A recurring topic at TOO is what northwest Europeans were like before Christianity and before modernity. This excerpt is from Lotte Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archeology of Scandinavia, AD 400–1000 (London: Routledge, 2011), 115ff. It paints a picture of a hyper-masculine, completely militarized society in which male sexual penetration was a marker of power, while being penetrated was, for a male, the ultimate insult. Accusing a man of having been sodomized was a grievous accusation, with the same penalty as for murder. Older males lacking the power or ability to penetrate took on the status of women and were even ridiculed by slaves. Women were spoils of warfare and raiding. The implication is that the social ties within the Mannerbunde did not involve homosexual sex, but Hedeager claims that there is evidence that, in some groups at least, attraction to young boys was common.

The Power of Penetration In the Norwegian Gulathings law, outlawry was the penalty if a man accused another of being sannsor∂enn (provably sodomised). Also, full personal compensation must be paid if a person says to another man that he has given birth to a child. The third is if he compares him to a mare, or calls him a bitch or a harlot, or compares him with the female of any kind of animal. … Then he can also kill the man as an outlaw as a payback for those words that I have now spoken, if he takes a witness to them. (Gulathings law 196) … The same accusation is listed in Norwegian laws, that is, the Gulathing law. Both stro∂inn and sor∂inn refer explicitly to the sex act in which a man played the passive role, while the other performed the action of stre∂a or ser∂a, indicating the male role in intercourse. The sexual meaning of ragr instead implied the general condition of being effeminate (Jochens 1998: 74). … Thus, concerning an accusation against somebody (implicitly a man) taking the form of sexual defamation (ní∂), the law not only prohibited it, but the maximum penalty for this crime equated with the penalty for murder. The outrage always demanded revenge and the insult might simply have been meant as a challenge to fight (Meulengracht Sørensen 1992: 199). …

It is commonly accepted among scholars that ní∂ was not a question of biological reality (after all, pregnant and childbearing men are metaphorical constructions); it was instead a sophisticated form of gendered insult, to be equated with the ‘murder’ of someone’s honour. That is why ni∂ has the secondary meaning of death. The conceptualisation of ní∂ is aimed at the person who was suspected of being the object of sexual penetration, whether man, woman, or animal. The masculinity of the practitioner is not the moral problem. In Old Norse society the physical act of penetration had no moral connotations, neither if one man penetrates another, turning his anus into a vagina (and metaphorically making him pregnant), nor if he practised sodomy, called tidelag. What was deeply defamatory, however, was to accuse a man of having being subject to penetration by another man – or a male animal – or of being transformed into a female or a female animal. The ni∂ was subjected to a transformation into ‘female’, not specifically into an animal (Solli 2002: 143). In short, ní∂ is an accusation of unmanliness and softness, that is, the person is argr (ergi, ergjask, ragr, etc.) (Clover 1993: 385; Meulengracht Søre (116) sexual terminology as a mark of identity, although the word may relate to a practice within a fl uid sexual system. … There was nothing in Greek culture – whether in art, law, or cult – which suggested that heterosexuality was natural and homosexuality unnatural. The Greeks regarded male homosexual desire as a natural part of life, and it was solely the differentiation between the active and the passive role in same-sex relations which was of profound importance (Dover 1989). The Gothic people, the Heruli, and the Scythians are all said to have practised pederasty between warriors and boys. However, by slaying a bear or a wild boar as part of an initiation ritual, boys achieved manhood and were no longer the target of male desire (Wolfram 1990: 107f.). The moral distinction that mattered was that between male prostitution and a homosexual ethos – the first prohibited by law (to Athenian citizens), the second regarded as part of nature (Dover 1989). …

Old men became females because they no longer penetrated others: