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Nolte emphasises that irrespective of a person’s social standing physical
and mental conditions affected an individual’s life as well as a community
at large54 This applies also to Old Norse saga society, which depends on
individuals who are able-bodied, can provide for their family, and, most
importantly, can protect their own and their family’s honour, for main-
tenance of its social structure.55 The notion of able-bodiedness, however,
is not restricted to unblemished bodies, but connected to the concept of
utilitas – that is, of being useful for the community and not depending on
others for a living.56 It is at this juncture that it will therefore be useful to
introduce Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of capital and consider the body’s role
in accruing symbolic capital in saga society.
5. The Body as Capital
Regardless of the extent to which the verbalised emotional response to
injuries and impairments may appear limited in scope, dis/ability does
not go unnoticed in the sagas. Concerns about embodied difference and
reactions to it, such as empathy and compassion, often translate into feel-
ings of honour and shame and thus surface repeatedly in connection to
juridical negotiations. In light of this, it is important to consider why both
saga narratives and saga society pay close attention to arbitrations and legal
considerations after fights and feuds, and the role that impaired bodies
play in these negotiations. After all, many a fight is brought to a close by
comparing the numbers of wounded and killed men on both sides in order
to make sure that the parties involved have suffered comparable losses.57
54 Cordula Nolte, introduction to Homo debilis: Behinderte – Kranke – versehrte in der Gesell-
schaft des Mittelalters, ed. by Cordula Nolte, Studien und Texte zur Geistes- und Sozial-
geschichte des Mittelalters 3. (Korb: Didymos Verlag, 2009), 18.
55 Buntrock, “Schmerzphänomen,” 235.
56 Cordula Nolte, “Funktionsfähigkeit, Nützlichkeit, Tauglichkeit: Was in Vormodernen
Leistungsgesellschaften zählte,” Dis/ability History der vormoderne: ein Handbuch. Pre-
modern Dis/ability History: A Companion, edited by Cordula Nolte, Bianca Frohne, Uta
Halle and Sonja Kerth (Affalterbach: Didymos, 2017), 170–172.
57 In the Konungsbók version of Grágás (Gks 1157 fol.), the section on vígslóði ‘treatment of
homicide’ offers a variety of homicide scenarios, definitions of wounds and details as to
how such incidents should be punished and what rights and duties the parties involved
have; see Laws of Early Iceland. Grágás, the Codex Regius of Grágás with Material from other
Manuscripts, transl. by Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, and Richard Perkins (Winnipeg:
University of Manitoba Press, 1980), 139–174. Both on a historical and a literary level,