Feeling at home with anymals in Old Norse sources

Evans Tang, Harriet J.

doi:10.1080/17406315.2021.1963622

Feeling at home with anymals in Old Norse sources

Evans Tang, Harriet J.

Authors

Dr Harriet Evans Tang harriet.j.evans@durham.ac.uk
Academic Visitor

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.

Citation

Evans Tang, H. J. (2021). Feeling at home with anymals in Old Norse sources. Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture Design and Domestic Space, 18(2), 83-104. https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2021.1963622

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jul 29, 2021
Online Publication Date	Oct 19, 2021
Publication Date	2021
Deposit Date	Aug 3, 2021
Publicly Available Date	Jan 11, 2022
Journal	Home Cultures
Print ISSN	1740-6315
Electronic ISSN	1751-7427
Publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	18
Issue	2
Pages	83-104
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2021.1963622

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Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.