‘I am the Barkman, and I am good at nothing’: Anthro-arboreal hybridity and vegetal politics in Qrvar-Odds saga

Abstract This article offers a new framework for approaching anthro-arboreal hybridity in Ǫrvar-Odds saga (c. 1250–1300 CE) by suggesting that the Barkman’s arborescent transformation is an active, political choice resonating with what ecocritic Michael Marder calls the ‘political plant,’ a system where productivity is not in service of the individual, but of the entire ecosystem. Focusing on the sequences in which the Barkman refuses to take any individual profit for labor, this article traces how the Barkman divorces productivity from social gain, destabilizing the systems of hierarchy which give monarchy meaning. Picking up on the call to imagine a vegetal model of the political, this article considers how the language of arboreality in Ǫrvar-Odds saga resonates with Marder’s imagined political ecosystem. An ecocritical reading of the Barkman sequence pushes the political plant beyond the abstract realm, embracing an idea of forests as physical threats to hierarchical systems.