Geroumk at vigi: Old Icelandic Perspectives on Selfhood, Agency and Guilt

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My thesis develops and applies the insights of the most recent scholarship on premodern psychology to the analysis of agency, selfhood and guilt in medieval Icelandic saga literature, demonstrating that the self is understood to be not merely affected but generated by the social, somatic and supernatural influences that permeate it. Scholars have long emphasised the alterity of Old Icelandic ethics, but thisthesis shows that, in conceiving of the self as a product of environmental factors, and agency as a collective quality, the sagas prefigure the ideological trends of modern criminology and social justice.