exposing newborn babies in Iceland

What the ghost of the dead baby does isn't paralleled in any Anglo-American version I know.

---

Carried Out (NÁ)

3 Dec 2011
I’m writing a book. I’ve written one before so you don’t have to roll your eyes. If you’re not rolling your eyes, clearly you haven’t met enough novelists.

The book is a ghost story and therefore I have been doing a lot of research into Iceland’s relationship with the “the other side.”

People get so fixated on the whole “elf” business that they tend to neglect Iceland’s rich “spectral” culture. Maybe it was just my family but there was always talk of ghosts at my house growing up.

As a hardened atheist and skeptic I am of course fascinated by this and this past week I have been reading about a particularly awful part of Icelandic history and the surrounding ghost lore.

I’ve been reading about útburður. It’s hard to translate; if I were to try I would say: “left out”.

In the days before Iceland had birth control and was astoundingly impoverished, women would at times carry out newborn babies and leave them outside to die.

This happened for a number of reasons but the most common reason was likely the fact that the women simply did not have the means to feed the baby or because they had been raped.

Sometimes it was because the child was a product of incest, disabled, already quite ill or the aftermath of an out-of-wedlock affair.

The practice of “carrying out” newborns eventually became illegal and women were punished by law if suspected of having committed the crime. In order to discourage women further, a kind of supernatural horror lore was born out of leaving babies out to die of exposure.

The most famous story is—as many stories in the past were—a song. The song is called “Móðir mín í kví kví”, or as my rough translation would lead you to believe: “My Mother in the Pen”.

You can hear a very impressive version of the song here and as you listen, I’ll give you the back story.

Once there was a young girl who became pregnant. She didn’t want the child for whatever reason (to my knowledge the reason was not specified) and therefore wrapped the newborn up in rags and left the baby out to die.

Some time later she was working on a farm, or more specifically in a pen, and she started to fret about what to wear to an upcoming dance.

This is where the story gets really fricking creepy.

Suddenly the corpse of her left-out baby wanders in singing the song which goes like this (excuse my clumsy translation):

My mother in the pen, pen
Don't you worry for, for
I will lend you these rags of mine
Rags of mine to dance in
I will lend you these rags of mine
Rags of mine to dance in.

Upon seeing this, the “vain” young girl who worried about what to wear to the dance was overcome with grief and guilt and then lost her mind.

This, of course, is just one in a number of stories designed to horrify. They were most likely based on facts and then used as ammunition to scare the crap out of girls who might be having premarital sex.

The problem with this, of course, is that these women weren’t vain, or evil. These women were perhaps raped and ran the risk of social exclusion for having an illegitimate child or so poor that they would either starve to death themselves or had to watch their babies starve to death anyway.

The worst part is that reaching out for help wasn’t exactly a viable option either. The community around these women, most likely as poor and hungry as they were, condemned ómagi (pauper children) and considered the babies untouchable anyway.

This is a dark part of Icelandic history and it makes for one hell of a scary ghost story. Of course this is just one of many more I am bound to stumble across in the research for my book.

Nanna Árnadóttir – Nanna.arnadottir@gmail.com
https://twitter.com/#!/NannaArnadottir