Viking Sex: Err... Loot and Pillage

But it would be ridiculous to discount the idea that at least some of the women who were taken to Iceland and the Faroe Islands were slaves, and some of them were slaves who were unwillingly used for sexual purposes by their masters, and then had offspring. Other slaves may have been freed after a period of time, and then subsequently married and had families, perhaps with other freed slaves, or perhaps with poorer free settlers. Furthermore, there is DNA evidence that in Ireland itself, a region subject to very high levels of Norwegian Viking activity, that many people are of Scandinavian descent, and the same is true of areas in the north of England. Some of the 'cross-cultural contacts' this speaks to must have been involuntary, further reinforcing the idea that that the Vikings did indeed rape, as well as loot and pillage.

Moving on from the unpleasant and controversial issue of mass sexual assault, we should perhaps investigate three further matters before wrapping up this survey. The first of these issues is that of same-sex relationships (the voluntary kind, rather than the possibility of the sexual assault of male captives in war). There is, generally, a sense that a group of men so macho and alpha as the Vikings can't possibly have had anything other than violent contempt for the concept of male homosexuality. However, other than a late Icelandic law that it was illegal to be on the bottom (and note, that doesn't actually outlaw homosexuality, merely an individual's place in one form of homosexual encounter), we have no actual evidence of any Viking attitude to male homosexuality. Of course, that might be difficult for some modern adherents to the 'macho' school of Viking history to swallow, but nevertheless it is the case that we just don't know what they thought of it, other than to acknowledge in this one law that male homosexuality existed.

Which is more than can be said of lesbianism. When it comes to attitudes to same-sex female relationships we are left with the sound of the wind blowing the tumbleweed through the ghost town. We can place any interpretation we desire on the Vikings and their attitudes towards lesbianism safe in the knowledge that it can't be contradicted. What does perhaps seem reasonable is to speculate that some women were gay, that some people knew about it, and that some of them were ok about it and some people weren't. It is impossible to state more than that without any evidence.

The second matter which may shed some light on the Viking attitudes and activities is that of their mythology. In common with much mythology the stories can seem wild, even excessive, and were probably not reflective of the practices of the average man on the farm in the early Middle Ages because, well, that's what the gods did, not us ordinary mortals. But for what it is worth, let us examine two elements of Viking mythology which do have a sexual nature.

The first is one belief (and there may have been many) surrounding death. It is commonly known that warriors who died in battle were taken by the Valkyries to spend the afterlife fighting and feasting in Valhalla as Odin's bodyguard. Except, that isn't the full story. In fact, the myth details that the goddess Freyja actually claimed half the dead and installed them in her hall Sessrumnir. Given that Freyja was the goddess of love, there is a pretty clear implication of what those lucky reanimated corpses were getting up to every night whilst their brethren over at Odin's table were munching meat, guzzling mead and belching loudly (although there is also some speculation that the Valkyries might have indulged their wandering eyes in Valhalla, too, so... lucky bodyguards).

The second set of beliefs concerns the trickster god Loki. This character causes all sorts of problems, and his actions eventually lead to the end of everything in a Norse Armageddon. But before this, Loki provides us with some of the only Norse hints (and very vague ones at that) of an understanding of transgender issues, if not an acceptance of them. This possibility comes from the stories surrounding him, despite being a male god, being the mother of Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir.

The myth goes that the gods decide that they want a wall built around Valhalla, and a man with a stallion takes on the task, demanding Freyja as his reward if he succeeds. The gods agree but give the man an impossible deadline, and stipulate that he can't be helped. He only requests that he be assisted by his horse and Loki gets the gods to agree to this. It then turns out that the stallion is impossibly strong, and soon it's clear the man will succeed in his task. The gods are peeved with Loki, to say the least, and promise dire retribution if he can't get them out of the hole he's dug for them. So, the night before the man is due to finish the wall, Loki turns himself into a mare and tempts the stallion into chasing him/her away from Valhalla in a fury of lust. Without his stallion the man fails in his task and is killed (and the gods get an almost finished wall for nothing), whilst some months later Loki returns with the foal Sleipnir. What this story meant to the Vikings is an open question, as is when it was added to their corpus of mythological stories.

The last issue we must turn to is the change from Paganism to Christianity, and how this affected Viking attitudes to sex. The Viking acceptance of Christianity was a drawn-out process that began in the Ninth Century, and didn't fully finish until after the end of the period we traditionally think of as the Viking Age. Thus, over a three hundred year period, and across Europe and the North Atlantic islands, different groups of Vikings at different points in time were converting to Christianity, whilst their cousins still followed the old beliefs.

The subject of the conversion is a massive one in itself, but we must note here that some people converted for political reasons whilst others converted due to their genuine belief, and yet others converted at the point of a sword. But regardless of why anyone converted, after a generation or two those reasons were largely forgotten and their descendants were immersed in the Christian paradigm for better or worse. So, what difference did Christianity have on Viking sexuality, if any? The first thing to note is that, as we saw in my earlier essay about Roman sexuality, the effects were almost certainly gendered.

For Viking women, the effects of Christianity were generally negative, in that they lost many of the rights they had previously enjoyed: under the old beliefs women could initiate divorce, and grown women could be seen as independent actors in their own right rather than appendages of their nearest male relatives. We mustn't get too carried away with egalitarian ideas, here: many, if not most women were living in a patriarchal paradigm, and were subject to the ideas, attitudes and actions of their fathers, brothers, husbands and, later, their sons. But what rights they did enjoy, even if only theoretically, were stripped away by the conversion to Christianity, to be replaced by a vague injunction that they shouldn't be mistreated in the same way that men shouldn't either, and we know how well that has generally gone.

The one other new attitude that Christianity did bring in its wake affected men and women equally, that of celibacy. This was something unheard of, that someone could dedicate their life to a higher purpose and step outside the general cultural lifestyle of arranged marriage in the late teens if a woman, sometime in the twenties if a man. This choice was highly respected, particularly amongst women, until whispers of corruption and moral decay began to abound in the late Middle Ages.

For some people it must have been a blessing, whilst for others it was enforced (there was a practice of dedicating children to the church either at birth or by the age of seven). And for some women in particular, the relief from forced marriage, and thus something akin to, if not actual marital rape, must have been great though others must have found the religious life stifling.

The last change that Christianity brought was a hardening of attitudes towards same-sex relationships, if the pre-Christian attitudes were in any way liberal or laissez-faire. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how many Vikings were affected by this change in attitude, and how they navigated their way through the new paradigm they found themselves living in.

And so, to conclude, we can see that there may have been two or perhaps three major strands of Viking thought regarding sex. Firstly, for some free people, sex was probably a fun, fulfilling activity, which may have been less rather than more limited by cultural constraints, whether those engaging in them were heterosexual, homosexual or engaging in sex with both men and women. However, for other free people, in particular women, sex was probably something to endure rather than to enjoy, their choice of partner not theirs to make freely.

The last group, those for whom sexual encounters with Vikings were unlikely to be anything other than traumatic and/or humiliating, were the unfree. These people, who were taken in their tens or hundreds of thousands from across northern Europe, were almost certainly the victims of mass sexual assault. I have not stopped to consider the attitude of the men who were capable of perpetrating such assaults, but the psychology of such Vikings was not unique. It was mirrored by other cultures in its own time, whether the perpetrators were 'civilised' monotheists or not, and can be seen to this day. Happily, though, we can at least speculate that it was far from all Vikings who indulged in such psychopathy, as many, if not most Vikings didn't actually participate in overseas expeditions, and surely not all those who did took part in the worst excesses, even if they witnessed them.

For those interested in reading further about the Vikings there is a wealth of resources regarding their culture and law, exploits, warfare, ships and technology, politics and international relations, religion, art, and conversion to Christianity. However, when it comes to the interpersonal relationships of individuals and their attitudes towards sex both in and out of marriage there is a dearth of any analysis. The best that can be done is to point the reader to the excellent series of saga translations and mythological texts by Penguin Classics, and from that the reader can make up their own mind.