Book Review: Oedipus Borealis, the aberrant body in Old Icelandic myth and saga

Lois Bragg (2004) Oedipus borealis. The aberrant body in Old Icelandic myth and saga. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. isbn 0838640281. 302 pp.

This book was cooking up through a decade, during which Lois Bragg, Professor of English at Gallaudet University, offered various hors d'oeuvres of Nordic Saga disability in academic journals. The full breakfast, lunch and dinner are fascinating, provocative, often damn peculiar, on occasions indigestible, but a culinary experience not to be missed. The book is enlivened by drawings of various disreputable characters and creatures. [1]

The Norse sagas do not lack saucy language and peppery characters whose impairments or temperament are prominent at sight, e.g. Idiot-Egil, Ivarr the Boneless, Thorfin Skull-splitter and Asgeir Scatter-brain, Ref the Sly, the twins Olvir Hump and Varest Gump, Ketil Flat-Nose, and Finn the Squinter. [Okay, one of those slipped back from modern times.] Bragg, an escaped Anglo-Saxonist, has no problem calling a fool a fool. She notes that when discussing "a fictional Swedish berserker, seen slobbering, howling and buggering his way across the Icelandic landscape", terms such as 'developmentally challenged' or 'speech impaired' or 'gay' are hardly adequate to capture the phenomenon. The book almost exclusively describes men -- twisty, shifty, violent, lusty, autistic, gory, quintessentially male -- while female aberrations remain decently behind the curtain. (Oh dear. This book has something for almost anyone to get annoyed with).

Bragg kicks off with an 'incidental digression' of 35 pages on Greek myths connected with Oedipus of Thebes. Replete with section headings such as "Dionysus: madness, sparagmos , and sex-role reversal", and "Laius: sodomy, parricide and more cannibalism", the Oedipus Saga provides a classical pedigree (pie de grue, or gruesome foot??) to the peculiar Icelandic heroes a thousand years later, and assures the modern American reader that she can relax, she gonna be on home ground. [2] Describing the unwitting encounter between Oedipus and his Dad at a point where three roads meet ("this shape is a nearly universal symbol of the female pubic triangle") and Oedipus knocking Dad off his perch physically, symbolically and pre-freudianly, Bragg suggests that "Sophocles rationalizes the story as a kind of 'road rage' incident, as when American commuters respond to lane-weaving with gunplay." This is understood to be 'male' commuters; and it should probably be Paw, not Dad, to pull the reader's leg about the "crablike discursive track" of Oedipus's complex podal arrangements. [3]

Gods, Giants, Goats & Grim

Most of the presented Icelandic material is based in text attributed to Snorri Sturluson (c. 1178-1241), who looked back rather censoriously (perhaps with tinges of wistfulness?) to a wonderful heathen past, over 200 years earlier, when Men Got To Do a lot of stimulating activities that Men Didn't Get To Do in Snorri's times. The change is ascribed by Bragg to the spoil-sport, quiche-eating, proto-puritanical influence of the "wholesale religious conversion of [Snorri's] society" to Christianity. Yah cain't rightly do road rage in no Christian nation. As for going a-Viking in the lands of distant people, smashing up their towns, looting their mineral assets, and causing their children to starve, that was one of the first things the Church authorities ruled Out Of Bounds. [4]

To plunge into the detail of aberrancy, Bragg has to assume that readers are at least vaguely familiar with Norse or Indo-European mythologies and their recent academic careers, or with disability studies and some of the wilder shores of academic lit. crit. However, she fills in some background and skirmishes en passant with a few mainstream saga wonks, fortified by fencing practice with her in-house expert, W. Sayers. Disability in Norse lit. could hardly have escaped the notice of earlier scholars, since various tales are titled with characters nicknamed for their impairment. Yet this form of aberrancy has attracted very little detailed examination. [5]

There is ample material that can be interpreted as linking assorted gods, giants, goats and homesteaders with a wide variety of aberrant intimacy that was once not deemed proper for discussion with maiden aunts. The sagas are adventure playgrounds for kiss-and-tell reportage, from those who were there (at least, in their cosmic imagination). Let nobody worry that any saga recorder, as Bragg underlines, "by no means intended or even imagined this reading" -- well, in those repressed times, after a couple of centuries of imported medieval Christianity, they wouldn't have imagined it, would they! (Or is that, too, a slightly over-confident modern myth that we know past mentalities better than they knew themselves - better, indeed, than we understand ourselves?)

Strolls with Trolls

The book is as full of words as there are notes in a bagatelle of Mozart. Bragg has a similar delight in playing with the building blocks, piling them up, dismantling some to show the bricklets inside, and suggesting ways in which the meanings and concepts changed over time. One can imagine the copy-editor sweating to keep up with the verbal plays and not mis-correct too many. On p. 260, for example, it is not entirely clear whether one is taking a troll through the Icelandic landscape, or a stroll; or perhaps both. The Icelandic Tourist Board should order a shipment of copies, for mystery tours of an early mythic world that is both strikingly different and disconcertingly resonant with the human shambles in which we live now.

NOTES

[1] One of the two drawings labelled "bodiless heads", on p. 66, looks very like the Universal Sign for "Yes, we have no bananas today!", which first appeared as an Egyptian heiroglyph, followed by a curious career upside down in a vast German lexicon. (Pierre Lacau, 1954, Sur le système hiéroglyphique , Cairo. p. 15.)

[2] Ladies, kindly note that sparagmos might not be legal in your country of residence. First call your lawyer, or check the web.

[3] May be a gloss by the early Polish scholar, E.D. Pöszcz.

[4] Men, just Don't Go There! You might get a serious telling-off from your minister.

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