Below, a portion of my introduction to Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Follow the link to read its extraordinary table of contents. The volume is the first of several to be published through a partnership between GW MEMSI and punctum books. Pleas also consider liking Oliphaunt on Facebook.
It was fun to return to Old Norse -- so much fun that I will be doing it a second time for my postmedieval "Ecomateriality" essay on fire that I am co-writing Stephanie Trigg. Stay tuned.
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All Things
Though superseded
by a newer translation, Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson’s version of Grettir’s Saga is a text to which I feel
a considerable attachment.[1] Its
rendering of the Old Norse narrative is crisp and lucid, capturing the austere
yet wry style of the original prose. Even more than its artistry, though, what
compels me about the Fox and Pálsson translation is the series of photographs
with which the book begins. Between the introduction and the story’s instigation
have been inserted twelve poorly reproduced black and white pictures depicting
locales mentioned in the saga. Unattributed and unpaginated, this interlude of
images captures the multiplicity of histories, real and imagined, that animate
the Icelandic narrative and its English reworking: a seeming timelessness in
which the landscape is ever as it has been; the ninth through eleventh
centuries, when Grettir and his ancestors were supposed to have journeyed these
frigid expanses; the early fourteenth century, when the saga’s unknown author
dreamt a past that never was and placed its unfolding action at familiar fjords,
glaciers, and vales; and the 1970s, when Fox and Pálsson published their English
translation of Grettir’s Saga, the
first in sixty years. The initial photograph, for example, is labeled “Bjarg in
Midfjord, site of Grettir’s birth.” The image depicts an undulation of grass, a
lone rock, and a distant mountain -- presumably Kaldbak, the chilly ridge that
Grettir’s great-grandfather Onund darkly spoke of having traded his Norwegian
grain fields to possess. Yet the picture also contains a farmhouse that if not
exactly modern is in no way medieval, with its bright paint, three expansive
levels, and chimney. The telephone poles and curve of road quietly argue against
placing a young Grettir within that home. Yet the story radiates such a keen
sense of domestic vitality that it is difficult to resist thinking of this boy destined
for a life no farm could contain, creating his particular brand of chaos within
that pastoral space. Every time I look at the photo I expect to see geese and a
horse, futilely fleeing his juvenile rage; or his beleaguered dad, storming out
of the farmhouse after telling a young Grettir one more time that he has made a
very bad choice.
Other photographs
in the sequence are less anchored in time and narrative. “Arnarwater Moor,
where Grettir supported himself by fishing” has no human content, just rocks
and grass and mountains. It’s easy to imagine that nothing has changed here in
a millennium. The white snow and dark stone of “Eiriks Glacier” could be as
full of half-trolls now as it was when Grettir dwelled in an ice cave, learning
for the first time compassion for animals (a grieving ewe rebukes him for the
devouring of her lamb) as well as the boredom that comes from a life of monstrous
solitude. My favorite image, however, is captioned simply “Bjarg, a rock known
as Grettir’s Lift.” A boulder dominates the photograph, looming perhaps nine
feet high and twice that wide. A young man stands on either side, each with one
hand upon the stone: on the left, a bearded fellow in jeans, a t-shirt and a
jacket holding what looks like a small shovel; on the right a man with much
shorter hair, glasses, and a wool sweater with a distracting pattern. The
exposure for the picture was not well executed, so the image is too bright.
It’s difficult to make out details. The first man actually could be holding a
camera or a bicycle pump, and the second figure could be a woman. But my best
guess is that we have here depicted the two translators of Grettir’s Saga. Having traveled to Iceland together, Denton and
Hermann had themselves photographed touching a narrative landmark, a stone so
heavy that Grettir alone could raise it.
The boulder christened
“Grettir’s Lift” appears twice in the saga. Shortly after his fist Althing ends
with condemnation to three years of outlawry abroad, Grettir is journeying with
some distinguished men and impresses them with his ability to heft the rock:
“everyone thought it remarkable indeed that so young a man could lift the
stone” (31). The landmark reappears briefly as Grettir fights haughty Gisli,
stripping him slowly of his clothing so that he is reduced to streaking across
the landscape in his breeches (125). The stone becomes an immediate and lasting
sign of Grettir’s remarkable powers, a piece of the landscape that “still lies
there in the grass and is now called Grettir’s Lift” (31). The picture
reassures us that to this day we can see and lay hand upon the historical
marker. Its endurance reassures us that the saga’s power abides. Denton and
Hermann, I imagine, had themselves photographed touching Grettir’s Lift in
acknowledgement of Grettir’s saga own
impress upon them. The rock takes the place of the narrative, and reassures
that some things will never vanish into history, that stories possess an
enduring materiality, weighing heavily even when they may have very little that
is historical behind them.
The picture of the
translators with hands upon the boulder well emblematizes a recurring theme of
the saga. Unembellished as its prose may be, the narrative could not progress
without a world enmeshed in densely expressive material objects. No matter how
firmly anchored they may seem, these objects may, like Grettir’s Lift, suddenly
begin to move. Though their power sometimes becomes most evident just at the
moment of a human touch, they possess an uncanny agency all their own. Fire,
ice and water are actors in the text: they consume, convey, renew, destroy. So
is wood. Grettir’s great-grandfather and the man most similar to him sports a timber
leg, attached after his limb is severed in battle. The trunk is quite literally
Onund Tree Foot’s support, the bestower of his full name. The disability also makes
him stronger, more renowned. Early in life Grettir is cruel to animals; toward
the end of his days he befriends a lonely ram. Only some of the characters in
the saga are people. The short sword that Grettir snatches from the undead Kar
the Old becomes his most treasured possession, his constant companion. Kar
resided in a dark burial mound, where he sat upon a throne in silent and
perpetual surveillance of his silver and gold. Grettir severs the barrow-dweller’s
head to end his haunting. He knows that the life of objects is in their
circulation, that their consignment to subterranean stasis deprives them of
story. Kar’s liberated sword therefore serves him well until his last moments
of life. Even in death it cannot be loosed from his hands.
Yet Grettir is
also undone by an agential object. Whereas a tree had been the source of
Onund’s continued life, Grettir dies when a log on which a curse has been
inscribed arrives at his island hideout. His axe rebounds off its trunk and
gashes his leg, infecting him incurably. Grettir’s downfall is engineered by a
sorceress, a woman who knows how to place the world’s materiality into
movement: the enchanted driftwood floats to Grettir’s hideaway against the
current, and each time it is tossed into the ocean the log returns. Things
matter in this text. And why should they not? Thing comes from a medieval Germanic word denoting a judicial
assembly. Thus Grettir’s life revolves around periodic meetings of the Althing,
a national convocation of Iceland’s powerful men at which law cases are
decided, officials elected, and momentous decisions ratified. This contentious
annual assembly held at a place called the Thingvellir was a two week struggle
for power. Its participants vied over how best to be heard, how to have an
enduring impress, how to bring about a desired future. Here Grettir’s outlawry
– his being outside the protection of the law – is twice pronounced. Grettir
dies just before he is admitted back into the society that employed the
mechanism of the Althing to exile him.
What if at this
contest for agency some of those who spoke were not priest-chieftains or influential
landholders? What if short swords, enchanted tree trunks, and hefted boulders
were allowed a voice? Shouldn’t an Althing include all things? Isn’t a republic
a res publica, a public thing? At a
parliament (from French parler), who
gets to speak? In his book Statues Michel
Serres explores the place of things like stones or statues, objects condemned
to silent roles in human dramas.[2] Because
Germanic and Latinate terms for “thing” are etymologically related to the words
for cause (causa, cosa, chose, Ding),
Serres observes that things tend to be admitted to reality only by legal
tribunals and assemblies – as if reality were a human fabrication (294, 307).
Yet things, especially things that appear to hold themselves in silence, must
possess a power indifferent to language: something that comes from themselves,
not via human allowance. Silent things must be able to speak, exert agency,
propel narrative. The philosopher of science Bruno Latour has famously imagined
just such a Parliament of Things, where
Natures are
present, but with their representatives, scientists who speak in their name.
Societies are present, but with the objects that have long been serving as
their ballast from time immemorial … The imbroglios and networks that had no
place now have the whole place to themselves. They are the ones that have to be
represented; it is around them that the Parliament of Things gathers
henceforth. ‘It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the
keystone’ (Mark 12:10).[3]
Or the stone hefted by the
Icelandic warrior doomed to a life of bad luck and unhappiness, a stormy life
that proceeded through his dependence upon objects: rocks to lift, swords to
keep him company, last days with a fire and a ram and an island and a
shepherd’s hut that became his best home.
The
essays collected here make a cogent, collective argument that things matter in a double sense: the
study of animals, plants, stones and objects can lead us to important new
insights about the past and present; and their integrity, power, independence
and vibrancy needs to be acknowledged, and can found a politically and
ecologically engaged ethics in which the human is not the world’s sole
meaning-maker, and never has been.
[1] Grettir’s Saga, trans. Denton Fox and
Hermann Pálsson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Further
references by page number. The newer translation is by Jesse Byock (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009). For the saga in Old Norse, see Grettis saga, ed. Örnólfur Thorsson
(Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1994).
[2]
Michel Serres, Statues (Paris:
François Bourin, 1987).
[3]
Brono Latour, We have Never Been Modern,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) 144.
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