The first study of its kind highlights pregnancy in the Viking era

Viking experts from Nottingham and Leicester universities examined pregnancy in the Viking era and discovered that pregnant women were represented in art and literature with martial equipment, and newborns were born in a hard world where they were not all buried or were born free.

The New Interdisciplinary Study, “Womb Politics: The Pregnant Body and Archaeologies of Absent”, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journalis the first targeted examination of pregnancy in the Viking era.

The research team was headed by Dr. Marianne Hem Eriksen, associate professor of archeology at the University of Leicester, and co-author, Dr. Katherine Marie Olley, assistant professor in Viking studies and director of the Center for the Study of the Viking Age at the University of Nottingham.

Research is based on multidisciplinary evidence and examines the words and stories used to describe pregnancy in subsequent Nordic sources, a singular Viking age figurine, convincingly displaying a pregnant body bearing a martial helmet and proof of burial of potential victims of obstetric death.

Dr. Olley, who examined old Nordic words, stories and legal regulations surrounding pregnancy, said: “The use of old Nordic texts to light up the Viking age beliefs is difficult because surviving manuscripts date well after the Viking age, but it is always fascinating to see the words, concepts and memories of pregnancy in these sources that can have their roots during anterior.

“Among the northern words used to indicate pregnancy, we find rich terms such as” the belly “,” non -light “and” to walk not alone “, which gives an overview of the ways that people can have conceptualized pregnancy”.

In a saga examined by Dr. Olley, a fetus still in his mother’s belly is intended to avenge his father, inscribed before birth in a complex social and political dynamic of kinship, quarrels and violence. Another saga tells the story of the Freydís woman, who in a violent meeting, cannot run away because of her late pregnancy. Industrial, she picks up a sword, puts the chest and knocks the sword against her chest, scary the attackers.

The Expert in Viking studies adds: “Freydís’ behavior is surprising but can find a parallel in the silver figurine examined of the study, where a pregnant woman, the weapons embracing her protruding belly, carries what seems to be a helmet with a nose protector. Although we are careful not to present simplified stories on pregnant pregnant women, we must not recognize in the fact that It is not artistic equipment and stories, ideas for traffic on pregnant women with marble equipment.

The study is added to existing research on sex, bodies and sexuality in the Viking era, but also to a broader discussion on the way in which the scholarship discusses what has been conventionally considered as problems of women, belonging to the “natural” or “private” sphere.

Dr. Eriksen said: “He strikes the banal to say, but pregnancy is an absolute necessity for all forms of reproduction – demographic, social, economic, political. Without pregnant organism, none of us would be here. Questions such as a pregnant body is one or two, how the kinship works, or when the person begins, does not discourage.”

References to pregnancy are curiously absent in evidence of the Viking age, and the authors note that among thousands of burials around the world of Vikings, there is only a handful of graduates from the possible mother -child – and it was at a time when obstetric death is considered very high.

Research suggests that mothers and babies were not systematically buried together and that infants are indeed underrepresented in the Viking age merger file overall. Some infants arise in other places, such as domestic houses, but otherwise we do not know what happened to infants, or if they had burial in the same way as adults.

“With legal legislation such as pregnancy being considered as a” defect “in a enslaved woman, or children born of subordinate peoples being the property of their owners, it is a brutal reminder that pregnancy can also leave open bodies to volatility, risk and exploitation,” added Dr. Eriksen.