Sekretariát programu SHV

The course aims to delineate a space for ideas about the body found in Old Norse literature and, in the context of contemporary analyses in body-related research, to search for other polarities than the body- soul dualism. The themes analysed in detail will be: somatic displays of emotions; change of form in the context of battle ecstasy and of magic; corporeality of revenants; physical aspects of Old Norse terms for "soul" and the human-animal relationship.
We will draw on Old Norse literature - sagas, Eddas, laws, skaldic poems. No philosophical treatises were written in the Old Norse world, so abstraction from concrete examples is left to us. We always find individual phenomena in specific stories, where, depending on the context, some aspect of their meaning always comes to the fore.