Sunday, August 4, 2019

Child Rearing in the Viking Age

The Clan



Introduction

Raising children in a modern sense is one of the most time-consuming and maddening experiences I have ever engaged in. It is also amazingly rewarding, and so worth it when you get things right. The truth is that if you take even a small glance at the internet, you will see hundreds and thousands of different approaches to how to raise children to be well adjusted successful adults. The one prevailing truth, no one actually knows. We each do our best and hope that we impart more wisdom and love than damage.

Practice time!
How did things work historically? Did ancient man spend their time worrying if they had messed up by not celebrating their child’s first birthday? Did medieval farmers share concerns over ale that they had messed up by not providing memorable experiences for their children? Probably no;  by everything I’ve seen, it looks like the main goal of parents was to make sure that children were healthy and prepared to be adults. Now, I imagine that parents wanted their kids to be happy, but when the choices are help on the farm or everyone starves, it puts things into perspective.

For this blog post, I’ll take a look at my own parenting style, as well as how things would have been done in Norse times. The reality is that we don’t know very much about what a Norse child’s life was like during the Viking Age. We can see in runestones and in the few mentions in the sagas that the children were loved, but their raising (like many day-to-day things) was left out. There was no ancient What to Expect When You're Expecting, so to rebuild their life I’m taking a look at what toys we have found, and the little bit we have seen mentioned in the sagas. All this means is that there will be a fair bit of conjecture and guessing based on what I understand about the culture and my own experiences as a father.

Genders for Viking Children

Modernly, it's difficult to discuss raising children without getting into the idea of gender and how gender roles affect the decisions we make as parents. In the Viking Age, gender was also important, as it would determine the rights of the child based on their age and what skills they would be taught. While women in the Viking Age did have a fair bit of freedom in what they did with their lives (Which you can read about in my previous blog post: https://ulfhedinnjourney.blogspot.com/2019/05/womens-rights-in-viking-age.html), there was still a divide in what was considered masculine arts and feminine arts. I'll get more into which skills children might learn below.

Laws were one of the main differences between how boy and girl children were handled. Boys were considered adults at the age of 16. Girls on the other hand could inherit at 16, but were typically considered adults when they married or turned 20, whichever came first. Girls were eligible to marry as young as 12, which meant that a young girl could be the woman of her house before a boy was considered a man. 

Ancient Norse Playtime

We know that the Norse of all ages enjoyed playing games and having fun. There are plenty of
My three girls. Thrudr, Aeta, and Merida.
Circa 2012
examples in the sagas of sport games and board games being played. I wrote a blog post on Knattleikr a few weeks ago  (https://ulfhedinnjourney.blogspot.com/2019/07/knattleikr-norse-ball-game.html), one of the many field games we hear about being played in the sagas. It would seem that, like many other cultures, field games were often battle analogs, promoting activity and strategic thinking. Games of all types have often been used as training tools, whether it’s teaching children math with Monopoly, or perfecting strategy with Hnefatfl. 

The majority of toys that we have found keep along with the same idea that play was meant to emulate adults and give children a sense of what they’d be doing when they grew up. We have found wooden ships and weapons that could be used either for pretend or training, and even the wooden tops we have found have been thought to have taught the finger skills needed for weaving and other fiber arts. We have also found dolls and other wooden figures that would allow children to play pretend in a variety of ways no different than the Playskool figures that children play with today. It is most interesting to me to see the parallels in the way children have played for millenia: in almost every age, we have found very similar toys, things that represent the imagination and allow kids to recreate the world around them as they see it. When my kids were younger, they used their toys and recreated a farm, complete with parents, children, and paddocks. When I was a kid, I did the same thing. I can see the same games going back all the way to the Norse times, with those kids having a much better idea of what goes on a farm, since they are actively living on one!
Examples of toys from the Viking Age

Education in the Viking Age

Education (at least structured education as we understand it in modern times) is a very recent change in the way we handle children. Even 200 years ago, children had some learning at a school house, but the majority of their education would be at the hands of their parents. In the Viking Age, nearly all teaching would be done by the parents. Essentially, they would raise their children to take their place in society or assist them in what they did, whether this was a craft or simply running a farm. This would include social lessons as much as practical ones. Parents would teach their children what the law was and how they were expected to behave within their culture. The practical lessons, however, would take up the majority of children’s time, and would take up more and more as they grew older. 

As near as we can tell, children were expected to assist around the home as soon as they were old enough to complete any given task, meaning babies and toddlers were left to play but as soon as they were more capable, they were given simple tasks such as gathering eggs or similar. As their capacity grew, so did their responsibilities until they were a fully functioning member of the homestead. In the cases of the children of crafts people, if the child wanted to continue the trade, they did have somewhat of a choice, and would help out around the shop and learn by watching their parents. This would give them the needed skills to take over the trade or expand the shop to be able to handle more work as they came of age. 

Merida and Aeta practicing sword and shield.
When I had my game store, I did something similar with my girls: they were expected to help out within their abilities. The youngest would help by sweeping, the older two by helping cook or ring up customers, which gave them experience that most kids their age don’t have. They already have a leg up when it comes time to apply for a retail job in a couple of years. Those same skills help them out at home when it comes to helping their mom and me maintain the house.

Now what about children who didn't want to follow the family trade, or perhaps the shop was already full? There are tales in the sagas that discuss fostering and apprenticeship. Fostering would be the act of sending one of your children to the home of another family to learn from them. This was less often about learning something different and more about connecting two families in a similar fashion to marriage. It creates a bond that is useful in a time when it was important to be close to people around you for mutual support and defense. Apprenticeship was a way for a child to learn something beyond the family trade. Your parents would make a deal with a craftsperson to take you on and teach you their trade. In some cases of apprenticeship, the child would move in with their teacher until they came of age. 

Beyond their basic education in society and future trade, there were also martial arts, which modernly conjures images of Eastern Martial arts, but includes the fighting styles of the West as well. The Viking Age was a brutal time where it was important for all people to be capable of defending themselves. Towards this end, parents would train their children in the ways of fighting. I imagine it wasn’t gender controlled, but that girls were only taught if they wanted to learn, while for
Thrudr practicing Archery
boys it was an expectation that they had to fulfill. The actual manners of how they trained their children didn’t survive, since they were an oral culture, but with the records of how combat happened in the Sagas we can have an idea of how the Norse fought. The Hurstwic Institute has put a ton of work into recreating the Viking fighting styles and train people to fight in the way that they might have a thousand years ago. 

Conclusion

The most interesting thing I’ve learned in doing the research for this post is that even as technology changes, the basic way children play hasn’t too much, or at least not in our house. We use play time to pretend and use our imaginations, whether it's about what the girls will be when they grow up or something entirely different (we are playing a Mandalorian Star Wars RPG at the moment!). The major change is that the home is no longer the family business, and much of their education takes place at school. I make it a point to teach them our culture, and the moral lessons that are important to me, and between my wife and I we teach them how to maintain a house: all the things they will need to be functioning adults when the time comes for them to go out on their own. I also train with them in Viking Martial arts, as it gives me sparring partners at home, and it creates tiny shield maidens that can hold their own!

If there are any aspects of Child Rearing the Viking Age you think I missed or glossed over, let me know! If there is anything I got wrong or you would like to hear more about in a future post, let me know that too! 



Sources 
REPRESENTATIONS OF CHILDREN IN THE ICELANDIC SAGAS by Anna Hansen- https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/46195

Posted by at

2 comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)