Shapeshifters in Medieval North Atlantic literature ed. by Santiago Barreiro and Luciana Cordo Russo (review)

This short volume sets out to provide a multidisciplinary and transcultural analysis of shapeshifting in medieval literature. The contributors cover the full range from early career researchers to established scholars and offer approaches drawn from literary criticism, history, philology, and anthropology, and deal with cultures ranging from Old English and Old Norse literature to early medieval Irish and Welsh. Shapeshifting is represented in a variety of its manifestations from the mutability of words to physically changing shape.

Rafał Borysławski’s chapter “Wundor wearð on wege ‘a wonder happened on the way’” focuses on the mutability of language and on how language transmutes ideas. By focusing on the slipperiness of meaning, Borysławski is able to show that language itself is a shapeshifter and seeks to prove that elusiveness of meaning is an integral part of Old English culture, being present in art and in literature. While he does demonstrate that it is present and sets up the comparison with ribbon-beast artwork that requires attention to unravel the image, the foundation is laid for wider exploration of this concept in literature rather than fully proving his argument. He makes the case for undertaking more research on the Old English riddles and concludes by outlining approaches that could be taken. As an exploration of riddles as monstrous and shapeshifters, this essay provides an interesting contrast to the physical shapeshifting of the other chapters, although the insertion of a discussion about Old Norse literature sits awkwardly in the middle of the essay.

In “The Big Black Cats of Vatnsdalr and Other Trolls,” Ármann Jakobsson uses the case study of Þórólfr sleggja and his cats in Vatnsdæla saga to illustrate the meaning and usage of Old Norse trylldir and trǫll. This is the shortest chapter in the book, but it makes a good point about the difficulty of defining the nature of magic and shapeshifting. The actual nature of the magical transformation in the case study is left to the audience’s imagination, thus making it more horrific precisely because, as in a horror movie, it exists off-screen and the audience must supply their own fears and horrors to fill out the detail. Unfortunately, this leaves more questions than answers. Indeed, the chapter lays out many interesting questions about the nature of monstrosity and magic, but does not provide answers to them, largely because the focus is on meaning, although possibly also because there are no firm answers available to us. Nevertheless, it would have been interesting to see further exploration of the options here.

Santiago Barreiro writes about the links between shapeshifting and hoarding treasure in Old Norse literature and draws on Old English literature to support his arguments. The essay examines texts where transformation into a dragon occurs and highlights how the dragon usually represents greed and unproductive use of wealth. It shows how Norse usage of dragons sees them as spoilers that take wealth out of circulation and thus fail to meet social obligations. He shows how the dragon as a hoarder of unproductive wealth changes to become the embodiment of evil in later texts through Christian influence. This examination of the dragon from a social perspective offers an alternative way to view dragons that fits well with Merkelbach’s chapter on social monstrosity in this volume. The chapter itself is sound, but the translation is occasionally not perfect: examples include “in” for “on” and the translation of vildi as present tense instead of past tense. More precision in the use of the various words for dragons and wyrms would also have been welcome. Barreiro tends to differentiate between dragon, wyrm and ormr, but at times it is not clear precisely which is being discussed or if all are included under the main heading “dragon.” A clearer differentiation might have offered further opportunities for analysis.

Rebecca Merkelbach examines monstrosity as a social phenomenon with...