Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Not all sexual relations were consensual. The Grágás (‘Grey Goose’, a name of obscure meaning) laws of early Iceland date in manuscript to the 1200s and are almost certainly a compilation from various places and times, but they probably go back at least in part to the tenth century. According to their statutes, a woman can cite as grounds for divorce a wide range of circumstances, including marital violence. This was a major issue that also occurs quite frequently in other law codes, although their medieval date (broadly contemporary with the family sagas) makes it hard to know how closely they reflected Viking-Age realities. They are generally thought to contain remnants of earlier customs, and in some cases, what they proscribe is so defiantly unchristian that it can hardly have been a product of the new faith.

  On the assumption that proscription in law is often an accurate guide to what at least some people are actually doing, these texts make for sickening reading. While there is little to indicate that early medieval Scandinavia was exceptional in this regard, the picture is certainly at stark odds with the stereotype of the ‘independent Viking woman’. The laws are horribly specific, with penalties spelled out for injuries visible on the face, for limbs so broken as to make movement or work impossible, for the loss of an eye—and so on. A category of ‘major wounds’ includes those that penetrate the brain, the body cavity, and the marrow. Violence against women is particularly heavily punished when committed in the bedroom, a suggestion that this recognises the concept of marital rape.

  The sagas contain a very few instances of practical, negative consequences that domestic violence could have for its perpetrators. In the Saga of Burnt Njál, for example, a man named Gunnar Hámundarson slaps his wife Hallgerd’s face during an argument, and she replies that he will one day have cause to regret his action. Years later, when Gunnar is besieged at home by enemies, his bowstring breaks in the middle of the fight, and in desperation he begs his wife to fix him a new one. She refuses, reminding him of the blow he once struck her, and as a result he is overwhelmed and killed.

  Sexual assault and rape were legally categorised and prosecuted according to the relative social status of both the abuser and his victim. A high-born rapist was less harshly punished than an enslaved male predator who committed the same crime, but they were both treated with greater leniency if the victim was of low status. By contrast, a wealthy female survivor could demand the ultimate penalty of her attacker, whoever he was.

  As in many essentially patriarchal societies, women’s honour was a prized possession of their families, to be avenged if lost and to be used as a bargaining chip. According to the Grágás, any man who found another in bed with his wife, daughter, mother, sister, foster-daughter, or foster-mother had the right to kill him, regardless of whether a sexual act had taken place. If an unmarried woman became pregnant, it was the father’s responsibility to care for the mother and child. If the expectant woman refused to divulge the man’s name, her male relatives were legally allowed to employ “force” to compel her answer, as long as they left “no lasting injuries or visible marks” (in the words of the law). That said, it is also clear that there was a very high degree of personal responsibility laid upon men guilty of sex crimes. The rape of a low-born woman was still a more serious offence than consensual adultery committed with a woman of status. Equally, the legal codes do seem to genuinely recognise a woman’s claim to the integrity of her body and person—for herself rather than merely as an extension of her kin. There were laws against unwanted touching without violence, with penalties that varied according to the part of the body on which a man laid hands or lips.

  The law codes thus both acknowledge female independence and agency, and the individual culpability of perpetrators, but also reinforce the inescapably misogynistic webs of transactional obligation, honour, and social standing in which all were caught.

  Broadly speaking, we have little reason to doubt that the majority of people ostensibly conformed to the accepted social norms of behaviour and sexuality—what one Danish scholar has called “the idea of the good”. Testaments to such people, in the form of brief but approving biographical summaries, are chiselled onto the runic memorials of the late Viking Age, no doubt with varying degrees of truthfulness. However, Viking lives could be lived in many different ways. There are clear suggestions of queer identities in the Viking Age (with a caveat for the retrospective application of contemporary vocabularies). These can be hard to define, access, and view at a resolution adequate for study, but in some cases it is possible to do so.

  Useful data can again be mined from the law codes. Many social norms were manifested in appearance, and clothing was clearly gendered—in cut and style, perhaps in colour, and certainly in decoration and adornment. The correlations of gender and status were also expressed in terms of quality. Although some kinds of jewellery were unisex, most were very much designed for either men or women (which is not to say that such signals could not be subverted). The Grágás laws define a clear offence for both men and women wearing clothing or haircuts appropriate to the opposite sex. This not only confirms that there were masculine and feminine norms of personal grooming and appearance, but also that some people evidently contradicted them.

  There are hardly any examples of this from the saga literature. One episode, in the Saga of the People of Laxardal, set in the ninth and tenth centuries, sees a man divorce his wife on the grounds that she wears trousers “like a masculine woman”, having previously complained about all the terrible things that can supposedly happen if “women go about dressed as men”. There are also female equivalents, when women end a marriage because of their husbands’ supposed effeminacy, as manifested in their wearing shirts cut so low as to expose the chest (it is not irrelevant that—as in this case—married men’s clothes were usually made by their wives, which offers intriguing glimpses of agency within a relationship). There are also divine tales of transvestism, in which Thor and other gods end up wearing female attire in scenarios of disguise and deception so convoluted as to be worthy of Shakespeare; here, the effect is usually one of ridicule and mockery. In all these cases, it is clear that such clothing choices are meant to be suggestive of sexual orientation differing from heterodox conventions, and that this was viewed negatively. What any of this means for Viking-Age practice is another matter.

  There is a possible archaeological image of cross-dressing men on two Gotlandic picture-stones from Lärbro Tängelgårda. These show figures in the flowing dress that typically seems to signal women, some of them holding drinking horns, but a number of them appear to have beards and perhaps helmets. On one of the stones are four of these figures side by side, and the ‘beards’ are very pronounced, although it is clearly possible this could represent some other convention of local style or artist’s preference; gendered signals in this kind of material are so hard to read that they may not be there at all.

  Male-bodied individuals buried in conventional women’s dress and/or with normatively feminine accessories have conclusively been found at several sites, including Klinta on Öland. There are also such graves from England—for example, at Portway in Andover, southern England, a body identified osteologically as that of a male was buried in a woman’s dress, including a full set of jewellery. There are other instances.

  There is no doubt that this was a time of extreme homophobia, and we can trace a clear, though chronologically interrupted, path to the Germanic peoples of Tacitus’s time. He relates how men found guilty of homosexual acts were pressed into bogs and held down to drown under wicker hurdles. Archaeologists have found many male corpses from the Iron Age in the marshes of Germany and Denmark, often naked, sometimes bound, usually exhibiting various traumatic injuries: slashed throats, blunt-force cranial depressions, garottes around their necks. Some of these victims have been found in pairs and actually covered by wickerwork, just as Tacitus describes.

  In the Viking Age, homosexual men were treated with extreme disdain and a complex kind of moral horror, especially tho
se who allowed themselves to be penetrated. Such a man was ragr, not only homosexual by inclination and action, but also inhabiting a state of being that extended to ethical and social qualities. This complex of concepts has been extensively studied, and in the words of its leading scholar, “the unmanly man is everything that a man should not be with regard to morals and character. He is effeminate and he is a coward, and consequently devoid of honour”.

  There are no positive depictions of same-sex relationships in the textual sources, although this is hardly surprising given that they were compiled by medieval Christians. Negative references come mostly in the form of formal insults, what the Norse called níð (usually anglicised as nid). The legal codes devote a great deal of space to such defamation, indicating the very high price placed on the honour thereby impugned. All such insults and insinuations refer exclusively to men. The saga allusion to ‘masculine women’ in trousers does not necessarily have to include a sexual dimension, of course, but the implication can arguably be read from it. Female same-sex relations are simply never mentioned at all.

  Homophobic insults are employed so numerously in the sagas and poems, and are addressed so frequently in the laws that they must have been relatively common. One archaeological example gives the tedious flavour, a runic inscription scratched on a bone that therein refers to a second inscription, carved into the timber walls of a church. The text takes the form of a dialogue and is written in two different hands (H1 and H2), implying it was passed between two people as they wrote in turn:

  H1: What was it that you carved into Cross Church?

  H2: Óli has not wiped himself and is fucked in the ass.

  H1: That sounded good!

  Nid of this kind were classified formally in law. The early medieval Norwegian Gulathing laws, for example, describe tréníð, ‘wood-nid’, as a carved depiction of two men engaged in a sexual act, or else a runic description of the same (the Cross Church halfwit above would have committed such a crime). There was also verbal nid, a slanderous claim of implied homosexual practices. Statements of this kind were fullrétisorð—words for which the full penalty must be paid. A further category of ‘exaggerated utterance’ encompassed accusations of shameful things that could not happen in life but which carried overtones of disgust, such as claiming that a man had given birth. There were more categories of this kind, and all of them carried the penalty of outlawry, the same as for murder and rape. In essence, this punishment was what its name implies: a placement literally outside the law, thus leaving one vulnerable to physical harm without redress.

  At the heart of nid, and Viking-Age homophobia, was the assumption “that a man who subjects himself to another in sexual affairs will do the same in other respects”. The key to such insults was not so much the accusation of perceived sexual perversion as an attack on an opponent’s honour. The latter partly defined cultural gender for the Vikings, and also partly depended on it to have meaning. What we would call sexual orientation was, in the Viking Age, completely bound up with much wider and deeper codes of behaviour and dignity, extending way beyond physical and emotional preference. Nid linked sexual and ethical concepts, and interlaced them with prevalent notions of the masculine and feminine. None of this implies a contempt for women; to be feminine and effeminated are not the same thing.

  Women could, on occasion, take on the social roles of men, in addition to their own specific and important power domains. However, women could not acceptably look like men or try to symbolically be them (as with the trouser-wearer of Laxardal). For men, there was no such blurring of borders, and it was not condoned for a man to take on any aspect of women’s lives and duties. Interestingly, it is the man’s gender that was limited and intensive, while the gender of women was to a degree unlimited and extensive. At the same time, demonstrative masculinity was a keystone of the sociopolitical foundations. Nid challenged this, but also affirmed it because those so accused were required to defend themselves, thereby vigorously upholding the expected norms of gendered power.

  Perhaps the greatest potential for the recovery of Viking-Age queerness lies in the analysis of magic and its roles in Viking-Age society. Every level of communication between the community and the other powers was implicated in the practice of sorcery, which only women could acceptably perform. Men could and did practise magic, but at the cost of entering a state of ergi—becoming ragr and taking upon themselves its full freight of unmanly connotations. There is a broad terminology of male sorcerers, as for their female counterparts, but some of the words are derogatory. There are references to female animals (cows, mares, bitches, and so on) and, again, their capacity to give birth. Whole categories of nid were also activated in the context of magic, such as a claim that a man fathered nine wolves on a sorceress.

  There seems to have been something in the mechanics and equipment of the rituals that had explicit sexual overtones, gender-appropriate for female performers but which would cast a male sorcerer in an effeminising role. The main tool of the sorcerer was a metal staff that was probably held between the legs and rotated (they apparently served as symbolic distaffs, and were used to ‘wind back’ the performer’s travelling soul, attached to the body by a kind of spiritual thread). Several of the terms for these staffs are synonyms for the male organ; descriptions of the magic-workers speak of them ‘riding’; and the body posture is suggestive. Some scholars have also proposed that the staffs were employed in literal sexual penetration, as part of rituals with undoubted carnal objectives (the sources detail long lists of what is essentially sex magic). Even in medieval woodcuts, there are depictions of naked female witches with distaffs between their legs, very definitely referencing concepts of deviant sexuality.

  To ask an obvious question, if the male practice of sorcery brought with it what was effectively a form of social death, and risked actual capital sanction, why would any man choose to openly follow such a path? The answer is that it conferred powers and experiences that could be obtained in no other way; it was imbued with qualities—and perhaps a subversive kind of status—that made it worthwhile even at so steep a price. What is curious is that this sometimes played out in a manner that nonetheless carried overtones of social acceptance, going far beyond the convenience of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. There are several saga examples of kings employing entire teams of male sorcerers for specific magical ends, without any social backlash at all.

  The ultimate demonstration of this bargain comes from Asgard itself, the home of the gods. Odin was the master of magic, but in particular he was the lord of precisely this kind of sorcery that made a man ragr. To get an idea of how deep the social contradiction went, one only has to imagine the god of medieval Christianity, with its capital penalties for many kinds of supposed sexual transgression, being clearly described in biblical texts as engaging in same-sex intercourse. Thus we have Odin—lord of the gods, divinity of war and poetry, patron of the royal elites to whom a masculine heterosexual ideal was central—also portrayed as the supreme practitioner of magic that was homophobically shameful for men to perform. A Norwegian scholar got to the heart of the matter some years back in a series of groundbreaking papers on the divine being she referred to as ‘Odin the Queer’. The same term surely applies to the men of magic, who were activating social disdain while controlling and weaponising it as power. It may be that all the workers of magic and sorcery were differently gendered, at least when seen in the light of their much better documented cousins in the circumpolar cultures of the last three hundred years. In much of Siberia, for example, it has been argued many times that ‘shaman’ (or its equivalent) constitutes a gender in itself.

  Further aspects of sorcery and cult clearly involved sexual performance. There is an extraordinary description of such rituals in the Story of Völsi, a prose tale with poetic elements preserved within the fourteenth-century manuscript of Flateyjarbók that, on the basis of internal detail, contains authentic information from the Viking Age. It relates a household rite of the earl
y eleventh century, the period when paganism was being suppressed in Norway, and tells how a Christian king and his retinue attend a ceremony in disguise. As part of a communal feast, a long series of rituals are performed in which a preserved horse’s penis is passed from hand to hand and spontaneous verses are spoken. The sexual content is explicit, as is the action, for it is made clear that the female servants of the house are expected to employ the object to masturbate:

  [Verse spoken by the eldest son]

  For you, serving-maid,

  this phallus will be

  lively enough

  between the thighs.

  [Reply by an enslaved woman as she takes the object]

  I certainly could not

  refrain from

  thrusting him inside me

  if we were lying alone

  in mutual pleasure.

  There is more of the same, including the graphic observation that the phallus will “be made wet tonight” by the daughter of the house. Other texts also draw sexual connections between women and horses, and there are a number of misogynistic poems that use the imagery of animals in heat to describe female desire.

  These themes and connections can be pursued in the study of graves. Archaeologists determine the sex of the buried dead through analysis of their bones (which is reliable, though not certain) or DNA (which uses a chromosomal definition that is generally uncontroversial, although one should be aware that there are also other ways of making sex based on the genitalia or internal organs). This provides sex determination of male- and female-bodied individuals, but it is not at all the same as gendering them: this is beyond the reach of science.

  However, in many cases the deceased were cremated, and the resulting ashes are hard to sex reliably. More often, preservation conditions in the soil are unfavourable to the survival of bone in any state, and there are many graves without human remains at all (although they were evidently originally present). In these cases, for centuries archaeologists have resorted to determining the sex of the dead through association with supposedly gendered objects—thus weapons in a grave are held to suggest a man, jewellery sets denote a woman, and so on. Beyond the obvious problems of conflating sex and gender, and also effectively sexing metal, these readings risk simply piling one set of assumptions on another in what forensic decision-makers call a ‘bias snowball’ of cumulatively questionable interpretations. Clearly this is unsatisfactory, and at worst can lead to a potentially vast misreading of Viking-Age gender from the literally tens of thousands of burials that have been analysed in this way over the years.