Gripla - 20.12.2017, Page 112

GRIPLA112
Constructing the Social Monster: outlaws in the
Íslendingasögur
In his doctoral thesis on monstrosity in Old Norse and Old English litera-
ture, Alistair McLennan notes that there are degrees of monstrosity,42 and
that there seems to be some connection between society’s perception of a
person and the person’s status as monster.43 the implications of this and
the connections between these two points, however, are not articulated in
McLennan’s thesis. Cohen already posits that “the monster seldom can
be contained in a simple, binary dialectic”,44 but Margrit Shildrick has so
far been the only scholar to advocate a break with the traditional binary,
stating:
In place of a morality of principles and rules that speaks to a clear-
cut set of binaries setting out the good and the evil, the self and the
other, normal and abnormal, the permissible and the prohibited,
I turn away from such normative ethics to embrace instead the am-
biguity and unpredictability of an openness towards the monstrous
other [...] to contest the binary that opposes the monstrous to the
normal.45
The monster is no longer considered an absolute, fixed and stable category,
and such an approach has gained more currency in recent years. In papers
presented at the Sixteenth International Saga Conference, scholars like
Ármann Jakobsson, arngrímur Vídalín and Sarah Künzler explored the
breaking down of dichotomies and binary oppositions.46 They argued
respectively that trolls, blámenn – whose name, just like the problematic
troll itself, can refer to a variety of beings from a black person to a ber-
serkr – and courtly, as opposed to monstrous, bodies can be placed along
a continuum.47
42 alistair McLennan, “Monstrosity in old English and old norse Literature,” (Doctoral
thesis, university of Glasgow, 2009), 17 and 44.
43 Ibid., 65.
44 Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 17.
45 Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London:
SAGE Publications, 2002), 3.
46 this is similar to the way in which increasing understanding of sexuality and gender as fluid
and non-binary has been entering mainstream culture in recent years.
47 See the abstracts in Jürg Glauser et al. (eds.) The Sixteenth International Saga Conference