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Icelandic literary corpus.16 García Pérez’s research is valuable in high-
lighting how lyfsteinar would have originally been anchored in a healing
context; Prehal’s research provides a useful overview of the appearance of
propertied stones in the literary corpus.
The following discussion supplements the work of these scholars by
investigating ideas of health and human–non-human relations as they
are expressed in both the Norse lapidary tradition and in saga literature.
Placing these different sources alongside one another highlights the de-
gree to which ideas around materiality and agency, deriving from a learned
continental tradition, frequently converge with and influence vernacular
interests in bodily health and curative processes: this serves as a useful
reminder to resist drawing strict binaries between “institutional/orthodox”
literatures and “popular/heterodox” literatures, as well as between “medi-
cal” and “magical” discourses. It is more productive to focus on overlap and
conversation between these apparent poles.
Medieval medical approaches to human health do not produce a mind–
body dualism,17 which would have been quite alien to the audiences and
compilers of these texts.18 But it is difficult to discuss the medieval holistic
approach to human health without running up against the entrenched
16 Brenda Prehal, “Handbook for the Deceased: Re-Evaluating Literature and Folklore in
Icelandic Archaeology” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2020): 184–225.
17 On concepts of the “mind” in medieval Icelandic sources, see particularly Brynja
Þorgeirsdóttir, “The Head, the Heart, and the Breast: Bodily Conceptions of Emotion and
Cognition in Old Norse Skaldic Poetry,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 15 (2019): 40;
Mackenzie, “Vernacular Psychologies,” 57–91. In the vernacular Norse tradition, cognition
and emotion (faculties we typically associate with the “mind”) are perceived as embodied
and adhering to a cardio-centric or pectoral (rather than cephalon-centric) model. This can
be seen, e.g., in kenning-patterns for breast/chest, in which base-words refer to topog-
raphic or architectural features (enclosure, land, house etc.) and in which determinants refer
to mental abilities, e.g., “stronghold of thought.” We also find evidence for the continued
association of emotion and cognition with the physical organ of the heart elsewhere in saga
literature (e.g., Völsunga saga, ch. 37; Fóstbrœðra saga (Hauksbók-version), ch. 17; Gísla saga,
ch. 21), eddic verse (e.g., Atlakviða, sts 21–25, Atlamál in grœnlenzku, sts 58–64) and Snorra
Edda (Skáldskaparmál, ch. 17).
18 On the topic of Cartesian dualism as anachronism in the context of Old Norse literature
and scholarship, see, among others, Sif Rikhardsdottir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature:
Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 8; Mayburd, “Between a
Rock,” 209; Mayburd, “Objects and Agency,” 45–46; Sara Ann Knutson, “When Objects
Misbehave: Materials and Assemblages in the Ancient Scandinavian Myths,” Fabula 61
(3–4): 258.
LAPIDARIES AND L Y F S T E I N A R