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This article builds on the above perspectives by examining the human
usage of powerful stones in medieval Iceland, focusing on the applications
of stones in saga literature and in the Old Norse-Icelandic lapidary tradi-
tion. Human–lithic relations in these sources offer a useful case study for
engaging with conceptions of the interplay between the human and the
non-human, particularly on the levels of bodily health and enhancement.
At the same time, they illuminate attitudes towards materiality, agency and
ontology circulating in medieval Iceland.
Despite their frequent appearance in Old Norse literature, powerful
stones and their perceived impact on human health have received limited
scholarly attention. Much of this interest has focused on the enigmatic
sólarsteinn,8 and whether or not it was actually used as a medieval naviga-
tional instrument.9 Scholars have since moved beyond this concern to es-
tablish a historical basis for literary depictions of stones,10 instead focusing
on how ideas surrounding powerful stones impacted and informed literary
worlds: Florian Schreck explores the abundant use of the Latinate lapidary
tradition in riddarasögur;11 Mayburd, in her article on dwarves and materi-
ality, argues that medieval perceptions of stones (with which dwarves were
studies which examine the relationship between personhood and handling of objects in
Viking Age burial acts (e.g., Julie Lund, “Connectedness with Things: Animated Objects
of Viking Age Scandinavia and Early Medieval Europe,” Archaeological Dialogues 24.1
(2017): 89–108; and Alison Margaret Klevnäs, “‘Imbued with the Essence of the Owner’:
Personhood and Possessions in the Reopening and Reworking of Viking-Age Burials,”
European Journal of Archaeology 19.3 (2017): 456–76).
8 Sólarsteinar, minerals by which the sun could purportedly be located in an overcast sky,
appear in two thirteenth-century texts, Rauðúlfs þáttr and Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar,
as well as church and cloister inventories from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Árni
Einarsson, “Sólarsteinninn: Tæki eða tákn,” Gripla 21 (2010): 296).
9 Ibid.; Thorkild Ramskou, Solstenen – Primitiv Navigation i Norden för Kompasset (Copen-
hagen: Rhodos, 1969); Peter Foote, “Icelandic solarsteinn and the Medieval Background,”
Aurvandilstá: Norse Studies, ed. by Michael Barnes, Hans Bekker-Nielsen and Gerd
Wolfgang Weber, The Viking Collection 2 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1984),
140–54.
10 Interestingly, this concern with establishing a historical basis for depictions of the
sólarsteinn in medieval texts parallels the earlier interest in pathologising non-normative
bodies rather than considering these bodies as literary constructions, as outlined above.
11 “Medieval Science Fiction. The Learned Latin Tradition on Wondrous Stones in the
Icelandic Riddarasögur” (paper presented at the Sixteenth International Saga Conference,
9–15th August 2015, University of Zurich and University of Basel); “The Old Norse
Lapidary Tradition and Its Influence on the Old Icelandic Riddarasögur” (paper presented
at Research Group for Medieval Philology, 10th April 2014, University of Bergen).
LAPIDARIES AND L Y F S T E I N A R