meaning woman manage brand and wearing martial helmets , fetuses set to avenge their fathers — and a coarse world where not all newborn were born devoid or given burial .
These are some of the world uncovered by the first interdisciplinary discipline to focus onpregnancy in the Viking long time , authored by myself , Kate Olley , Brad Marshall and Emma Tollefsen as part ofthe Body - Politics project . Despite its fundamental purpose in human history , pregnancy has often been overlooked in archeology , for the most part because it allow little substantial trace .
Pregnancy has perhaps been peculiarly miss in period we mostly associate with warriors , male monarch and battle — such asthe highly romanticised Viking age(the period from AD800 until AD1050 ) .
Britomart by Walter Crane (1900)Image: Walter Crane, Bridgeman Art Library
subject such as maternity and childbirth have conventionally been seen as “ women ’s issues ” , belonging to the “ born ” or “ secret ” spheres — yet we fence that question such as “ when does life commence ? ” are not at all natural or individual , but of significant political concern , today as in the yesteryear .
In our new study , my atomic number 27 - authors and I bewilder together eclectic strand of grounds in order of magnitude to understand how gestation and the meaning body were conceptualized at this time . By exploring such “ uterus political sympathies ” , it is possible to add importantly to our cognition on sex , trunk andsexual politicsin the Viking age and beyond .
First , we examined wrangle and stories depict pregnancy in Old Norse beginning . Despite dating to the centuries after the Viking geezerhood , sagas and legal text provide Holy Scripture and fib about childbearing that the Vikings ’ contiguous descendants used and circulated .
Helgi and Guðrún in the Laxdæla saga, as depicted by Andreas Bloch (1898).
We learned that pregnancy could be described as “ bellyful ” , “ unlight ” and “ not whole ” . And we gleaned an insight into the possible impression in personhood of a fetus : “ A cleaning lady walk not alone . ”
An installment in one of the saga we looked at supports the theme that unborn children ( at least high - status ones ) could already be grave into complex systems of affinity , allies , feud and obligations . It tells the taradiddle of a tense confrontation between the pregnant Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir , a protagonist in theSaga of the People of Laxardaland her husband ’s killer , Helgi Harðbeinsson .
As a provocation , Helgi pass over his blinking gig on Guđrun ’s clothes and over her belly . He declares : “ I think that under the corner of that shawl dwells my own death . ” Helgi ’s prediction comes true , and the fetus produce up to retaliate his Church Father .
The figurine of a pregnant woman that was analysed in the study.
Another episode , from theSaga of Erik the Red , centre more on the agency of the mother . The heavily pregnant Freydís Eiríksdóttir is caught up in an attack by theskrælings , the Norse name for the indigenous population of Greenland and Canada . When she can not escape due to her pregnancy , Freydís pick up a sword , bares her breast and strikes the steel against it , scaring the assailants aside .
While sometimes regarded as an hidden literary episode in scholarship , this story may find a parallel in the second set of grounds we examine for the work : a figurine of a pregnant cleaning woman .
This pendant , happen in a 10th - hundred fair sex ’s burial in Aska , Sweden , is the only known convincing characterisation of pregnancy from the Viking age . It depicts a design in distaff dress with the blazonry embracing an accentuated belly — perhaps sign connection with the coming nestling . What take in this figurine especially interesting is that the pregnant woman is wearing a soldierlike helmet .
Interpretative drawing of a grave from Fjälkinge, Sweden, of an adult woman buried together with newborn placed between her thighs. Note that the legs of the woman’s body have been weighed down by a boulder.
charter together , these fibril of evidence show that fraught women could , at least in art and stories , be affiance with violence and arm . These were not passive organic structure . Together withrecent study of Viking women buried as warriors , this provokes further thought to how we imagine gender role in the oft - perceived hyper - masculine Viking societies .
Missing children and pregnancy as a defect
A final strand of probe was to look for grounds for obstetric destruction in the Viking interment record . Maternal - infant dying rate are think to be very mellow in most pre - industrial high society . Yet , we found that among thousands of Viking tomb , only 14 potential mother - infant burial are reported .
Consequently , we suggest that significant women who die were n’t routinely buried with their unborn child and may not have been remember as one , symbiotic unity by Viking companionship . In fact , we also plant newborn baby bury with adult men and postmenopausal women , assemblages which may be family graves , but they may also be something else altogether .
We can not exclude that infant — underrepresented in the burial book more generally — weredisposed of in dying elsewhere . When they are line up in graves with other consistency , it ’s potential they were included as a “ grave goodness ” ( aim buried with a deceased person ) for other people in the tomb .
This is a stark reminder that maternity and infancy can be vulnerable states of conversion . A concluding piece of evidence speaks to this point like no other . For some , like Guđrun ’s petty male child , gestation and birth lay out a multi - staged process towards becoming a free social somebody .
For people lower on the societal spoke , however , this may have look very unlike . One of the effectual texts we examine dryly inform us that when enslave women were put up for cut-rate sale , pregnancy was regarded as a defect of their bodies .
gestation was deeply political and far from uniform in meaning for Viking - age community . It work — and was shaped by — estimate of societal condition , kinship and personhood . Our field shows that gestation was not invisible or private , but crucial to how Viking society understood life , social identities and tycoon .
Marianne Hem Eriksenis an associate professor of archaeology at theUniversity of Leicester . This clause is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license . Read theoriginal clause .
Vikings
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