Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  It is clear that Viking society quite emphatically set out expectations based on the normative concepts of male and female sex, expressed in standards of gendered behaviour for both women and men. Some of the sources (especially Snorri) convey information very much through a Christian, masculine filter, but there are less prejudiced texts.

  There is a sense of an outdoor realm for men, while women’s domain was inside the dwelling, but both these spheres were perceived as places of genuine power and authority. This distinction was not a literal one but instead referred to arenas of responsibility—thus ‘the house’, in practice, meant the management of the entire farm, both economically and socially. A wide range of indoor and domestic tasks were also the province of women, including kitchen and food-related activities of all kinds, textile work (a major endeavour, as we have seen), and the daily round of agricultural life. None of this was devalued through patronising notions of ‘women’s work’; by contrast, these were vital skills and activities in which ability carried respect. To take but one example, this can be seen clearly on a remarkable runic monument from about 1050, a stone from Fläckebo parish in Swedish Västmanland, set up in memory of a wealthy lady with the unique name Óðindísa (‘Odin-woman’, though using the spirit dísir as a metaphor): “There will come / to Hassmyra / no better housewife / who arranges the estate”.

  In addition, women had a primary role in the conduct of household and communal rituals—for example, by officiating at sacrifices to the elves and dísir. In a real sense, they also managed the spiritual economy of the people. This was another source of true social power, guarding the lines of communication between the community and the other worlds, channels that might need to be opened up at any time.

  For men, the ‘wider world’ extended to the sea, hunting and fishing, metalworking and smithying, the public assemblies, commerce, law, and war. Above all, politics was the preserve of men. An influential study from the early 1990s argued that Viking society operated on a model that essentially divided the powerful from the disempowered, regardless of sex. Masculine roles were prioritised, but women could assume them if circumstances dictated (for example, in the case of widows with no adult men left in the family). Most scholars have moved away from the rigidity of this concept, emphasising instead women’s relative independence and agency in their own right, but there is no doubt that at times they could take on male tasks and duties apparently without social prejudice. There are clear examples of women acting in the courts, owning and selling property, and conducting trade.

  Some social arenas were strictly gendered, such as everything surrounding childbirth, in which there is no indication of male involvement at all. By contrast, women were most often exempt from direct reprisals in feud-based violence—although not, of course, from its consequences.

  It is also just as productive and necessary to consider the traits that were shared across gender boundaries, in which identity was formed as much by social role as by gender or sex. This is different from the single-sex model, as it does not place any primacy on masculine power. A recent study of burial customs in Norway, for example, has shown that a great many graves do not seem to be overtly gendered at all, and that the identity of the dead can be mediated in many ways. Close study also reveals that assumptions about the connections between gender and activity (problematic in themselves) cannot be applied consistently across Scandinavia; for example, cooking equipment is more common in Norwegian male burials than in female ones. It should also be remembered that the cultures of Viking-Age Scandinavia very definitely recognised degrees of personal freedom, from types of (in)voluntary servitude to full enslavement. These conditions of life were also deeply gendered.

  Status can also intersect with gender, raising questions of hierarchy. When other factors are added to the mix, such as relative age and maturity, definitions can become problematic—such as the nature of childhood in the Viking Age and the border to adulthood. What did all this mean in practice for how a person was regarded (even if and when they were a person at all), and what they were permitted or expected to do? There is little evidence that children were automatically regarded as fully social beings from birth in pre-Christian Scandinavia. Children as young as five or so are sometimes found buried with full sets of ‘grave-goods’, the objects accompanying them in the ground. Mostly they are scaled down for them to have used (tiny jewellery, for example), but sometimes children are interred with adult-sized things. This is especially the case with very young boys and weapons, which implies a confirmation or conferral of status, perhaps linked to the identity of the bereaved family. However, such instances are rare.

  Those who survived childhood seem to have gone through a number of rites of passage (such as weaning, naming, and so on) before relatively rapidly joining the workforce in whatever capacity they were able to. At around the age of fourteen or so, any differences between ‘children’ and ‘adults’ fade away in the graves, and this seems to have been the threshold of maturity. This would have included marriage and participation in war. It was not a sentimental time.

  Bioarchaeological studies of skeletal remains sometimes reveal the signs of childhood malnutrition, and the results are telling. At least in central Sweden, a consistent pattern seems to emerge with up to 7 percent of men having been malnourished as children compared to up to 37 percent of women. Child mortality was high, estimated at between 30–60 percent, which leads to an inescapable conclusion: girls and boys were given different amounts and qualities of food, strongly to the advantage of the boys and to a potentially life-threatening degree for the girls. It is impossible not to read a chilling value system into this discrepancy.

  A difficult question concerns the possibility of infanticide, the deliberate killing of unwanted children. This has become a standard trope about the period, but the actual evidence is rare and often equivocal. A man seems to have had the right to reject any child of his wife or concubine, and the inclusion of infanticide in saga narratives suggests it was practised, although to an unknown extent. This is supported by numerous medieval Christian law codes, which include statutes that prescribe punishments for the exposure of children, indicating it persisted well after the conversion.

  The recovery of infant remains from middens, cairns, and refuse pits, for example, has been argued to be indicative of the practice. However, even beyond this, nowhere near sufficient numbers of child burials have been found to match the rate of child mortality, which must indicate that not all of them received a conventional grave. Here we also have an external viewpoint from the tenth-century Jewish traveller Ibrāhīm ibn Ya’qūb, who notes that unwanted children at Hedeby, Jylland, were thrown into the sea. Given that the law codes refer to exposure, which would not leave an archaeological trace, we must observe that this agrees with Ya’qūb’s account. Selective female infanticide is particularly difficult to trace, although there are small suggestions in the archaeology. In the runestone inscriptions of central Sweden, up to six sons might be mentioned from one family, but never more than two daughters. This does not match natural birth rates, although it may be the consequence of prejudice or custom rather than infanticide.

  The burial record suggests other parallels for this imbalance among adults too. A study of Scandinavian graves in northern Scotland reveals equal numbers of dead buried with weapons and jewellery, and yet in parts of western Norway the figure is 77 percent and 12 percent respectively. If the gendered assumptions of artefacts hold, this implies radically different treatment of the male and female dead in these two areas, which surely represented a contrast in social attitudes as well.

  Notions of gender, and relations between individuals, are also closely bound up with sexuality—not least in terms of orientation and its expression in sexual behaviour, whether socially sanctioned or not.

  Heterosexual marriage, sometimes polygynous, was the core manifestation of family values in Viking-Age society, including what was regarded as legitimate sexuality. However, not all liais
ons were conducted within the codes of marriage or concubinage, and some were much more informal. Interestingly, while adultery was frowned upon, it was not necessarily grounds for divorce (indeed, intolerance of an open marriage might lead to separation). Married women take lovers in several tales, including the Saga of Grettir, the Saga of the People of Eyri, and the Saga of Icelanders (not to be confused with the generic category); in the Saga of the Ljósvetningas, a young woman has a whole string of boyfriends.

  There were also divine equivalents. In the curious and quite funny Eddic poem Loki’s Quarrel, the trickster interrupts the gods at a feast in Asgard and proceeds to insult each of them in turn with vivid accusations of a variety of sexual improprieties. It becomes clear that not only is every claim essentially true, but also that nobody much cares. When the goddesses are accused of infidelity, the god Njörd makes an interesting reply: “There’s little harm though ladies get themselves a man, a boy on the side, or both”. Clearly, although every goddess is married, they have all acted on their desires. Frigg is said to have slept with each of Odin’s brothers, and also with a slave in revenge for a slight from her husband; Idun has taken her brother’s killer to bed; Gefjon has “laid her thigh over” an unnamed youth (and is therefore on top); Loki has had sex with the wives of Týr, Thor, and indeed Njörd himself; and Freyja has slept with every god in the room, including her brother.

  Minus the incest, this may be the practical reflection of concubinage, an accepted licence of female desire though without a comparably formal structure. The legitimacy of women’s sexual feelings is mentioned several times in the sources, and the same is true of female supernatural beings, such as the Valkyries, who mourn their dead human lovers. Thus the titular battle-woman in the Eddic Poem of Gudrún laments that she misses her man, “in the high-seat and in bed”.

  Many of the sagas also emphasise mutual attraction as the proper basis for sexual relationships, with a constant element of choice on the part of free (as distinct from enslaved) women. Encounters are initiated by drawing a person close to sit adjacent or on the lap and then proceeding to kisses. This appears in the sagas as consensual behaviour. Sex is described in terms of a passionate embrace, faðmr and faðmlag, literally encircling a partner with one’s arms. Couples “turn towards” each other in bed.

  This idea of the sexual freedom of Scandinavian women also surfaces in foreign texts, such as the account of a diplomatic mission from the Muslim emirate in Iberia to the Viking court of what is thought to be southern Denmark, preserved in a thirteenth-century source. In the mid-800s, the ambassador Yah.yā b. H.akam al-Jayyānī, known as al-Ghazāl (‘the Gazelle’) for his good looks, spent some time with Scandinavian royalty and was a particular favourite of the Viking queen called Nūd in the Arabic, which some scholars have read as the Norse name Aud. According to the text, al-Ghazāl is unnerved by the attention paid to him by such a high-born woman, at which she tells him, “We do not have such things [sexual taboos] in our religion, nor do we have jealousy. Our women are with our men only of their own choice. A woman stays with her husband as long as it pleases her to do so, and leaves him if it no longer pleases her”. It is hard to know how much to rely on this—and some scholars have dismissed the entire text as a medieval muddle—but probably at least as much as we can on the sagas. Other Arab sources mention not only what they see as the promiscuity of Scandinavian women but on several occasions how they themselves have the right to initiate divorce; this is quite exact, repeated across several independent texts, and cannot be dismissed as mere prejudice about supposedly loose-living female foreigners. It also correlates well with the Norse sources, including the laws.

  The poetic corpus contains several charms to attract the opposite sex, most of them used by gods but clearly a reflection of human concerns. Odin sometimes uses what he calls mánvelar, ‘love-spells’, to seduce groups of women at a time in Eddic poems such as Harbard’s Song. Similarly, the ‘List of Spells’ in Sayings of the High One includes two of this kind:

  I know a sixteenth [spell]:

  if I want from a clever girl

  to have all her mind and love-pleasure,

  I turn the thoughts

  of the white-armed woman

  and I change her mind entirely.

  I know a seventeenth [spell],

  so that very late [i.e., never] will

  a maiden-young girl reject me.

  The sagas also relate several instances of sorceresses being contracted by unhappy lovers to work such magic. There are spells to induce impotence, and its opposite, engorgement to the point of disfunction. Other charms give the recipient the outward appearance of another in order to seduce someone in the guise of his or her preferred partner. A blow from a sorcerer’s staff could induce sexual submission or ungovernable desire. A particularly cruel spell allowed a man the favours of all women except those he truly loved, perhaps an insight into Viking-Age social mores. Some of this magic was performed with the aid of runes, three of which had names that meant approximately Lust, Sexual Burning, and Unbearable Need. The sorceresses who possessed such power were themselves held to be sexually predatory and unwise to get to know too well. They were thought to have the ability to shroud a man’s mind in a kind of carnal fog.

  Of course, sex could also be prosaic, and vulgar. There is another, quite different vocabulary in Old Norse, a coarser world where men boasted to each other of who they’d like to serða and streða, ‘screw’ and ‘fuck’. They sniggered about “romping on a woman’s belly”, or “stroking her groin”.

  The material culture preserves some remarkable archaeological snapshots. There is the rune-inscribed bone from eleventh-century Oslo on which is deeply carved, “Kiss me”. One wonders whom it was passed to. Another set of examples comes from a most unlikely place. On the largest island of the Orkneys, off the north coast of Scotland, is the great Neolithic chambered tomb of Maeshowe. Constructed thousands of years before the time of the Vikings, it is one of Europe’s finest monuments of the late Stone Age. It also contains the largest collection of runic inscriptions outside Scandinavia, made at the end of the Viking Age and into the early 1100s when Norse settlers broke into the interior, emptied it out, and used its convenient burial niches for quite other purposes than originally intended. Maeshowe was evidently a trysting place—a secluded spot for those seeking privacy out of the wind, with stone alcoves that could quickly be made comfortable with a blanket and a rush light. The inscriptions—often signed—cover a variety of subjects but include several with crude sexual allusions, one referring to the long, low passage by which one enters the chamber (the men’s names are in italics):

  Ingibjörg, the fair widow. Many a woman has gone stooping in here. A great show-off. [signed] Erlingr.

  Ingigerd… sex [?]… is the most beautiful… [a fragmentary text next to an engraving of a slavering dog]

  Thorný fucked. Helgi carved [the runes].

  There is otherwise almost nothing in Viking-Age art and iconography with an explicitly erotic theme. Some of the gold foil plaques—the aristocratic ‘business cards’ fixed on the posts of halls—have scenes of chastely embracing and kissing couples. A handful of male figurines in states of sexual arousal, usually naked except for a belt clasped in their hands, have been found deposited around longhouses, but they seem more like emblems of divine (or secular) virility—sex as power, another dimension of hall culture. The same may apply to the famous three-dimensional bronze figurine from a burial mound at Rällinge in Swedish Södermanland that is reproduced in every book on the Vikings and usually labelled as representing the god Freyr. Nude except for a helmet and bracelets, he is sitting cross-legged, one hand on his knee and the other gripping his beard, and sporting a prominent erection. Despite the bracing confidence of the traditional identification, there is simply no way to know whether he is a god, some other notoriously libidinous creature such as a dwarf, or a man. The odd posture and specific clothing details again hint at something beyond a purely
sexual meaning. The context in which it was intended to be used or seen, or indeed hidden, is similarly unknown—only that it accompanied someone into the grave.

  As far as I am aware, in the whole world of Scandinavian imagery of the Viking Age, there is only a single depiction of sexual congress. On a runestone from Onslunda in Uppland, Sweden, set up by three brothers in memory of their father, Ófeig, a pair of human figures lie down together, the bearded one on top, their legs improbably entwined. The image appears to be a graffito (although far from casual, as it would have taken effort to carve), added after the stone was raised. It seems unrelated to the primary design scheme and red-painted inscription, although it may have been some kind of comment on the one commemorated.

  11. Sealed with a kiss. Two embracing figures on a gold foil from Sweden, early Viking Age. Such images are the primary evidence for conventions of men’s (left) and women’s (right) gendered dress. Photo: Gunnel Jansson, Swedish History Museum, Creative Commons.

  Finally, there is one puzzling artefact that has undoubted sexual overtones but is of uncertain function. Since before the Viking Age, the southern border of the Jylland Peninsula was protected by a linear fortification, a complex set of ramparts known as the Danevirke. In one of its ninth-century earthen banks, archaeologists have found a twenty-three-centimetre-long wooden phallus, carved as if erect, and broken at the base. It may have come from an idol of some kind, it may be a sex toy, but like so many such signals from the Viking Age, its real meaning is now obscure.