Many viking era households held concubines along the official wife, which meant that there was always a group of women who were not related to each other living in the same house. The slaves were a different matter: among them were even male prostitutes.įor women things were perhaps a little bit easier since they did not have to worry about their manliness. If serving as the passive part equalled being dealt a lethal wound I highly doubt any man could have ever even considered doing that to someone he loved (that was of equal standing). This attitude no doubt would have had a huge impact on homosexual relationships. Heimdallur: “Yes, now he’s just like Freyja.” It was considered “unmanning” a man to make him “play the part of a woman” or as Íslensk hómilíubók so elegantly puts it, “those appalling secret sins perpetrated by men who respect men no more than women”.* This kind of humiliation occurred because raping someone was counted among hin meiri sár (= the deadly blows) that could be dealt against the body: a wound to the brain, torso or the marrow. A good example can be found in the Guðmundar saga dýra where Guðmundur plans the rape of a traitorous couple, both the woman and the man, that he’s taken captive. Only one type of homosexual activity seems to have been fully acceptable in the viking era north, which was playing the “active” part, especially as male sexual aggression towards opponents that lost a battle. Considering there were numerous slurs against homosexuals I think it’s safe to say these were not something anyone would have been open about. In short, society demanded that every member of it should produce children first and foremost, what other relationships there were besides that were a private matter.
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Pre-Christian Iceland did not consider homosexuality a crime as such, but attempting to avoid marriage because of it was illegal.
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It simply means that people of the era had no way of being exclusive about their preferences. This is not to say that homosexuals themselves did not exist, they definitely were around already. To begin with it’s important to note that homosexuality as it is now did not exist in Iceland. Despite of what some of the legends of the Norse gods such as Ása-Þór, Loki and Ódinn suggest, attitudes seemed to have been somewhat against it in everyday life and grew only stricter with the arrival of Christianity. Last weekend’s Gay Pride reminded me of another topic that I’ve been thinking of writing about for a while now: homosexuality in viking era Iceland. What a Lovely Maid it is!: Wikimedia Commons