There is a picture going around, mostly online, of what a woman in a properly Heathen household ought to be. She keeps the home. She defers to her husband. She finds her whole purpose in him and in their children, and she is told that in living this way she honors her ancestors.
I work in safeguarding, and I am a Heathen, and I want to say two things about this picture. The first is that it is bad history. The second is that I have seen what it is sometimes used for.
The wife in the sagas
Open any of the Icelandic family sagas and look for the obedient wife. You will be looking for some time.
You will find Hallgerd, whose husband Gunnar once slapped her face in front of guests. Years later, surrounded by his enemies, his bowstring cut, he asks her for two locks of her long hair to twist a new one. She asks whether much depends on it. His life, he says. Then she reminds him of the slap, and refuses. The saga does not admire her. It does not find her unbelievable either.
You will find a woman called Breeches-Aud, whose husband divorced her on the pretext that she wore men's trousers. She rode to his house by night, found him asleep, and wounded him with a sword. When men gathered to ride after her, her former husband forbade it, saying that she had done only what she had to do.
You will find Gudrun, four times married, the finest and most formidable woman in Iceland, who drove the events of an entire saga and in old age summed up her life in one line: she had been worst to the one she loved most.
These are not role models. Several are frightening. But they are what the Norse imagination produced when it thought of a wife: a person with her own honor, her own property, her own kin behind her, and a will that a husband ignored at his peril.
The wife in the laws
On property, the law codes agree with the sagas. As our page on women in the Viking Age sets out, a Norse wife owned her dowry and her bride payment outright. She could also leave. In the sagas a wife divorces her husband by a declaration before witnesses, over a blow or an insult; the written codes are stricter about the grounds, but they too let a wronged wife go and take her property with her. She ran a household that was the main productive unit of the whole economy.
That last point deserves a moment. The modern division between a husband who goes out to work and a wife who stays at home did not exist. Home was where the work was, for everyone. The mistress of a farm managed stores, staff, and production. The cloth made under her direction was the family's wealth and, in Iceland, its money. To imagine her as a dependent is to misunderstand the entire arrangement.
Where the picture really comes from
The ideal of the sheltered, yielding wife whose sphere is the home and whose husband represents her to the world is real enough. But it is a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not of the tenth. When it is dressed in a linen apron and oval brooches and presented as ancestral, we are looking at a costume.
In fairness, the opposite costume is also on sale. Norse women could not vote or speak at the assembly, could not exercise a chieftaincy, and lived under the legal guardianship of men. Anyone who tells you that Viking society was a paradise of equality is selling something too.
What history cannot do
Here is the point I care most about. Even if the obedient Viking wife had existed, she would have no authority over you.
Our Statement on Women in Heathenry says that the past is a teacher and not a master. A woman who chooses to make a home and raise children has chosen an honorable life, and no one in this fellowship will tell her otherwise. Many of our members have chosen exactly that. What matters is the word "chosen."
What I listen for
In my work I have learned to pay attention when certain things are said to a woman, or about her, in the name of tradition.
- That she does not need her own money, because he provides.
- That her friends and her family are a bad influence, and she should see less of them.
- That questioning him is disloyal, and that loyalty is what the gods require.
- That other Heathen women, the ones who lead rites and speak their minds, are not real Heathens.
None of these is Heathen. Each of them is a recognized step in the isolation of one person by another. When they come wrapped in the language of our religion they are harder to see, and that is exactly why the language is used.
If any of this is familiar from your own life, please talk to someone you trust outside the situation. Hallgerd, at least, never doubted that she was a person. Neither should you.