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Even though (individual) physical causes for traumas may have remained
unchanged over time, the psychological damage they cause is likely to have
changed depending on the various ‘emotional and cultural experiences of
the individual’.75 Along with categories such as gender, race, religion, and
– in the present case – dis/ability, trauma offers an additional approach for
analysing processes of othering and of (embodied) difference.76
Similar to dis/ability, trauma as a methodological tool can be used to
explore depictions of differences related to body and mind, as well as the
ways in which both individuals and society deal with such (embodied)
difference. In a literary context, ‘trauma narratives’ can be understood as
a ‘narratological phenomenon’77 focused on painful and disturbing events
and their aftermath, which aims at finding a way of dealing with and ideally
coming to terms with a trauma. In the same way that there is no universal
definition of trauma applicable to premodern sources, trauma narratives
do not feature uniform narrative patterns, but require distinct readings and
interpretation.78 Nevertheless, Trembinski suggests that such stories may
have common features, such as ‘[n]arrative disjunctures, disordered prose,
formulaic language or metaphors,’79 that reflect the fragmented recollec-
tions of the event and figure as the only way of (temporarily) verbalising
a traumatic experience. The substance of the traumatic experience will of
course be specific to the historical context of the society that produced
the narrative, and it is worth keeping in mind Turner and Lee’s emphasis
on the importance of identifying what aspects the sources are specifically
silent about, which is very much the aim of this article.80
and Collective Identity, ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil
J. Smelser, Pitor Sztompka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 31–59.
75 Trembinski, “Trauma,” 16.
76 Trembinski, “Trauma,” 29–30; Sonja Kerth, “Narratives of Trauma in Medieval German
Literature,” trauma in Medieval society, ed. by Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee,
Explorations in Medieval Culture 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 276. On ‘other(-ing)’ see e.g. Jean-
François Staszak, “Other/otherness,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. by
Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2008), 43–47. For a very recent
discussion of ‘other(ing)’ in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, see Merkelbach, “Monsters,”
esp. 11–15, 26–28.
77 Kerth, “Narratives of Trauma,” 279.
78 See e.g. Trembinski, “Melancholy,” 85–86, and “Trauma,” 22–29; and Kerth, “Narratives
of Trauma,” 281–296.
79 Trembinski, “Trauma,” 21.
80 Turner and Lee, “Conceptualizing Trauma,” 12.