Body Symbolism in Old Norse Myth (original) (raw)
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Rhetorical Tropes and Body Symbolism: The Semiotic Approach to Old Norse Myth
The article offers one possible answer to the question 'Why are myths so weird?' by analysing a series of Old Norse myths with especially pronounced surreality connected to the loss or transformation of bodies or body parts. These myths are shown to fall into a fourfold typology which correspond to the so called 'master tropes', i.e. metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony. These four tropes are spread throughout languages and literatures across historical eras, from everyday speech to poetry, so it is no surprise we find them also in mythology. Mythology shares many features with other semiotic systems, especially the semiotic super-system of language, but it employs the features in a different way. In myth the tropes are intensified into whole stories based on these relationships. They are elevated into powerful magical connections between beings and objects that are much stronger than in real life and links that exist as a mere psychic associations or analogies become real principles of transformation in myth. Myths are so weird because they let the conceptual metaphors play out as stories and images and externalize into concrete and active images the organizing principles of our minds and of cultural semiotic systems. One (but surely not the only) function of myth therefore seems to be to playfully reflect upon and meta-analyse the rhizome of interconnected symbolic systems of a given society.
Distorted, Dismembered, Diffused: Rethinking the Body in Old Norse Material Culture
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 2021
From the late-eighth through the early-twelfth centuries, medieval Norse objects represented the human body in varying states of ambiguity. Schematized, twisted anatomies emerged from the rends of wood, were relieved into stone monuments, cast in metals such as silver and bronze, and carved into segments of animal bone. While the Latin West would establish conventions for representing figures that visibly asserted the emotive expressivity of the face and body to circumscribe the beholder’s expected emotional (and spiritual) comportment, the figures represented in medieval Norse art are lacking in physiognomic distinctions such as defined facial features or somatic expressions of emotion. If their anatomical configurations do not appear to convey behavioral codes, then what could they refer to? What cultural factors contributed to their distortion, and how were they read by their intended beholders? This article argues that such enigmatic bodies did not represent human anatomy as it appeared before the eye, but gestured to a broad, flexible, and supernatural corporeality that transgressed the divisions between divine, human, and animal of Latin Western art and thought. Centering three small objects—a bone button-plaque, a silver disc-brooch from Gotland, and a bronze costume needle head—it employs an art-historical perspective to draw out the idiosyncrasies of Old Norse thought as it played out in material culture.
In Wikström af Edholm, K., Jackson Rova, P., Nordberg, A., Sundqvist, O. & Zachrisson, T. (eds.) Myth, Materiality, and Lived Religion: In Merovingian and Viking Scandinavia. Pp. 269–301. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. , 2019
This chapter outlines an approach to how ritual technologies prominent for a person can impact on the development of that person’s body image – i.e. a symbolic and iconic model of what our body is (and is not). Three types of ritual specialists from the Old Norse milieu are explored: berserkir, vǫlur and what are here described as deep-trance specialists. It is argued that all three were likely conceived as having distinct body images linked to the respective ritual technologies that they used. Bringing into focus the relationship between the technology of practice and body image interfaced with it offers insights into how their technologies were imagined to “work”, and also the degree to which they aligned with or diverged from the normative body image identified with non-specialists in society. A response to the chapter has been submitted by Margaret Clunies Ross.
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE HUMAN BODY
The vision that people had about the human body has evolved over time. Rather, it has continuously changed, because "evolution" meant not every time, at every moment of a changing of the paradigm, an increasingly clarification, a more sharp image that cultures have developed in relation to the human body. Most radically different conception of the role, significance and symbolism of the human body were recorded-in the European space-between Roman and Greek antiquity and the debuts of Christian era. Worshiped in Antiquity and mortified by Christians the human body was the battlefield where were fought the fiercest ideological battles of the first millennium AD. And the fight-in a deaf form-continues... Radical difference between the way the human body it was and is still regarded were recorded and longer found today across and beyond the dividing line that separates the western world from Orient. If we stand-symbolically speaking-midway between the two worlds we see that, by contrast with the sombre, visceral vision of the body that it was building in the Western world, due in part to an iconography that emphasized (especially in the Gothic sphere) suffering, martyrdom, ascesis, emaciation and death, the Far Eastern world inherited and was cultivating by tradition the concept of a luminous body built in perfect harmony with the universe. The disciplining of the body in Far Eastern cultures known in the Hindu space as tapas – ardour, even though it has some similarities with Western ascesis, is oriented, by contrast with the former, towards the superior tuning of the body's energy strings, towards the idea of obtaining resonance with the universe's ethereal planes, and by no means towards the maceration of the 'flesh' as sole solution for obtaining spiritual volatility. The Yoga and Zen disciplines approach the body from a perspective diametrically opposed to the European one; while Western ascesis is 'flagellating' at the bodily level and glorifying in the sphere of man's spiritual 1 1 Sergiu Anghel graduated with a degree in choreography in Cluj and Bucharest, having previously obtained a degree in letters at the University of Bucharest, with a major in Romanian and a minor in French. His PhD thesis was entitled 'Archetype Dance in 2002'. He is a member in full standing of CIDD-Unesco and of ITI-Bucharest. He has printed two specialty books and has authored over 20 TV film shows, having written the scripts and dramatic texts of those works. He has been made an Officer of the Order for Education (sergiuanghel@hotmail.com)
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Feminist authors have long been trying to alter the patriarchal structure of the Western society through different aspects. One of these aspects, if not the strongest, is the struggle to overcome centuries long dominance of male authors who have created a masculine history, culture and literature. As recent works of women authors reveal, the strongest possibility of actually achieving an equalitarian society lies beneath the chance of rewriting the history of Western literature. Since the history of Western literature relies on dichotomies that are reminiscences of modernity, the solution to overcome the inequality between the two sexes seems to be to rewrite the primary sources that have influenced the cultural heritage of literature itself. The most dominant dichotomies that shape this literary heritage are represented through the bonds between the concepts of women/man and nature/culture. As one of the most influential epics that depict these dichotomies, Homer's Odysseus rev...
When Objects Misbehave: Materials & Assemblages in the Ancient Scandinavian Myths
Fabula, 2020
This article explores new possibilities for the interpretation of myths. It asks how people in the past configured their world and its complex interactions, to which their orally-constructed stories bear witness. It is assumed here that myths contain structures of belief, cognition, and world-making beyond their immediate subject matter. This article focuses specifically on the preservation of material objects in myths throughout their transmission from changing oral narratives to written form. We should not assume that objects in oral traditions simply color the narratives; rather, these representations of materials can provide clues into the mentalities of past peoples and how they understood the complex interaction between humans and materials. As a case study, I examine the Old Norse myths, stories containing materials that reinforced Scandinavian oral traditions and gave the stories traction, memory, and influence. In doing so, this article hopes to help bridge materiality studies, narrative studies, and folklore in a way that does not privilege one particular source type over another. The myths reveal ancient Scandinavian conceptions of what constituted an “object,” which are not necessarily the same as our own twenty-first century expectations. The Scandinavian myths present a world not divided between active Subject, passive Object as the Cartesian model would enforce centuries later, but rather one that recognized distinctive object agencies beyond the realm of human intention.
The Image that Does Not Represent: Mythological Approach
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Can an image not signify? This paper explores two cases: self-referential images and mythological im-ages. While Winfred Nöth defends the universality of semiotics against a potential paradox, this paper argues thatsubjection to semiotic logic can distort the understanding of domains such as myth. Mythological images do notadhere to formal logic and lack distinct signifiers and signified. By studying myth from within, without attemptingto interpret it through external frameworks, the unique asemiotic nature of the identity between subject and objectis revealed.
Ability and Disability. On Bodily Variations and Bodily Possibilities in Viking Age Myth and Image
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