Feeling at Home with Anymals in Old Norse Sources

Abstract

While Viking-age and medieval Iceland was a place of domestic animals, studies of its literature and material culture have little considered the multi-sensory nature of anymal-human relationships. 1 A farming society necessarily shapes its places and society around the animals with whom its livelihoods are shared, but the ways in which the home (ON heimr) became, and continued to become a multi-species space in early Iceland cannot be simply assumed. This article considers ways in which the sights, sounds, and tangible bodies of domestic animals are implicit markers of the home in the Sagas of Icelanders, through investigation of dogs, cattle, and sheep, and their relations with human figures. Icelandic archaeology tells us about field and farm, but little about home, and this article aims to demonstrate that a focus on home in the Sagas enables us to think more deeply about the evocation of home-feelings in our archaeological material.