Transformation and Identity in Old Norse Literature: The Human and Beyond

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.