Abstract
Was berskerk a bear? This paper attempts to show changes in perception of body in the extant Old Norse sources by using theory of conceptual metaphor. Examples will be taken from episodes describing shape-shifting and physical effects of emotions.
Old Norse literary corpus includes works where an archaic concept of body-soul complex can be traced, as well as those where the Christian dichotomisation is already clear. As the dating of individual works is due to oral and aural phasis as well as due to the manuscript transmission process almost impossible, this axis cannot be identified with a time axis, but has to be understood as monism-dualism axis.
It has been shown in the Old English literature, that the hydraulic model and kardiocentrism survived long time after the arrival of Augustinian ideology and the same can be probably seen in the Old Norse sources. In terms of cognitive linguistics, this process of distinguishing between the inanimate body and immaterial soul can be described as transfer from the conceptual metaphors to the literary ones, as so called metaphorization.
Thus, in some texts, where the physical and mental level was still connected, respective metaphors were understood as conceptual: BODILY TEMPERATURE IS EMOTION, MIND (EMOTION, KNOWLEGDE) IS FLUID, EYE PAIN IS QUILT or BERSERK IS BEAR. In texts on the other end of our axis, those metaphors are just a literary ornament.
Somatic change is then understood as a result or a symbol of an emotion and changing of shape (hamr) becomes a comparison. Thus paleness is not the same as fear, but its consequence, love warms up only symbolically and berserk is strong as a bear.