What happened to the baby? (Part I of II)

Mothers from all over the world tell stories to one another warning about the menacing dangers of pregnancy and childhood. I hadn’t fully realized, until I myself became pregnant, how much cultural anxiety is directed toward the pregnant woman and her child. Regardless of culture, the pregnant woman is subjected to sometimes highly specific prescriptions of what to eat, behaviors to avoid, and omens to look out for, whether these be advocated by the authority of the medical community or function simply as “old wives tales.”

As my own pregnancy becomes more apparent, I’ve started to notice subtle changes in behavior from the people around me. For one, people are more solicitous of my needs. They smilingly give me “right of way” when passing on the sidewalk. They offer me unsolicited food at the most unusual times, sometimes digging through their bags for a half-eaten package of crackers to push at me. Most importantly, they dole out a fascinating collection of things they’ve heard about anything ranging from predicting child gender to the implications of drinking milk and wearing proper shoes during pregnancy. All of this has, of course, prompted me to reflect on the universal aspects of being “with child” and sent me looking into the history of Norwegian beliefs about this critical period.

One function these legends and beliefs serve is to explain what happens when things go wrong. A failure to thrive, slow-wittedness, or severe deformities were and are often attributed to the amoral prenatal behaviors of the parents or interference from the spirit world. Rumors of changelings, or infants who have been swapped by trolls for one of their own, help to caution new parents to be attentive to their newborns. Association with women of “loose morals” brought threat of diseased and sickly babies. The following legends, taken from Kvideland and Sehmsdorf (1988) represent only a few of these stories.

Pregnancy
Pregnancy is often considered a fragile, vulnerable state for women. In traditional Scandinavian society, this was often expressed by fears that the pregnant woman would be attacked by a wild and hideous creature such as a werewolf or a half-man/half-bear, affecting the outcome of the child. The behavior of the woman herself sometimes brought on these attacks. One legend recorded in Denmark in the late 1800s explains:

If a woman crawls naked through the caul of a foal, she will give birth without any pain, but her firstborn will become a mare or a werewolf (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, 1988, p. 75).

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