Vansköpuð börn í norskum og íslenskum kristinrétti miðalda: um barnaútburð á elstu tíð.

BIRTH DEFECTS AND INFANT EXPOSURE IN OLD NORSE AND ICELANDIC CHURCH LAW Despite an absence of contemporary evidence, scholars of ancient Icelandic society have generally agreed that infanticide through exposure was freely permitted in pagan times. The main source of evidence for this is Íslendingabók (the Book of Icelanders), written by the priest Ari Þorgilsson in the period 1122–1133. According to this text, when Christianity was adopted in Iceland at the turn of the first millennium, one of the legal provisions agreed was: “the old laws on child exposure shall remain in force.” These words have been interpreted to indicate that exposing children was unrestricted in pagan times and continued to be so after Christianisation. This article rejects the traditional interpretation, maintaining that the exposure provision actually suggests not that infant exposure was free of restrictions (which would obviate the need for any laws about it) but rather was subject to definite rules and requirements. While these old laws have been lost, the Icelandic and Norse provincial laws of that time were so closely akin that similar approaches to child exposure are likely. The oldest extant Norse laws on child exposure are found in the Christian law of Gulathing, dating to around 1020, and other Norse regional laws. These allow for the exposure or neglect of children born with certain specified deformities. Remarks on the special treatment of children with abnormal appearances are also found in Icelandic Christian law. Because comparable laws on deformed children are not found in texts of Christian law and philosophy from other countries, we can conclude that the manner in which children with birth defects were treated in Norse Christian law was not based on foreign models, but originated in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, one must go back many centuries, as far as pagan Greece and Rome, to find comparable attitudes towards the right of deformed children to live. According to epidemiological estimates, approximately 3% of live-born infants have a visible birth defect, and if the proportion of these birth defects was similar in pagan times, when there was a smaller number of births due to the lower population, there would have been still fewer such deformities present in Icelandic society. Thus the descriptions of birth defects found in old Norse Christian law probably represent knowledge accrued over a long period of time that in all likelihood was originally heathen and was transposed into Christian law. These ancient laws banned exposing healthy infants but allowed exposing the deformed.