Gripla - 2020, Side 279

GRIPLA278
Thus, although invoked using only a few words, the narrative methods of
the saga’s writer become apparent as the text briefly veers from Old Norse
literature’s typical ocularcentric norm. While far from a conclusive analy-
sis, it is worth noting, for example, that the Dictionary of Old norse Prose
(ONP) contains 1179 citations for the verb sjá [to see/look], 470 citations
for the verb heyra [to hear/listen], 94 citations for the verb bergja [to taste],
51 and 45 citations for the verbs snerta [to touch] and þreifa [to feel with the
hand] respectively, and 27 and 12 citations for the verbs þefa [to smell] and
ilma [to give off a pleasant scent] respectively.35
Concerning blindness and ocularcentrism more broadly, disability stud-
ies scholar Rod Michalko explains that “blindness is always experienced in
the midst of sightedness” where “people are either born blind into a world
organized by sight or lost their sight in the same world.” Thus, he contin-
ues, “the meaning of blindness is wrapped in its immersion in a ‘sighted
world.’”36 Consequently, vision loss or blindness, often conceptualized as
the “empty other, the polar (and defining) opposite to the wholeness and
norm of ‘seeing,’” is often seen to be antithetical to knowledge acquisition
and other mental processes.37 Though certainly with some exceptions,
vision has been widely privileged over any other sense across history,
including during the Middle Ages.38 The same seems to hold true for the
35 Aldís Sigurðardóttir, Alex Speed Kjeldsen, Bent Chr. Jacobsen, Christopher Sanders, Ellert
Þór Jóhannsson, Eva Rode, Helle Degnbol, James E. Knirk, Maria Arvidsson, Simonetta
Battista, Tarrin Wills, and Þorbjörg Helgadóttir (eds.), OnP: Dictionary of Old norse Prose
[Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog] (Copenhagen: Den Arnamagnæanske Kommission),
https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php
36 Rod Michalko, the Mystery of the Eye and the shadow of Blindness (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1998), 8; Rod Michalko, the Difference that Disability Makes (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2002), 136–40.
37 Scott Wells, “The Exemplary Blindness of Francis of Assisi,” Disability in the Middle
Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. by Joshua R. Eyler (Farnham: Ashgate,
2010) 67; see also Michalko, the Mystery of the Eye, 8–34, 65–101; David Michael Levin,
“Introduction,” Modernity and the Hegemony of vision, ed. by David Michael Levin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2–4.
38 In the context of medieval Christian culture, some have suggested that hearing, and some-
times even touch, rather than vision assumed primacy among the senses; see, for example,
Roland Barthes, sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. by Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989), 65. However, some of these claims are made on rather thin evidence
and, while hearing is commonly privileged above the remaining senses and sometimes
touch as well, the hegemony of vision remains widely prevalent, particularly during the
later Middle Ages; see Walter J. Ong, “The Shifting Sensorium,” the varieties of sensory