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Cognizing As the Wind and Metaphors of Mind: a Reconsideration of Old Norse Hugr and Huginn

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Cognizing as the Wind and Metaphors of Mind: A Reconsideration of Old Norse hugr and Huginn Alex Benjamin Casteel Master's Thesis in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies MAS4091 (30 ECTS) Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Iceland Spring 2020 © Alex Benjamin Casteel 2020 Cognizing as the Wind and Metaphors of Mind: A Reconsideration of Old Norse hugr and Huginn Alex Benjamin Casteel http://www.duo.uio.no/ Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo Summary Eschewing for lack of evidence notions of an Old Norse “mind” which transgresses the body through breath or is operatively breath, this study adopts and applies conceptual metaphor theory and other cognitive perspectives with a self-referential focus on “mind,” formulates novel cognitive metaphors with which to approach primary sources, and in turn investigates a corpus relevant to Old Norse hugr, “mind, thought” inclusive of skaldic poems thought to date the very early eleventh century or earlier, eddic poems, Útgarðr-Loki’s Hugi, the raven heiti Huginn, and vindr trǫllkvenna kennings with their proposed referent [HUGR]. Investigation revolves around the ontological distinction between “self” and non-“self” as embodied in human experience through somatic and extrasomatic spaces, and specifically as realized in a temporally and culturally disparate schematic in which hugr is not located in the brain but in the breast, reflected in two correspondingly adapted general metaphorical views of mind, MIND AS PHYSICAL SPACE and IDEAS AS EXTERNAL ENTITIES. Conceptual recognition of Huginn as a raven form hugr allows for the generation of Old Norse specific cognitive metaphors HUGR IS A FLYING BIRD and HUGR IS A RAVEN INCITING A WOLF which are employed to seek to better understand the interrelationships between the base-word, determinant, and referent of vindr trǫllkvenna, leading to the development of the hypothesis, subsequently tested on four examples, that [HUGR] is a context specific performance of cognizing as “wind” as extended extrasomatically into space that is agentially difficult or impossible to control. Analysis is framed within broader research questions concerning whether the Old Norse body may have been conceived as metaphysically permeable as well as the interrelations of the semantics of “mind, idea, thought” and hugr. Foreword I would firstly like to thank my advisor, Mikael Males, for the valuable help in this process, as well as Karl G. Johansson and Jan Bill for the same reason; I am very grateful for all exchanged words concerning what is foremost a project of sincere interest. I feel similar gratefulness toward Haraldur Bernharðsson, a tireless leader, organizer, and teacher of Old Norse, and the many, many wonderful others involved with the VMN program. No less, however, would I like to extend my thanks to Mary R. Bachvarova, whose classroom and knowledge bloomed scholastic growth and academic maturity, to Terry Gunnell, to whom I have deep respect and admiration as both an educator and researcher, and to my undergraduate advisor Scott Pike, who provided me with opportunities that have led to this moment. Without the inspirational Medieval educational experiences offered by Wendy Petersen Boring and Joanna Story, it is hard to imagine I would be where I happily am now. I must also extend a word to two of the best educators anyone could ever hope for: Paula Clarke and Ted Hamilton, who catalyzed what was then a much vaguer interest in anthropology; sincerely, thank you. Movement from the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology toward linguistics and Old Norse Studies has been a wonderful and exciting academic challenge, and all interdisciplinary scholars paving the way have my utter admiration. Without the friendship of Meg Morrow and Sam Levin, as well as Catelynn Hendrick, friendships which can, for obvious reasons, only be metaphorically described as colorful blossoms in the Norwegian springtime, the road would have been very difficult and more or less unimaginable. I would also like to thank Camille Zuber, for, above all, her patience, grace, and kindness throughout this process. The VMN cohort as a whole offered so much to look up to, with some notable (yet intriguing) exceptions: to both, thank you friends. To all the folks in Iceland and Norway who I got to know these past months, I look forward to the next time seeing you. On a final note, thanks go to my parents, Bruce and Lisa, for your support. “Ravens about to tease some resting wolves.” L. David Mech, 1966 Table of Contents I. Introduction 1 I.1 Aims and Relevance to Current Scholarship 1 I.2 Adopted Theories and Applied Methods 5 I.3 Introduction to the Sources 7 II. Dispelling the “breath concept” 10 III. Metaphors of Mind and Old Norse hugr 15 IV. Introduction to vindr trǫllkvenna and Huginn 30 V. Three vindr trǫllkvenna kennings 41 VI. Huginn and the Wolf: Guþþormr’s Hákonardrápa 8 50 VII. Conclusions 64 VIII. Bibliography 68 IX. Appendix: A-C 77 I. Introduction I.1 Aims and Relevance to Current Scholarship The pursuance of this endeavour was motivated from the desire to question if to any extent the Old Norse biological body shell, if indeed a boundary for the “self,” may have been perceived as or believed to be permeable in a sense of “being” and “existing,” as well as one of the most ubiquitous yet puzzling aspects of life as a human being: the intrinsic ability of the mind to think and to cognize.1 This functionality is immaterial and incorporeal, operating apart from any observable laws of physics and belonging to a human agency and will that is similarly formless.2 As operatively metaphysical, exclusively self-apparent, and as a phenomenon often tacitly normalized in everyday discourse, the mind’s aptitude for cognizing performance is of disproportionately high risk for neglection and presumption in any study of the past. This study will utilize metaphorical views of mind and conceptual metaphors to address the notion of Old Norse hugr, commonly translated as “mind, thought,” as an entity which may have the potential to “be” extrasomatic. This approach is demonstrated to be evidentially preferable to the so-called "breath concept," so named and critiqued in a 1983 study by Stephen E. Flowers, which entails that human breath is either an explicit medium for the permeability of the “mind, soul,” or that the “mind, soul” is itself operatively conceived as breath. In particular two such metaphorical views are employed which are adopted from cognitive scientist John A. Barnden, which target any ontological gap in cognitive experience that may exist between what will be substantiated as a cardiocentric hugr of BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE MIND, located in the breast and body where one physiologically “feels” emotion, and the performance of cognizing in which 1 Chris Fowler, The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 5-6. “Dividuality” is the foundation of permeability, in which the composite parts of a person may not be fixed but may instead either enter into or emerge from a person. Cf. Bo Gräslund, “Prehistoric Beliefs in Northern Europe,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 60 (1994), which embraces a bipartite division of transgressive soul elements from an archaeological point of view: a “breath soul or body soul” and a “free soul or dream soul.” 2 Eric T. Olson, What Are We?: A Study in Personal Ontology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3. 1 the “thinking” hugr must connect with extrasomatic “objects”.3 These are MIND AS PHYSICAL SPACE and IDEAS AS EXTERNAL ENTITIES, two conceptual views “that a mind can intermittently use in thinking about itself and other minds,” which provide a capable framework to address if hugr might have been conceived as “mind” in a physical space in which emotion and products of the performance of cognizing (such as "ideas, thoughts") are located somatically and can be manipulated “within,” or if hugr might also have been conceived as “mind, idea, thought” separately in space external to the body of the agent such that the agent is conceptually “being” within a space populated by “mind” or products of cognizing performance (“ideas, thoughts”).4 A survey of hugr in all eddic poems and in skaldic poems widely maintained as having been composed in the years prior to the very early eleventh century yields a corpus which is, with relatively few verses neglected, analyzed in Section III primarily through these two metaphorical views but also other related and entangled conceptual metaphors. These methods are then converged with the generation of two Old Norse metaphors of mind formulated from the raven- heiti Huginn, subsequently applied to four early vindr trǫllkvenna kennings, which are suggested to function as metaphors in their own right to upon which discuss a sense of ontological uncontrollability and “fate”: HUGR IS A FLYING BIRD and HUGR IS A RAVEN INCITING A WOLF. Section V and VI make use of the primary correlations of the respective source and target domains of these two metaphors in order to test the hypothesis that the relationship between the base-word <vindr> and the referent [HUGR] alludes to the performance of extrasomatic cognizing and the “flight” of hugr by hyggjandi, “thinking,” as the bird flies through the wind, and that the relationship between the determinant <trǫllkvenna> and the referent [HUGR] is that of a spatial synecdoche in which [HUGR] is hugr in the view of IDEAS AS EXTERNAL ENTITIES, as the mythological space of jǫtunn is that “outside” preordained bounds. 3 John A. Barnden, “Consciousness and Common-Sense Metaphors of Mind,” in Two Sciences of Mind: Readings in Cognitive Science and Consciousness, ed. P. S. O’Nuallain et. al. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997).
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