Args aðal: Queer Carnival and Divine Deviance in Lokasenna and Þrymskviða

This article argues that the most appropriate critical framework for interpreting the comedic aspects of the eddic poems Lokasenna and Þrymskviða — and understanding their social, cultural, and artistic functions for their medieval audiences — is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. Both poems are archetypal examples of what Bakhtin calls ‘free play with the sacred’: their degrading humour renews rather than negates, purposefully supplanting images of violence, social fracture, and death with images of fertility and productivity. These texts specifically address anxieties around gender performance and sexuality by offering fantasies of regenerative humiliation without lasting damage or consequence, and their structured forays into subversion invite us to re-evaluate their role in the Codex Regius’s prosimetric compilation.