Gripla - 2022, Blaðsíða 150

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and compilers with a greater variety of narrative opportunities. This is not
a rigid rule, since there is variation in depictions of properties within and
across saga “sub-genres:” this flexibility of magical stones as a saga motif
reflects the openness and “multimodality” of saga traditions.
As in lapidary texts, the curative and prophylactic properties of saga
stones work through the stone’s proximity to humans, either worn on the
body, or applied topically to ailments. And, as in the lapidary tradition,
stones both heal and enhance the body. Where saga stones operate through
physical proximity, a similar porousness of stone and body is implied, as it
is in the lapidary tradition. However, in the case of lyfsteinar, we see a fur-
ther level of contagion at work, between the sword and its curative stone.
Through its proximity to the sword, the stone becomes contaminated with
the sword’s nature. The lyfsteinn thus provides the only cure for wounds
inflicted by the associated sword (as is stated explicitly in Laxdœla saga),
operating through the principle of similia similibus curantur. This finding
extends the relationship often seen between material artefacts and the
personhood of its (human) owner, wherein the personhood of previous
owners of an object contaminates the object and can be seen as an exten-
sion of the owner’s self: in the case of lyfsteinar, the nature or personhood
of the sword contaminates the lyfsteinn attached to its hilt.
This case study, then, suggests a worldview in which the boundaries of
humans and objects are open to negotiation. Networks of personhood and
capability span both human and non-human matter: stones transfer their
náttúrur to human users, just as swords transfer their náttúrur to lyfsteinar.
What results is an understanding of human health and ability in flux and of
the external material world as potentially vibrant or agentive, instrumental
in maintaining a state of heill (health/wholeness).167 This has implications
not only for our understanding of medieval medical approaches to the
mind–body complex but also for how we think about medieval Icelandic
conceptions of personal and ontological identity, agency and attitudes to-
wards the non-human world.
167 On the physiological and social denotations of this term, see Cristopher Crocker and
Yoav Tirosh, “Health, Healing and the Social Body in Medieval Iceland,” Understanding
Disability throughout History: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Iceland from Settlement to 1936,
ed. by Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and James G. Rice (New York: Routledge, 2021), 114.