Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 62

Christopher Callow
Carol Clover, who has made the
most extensive case, bases her argument
mostly on the Sagas of Icelanders and
legal texts, where child exposure is explic-
itly mentioned, as well as archaeological
evidence from mainland Scandinavia
(1988: 150-5). For the written evidence
the real issue is whether either literary or
legal texts contain genuine evidence of
beliefs from the tenth century or whether
both are misleading, giving us twelfth- or
thirteenth-century views of pre-Christian
Iceland. I would suggest that it is most
likely that where Sagas of Icelanders
mention children being exposed it is an
almost romanticised view of the past as
barbaric and ‘other’. The written stories
may well form part of a tradition of sto-
ries about infanticide but the age of that
tradition and its relationship to a real situ-
ation are difficult to gauge. This might be
especially true where characters go so far
as to claim to want to expose a baby girl
and not a baby boy (cf. Clover 1988: 156,
158). The legal evidence is perhaps more
valuable, if we assume that prohibitions
against child abandonment represent a
fear of the Church which was based on
a known practice at the time of writing.
Again, how real that fear was is difficult
to judge, either for Norway or Iceland
where the legal sources mention aban-
donment (Mundal 2005). The legal texts
seem to show a genuine concern for the
possibility that Icelanders and Scandina-
vians would expose babies although it is
impossible to say how real this was. It is
difficult to know to what extent the kill-
ing of children in Scandinavia, rather like
cannibalism more generally, or atrocities
associated with medieval Jews (including
infanticide itself as well as male men-
struation) was one of those rumoured
barbarisms which attracted the attention
of ill-informed or gullible Christian writ-
ers (e.g Johnson 1998). This is not to
deny the possibility of selective female
infanticide having taken place in early
medieval Scandinavia, but to suggest
that the written evidence we have is not
necessarily a good guide to its nature and
prevalence.
Other arguments about male
anxieties over a shortage of women have
been put forward as an explanation of
much of the conflict recorded in those
sagas which recall events in Iceland.
Certainly their male writers do seem to
display generalised anxieties about pow-
erful women - the women who incite
their menfolk to violence - but misogyny
in the medieval period was not unique to
Iceland. Sagas’ focus on men and men’s
concerns is best seen as a product of their
male writers’ interests rather than the
result of them not having any women to
talk about. For example, we hear about
the childhoods of remarkable figures like
Egill Skallagrímsson and Grettir Ásmun-
darson because they were remembered as
heroes and not because saga authors did
not know that there were vast numbers of
girls growing up to become women.
Finally in this connection we
ought to note that other societies also
produced literature about infanticide but
little other evidence of the practice actu-
ally taking place on a large scale. In later
medieval England, for example, there
was a literature which, like the sagas,
occasionally delighted in tales of adults
or parents killing children, yet contempo-
rary court records (of a kind lacking for
Iceland in the thirteenth century) identify
barely any evidence of even accusations
of infanticide (Sandidge 2005: 294-306).
No doubt if we had court records from
earlier on in Iceland we would not have
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