| dc.description.abstract | Eschewing for lack of evidence notions of an Old Norse “mind” which transgresses the body through breath or is operatively breath, this study adopts and applies conceptual metaphor theory and other cognitive perspectives with a self-referential focus on “mind,” formulates novel cognitive metaphors with which to approach primary sources, and in turn investigates a corpus relevant to Old Norse hugr, “mind, thought” inclusive of skaldic poems thought to date the very early eleventh century or earlier, eddic poems, Útgarðr-Loki’s Hugi, the raven heiti Huginn, and vindr trǫllkvenna kennings with their proposed referent [HUGR]. Investigation revolves around the ontological distinction between “self” and non-“self” as embodied in human experience through somatic and extrasomatic spaces, and specifically as realized in a temporally and culturally disparate schematic in which hugr is not located in the brain but in the breast, reflected in two correspondingly adapted general metaphorical views of mind, MIND AS PHYSICAL SPACE and IDEAS AS EXTERNAL ENTITIES. Conceptual recognition of Huginn as a raven form hugr allows for the generation of Old Norse specific cognitive metaphors HUGR IS A FLYING BIRD and HUGR IS A RAVEN INCITING A WOLF which are employed to seek to better understand the interrelationships between the base-word, determinant, and referent of vindr trǫllkvenna, leading to the development of the hypothesis, subsequently tested on four examples, that [HUGR] is a context specific performance of cognizing as “wind” as extended extrasomatically into space that is agentially difficult or impossible to control. Analysis is framed within broader research questions concerning whether the Old Norse body may have been conceived as metaphysically permeable as well as the interrelations of the semantics of “mind, idea, thought” and hugr. | eng |