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agency as distributed has been theorised in new materialist scholarship,
and is ultimately indebted to Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory35 and
Jane Bennett.36 More specifically, if these stones are perceived as agentive,
then this agency resides in what Karen Barad has dubbed “intra-action” (a
replacement term for the usual “interaction”): intra-action posits agency
not as an inherent attribute of something or someone, but rather a dyna-
mism of forces.37 The collaboration between humans and stones in the
lapidary tradition also extends to the treatment that human users must give
the stones in order for them to work effectively, setting them in specific
metals, wearing them on specific body-parts and so on.
The questions lapidaries raise over agency in turn prompt consid-
eration of the nature of the stones and the origins of their properties. The
lapidary tradition developed a specific vocabulary for discussing the agency
of stones, describing their properties and potentials for action through
Lat. virtus. This is translated in Old Norse lapidaries as náttúra,38 which
ranges in meaning from “nature, disposition” to “power, property, quality.”
Náttúra is applied elsewhere both to human and non-human entities.39
The thirteenth century saw the development of the concept of “natural
magic” in theological discussions on the continent, a framework combining
classical ideas regarding the hidden virtues of natural matter with Christian
35 Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47.4
(1996): 369–81.
36 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010). Scholars have started to implement new materialist theory as a framework
for engaging with Old Norse-Icelandic literature, resulting in several stimulating articles:
e.g., Knutson, “When Objects Misbehave”: 257–77 (on object agency in Norse mythology)
and Christopher Abram, “Kennings and Things: Towards an Object-Oriented Skaldic
Poetics,” The Shapes of Early English Poetry, ed. by Eric Weiskott and Irina Dumitrescu
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019) 161–88 (on the applicability of “object-oriented ontology”
to skaldic poetics).
37 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 214. Barad’s “intra-action”
further resonates with Laura Stark’s concept of “dynamistic forces” that span both the
human self and various objects and environments, developed in the context of her work on
magic and the embodied self in rural early modern Finland (Laura Stark, The Magical Self.
Body, Society and the Supernatural in Early Modern Rural Finland (Helsinki: Suomalainen
Tiedeakatemia, 2006), 254–85).
38 E.g., “hans natura,” AÍ, 77; ”med hans naturu,” AÍ, 83.
39 See Aldís Sigurðardóttir et al., ONP: Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, https://onp.ku.dk/onp/
onp.php?o56477 .