IMC 2026: Sessions

The medieval North offers a strikingly rich array of bodies—human and non-human, divine and monstrous, living and dead— which feature in a range of temporalities and cultural spaces. This panel brings together four papers that interrogate how bodies in the Viking and Pictish worlds were conceptualised, represented, and manipulated, highlighting the fluidity, hybridity, and political stakes of embodiment in pre- and post-conversion contexts.

The first paper examines the tenth-century Uppåkra amulet depicting the mythic smith, Völundr, whose splayed, hybridised form unsettles categories of human and animal, ornament and figure. This case challenges modern habits of interpretation and instead proposes a cross-disciplinary approach to grasp pre-Christian ontologies of bodiliness. The second paper expands this framework to Viking Age practices and artefacts, from tooth-filing and cosmetics to figurines and burials, arguing for a vision of Viking bodies as unbounded, entangled assemblages that exceed modern dichotomies of subject and object. The third paper turns to the Papil Stone, where axe-bearing birdmen balance a severed head in their beaks. Far from a simple borrowing of Irish iconography, this hybrid imagery functioned within Pictish visual culture as a didactic warning in a moment of religious conversion, embodying both monstrous alterity and the perils of paganism. Finally, the fourth paper considers the mutilation of Magnús inn góði in the Kings’ Sagas, tracing how deliberate violence upon the body not only redefined individual personhood but also transformed political legitimacy and reshaped narratives of dynastic power.

Together, these papers demonstrate the centrality of the body as a site where meaning, identity, and authority were negotiated. Whether through hybrid imagery, bodily modification, mortuary practice, or political mutilation, bodies in the medieval North emerge not as fixed entities but as mutable, dynamic, and charged with social, spiritual, and political significance. This panel thus calls for a re-examination of medieval embodiment across disciplinary and regional boundaries, foregrounding the body as a primary locus for understanding cultural anxieties, negotiations of power, and the porous boundaries between human and non-human worlds.