Kentaurer i Ödesryttarna

In my work with the first out of two trilogies of Soul Riders by Helena Dahlgren, I examine how the human-horse relationship forms centaurs in the story. The centaur is formed when two individuals in a complex web of parries and responses become so coordinated in their movements that it is no longer possible to distinguish where one body’s movement ends and where the other’s begins. The concept is based on Bornemark’s theory of the centaur as a phenomenological being, in other words, as an experience of the body. With support from Donovan’s and Mane’s theories, I further argue that the horses in the books are regarded as subjects in a dialogue that violates the humanistic idea that man, due to his rationality, stands above the animal in a hierarchical order. With that in mind, I am presenting the connection between horse and rider as a bodily and a subjective transformation, a shift that defies the notion that the rational human and the non-rational non-human (the horse) would be binary opposites. But the centaur is not unconditional, an argument that is supported by the fact that some of the equipages in the books fail to form centaurs. If the rider tries to make the horse submit to the human will by using tools that injure the horse, their movements will not create a united body. My aim is to show that viewing the horse as a subject, and letting the distinction between human and animal dissolve is a prerequisite for the centaur.