I've read a majority of the Icelandic sagas that have been translated into English, and a good number of them in the original Norse. While casual violence and bloody feuding are frequent ocurrences, I cannot, offhand, recall any accounts of systematized infanticide, female or male. It is well known to scholars of Old Norse that later medieval accounts of the Viking Age, written by Christians, often went out of their way to make the older Pagan societies look bad.

As things currently stand, a number of hypotheses exist to explain the Viking irruption out of their ancestral lands; among them, overpopulation, a climactic downturn, the lack of central authority in the lands they invaded (note...

I've read a majority of the Icelandic sagas that have been translated into English, and a good number of them in the original Norse. While casual violence and bloody feuding are frequent ocurrences, I cannot, offhand, recall any accounts of systematized infanticide, female or male. It is well known to scholars of Old Norse that later medieval accounts of the Viking Age, written by Christians, often went out of their way to make the older Pagan societies look bad.

As things currently stand, a number of hypotheses exist to explain the Viking irruption out of their ancestral lands; among them, overpopulation, a climactic downturn, the lack of central authority in the lands they invaded (note that during this period, Scandinavian countries consolidated into fairly large kingdoms with strong rulers while the rest of Europe remained highly partitioned and weak) and an anti-authoritarian movement that led anti-royalists to resist the centralization of power by packing up and leaving. It was probably a combination of a number of these factors.