Minds, Cognitive Ecologies, and Old Norse Literary Artefacts

This open access book examines reading and mindreading in medieval manuscript culture through a focus on Old Norse literature and ecology. It demonstrates how medieval literature, through its textuality and materiality, represents and describes various social and fictional worlds while also forming a constitutive element in the socio-cognitive ecology. To accomplish this, Eriksen engages in a close reading of three texts from different genres, that are all preserved in the fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript Hauksbók. These include the Old Norse translation of Elucidarius, a pan-European handbook in medieval theology, the Icelandic family saga Fóstbrœðra saga, and the legendary saga Hervarar saga ok Heiðriks. Collectively, the three texts represent a wide variety of minds, bodies, and worlds, through a unique combination of literary styles and forms (prose, dialogue, and skaldic and eddic poetry). Thus, they reveal how one manuscript could offer a great variety of cognitive tools to its audience and thus guide their social existence through various social contracts. This investigation is based on new insight from cognitive studies, which postulates the symbiotic entanglement between minds, bodies, and their worlds (4E cognition); these elements' symbiotic co-evolvement in their cognitive ecologies; and the centrality of mindreading, also when reading, as a main strategy to navigate these cognitive ecologies. These theoretical frameworks serve as basis for the development of a new analytical toolkit for investigating the role of writing and reading as a navigation strategy in Old Norse society.