Abstract
In the Old Norse-Icelandic literary context, animals are understood to be capable of emotional experience, but they are generally unable to communicate their feelings through a language which people might understand. To resolve this issue and express animal emotionality, Old Norse authors used several strategies: emotion words, inference through behaviour, and emotive gestures, both naturalistic affective responses of animal bodies and affective anthropomorphisation – recognisably human emotive displays. Medieval romance offers a vehicle for cross-cultural comparison: a study of the lion’s tears in the various translations and reinventions of Chrétien’s Yvain further establishes the literary popularity of animal emotionality in the medieval North. Emotive performativity was reformulated through translation and acculturation, acting as a tool for medieval authors to imbue animals with textual subjectivity and literary selfhood. However, there are limitations to the human ability to comprehend animal cognition and emotional experience, and in the Old Norse context, animals textually experience a finite range of emotions, indicating a limited medieval understanding of animal selfhood, with implications for how we understand humanity’s historical subjugation of the nonhuman.
How did people in medieval Europe conceive of animal emotional experience, and how was this capacity expressed through the medium of literary narratives? Much recent and ongoing scholarship has paid renewed attention to the existence of emotions in the supposedly stylistically objective and emotionally laconic Old Norse-Icelandic literary corpus, revealing the emotionally rich and passionate lives of the human characters. By shifting attention away from people and uniting the burgeoning field of emotion studies with a focus on animals, we can see that Old Norse textual culture contains a rich emotional life beyond the human as well; by tracing the textual appearance of emotions as experienced by nonhuman bodies, we can discover how Old Norse emotive systems present a worldview in which emotionality is not thought to be solely a human phenomenon.
The inability to communicate through a mutually comprehensible complex language is an ever-present barrier to inter-species relationships. In the Old Norse-Icelandic literary context, animals are understood to be capable of emotional experience, but they are generally unable to convey their feelings through a language which people might understand. This essay examines the ways in which the Old Norse authors of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia resolve this issue and express both domestic and wild animal emotionality and selfhood, contributing new insight into our understanding of animal representation across a range of genres. The first section centres the most profound displays of animal emotionality, for which authors deploy recognisably human emotive gestures and project them onto animal bodies, in a process which I term affective anthropomorphisation. The analysis will focus on the grief felt and displayed by the horse Grani in eddic poetic tradition and the hound Vígi in Saga Óláfs Tryggvasonar. The second section turns to more realistic affective responses of wild animal bodies, such as the bear in Finnboga saga and the dream-bear in Ǫrvar-Odds saga as they demonstrate their rage, as well as opening up the issue of whether, or how far, emotions can be inferred through an animal’s behaviour. The third section questions how nonhuman emotionality was culturally contingent in the medieval period. Using Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain as an exemplar, it establishes the literary popularity of animal emotionality in the medieval North, as the motif of the lion’s grateful tears became especially popular in numerous romances from late medieval Iceland. The conclusion reveals the broader implications of these findings, including the means by which nonhuman textual selfhood can be established through literary emotionality, while recognising the limits to human understanding of animal cognition and emotional expression.
In addition to the inherent issues of studying historical emotions and textual representations of emotionality, there is also the methodological problem of attempting to understand animal emotionality.1 As Rob Boddice writes, ‘when psychologists confirm the capacity for animals to experience emotion, they are referring to specific cognitive and physiological indicators, as well as observations of behavioural patterns, in order to ascribe affective states and moods to animals’. Significantly, this kind of work can only be done through analogy and the comparison of human and animal brain patterns:
Non-human emotions, though they doubtless exist, cannot be understood experientially from the animal’s point of view. To enter the animal’s point of view is an imaginative leap … but it depends on a degree of inference far beyond what it takes to enter the historical human’s point of view … in the end, what humans say about the experiences of animals – that is to say, what it feels like to be them, beyond what we can observe as anatomical fact or physiological function – always ends up being a statement about the experience of humans. We are, as a species, ontologically bound.2
As contemporary thinkers, we are ontologically bound, as were Old Norse authors and audiences in their own way. But we can also circumvent this issue somewhat by acknowledging that we are dealing with textual representations in literary narratives which form the subject of study, rather than pretending to be able to access the lived emotional experiences of animal beings in the Middle Ages. As scholars of medieval literature, we can still identify the different ways in which authors navigated this ontological limitation – their various imaginative leaps – and question what their methods and representations might tell us about how humans have historically conceived of nonhuman emotional experience and expression.
1 Animals and Affective Anthropomorphisation
In Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, the wise and eloquent Ericus consumes the saliva of two pitch-black snakes mixed in stew, prepared by his stepmother Craca and intended for his stepbrother Rollerus. The potion’s supernatural effects are remarkable:
Ericus itaque fausta iam dape refectus interna ipsius opera ad summum humane sapientie pondus euasit. Quippe epuli uigor supra quam credi poterat omnium illi scientiarum copiam ingenerauit, ita ut etiam ferinarum pecudaliumque uocum interpretatione calleret. Neque enim solum humanarum rerum peritissimus erat, uerum etiam sensuales brutorum sonos ad certarum affectionum intelligentiam referebat.3
(So Erik, now refreshed by his meal of good omen, achieved through its internal workings the most authoritative human wisdom. This potent feast generated in him a bulk of knowledge beyond credence in all subjects, so that he was even skilled in understanding the speech of wild animals and cattle. For he was not only expert in man’s affairs but could interpret the way animal noises conveyed sense and indicated particular feelings.)
The implication is that animals are indeed capable of both sensorial perception and emotional interiority (‘certarum affectionum’ – ‘particular feelings’, literally ‘affects’); humans simply lack the linguistic ability to understand animal speech, a barrier which can be overcome through magic.
In Norse legend, Sigurðr Fáfnisbani, amongst others, becomes able to understand the language of birds after tasting the blood of the serpent Fáfnir.4 The ability is inherited by his daughter, Áslaug Sigurðardóttir – who also goes by the name Kráka (compare Saxo’s Craca) – as well as his wife, Guðrún Gjúkadóttir.5 Guðrún also tastes the serpent’s heart and can thus understand bird-speech, though she is seemingly unable to communicate with other animal species through a mutually comprehensible language, as demonstrated by her exchange with the horse Grani.6
The loyal steed of Sigurðr, Grani is himself both responsive and emotional in the eddic poem Guðrúnarkviða II.7 Following Sigurðr’s death at the hands of Guðrún’s brothers, ‘Grani rann at þingi, / gnýr var at heyra’ (‘Grani galloped from the assembly, an outcry could be heard’).8 The other horses have seemingly arrived before him, and they are covered in sweat from swiftly carrying the killers. According to the thirteenth-century Vǫlsunga saga, Grani witnesses the passing of his human companion: ‘Mikinn gný gerði Grani, þá er hann sá sáran sinn lánardróttin’ (‘Grani made a terrible noise, when he saw his liege lord wounded’).9 Grani’s immediate cry of distress is his first emotive gesture, and when Guðrún questions why her kinsmen have returned before her husband in the poem Brot af Sigurðarkviðu, Hǫgni details Sigurðr’s murder and adds that ‘gnapir æ grár jór / yfir gram dauðum’ (‘the grey steed still hangs his head over the dead prince’).10 The animal thus shows more compassion and sympathy than the human; he remains faithful, unlike Guðrún’s brothers who betrayed Sigurðr and brought about his death despite their pledges and oaths of allegiance.11 This sequence of events follows the narrative tradition established by the Brot’s prose epilogue; rather than being killed inside in his bed, here Sigurðr is killed outside – in a forest (according to ‘þýðverskir menn’, ‘German men’) and/or while riding ‘til þings’ (‘to the assembly’), according to ‘Guðrúnarkviðu inni fornu’ (‘The Old Lay of Guðrún’; presumably Guðrúnarkviða II).12
Grani thus witnesses and grieves at the passing of his human companion; he responds by neighing loudly, drooping his head, and riding back to the home of the Gjúkungs, riderless. The horse’s emotional interiority is further recounted by Guðrún in Guðrúnarkviða II:
(I went weeping to speak with Grani, with wet cheeks, I asked the horse for tidings; Grani then drooped his head, dropped it in the grass; the steed knew that his owner no longer lived.)
Guðrún’s tears express grief and Grani responds with another markedly human affective display of sadness, again hanging his head downwards, and notably, the verb hnípa appears elsewhere as a somatic signal of human sorrow.14 This does not appear to be an ethologically informed equine emotional response, and combined with the horse’s uncanny comprehension of Guðrún’s words, the textual gesture is thus a human projection and form of affective anthropomorphisation. The horse is understood to be expressing sadness, however; the dropping of the head matches Guðrún’s tears, as wife and steed together grieve for the fallen hero, and in approaching Grani, Guðrún may be seeking comfort and company to better cope with her sorrow. Within the internal logic of this poem, Guðrún does not seem to yet know of Sigurðr’s death, as she questions Grani for news, or perhaps confirmation, since she already has a notion of what has happened through intuition, indicated by her wet cheeks (a riderless horse can only mean one thing).15 Guðrún’s attempt to communicate with Grani is made explicit in Vǫlsunga saga: ‘rœdda ek við hann sem við mann, en hann hnípti í jǫrðina ok vissi at Sigurðr var fallinn’ (‘I spoke to him as I would with a person, but he drooped [his head] to the ground and knew that Sigurðr had fallen’).16 Language is a clear barrier to the full communication of feeling between human and animal. Grani seemingly understands Guðrún’s speech and communicates through body language, though the text assimilates this behaviour to a human form of emotional expression.
Grani cannot communicate his grief through a vocalised language which Guðrún might understand, even though, by this stage in the wider legend, she has consumed the blood of the serpent Fáfnir and is thus able to comprehend bird-speech. As with Sigurðr, Guðrún’s ability to understand animal languages is limited to birds, whereas Ericus’s ability in Gesta Danorum includes mammals, both wild and domestic. However, when Guðrún eventually allows her tears to fall at the sight of Sigurðr’s corpse in Guðrúnarkviða I, her geese in the meadow respond and ‘gullu við’ (‘honk in reply’).17 Animals thus help provide Guðrún with solace and companionship in her bereavement – important elements of healing which she cannot expect from the members of her family.18
Another profound experience of animal emotionality is displayed by the ‘hjarðhundr’ (‘shepherd’s dog’) Vígi in the partially hagiographic Saga Óláfs Tryggvasonar, originally composed in Latin in the late twelfth century by the Benedictine monk Oddr Snorrason and translated into Old Icelandic soon afterwards.19 Following the death of King Óláfr Tryggvason at sea, Vígi’s caretaker goes to the house where the dog is kept, assumes a posture of ‘miklum hryggleik’ (‘great sorrow’), and informs Vígi that they are now without a lord.20 Vígi clearly comprehends the full import of these words, a supernatural (or perhaps preternatural) ability that is twice presaged in the saga when Vígi follows elaborate human instructions.21 Learning that Óláfr has died, Vígi’s performance of animal mourning is unparalleled in saga literature:
Ok er hundrinn heyrði þetta, þá hljóp hann upp frá konungs sætinu ok kvað við hátt um sinn ok gekk út ok nam eigi staðar fyrr en á einum haugi ok lagðisk þar niðr ok þá hvárki mat né drykk, ok fór svá marga daga at hann sveltisk ok þá eigi fœzlu. Ok þó at hann vildi eigi eta þat er at honum var borit, þá bannaði hann þó ǫðrum hundum ok fuglum ok dýrum at bera frá sér. En tárin flutu fram um trýnit ór augunum, svá at allir máttu þat skilja at hann grét ákafliga sinn lánardróttin, ok aldrigi fór hann ór þeim stað er hann nam staðar, heldr var hann þar allt til þess er hann dó.22
(And when the dog heard this, then he leapt up from the king’s seat and loudly yelped once and walked outside and did not stop until he came to a certain mound and there lay down, and then he would receive neither food nor drink, and went so many days without food that he starved himself. And though he would not eat what was brought to him, he prevented other dogs and birds and animals from carrying it away. And the tears flowed from his eyes and over his snout so that everyone could understand that he deeply grieved his liege lord. And he never moved from that place which he had chosen but remained there until he died.)
Similar to the companion animals who were buried with people in medieval Scandinavia for their journeys in the afterlife, Vígi symbolically dies with his owner, though in this case it is an active choice, and the dog that dies of starvation on the grave of his master is also a common motif in medieval exemplary texts.23 Vígi’s tears are particularly noteworthy however: in reality, dogs grieve for absent people, but they do not weep, and Vígi is endowed with human signs of mourning to clearly show his interior state. Like Grani, Vígi is affectively anthropomorphised, yet the effectiveness of this narrative sequence is reliant upon the understanding that Vígi would indeed be capable of feeling the loss of his human companion – the notion that canine emotionality is indeed a potential reality; thus the tears work to both anthropomorphise the animal and emphasise his sorrow.
It is also significant that Vígi is said to weep so that everyone could understand his grief and mourning. In accordance with Kathryn Starkey’s formulation of emotional performance in the Middle High German poem Das Nibelungenlied, the tears emerge as a performed gesture: ‘self-conscious presentation or action undertaken with the knowledge that someone is watching’.24 Performance, therefore, is premeditated and ‘implies a self-conscious distance between the enactment and the motivation, sentiment, or intent’.25 Vígi may well have been thought to be genuinely experiencing his grief, but this emotive gesture is also textually performed with his human audience in mind. While the grief of Óláfr’s followers might be projected onto the dog, the tears at the mound are suggestive of hagiographic influence and Vígi can also be seen to perform an instructive function following the death of Óláfr, espousing the virtues of a Christian king who was instrumental in the conversion of Norway.26 The animal’s profound display of mourning and devotion serves as an affective model of piety for his audiences, both the witnesses within the reality of the narrative itself as well as Oddr’s later audience in medieval Iceland.
2 Animal Bodies, Emotive Gestures and Inferences
The previous section examined anthropomorphic affective displays of domestic animals, and I here turn to more naturalistic emotive gestures performed by wild animal bodies, beginning with an extraordinary bear that exhibits emotionality in the early fourteenth-century Finnboga saga. The hero Finnbogi encounters a troublesome bear in Norway which seemingly understands human speech, and like the horse Grani in eddic tradition, communicates in turn through body language – a form of emotive expression alternative to vocalisation which permits inter-species communication. The bear repeatedly refuses to fight Finnbogi, variously standing up, sitting down, and shaking its head, until its honour is questioned; Finnbogi throws away his sword so they are equally armed, and declares ‘statt nú upp, ef þú hefir þat hjarta, sem líkligt væri, heldr en þess kvikendis, er ragast er’ (‘now sit up, if you have the heart one would expect, rather than that of the most cowardly of animals’).27 Uncannily comprehending the significance of Finnbogi’s words and the shame-inducing connotations of ragr (‘ragast’), the bear stands up and ‘byrsti sik’ (‘bristles’).28 The bristling of an animal’s fur is an obvious affective response to Finnbogi’s words, and the verb byrsta can also be used to indicate human displeasure.29 The bear is also ‘mjök ófrýnligr’ (‘frowning deeply’); the bear’s face expresses its anger, and the emotive word choice indicates that it is insulted and upset as a direct consequence.30 With its state of anger textually established, the bear attacks Finnbogi and is killed after a lengthy fight. The bear’s interiority is thoroughly anthropomorphised: the saga conveys a realisation that bears experience emotion and display affect in their own particular way, but also suggests that they are innately similar to people. Human behaviour and psychology are projected onto the animal as it follows medieval Icelandic social norms of masculinity, honour, shame and vengeance.
The emotionality of another bear, this one in a dream-vision, is described through a similar emotive gesture in the legendary Ǫrvar-Odds saga. When Oddr wishes to sail with his kinsmen Guðmundr and Sigurðr, he is denied passage. They lie at anchor for a fortnight, waiting for a fair wind, and one night Guðmundr dreams that a polar bear lies in a ring around the island with its tail meeting its head, which Sigurðr correctly interprets as representing Oddr, who is angry with them.31 Significantly, Guðmundr describes the bear as ‘grimmligt, svá at ek hafða ekki þvílíkt sét, ok fram horfðu ǫll hár eptir dýrinu, ok svá þótti mér, sem þá ok þá mundi þat hlaupa út á skipin ok søkkva báðum’ (‘grim in appearance, such as I have not seen before, and all the hairs on the animal turned forward, and so it seemed to me as though it would leap out at the ships and sink them both’).32 The bear appears ‘grimmligt’ (‘grim-like’‚‘fierce’) and Guðmundr infers that the bear is angry because its hairs display piloerection, resembling the bear in Finnboga saga whose fur bristles when it becomes enraged. The human experience of anger is projected onto these animals, but the emotive gestures must be performed differently because the facial and bodily features of bears are of course distinct from those of humans (despite their similarities). Guðmundr has never seen anything comparable before because humans do not experience and display the emotion of anger in the same way as bears. Apparently this is his first time seeing an angry bear, and presumably one that displays affect in such a manner, indicating authorial invention and narrative imagining.
This bear does not exist in the reality of the saga narrative; it is a dream-bear, a fylgja (in singular, fylgjur in plural) – a symbolic image which appears in dreams and visions and figuratively points towards a person’s defining qualities and reveals their fate.33 The emotions experienced by dream-animals reflect those being experienced – or more likely to be experienced in the future – by their human counterparts. This is also the case in the late thirteenth-century Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu: the saga’s protagonists are seen as birds in a precognitive dream early in the narrative, with two eagles (representing Gunnlaugr and Hrafn) fighting over a swan (Helga in fagra, ‘the fair’) and killing one another. The swan’s consequent grief is detailed – ‘en álptin sat eptir hnipin mjǫk ok daprlig’ (‘and the swan remained sitting afterwards, very downcast and sad’) – until a hawk (Þorkell) arrives and the two birds fly away together.34 The swan’s emotional state is described as ‘daprlig’ (‘sad’) and, significantly, this is affectively displayed through the adjective ‘hnipin’ (‘downcast’, ‘drooping’, ‘despondent’), related to the verb hnípa used to describe the horse Grani’s head-hanging gesture of sadness in Guðrúnarkviða II and Vǫlsunga saga. An animal’s lowering of its head emerges as a common Old Norse somatic signal of sorrow across species lines. Thus when Sigurðr sees Brynhildr at the home of Heimir in Vǫlsunga saga, her nephew, Alsviðr, questions why Sigurðr is so worryingly quiet, adding that ‘Haukar þínir hnípa ok svá hestrinn Grani’ (‘Your hawks are downcast and so is your horse Grani’).35 Sigurðr’s longing and pining for Brynhildr, and consequent distress, is metonymically shared by his companion animals, and the verb hnípa signifies the anguish simultaneously felt by human, hawk and steed.
Old Norse authors deployed several strategies to surmount human-animal linguistic barriers and depict animal emotionality. An animal’s emotions can be stated explicitly and extradiegetically or displayed through emotive gesture, either through affective anthropomorphisation or naturalistic affective responses of animal bodies. A further potential means for readers to learn of an animal’s emotionality is through inference, though this is difficult to do in a manner that is objective and precise. Regarding saga literature, William Ian Miller writes that ‘dialogue and the action itself, that is, the whole range of behaviors … simply wouldn’t make sense unless we make certain inferences about the possible range and styles of emotions that motivate the action’.36 With several Old Norse animals, emotionality might be inferred from an animal’s actions, though the author does not use specific emotion words or gestures – for example, aggression and violence are behaviours linked with anger in human psychology.37 There is more work to be done on the drawing of inferences about human emotions in Old Norse literature, which, with a bigger sample size, could then lay the foundation for a larger study of animal behaviour and inferred emotionality.38
3 Animal Emotionality and the Lion of Yvain
Using medieval romance as a vehicle for cross-cultural comparison and Chrétien de Troyes’s Old French poem Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion as a model, I will now explore how emotional performativity was reformulated through translation and acculturation. A comparative examination of the motif of the lion’s tears of gratitude further establishes my argument about the literary popularity of animal emotionality in the medieval North. By focusing on the lion’s emotionality rather than its symbolic function in the narrative, I also aim to push past what Sarah Stanbury terms ‘the tyranny of metaphor’, which has historically dominated Yvain scholarship and medieval animal studies more broadly – ‘the anthropocentric figuration in which animals appear in texts chiefly to mark and even create human subjects’.39
In Chrétien’s Yvain (c.1180), the eponymous protagonist rescues a lion from a venomous, fire-breathing serpent, and the lion communicates his gratitude through posture and emotional gesture, bowing his face to the ground and kneeling, ‘et tote sa face moilloit / de lermes par humilité’ (‘And his face was wet all over / With humble tears’).40 The lion becomes Yvain’s constant and close companion throughout the tale, offering loyal service and fierce protection. The lion’s emotional interiority is a repeated motif in the narrative: he displays extreme grief when believing Yvain to be dead and when unable to aid him in battle; anger when seeing his master injured and when fighting his enemies; and joy when the two are reunited.41 These emotion words and gestures are generally included in the Old Norse-Icelandic prose translation Ívens saga, first translated in Norway in the mid-thirteenth century, despite the reduction in the quantity and variety of emotional vocabulary.42 The lion’s tears of gratitude are also included when he is rescued: ‘En leó snýr þegar upp á sér maganum ok skreið at honum sem hann vildi biðja sér friðar með tárum’ (‘But the lion immediately rolls over on his back and crawled towards him as though he wanted to be reconciled with his tears’).43 The tears indicate anthropomorphism and the lion’s submissive back-rolling resembles the behaviour of a dog – a more familiar companion animal in medieval Iceland.44
Yvain and his feline companion spread throughout medieval European literature, but key textual markers of the lion’s emotionality were often lost in translation. For example, the lion’s tears of gratitude are excluded from Hartmann von Aue’s Middle High German poem Iwein, the Middle Welsh prose Owain: Chwedl larlles y Ffynnon, and in Middle English versions, including both the verse romance Ywain and Gawain and Thomas Malory’s iteration of the motif in the Percival tale in Le Morte d’Arthur. However, the lion’s emotionality is fully realised in Scandinavian sources, including Ívens saga as well as the early fourteenth-century Old Swedish poem Herr Ivan lejonriddaren, in which the lion is uniquely gendered as female when expressing grief in the so-called suicide scene.45 The motif of the grateful lion became especially popular in late medieval Iceland, where it appears in at least six original Icelandic prose romances from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including Ectors saga, Grega saga, Kára saga Kárasonar, Konráðs saga keisarasonar, Sigurðar saga þögla and Vilhjálms saga sjóðs.46 Perhaps unexpectedly, the emotions of lions are thus the most commonly and most elaborately portrayed of any nonhuman animal species in the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. These texts also offer intriguing variations on the inseparable human-lion relationship, the extent to which the lion is personified and the animal’s quasi-human emotionality.
A longer comparative analysis of these episodes goes beyond the scope of this article; two particularly striking examples are here used as exemplary. In the Arthurian romance Sigurðar saga þögla, Sigurðr decides to save the lion from the dragon when he recalls that he has the image of a lion on his shield. Sigurðr kills the dragon and then pets, feeds and heals the wounded lion, who then exhibits his feline ‘frækleika’ (‘courage’) as well as the ‘viturleika’ (‘wisdom’) of Sigurðr, for the lion is ‘mjúkt sem einn köttur’ (‘as gentle as a cat’).47 Meanwhile, in Konráðs saga keisarasonar, the lion is compared to a human rather than another feline. When the hero Konráðr rescues a lion, which he has heard is most wise and understands human speech, he offers to become its liege lord, saying it should accompany and serve him faithfully. In response, the lion communicates gratitude and humility: ‘Það felldi tár sem maður og skreið að honum og sneri upp maganum og friðaðist’ (‘It shed tears like a person and crawled towards him and turned up its belly [i.e. rolled onto its back] in submission’).48 This lion is both explicitly anthropomorphised through the emotive gesture of humanlike tears as well as implicitly caninomorphised through behavioural act when it rolls onto its back, reflecting influence from the lion in Ívens saga.
Different affective communities in medieval Europe had distinct cultural conceptions and literary expressions of nonhuman emotionality; in the Old Norse setting, lions proved to be especially good to think with emotionally, perhaps because their geographic distance from Scandinavia opened up opportunities for imaginative exploration.49 The late medieval Icelandic iterations of the grateful lion motif increased the possibilities for authors to display animal emotion in new and varied ways, combining emotionality with other forms of anthropomorphisation. These animals become more than mere companion animals or metaphoric symbols for the hero; through emotion, they emerge as subjective characters in their respective narratives, endowed with a selfhood of their own.
4 Conclusion: Language, Limitation and Subordination
In his Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen’ (‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it’).50 Animals lack human contexts, our ways of perceiving, our cultural practices, values and concepts. In trying to take the perspective of a lion, we humans are inevitably just imagining being ourselves in a lion’s body.51 To comprehend a particular animal, you must be that animal, but then you will not have any way to articulate that animal’s thoughts in a way that is recognisable to humans. This problem is not fully addressed in the texts under study, but there is still a sense that something must be overcome – for understanding an animal, magic or the supernatural must be invoked, or otherwise the animal’s interiority is anthropomorphised, imbued with humanlike forms of emotional expression.
Animal emotionality was evidently a popular literary motif in the medieval North, as proven by the range of examples across the genres of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry and prose, as well as the migration of the lion’s emotions in the Yvain romance across medieval literatures and its subsequent popularity in medieval Iceland. However, the range of emotions textually experienced and expressed by animals in Old Norse literature is limited. Sadness, or more specifically grief, is the emotion that is most often displayed by animals, and in some instances anger is textually conveyed or at least might be inferred through an animal’s behaviour. In one example of an animal expressing joy – when the lion in Ívens saga is reunited with his human companion and ‘fagnaði honum’ (‘embraced him’, ‘rejoiced’, i.e. ‘expressed his joy’) – there is even a disclaimer attached: ‘sem hann kunní’ (‘as he knew how’, i.e. ‘as much as he could’).52 Emotion acts as a tool for medieval authors to express textual subjectivity and literary selfhood, but in the case of animals in Old Norse literature, there are important distinctions to be made in terms of the categorisation of emotions, and consequent limitations to be recognised in the representation of animal textual selfhood. For the most part, animals do not display complex emotions in Old Norse texts, nor do they display self-conscious emotions.
The Emotion and Self Lab at the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia focuses on ‘the place that self and emotions meet: the self-conscious emotions of pride, shame, embarrassment, and guilt’.53 These secondary emotions are self-reflective and self-aware and can be distinguished from more basic emotions: they entail the ‘me’ self rather than ‘I’ self, which is only known retrospectively, on reflection, as cognitive object. Primary emotions such as anger and sadness can still be indicative of selfhood, but self-conscious emotions can be seen as categorically distinctive: ‘all emotions can involve the self’, but ‘only self-conscious emotions cannot occur independently of elaborate self-processes’.54 This clarifies the limitation in the depiction of animal selfhood in Old Norse literature: it inevitably involves the ‘I’ self but not the ‘me’ self, and there is a relative lack of clear textual signals of nonhuman animal self-awareness and self-reflection. There may be exceptions to this general rule, such as the bear in Finnboga saga, which must be aware of itself as cognitive object when accused of ergi since this is what provokes its anger, and its behaviour may therefore also be thought to signal shame. The overall pattern, however, suggests that while animals were considered capable of emotional experience, their imagined selfhood did not involve the abilities to be self-aware and to self-reflect – or if these capacities were thought to exist, then people did not know how to express them on their own terms, something which broadly remains true to this day.
Questioning which emotions are being experienced and expressed by animals leads to another important question: which animal species are depicted as emotional in Old Norse texts? Of all nonhuman species, it is in fact the lion which appears the most often as emotional in the Old Norse corpus, disrupting the expectation of what animal emotionality might look like in a Nordic context. In more naturalistic texts based in medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, the majority of animals that display more profound emotional interiority are domestic companion animals which were not consumed as meat at the time, notably horses and dogs.55 We do not see sheep crying or cows drooping their heads in sadness – with the possible exception of the mother ewe Mókolla in Grettis saga, these animal species are marked by a lack of emotions or, in some cases of feral livestock and wild beasts, by unregulated and uncivilised emotionality, running amok beyond any semblance of reason.56 Emotion emerges as a tool for classifying animal species into distinct categories and degrees of subordination. As Boddice suggests, ‘The construction of the non-human helps us to establish the cultural parameters of what it means and what it takes to be human – the species of emotional control’.57
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by postdoctoral fellowships from Rannsóknasjóður Íslands (The Icelandic Research Fund) on the project ‘Emotion and the Medieval Self in Northern Europe’ and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, held at the University of Iceland and the University of British Columbia, for which I am sincerely grateful.
Katrin Pahl proposes the term ‘emotionality’ because it is ‘characteristic of non-human processes or entities’ and involves the quality, potential, and ability to be emotional; following Sif Rikhardsdottir, the term also addresses the fact that the emotions under study are (historical) textual constructs and we are thereby analysing ‘the emotionality of a text, i.e. the way in which emotions are manifested’. Katrin Pahl, ‘Emotionality: A Brief Introduction,’ Modern Language Notes 124 (2009): 547–54 (547); Sif Rikhardsdottir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 12.
Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 101.
Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes, ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen, trans. Peter Fisher, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015), 268–69. Unless otherwise indicated, all remaining translations are my own.
Fáfnismál, in Eddukvæði II: Hetjukvæði, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2014), 309; Vǫlsunga saga, ed. R. G. Finch (London: Nelson, 1965), 33. See further Timothy Bourns, ‘The Language of Birds in Old Norse Tradition,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 120, no. 2 (2021): 209–38.
Ragnars saga loðbrókar, in Vǫlsunga saga ok Ragnars saga loðbrókar, ed. Magnus Olsen (Copenhagen: S. L. Møllers Bogtrykkeri, 1906–08), 134.
Guðrúnarkviða I, in Eddukvæði II, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 329; Vǫlsunga saga, ed. Finch, 48.
Grani is descended from Óðinn’s eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, who is famously conceived by Loki and Svaðilfœri. Vǫlsunga saga, ed. Finch, 24; Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, in Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2nd edn (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London, 2005), 34–35.
Grammatically this reads that Grani is riding to the ‘þing’ (‘assembly’), but narratively it makes sense that he is returning. Guðrúnarkviða II, in Eddukvæði II, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 353.
Vǫlsunga saga, ed. Finch, 61.
Brot af Sigurðarkviðu, in Eddukvæði II, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 325.
Grani’s commitment and loyalty to Sigurðr is previously established when he refuses to carry Gunnarr through the flames in Hlymdalir. Vǫlsunga saga, ed. Finch, 48.
Brot af Sigurðarkviðu, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 328. The annotator is likely correct about a German version telling of Sigurðr being killed in a forest, as this follows the narrative in the Middle High German Das Nibelungenlied and the Old Norse translation Þiðreks saga af Bern; according to both texts, Siegfried/Sigurðr is killed on a hunt by Hagen/Högni. The alternate sequence of events, in which Sigurðr is killed inside in his bed, appears in Sigurðarkviða in skamma, Guðrúnarhvǫt, Hamðismál and Vǫlsunga saga.
Guðrúnarkviða II, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 353.
For examples of the verb hnípa as an indicator of human grief, see Karlamagnus saga ok kappa hans, ed. C. R. Unger (Christiania: H. J. Jensen, 1860), 342, 354; for the related adjective, ‘hnípinn’, see, for example, Bærings saga, in Fornsögur Suðrlanda, ed. Gustaf Cederschiöld (Lund: F. Berlings boktryckeri, 1884), 95; and Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, ed. Faulkes, 31.
As noted above, however, Guðrún is informed of Sigurðr’s murder by Hǫgni in Brot af Sigurðarkviðu.
Vǫlsunga saga, ed. Finch, 61.
Guðrúnarkviða I, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 331.
The geese might simply be disturbed by the noise of Guðrún’s release of grief; in Sigurðarkviða in skamma, Guðrún claps her hands together so loudly that the goblets in the corner ‘kváðu við’ (‘echoed back’) and the geese begin to honk. Sigurðarkviða in skamma, in Eddukvæði II, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 340.
There are several accounts of the life of King Óláfr Tryggvason, though Vígi only appears in Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Oddr Snorrason’s version, in which Vígi plays a more substantial role and which solely contains the scene of his mourning (besides the later Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta which draws extensively from Oddr’s account). For references and comparison of the different versions, see Lena Rohrbach, Der tierische Blick: Mensch-Tier-Relationen in der Sagaliteratur (Tübingen: Francke, 2009), 131–36; and Lena Rohrbach, ‘A Man and His Dog – Animal-Episodes in Different Versions of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar,’ in Skáldamjöðurinn: Selected Proceedings of the UCL Graduate Symposia in Old Norse Literature and Philology, 2005–2006, ed. Anna Zanchi (London: Centre for Nordic Research, University College London, 2008), 147–80.
Oddr Snorrason, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd Munk Snorrason, in Færeyinga saga – Óláfs saga Odds, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, Íslenzk fornrit 25 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2006), 355.
Oddr Snorrason, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, 176–77, 285–86; also see Snorri Sturluson, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, in Heimskringla I, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, Íslenzk fornrit 26 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1941), 269.
Oddr Snorrason, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, 356. This is the more extensive version of the episode found in the manuscript AM 310 4to (Stockh. perg. 4to nr. 18 contains a shortened account).
See Frederic C. Tubach, Index Exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales, Folktale Fellows Communications 204 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1969), 139. Regarding the frequency of horse and dog burials in medieval Scandinavia, Kristina Jennbert suggests that these species in particular ‘had a close relationship to their owners and that they meant a great deal emotionally to them’. Kristina Jennbert, Animals and Humans: Recurrent Symbiosis in Archaeology and Old Norse Religion (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 69.
Kathryn Starkey, ‘Performative Emotion and the Politics of Gender in the Nibelungenlied’, in Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity, ed. Sara S. Poor and Jana J. Schulman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 253–71 (257).
Starkey, ‘Performative Emotion’, 258.
On the saga’s hagiographic entanglements, see Sian E. Grønlie, The Saint and the Saga Hero: Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 39–78.
Finnboga saga, in Kjalnesinga saga, ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson, Íslenzk fornrit 14 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1959), 274.
Finnboga saga, ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson, 274. The adjectives ragr and argr are part of a larger ideological complex related to the noun ergi and verb ergjask; they are suggestive of cowardice and effeminacy and accuse a man of performing the passive/receptive role in anal intercourse – an extreme and homophobic insult in medieval Icelandic society.
For further examples of the emotive verb byrsta in relation to both humans and animals, see Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, s.v., ‘byrsta vb.,’ accessed 15 March 2023, https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?o12731. This includes another Vígi episode, before he leaps on the attack in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, series A, vol. 2 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1961), 126 (the word is not used in Oddr’s version).
Finnboga saga, ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson, 274; An Icelandic-English Dictionary based on the ms. collections of Richard Cleasby, revised, enlarged and completed by Gudbrand Vigfusson, with a supplement by Sir William A. Craigie, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 471.
The depiction of the bear encircling the island surely echoes the mythological world- serpent Miðgarsormr, also known as Jǫrmungandr, which lies in the sea and surrounds Miðgarðr, biting its own tail, akin to the ouroboros. Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, ed. Faulkes, 27, 43, 45.
Ǫrvar-Odds saga, ed. R. C. Boer (Leiden: Brill, 1888), 22. This is the longer M redaction of the saga; for the nearly identical account in the older S version, see 23.
On animal fylgjur in saga literature, see, for example, Else Mundal, Fylgjemotiva i norrøn litteratur (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974). There is some complication with the emotionality of dream-animals: are their emotions genuinely animal? Would the bear and the swan express their anger and sadness in the same way if they were not symbolic of their human counterparts? The answer is probably that they would, since these displays are not especially profound or unrealistic, and in both cases, there are other texts that indicate similar emotional experiences. While dream-animal emotionality is relatively straightforward, the emotional states of human-animal hybrids and metamorphoses can become quite complex and unclear, and these have been left out of this essay.
Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, in Borgfirðinga sǫgur, ed. Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 3 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1938), 54.
Vǫlsunga saga, ed. Finch, 42.
Miller further argues that ‘inferring motivation and the emotional underpinning of human action is something we do all the time’, thus leaving open the question of whether the same is true of animal behaviour and emotionality. William Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 98, 111.
Aggression is of course a behaviour rather than an emotion, but emotions like anger and frustration (as well as shame, humiliation and fear) are important psychological factors in producing aggression and violence, and there is a causal link between subjective feeling and objective action. See, for example, Roy F. Baumeister and Brad J. Bushman, ‘Emotions and Aggressiveness,’ in International Handbook of Violence Research, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 479–93; and Roy F. Baumeister and Brad J. Bushman, ‘Angry Emotions and Aggressive Behaviors,’ in Emotions and Aggressive Behavior, ed. Georges Steffgen and Mario Gollwitzer (Göttingen: Hogrefe, 2007), 61–75.
Relevant examples could be wide-ranging, including the dog Sámr in Njáls saga, the horse Freyfaxi in Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, the bull Glæsir in Eyrbyggja saga, the ewe Mókolla in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, cultic livestock, and horse-fighting.
Sarah Stanbury, ‘Posthumanist Theory and the Premodern Animal Sign,’ postmedieval 2 (2011): 101–14 (102).
Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au lion, ed. Corinne Pierreville (Paris: Champion, 2016), lines 3396–97; Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, trans. Burton Raffel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), lines 3400–01.
Chrétien, Le Chevalier au lion, ed. Pierreville, lines 3500–13, 3542–45, 4213–23, 4523–54, 5520–29, 5588–603, 6449–53, 6483–87. For discussion of these passages and the lion’s emotionality in Yvain, see Monica Antoinette Ehrlich, ‘Embodied Emotion as Animal Language in Le Chevalier au Lion,’ in Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, ed. Alison Langdon (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 235–59.
Ívens saga, in Norse Romance, II: Knights of the Round Table, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke, Arthurian Archives 4 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 74, 78, 82, 88, 94. On the reduction in emotional vocabulary, see Sif Rikhardsdottir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature, 33–43; and Sif Rikhardsdottir, ‘Translating Emotion: Vocalisation and Embodiment in Yvain and Ívens saga,’ in Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice, ed. Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 161–79.
Ívens saga, ed. Kalinke, 72.
The back-rolling gesture is unique to Ívens saga, though many scholars have noted the lion’s canine characteristics in Chrétien’s version. See, for example, Stanbury, ‘Posthumanist Theory,’ 101; Ehrlich, ‘Embodied Emotion,’ 259; Jean Dufournet, ‘Le lion d’Yvain,’ in ‘Le Chevalier au lion’ de Chrétien de Troyes: Approches d’un chef-d’œuvre, ed. Jean Dufornet (Paris: Champion, 1988), 77–104 (81); Grace Armstrong, ‘Rescuing the Lion: From Le Chevalier au lion to La Queste del Saint Graal,’ Medium Aevum 61 (1992): 17–34 (23); and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ‘The Lady and the Dragon in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion,’ in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 65–86 (80).
As William Layher notes, ‘The re-gendering of the lion through the use of the feminine pronoun hon, even though the Swedish noun leon is neuter, causes this highly emotional passage to ring with echoes of a previous scene, namely the lament of Wadein’s widow who, like the lion, mourns the loss of her male hero’. See discussion and references in William Layher, ‘The Old Swedish Hœrra Ivan Leons riddare,’ in The Arthur of the North: The Arthurian Legend in the Norse and Rus’ Realms, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages 5 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 123–44 (132–33).
See discussion and references in Marianne E. Kalinke, King Arthur, North by Northwest: The ‘matière de Bretagne’ in Old Norse-Icelandic Romances, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana 37 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels boghandel, 1979), 228–36; and Marianne E. Kalinke, ‘Arthurian Echoes in Indigenous Icelandic Sagas,’ in Arthur of the North, ed. Kalinke, 145–67 (161–63). For discussion of the motif in the post-Reformation Vígkæns saga kúahirðis, see Marianne E. Kalinke, ‘The Cowherd and the Saint: The Grateful Lion in Icelandic Folklore and Legend,’ Scandinavian Studies 66, no. 1 (1994): 1–22.
Sigurðar saga þögla, in Riddarasögur, vol. 3, ed. Bjarni Vilhjálmsson (Reykjavík: Íslendingasagnaútgáfan, Haukadalsútgáfan, 1949), 148.
Konráðs saga, in Riddarasögur, vol. 3, ed. Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 311.
Regarding saga depictions of Vínland, Christopher Abram similarly suggests that ‘The absence of a continuing lived engagement with the land permits a much more fantastical rendering of the environment than would be possible when writing about Iceland’. Christopher Abram, Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 115.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen – Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edn by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 235.
As Thomas Nagel argues, ‘I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task’. Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,’ The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50 (439). Daniel J. Povinelli and Jesse M. Bering similarly suggest that ‘If there is one thing that our species is obviously not very good at, it is imagining ways of understanding the world that differ markedly from our own … We humans will automatically interpret the psychological facts from the perspective of our evolved, but peculiarly distorted, ways of understanding the world’. Daniel J. Povinelli and Jesse M. Bering, ‘The Mentality of Apes Revisited,’ Current Directions in Psychological Science 11, no. 4 (2002): 115–19 (118).
Ívens saga, ed. Kalinke, 94. In the French original, the lion’s specific limitation in conveying emotion is his inability to speak, greeting Yvain as a ‘beste mue’ (‘mute beast’). Chrétien, Le Chevalier au lion, ed. Pierreville, line 6487.
They ‘also study more basic level emotions linked to moral behavior, like disgust, as well as other complex social emotions, like humility and schadenfreude’. Jessica L. Tracy, ‘UBC Emotion & Self Lab,’ 15 March 2023, https://ubc-emotionlab.ca/. I thank Jessica and the whole Emotion & Self Lab team for welcoming me into their community during my time at UBC.
Jessica L. Tracy and Richard W. Robins, ‘Putting the Self into Self-Conscious Emotions: A Theoretical Model,’ Psychological Inquiry 15 (2009): 103–25 (121).
This relates more broadly to medieval learned thought, suggesting potential Latin influence or cross-cultural similarity. In Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, for example, horses and dogs are the two animal species that experience grief upon the death of their human companions, and Isidore of Seville describes both equine and canine bereavement in his Etymologies, marking them out as distinctive. Pliny, Natural History, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library 353 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 100–01, 110–11; Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 12.1.43, 12.2.25–26.
When Mókolla misses her lamb after Grettir kills it for meat, she goes to his hut every night and bleats, greatly disturbing his sleep and causing him to regret his decision. From this behaviour, animal grief and/or anger may be inferred. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, in Grettis saga, ed. Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 7 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1936), 200. On this episode, see Harriet J. Evans Tang, Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2022), 176–78.
Boddice, History of Emotions, 105.