Abstract
This book aims to delineate a space for ideas about the body as found in Old Norse literature. Two themes that are closely related to the concept of the body are analysed in detail: somatic displays of emotions and shapeshifting (hamr), while the semantic analysis of the root word ham- makes up the central focus of the book.
Somatic displays of emotions are broken down into general psychosomatic symptoms such as tiredness or change of skin colour, swelling, eye pain and death from psychological reasons. During this process we find some cases where the mental and physical realms overlap and where the boundary between illnesses and emotions is unclear, and others where both realms are already more or less separated.
Emotions can therefore be understood in many contexts as physical experiences. Turning to phenomena linked with a change of form, the semantic field of the root word ham- is discussed through analysis of the context of all known occurrences of this root word in Old Norse literature.
The evolution of the meaning of ham- is further traced through Scandinavian ballads and in contemporary Icelandic. In the medieval material, three major thematic areas can be seen: changes of form linked with flight and with the ecstasy of battle, and the shapeshifting of mages.
Within this framework, individual episodes are analysed in the context of each given work and its genre and classified along an axis from those where the form is conceived holistically through to those when it is differentiated into either body or soul. These main themes aside, the book is also concerned with the process of change in the relationship between man and animal in the Germanic environment, and the transformation of skaldic kennings of individual body parts.
In this way, Old Norse sources show their highly heterogeneous character; we find in them a broad spectrum of ideas on the question of the connection between body and soul. Thus, from the perspective of ideas about the body, we can see the period in which the texts were written-the 12th to 14th centuries-as transitional.
We find here a pre-Christian concept, in which man is not understood within the framework of polarities of body and soul: the animal and human forms belong among the powers of the given protagonist and emotions have simultaneously both a mental and physical component, while one is not the consequence of the other. At the same time, both Christian and medical ideas from continental Europe are absorbed into the Old Norse environment and in vernacular texts we see situations arise that illustrate medieval theories of the humours, or that work with the concept of an external form different from the substance of the protagonist.
We also use the theory of cognitive linguistics to demonstrate this process of the separation of the internal and external, specifically the process of transition from idioms based on physical experiences to literary metaphors, where claims about the physicality of emotions or of the transformation into an animal were no longer perceived literally.