During the Viking Age, Pregnancies Were Political, Precarious—and Violent

Pregnant ladies wielding swords and sporting martial helmets, fetuses set to avenge their fathers—and a harsh world the place not all newborns had been born free or given burial.

These are a number of the realities uncovered by the primary interdisciplinary research to deal with being pregnant within the Viking age, authored on my own, Kate Olley, Brad Marshall and Emma Tollefsen as a part of the Physique-Politics undertaking. Regardless of its central function in human historical past, being pregnant has typically been ignored in archaeology, largely as a result of it leaves little materials hint.

Being pregnant has maybe been notably ignored in intervals we largely affiliate with warriors, kings and battles—such because the extremely romanticised Viking age (the interval from AD800 till AD1050).

Subjects akin to being pregnant and childbirth have conventionally been seen as “ladies’s points”, belonging to the “pure” or “personal” spheres—but we argue that questions akin to “when does life start?” are under no circumstances pure or personal, however of great political concern, at the moment as previously.

In our new research, my co-authors and I puzzle collectively eclectic strands of proof with a view to perceive how being pregnant and the pregnant physique had been conceptualized right now. By exploring such “womb politics”, it’s doable so as to add considerably to our information on gender, our bodies and sexual politics within the Viking age and past.

First, we examined phrases and tales depicting being pregnant in Previous Norse sources. Regardless of courting to the centuries after the Viking age, sagas and authorized texts present phrases and tales about childbearing that the Vikings’ fast descendants used and circulated.

We realized that being pregnant could possibly be described as “bellyful”, “unlight” and “not complete”. And we gleaned an perception into the doable perception in personhood of a fetus: “A lady strolling not alone.”

An episode in one of many sagas we checked out helps the concept that unborn kids (no less than high-status ones) may already be inscribed into advanced techniques of kinship, allies, feuds and obligations. It tells the story of a tense confrontation between the pregnant Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, a protagonist within the Saga of the Folks of Laxardal and her husband’s killer, Helgi Harðbeinsson.

As a provocation, Helgi wipes his bloody spear on Guđrun’s garments and over her stomach. He declares: “I believe that below the nook of that scarf dwells my very own demise.” Helgi’s prediction comes true, and the fetus grows as much as avenge his father.

One other episode, from the Saga of Erik the Pink, focuses extra on the company of the mom. The closely pregnant Freydís Eiríksdóttir is caught up in an assault by the skrælings, the Norse title for the indigenous populations of Greenland and Canada. When she can not escape resulting from her being pregnant, Freydís picks up a sword, bares her breast and strikes the sword towards it, scaring the assailants away.

Whereas typically thought to be an obscure literary episode in scholarship, this story might discover a parallel within the second set of proof we examined for the research: a figurine of a pregnant lady.

This pendant, present in a tenth-century lady’s burial in Aska, Sweden, is the one recognized convincing depiction of being pregnant from the Viking age. It depicts a determine in feminine gown with the arms embracing an accentuated stomach—maybe signaling reference to the approaching little one. What makes this figurine particularly attention-grabbing is that the pregnant lady is sporting a martial helmet.

Taken collectively, these strands of proof present that pregnant ladies may, no less than in artwork and tales, be engaged with violence and weapons. These weren’t passive our bodies. Along with latest research of Viking ladies buried as warriors, this provokes additional thought to how we envisage gender roles within the oft-perceived hyper-masculine Viking societies.

Lacking kids and being pregnant as a defect

A remaining strand of investigation was to search for proof for obstetric deaths within the Viking burial document. Maternal-infant demise charges are regarded as very excessive in most pre-industrial societies. But, we discovered that amongst hundreds of Viking graves, solely 14 doable mother-infant burials are reported.

Consequently, we recommend that pregnant ladies who died weren’t routinely buried with their unborn little one and will not have been commemorated as one, symbiotic unity by Viking societies. In actual fact, we additionally discovered newborns buried with grownup males and postmenopausal ladies, assemblages which can be household graves, however they might even be one thing else altogether.

We can not exclude that infants—underrepresented within the burial document extra usually—had been disposed of in demise elsewhere. When they’re present in graves with different our bodies, it’s doable they had been included as a “grave good” (objects buried with a deceased individual) for different individuals within the grave.

This can be a stark reminder that being pregnant and infancy may be weak states of transition. A remaining piece of proof speaks up to now like no different. For some, like Guđrun’s little boy, gestation and beginning represented a multi-staged course of in direction of turning into a free social individual.

For individuals decrease on the social rung, nonetheless, this may increasingly have appeared very totally different. One of many authorized texts we examined dryly informs us that when enslaved ladies had been put up on the market, being pregnant was thought to be a defect of their our bodies.

Being pregnant was deeply political and much from uniform in which means for Viking-age communities. It formed—and was formed by—concepts of social standing, kinship and personhood. Our research reveals that being pregnant was not invisible or personal, however essential to how Viking societies understood life, social identities and energy.

Marianne Hem Eriksen is an affiliate professor of archaeology on the College of Leicester. This text is republished from The Dialog below a Inventive Commons license. Learn the unique article.