Viking Sex: Err... Loot and Pillage

So, there is, of course, a rather large pachyderm glowering in the corner of the room, and we will get to it. But not yet. Though, if we were to ask the average man on the Clapham Omnibus what the Vikings were particularly known for, he would soon get, after mentioning horned helmets (thanks Wagner) and the pillaging and the looting, and shouting 'skol' whilst downing copious quantities of beer from drinking horns, to sexual assault. This, however, is not the alpha and omega of the subject, thankfully. But first some qualifiers.

In my previous essay about the Romans I noted that their attitudes to sex might well have been modified by class, status, gender and wealth, and there were further issues surrounding location, location, location in an empire that spanned the whole of the Mediterranean, to the Rhine, the Danube and Mesopotamia. Something similar can be said of the Vikings, though not so much when it comes to wealth or class: whilst there were definite differences between king and pauper, the Viking world hardly saw the wild inequalities of wealth and class so common across the Roman world. There may also have been a different attitude towards gender, more of which later. But status and location may still have played their part.

For the uninitiated, the Vikings spread themselves far and wide. At their height in the Tenth Century CE (AD for those of us who prefer 'old' time) the Vikings occupied their Scandinavian homeland, large parts of Britain and Ireland, a chunk of France, large parts of what would become European Russia and Ukraine, the Atlantic islands of Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes, parts of Poland, and their adventurers were also tentatively pressing into North America and Central Asia (neither of these particular attempts turned out well). Viking traders were also scattered across the rest of Europe, and Viking warriors formed the famed bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople, as well as acting as 'independent military consultants' in other places to the greater or lesser woe of the natives.

It follows, then, that the Vikings were exposed to a variety of attitudes towards sex, aside from that prevalent in their own, initially pagan, homelands, with these differences perhaps being particularly noticeable in contacts with the pagan non-Vikings in the eastern Baltic, and the monotheistic religions to the south and west. Even then, however, the experience of a Viking in conservative southern England might have been rather different to that of one trading in Rome, a city where by repute about one third of all the women may have been sex workers. How this might affect the attitudes of our average Viking, if it even did, is open to speculation, but must be borne in mind.

One other factor that is important for our average Viking is the speed at which he will likely have assimilated. The Vikings were particularly noted for 'going native' by the second generation, taking on the cultural values of those around them, and it would be bizarre to discount attitudes to sex from amongst the grab bag of cultural values they adopted. This is particularly noticeable, probably, in the eastern regions that they occupied (or infested, depending on your viewpoint) given the accounts of Muslim travellers who encountered them and wrote down their experiences, but is a general truism across the board.

Which neatly brings us to a quick overview of the available sources. These are unfortunately minimal, to say the least. Whilst not illiterate, the Vikings only used writing for inscriptions and short messages that acted as curses, spells, blessings or, perhaps, jokes. What we don't have is any contemporary written account of Vikings, by Vikings. The only people who wrote any contemporary account of the Vikings were those people in the Christian and Muslim worlds who encountered them, and given that those encounters were often at sword point those accounts have a habit of being a little 'testy' towards the Vikings -- one is hardly likely to credit a bunch of violent gangsters as being culturally rich, thoughtful and diverse when they've just burnt your monastery to the ground and made off with every scrap of gold and silver they could find, along with everyone they could catch under thirty in tow, too, bound for the slave market.

And even if the contemporary accounts were scrupulously fair -- and there were a couple of missionaries who ventured into Scandinavia who left written accounts -- they would still butt up against our old friends 'cultural misunderstanding' and 'language barrier'. There were, however, some Norse accounts written later, and we will be leaning heavily on them, though it is essential to remember that the prose accounts didn't begin to be written down until two hundred years after the Vikings were in their prime, and were viewed as history and literature rather than reportage. The accounts are also very limited in terms of place, being concentrated in medieval Iceland, but they are the best we have apart from chance clues, so we will have to pick them up and run with them perhaps further than might be ideal.

Thus, to business. The first thing to note is that, in common with everywhere else, the Vikings were a patriarchal society, with all that can mean for the position of women (particularly young, unmarried women) when it comes to sex. Marriages were arranged, and it would be perverse to imagine that all those arranged marriages took into account the feelings of the bride (particularly) and groom, rather than the feelings of the fathers at the sight of the possible advantages in land, status, family alliances, or simply getting rid of a mouth to feed that a marriage might bring. Bearing this in mind there were, without doubt, couples who were dramatically sexually mismatched and, given that this was a patriarchal society, it was the women who bore the brunt of the misery in such a situation.

To be fair, there were probably also couples who fell in love at first sight and remained sexually in tune until death parted them. And then there were the largest group, which fell somewhere between these two extremes. But what of their attitudes to sex? Basically, we don't know. Which also means we don't have the same available knowledge about what they thought was weird or depraved as we have for the Romans, who believed, for example, that oral sex was just plain wrong, on every level. So, we can at least imagine that there were Vikings who believed in foreplay, who understood what a clitoris was, who fellated their husbands or gave their wives cunnilingus, and who viewed it all as healthy rather than hung themselves up about all of it.

But do we have any evidence for this? No, we have very little evidence for actual sexual practices in the Viking world, even when there are direct references to sexual relationships. And we have so few references to sexual relationships we could almost simply list them and make our own minds up from there. So, the evidence is as follows:

1. In the first chapter of Laxdaela Saga, a visitor to a Viking nobleman's house in Norway sees a couple fucking in the open, presumably in the main hall of the farm where everyone ate, slept and socialised. The nobleman doesn't stop them, but merely covers them with an ox hide. We might perhaps glean from this that sex was regarded as basically normal, to the point of being undertaken in the communal area, but was still somewhat private (perhaps usually to be indulged in behind a curtain, or under cover of darkness).

2. A Viking called Hrut Herjolfsson, who features prominently in two of the main sagas, encounters Gunnhild, queen-mother of Norway, and is seduced by her (she is one of the first cougars in European literature). After a while, however, Hrut wants to return to his home in Iceland to marry his sweetheart. Gunnhild, displeased at this, puts a curse on him so that his cock will grow too large for him to have sex with his new wife. This comes to pass and results in a feud when his wife divorces him for non-consummation, and tries to get her dowry back.

3. A Viking called Olaf the Peacock encounters a Baltic slave trader in Norway and buys the best-looking young woman the man has for sale. He takes the woman, called Melkorka, back to his home in Iceland (to the ill-concealed chagrin of his wife) and has a son by her. On learning that she is the granddaughter of an Irish king he treats her well (relatively; he doesn't let her go home to Ireland, but he does set her up with her own household -- effectively making her a free landowner), and the suggestion is that he prefers her to his wife.

4. The central story in Laxdaela Saga is a love triangle between Kjartan (son of the freed slave Melkorka referenced above), his cousin Bolli, and a woman called Gudrun. It ends very badly, with a blood-feud that lasts two generations.

5. A main theme of Njal's Saga, perhaps the most accomplished of all the Icelandic sagas, is the story of an ill-matched marriage between the beautiful Hallgerd Longlegs (her nickname hinting at the sexual manner in which she is thought of) and a heroic warrior called Gunnar. She is reputed to be a 'difficult' woman, and she has had previous husbands who have met bad ends in which her foster-father has taken fatal vengeance for her in cases of domestic violence, an explicit example of the potential negative reality that must have been faced by many women, even in 'loving' relationships, in a frontier, patriarchal warrior society. In the end Gunnar finally hits her when she causes him shameful embarrassment with his neighbours and rivals, and she promises revenge, a revenge that indirectly causes his death. Interestingly, one of the factors that causes the marriage to be viewed as ill-starred is that it is a love match decided on by the bride and groom themselves rather than arranged by their families (he is the head of his family and she is twice-widowed with a teenage daughter, and is thus viewed as able to make her own decisions).

6. In Eyrbyggja Saga, a man named Bjorn has an adulterous relationship with a married woman called Thurid. Her husband and his friends try, and fail, to kill Bjorn. He is then induced to go into exile by the local chieftain.

7. A central element of Gisli Sursson's Saga relates to relationships. Gisli and his brother Thorkel marry women in Iceland, and then overhear that prior to their marriages the women had desires for other men in the extended clan group. Gisli can live with this -- nothing ever actually happened, but Thorkel reacts very badly. A further complication is that Gisli and Thorkel's sister Thordis, who it is hinted that Gisli has incestuous feelings towards, is married to the man that Thorkel's wife admitted desiring. Families, huh?! Cue a cycle of murder and revenge, the brothers falling out and the brother-in-law murdered, with Gisli bound ever further into a cycle of avenging members of the clan, whilst having been outlawed himself and now being hunted down by other men caught in the same web of vengeance. Finally, after a heroic defence, he is killed. On hearing the news Thordis wounds her second husband with his own sword as it was his relatives that killed her brother (and possibly incestuous lover). Yes, its messy.

8. In the account of Ibn Fadlan, an Arab diplomat travelling through the southern part of European Russia, a Viking trader dies. As part of his funeral rites a slave girl is chosen to accompany him in death. She then has sex with six of the Viking's comrades before being sacrificed and buried with him. The account suggests that she undergoes this sacrifice willingly, though it also makes clear she was drugged (these two facts need not be mutually exclusive).

This is about the limit of the written evidence that deals overtly or obliquely with sexual matters. What can we learn from this evidence? In a moment we will turn to questions of gender and status, but firstly we can make some assumptions. The first thing to note, stated explicitly in the first reference above, is that sex was rarely a 'concealed' issue in the way it can be today. People slept communally, and there weren't bedrooms except for royalty and aristocrats, so everyone must have heard, even if they didn't see, what everyone else was getting up to.

The head of a household might have a closed bed closet which he slept in with his wife (which was still in the large, main room with everyone else), but for the rest of the household the only privacy would have been provided by curtains or tapestries, hung up to section off parts of the single room, or simply darkness. The only way to have a private assignation would have been to find a place al fresco, out of sight of the farmhouse, and this may have been particularly favoured by the unmarried or those engaging in adultery.

But in this communal environment, did people engage in communal sex? Were there Viking orgies? Some might like to think that they did, but we have absolutely no evidence one way or the other.

The second thing we can notice is that boys will be boys, and when their wives are playing around their first thought, as ever, is to take it out on the other man. We can speculate why, but as ever it probably comes down to ideas of 'ownership' and ingrained habits of 'you can't hit a woman'. This was probably magnified by the frontier nature of Viking culture, where every man was responsible for enforcing the law, through either legal cases at local assemblies, or through simple blood vengeance. As every man was his own lawyer, and his own sheriff, it is easy to see how men would become particularly touchy about their perceived status, and were particularly quick to ensure nobody thought they were a weakling.

It is now time to turn to questions of gender and how they affected Viking attitudes to sex. As with everything else so far we will be stumbling in the dark somewhat, however there is a glimmer of light by which we can navigate, even if it is by inference. First, in the examples listed above we can see that some of the women had a certain amount of genuine agency. Hallgerd Longlegs makes her own decision about marrying, Thurid decides to be a Loving Wife with Bjorn (we presume she was participating voluntarily as there is no suggestion otherwise), Gunnhild seduces a younger man (and he is definitely not complaining about it), and even the slave girl agrees to be a human sacrifice, though here we can assume that a handful of slaves were told that one of them was going to be sacrificed, no matter what, so make up your minds which one.

This idea of female agency is repeated in other stories across the Viking world: there are matriarchs who make familial decisions, women who engage in combat in defence of home and hearth, and other women who are the driving force behind the men who take blood vengeance in feuds, or even start the feuds themselves. This view of women having agency is beginning to be supported by archaeology, with at least two warrior graves being now identified as those of women where they were previously thought to have been male, with one skeleton having what could be combat wounds that subsequently healed before a later death.

What that might mean for women's sexual attitudes or activities is anyone's guess, however it isn't unreasonable to think that a woman who was prepared to fight alongside the men might also have some pretty forward ideas about what she wanted from a man (or a woman) in bed, and be fairly forthright about acquiring it. Of course, quite how many women were this traditionally 'masculine' in their behaviour is unknown, though it is probably quite limited for an indirect reason: the Churchmen who wrote accounts of the Vikings during this period were misogynists to a man, and would have had no compunction in damning the pagan Vikings even further if they thought that Viking women were habitually taking on male roles. That these written accounts don't make reference to women fighting or leading households suggests that it was very much the minority of women who did do this, such that the Churchmen never encountered them.

We must now turn, however, from women inhabiting leading roles, to the elephant in the room mentioned at the beginning of this survey of sex in the Viking world: rape. This is generally referred to as part of the trifecta of Viking activities undertaken when off raiding the peaceful natives of Christian lands, along with looting and pillaging. The first thing to briefly note here is that it wasn't only the Christians who suffered: the Muslims in Spain and the pagans in the eastern Baltic/Arctic Circle also suffered at the hands of the Vikings. That being noted, we need to move on to the main accusation against the Vikings, that of wholesale rape.

It would be perverse to suggest that, over the course of two centuries, in locations as diverse as Spain and Ireland, Lithuania and England, France and Russia, that there weren't instances of the rape of female (and perhaps male) captives who were taken to be sold in slave markets. We can be certain that rape did occur, on the balance of probabilities, particularly amongst men habituated to violence who may have seen comrades fall mere minutes earlier during an assault on a town. Men in such situations, history unfortunately tells us, have a habit of taking out their anger on the nearest people who can't fight back.

The question then becomes whether this was systemic, in that it was seen as a general 'perk' of going a-Viking, or whether it was very much an individual thing. And... quite simply the jury is out. Our evidence is non-existent, with only a few brief comments from some French monks about 'rapine', a word that can unfortunately mean either straight rape, or the 'rape' of a country, as in a group coming and violating that country by looting and destruction, and from which the whole idea of mass rape may have grown. Unless it was known in European culture and remained as part of the collective knowledge of Vikings and their habits, without actually being spelled out until later. This is certainly not impossible.

We can also use our imaginations, and our knowledge of how some young men, with ultimate power and no limitations, will likely behave. From this I would suggest that, at least at some points in time, and in some places, amongst some armies of Vikings engaged in campaigns on foreign soil, the rape of captives deemed young and attractive enough (mostly women, but maybe some men, too, particularly as a form of humiliation) was habitual, and it may have been far more common than that. I don't believe such a viewpoint is controversial.

So much for newly acquired slaves in the midst of military campaigns, with all the stresses and psychological issues for everyone concerned. But what of slaves in the long term? We can see the case of the slave Melkorka listed above that she was bought for the purpose of being a concubine, effectively a sex slave, and she had no choice in the matter. At which point it is rape, pure and simple. That the man who bought her subsequently freed her once he learnt her lineage doesn't take away from the brutality of her initial situation, and we can also infer that her case was unusual -- for how many women bought as sex slaves could claim descent from a king? The other women, however many of them there were, would not have had nearly the same status that might cause a Viking to place them on some kind of pedestal (which would reflect well on them, too), however much it was a gilded cage in reality.

So, how many women were in this situation? Once again, we don't really know, but we can make some guesses. A genetic study conducted on the Icelanders has discovered that 62% of the maternal gene pool is Irish or Scottish in ancestry, whilst in the Faroe Islands 37% of the maternal gene pool is Norse in ancestry (meaning that 63% isn't). This doesn't mean that the majority of women who were part of the settlement of these islands were slaves -- the settlers may have in part been the descendants (children or even grandchildren) of earlier Viking settlers in Ireland and Scotland who married local girls and had children who were recognised as freemen and women.