Oedipus Borealis. The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga. By Lois Bragg. Madison, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Pp. 302. $45.

It would be possible to write an interesting and original monograph on how medieval Icelanders regarded and treated human physical, social, and mental impairment, drawing on the resources of saga literature, the laws, poetry, mythology, and other evidence, such as nicknames, which often shed light on what people regarded as unusual or aberrant. This book is not a monograph like that but rather "an essay on the aberrant figure in European myth and other genres of early narrative literature" in which "the aberrant body . . . may be crippled, blind, gigantic, alingual . . . superhumanly wise or subhumanly stupid . . . [and] may display behavioural aberrations [in terms of social norms]" (p. 9). Bragg's thesis is that persons who in today's Western societies may be classified as disabled or criminals or in need of psychological help were held in awe and admiration rather than feared, scorned, or rejected by earlier European societies. Aside from the first chapter, which deals with the aberrant body in ancient Greek myth, mainly focusing on the Oedipus legend, the rest of the book discusses examples of aberrant bodies and behaviors, not in European myth generally, but in a small selection of Old Icelandic texts: Snorri Sturluson's Edda, Egils saga SkallagrÍmssonar, the poets' sagas (skˆlds�gur), Grettis saga, some extracts from Ólˆfs saga helga in Heimskringla, as well as a saga of the Icelandic bishop Gudmundr Arason. She makes an interesting case for regarding a cluster of motifs in sagas of Icelanders and two historical sources as continuing mythic patterns she detects in Greek myth and Snorri's Edda.

Margaret Clunies Ross
University of Sydney