Paper short abstract:

Disability understanding is formed and distributed using language and by telling stories. By combining approaches of disability studies and folkloristics I explore the 19th century Icelandic legend Álfkonan hjá Vatnsenda (The hidden woman by Vatnsendi) to see how disability is formed within it.

Paper long abstract:

Disability understanding is both formed and distributed using language and by telling stories. The purpose of the presentation is to explore, by combining approaches of disability studies and folkloristics, the 19th century Icelandic legend Álfkonan hjá Vatnsenda (The hidden woman by Vatnsendi), to discover how disability is formed within it. The legend analysis is built up of the legend-text itself as well as the historical context of the time and space, which is then reflected upon using the theoretical approach of embodiment, folk belief and understanding of body and difference. This will reveal that what looks like a simple tale of visual impairment of a punitive origin, is a complex tapestry of understanding that has been transmitted through tradition and storytelling. It is established within legend scholarship that legends reflect the social and cultural understanding of the people that tell and listen to those stories at the given time. Stories of disability, in past and present, reveal ideas and understanding of difference, and it is important to tell, hear and research such stories. This paper will also reveal clues to the development of the stereotype referred to in disability studies as “the super cryp” and how minute but vital nuances of the context dictate the affect the stereotype can have on disability understanding both then and now. With this paper I offer a new approach, combining disability studies and folkloristics to analyse a single legend of a supernatural encounter, and lives, real or imagined, lived with blindness.