This book is a translation of the author’s Czech monograph from 2019 and, as the English title suggests, it focuses on how the body mediates emotion in Old Norse, and on changes of form or shape (Old Norse hamr) which can illuminate pre-Christian understandings of body and soul and track how these develop over time. It consists of a short introduction (9-18), two chapters--one of which is over twice as long as the other (19-53 and 55-139)--and an appendix to the second chapter (141-201), which is considerably longer than the first chapter.
The introduction very briefly sets the background for this study of body and soul. The author acknowledges the methodological limitations of dealing with texts that are historically and culturally distant from us, as well as the specific difficulties posed by the gap between when texts might have been composed and the much later manuscript record. She proposes to take a literary-critical approach that construes meaning intertextually. The influence of continental learning in Iceland is also acknowledged in the form of medical texts, humoral theories, and the popular (and dualistic) debates between body and soul, of which two were translated into Old Norse-Icelandic. However, the author argues that learned medical and vernacular folk traditions might well have persisted alongside each other in the medieval period, as has been argued in the case of Old English literature.
The first chapter focuses on the close connection (even synonymity) between the physical and mental aspects of how emotion is expressed in Old Norse texts. This is fairly well trodden ground, and many of the examples given--change of facial colour, swelling, and eye pain, for example--have been discussed in much greater detail elsewhere (e.g., Baccianti, Kanerva, Larrington, Sif Ríkharðsdóttir). If anything, Novotná’s analysis here tends to flatten what are sometimes quite complex and self-consciously literary passages, such as the first stanza of Sonatorrek (“The Grievous Loss of Sons”), in which Egill Skalla-Grímsson so beautifully captures the inexpressibility of grief through the physical sensation of his tongue being weighed down and unable to articulate verse. Novotná classifies this as an example of grief being equated with exhaustion and fatigue: “Egill states that he is so tired that he cannot move his tongue” (29). In relation to Flosi’s changes of colour in Njáls saga--which one might imagine in terms of a whole host of different emotions--we are told that “reddening and going pale--opposite reactions in terms of temperature--are used synonymously” (33), as if all changes of colour mean the same thing (i.e., anger). The section on death as a result of strong emotion brings together a number of deaths that sound rather different, as Novotná herself acknowledges, and are strongly gendered as female: Nanna’s instantaneous bursting with grief inGylfaginning, Hrefna’s slower process of heartbreak in Laxdœla saga, Helga dying of illness on her husband’s lap as she gazes at her lover’s cloak inGunnlaugs saga ormstungu, and finally Þóra’s clerically sanctioned suicide inÓláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta. Novotná’s argument here is that, in all these cases, there is very little or no difference between the interior and the exterior: it is not that emotion is expressed through the body, but rather that the body “manifests” emotions, and is not perceived by the saga author as a separate entity from the soul; the two are holistically connected (52-53). This may well be true in terms of folk belief. However, in a literary text, in which a saga author has the choice of saying either that a character is angry, or is swollen; either that they are tired or that their tongue feels too heavy to move, it doesn’t quite ring true.
The second chapter takes us right to the heart of the author’s main interest: the meaning (or “semantic field”) of the word hamr (meaning “form” or “shape”) and what that can tell us about the relationship between body and soul. Here the author argues clearly and consistently that words and expressions containing the root ham-, for example eigi einhamr (“not having a single form”) or hamrammr (“potent” or “strong in form”) have a continuum of meanings ranging from the physical to the spiritual. She claims furthermore that it is possible to trace the development of these meanings over time, and that what was originally a single concept of body and soul as one divided, over time, into two different aspects, one relating to the body (“skin”) and the other to the soul (“mood” or “mental state”). This argument is supported by a thorough analysis of all the different kinds of transformations or changes of hamr in Old Norse texts. These include changes associated with flight, such as giants becoming birds or gods borrowing the power of flight from birds; changes associated with strong animals, including hybrid forms such as bear-men and werewolves; the abilities of magical practitioners to change form; and finally the loss of hamr (e.g., vera hamstoli “to be robbed of hamr” or “to lose one’s mind”). Novotná also considers post-medieval ballads and reflexes of the word in modern Icelandic, where it can refer either to a surface of the body or to mood. This is a rich and full study of the semantics of a single word, and much of the material is fascinating. The section on berserkir, bears and werewolves, for example, is undertaken with enormous care and detail and ranges over a large number of texts, both translated and vernacular: the author examines each individual passage in detail to distinguish whenhamr entails a complete transformation into an animal and when the change is metaphorical, associated only with animal characteristics such as ferocity and strength; when hamr is a discardable body surface which can be removed at will, and when the external mechanism brings with it the inner character of the animal as well; when transformation is voluntary and when it is involuntary, and when it is somewhere between the two. The author also traces the possible influence of continental stories of werewolves, teasing out the ways in which the translation of Marie de France’s Bisclavret shows a subtle pattern of domestication to Old Norse ideas of the body and soul. The value of this study lies both in the wide range and the impressive detail of the study of a single word and its derivatives.
The conclusion compares the historical change of meaning of words with the root ham- to the process of how conceptual metaphors are formed: from a starting point where interior and exterior are not clearly distinguished (where bodily phenomena are emotions) we move towards the discovery of interiority, which is not always reflected in the exterior, but for which bodily phenomena serve as metaphors. This change is dated provisionally to the twelfth century. Novotná goes on to suggest that what we call “saga style”--the apparent lack of interest in the sagas in the interior lives of the characters--reflects the absence of any division between mind and body, since mental processes are expressed only through somatic indicia. But this is quite a jump: the sagas were written down in the thirteenth century and survive in even later manuscripts, often copied in the same scriptoria as saints’ lives and other learned literature. It seems more likely that saga style is a conscious choice on the part of saga authors, rather than an unconscious reflex of pre-Christian sensibilities.
Finally, the appendix provides a list of all the occurrences of hamr and its derivatives in Old Norse literature, based on data from the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, and a few other published sources. Each text is provided with a brief introduction, followed by a transcription and translation of the passage containing the rootham-, and an explanation is given of what the word means in each context. Each entry is given a number which links it back to the discussion in Chapter Two, so that the reader has immediate access to each passage that the author discusses there. The appendix is also very useful in its own right, however, as a comprehensive overview of where and how the word hamr and its derivatives are used across a range of genres.
This book will be invaluable to anyone working on body-soul relations and pre-Christian sensibilities in Old Norse and related literatures. It is the most in-depth investigation to date of the word hamr and its derivatives, and it is meticulous in its amassing of data. The structure should perhaps have been thought through more carefully: the first chapter feels quite a lot weaker than the second, while the second might usefully have been split up into several chapters incorporating the material in the appendix. Some readers will need more of a cultural/historical introduction than Novotná provides here. However, this is not to dismiss the care and imagination that the author has lavished on this single word-root and what it can tell us about how people thought in a culture so distant from our own.