#scholarly

LIVE

“As an illustration of the need for extreme caution in determining how a culture far distant from us might have viewed what we would call a disability we may take this passage from the thirteenth century Icelandic Sturlu saga (chap. 6). The narrator is describing the powerful twelfth-century chieftain Einarr Þorgilsson:
Han skorti ok eigi kapp né áræði. Engi var hann lagumaðr, ok blestr í máli.
(Jón Jóhannesson et al., 1946, Vol. 1, p. 68.)
A very literal translation would be:
He lacked neither zeal nor courage. He was no lawman, and [he was] lisping in speech.
Given that Old Norse syntax is typically additive rather than subordinative, how is one to understand the relationship among Einarr’ s boldness, his being no lawman and his speech impairment? Based on what we know of the saga world, we might understand it thus: Einarr has a lisp, which makes him unable to plead effectively in a law case, since he could be faulted procedurally by his opponent for failure to articulate properly. Therefore, he resolves his disputes out of court and has cultivated an image of boldness to bring about such extra-legal resolutions in his favor. However, if one were to read this passage by retrojecting the sort of notions current today about a lisp– that is, a paramedical condition requiring intervention by professionally trained and certified speech pathologists and, at the same time, a sign of effeminacy (and therefore, in males, of homosexuality)– one might seriously misread this passage, as has the translator of the only English version currently in print:
He did not lack courage or daring even though he was not a man of law, and lisped somewhat when speaking (McGrew & Thomas 1970, Vol. 1, p. 65; emphasis mine).
The translator’s `even though’ implies that a lisp would indeed indicate a lack of (manly) courage, while her `somewhat’ attempts to soften what she understands to be an embarrassing defect. The text, however, indicates that such assumptions are wholly unfounded.
Disabilities, then, are individually defined by the culture in question and it is our task, as unintended readers of archaic texts, to suspend our own cultural notions and to determine, in so far as possible, the view of the culture at hand.”
- Lois Bragg, from “From the Mute God to the Lesser God: Disability in Medieval Celtic and Old Norse Literature”