Festering Wounds on Heroic Bodies: Depictions of Leprosy and Infection in the riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur

Introduction

Leprosy is one of the most common medical conditions to appear in medieval literature, and it has long held symbolic significance in the literary imagination as a disease that set its sufferers apart from society.¹ Though "leprosy" as it appeared in medieval texts was likely a variety of different skins conditions, the disease caused by the bacillus Mycobacterium leprae is now known as Hansen's disease and still affects millions worldwide today.² This essay examines the condition líkþrá, commonly translated as "leprosy," primarily as it is portrayed in the riddarasögur ("sagas of knights" or chivalric sagas) and fornaldarsögur ("sagas of ancient times" or legendary sagas), demonstrating that the disease took on a unique literary character as it entered the worlds of these sagas. I argue that the authors of several of these sagas did not depict leprosy as a divine punishment or an opportunity for penance for the sufferer, but rather as a temporary affliction imposed upon male bodies by maleficent women with magical abilities. The líkþrá (leprosy) of these sagas is a disease that performs in highly gendered ways that reflect both the ethos of heroic literature and the influence of medieval romance, specifically the latter genre's depictions of the wounded or diseased male body.

Scholarship on leprosy as it appears in the medieval texts produced across Europe has been largely divided between those who argue that medieval people interpreted leprosy predominantly as a marker of sin,³ particularly sexual sin, and those who emphasize the diversity of roles that the leprous body played in the medieval imaginary.⁴ Yet literary depictions of leprosy from medieval Scandinavia have gone unnoticed as scholars continue to reassess the role of the "leper" in medieval society. Scholarship on Hansen's disease in medieval Scandinavia has been primarily limited to osteological studies,⁵ and the only book-length study on "lepers" in Scandinavia does not utilize medieval Scandinavian literary sources.⁶ While the present article cannot survey every appearance of líkþrá (leprosy) and related conditions in the entire Old Norse-Icelandic corpus, it is my hope that this study will be the first of many that takes a careful look at how the disease appeared in the literary imagination of medieval Scandinavia. It is significant, I think, that líkþrá assumes a peculiar character as it was imagined in the original riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur, one that is quite distinct from the discourses surrounding the disease in other contemporary literatures. While leprosy itself has not been examined in medieval Scandinavian literature, recent decades have seen increased interest in depictions of disability in the sagas (Michelson-Ambelang 2015; Anderson 2016; Sexton 2010; Bragg 1994; 1997; 2000; 2005; Byock 1993).⁷ A new article on the application of Disability Studies to the medieval sagas observes that Disability Studies counters interpretations of disability as an "individual deficit" and instead views disability as a "social phenomenon embedded in social arrangements and cultural conventions" (Ármann Jakobsson et al. 2020, 441). The present article examines the cultural conventions surrounding líkþrá, arguing that the leprosy imagined by medieval Icelandic authors in the original riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur combined convention and innovation in its depiction as a special danger to the male body.⁸ The role of the leprous body in several Old Norse-Icelandic works significantly differs from the prevailing models offered in continental and insular literatures—both models that emphasize the leprous body as a sinful one and those that interpret lepers as bearers of purgative suffering.⁹

As several studies on medieval depictions of leprosy from the continent and British Isles have underlined, the alterity of the leprous body could be symbolically associated with other non-normative, marginalized bodies in medieval thinking. Susan Zimmerman has argued that leprosy was "perceived as a challenge to the fundamental framework of Christian belief," and further, that "the leper, the female, and the Jew were connected in the medieval imaginary through problematic relationships of contaminated blood."¹⁰ The...