Gripla - 2019, Qupperneq 77

77
Gripla XXX (2019): 77–106
TOM GRANT
A PROBLEM OF GIANT PROPORTIONS
Distinguishing Risar and Jötnar
in old Icelandic saga material
The problem
it is easy to fall into the trap of viewing the literature of the ancient
past through the lens of our own cultural experience. For as long as
scholarship on and translations of Old Icelandic sagas have existed in the
English language, the word “giant” has been silently accepted as a term
which maps unproblematically onto this literature. When employing this
word in scholarly discourse on Old Norse-Icelandic prose and poetic
works, we unconsciously impose our preconceptions about giants of recent
folklore onto the literature of the distant past.1 The result is distortion-
ary. The words that medieval Icelandic authors used for gigantic beings,
including, but not limited to jötunn, risi, þurs and tröll (plural jötnar, risar,
þursar and tröll), and any independent meaning that might be attached to
these individual words, is whitewashed.2 These emic terms and the figures
1 on this practice see Ármann Jakobsson, “the trollish acts of Þorgrímr the Witch: the
Meanings of Troll and Ergi in Medieval Iceland,” Saga-Book 32 (2008): 40 and “The
Taxonomy of the Non-Existent: Some Medieval Icelandic Concepts of the Paranormal,”
Fabula 54 (2013): 199–201. In this article, “Old Norse-Icelandic” will be used when refer-
ring to texts which derive collectively from Norway and Iceland, such as when referring
to the “Old Norse-Icelandic corpus.” “Old Icelandic” will be used of texts which were pro-
duced in medieval Iceland, such as the Íslendingasögur and fornaldarsögur. “Old Norse” will
be used both of the language in which these texts were composed and of the pre-Christian
mythology of Scandinavia.
2 Comments made here about the misuse of the word “giant” are also true of the word Riese,
which is the usual term used to translate risar and jötnar in German-language scholar-
ship. The translation of both of these terms as Riese stretches back to Jacob Grimm’s
Deutsche Mythologie, and this practice has been followed by Katja Schulz in her ambitious
study of these figures, Riesen: Von Wissenschütern und Wildnisbewohnern in Edda und
Saga (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004). Norwegian-, Swedish- and Danish-
speaking scholars and translators typically use the terms jotun, jätte and jætte respectively.
While these terms are cognate with the Old Norse jötunn, they are generally used to
translate the words jötunn, risi and þurs indiscriminately and are therefore also problematic.
Modern Icelandic editions and scholarship expectedly retain the terms risi, jötunn, þurs