During the Vikings era, pregnancy cases were political, risks and violent

Pregnant women who practice swords and wear military helmets, embryos are set for revenge on their fathers – and a harsh world where not all newborn or burial children are born.

These are some of the facts revealed by the first multidisciplinary study to focus on it Pregnancy in the era of VikingsWritten by myself, Kate Ully, Brad Marshall and Emma Tolptures as part of Physical policy project. Despite its main role in the history of mankind, pregnancy is often ignored in archeology, to a large extent because it leaves a little physical tracking.

Perhaps pregnancy has been particularly overlooked in periods that we mostly connect to warriors, kings and battles – such as The era of Viking is very romantic (From AD800 to AD1050).

Topics such as pregnancy and childbirth were traditionally considered “women’s issues”, which belong to the “natural” or “private” fields – and we also argue that questions such as “When will life begin?” They are not at all natural or private, but they are of great political anxiety, today as in the past.

In our new study, the Attami highlighted the participants with some selective tapes of evidence in order to understand how pregnancy and the pregnant body were imagined at this time. By exploring such a “uterine policy”, it is possible to add a large extent to our knowledge of sex and bodies and Sexual politics In the era of Vikings and beyond.

First, we studied the words and stories that depict pregnancy in old NORSE sources. Despite dating to the centuries that followed the Vikings era, Sagas and legal texts offer words and stories about childbearing descendants.

We have learned that pregnancy can be described as “belly”, “solutions” and “not all”. We gave an insightful look at the potential faith in the influence of the fetus: “A woman walks alone.”

An episode in one of Sagas supports the idea that children who have not been born yet (at least children with high diseases) can already be included in complex systems of kinship, allies, disputes and obligations. He tells the story of a tense confrontation between a pregnant woman Guðrún ósvífrsdótir, the protagonist in Laxardal people epic Her husband, Hilji Harbinson, fought.

Casting, Hilgi wipes his bloody spear on Guđrun’s clothes and on her stomach. He declares: “I think that under the corner of this shawl lives my death.” Helgi predicts, and the fetus grows for revenge on his father.

Another episode, from Erik Red ErgeIt focuses more on the mother agency. Freydís Eiríksdótir, a pregnant pregnant woman, has been arrested in an attack before SkrælingsThe Scandinavian name for the indigenous population in Greenland and Canada. When you cannot escape because of her pregnancy, Freydís picks up a sword, her chest lands and the sword strikes against him, and the attackers are afraid of away.

Although this story may sometimes be considered a mysterious literary episode in the scholarship, this story may find parallel in the second group of the evidence we examined for the study: a statue of a pregnant woman.

This necklace, which is in the burial of women in the tenth century in Aska, Sweden, is the only convincing photography known for pregnancy from the Vikings era. He depicts a character in a female dress with arms adopting a manufactured belly – perhaps indicating contact with the next child. What makes this distinction particularly interesting is that a pregnant woman wears a military helmet.

Combating, these evidence shows that pregnant women can, at least in art and stories, participate in violence and weapons. These were not negative bodies. with Modern studies on Viking Women, Muddonon CorewersThis also raises thinking about how gender roles in VIKING societies are often visualized.

Lost children and pregnancy as a living

Another throat of the investigation was to search for evidence of obstetric deaths in the Vikings burial record. Mother’s death rates are believed to be very high in most pre -industrial societies. However, we found that among the thousands of Viking cemeteries, only 14 of the burial of the mother and contentment were reported.

Consequently, we suggest that pregnant women who are not routinely buried with their child who has not yet been born and may not have been commemorated as a referendum unit by Viking societies. In fact, we also found newborns buried with adult men and women after menopause, gatherings that may be family graves, but they may also be completely something else.

We cannot exclude that children – were represented in the burial record in general – Get rid of him in death elsewhere. When it was found in the graves with other bodies, it is likely to be included as a “dangerous commodity” (things buried with a deceased person) for other people in the grave.

This is a blatant reminder that pregnancy and lactation can be weak transitional situations. There is a last evidence that talks to this pointless point. For some, such as the little Guđrun boy, pregnancy and childbirth represent a multi -flyer’s process towards becoming a free social person.

For people who are less than social degrees, this may be completely different. One of the legal texts we studied dries that when slave women were offered for sale, the pregnancy was a defect in their bodies.

The pregnancy was deep and far from the military uniform in the meaning of the Vikings societies at the age. It was formed – and it was formed before – the social, kinship and personal situation. Our study shows that the pregnancy was not invisible or private, but it is decisive of how to understand the Viking societies, life, social identities and power.

Marian Herme Eriksen He is an associate professor of archeology in Leicester University. This article has been republished from Conversation Under the creative public license. Read The original article.