Transforming Images: Exploring Powerful Children

Abstract

The perception of children as vulnerable, instead of powerful, beings is the opposite of what is found to be the case in the historic evidence. The paper investigates the relationship between ideology and material culture by examining some attitudes towards children found in Scandinavian traditions, which have been connected with archaeological finds. This concerns the area of the Norse Sagas and the comparative studies of religion, folk medicine and folklore in relationship to the tradition of burial alive in the Nordic regions. In relation to children's access to origin of a cosmological order it looks into the Norwegian Odal law of the firstborn and pre-Christian practices concerning the treatment of children.