Saga - 2012, Page 124

Abstract
bryn ja b jörnsdótt i r
BIRTH DEFECTS AND INFANT EXPOSURE IN OLD NORSE AND
ICELANDIC CHURCH LAW
Despite an absence of contemporary evidence, scholars of ancient Icelandic soci-
ety have generally agreed that infanticide through exposure was freely permitted
in pagan times. The main source of evidence for this is Íslendingabók (the Book of
Icelanders), written by the priest Ari Þorgilsson in the period 1122–1133.
According to this text, when Christianity was adopted in Iceland at the turn of the
first millennium, one of the legal provisions agreed was: “the old laws on child
exposure shall remain in force.” These words have been interpreted to indicate
that exposing children was unrestricted in pagan times and continued to be so
after Christianisation. This article rejects the traditional interpretation, maintain-
ing that the exposure provision actually suggests not that infant exposure was
free of restrictions (which would obviate the need for any laws about it) but rather
was subject to definite rules and requirements. While these old laws have been
lost, the Icelandic and Norse provincial laws of that time were so closely akin that
similar approaches to child exposure are likely. The oldest extant Norse laws on
child exposure are found in the Christian law of Gulathing, dating to around
1020, and other Norse regional laws. These allow for the exposure or neglect of
children born with certain specified deformities. Remarks on the special treatment
of children with abnormal appearances are also found in Icelandic Christian law.
Because comparable laws on deformed children are not found in texts of Christian
law and philosophy from other countries, we can conclude that the manner in
which children with birth defects were treated in Norse Christian law was not
based on foreign models, but originated in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, one must go
back many centuries, as far as pagan Greece and Rome, to find comparable atti-
tudes towards the right of deformed children to live. According to epidemiolog-
ical estimates, approximately 3% of live-born infants have a visible birth defect,
and if the proportion of these birth defects was similar in pagan times, when there
was a smaller number of births due to the lower population, there would have
been still fewer such deformities present in Icelandic society. Thus the descrip-
tions of birth defects found in old Norse Christian law probably represent knowl-
edge accrued over a long period of time that in all likelihood was originally hea-
then and was transposed into Christian law. These ancient laws banned exposing
healthy infants but allowed exposing the deformed.
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