Gripla - 20.12.2017, Page 110

GRIPLA110
cussed in connection with revenants; other such features are, as mentioned
above, hybridity and transgressiveness, as well as contagion.
rather than non-conformity to the laws of nature, as is the case with
the monstrous races, it is therefore the social monster’s rejection and/or
active transgression of social laws that render it a social hybrid – someone
who is (or was) human but has now taken a step outside of the human
community. Social monsters are disruptive characters that, through their
transgressive association with the paranormal – with that which is out-
side of ordinary human experience – threaten society. they have to be
removed in order for society to regain peace and stability, and this is true
just as much of Grendel and the dragon in old English poetry as it is of
the monstrous characters encountered in the Íslendingasögur, of revenants,
berserkir and magic-users, but also – and perhaps most controversially – of
the outlaws discussed in the following analysis.
one could argue that the concept of “monster” as it is developed by
Cohen, Sayers or neville was not native to medieval Scandinavia, and
that therefore, the reading proposed here is methodologically flawed.
While the Latin word monstrum from which the modern term derives
would have been understood in a very different way, rendering such ex-
traordinary marvels as the einfætingr in Eiríks saga rauða,35 I would argue
that medieval Icelanders did have a concept of the social monster similar
to the contemporary one, but they used a different term to denote it:
the term troll. If this is the case, one might ask why this term is not used
here instead of the more contentious, and potentially anachronistic, term
“monster”. However, several scholars within the field of old norse studies
have drawn attention to the fact that a troll is not always a troll, or at least
that not all trolls are what we think they are. Martin arnold states that the
term troll is used to provide a “description for some worrying or abnormal
characteristic of a human”,36 Ármann Jakobsson lists thirteen types of char-
35 rudolf Simek, “the Medieval Icelandic World View and the theory of the two Cultures,”
Gripla 20 (2009): 190.
36 Martin arnold, “‘Hvat er tröll nema þat?’: the Cultural History of the troll,” The Shadow-
Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous, ed. tom Shippey, arizona Studies in
the Middle ages and the renaissance 14 (tempe and turnhout: arizona university and
Brepols, 2005), 112.