poetry combined with a narrative
analysis for each poem and a closing comparative overview.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.