Those poor, poor women. To think that a weekly bath was a huge upgrade…
Don’t worry. The women’s bathing wasn’t any more frequent. The whole thing is nasty
Saturday = Lördag, in Swedish, the origin of the word has the meaning of “water”, but came to mean ~" bathday".
Etymology of laugardagr:
Compound of laug (“bath”) + dagr (“day”), literally “bath day”. The former element is cognate with English lye
Seems crazy to have everyone bathe on the same day… Should have a rotating schedule imo
But then who’s going to scrub your back?
What is the name of the chronicler and the specific text?
Attributed to John of Wallingford (wiki link). There may not be a lot of truth in it.
Self-care is ungodly
They did it all for the nookie.
There’s also the fact that Norse society at the time gave women a lot more power than the societies they raided.
So you’ve got an option, a well kempt man who wears jewelry and believes that marriage is a partnership where the woman has authority in certain aspects, as well as him probably having more money and the ability to protect you. Or you can have a man who thinks bathing is a sin, dressing nicely is vanity, and your job is to pop out more babies, do manual labor, and do whatever he says.
I saw recently that a contributing factor to solidifying the the Orthodox/Catholic schizm was that when Crusaders passed through Constantinople on their way to Jerusalem, they were a bunch of filthy Western rednecks, and everyone was horrified by how terrible they were.
Interesting, because Ahmad ibn Fadlan wrote about dirty vikings: Old Arabic texts describe dirty Vikings
They are the filthiest of all Allah’s creatures: they do not purify themselves after excreting or urinating or wash themselves when in a state of ritual impurity after coitus and do not even wash their hands after food.
Yeah, it’s a scale of clenliness.
- Asians (inc arabs)
– Ritual cleansing multiple times daily - Vikings
– Weekly baths! - Medieval peasants
– IDK, bathing with their pigs monthly?
Before you get mad, remember that shoes are not allowed inside asian homes.
- Asians (inc arabs)
I’m much more pessimistic here.
Generally when the media treats a group of people as rapists, such as “black men defiling our white daughters” it’s usually a cover for a consensual phenomenon. You have to create violence against the men because keeping the women “safe” doesn’t help, since they’ll just escape and flee to their partners.
When the media treats a relationship as that of women being seduced, they’re probably being raped. When you undermine women’s victim narrative and blame them for their rape you make it impossible for them to get help from their partners and communities because everyone will just suspect them of being “seduced”. This way you force women to take steps to avoid or hide their rape, which solves the visible problem with minimal effort, again.
Vikings certainly bathed and groomed better than Englishmen, but when I see things like this I’m immediately suspicious of the intent of the writer.
