Gripla - 2019, Síða 78
GRIPLA78
they describe are made to match the expectations attached to the singular,
modern, and etic noun “giant.”3 In other words, using the word “giant”
forces all of the above Old Norse words into a single, narrow semantic
range. The ongoing use of this word in English-language translations and
scholarship continually reinforces the view that jötunn, risi, þurs and tröll
must be essentially identical, and explorations of whether this homogene-
ity is reflected in the textual record itself are almost non-existent.4
Hard-and-fast distinctions between the Old Norse terms jötunn, tröll
and þurs are often difficult to locate, especially in saga literature. The level
of synonymy between these words when describing giantlike beings is such
that identifying the individual meaning attached to them is a speculative
task.5 As a result, although some nuances are paved over when these words
are collectively rendered as “giant,” I will not be taking up the question of
the distinction between them. Instead, this discussion is concerned with
the words risi and jötunn. Of the four terms mentioned above, these are
the two which have been most critically mis-rendered in English-language
and tröll, though this does not necessarily imply that differences between these terms are
considered in Icelandic scholarship.
3 Emic labels describe “the entities and processes of social life that are real and important
to the participants,” whereas etic labels describe “entities and processes which by virtue of
their scientific status are capable of efficaciously explaining (and changing) social thoughts
and activities, regardless of whether they are real or important from the participant’s point
of view,” Marvin Harris, “History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction,” Annual
Review of Anthropology 5 (1976): 330. That is to say, while jötunn, risi, þurs and tröll are “real
and important” terms to the societies that generated Old Norse-Icelandic literature, “giant”
and related terms are labels of extra-cultural provenance that were unknown to these
societies.
4 The most notable study of this kind was conducted by Lotte Motz, “The Families of
Giants,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 102 (1987): 216–36. She attempted to show that jötnar,
risar, tröll and þursar all possessed distinct characteristics in Old Norse-Icelandic sources,
and that each could be characterised as a different type of “giant.” However, the textual
support for such neat divisions between all four of these terms does not exist.
5 This is not to say, of course, that the semantic range of these words is necessarily restricted
to giantlike beings. The word tröll, for instance, has a striking array of different meanings.
See Ármann Jakobsson, “trollish acts;” “Beast and Man: realism and the occult in Egils
saga,” Scandinavian Studies 83 (2011): 32; “Taxonomy,” 201; and Randi Eldevik, “Less Than
Kind: Giants in Germanic Tradition,” The Shadow Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of
the Monstrous, ed. by Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 91. On tröll in general, see
John Lindow, Trolls: An Unnatural History (London: reaktion Books, 2014) and Ármann
Jakobsson, The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North (New York:
Punctum Books, 2017).