Gripla - 2022, Page 117

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ADÈ LE KREAGER
LAPIDARIES AND LYFSTEINAR
Health, Enhancement
and Human-Lithic Relations in Medieval Iceland1
concepts of the body and human health in Old Norse-Icelandic
literature have received considerable scholarly interest in recent years. This
owes in no small part to the burgeoning field of disability studies2 and
its application to medieval material. The tendency of earlier enquiries to
pathologise bodily and mental differences in terms of modern disorders3
is increasingly being replaced by a more nuanced approach towards the
social construction and presentation of disability and its intersection with
other discourses of power, gender and social in/exclusion.4 At the same
time, there has been increased interest in medieval theories of medicine,
1 I would like to thank my two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have
informed my thinking within and beyond this article. My thanks also to Judy Quinn for
her feedback on an earlier draft and to Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir for her generous help with the
Icelandic text of my abstract.
2 Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that approaches disability through its inter-
section with culture and society. It offers an alternative approach that does not rely exclusi-
vely on the biomedical framing of disability as a deficit.
3 See, e.g., Jesse Byock, “The Skull and Bones in Egils saga: A Viking, A Grave, and Paget’s
Disease,” Viator 24 (1993): 23–50; Peter Stride, “Egill Skallagrímsson: The First Case of
Van Buchem Disease?,” J R Coll Physicians Edinb 41 (2011): 169–73; Jon Geir Høyersten,
“Manifestations of Psychiatric Illness in Texts from the Medieval and Viking Era,” Archives
of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy 2 (2015): 57–60; Diana Whaley and David Elliot, “A
Medieval Casebook: Hand Cures Documented in the Icelandic Sagas of Bishops,” Journal
of Hand Surgery 19B.5 (1994): 667–71.
4 See, e.g., all articles in the special edition edited by Christopher Crocker, “Disability in
the Medieval Nordic World,” Mirator 20.2 (2021), as well as Crocker’s bibliography of
disability in medieval saga writing (https://cwecrocker.com/bibliography-of-disability-
studies-and-the-medieval-icelandic-sagas/ ). For a detailed overview of disability studies
in the context of Norse scholarship, see Ármann Jakobsson et al., “Disability before
Disability: Mapping the Uncharted in the Medieval Sagas,” Scandinavian Studies 92.4
(2020): 440–60.
Gripla XXXIII (2022): 115–155