In his mother’s womb, he was fated to avenge his father – how was pregnancy understood in the Viking age?

This striking story is one of only a few references found in Old Norse texts to pregnant women and their unborn children. But how typical is it? And what does it tell us about how Vikings understood pregnancy, unborn life and the women who carried it?

New research into Viking understandings of pregnancy

Those are the questions that new research, published in May 2025, has sought to answer, aiming to unpick the ambiguity and uncover what pregnancy was really like for Viking women, and examine its place within Old Norse culture and society.

In ‘Womb Politics: The Pregnant Body and the Archaeologies of Absence’ (Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2025), Marianne Hem Eriksen, Katherine Marie Olley, Brad Marshall and Emma Tollefsen examined 300 years of Viking texts, images, and burial evidence – and what they found was a culture that had surprisingly mixed views on pregnancy. In some places, the unborn were seen as people with destinies of their own. In others, pregnancy was treated more like a health condition, with no suggestion that the fetus had a separate identity at all.

What’s most striking, though, is how often pregnancy is simply left out of the record – not missing by accident, the authors say, but likely made deliberately invisible.

Women in the Viking Age

Hem Eriksen notes that there was no one way of experiencing life as a woman in the Viking Age. Most people lived on rural farmsteads where everyone had to do their part, and agricultural tools have been found in both male and female burials. Based on grave goods, some women seem to have been associated with long-distance trade or metalworking. One task that seems particularly female-gendered, however, is textile production, yet this task would probably look quite different whether you were a subaltern woman doing large-scale textile production in a pit-house, or a high-status woman weaving by the hearth in the feasting hall.

What women across social groups and standing may have had in common, was the experience of pregnancy. As the research explains, women who lived before effective forms of contraception likely spent much of their adult lives being pregnant, recovering from pregnancy, and nursing. Yet despite this centrality, pregnancy is rarely talked about in the written sources.

So the researchers dug deeper. Looking across sagas, poems, law codes and Christian writings, they searched for hints about how Vikings understood pregnancy.

• Read more | Viking women: raiders, traders and settlers

Legends and language

While most Old Norse descriptions of pregnancy were inferred rather than described, literature and language do provide some useful insight into how Vikings thought of pregnancy.

Guðrún’s story in the Laxdaela Saga is a potent example of when the Vikings gave “more existential weight to the fetus,” say the study’s authors. The story of Guðrún and her unborn son shows how the Vikings could sometimes imagine the fetus as a separate person, with its own fate.

When Helgi wiped the blood on her shawl, he was already seeing Guðrún’s fetus as a boy with a destiny, independent from his mother. Other Old Norse phrases for being pregnant – such as “to go not a woman alone” and “to walk with child” – support this interpretation too.

So, then, did Vikings see unborn children as integrated social persons? It might not be that straightforward.

Researchers also found words that emphasise the mother’s physical, or embodied, experience of being pregnant. When describing pregnant women, Old Norse societies used adjectives like ‘bellyish’ and ‘unlight’. Meanwhile, ‘health-lack’, ‘unstrong’ and ‘sickness’, highlighted the physical impact of pregnancy and labour, essentially viewing pregnancy as a female health condition.

It's a view that contradicts the story in the Laxdaela Saga – pointing to the idea that Vikings could also see the unborn as not yet having their own individual identity or personhood.

A pregnant warrior?

Away from textual sources, the researchers also sought out information from physical evidence: burials and artefacts.

Across the Viking Age, only one convincing visual representation of Viking pregnancy survives: a silver figurine, discovered in the 1920s in a burial mound in Aska, Sweden. The object is just 3.8cm tall and it depicts a circle with a human in its centre, cradling a round belly with her arms. It’s widely understood to represent pregnancy.

Intriguingly, this woman may also be wearing a helmet with a cloverleaf-shaped nose guard. When seen against the mounting evidence that some women were buried with full weapons' gear: could pregnant Viking women, alongside their unborn children, also be seen as warriors?

According to the authors, the artefact provides firm evidence that the notion of “a pregnant woman in arms was not an unthinkable concept”.

The burial record

Meanwhile, one of the most puzzling parts of the study comes from the burial evidence. Across the thousands of Viking Age burials that have been recorded by archaeologists, the authors of the new research found only 14 examples of a mother being buried with her infant: a number that’s misaligned with the fact that death during or around pregnancy was extremely common in medieval Scandinavia.

What could have caused this “extremely low” number of burials of mothers and infants together? The authors don’t believe this low number could be down only to poor preservation of the remains, nor that Viking women and infants who died in pregnancy and childbirth were exclusively cremated rather than buried. Instead, they suggest a third possibility: that mothers and their newborn children were separated, rather than being buried together.

• Read more | Gods, myths and rituals: what we know about Viking religious beliefs

This is one explanation as to why burials with Viking women and newborns are so rare – despite the evidence that death rates were so high – and the study suggests this was intentional by the Vikings.

The authors suggests a couple of theories for why this might have happened. The newborns might have been used as ‘grave-goods’ in the burial of other bodies, in the same way the Vikings buried adults with animal bodies – or used in other ritual practices. Alternatively, perhaps the newborns weren’t formally buried at all – which gives rise to the as yet unanswered, unsettling question of whether Vikings saw dead babies as worthy of grieving over at all.

A culture of contradictions?

In the end, the Viking view of pregnancy appears full of contradictions. The unborn could be seen as future warriors – or not as people at all. Pregnancy could be seen as powerful, or as a health burden to endure. It’s an ambiguity that seems paradoxical given how preoccupied the Vikings were with kinship and family.

Were the unborn their own beings with their own lives ahead of them, or not? Was pregnancy simply a state of health? Could the pregnant women even be warriors, in some form or another? And what happened to the mothers and infants who didn’t survive the experience?

Without clear evidence one way or another, the Viking Age understanding of pregnancy remains a complex puzzle: one in which birth, life and death were ever-present and deeply intertwined.