Pain, Emotion, and Embodiment in Old Norse Literature

Pain is ever-present in the Middle Ages. Indeed, medieval people must at times have had to suffer through excruciating pain: infected wounds, broken bones badly healed, toothaches with few remedies available short of pulling the affected tooth. Physical pain is an accompaniment of the human body, a continuous by-product of human existence. Analyzing representation of pain can therefore illuminate both cultural and literary conventions for expressing, mitigating, and understanding pain as a human reality, a religious experience, or a physiological or an emotional event. This article addresses the medieval concept of pain and its various manifestations in Old Norse literature. It will consider the relation between pain and ideological values, the physiological and psychosomatic dimensions of pain, and the function of pain as an emotion. I suggest that in Old Norse literature pain is intimately interlinked with notions of interior emotionality and its physical manifestations. The literary depiction of pain within Old Norse saga literature will therefore be used to explore notions of pain as a phenomenon in medieval Iceland, its literary functionality in affirming and staging gendered and value-bound ideologies, and, ultimately, its figurative representation as an embodied sensation or an emotional state of mind, or both.