8
Traditions preserved in the Landnámabók or Book of the Settlements tell us that the first to set foot on Iceland was a Norwegian named Nadodd who set out for the Faroe Islands and was blown off course and ended up off the east coast of the island. Going ashore in the vicinity of what was later named Reydarfjord, he climbed a mountain, but saw neither smoke nor any other sign of human habitation from the top. On his way back out to sea it began to snow heavily, and he decided to call his discovery Snæland, or ‘Snowland’. Another story credits the discovery to a Swede named Gardar Svavarsson, who was sailing through the Pentland Firth on his way to the Hebrides to claim property inherited by his wife when he too was blown off course. After a cautious circumnavigation of the island he went ashore at a place he called Husavik (‘house point’) and spent the winter there before leaving. He gave the island his own name, Gardarholm or ‘Gardar’s Island’. In another version of the story his mother, a seer, saw the island in a vision and gave Gardar directions on how to get there.1
The first attempt to settle was a small venture led by Floki Vilgerdason, a Norwegian from Rogaland. Before setting out on his voyage Floki is said to have sacrificed three ravens. The Book of the Settlements explains that this was done because at that time ‘sailors in the Northlands had no loadstone’ with which to navigate.2 Floki’s techniques of natural navigation were successful and earned him the nickname ‘Raven’ Floki: ‘When he loosed the first, it flew aft astern; the second flew high into the air, then back to the ship; the third flew straight ahead in the direction in which they found land.’3 Going ashore in Vatnsfjord they found the waters so well stocked with fish and seal that they neglected to make hay in the autumn, an oversight that cost the lives of the sheep and cattle they had taken with them, and put paid to the plan of permanent settlement. At the start of a bitterly cold spring Floki climbed a high mountain and saw in the north a fjord full of drift ice which led him to give the island its third and defining name of Íslandor Iceland. The demands of colonization seem to have been beyond this particular little group, for they delayed their departure until too late in the summer and found themselves driven back and had to spend another winter there, sustained this time by a whale they found washed up on the west bank of the fjord. When they eventually did get back to Norway Floki did not speak of the new land with any enthusiasm.
These sightings and landings probably took place sometime in the 860s. The commencement of the settlement proper is dated by Ari Thorgilsson in the Book of the Icelanders, the earliest written history of Iceland, to 870, ‘. . . when Ivar, son of Ragnar Lothbrok, had St Edmund, king of the Angles, killed’, striking incidental evidence of the significance Edmund’s death had acquired throughout the Christian world by the time of Ari’s writing (1122-33). In the topographical description of Iceland given in theHistoria Norwegie, probably written some time between 1160 and 1175, the author notes its ‘innumer able mountains overlaid with unmelting glaciers’, and that among these rises Mount Hekla, ‘whose whole surface twitches like Etna and when it has shaken with a horrifying earth tremor, it belches up sulphurous fireballs’.4 Analysis of the tephra layers deposited in the terrain by such eruptions has confirmed, to within a year either way, the accuracy of the date given by Ari. Previous to this there are no signs of human habitation in the soil below the landnám or settlement layer.5 Two other tephra layers, the Katla R layer from about 920 and the Eldgjá from about 935, likewise confirm Ari’s statement that within sixty years Iceland was fully settled, and that no significant immigration took place after about 930.
It has been observed that many of the most important actors in Ari’s version of events were his own relatives, and that the book is as much a family history as it is an ecclesiastical or national history.6 Perhaps because his ancestors were not involved he makes no mention of the earlier stories concerning the discovery of the island, and by contrast with other sources he is summary in his account of the arrival of the first permanent settler:
It is said with accuracy that a Norwegian called Ingolf travelled from there [Norway] to Iceland for the first time when Harald Finehair was sixteen years old, and a second time a few years later; he settled in the south in Reykjavik. The place to the east of Minkthakseyr where he first came ashore is called Ingolfshofdi, and the place to the west of Olfossa which he later took possession of is called Ingolfsfell.7
The only other items of information Ari adds about the earliest days of the settlement is that the country was at that time richly forested, evidently in contrast to the state of affairs at the time of his own writing, and that there were Christians living on the island, whom the immigrants called papar, who left ‘because they did not wish to stay here with Heathens’. He writes that they left behind them some of the paraphernalia of Irish Christianity, including the small bells made of iron or bronze that were rung to call monks to prayer, psalters, gospels and other devotional books, and the croziers or staffs that were used as signs of office and as walking sticks.
Dicuil’s Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae, written in about 825, adds background to Ari’s brief and enigmatic observations. Irish monks of the time practised a peculiar form of devotion known as peregrinatio which involved seclusion in remote and wild places, far from the temptations of the world, in search of mystical communion with God. Skellig Michael, off the Kerry coast, where in 824 Viking raiders carried off the hermit Éitgal, was an example of such a retreat. Dicuil relates that some of the most devout of these Irish Christians made their way north in small boats as far as Iceland (which, following Roman usage, he calls Thule), to spend the spring and summer months there. Still others made the shorter journey of two summer days and a night’s sailing north of Ireland to what were almost certainly the Faroe Islands. Dicuil writes that monks from Ireland had been using these islands as retreats for about 100 years up to the time of his writing, but that now, ‘because of Norse pirates, they are empty of anchorites, but full of innumerable sheep and a great many different kinds of seafowl’.8
Among the Immrama, the collective name given to these tales of intrepid Irish monks, are accounts of the voyages made by St Brendan, which include his description of ‘a great hellish mountain which appeared full of clouds and smoke about its summit . . . And the brink of the island was of an appalling height, so that they could scarcely see the top of it, and it appeared full of firebrands and red sparks, and was as steep as a wall.’9 These vivid images might well describe a volcanic eruption witnessed by Brendan, possibly of Katla, currently shrouded beneath the immense glacier Myrdalsjokull, on the south coast of Iceland.
No archaeological evidence has been found so far to confirm Ari’s claim of an early Christian presence in Iceland, and the existence of similar traditions concerning the Faroes has led to suggestions that it is a topos, introduced by medieval Church historians to establish Christ as the spiritual occupant of the islands even before the arrival of the Heathen settlers.10 Crosses carved on the walls of man-made caves in southern Iceland, like those at Kverkarhellir and Seljalandshellir, seem to bear a stylistic resemblance to crosses from Argyll, the Hebrides and the Shetlands, leading some archaeologists to suggest a possible link between the stories told by Ari and Dicuil, and monks from the pre-Viking Age Christian settlements associated with Iona engaged in peregrinatio, though the link remains speculative.11
One redaction of the Book of the Icelanders supplements the tale of the finding of the bells, books and staffs with the information that these were found ‘in Papey and in Papyli’, the former an island off the east coast of Iceland, the latter a region in the south-east of the country. Such place-names are based on the word papar and derive from Latin papa via the Irish pabba or pobba. The same pap element occurs in Scotland as Papil in the north of Shetland (Unst), Pabbay in the Outer Hebrides (Barra), and Papadil in the Inner Hebrides (Rum), as well as on the Isle of Man and the Faroes. The Historia Norwegie tells us that, as in Iceland, monks were living on the Orkneys before the Vikings came and that they, too, left books behind them when they fled the Vikings, though here the author makes the surreal claim that these identified their former owners as followers of Judaism from Africa.12 Ari tells us that the monks left Iceland because of an aversion to living among Heathens, but it is inherently unlikely that they would deliberately have left behind their bells and books and staffs. Ari’s story is possibly a euphemistic glossing-over of the fact that these too, like so many other members of Christian communities on remote islands around Britain, were simply killed by the first wave of Heathens to arrive.13
In the Saga of Harald Finehair, Snorri nicely weaves together the three main strands of his story: the tale of how Harald acquired his after-name; an account of the first unification of Norway; and an explanation of when and why the first settlers emigrated to Iceland.14 The first element is a love-story, for it seems Harald was attracted to the daughter of a local Hordaland king, a girl named Gyda, and sent his men to ask if she would become his mistress. Gyda replied that a petty king like Harald was not good enough for her: why could he not do as Gorm in Denmark or as Erik in Swedish Uppsala had done and raise himself up to be king of a whole country? Only then would she consider his proposal. The returning messengers assumed the king would simply take the girl by force. Instead her spirit and ambition inspired him. Snorri puts the following words into his mouth: ‘I make this vow, and the god who made me and rules all things shall be my witness, that never shall my hair be cut or combed till I have possessed myself of all Norway inscot, dues and rule - or else die.’15 Little is known of the details of Harald’s subsequent campaign to unify Norway and so make himself worthy of Gyda’s love, but the violence involved precipitated a mass emigration to Iceland, led by chieftains who saw no benefit to themselves in the introduction of a monarchy.
Among the scholars who created the idea of the Viking Age towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was natural to relate the high concentration of Viking Age monuments found in Vestfold, on the western side of the Oslo fjord - like the sumptuous Oseberg and Gokstad burials and the stately field of mounds at Borre - to the impression given by Snorri in the saga that Vestfold was the seat of royal power from which Harald’s campaign began, and the cradle of modern Norway. However, Harald’s only certain connection to Vestfold is a reference, in Torbjorn Hornklovi’s contemporary poem ‘Haraldskvæthi’, or ‘the Lay of Harald’, to Halvdan the Black, Harald’s father, as a king from the east of Norway. In recent years the story has been rewritten by Norwegian historians and archaeologists in a way that reveals much more clearly the logical connection between the first unification and the settlement of Iceland. One of the main sources believed to have been used by Snorri for the genealogies that led him to place Harald in the east of Norway was the ‘Ynglinga tal’ or ‘Genealogy of the Ynglings’, a poem by Tjodolf of Hvin believed to date from about 900. In 1991 the Norwegian historian Claus Krag analysed the ‘Ynglingatal’ and found that its intellectual world was incompatible with composition by a ninth-century Heathen Scandinavian, and much more credibly the creation of a Christian Norwegian or Icelandic historian of the twelfth century. He concluded that, rather than being a contemporary Norwegian source from about 900, the poem had evolved over a considerable period of time before reaching the form in which Snorri used it, and that it probably reached this final form in Iceland, perhaps as late as 1200.16 Krag’s arguments are widely, though not universally, accepted.17 The location of Harald’s seat of power in Vestfold had always contained anomalies which the diminished credibility of ‘Ynglingatal’ as a source went some way towards resolving. Norwegians now generally accept that the heart of Harald’s territory and the starting-point of his unification was not Vestfold, but Avaldsnes on the south-western coast of Norway, in Rogaland. Archaeological excavations currently being carried out close to the site of the Olav Church in Avaldsnes, on the island of Karmøy near Haugesund, seem poised to confirm this new scenario. Finds made in three different locations, including a layer of stones that was probably flooring, two spinning weights and a griddle for baking, identify the site as a large, Viking Age estate. A trial shaft dug in the car park by the church revealed a substantial post-hole dated to 900-1030 and so within the period of Harald Finehair’s reign. A burnt post to the south of the car park has been dated to 690-840: all the datable finds from the royal palace and its environs have been identified as Viking Age.
It was hardly a country Harald was fighting to gain control over, more a coastal route; the term ‘Nordvegr’ or ‘the north way’, used by the trader Ottar for his home-country, implies as much. A decisive battle in the campaign was fought at sea off Hafrsfjord, not far from Stavanger. It is traditionally dated to 879, though many historians prefer a date closer to about 890 as this better accounts for a particularly intense period of emigrations to Iceland between 890 and 910, with refugees that responded to Harald’s campaign as to a short-period pressure that, while it lasted, created an emergency.18 Snorri tells us:
King Harald set the law wherever he won land, that he was possessed fully of all the land by odal right and he made all bonders, great and small, pay him a land tax. Over each shire he set a jarl who should administer the law and justice in the land and gather the fines and land dues, and every jarl should have a third of the tribute for living and costs. Every jarl should have under him four or more district chiefs, and each of them should have an income from the land of twenty marks. Each jarl should muster for the king’s army sixty warriors and each district chief [herse] twenty men. But so much had King Harald increased the tribute and land taxes, that his jarls had greater incomes than the kings had had aforetime, and when that was learned in Trondheim, many great men sought King Harald and became his men.19
It may well be imagined that those who found themselves excluded from Harald’s new aristocracy of earls, and paying rather than collecting taxes, had little liking for their first taste of the monarchical way and felt the desire to leave and make a fresh start elsewhere. Those in the south-west of the country would have felt the desire most pressingly, and it was from this region that the majority of Iceland’s earliest settlers came. As we saw earlier, Harald’s determined campaign to make himself monarch of all Norway was the reason given in the Orkneyinga Saga for the settlement of the Orkneys and Shetland, from where dispossessed and discontented chieftains harried the coastline of their former home so frequently that Harald moved against them, leading a fleet across the North Sea in about 890 and asserting his dominance over the islands. Snorri writes that Harald’s authority at this point even extended to the Isle of Man, and quotes verse by Torbjørn Hornklofi that refers to his fighting in Scotland.
At this point in his narrative Snorri ties up his tale of Harald’s after-name. Having met Gyda’s challenge and now king of a unified Norway, he sent men to claim his prize. The romance of it all is diluted by the fact that, while waiting for her, he had taken a number of other wives and concubines and Gyda turned out to be only one of at least ten women who bore him sons, sixteen of them in some sources, twenty in others.20 She did not even have the honour of finally cutting and combing his hair. That went to Ragnvald, earl of Møre, whom Snorri also credits with coining the king’s new after-name, turning Harald Thickhair into Harald Finehair. The gesture of combing is peculiarly appropriate, for across the geographical and temporal spread of Viking Age culture the single item most commonly found in graves remains, as we have sometimes seen earlier, the humble comb.
Natural factors also played their part in the settlement, in particular the serendipity of an interlude of climate change, known to climatologists as the Medieval Warm Period or Little Optimum, that lasted from about 800 to 1200 and made these centuries among the warmest of the past 8,000 years, opening up previously inaccessible regions of the northern seas to the intrepid sailor.21 Ottar made no mention to Alfred of Harald’s campaign, but then Hålogoland may have been too far north for him to have noticed its effects. As we noted earlier, he stressed to Alfred the poor quality of the farming land in Norway: ‘whatever of it can be used for grazing or ploughing all lies along the coast. Even that is very rocky in some places, and wild mountains lie to the east and above, all along the cultivated land.’22 To those who struggled to eke a living out of this inhospitable soil, the lure of free land in an uninhabited country not too far away must have been strong, and made even stronger by persistent mild and stable weather all across the region. By the 870s the amount of pack-ice in the waters of the North Atlantic had fallen dramatically and ice conditions around Iceland, Greenland and Labrador remained unusually favourable for voyaging throughout the Viking Age.23 The analysis of ice samples obtained by boring to great depths, in the extreme case of north Greenland to a depth of 3,085 metres, and the snow that fell 125,000 years ago, provides an almost year-by-year record of the degree of severity of successive winters and, on a larger scale, of the progress of successive ice-ages.24 The ‘ice-thermometer’ readings suggest that Floki Vilgerdason and his would-be settlers were unfortunate enough to reach Iceland at the end of a run of cooler decades in the middle of the Medieval Warm Period. The tale of his sighting of an Icelandic fjord ‘filled with ice’ is about the last time mention is made of sea-ice around the coast of Iceland for the next 300 years and we do not get reports of drift ice in the Icelandic annals until the thirteenth century.25
In Norway the warmer climate led to the clearance, settlement and cultivation of valleys and hillsides over 100 metres above levels that had not been attempted for over 1,000 years. Even the bizarre, volcanic landscape of Iceland would have looked fertile and inviting. As Ari informed us, at the time of the settlement, Iceland was ‘covered with woods between the mountains and the seashore’, and the first settlers would have been heartened to find the sedges and grasses and dwarf woodlands of birch and willow familiar to them from Norway. Somewhere between 40 and 75 per cent of the total area seems to have been available as pasture, in stark contrast to today’s figure of 20 per cent.26 Settlers were able to grow barley and oats, although animal husbandry, fishing and bird-trapping remained the main sources of food.
The Book of the Settlements is a full and often dramatic account of the colonization of Iceland. Based on a lost original from the early twelfth century it contains the names of over 3,000 people and 1,400 places.27 After Floki’s false start, the first permanent settlers are named as two Norwegian foster-brothers, Ingolf and Leif, Viking adventurers who fell out with some of their associates and killed them. A court awarded their estates to the family of their victims, and the brothers decided to make a fresh start elsewhere. A preliminary reconnaissance trip established that the south of Iceland seemed more inviting than the north, and on a date traditionally given as 874 they set sail.
The author contrasts the approaches of the brothers to the great adventure: Leif was the one who ‘would never sacrifice’; Ingolf ‘offered up extensive sacrifices and sought auguries of his destiny’ before departing.28 As Floki had done, he made use of natural means to aid his decision-making and on first sighting land threw his high-seat pillars overboard and swore to make his home at the place where they came ashore. They were not found immediately and Ingolf built a temporary home at Ingolfshofdi or ‘Ingolf’s Head’. Leif settled at Hjorleifshofdi. Each year slaves went out to look for Ingolf’s pillars.
In the meantime, Leif’s slaves had risen up, killed him and his family and abducted their women. In the spring of the second year Ingolf’s men came across the dead bodies and returned with the news to Ingolfshofdi. The author puts a sorrowing response into Ingolf’s mouth: ‘This was a sorry end for a brave man, that thralls should be the death of him; but so it goes, I see, with such as are not prepared to offer up sacrifice.’29 It is almost as though this Christian-era writer believed Heathen piety to be better than no piety at all. Ingolf’s devout nature was rewarded when, in the third year of searching, his posts were finally washed ashore. He kept his word and moved his farm to the location indicated by his gods.
In the Book of the Icelanders Ari gives special prominence to four main settlers as founding fathers and mothers: Rollaug, a son of Ragnvald, that earl of Møre who finally gave Harald his haircut; Ketilbjørn Ketilsson; Aud, the daughter of Ketil Flatnose; and Helgi the Lean, the son of Eyvind the Easterner. Ari stresses the Norwegian origins of each of them, ignoring the fact that Rollaug’s family were earls in Shetland and Orkney, that Aud spent much of her adult life in Dublin and Caithness and arrived in Iceland from the Hebrides, and that Helgi’s maternal grandfather was an Irish king, Helgi himself having been raised in the Hebrides and Ireland. In this way Ari, and Snorri after him, by explaining the settlement solely as the result of Harald’s tyranny, both intend to convey an impression of the aristocratic origins of the new community. Even so, there are hints in the sagas that emigration to Iceland was regarded, by some, as a soft option. When Rollaug asked for the succession to the earldom of the Orkneys, his father Ragnvald was categorical in his rejection: ‘You may not be earl, you have no disposition for war. The path that you must follow leads rather to Iceland.’30 Iceland is surprisingly poor in archaeological remains from the Viking Age, but the chieftains’ graves that have been found lack monumentality and are poorly furnished by comparison with those from Norway. Only five boat-graves have been discovered, and in all cases the coffins were small rowing-boats.31 The likely explanation is that the Icelandic chieftains who cut such proud figures in the later Family Sagas came originally from modest farming backgrounds, and that the literary sources have been prone to glamorize their status prior to emigration.32 The compendious Book of the Settlements gives what is clearly a more accurate picture of the mixed origins of the settlers than Ari, without disturbing the fundamental premise that most of them came originally from western Norway.
At least, most of the male settlers did. A study of the mitochondrial DNA of Icelandic women carried out in 2001 found that it was most closely related to Welsh and British mitochondrial DNA in some 63 per cent of the samples. A parallel study of the Y-chromosomes of a group of Icelandic men showed that about 80 per cent of them were of Norse origin, with the remainder tracing their descent to the British Isles.33 The likely explanation for the imbalance is that the women came as slaves and concubines of the men, having been taken from their homelands in Viking raids.
King Harald initially tried to extend his authority to Iceland by sponsoring the claim of Uni, son of the Gardar who was one of the first discoverers of Iceland, to be his earl there. When he tried to press this claim Uni was ostracized by the other settlers and presently killed.34 The rejection of Harald was not universal, however. The first settlers to arrive had taken large, even exorbitant claims, and the Book of the Settlements tells us that a second apparent attempt at interference by Harald, when he tried to set limits to the size of claims that could be made, was actually in response to a plea from frustrated late arrivals for the authoritative regulation of such an important matter.35 It was a potentially dangerous precedent, and must have brought home to the Icelanders the need to take stock of their situation and create effective leadership of their own that would satisfy the majority and reduce the possibility of the aggrieved appealing for help to Norway.
Their solution was to adapt the principle of government by local assembly or thing, familiar to them from Norway in the days before Harald Finehair. The island was divided into a number of regional institutions called goðorð, each under the control of a chieftain called a goði (plural goðar). Normally, but not inevitably, a goði was the leader of the people living within his goðorð, who were known as his thingmen; but a farmer was not bound to commit himself to the protection of his local goði if he did not choose to do so, and a goði’s supporters or thingmen could be spread over a wide area. A goðorð was the property of the individual goði. It could be bought, sold, borrowed and inherited. Initially the number of these institutions was set at thirty-six. Later reforms increased it to thirty-nine and then to forty-eight. This was possible since it seems that, in the early years, there were more chieftains than there were goðorð, owing to the flexible nature of the office.36 In return for a thingman manifesting his authority when called upon to do so, the goði offered protection and support in disputes in which his thingman became involved. The larger the goðorð, the larger the force the goði could put into the field in any contentious matter requiring that he support a thingman.
Legal disputes and matters of common concern were taken up each spring at local meetings of the thing. The earliest such assembly to be created was probably that at Kjalarnes, in the south-west of Iceland, where the goði was Thorstein Ingolfsson, a son of the first settler, Ingolf. Another was Thorolf Mostrarskegg’s assembly at Thorsnes, on Breidaford, which was ringed about with Thorolf’s injunctions forbidding men to look on Helgafell, or the ‘Holy Mountain’, with an unwashed face, and requiring them to leave the assembly grounds for the privacy of a nearby skerry when answering the call of nature.37 The Landnámabók enlarges on the sacral aspect of the goði’s obligations at thing meetings: he must ensure that
A ring of two ounces or more should be on the stall in each principal hof [temple], each goði should wear that ring on his arm at all established assemblies in which he himself should participate, and redden it beforehand in gore from the blood of the beast he personally sacrificed there. Everyone who needed to perform legal duties there at court should previously swear an oath on that ring.38
By 930, with the available land taken, an awareness of Iceland as a country and of themselves as no longer settlers but Icelanders had arisen among the farmers. This manifested itself in the desire for an assembly that would serve the needs of the entire population. It is thought the decision to establish such an institution may have been taken at the Kjalarnes thing.39 This general assembly, the althing, convened annually for two weeks in late June at Thingvellir, or ‘the Assembly Plain’, a dramatic open-air site on the northern shore of a lake in the south-west of the country. The althing and the first Icelandic law code probably came into being at about the same time. Ari tells us that ‘when Iceland had been settled widely, an Easterner called Ulfljot first brought laws out here from Norway (Teit told us) and they were subsequently called Ulfljot’s laws’.40 Ulfljot’s laws ‘were for the most part modelled on the laws of the Gulathing’, says Ari, a natural choice of model, given the west Norwegian origins of the majority of the male settlers. The oldest surviving version of the Gulathing code is the Codex Rantzovianus, dated to about 1250, and comparisons of this with the early tenth-century treaties drawn up between the Kievan Rus and Constantinople preserved in the Russian Primary Chroniclereveal similarities in the regulation of certain practices, suggesting that parts, at least, of the Gulathing code date from the early 900s.41
The althing’s presiding officer was the Lawspeaker, a man with an approved reputation for wisdom and a lawyer well versed in the technicalities of the law. He was elected for a period of three years and could be re-elected. It may well be that Ulfljot himself was the first Lawspeaker, since the most important duty of the office was to recite a third part of the law code each year, addressing the assembly from a prominent natural pulpit known as the Law Rock perched on a hillside above the site. Attendance at these annual recitations was mandatory for goðar, who also sat on the althing’s legislative body, known as the lögrétta. Another of the Lawspeaker’s duties was to inform the assembly of any new laws passed by the lögrétta. He was the assembly’s legal oracle and his advice would be sought on problems or disputes over the interpretation of the law as they arose.
We know little of the organization of the althing and of the content of the law code prior to the reforms of the 960s, which Ari describes in Chapter 5 of the Book of the Icelanders. The first laws were not recorded until 1117-18, and the overriding impression conveyed by the collection of early laws, compiled in the middle of the thirteenth century and known as Grágás, or ‘Grey Goose’, is of a staggering attachment to procedural complexity.42 The spirit that invests these, and other Viking Age law codes generally, is more readily grasped. As we noted in an earlier chapter, the Viking Age conception of law differed from the Roman conception in the degree to which it was based on a communal rather than an individual response to law-breaking, and the compulsory involvement of members of the community in the processes of confession, arrest and punishment. The law was so intrinsically a part of communal life in Iceland that a man who was not ‘in thing’ with a goði did not even have a legal existence.43
The slaves who were bought or captured and taken out to Iceland by the settlers had a legal existence, but only as the property of their owner, on a par with his cattle. Whether slavery was imported as an economic necessity, or was a culturally conditioned import from the old country, remains a matter of debate. The ‘Rigsthula’, a poem dated as early as the tenth century by some scholars and as late as the thirteenth by others, and thought variously to originate in Ireland, Iceland and Norway, provides a fatalistic anthropology of Viking Age Scandinavian society, though the uncertainty about its provenance means that its source value remains provisional.44 It describes how Heimdall, the watchman among the Aesir, under the name Ríg, visits three households in turn and in each has sex with the woman of the house. The first is a great-grandmother, named Edda. Nine months later she gives birth to the first slave, a swarthy, rough-skinned child, coarse-fingered and scabby-faced, with a crooked back and big feet. When he grows up he marries a knock-kneed woman with a hooked nose and dirty feet. They give birth to numerous children whose names, such as Stumpy, Smelly, Horse-Fly, Foul, Lump, Coarse, Brawler, reflect their destinies as the slaves of the world. Ríg’s remaining unions are with the successively younger Amma (grandmother), on whom he fathers the first of the free yeomen, and Móthir (mother), from whom are descended the race of kings. The point of the divine origin of the three classes is not that all are fundamentally equal but that class divisions are divinely ordained and immutable.45
Under Viking Age Scandinavian law, slaves, whether thræll (male) or ambátt (female), were property before they were people. Early Viking Age societies answered any unease that might have surrounded the institution by the cultivation of a circular logic that showed slaves to be lesser beings, whose inherent contemptibility was demonstrated by the fact that they had failed to prevent themselves from becoming slaves. For Ingolf, the special tragedy of his brother Leif’s death was the humiliation of having been killed by slaves. Among the laws of the Swedish Västergötland was a provision that, in the event of such an abomination taking place, no credit at all must be given to the slave as the killer of a free man. The rigidity of the codification was complete: in Egils Saga a slave who dares to treat a free man as an equal by challenging him to a fight is killed while bending to tie his shoelaces. Codes of honourable behaviour simply did not apply between the free and the enslaved.46
It required a great cultural effort to preserve the lowly status of the slaves, and the echoes of this sounded on into the era of Christianity and the written word in Iceland. The Book of the Settlements is careful to tell us that when Ingolf caught up with Leif’s killers, hiding out on the Westmann Islands, he surprised them in the ignoble act of eating. Nor did they stay to fight but panicked, scattered and ran, some jumping to their deaths over a cliff. In the Family Sagas, dealing with events between about 930 and 1030, slaves feature only incidentally, and then usually as stock figures of fun or villains. Most are male, reflecting perhaps the fact that the slave population was controlled by the practice of leaving infant females out to die. In the Saga of Gisli, Gisli has a slave named Thord whose after-name is ‘the Coward’. The author tells us that he had ‘as much sense as he had spirit, for he had none of either’.47 When, in Egils Saga, the old Viking decides to spite his family by burying his wealth he gets two slaves to carry the chest for him. Once the digging is done and the treasure is buried he kills them. Egil is old and blind by this time, and it is unnecessary for the sagaman to point out to his listeners that only slaves would be stupid enough to allow themselves to be killed by such a man. In any event, it was not illegal for a man to kill his own slaves - all Egil had to do afterwards was announce the deaths for that to be the end of the matter. Arnkel meets his death in the Eyrbyggja Saga because his slave is so preoccupied with the haymaking he forgets the instructions he has been given to send for help.48
Perversely, the absence of a fully human status sometimes worked to the benefit of the slave. Under the Gulathing law, a slave who accompanied a free man in a robbery had no guilt in the matter, since ‘the man who steals with another man’s slave steals by himself’. And a remarkable legal exemption in Icelandic law stated that: ‘A thrall has the right to kill on account of his wife, even though she is a bondmaid. But a free man is not allowed to kill on account of a bondmaid, even though she is his woman.’49 The children of slaves were also slaves; where only the mother was a slave, the child took the social status of the father. The law also showed occasional glimpses of humanity: a slave who was physically injured was allowed to keep a third of the compensation paid to his owner for the damage to his ‘property’.
There were less extreme forms of slavery than outright ownership. Debtors unable to meet their debt could work it off by entering the service of their creditor for an agreed period of time with no other reward than the cancelling of the debt. And for the very poor, an arrangement existed whereby one man could hand over himself and all he owned to another, in return for the promise of being looked after for the rest of his life. Another option was to hand over a child, and in certain circumstances a petty thief could be sentenced to become the slave of his victim.50 As we noted earlier, the right of an owner to kill his slave was sometimes used to sacrifice someone to accompany a dead master into the grave. Even this was too much familiarity for some: the ghost of a settler buried with his slave at Asmundarleidi was graceless enough to complain so bitterly about the company that the mound was opened and the slave removed.
Alone in this berth of stones I lie
In the sea-king’s raven’s hold.
No press of men on the decking.
On the waves’ steed I live.
Better for the battle-skilled fighter
Is space than this low companion.51
The sea beast is my command.
Long will that stand in man’s memory.
To a modern reader, a striking feature of the Icelandic Family Sagas is the almost complete absence of any expression of wonder or curiosity about the new environment, certain features of which must have struck the settlers as very different from anything familiar to them in the old country: erupting volcanoes; lava fields that glowed in the night; sea-water washing across black sands; hot thermal springs, spouting geysers and steaming solfataras. Perhaps the novelty of it had worn off by the time the sagas were written down. The best-known exception to this apparent indifference to natural beauty is a scene in Njals Saga in which Gunnar of Hlidarendi rides down to the ship that will take him away from Iceland after he has been sentenced to three years in exile as an outlaw. He is accompanied by his brother Kolskeggur, who has received the same sentence:
They rode down to Wood River. There Gunnar’s horse stumbled and he leaped from the saddle. Glancing up toward the slope and his farm at Hlidarendi he said: ‘How beautiful the slope is! It has never seemed so beautiful before, with its ripening grain and new-mown hay. I am going to ride back home and not go abroad.’
Kolskeggur goes on alone to the waiting ship, but Gunnar rides back home. Shortly afterwards, he meets his death. One of many possible interpretations of the scene might be that an aesthetic appreciation of the landscape was not only a luxury but a dangerous luxury. For the first settlers the land was something to be cleared and used. The landscape was a route to be forced and conquered, not a subject for contemplation. The description in Hrafnkels Saga of Eyvind’s flight across Flotsdal moor, with Hrafnkel in pursuit, vividly conveys its harsh and refractory nature.52 In a brief section on the topography of Iceland in the Historia Norwegie, from the second half of the twelfth century, the author notes how wool or cloth that has been left in the waters of certain springs will turn to ‘stone’ overnight; and he includes a dramatic account of an underwater volcanic eruption. But it is not until the thirteenth century, and the Norwegian Konungs skuggsjá (King’s Mirror), a didactic work in the form of a dialogue between a father and son, that we get an extended insight into how the medieval mind regarded phenomena such as volcanoes, glaciers, the aurora borealis and the thermal springs. As late as the source is, it comes well before the spread of scientific rationalism and probably sounds an echo of past wonderment more accurately than it predicts future explanations:
Son: What do you think of the extraordinary fire which rages constantly in that country? Does it rise out of some natural peculiarity of the land, or can it be that it has its origin in the spirit world? And what do you think about those terrifying earthquakes that can occur there, or those marvellous lakes, or the ice which covers all the higher levels?
Father: As to the ice that is found in Iceland, I am inclined to believe that it is a penalty which the land suffers for lying so close to Greenland; for it is to be expected that severe cold would come thence, since Greenland is ice-clad beyond all other lands. Now since Iceland gets so much cold from that side and receives but little heat from the sun, it necessarily has an over-abundance of ice on the mountain ridges. But concerning the extraordinary fires which burn there, I scarcely know what to say, for they possess a strange nature. [ . . . ]
I am also disposed to believe that certain bodies of water in Iceland must be of the same dead nature as the fire that we have described. For there are springs which boil furiously all the time both winter and summer. At times the boiling is so violent that the heated water is thrown high into the air. But whatever is laid near the spring at the time of spouting, whether it be cloth or wood or anything else that the water may touch when it falls down again, will turn to stone. This seems to lead to the conclusion that this water must be dead, seeing that it gives a dead character to whatever it sprinkles and moistens; for the nature of stone is dead. But if the fire should not be dead but have its origin in some peculiarity of the country, the most reasonable theory as to the formation of the land seems to be that there must be many veins, empty passages, and wide cavities in its foundations. At times it may happen that these passages and cavities will be so completely packed with air, either by the winds or by the power of the roaring breakers, that the pressure of the blast cannot be confined, and this may be the origin of those great earthquakes that occur in that country. Now if this should seem a reasonable or plausible explanation, it may be that the great and powerful activity of the air within the foundations of the earth also causes those great fires to be lit and to appear, which burst forth in various parts of the land. [ . . . ]
Father: I have no doubt that there are places of torment in Iceland even in places where there is no burning; for in that country the power of frost and ice is as boundless as that of fire. There are those springs of boiling water which we have mentioned earlier. There are also ice-cold streams which flow out of the glaciers with such violence that the earth and the neighbouring mountains tremble; for when water flows with such a swift and furious current, mountains will shake because of its vast mass and overpowering strength. And no men can go out upon those river banks to view them unless they bring long ropes to be tied around those who wish to explore, while farther away others sit holding fast the rope, so that they may be ready and able to pull them back if the turbulence of the current should make them dizzy.
Later the father attempts to satisfy his son’s curiosity on the subject of the aurora borealis, another phenomenon of nature we might expect to find referred to frequently in the saga literature but in fact do not find at all:
Father: But these northern lights have this peculiar nature, that the darker the night is, the brighter they seem; and they always appear at night but never by day, most frequently in the densest darkness and rarely by moonlight. In appearance they resemble a vast flame of fire viewed from a great distance. It also looks as if sharp points were shot from this flame up into the sky; these are of uneven height and in constant motion, now one, now another darting highest; and the light appears to blaze like a living flame. While these rays are at their highest and brightest, they give forth so much light that people out of doors can easily find their way about and can even go hunting, if need be. Where people sit in houses that have windows, it is so light inside that all within the room can see each other’s faces. The light is very changeable. Sometimes it appears to grow dim, as if a black smoke or a dark fog were blown up among the rays; and then it looks very much as if the light were overcome by this smoke and about to be quenched. But as soon as the smoke begins to grow thinner, the light begins to brighten again; and it happens at times that people think they see large sparks shooting out of it as from glowing iron which has just been taken from the forge. But as night declines and day approaches, the light begins to fade; and when daylight appears, it seems to vanish entirely.
Finally the father describes the mineral-rich ‘ale-springs’:
Father: . . . There is still another marvel that men wonder at. It is reported that in Iceland there are springs which men call ale-springs. They are so called because the water that runs from them smells more like ale than water; and when one drinks of it, it does not fill as other water does, but is easily digested and goes into the system like ale. There are several springs in that country that are called ale-springs; but one is the best and most famous of all; this one is found in the valley called Hitardal. It is told about this spring, or the water flowing from it, that it tastes exactly like ale and is very abundant. It is also said that if drunk to excess, it goes into one’s head. If a house is built over the spring it will turn aside from the building and break forth somewhere outside. It is further held that people may drink as much as they like at the spring; but if they carry the water away, it will soon lose its virtue and is then no better than other water, or not so good. Now we have discussed many and even trifling things, because in that country they are thought marvellous; and I cannot recall anything else in Iceland that is worth mentioning.53
The rapidity of the colonization of Iceland owed much to the fact that there were no natives to subdue. Apart from the arctic fox there were no indigenous wild animals for the settlers to compete with either. Everywhere else the Scandinavians of the Viking Age gained a foothold - in Ireland, in England, in the Scottish islands, in Normandy, and later in Greenland and Vinland - they had to fight for it. Their own courage and willingness to adapt played a large part in the success of the venture. So did the elevation of law among them to an almost spiritual prominence, which kept the temptations of indiscipline at bay. The Icelanders were proud of their law. Iceland was as much vár log - ‘the domain of our law’ - as it was a location in the remote North Atlantic.54 An enduring peculiarity of this pride was that they did not complement the legislative and judiciary powers they had awarded themselves with administrative or executive authority. A verdict handed down in a court of law left the implementation of it to the successful litigant. The practical result was that might rather than right remained the deciding factor. The omission, if such it was, of an executive structure is in contrast to the formalism and sophistication of the legal procedures and has sometimes been seen as containing within itself, even at this early stage in its development, the seeds of the eventual collapse of the Icelandic free state over 300 years later.55