Posthumously active dead people – the living or restless dead.
By Dr. Kirsi Kanerva
Department of Cultures
University of Helsinki
Introduction
In the medieval Icelandic Flóamanna saga (Saga of the Men of Flói) there is an episode where a man suddenly becomes insane, dies and becomes a ghost, infecting other people with a lethal disease, who in their turn become posthumously active and inflict upon the survivors illness and fear. The story begins when the main character of the saga, a Christian man called Þorgils Örra beinsstjúpr, sails for Greenland and is shipwrecked on a deso-late shore. Unable to leave, he and his fellow-passengers are forced to stay there the whole winter.2 At the darkest time of the year, one night during yuletide:
while they are eating, there is a sharp and vehement knock on the door [of the hut they had made]. Then one of them said: “Good tidings might be near at hand.” The man rushed out, and those who were inside thought it took him a long time to get back. Jósteinn and his men now go out; the one who was outside has become insane, and in the morning he dies. A similar thing happens on another evening, that a man becomes insane and soon dies, and he thought he saw the one who had died earlier leap upon him. The disease now takes hold of Jósteinn’s men and six of them die.3
Posthumously active dead people – the living or restless dead – as described in medieval Icelandic Family Sagas (Íslendingasögur), were tangible and corporeal ghosts: revenants that appeared to the living in their undecayed, physical and still recognizable bodies. The dead often became restless of their own free will and wished to participate in the lives of the living, for instance, avenging the dead who had been left unavenged, pointing out disturbers of social order, or helping and supporting the living in their deeds and achievements.4
Elsewhere in Europe seeing dead people was occasionally considered a symptom of mental disorder, but in medieval Iceland the malicious restless dead were frequently considered causes of unpleasant psychic and bodily con-sequences. They caused the people great fear, sometimes loss of consciousness or wits and madness, or disease and death that could result in posthumous restlessness.5 Thus, they were creators of disorder that influenced – especially in the modern sense – both the mental and physical well-being of the living, and offer an intriguing object for the investigation of medieval conceptions of mental disorder.
Of interest here is how the medieval Icelanders interpreted the consequences of the ghosts’ actions. In modern western thought, “mental” typically refers to the mind and its intellectual, abstract functions. Yet cross-cultural studies suggest that various mental conditions and disequi-libria, such as emotions and madness, are not always distinguished from corporal conditions, such as physical diseases, bodily decrepitude or displace-ment of internal organs, and psychological distress may be somatised. Moreover, conditions that we regard as normal, such as emotions, may be considered states of disorder or pathogens that expose people to such disturbances.6 What we would consider physical might thus be mental to others, and what we consider as normal may be viewed as a disorder in other cultures.
In this chapter, I will concentrate on two of the above-mentioned effects provoked by the restless dead, which would be considered either mental or physical nowadays: fear and disease. I will discuss how these conditions caused by the revenants were interpreted in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland and examine the relationship between mind and body, and mental and physical disorders and illnesses, in order to discover what the medieval Icelandic conception of “mental” disorder was like.
As the study will show, both the emotions, that is mental reactions elicited by the dead and physical illnesses, were considered conditions of bodily disor-der. In medieval Icelandic culture many emotions as such were regarded as morbid and pathogenic, and many diseases were thought to have an emotional origin. Moreover, I will argue that for medieval Icelanders, whether they were influenced by indigenous ideas or Latin learning, mental disorder would not have been merely an abstract state of insanity, but an all-encompassing bodily disequilibrium that often originated in inner organs that were defective in size or displaced, or was caused by excessive emotions. Excessive emotion gener-ated disorder by causing bodily illness, or movement of the viscera and bodily fluids, or by exposing the human body to malignant external forces existent in the physical environment. Additionally, mental disorder was represented in sagas as a condition that was to some extent dependent on the social status of the person.
Among the Icelandic Family Sagas,7 my focus is on the above mentioned Flóamanna saga8 in addition to Eyrbyggja saga,9 Laxdæla saga,10 and Eiríks saga rauða.11 These main sources are all linked to western Iceland, and share some themes, characters, geographical locations of events, or other character-istics. There was probably a common oral tradition behind the stories, or other literary connections.12
Icelandic Family Sagas were based on oral tales of people who inhab-ited Iceland in the ninth and tenth centuries and their descendants after Iceland was Christianised (year 999/1000). They were written in Old Norse-Icelandic and compiled in the thirteenth and fourteenth century by or for the descendants of these immigrants. They were regarded as history that also func-tioned as a tool of power, legitimising the land ownership and authority of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century farmers.13 The Icelandic Family Sagas were produced by the literary elite – learned people who were often men and often clerics or wealthy landowners. The saga audience, however, presumably origi-nated from all social layers present on medieval farms, and the texts often had didactic purposes, as well.14
Icelandic literature did not arise in a vacuum, but absorbed many influences from foreign learning as there were continuous contacts between Iceland and Norway and other parts of Europe.15 For instance, medical learning in Iceland may have been influenced by continental European ideas from the early twelfth century onwards. There are some surviving Icelandic medical tracts that date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and were mainly compilations and translations of Latin or Scandinavian medical handbooks,16 but already the thirteenth-century saga writers appear to have been familiar with Latin learning to some extent.17 This foreign influence has been emphasized in earlier research,18 and is supported by the notion that some sagas exist in man-uscripts that also include medical knowledge, like information on the humoral theory.19 However, this argument has also been criticized,20 and will be further commented upon in this discussion. Consequently, in addition to the conceptions of mental disorder, I will also examine to what extent the views represented in sagas reflect theoretical Latin learning, and what implicit medieval Icelandic conceptions of the human mind, illnesses and emotions, based on empirical, everyday observations, that is lay views of human physiology, the sagas convey.
In order to reach the culturally and historically constructed meanings of emotion and illness in medieval Iceland, I will study the subject intertextually, in connection with other saga literature.21 The examples provided by the kennings of medieval Icelandic Skaldic Poetry and metaphoric expressions concerning mind and emotions will offer further information of how medieval Icelanders conceptualised the mind, body, illnesses and emotions.22
In the first section of this chapter, I will discuss the nature of fear elicited by the restless dead and its mental and physical aspects. In the second part, I will examine the mental origins of the physical illnesses caused by ghosts.
The Anatomically Deficient and Porous Bodies of the Fearful
The ghosts of the sagas invariably appeared in the night or the dark period of the year,23 frequently causing fear to those they encountered. Flóamanna saga, for instance, tells of a farm of a powerful man in Norway called Björn, whose father has just died. The father becomes restless after his death, and the people on the farm are forced to go to bed early every evening because they “were also frightened of him.”24 Eyrbyggja saga suggests that such an emotional reaction was usually anticipated when people encountered revenants. The writer states that seeing ghosts “made everyone frightened, which was to be expected.”25 Yet the question arises whether fear was merely a harmless emotion, a mental reaction to seeing ghosts, or something else.
In medieval Icelandic literature fear and other emotions were usually displayed through somatic changes such as blushing, turning pale or shedding tears. These somatic changes of the body, or emotions expressed in words, informed readers or listeners about the emotions of the character in a culture in which literature did not describe the individual’s abstract inner state.26
The seat of various intellectual functions – emotions, thoughts, memory, will and intentions – was the “mind,” which existed in the breast, its actual physical organ being the heart.27 In kennings, used predominately in Skaldic Poetry, the breast could be described, for example, as the “castle of the mind,” “vehicle of contemplation” or “ship of memory.”28 The heart might be called “the house of the mind,”29 and an emotion was literally “movement of the mind.”30 These kennings and words suggest that mental functions were thought to be physical in nature, rendering every movement of the mind, emo-tions included, a bodily condition. Emotional states were thus connected to various physical states, always involving the body.
In the medieval Icelandic culture the movements of the mind categorized as fear were clearly unwanted. Fright was not a part of the emotional repertoire of respectable men and women,31 and even the slightest suspicion of fear was considered disgraceful. Fright caused by the dead was connected with social stature;32 heroes and remarkable men and women are never mentioned as fearing revenants.
In Laxdæla saga, for instance, a noteworthy Christian woman and an ances-tor of some important thirteenth-century Icelandic families, Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, is described as expressing no fright when she sees a ghost on her way to church. Instead, when it tries to address her and tell her “great tidings,” she merely answers in an authoritative manner: “Keep silent about them, you wretch.”33 Conversely, only nameless and landless inhabitants, that is the “people” (menn, fólk) are mentioned as being frightened when they encounter ghosts. Fear caused by the dead was thus mostly experienced by people of lesser importance.
Nevertheless, a total lack of fear may have been regarded as perplexing in medieval Icelandic culture. The sagas suggest that incapability to feel fear originated from anatomical factors. In Fóstbræðra saga,34 Þorgeirr is depicted as troublesome, unpredictable and sometimes excessively violent at unexpected times.35 He could not feel fear, but was a remarkably stout-hearted man.36 This fearlessness is thought remarkable and it requires explanation, especially since it seems to reflect the origins of his socially unwanted and destructive behaviour. Þorgeirr’s killers expect to find an explanation for it in his mind, so they cut out the heart from Þorgeirr’s dead body in order to see what the heart of a fearless man looks like. They notice that it is “rather small,” in the Möðruvallabók version of the saga.37 In the Hauksbók version, Þorgeirr’s heart is described as “not bigger than the size of a walnut, hard like callus, and there was no blood in it.”38 However, the writer of the Möðruvallabók version has a slightly different view: Þorgeirr’s heart “was not so full of blood that it could have trembled of fear,”39 suggesting that it was not completely bloodless as indicated in the Hauksbók version, nor full of blood.
The ability to feel fear was thus thought to depend on the physical size of the heart as well as on the amount of blood it contained. Whether the living were frightened by the dead depended on the former’s anatomy – the size of the mind organ and the amount of blood it contained. Interestingly, in humoral theory mental disturbances were considered to result from “excess of blood in the heart,”40 suggesting similarities between learned medical theories and the Icelandic view. However, the two differing versions of Fóstbræðra saga imply that the traditional Icelandic view was influenced by foreign learning, but the knowledge of humoral theory was nevertheless somewhat distorted because of a competing traditional view.
In Old Norse-Icelandic a timid or faint-hearted person could also be called huglauss, literally “without mind,” and huglítill, “small-mind” – expressions that alluded to either a small-sized heart or actual absence of this mind-organ in fearful people.41 The description of the heart of the fearless man in Fóstbræðra saga was thus in conflict with the traditional Icelandic conception of timid people as small-hearted and “mindless” and thus, metaphorically, without heart.42 Both views, however, implied that feeling fear, and thus the tendency to be affected by the restless dead, was dependent on the person’s anatomy and on whether it was confined within the limits of “normal,” instead of “abnormal,” and thus possibly morbid.43
The early fourteenth-century Icelandic Hauksbók suggests that fear had connotations beyond differences in anatomy, extending to other physiological divergences and morbid states. The writer of Hauksbók enumerates the four substances of humoral theory – yellow and black bile, blood and phlegm – and the symptoms caused by an excess of each essence separately, indicating clearly that he is now talking about the opposite condition to soundness (heill): bodily disorders in which the four bodily fluids were not in balance.44 These imbalances may be described as illness(es),45 but in Hauksbók they are depicted as behavioural tendencies and disposition. For instance, a person with an excess of yellow bile was nimble, brisk, active, sly, hot-tempered and ate a lot, whereas one suffering a surplus of phlegm was timid, jumpy and unsteady.46 These conditions, as opposite to being heill, sound, imply that certain traits, behavioural tendencies and emotions would have been labelled a disease by those familiar with humoral theory.
Apparently, humoral theory was part of Icelandic learned tradition and considered important, since the details of the four bodily substances were written down in Hauksbók. However, knowledge of medical doctrines was not necessarily widely spread or internalised, and medical practices related to foreign learning may have been special knowledge, practised by a select few. Yet typical symptoms of excess of phlegm apply surprisingly well to victims of fear in sagas. The timid, alert and unsteady nature of phlegmatics is clear in the representations of fear in the thirteenth-century Gísla saga Súrssonar.47 The saga depicts how Vésteinn is stabbed to death with a spear in the house of his brother-in-law Gísli one night. Gísli’s wife Auðr asks a slave called Þórðr the faint-hearted,48 who is the only man present when the body is discovered, to withdraw the spear from the body. The slave does not dare to go anywhere near the dead body because he is so afraid of corpses.49
We do not learn anything else from his reaction, but as Gísli, the farmer himself, comes in he immediately realizes the situation and, according to the saga, “asked Þórðr to be calm.”50 The word used for calm here is kyrr, which literally means still, quiet, or at rest: Gísli wants Þórðr to be silent and be still.51 The implication of Gísli’s comment is that this is precisely the opposite of Þórðr’s behaviour when he speaks. Þórðr the faint-hearted may have been panic-stricken, perhaps moving or gesticulating and uttering some sound, comprehensible or incomprehensible; like the phlegmaticus referred to in Hauksbók, he is timid, jumpy and volatile, and thus easily startled. Following the Hauksbók definition, those fearing the restless dead suffered from an over-abundance of phlegm, which makes fear a morbid condition, if not a bodily illness. Yet it can be doubted whether this would have been the view held by most of the medieval Icelanders, or simply by the members of the learned elite, as the frightened body of the phlegmaticus indubitably resembled the behaviour of terrified people in general.
According to the evidence in other Family Sagas fear was also connected to sadness.52 In Eiríks saga rauða sorrow along with fear is connected to the actual encounter with ghosts. The saga relates that a disease has killed many people on a farm in Greenland. Then, one night a woman called Sigríðr,53 who has already caught the illness, needs to go outside to the privy. She is assisted by Guðríðr, who does not fall ill herself. When they turn back to face the front door “Sigríðr then cried loudly” because she sees those who have died of the disease standing by the door. The group of dead includes Sigríðr herself and Guðríðr’s husband, Þorsteinn Eiríksson, who are both fated to die later. Seeing this sight and herself among the dead, Sigríðr utters that it “is sorrowful to see such things.”54
Guðríðr comments on Sigríðr’s anxiety: “We have trod carelessly, and you are not able to stand [literally ‘you do not have courage to endure’] the cold that has entered you.”55 Sigríðr is both frightened, as her cry shows, and lacking in courage, as Guðríðr’s comment suggests, but she is also sad. Possibly Sigríðr finds the vision sorrowful because she sees herself in the group of revenants, which brings home to her that the disease she has already caught will kill her.56 The apparent connection between sorrow and fear, both felt by Sigríðr, is intriguing, and (at least superficially) resembles modern definitions of these emotions. Inability to act is occasionally seen as characteristic to both of them: fear may disable momentarily, and as a long-term emotion sorrow can likewise lead to lack of strength and exhaustion.57
In the medieval European context, fear and sadness58 were considered particularly dangerous and detrimental because they affected the mental immunity of the person. These emotions could expose people to the influence of demons or evil spirits.59 In cultures with similar conceptions, a body schema regarded as “open” is held: according to this schema, the human body is porous and “open” to various influences from the external environment that can pen-etrate it through the body openings. Fright is then considered a lapse or total loss of agency of the self, and may lead to involuntary opening of the body’s boundaries and of the borders of the self. As a result, body is thought to become subordinate to the influence of various forces existent in the natural environ-ment or in other people, such as witchcraft.60
According to the Icelandic sagas, fear was a condition that disabled people, as it made them incapable of acting in a controlled manner, losing restraint in their terror. This is revealed in the frightened and panic-stricken reactions of socially inferior (i.e. slaves and people without genealogy) and phlegmatic people.61 Even if it is not explicitly indicated that the bodies of those who fear the restless dead were penetrated by some external forces, certain vulnerabil-ity to external influences is implied. For example, fear and lack of courage make the aforementioned Sigríðr vulnerable to cold while she is outdoors. This may be understood as a manifestation of an “open” body schema in medieval Iceland: a cold air current or wind, that is an external element, was thought to penetrate her body (through nostrils or mouth, for instance) and made her suffer from coldness,62 which was held as an omen, or symptom, of death.63
The ideas of an “open” body and wind as a force that moves objects raise the question of the role of external factors in the upspring of emotions. In medieval Icelandic thought, air in addition to blood was thought to flow in the arteries.64 This could imply that movements inside the body recognised as emotions were thought to occur also when air currents entered the victims’ veins (through the body openings) and stirred the blood (or body liquids in the humoral theoretic sense) and the inner organs.65 Accordingly, natural elements, such as winds, could be considered responsible also for the movements inside the body, that is for emotions. This resembled, but was not neces-sarily influenced by, the medieval idea of microcosm and macrocosm, according to which the body was an image of the world and consisted of the same elements as the world, and could, for this reason, be influenced by the powers of nature.66
The Emotional Origin of the Disease Invoked by the Living Dead
On some occasions the dead could also cause the living to suffer from a condi-tion that the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century saga writers labelled illness, sóttir. Yet this was not necessarily merely a physical malfunction,67 exclusive of emotional connotations. In Eyrbyggja saga and Flóamanna saga (which was probably influenced by the former) the restless dead infect the living with a disease that leads to a severe epidemic and restlessness among those who die of it.68 This disease is brought about by one person, who first becomes mad69 or bewitched70 after being outside alone in the darkness, and then dies and subsequently becomes restless.
In the wonders of Fróðá in Eyrbyggja saga, a Hebridean woman dies of an illness after a mysterious blood rain which people consider a death omen. This woman is presented as a good Christian and granted a Christian burial, although her character is rather ambiguous and shares some traits with women skilled in witchcraft. Moreover, her last wish that her precious bedclothes should be burned is not followed in full, suggesting that she is involved in the hauntings that follow.71 Weird light phenomena appear after her burial and one night a shepherd comes home in a peculiar condition. The saga states that:
the shepherd came home, being very silent;72 he spoke little, but when he did speak, he was rather sullen. People thought he must have been bewitched since he kept away from other people and kept muttering to himself, and this went on for some time. When two weeks of winter had passed, the shepherd came home one evening, went to bed and lay down. Next morning, when people went to see him they found him dead, and he was buried at the church there. Not long afterwards massive hauntings began.73
Shortly thereafter the dead shepherd attacks a man called Þórir viðleggr (“Wooden leg”), and the epidemic is unleashed:
He [Þórir] was badly affected by this, but managed to get to his bed. He had turned coal-black all over. He fell ill of this and died. He was then buried in the church yard; after that both the shepherd and Þórir viðleggr always appeared together […] [T]hen one after another died until six had passed on.74
It is made explicit that Þórir died of an illness. He had apparently caught the affliction during the shepherd’s attack; a similar contagion occurs in Flóamanna saga cited in the beginning of this chapter. In both sagas, those who die have first become mad and bewitched after they have spent time outside, alone in the dark and at the mercy of cold winter winds. The shep-herd’s madness may have been caused by harmful winds,75 sent, for instance, by malevolent people skilled in magic, or otherwise “witchlike” persons,76 like the aforementioned woman in Eyrbyggja saga.77 Apparently, Þórir’s illness originated in some malignant external force that had penetrated the body of the shepherd and was then transmitted to Þórir. Hence Þórir’s illness was not necessarily considered an ordinary “epidemic,” although several people die of it, but a state in which the physical condition was altered by some external power that violated the boundaries of the body and caused bodily disequilibria.
Moreover, in medieval Iceland the border between emotions and dis-eases appears to have been flickering, even if people had separate concepts of them. This is implied in Gísla saga, where Gísli sees some kind of “heaviness” in his brother Þorkell, who is more silent than usually. Þorkell had eavesdropped a discussion where his wife has told about her affection for another man:
In the evening Gísli came home from work. It was Þorkell’s habit to thank his brother for the work he had done, but now he is quiet and does not say a word. Gísli asks whether he is feeling heavy. “There is no disease in me,” says Þorkell, “but worse than disease.”78
Gísli uses the word þungr, heavy,79 to refer to the condition he thinks his brother has. Þorkell’s reply suggests, however, that such “heaviness” was often considered an illness. This heaviness was presumably perceived in Þorkell’s physical appearance and his behaviour, since he was not acting in his usual manner. Apart from being quiet, “Þorkell eats only little in the evening and is the first one to go to sleep.”80 Going to sleep surprisingly early or refusing to eat suggested that the person was either ill,81 downcast, sad, or in grief, as if bereaved.82
Yet Þorkell identifies his experience as something else – perhaps an emotion, jealousy,83 resulting from his wife’s affection towards another man. Apart from “heaviness,” Þorkell suffers from silence and speechlessness – behavioural patterns that in sagas usually signify extremely strong and vengeful anger.84 Yet, despite this clear evidence, it was seemingly hard to distinguish a malady from a mental state that comprised, as in Þorkell’s case, feelings of emotional pain and turmoil such as jealousy or anger.85
People usually died from afflictions generated by the dead, but this sickness may not necessarily have been interpreted as a physical and fatal contagious disease as we understand it. In medieval Icelandic thought, strong emotions such as deep sorrow over the death of a loved one could also lead to death.86 Accordingly, the disease generated by the dead may thus have been comprehended as disorder that involved both the mind and the body. In sagas the condition could be called a disease, but was recognised as a condition com-prising emotional turmoil.
Sometimes the border between disease and emotion could become com-pletely blurred, since certain illnesses were considered to originate in emo-tions. This is seen in the late thirteenth-century Brennu-Njáls saga;87 Þórhallr is a respected man and learned in law, but his expression of anger differs from those of the other eminent people, who rarely express violent rage. The normative representations of anger in sagas included only subtle somatic changes such as blushing or turning pale, or sweat on the forehead.88
Þórhallr’s fury is aroused when he hears that the killers of his foster father will not be sentenced in the court of law. According to the saga “when he heard about this he was so moved that he could not utter a word.”89 Immediately afterwards, Þórhallr jumps up from the bed where he has been lying with a sore leg, seizes his spear and sticks it into his shank,90 which is “as thick and swollen as a woman’s thigh” because of an ailment that has forced him to walk with a stick.91 As Þórhallr pulls the spear out with flesh and the core of the boil on it, blood and matter from the swollen part of his leg gush out and run down onto the floor. Then he runs outside so hastily that the man following him cannot keep up with him, despite Þórhallr’s former leg problem. When Þórhallr encounters the first of his enemies, he immediately strikes the man with his spear, so that it splits the man’s shield and pierces his body.92
It is clear that Þórhallr is furious.93 His anger is nevertheless a peculiar com-bination of action, speechlessness and bodily fluids. There is an implication that the last, the blood and matter that gush from the swelling in his leg, was part of the illness Þórhallr was suffering from, which had caused the malfunction of his leg. The body fluids nevertheless seem to serve as indicators of his mental state. Naturally, it is also possible that Þórhallr’s emotions are here viewed as a pathogen, a condition that invokes the swelling. Though cause for the swelling is not explicitly stated, its origin appears to be emotional. The ail-ment begins after Þórhallr has been informed of the death of his foster father, when the preparations for the arduous legal action over this killing begin.94 It ends in the above-mentioned climax, when the situation becomes heated because these legal actions have failed. Crucial for my discussion is that Þórhallr’s condition was viewed both as an emotion and as a disease, or a combination of both conditions.
It is possible that in Þórhallr’s case the swelling could have resulted from sorrow that Þórhallr experiences after hearing of his foster father’s death.95 In earlier research, Þórhallr’s reaction to his foster father’s death has been inter-preted as a choleric one (and thus as a manifestation of humoral theoretic ideas in saga literature): blood gushes out of Þórhallr’s ears until he falls unconscious, ears being the organ through which yellow bile was thought to exit.96 This argument has been criticized since the secretion connected to ears would not have been blood. Instead, the natural secretion linked with ears in humoral theory was earwax.97
However, the excerpt from Hauksbók suggests that medieval Icelanders thought slightly differently and regarded yellow bile, black bile and blood as a sanguine body fluid all as blood and named these fluids accordingly: “red blood,” “black blood” and “real blood.”98 The excerpt also clearly indicates that (excess of ) red blood exits through the ears, black blood through the eyes and real blood through the nose.99 The episode in Brennu-Njáls saga suggests that a scribe or an author wished to apply humoral theory as its principles were understood in Iceland and implied that Þórhallr had a choleric temperament – that he was nimble, brisk, active, sly, hot-tempered and ate a lot, labelled as the symptoms of yellow bile above.
Yet boils were connected to both yellow and black bile in humoral theory,100 rendering the manifestation of Þórhallr’s temperament a somewhat obscure mixture of melancholic and choleric traits. Moreover, the depiction of Þórhallr’s condition appears to reflect a traditional Icelandic view that seems to differ from learned Latin views. One of the symptoms, the swelling of Þórhallr’s body, is indicated with the word þrútinn, “swollen.” In medieval Iceland, such a swollen condition was associated – in addition to grief – with strong emotions, such as anger,101 and referred to the actual physiological symptoms of anger, that is bulging of the body.102
Thus, the majority of medieval Icelanders may not have interpreted Þórhallr’s swelling, that is the “boil,” as excess of yellow or black bile. The swol-len part of Þórhallr’s leg apparently contained some matter apart from blood which could, in a modern sense, be considered an abscess containing pus. Yet the word vágr that is used in the saga text to describe the contents of the swell-ing that gush out merely refers to matter from a sore, and the word used to indicate “core of the boil,” kveisunagli, a compound word of which last part nagli means “nail” or “spike,”103 suggests that the swelling is caused by some external force or agent.104
Whether a disease with an exterior cause or not, the saga explicitly emphasises the connection between Þórhallr’s þrútinn condition and emotions, as he is said to swell up when he hears about the killing of his foster father. This condition is not explicitly mentioned as existing for a longer period of time.105 Thus the boil in his leg only appears later, as if a consequence of the legal procedures.106 This condition apparently indicates the swelling up of the boil but is identical with Þórhallr’s earlier emotional state. Both involve swelling that was usually associated with emotions. The swelling present in anger and fear suggests that medieval Icelanders conceptualised the body as a kind of container that was considered pressurized when a person was angry.107
However, what appears to have been in the body as a container may not have been considered heat or liquid, states of matter that would have com-ported well with the humoral doctrine apparently applied by the writer of Brennu-Njáls saga. Instead, anger-related emotions were interpreted as a kind of a force or substance that resided in the breast, that is in the heart, and made the body and skin bulge.108 In the minds of medieval Icelanders the þrútinn condition could thus allude to the increasing amount of anger or grief that was dammed up in Þórhallr’s body, and that could also cause long-lasting swelling and pain that medieval Icelanders considered illness. Accordingly, the disease generated by the dead was not necessarily a disease pure and simple. It may have been considered likewise to originate in emotions felt by the people inhabiting the farms and places where the restless dead appeared, and some-times elicited by powers of external origin.
Conclusion
In the Icelandic sagas, the ghosts could cause mental, that is emotional reac-tions, as well as physical illnesses. In interpretation of the effects of the living dead, traditional Icelandic views intermingled with learned medical theories. The Icelandic literary elite was apparently very interested in foreign medical theories; they copied them in manuscripts and also utilised their knowledge in some of the sagas. Even then, traditional conceptions appeared in texts, mixed with learned theories, either deliberately or unintentionally, or representing a conflicting view.
Medieval Icelanders shared a view of mental disorder that was different from our own. For them, “mental” was something rather physical and the mind was a physical organ, the heart. Thus when the restless dead elicited fear this caused a thoroughly physical reaction. Rather than being normal behaviour, fear, like many other emotions, was considered a disorder. This idea was appar-ent in medieval medical theories, but also in the traditional Icelandic view. The feeling of fear was connected to anatomic differences: to the actual physical size of the mind-organ, the heart, and the amount of blood it contained.
Some explanations derived from the humoral theory claimed that the frightened had a large heart full of blood. The more traditional Icelandic view held that the terrified one had “lost” the organ altogether. All emotions were considered to stir the equilibrium of the body. For example, fear elicited by the restless dead caused further disorder, as the emotion caused the opening-up of the body boundaries to malignant external forces that caused madness, disease or death. Moreover, since emotions were considered movements of the heart (i.e. mind), it is probable that medieval Icelanders also saw the connection with the physical environment as twofold, in that external forces might elicit motion in the heart.
Mental disorder was thus not considered merely a disturbance that origi-nated within the body, but was dependent on the external (physical and social) environment and triggered by exterior agents and forces. However, the ascription of timidity to nameless and landless people suggests that people of lower status were held to be more susceptible to outer stimuli and forces. Presumably, their blood and internal organs were thought to be more inclined to move than those of the elite and as a consequence they were considered more prone to experience mental disorder.
Illnesses could have a mental origin. Emotions were sometimes part of the aetiology of illnesses, as excessive emotions and emotional pain could give rise to physical illnesses. Even if words for both disease and emotion existed, the distinction between these two concepts does not appear to have been entirely clear to medieval Icelanders. Thus the illness caused by the restless dead was a physical disorder, a disease. Nevertheless, its essence was connected to emotions, and therefore it originated from mental causes.
For medieval Icelanders, then, physical diseases could be comprehended as manifestations of mental disequilibrium. However, it is likely that only the literary elite considered this kind of mental disorder to originate in the distur-bance of the four bodily substances. Otherwise, disorder could originate in emotions that were forces or substances affecting the body from within, but could also have their origin in the external environment.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Contribution (219-242) from Mental (Dis)Order in Later Medieval Europe, edited by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Susanna Niiranen (Brill Academic Pub., 03.12.2014), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.
