Viking experts from the Universities of Nottingham and Leicester have examined pregnancy in the Viking Age and discovered that pregnant women were depicted in art and literature with martial gear, and newborns were born into a harsh world where they were not all given burial or were born free.
The new interdisciplinary study Womb Politics: The Pregnant Body and Archaeologies of Absent – led by Dr Marianne Hem Eriksen, Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester, and co-author Dr Katherine Marie Olley, Assistant Professor in Viking Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age in the School of English at the University of Nottingham – is the first focused examination of pregnancy in the Viking Age.
The research published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and funded by the European Research Council (ERC), draws on multidisciplinary evidence and examines words and stories used to depict pregnancy in later Old Norse sources; a singular Viking Age figurine convincingly displaying a pregnant body wearing a martial helmet: and burial evidence for potential victims of obstetric deaths.
Dr Olley, who examined Old Norse words, stories and legal regulations surrounding pregnancy, said:
Using Old Norse texts to illuminate Viking Age beliefs is difficult because the surviving manuscripts date to well after the Viking Age, but it is still fascinating to see words, concepts and memories of pregnancy in these sources that may have their roots in the earlier Viking period. Among the Norse words used for denoting pregnancy, we find rich terms such as 'bellyfull,' 'unlight,' and 'to walk not a woman alone' which provide glimpses of ways people may have conceptualised pregnancy."
In one saga examined by Dr Olley, a fetus still in his mother's womb is fated to avenge his father, being inscribed even before birth into complex social and political dynamics of kinship, feuds, and violence. Another saga tells the story of the woman Freydís, who in a violent encounter can't run away due to her late-term pregnancy. Undaunted, she picks up a sword, bares her breast, and strikes the sword against her chest, scaring the assailants away.
The expert in Viking Studies, adds: "Freydís's behaviour is surprising but may find a parallel in the study's examined silver figurine, where a pregnant woman, arms embracing her protruding belly, is wearing what appears to be a helmet with a noseguard. While we are careful not to present simplified narratives about pregnant warrior women, we must acknowledge that at least in art and stories, ideas were circulating about pregnant women with martial equipment. These are not passive, or pacified, pregnant bodies."
The study adds to existing research on gender, bodies, and sexuality in the Viking Age, but also to a broader discussion of how scholarship discusses what have conventionally been seen as women's issues, belonging to the 'natural' or 'private' sphere.
Dr Eriksen, said: "It verges on the banal to say, but pregnancy is an absolute necessity for all forms of reproduction – demographic, social, economic, political. Without pregnant bodies, none of us would be here. Questions such as whether a pregnant body is one or two, how kinship works, or when personhood begins, are not devoid of politics and we don't have to look very far into our contemporary world to recognise that."
References to pregnancy are curiously absent in Viking Age evidence, and the authors note that among thousands of burials across the Viking World, there are only a handful of possible mother-infant burials from the period – and this was at a time when obstetric death is thought to be very high.
The research suggests that mothers and babies are not routinely being buried together and indeed infants are under-represented in the Viking Age burial record overall. Some infants crop up in other places, such as domestic houses, but otherwise it is unknown what happened to the infants, or whether they were afforded burial in the same way as adults.
"Together with legal legislation such as pregnancy being seen as a 'defect' in an enslaved woman to be bought, or children born to subordinate peoples being the property of their owners, it is a stark reminder that pregnancy can also leave bodies open for volatility, risk and exploitation," adds Dr Eriksen.
