Concubinage and Slavery in the Viking Age

Abstract

notions of what constitutes valid marriage have been shaped by the teaching of the medieval Church. Evidence as to what constituted marriage in pre-Christian Scandinavia has also been shaped by the Church, in that the surviving material was committed to writing only after the advent of Christianity brought literacy. Nevertheless it is possible to step aside from the modern definitions of marriage and legitimacy and to look behind the documentary remnants of pagan times as recorded by Christians, in order to examine the variations in the legal and social status of women involved in different sorts of conjugal or sexual relationships during the Viking Age and in the status of their children.1 The status of the concubine has been much debated and equated with that of the wife. While many Germanic peoples, including Scandinavians in the Viking Age and before,2 did practice plural marriage at least among royalty, that does not mean that all women in plural relationships were plural wives. This article proposes that in the Viking Age concubinage and slavery were intimately and intricately connected. Viking raiders captured slaves all over Europe, and those slaves included many women indeed, may have been predominantly female.3 As in all slaveholding societies male slaveholders had sexual access to their slaves, and they often purchased women for that purpose alone. Slaves who became concubines clearly were not counted as plural wives. But all evidence points to a lack of distinction between slave and free concubines. The position within a couple of a free woman who had not gone through marriage rituals was no better than that of a slave. Concubinage as known in Viking Age Scandinavia had at least its conceptual roots, if not its historical origins, in slavery. The status of women who were not official wives must be clearly distinguished from the separate issue of the status of their children. The question of whether children not born in lawful wedlock those who came to be labeled as illegitimate could inherit their fathers' lands and titles was a subject of some dispute throughout western Christendom as the Roman church attempted to impose its model of monogamous,