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

Pregnant women use swords and began to take revenge in the ferties, and all newborns and all newborns were free or buried.

These are some truths opened by the first interdisciplinary research that will focus Pregnancy at the age of VikingMyself, Kate Olley, Brad Marshall and Emma Tollefen is the author by myself Body policy project. Despite the central role in human history, the pregnancy has often taken into account in archeology, mainly because it releases a small material footprint.

Pregnancy, perhaps mostly, especially in times of the times we associate with warriors, kings and battles High Romantic Viking Age (Up to AD800 up to AD1050).

Subjects such as pregnancy and childbirth, “natural” or “women’s problems” are seen as “women’s problems”, but ask questions like “when life happens.” All natural or private, but today is not a significant political concern as in the past.

In the new study, I find an eclectic evidence ropes together to understand my co-authors and pregnancy and pregnant institution are conceptualized. It is possible to significantly add such a “womb policy” to our knowledge of gender and organization. And sexual policy Viking age and beyond.

First, we examined the words and stories depicting pregnancy in old Norwegian sources. Despite the fact that after the age of Viking, Sagas and Legal Texts give words and stories about the immediate use of the vikings, the immediate generation of Vikings and spreads.

We learned that the pregnancy could be described as “abdomen”, “extreme” and “whole”. We said an opinion of possible confidence in a fetus personality: “A woman is not alone.”

In one part of the unborn children, an episode supports the idea that unborn children can now be recorded in complex systems of kinship, alliance, feuds and liabilities. This explains the story of a tense confrontation between Guðrún ósvífrsdóttir The saga of the Laxardal people And Husband’s killer, Helgi Harðbeinsson.

As a provocation, Helgi delegates the bloody spear on Gurrun’s clothes and abdomen. He announces: “I think that in the corner of this Sharp lives my death.” Helgi’s forecast is realized and the fetus is growing to get their father revenge.

Another episode, Erik’s saga redHe focuses on the mother’s agency. Freudís eiríksdóttir, which is severely pregnant, is held in the attack PeelingNorse name for local populations of Greenland and Canada. When he could not escape his pregnancy, Freudís takes a sword, scans his breast and scared his sleeves and scared the goals.

Sometimes when the scholarship is considered a dark literary episode, this story can find a parallel in parallel in the second evidence we investigate for work: a pregnant woman’s figurine.

This suspension, which is the funeral of a woman in the tenth century in Sweden, is the only known convict of pregnancy. A belly-perh highlighted with the future child is perhaps a shaft depicting a figure in a woman’s clothes with a lever. This sculpture, which is particularly interesting, is wearing a pregnant woman’s battle helmet.

Together, these ropes of these evidence show that pregnant women can deal with at least art and stories, violence and weapons. These were not passive objects. Together with Viking Women’s Recent Studies were buried as a warriorThis makes it think that the sexual roles are designed in the Viking communities of their accepted hyper-male Viking.

Missing as a defect of children and pregnancy

The end of the final investigation was to seek evidence for the death of obstetrics in the Viking funeral record. Motherhood of maternal baby death rates are thought to be very high in most industrial societies. Again, only 14 possible mother baby buries among the thousands of Viking graves were reported.

As a result, we suggest that the dead pregnant women were buried with the unborn child and were not recognized by one of the symbiotic unity by Viking societies. In fact, we also found newborns born with adults, postmenopausal women, collected children and postmenopausal women, but they can be completely different.

We can’t rule out the exclusion of infants outside the babies, more than the funeral record dumped in death elsewhere. When it was found in the graves with other agencies, they are available to include a “tomb good” for other people in the grave.

This is a harsh reminder that pregnancy and the baby can be vulnerable. The last piece of evidence is not like any of this point. For some, Gurrun represented a very merciful process towards becoming a free social person like a small son, gestation and childbirth.

For people who are down in Social Rung, this may be very different. One of the legal texts we examined was accepted as the flaw of pregnancy bodies when the women who entrust us to us.

Pregnancy was deep political and far in the sense of Viking-wet communities. It is formed and the idea of ​​social situation, kinship and personality was formed. Our study shows that pregnancy is not invisible or private, but Viking societies are very important for how life, social identities and strength.

Marianne hem eriksen Archaeological Associate Professor Lide University. This article is republished Conversation Under the Creative Commons license. Read original article.