Essay on Passive Male Homosexuality in Pre-Christian...

â€Å"The love that dare not speak its name† truly was a mute love in pre-Christian Norse society. The Norse viewed male homosexual intercourse through a curious (by modern American standards) dichotic lens. Similarly to Roman and Greek societies, the Norse attached no great negative stigma or condemnatory connotations to the idea itself of homosexual intercourse. However, the Vikings intensely disapproved of free men taking the passive role in any male-male sexual acts. Norse society regarded passivity in all penetrative intercourse as intrinsically related to unmanly, and therefore feminine, behavior. Thus, any man who participated in this behavior was defamed as less than worthy of the title of ‘man’. Sociolinguistic evidence, contemporary†¦show more content†¦The Old Norse language abounds with extraordinarily negative epithets for men who engage in same-sex intercourse. The Roman historian Tacitus is the earliest author to record in writing such Nors e curses. He explains in his pan-Germanic historical chronicle Germania, that the rather common Norse word argr meant â€Å"slothful and unwarlike and sexually infamous† (Encyclopedia 1156). Tacitus continues on to record that the law demanded that any many who was confirmed to be argr be drowned in a swamp as punishment for his crime. Professor Sà ¸rensen at the University of Odense states, † den arge mand er villig til, disponeret for ellet interesseret i at fungere som den â€Å"kvindlige† part i et seksuelt forhold† [The argr man is willing to, disposed towards or interested in playing out the ‘womanly’ part in sexual relations] (Nà ¸rront Nid 22). This words was so common throughout the Norse world that it has survived in a vestigial form to this day in several languages whose ancestors had extensive contact with the Norse; â€Å"in Finnish and Estonian the loan word argr is a complete inventory of the traits ascribed to the passive-ef feminate homosexual, while in Modern German the word arg means simply ‘bad’† (Encyclopedia 1157). The insult argr, along with two others: stro∂inn and sanssor∂inn, make up the three fullrettisord, â€Å"words whose utterance amounts to a capital