Boundaries of the Human: Identities, Ontologies and Transformations in Old Norse Literature ...

• Main Author: Kreager, Adele
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository 2023
• Subjects: concepts of transformation; fornaldarsogur; human identity; human-nonhuman relations; Old Norse-Icelandic Literature; Poetic Edda; posthumanism; skaldic poetry; Snorra Edda; Volsunga saga; Iceland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.106845; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/365612

This dissertation examines the definition of the human in vernacular texts preserved and transmitted in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland drawing on a variety of sources, from saga literature, mythological narrative and traditional poetics (eddic and skaldic) to legal compilations and religious works. Using three theoretical frameworks (critical posthumanism, new materialism and disability studies), I analyse how different literary modes grapple with concepts of human identity, and find that the material and conceptual boundaries between humans and their nonhuman environment of plants, landscapes, animals and objects become key sites of negotiation in constructions of the embodied self. I explore how narrators and poets offer audiences diverse visions of the human subject and body as critically embedded in, and co-constituted by, the nonhuman world—an entanglement that some texts embrace, and others reject. My research reveals the relational and contingent nature of Old Norse ontologies as expressed ...