How were sexual identities treated in Viking societies?
My poster contains the main points examined in my essay that made up the bulk of my argument, however I cut out the majority of the argument to leave the facts for people to read. The poster is loosely split into four sections on the main areas such as; that the facts I have came from after the Viking Age and may have had Christian bias, how women lived, the laws and language of the Vikings and Norse Mythology. This allows for ease of reading as each section can stand alone. The guldgubber was very important to my argument so although it does not fit seamlessly into the poster I felt it was too important to be left out as it is possible proof of homosexual marriage and as Christian authors would not have written about that topic it is the only way we can have any information that something may have occurred within society. The poster allowed me to present the little information we do have about the treatment of sexual identities in Viking societies, however a lot of information had to be removed to make it a poster rather than a landscape essay and my analysis also had to be removed which doesn’t allow for my conclusion that based on the religious practice and prevalence of prostitution I believe homosexuality may have been more accepted into society than the Christian chroniclers wish to make out.
There is very minimal archaeological evidence from the time with links to homosexuality and so for my images whilst I did include some historical sources, most of my images had to be drawings from a later point. The most difficult part of studying Viking society is a lack of sources from the time and a lack of information written about women and sexuality, the same goes for finding relevant images; it was easy to find a drawing of Saxo Grammaticus from the 1800’s, however a similar drawing of Viking women was much harder to source.
