@TralliE You're speculating about what a very different people may have thought based largely on what makes sense to us today. As a historian, I try to not indulge in that sort of speculation without a lot of analysis of surviving documents to provide a basis for support. Yes, logically, a man's feelings about his wife would probably shape how he responded to evidence of adultery. But early medieval Norse men probably had very different ideas about what adultery meant than we do. Remember that this is a culture in which a man's reputation for masculinity is extremely important. And we know for a fact that infanticide was quite common in this culture, so I think it's quite likely that a man would in fact expose a child that wasn't his, if only because he didn't want to be responsible for expending the resources to raise another man's child. Your 21st century mindset is distorting your ability to think like a Viking.
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@TralliE You're speculating about what a very different people may have thought based largely on what makes sense to us today. As a historian, I try to not indulge in that sort of speculation without a lot of analysis of surviving documents to provide a basis for support. Yes, logically, a man's feelings about his wife would probably shape how he responded to evidence of adultery. But early medieval Norse men probably had very different ideas about what adultery meant than we do. Remember that this is a culture in which a man's reputation for masculinity is extremely important. And we know for a fact that infanticide was quite common in this culture, so I think it's quite likely that a man would in fact expose a child that wasn't his, if only because he didn't want to be responsible for expending the resources to raise another man's child. Your 21st century mindset is distorting your ability to think like a Viking.