Gripla - 2022, Side 161

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Margrétar saga as birthing aid
Prayers for safe delivery were – and still remain – central to women’s
birthing practices in many cultures. The 1541 Icelandic Church Ordinance
included instructions translated from Danish on the spiritual preparation
of midwives and pregnant women for childbirth, which under Lutheran
teaching was the responsibility of the parish minister.10 Official Lutheran
prayers for the mother and child during labour were to be directed to God
alone, but before the Reformation it had been common practice to turn to
saints as intercessors.11
One such powerful intercessor was St. Margaret of Antioch, who ac-
cording to her legend was an early fourth-century Christian martyr. She
was tortured and executed during the Diocletian persecution by Olybrius,
a wicked Roman official who wished to marry her or take her as his con-
cubine. Having already dedicated her virginity to God, Margaret rejected
Olybrius’s unwanted attention and was not swayed by imprisonment,
torture or threats of public execution. In the legend’s most famous scene,
St. Margaret is confronted by a dragon that swallows her alive after she
prays to see her true enemy. Undaunted, she makes the sign of the cross
and is spectacularly delivered from the belly of the dragon, which explodes
and releases her. Before receiving the crown of martyrdom, St. Margaret
makes a prayer asking that women who call on her during childbirth be
granted a safe delivery, and likewise that no child be born blind, dumb,
possessed or witless to those who copy, read or buy her vita or have the
book in their house.12
Her encounter with the dragon is widely interpreted as St. Margaret’s
primary connection to childbirth: she is a female dragon-slayer, whose
expulsion from the dragon is a symbolic form of birthing process.13 The
10 DI 10, 127, 152 –55, 210–13.
11 On medieval Icelandic birthing practices, see Margaret Cormack, “Fyr kné meyio: Notes
on Childbirth in Medieval Iceland,” Saga-Book 25.3 (2000): 314–15.
12 Kirsten Wolf, “Margrétar saga II,” Gripla 21 (2010): 61–104, at 75. The precise content of
the prayer and the protection offered by the presence of the vita varies among redactions
of Margrétar saga.
13 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “St. Margaret, Patroness of Childbirth,” Mythological Women: Studies in
Memory of Lotte Motz (1922–1997), ed. by Rudolf Simek and Wilhelm Heizmann, Studia
Medievalia Septentrionalia 7 (Vienna: Fassbaender, 2002) 319–30. See also Svanhildur
Óskarsdóttir and Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, “Dýrlingar og daglegt brauð í Langadal: Efni og
samhengi í AM 461 12mo,” Gripla 30 (2019): 107–53.
MAGIC, M A R G R É T A R S A G A