Gripla - 2022, Page 156

GRIPLA154
Sverrir Jakobsson. “Hauksbók and the Construction of an Icelandic World View.”
Saga-Book 31 (2007): 22–38.
Tirosh, Yoav. “Milk, Masculinity, and Humor-Less Vikings – Gender in the Old
Norse Polysystem.” Limes 13 (2020): 136–50.
Torfi H. Tulinius. “Time and Space.” A Critical Companion to Old Norse Lit er-
ary Genre, ed. by Massimiliano Bampi, Carolyne Larrington and Sif Rik-
hardsdottir. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020, 145–60.
Ward, Elisabeth. “Nested Narrative: Þórðar saga hreðu and Material Engage ment.”
PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012.
Whaley, Diana, and David Elliot. “A Medieval Casebook: Hand Cures Docu-
mented in the Icelandic Sagas of Bishops.” Journal of Hand Surgery 19B.5
(1994): 667–71.
S U M M A R Y
Lapidaries and lyfsteinar: Health, Enhancement and Human-Lithic Relations in
Medieval Iceland
Keywords: AM 194 8vo, medicine, materiality, agency, human–non-human
relations, lapidaries (texts), sagas
This article examines the properties of powerful stones in medieval Iceland,
focusing on the applications of such stones in learned treatises and in saga
literature. The relationships between humans and stones in these sources offer
a useful case study for engaging with medieval Icelandic conceptions of the
interplay between the human and the non-human world, specifically in terms
of bodily health and enhancement. The article has two parts: the first part
examines the Old Norse-Icelandic lapidary tradition as witnessed in the translated
lapidary text in AM 194 8vo (ff. 45v–48v), providing an overview of the range
of physiological, emotional and cognitive effects stones were thought to have on
humans (from the curative and prophylactic to the enhancive); the second part
discusses the appearance of stones in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century saga
literature, examining how their properties alter and develop over time and across
genres. This research builds on the growing bodies of scholarship on dis/ability
and medicine in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and finds that the presentation of
powerful stones in these texts suggests an understanding of the human body and
mind as fundamentally “open” to the vibrant, material world. It therefore further
supplements contemporary research into conceptions of the self in medieval
Iceland, as well as attitudes towards the non-human world.