Co-Presence and Consumption: Eating Kin(ship) In Old Norse Myth And Legend

Abstract

The article explores kinship in Old Norse myth and legend in the light of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ definition of kinship as “mutuality of being”, according to which kinsmen are those who are co-present in one another. While co-presence is usually taken figuratively to mean a process of identification and empathy between a group of individuals, the interplay between shared substance and kinship means it can also be extended in some cases to include narratives of literal consumption or cannibalism. The article interrogates how kinship and consumption collide in Old Norse myth and legend when Atli eats his children in the Atli poems of the Poetic Edda, when Bera is forced to eat the transfigured flesh of her dead husband Bjǫrn in Hrolfs saga kraka, and when Sigurðr eats the roasted heart of his foster-father's brother Fafnir in Fafnismal. The analysis demonstrates that kin-consumption is the result rather than the cause of broken kinship relations and is used in these narratives to comment on the devastating and dehumanising effects of exploitative as opposed to symbiotic kinship relationships. The article culminates in a new reading of the binding of Fenrir, characterising his biting off of Týr’s hand as an act of kin-consumption which symbolises the dissolution of the kinship between him and the AEsir with inevitable dehumanising consequences.