Co-Sponsored by the Center for German & European Studies DAAD Centre of Excellence, the Department of German, Nordic & Slavic+, and the Program in Medieval Studies.
Within the last two decades, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to constructions of impairment and disability in medieval literature and history, utilizing interdisciplinary approaches to cast light on how visible and invisible difference was understood in the Middle Ages. In the field of Old Norse, a number of studies have recently appeared, which discuss physical, sensory, and mental difference in medieval Iceland. These studies have clearly demonstrated how what we now refer to as “disabilities” are present in the prose narratives of medieval Iceland, both in characters who are central to the narrative as well as those who are incidental within it. Various forms of physical, sensory, and mental difference may be an important part of a central saga character’s background, and/or an explanation for their nickname, or it may be critical to a major episode within the saga. In minor (often unnamed) characters, physical, sensory, and mental difference may serve as a foil to the major character, or the major character may “cure” the other’s state of difference in order to demonstrate their own powers. As a whole, as these studies indicate, appearances of disability motifs in the saga corpus speak to what the saga public thought was narratively believable, and as such warrant closer consideration.
Through a presentation of interrelated examples from a variety of Old Norse texts, this lecture focuses on the importance of reading across traditionally defined Old Norse genre boundaries in order to better understand how physical, sensory, and mental difference was named, experienced, and treated in medieval Iceland. It focuses especially on the importance of examples from hagiographic and religious literature, which best reflect the medieval Christian understandings of mind and body that would, in turn, have impacted constructions of disability in the Icelandic family sagas and other “secular” genres.
Natalie Van Deusen is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Professor Van Deusen holds the inaugural Henry Cabot and Linnea Lodge Scandinavian Professorship in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Programs. She is also Editor for Scandinavian-Canadian Studies. Her research interests include Old Norse-Icelandic paleography and philology, manuscript culture, hagiography and religious literature (poetry and prose), gender studies, and disability studies. She has published articles and book reviews in Scandinavian Studies, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Speculum, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, Arthuriana, Arkiv för nordisk filologi, and Maal og minne.