Meredith Mansfield, Author

Day 4 of the World Building Blog Fest hosted by Sharon Bayliss is about Culture. Since the protagonist of THE BARD’S GIFT is Astrid, a sixteen-year-old girl with an unusual gift, I choose to blog about the position, treatment, and role of women.

Women did have different roles than men. Women’s work was generally done inside the longhouse (a norm that Astrid breaks routinely). Men did the heavier, dirtier work outside.

The Norse culture was extremely violent. However, there was at least one major exception: the treatment of women. Offering any kind of violence to a Norse woman was considered unmanly. Notice, I specified Norse women. The same consideration was not extended to captive women or women encountered on Viking raids. At home, though, a man or boy simply did not raise his hand to a woman. Even accidentally harming a woman was considered shameful.

Women oversaw the finances of the family and sometimes oversaw the farm as well. As widows, they could become wealthy landowners in their own right. Women could easily divorce their husbands and upon divorce, both the dowry and the bride price became her property.

Interestingly, about the only form of magic that was considered good (as opposed to evil) was prophecy–and prophecy was exclusively the province of women.