@inbook{7e8ba12118994e969984a5ff56d2caa2,
title = "Grotesque Emotions in Old Norse Literature: Swelling Bodies, Spurting Fluids, Tears of Hail",
abstract = "One of the most highly acclaimed of the thirteenth-century {\'I}slendingas{\"o}gur, Nj{\'a}ls saga, includes a unique account of somatic emotional display. When {\TH}{\'o}rhallr {\'A}sgr{\'i}msson learns that his foster father has been burnt to death, his whole body swells up and blood spurts out of his ears in a bow until he faints. In this chapter, these expressions are put in context with hydraulic emotive displays in several Old Norse narratives of various genres, where emotions are conveyed in the form of a build-up of pressure in fluid form within the body that can overflow or burst through, possibly with a fatal outcome. This imagery is used to describe powerful and decidedly negative feelings such as anger and grief at high-tension points in the narratives, where they manifest in colour changes (pallor, blushing, and black colour), red patches, swelling, spurting blood, sweating, or crying tears of hail, intermittently using dramatic imagery such as blood-similes, tearing clothes, hair loosening, bursting, or collapsing. In this chapter, these depictions are explored within the framework of cognitive linguistics and previous assumptions that hydraulic expressions in the sagas can be attributed to the influence of the Galenic theory of the four humours are reconsidered.",
keywords = "Cultural History, Emotions in Old Norse literature, Emotions in literature, History of Medieval Europe, Medieval Emotions, Medieval Literature, Emotions in literature, Icelandic Sagas, Middle Ages, Old Norse, history of emotions",
author = "Brynja {\TH}orgeirsd{\'o}ttir",
year = "2023",
month = aug,
day = "25",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-031-33965-3\_2",
language = "English",
isbn = "978-3-031-33964-6",
series = "Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions",
publisher = "Palgrave Macmillan",
pages = "17--42",
editor = "Erin Sebo and Matthew Firth and Daniel Anlezark",
booktitle = "Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World",
edition = "Palgrave Macmillan",
}