Iceland Saga E-Book

Magnus Magnusson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 444

Beschreibung

Magnus Magnusson relates the world-famous Icelandic sagas to the spectacular living landscapes of today, taking the reader on a literary tour of the mountains, valleys, and fjords where the heroes and heroines of the sagas lived out their eventful lives. He also tells the story of the first Viking settler, Ingolfur Anarson.

Leseprobe

ICELAND SAGA

ICELAND SAGA

MAGNUS MAGNUSSON

Cover Illustration: The slaying of St Ólafr Haraldsson at Stiklarstaðir in 1030. An illuminated initial at the beginning of the Saga of King Ólafr Haraldsson in Flateyjarbók, Gl. kgl. sml. 1005 fol., col. 310, a vellum MS written in Iceland ca. 1390. Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi.Photo: Jóhanna Ólafsdóttir.

Revised edition first published by Tempus in 2005

This ebook edition first published in 2016 by

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port,

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Magnus Magnusson, 1987, 2005

The right of Magnus Magnusson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8183 5

Typesetting and origination by Tempus

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CONTENTS

A note on pronunciation

Acknowledgements

1 Saga landscape

2 Reykjavík: the First Settler

3 Some early settlers

4 Early Christians

5 The worship of Þórr

6 Priests of Freyr

7 Þingvellir: birth of a nation

8 Stöng: how they lived then

9 The hammer and the cross

10 The conversion to Christianity

11 Skálholt: the first bishopric

12 The first historians

13 Hólar: the northern bishopric

14 Snorri Sturluson

15 Laxdæla Saga

16 Njáls Saga

A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

Icelandic words may look a bit formidable at first glance, but the rules of pronunciation are basically simple and can be mastered easily by readers who want to be able to pronounce the names correctly in their minds as they read.

The modern Icelandic alphabet has 32 letters (compared with 26 in modern English), and in this revised version of Iceland Saga I am using all of them and giving Icelandic proper names and words in their original form and original spelling, accents and all.

There are two extra consonants in Icelandic – ð and þ:

ð (Ð) is known as ‘eth’ or ‘crossed d’, and is pronounced like the (voiced) th in breathe;

þ (Þ) is known as ‘thorn’, and is pronounced like the (unvoiced) th in breath.

In addition there is a diphthong (æ), which is pronounced like i in life.

The pronunciation of the vowels is strongly conditioned by the accents:

a as in father

á as in owl

e as in get

é as ye, in yet

i as in bid

í as in seen

o as in got

ó as in note

u as in German mütter

ú as in soon

y, ý – as in i, í.

ö as in French fleur

au as in French oeil

ei, ey as in tray

Personal names frequently change form in the genitive – Egill/Egils, Gunnar/Gunnars, Björn/Bjarnar, and so on. The saga titles are given in the Icelandic, like Egils Saga, to avoid the clumsiness of writing ‘Egill’s Saga’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In this book I have drawn on the works of many scholars, both Icelandic and non-Icelandic, to help me present an up-to-date assessment of the Icelandic sagas and their place in the Iceland Saga. I am indebted to my friends Jónas Kristjánsson and the late Hermann Pálsson and Björn Þorsteinsson who generously guided my thinking about the Icelandic sagas over the years. This book is written very much from an Icelandic point of view; but it is a pleasure also to acknowledge the tremendous contribution which scholars in Britain and the United States have made to Icelandic studies in general and this book in particular.

The translations in this book are mostly my own (from The Icelandic Sagas I & II, Folio Society, 1999 & 2002); but I have made free use of the work of other translators where I found I could not better their efforts.

Many people have helped with up-to-date information for the revision of this book. I am particularluy indebted to Súsannah Westlund, of Reykavík Excursions/FlyBus in Kópavogur, for dealing uncomplainingly with a stream of inquiries, and to Christine Moorcroft and Marion Whitelaw for their patient scrutiny of the proofs.

Finally, I am grateful to Peter Kemmis Betty and the staff of Tempus Ltd for their unflagging enthusiasm and support in the presentation of this book.

ONE

SAGA LANDSCAPE

Landslag yrði

lítilsvirði,

ef það héti ekki neitt.

Landscape would have

little value

if the places had no names.

(Tómas Guðmundsson: Fjallganga)

There is a charming and witty little poem by Tómas Guðmundsson (1901-84), ‘the poet of Reykjavík’, entitled Fjallganga (‘Hill-walking’). In it he describes the breathless efforts of a suburban would-be climber on a day’s outing in the hills – the puffing and the panting, the scrabbling and the scrambling, followed by the profound and self-conscious satisfaction of reaching the top. He stands there, gazing around with eagle eyes like stout Cortez, silent, upon a peak in Darien, trying to identify and name all the other peaks he can see in the far distance; because, as the poet said, ‘landscape would have little value if the places had no names’.

It is an ironic and telling observation. And the converse is just as true: that place names would have little value if they had no landscape, no physical perspectives to give them identity and dramatic context. This is particularly true of Iceland, because the story of Iceland – the Iceland Saga, as I like to call it – is deeply rooted in the living landscape of the country; this is what gives the story such a tremendous sense of place, such an alluring vividness of impact, because one can so readily relate it to the natural landscape in which the historical events of the past are said to have occurred. It is a huge living canvas on which historians and ‘storians’ alike can paint their perceptions of the past – a big island in the North Atlantic some 103,000km2 (40,000 square miles) in area and considerably larger than its near neighbour, Scotland.

Origins

This landscape of Iceland is very spectacular. Iceland has been called Nature’s geological laboratory, because it is one of the most vigorously active volcanic regions on earth: Icelanders have become accustomed to expect an eruption to break out every five years or so. Geologically speaking, Iceland is a very young country. It emerged in a series of convulsive volcanic effusions a mere 20 million years ago, in the Upper Tertiary period. Before that, Iceland did not exist. According to geologists, it came about because of the phenomenon known as plate tectonics. Some 200 million years ago the major continents formed a super-continent called Pangaea; the pressure from below the earth’s crust eventually cracked Pangaea into a number of ‘plates’ which began drifting apart. As the American continental plate pulled away from the Afro-European plate, the basin of the Atlantic Ocean came into being; and where the original cracking occurred, incessant volcanic activity on the ocean floor created what is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge – a chain of submarine mountains, 15,000km long, which meanders from Antarctica to the Azores and on to Iceland. The molten rock, or magma, which underlies this rift system surfaces in a number of geological ‘plumes’. Iceland is situated right on top of one such plume. As the sea-floor spreads, molten rock explodes through the vents to fill the gap and push the continental plates even farther apart. That is how the Icelandic plateau came into being, 20 million years ago; and it is still going on. Iceland is literally pulling apart under our feet, at a rate of something like 2cm a year.

The very first eruptions created a platform of laminated layers of basalt lava-flows. This is the basic bedrock of Iceland, about 10,000m thick and 20 million years old. It can now only be seen in the east and north-west of the country, because so much of it has been overlaid by subsequent frenzied periods of volcanic activity. At the start of the Pleistocene period, about 3 million years ago, there were violent effusions of dolerite (grey basalt); and during the latter stages of the Ice Age, some 700,000 years ago, when Iceland lay submerged under the successive polar ice-sheets which invaded most of the northern hemisphere, the plume under Iceland erupted again and again. A thousand metres under the ice-fields furious conflicts raged, as volcano after volcano tried to force a way up through the ice. The mountains which were born under this chilly shroud were formed of compacted volcanic tuffs and breccias called palagonite (Icelandic móberg); this is a rather soft rock, rich in brownish hydrated glass, easily moulded into the individual and readily identifiable mountains which delineate the horizon at every turn.

When the covers came off at the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago, Iceland began to emerge in something like the shape we know today: a brawling mass of mountains, young and dishevelled still, interspersed with fertile valleys gouged by the raking passage of the ice as it went grinding inexorably towards the coast. But the shaping has never ceased: no less than one-tenth of the surface of Iceland is covered by lava-flows which have spilled from more than 200 active volcanoes in geologically ‘recent’ time, in the post-glacial period. Some of the cover still remains, in a number of extravagantly beautiful glaciers and ice-caps covering another tenth of the country, including Europe’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull (‘Waters Glacier’) on the south coast.

At least 30 volcanoes are known to have been active in Iceland since the discovery and settlement of the country, only 1,100 years ago – and several of them many times over. Mount Hekla, which used to be renowned throughout Europe during the Middle Ages as one of the vents of Hell itself, has erupted on some 20 occasions, most recently in February 2000. In earlier times Hekla was hated and feared: a map of Iceland made in 1585 shows the volcano in full fury, captioned HEKLA perpetuis damnata estib. et nivib. horrendo boatu lapides evomit (‘Hekla, cursed with eternal fires and snow, vomits rocks with a hideous sound’); but today’s Icelanders are only concerned lest a new eruption destroys the classic beauty of its majestic shape!

The Lakagígar eruptions

Some volcanic eruptions have been devastatingly destructive. More than two centuries ago, in 1783, the mountain Laki in south-east Iceland burst open in the most catastrophic volcanic event in the history of Iceland. In June 1783 the earth here split into a fissure about 25km long. This fissure contained more than a hundred separate craters, the Lakagígar (‘Laki Craters’). From those craters poured the most extensive lava-flows on earth in historical times, covering 565km2 of the southlands. But that was not the worst of it. The long eruption (it lasted for seven months) was accompanied by an enormous effusion of sulphur dioxide which shrouded Iceland with a bluish haze, and the pastures were poisoned by a mantle of volcanic ash which contained a fluorine compound. Three-quarters of Iceland’s livestock – horses, cattle, goats, sheep – died of starvation. In the resultant famine over the next three years, known as the Móðuharðindi (‘Haze Famine’), Iceland’s population plummeted by a quarter to some 38,000 people.

In the appalled aftermath of the Lakagígar eruptions there was talk of evacuating the surviving population of Iceland and resettling them in Jutland in Denmark – all 38,000 of them. But no one took the proposal very seriously, least of all the Icelanders. They had grown used to their volcanoes, however devastating. Today the Lakagígar area is regarded with awe and even pride. It is spectacularly and eerily beautiful: the sombre black ash-cones, the silent craters with their walls of re-burned scoria, the lunar reaches of lava deeply carpeted with soft grey moss which turns a brilliant green in the rain. Visitors instinctively take care not to injure or despoil the environment, treating it as if it were a vast memorial to some ancient cosmic war.

Surtsey

It is only within the last few years that the world at large has come to realise how intensely volcanic Iceland actually is. On 14 November 1963 a colossal undersea explosion, accompanied by towering plumes of steam and ash nearly 10,000m high, heralded a submarine eruption off the south coast, 18km from Vestmannaeyjar (‘Westmen Islands’). It was a new island, Surtsey (‘Surtur’s Island’), named after Surtur, the fire-giant of Norse mythology. Millions of television viewers were given a vivid action-replay of the way in which the world itself was formed. The eruption lasted for three years. By 1967 Surtsey had reached a height of 150m and covered an area of 3km2. More than 30 per cent of the new island was soon eroded by the sea, but the high temperatures in the crater fused the remaining material into a more resistant rock. Surtsey is now a science preserve, off-limits to all but authorised scientific personnel, a sanctuary in which scientists can study the processes whereby newly-wrought land, isolated by the ocean, is colonised by plant and animal life.

Heimaey

It may not have been the largest eruption of recent times, but it was certainly the most spectacular – the eruption on Heimaey (‘Home Island’) in the Vestmannaeyjar (‘Westmen Islands’) on 23 January 1973.

Heimaey is the largest of the 16 islands which make up the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago. It is also the only inhabited island; the town of Heimaey, on the island of the same name, has a population of some 6,000 people, mostly fishermen.

Ten years earlier, Surtsey had emerged from the surrounding sea; no one expected another volcanic outburst so soon; after all, the volcano had been dormant for some 5,000 years. But at 2am on 23 January 1973, when the town was asleep, the eastern slope of Mt Helgafell (‘Holy Mountain’) above the town cracked in a great fissure nearly a mile long. The town itself was to a certain extent shielded from the full force of the volcano, because the fissure was on the far side of the ridge. Throughout the length of the chasm red-hot lava was spouting into the air. It was a classic fissure eruption of a kind only now found in Iceland: not a huge amount of lava-flow, but a constant bombardment of burning pumice and tephra (volcanic ashes). Yet although it happened on the very threshold of the town, there was not a single casualty. The fishing fleet was providentially in harbour that night, and throughout the night the whole population abandoned their prosperous homes and possessions and took to the sea in the island’s 80 fishing boats. By dawn they were all safe on the mainland.

Over the next five months a prodigious amount of volcanic material was spewed out – more than 30 million tonnes of lava and tephra. The destruction wasn’t sudden. Within the first few days only half a dozen houses in the town had been burned down by splashes of lava and eventually smothered by a slow-moving lava-flow. But another 50 had been wrecked by the weight of the volcanic ash spewed from the mountain.

What were the islanders feeling? Above all there was a sense of helplessness and of grudging admiration; not dread, but awe – an awed respect for the appalling forces of Nature going berserk, of the fierce subterranean forge of the world cutting loose and breaking out. There was nothing to be done, it seemed, other than to try to save what could be salvaged and then wait patiently for the paroxysm to exhaust itself – many weeks, perhaps, many months, perhaps even a year or two.

The devastation of Heimaey was a terrible blow to Iceland. It was much the most important fishing centre in the whole county, supplying 20 per cent of the fish exports on which Iceland depends so heavily. Where else was this capacity to be found? Where else was the fish to be processed for export?

Six months later the eruption was over. One third of the houses had been destroyed under a new mountain of lava or smothered under volcanic ash; in fact, the area of the island had grown by 15 per cent. But the fight-back had already started.

There had been a very real danger that the harbour would be destroyed by the advancing wall of lava. Without a harbour, Heimaey could have no future. In an inspired move, the islanders hosed cold seawater on to the outskirts of the molten lava in order to slow its advance and divert its course. Eventually, a million litres of seawater per minute were being pumped on to the molten lava. Whether as a result of these efforts or not, the lava flow halted 175m short of closing off the harbour – in fact, the harbour facilities were improved by the increased shelter provided by the new lava breakwater.

A million tons of volcanic ash were cleared away and exported as valuable building and road-making material. The rest was used to improve the airfield and smooth out the hollows and dells in the rocky areas of the island. And – most tellingly, to my mind – a host of young back-packer volunteers from all over the world descended on Heimaey to excavate, of all places, the old churchyard. It was the most symbolic act of the whole drama.

Today, Heimaey has been transformed. Most of the original population has returned and resumed fishing. The town has become a splendid tourist haven, where people can see how a determined community can take on the power of a volcano – and win.

Early history

Such is the dramatic, eventful, new-formed landscape which provides the setting for the Iceland Saga. Historically as well as geologically Iceland is comparatively young; indeed, it is the only country which claims to be able to remember its own beginnings, enshrined in the memories of its early settlers and the written works of its early historians.

There is no evidence that Iceland was ever inhabited in prehistoric times: Iceland has history in abundance, but no prehistory at all, which makes it unique among the world’s nations. However, it is clear that people in classical times had an inkling, at least, that Iceland existed, even if they knew little about it. Around 400 BC a resourceful Greek navigator named Pytheas of Marseilles (Massilia) was commissioned by his local city fathers to reconnoitre the relatively unknown world of northern Europe, in order to chart a new trade route by sea to the tin and amber markets there. His original report on his voyage has not survived, but it is possible to surmise some of its contents from references in later classical sources. He seems to have told people that he had discovered a country named ‘Thule’ or ‘Ultima Thule’, which lay six days’ sail to the north of Britain. A day’s further sail to the north lay ‘the lung of the ocean’, where the sea was said to be congealed into a sort of primeval jelly. Contemporary authors ridiculed him for centuries because he had claimed that the sun could be seen all night long in this country around the summer solstice. There is no way of telling whether Pytheas meant Iceland or the arctic regions of Norway; but the name has since adhered to Iceland: ‘Ultima Thule’, the island at the end of the world.

There is a possibility – but no more than that – that a stray Roman ship may have reached Iceland, because four Roman copper coins from the period AD 270-305 have been found at three separate sites in the south of Iceland. They are certainly the oldest artefacts so far discovered in Iceland, and because they date from a period of peak Roman naval power under the command of the British governor Carausius (AD 286-293), it has been suggested that they found their way there on board a Roman galley on long-range patrol, or perhaps storm-swept off its course, and were then hoarded as souvenirs by the early Norse settlers of Iceland several centuries later. But since coins of this kind have been widely found in Britain, it is considered much more probable that they were taken to Iceland during the Viking Age as curios, antique relics without monetary value.

In the Middle Ages it is clear that the name ‘Thule’ had become attached to Iceland as a matter of academic dogma. The great Anglo-Saxon scholar, the Venerable Bede (c.673-735), early in the eighth century, referred to Thule more than once in his De temporibus (AD 703) and the larger De temporum ratione (AD 725), and was cited as an authority by the early Icelandic historians:

In his book De temporibus the Venerable priest Bede makes mention of an island called Thule, which in other books is said to lie six days’ sail to the north of Britain. He says that there is neither daylight there in winter, nor darkness during summer when the day is at its longest. For that reason, learned men reckon that Thule must be Iceland, because there are many places in the land where the sun shines throughout the night during the longest days and where it cannot be seen during the day when the nights are longest.

(Landnámabók, ‘Book of Settlements’)

A century later, in AD 825, an Irish cleric named Dicuil at the court of the Emperor Charlemagne wrote a geographical treatise, De mensura orbis terrae. His work had urgent topical relevance, because Europe was then wincing from the early impact of the Viking Age – hammer-blow raids on ecclesiastical and commercial centres by sea-borne pirates from Scandinavia. England, Scotland and Ireland had already felt the sting of attacks on Lindisfarne and other island monasteries from AD 793 onwards; so any information about these new barbarians was eagerly welcomed. Dicuil was writing with all the authority of the Church of Ireland, whose disciplined learning had enriched the libraries of Europe and whose ardent monks had carried the gospel to hitherto heathen lands. Dicuil knew stories of distant countries from monks who had experienced them at first hand – including Thule:

It is now thirty years since priests who lived in that island from the first of February to the first of August told me that not only at the summer solstice but on the days to either side of it the setting sun hides itself at the evening hour as if behind a little hill, so that no darkness occurs during that very brief period; but that a man could do whatever he wished as though the sun were there, even to picking the lice from his shirt.

Most scholars are in no doubt that, by Thule, Dicuil was referring to Iceland. Nor should it surprise us that the Irish could undertake such sea-voyages at this time. Irish hermit monks had established themselves on the then uninhabited Faroes around 700, bringing with them the sheep from which the islands derive their name. They sailed in large hide-boats called currachs, made of ox-hides tanned in oak bark, stretched over a wooden framework and sewn together with leather strips, and then tautened with melted tallow. They could carry a crew of twenty men with ample provisions for long journeys, and carried sail as well as oars. They were excellent ocean craft, as was shown by the adventurer Tim Severin who constructed just such a boat for a voyage he made from Ireland to the Faroes and Iceland in 1977, and from there to Greenland and North America.

The early Icelandic historians certainly believed that some Irish monks had been present in Iceland before the arrival of the first Norse settlers in the second half of the ninth century. The first Icelandic historian in the vernacular, Ari fróði (‘the Learned’) Þorgilsson (cf. Ch 12), wrote about their presence and hasty departure at the time of the first settlers in his Íslendingabók (‘Book of Icelanders’):

At that time there were Christians living here, whom the Norsemen called papar, but they left the country because they did not want to associate with pagan people; they left Irish books and bells and croziers, from which one could tell that they were Irishmen.

A scattering of place names from the south-east of Iceland, like Papey and Papós and Papýli, might seem to corroborate this tradition by indicating where these papar (‘little fathers’) had once lived. But despite diligent archaeological excavation (on the island of Papey in 1972, for instance), no material evidence of Irish occupation has yet been found.

The Settlement of Iceland: 874 and all that

The Settlement of Iceland proper was carried out by Norsemen in the second half of the ninth century, a few decades after the onset of the so-called Viking Age (800-1050). Tradition has it that the name of the first settler of Iceland was Ingólfur Arnarson, and that he made his home at Reykjavík in the year 874. His was not the first visit by a Norseman, however – other and earlier visitors and would-be settlers are mentioned in the historical record (cf. Chapter 2). But it is the figure of Ingólfur Arnarson and the date of 874 which are worth exploring further.

There are two principal written sources for the Settlement: Íslendingabók (‘Book of Icelanders’) and Landnámabók (‘Book of Settlements’).

Íslendingabók is a very short chronicle of Iceland’s early history (sometimes called ‘Libellus’) of only some 20 printed pages; it was written by the priest Ari fróði in the period 1122-33. He had a keen sense of chronology and devoted enormous effort in trying to get the early chronology of Iceland right. The other source, Landnámabók, is a report of the Settlement and of more than 400 of the major settler families all over Iceland. There are several extant versions of Landnámabók, compiled in the thirteenth century and later; but the collecting and writing of the material for it began in the days of Ari fróði, and few scholars now doubt that Ari was a major participant in its original compilation.

Ari fróði had no interest in early visitors to Iceland. His Íslendingabók starts with the uncompromising statement:

A Norwegian named Ingólfur is reliably reported to have been the first to leave Norway for Iceland, when Harald hárfagri (‘Fine-Hair’, king of Norway) was 16 years old, and a second time a few years later. He settled in the south at Reykjavík.

For Ari fróði, the Settlement period started in 870, with Ingólfur’s second visit to Iceland, and ended sixty years later in 930, just before the death of Harald hárfagri at the age of 80.

Landnámabók has much more to say about Ingólfur and how he came to select Reykjavík as the site for his home (cf. Chapter 2). More to the point, perhaps, Landnámabók claims, out of the blue, that the year in which Ingólfur Arnarson came to Iceland to stay there permanently was – 874. Just like that! The date stuck, and became the base-line for all future anniversaries. But how likely is it that Ari fróði and his colleagues were right? How much was the year 874 pure guesswork?

So far, archaeological science has come to Ari’s support. A new technique was developed in the 1940s called ‘tephrochronology’, which could give a date to the layers of ‘tephra’ (volcanic ashes) found in the soil. Ingólfur’s original homestead was sited in the centre of Reykjavík. Among the grass-roots of the remains of a turf wall were found traces of tephra which were identified as the fall-out from a volcano in the Torfajökull area, in southern Iceland, shortly before the year 900. Archaeologists call it, familiarly, the Settlement Age tephra (Layer VII ab), a wafer-thin layer of dark basaltic ash under a light-coloured spread of rhyolitic ash. The date has been corroborated by Carbon 14 dating, and by ice cores from the Greenland ice cap, dating to c.871. So, yes, the year 870, Ari fróði’s choice for the start of the Settlement period, seems to have been spot on after all.

The settlers arrive

Ingólfur Arnarson was followed by a steady stream of immigrants, mostly from western Norway but some from viking enclaves in the British Isles, particularly Shetland and Orkney and Ireland. The reasons for this mass migration were doubtless complex, as indeed were the ‘causes’ of the Viking Age itself – a mixture of Scandinavian power-politics, land-hunger, commercial expansionism, technological skill (especially in ship-building), private enterprise and sheer physical vigour. Early Icelandic historical tradition tended to simplify, indeed over-simplify, the position: the Settlement of Iceland was the direct outcome of the tyrannical behaviour of the first king to unite the scattered regions of Norway into a single realm, King Harald hárfagri (‘Fine-Hair’). According to the Icelandic historians, Harald hárfagri succeeded to the petty kingdom of Vestfold in south-eastern Norway around the year 870 at the age of 16. Not only did he manage to hold on to his inheritance, but soon he was engaged in a determined and ruthless campaign to make himself master of all Norway; eventually, around the year 890, he won a celebrated victory against a confederacy of recalcitrant chieftains and sea-kings at the naval battle of Havsfjord, just off the modern Norwegian oil-boom town of Stavanger. As a result of this victory many of the defeated chieftains and independent-minded magnates who had opposed Harald’s rise to power fled the country, some to Iceland and others to join kinsmen who had settled in Scotland and Ireland. Harald pursued the fugitives to Orkney and Shetland and conquered those Northern Isles, too, making them subject to the Norwegian crown. This was followed by another exodus to Iceland, of Norsemen who had by now intermarried into families of native Celtic stock and who took with them Scottish and Irish wives and kinsmen and slaves.

Such, in outline, was the political situation in Norway late in the ninth century. Iceland’s historians tended to telescope the timescale involved, in order to explain the motives of the early settlers; but it is reasonable to assume that even if Harald hárfagri was not the prime cause of the first settlements, his forcible centralisation of royal power in Norway added considerable impetus to the movement westwards to Iceland.

The earliest settlers came in small family groups, sailing in relatively small cargo vessels which could accommodate sufficient livestock with which to start farming – sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, goats and geese. The boats were not the celebrated longships used for coastal warfare, like the Gokstad and Oseberg ships which were excavated from burial mounds in Norway in 1880 and 1904, but the stubbier, swan-breasted deep-sea traders which were the all-purpose ships of the Viking Age. This maid-of-all-work was called a knörr. By great good fortune a knörr was discovered in 1962 and salvaged, almost entire, from the waters of Roskilde Fjord in Denmark. Standing on display in the Roskilde Ship Museum as she was being restored she looked astonishingly small: what a cramped, uncomfortable and perilous journey the passage to Iceland from Norway must have been!

But what sort of land did these early immigrants find? Iceland was significantly different from mainland Scandinavia; it was a land which showed the vivid effects of active volcanic systems, a land chronically short of good building wood. Iceland was isolated and took little active part in trade with Viking Age Scandinavia. These early immigrants found a vast island which was to all intents and purposes virgin territory. The central highlands were barren and uninhabitable, but around the coasts were plains and valleys well capable of supporting the kind of farming they had pursued in Norway. The climate was tolerable, despite the country’s chilly new name – what meteorologists tactfully call ‘cold-tempered oceanic’ or even ‘temperate sub-boreal’, which means that it is considerably better than one has any right to expect at such a northerly latitude. Furthermore, the mean temperature in the first centuries of settlement was a little warmer than it is today, by an average of about 1°C, and at that latitude a single degree makes a great deal of difference. In the second place, the pattern of vegetation was very different then. Iceland’s first vernacular historian, Ari fróði, wrote in his Íslendingabók (‘Book of Icelanders’) around 1130 that ‘in those days, Iceland was wooded between mountain and shore’. That statement may come as a surprise to those who know Iceland today as a country almost entirely bare of trees; but it suggests that only 250 years after the first settlers had arrived, there were already far fewer trees than there had been: the denudation of Iceland’s vegetative cover had begun.

Modern botanical research has shown that the tree-line in the early days of the Settlement reached as far up as 500m above sea level (today it is no more than 300m) and that most of the country, with the exception of recent lava-fields, glacier sands and the soggiest marshland, was overgrown with birch wood and dwarf willow with occasional rowans and aspens. It has been estimated that 25 per cent of the land was tree-covered; today, the figure is only 1 per cent. Overall, it is believed that at the time of the Settlement as much as 60 per cent of the surface of Iceland had a covering of vegetation of some sort – all but the high plateaux of the interior, in fact. Today that figure is only 21 per cent, consisting of 20 per cent rough grazing and only 1 per cent arable land.

What caused this catastrophic decline which turned huge areas of fertile land into bleak deserts and semi-deserts? Partly the blame lies in the steady deterioration of the climate for all but the last two centuries – the Little Ice Age of the late Middle Ages. Partly the blame can be found in incessant volcanic activity – lava-flows which destroyed farms and pastures, ash-falls which obliterated fertile valleys, glacier-bursts and floods which turned the low-lying coastal farmlands of the south into desolate plains of black sand. But the real culprits, without a doubt, have been people. Before Iceland was settled there were no herbivorous animals living in the country – no indigenous land animals at all, indeed, except for the Arctic fox. By introducing livestock the settlers shattered the country’s natural ecology with heavy and uncontrolled grazing. Meanwhile the settlers busied themselves with felling the woods around their farmsteads for pastoral and agricultural purposes and to make charcoal for heating. As the woods disappeared, soil erosion set in; deprived of shelter from the keen wind and the anchoring carpet of vegetation, the soil began to blow away in all directions. Winter rains scoured the undefended hillsides and laid them bare. Today, diligent efforts are being made to turn the ecological clock back, but it is a desperately slow business.

The Icelandic horse

The pattern of settlement was dictated by the demands of the terrain, as it was to be for centuries thereafter. Individual farms required a lot of land to be economically viable, and so settlement was widely dispersed and farmsteads flourished in the remotest upland valleys as well as down by the coasts. Physical communications were daunting. Torrential rivers, formidable mountains, impassable reaches of lava and huge distances were forbidding obstacles to social intercourse. But the settlers from Norway had brought with them a creature which made light of difficulty and distance – the hardy, nimble-footed Icelandic horse, the pure-bred equus scandinavicus. It was as important a catalyst for settlement by land as the knörr was by sea. Sturdy and docile, the horse carried everyone and everything on its back – and continued to do so, indeed, for 1,000 years; the first road for wheeled vehicles was not built in Iceland until 1874. The Icelandic horse has not changed in the slightest over the centuries; it has never interbred with foreign stock, and is still the original Nordic horse. It has a unique range of five gaits: step (fetgangur), trot (brokk), gallop (stökk), pace (skeið), and running walk, or rack (tölt); this is the distinctive gait of the Icelandic horse, setting it apart from other European breeds – the rider sits perfectly still in the saddle, while the horse positively glides along. Horse-riding in Iceland is now a pleasure and a sport rather than a necessity; to own a herd of free-running horses is something of a status symbol. There are some 90,000 horses in Iceland now (one for every three of the human population), adding romance and glamour to the landscape as they range free in the upland pastures. In the long Iceland Saga the bond between man and horse has always been close and affectionate.

The earliest settlers, with the whole island to choose from, used their horses to carve out huge tracts of land for themselves: Ingólfur Arnarson, the First Settler, for instance, laid claim to the whole of the south-western corner of Iceland. Each main settler would then parcel out his land-claim to his kinsmen and followers and freemen, thus building up close-knit clan communities of which the family head became leader by dint of wealth, personal authority and power of patronage. One eminent woman settler, Auður djúpúðga (‘the Deep-Minded’), came from Norway via Scotland with twenty well-born freemen, many of them with their own families, and became the matriarch of the people of Laxárdalur in Laxdæla Saga (cf. Chapter 15). As time passed, land would be sold or let in smaller parcels to new arrivals. New settlers could no longer have their pick of what they wanted, and rules for limiting the size of land-claims were agreed: no man could take more land than he could run round in one day carrying a lighted torch, and no woman could take more land than a two-year-old heifer could go round in one day.

By the end of the Age of Settlement (c.930) – the first formal period of Iceland’s history – the population of the country was fairly substantial, although it is difficult to estimate it with any precision. It is thought that by the year 1100 the population was somewhere between 50,000 (a conservative estimate) to a high estimate of 100,000.

Landnámabók (‘Book of Settlements’), originally compiled by Ari fróði and others in the first half of the twelfth century (cf. Chapter 12), is the major historical source about the Settlement of Iceland. It records the names, genealogies and biographies of more than 400 original settlers and their followers who established farms at definite, named places, most of which are known by the same names to this day. No other nation in Europe is blessed with such a remarkable record of its remembered history from the very outset. But in addition to Landnámabók, Iceland has a wealth of other sources about the lives and loves and deaths of the early settlers in the literature of the Icelandic sagas (cf. Chapter 3).

A suitable case for settlement

One of the greatest of the sagas, Egils Saga, the Saga of Egill Skallagrímsson (cf. Chapter 14), gives us a glimpse of the way in which Egill’s father, a diligent and determined pioneer, exploited the natural resources of the Mýrar (‘Marshes’) and built up a prosperous stake in the new country. His name was Skallagrímur, a Norwegian farmer who had fallen foul of King Harald hárfagri and started a new life in Iceland at Borg, in Borgarfjörður, on the west coast; his son was the great Icelandic warrior-poet Egill Skallagrímsson, the eponymous hero of the epic Egils Saga (Chapter 29):

Skallagrímur was a very hard worker. He always had a number of men with him and had them gather in all the natural produce which could be used for supplies, because at first they had not much in the way of livestock, considering what they needed for so many people; the livestock they had were left to graze in the woods over the winter.

Skallagrímur was also a great shipwright. There was no lack of driftwood west of the Mýrar, so he built a house on Álftanes and ran another farm; from there his men rowed out to the fishing and to hunt seals and gather eggs; there was an abundance of everything. There was also driftwood to bring back. Whales were stranded in great numbers, and there was plenty of shooting; the wildlife did not bolt, because they were not used to people.

Skallagrímur had a third farm by the sea in the western part of the Mýrar; it was an even better place for collecting driftwood. He sowed crops there and called the place Akrar (‘Fields’). There were some islands lying offshore where whales were found, so they were named the Hvalseyjar (‘Whale Isles’). Skallagrímur also sent his men up the rivers to catch salmon, and he settled Oddur einbúi (‘the Hermit’) by the river Gljúfurá to look after the salmon-fishing there...

As Skallagrímur’s livestock increased, the animals were sent up to the hill pastures in the summer. He found that the animals which grazed up on the moorland were much better and fatter, and also that the sheep which could not be brought down for the winter throve in the mountain valleys. So Skallagrímur had a house built near the mountains and ran a sheep-farm there. A man named Gríss was in charge of it, and Grísartunga (‘Gríss Tongue’) is named after him.

So Skallagrímur’s wealth was founded on many good footings.

Social organisation

In any formative society, some people rise to the top like cream by dint of their prowess and personality, bolstered by family ties and accrued possessions. Most of the leading settlers had been men of substance in Norway or the British Isles (it needed considerable resources to be able to afford the cost of emigration, for one thing), and they settled naturally into a loose aristocracy or oligarchy of land-owning magnates. It was essentially a chieftainly society (the Icelandic word is höfðingi, ‘head’); and the authority of the chieftain was reinforced by some sort of priestly office. Most of the settlers, with some notable exceptions, were pagans; they believed in a loose pantheon of Norse gods and natural spirits, but not in any systematic way. Paganism as a formal religion was on the wane throughout the Northlands at this time, and would soon be replaced by Christianity; but during the pagan period the leading chieftains of Iceland also had religious functions to perform. Such people (they were usually men) had the title of goði (plural goðar), usually translated as ‘priest-chieftain’, and their office was the goðorð. It is not clear to what extent, if any, specifically religious duties such as conducting temple-worship were involved – there is some doubt whether pagan temples as such ever existed in Iceland – and the office of goðorð could be inherited, bought or sold, divided, or even temporarily borrowed. But whatever the function of the office, the real power of the goði lay in the ties of mutual obligation between the chieftains and their acknowledged followers (constituents).

Soon after the Age of Settlement began, it must have become apparent that some sort of organisation was necessary to regulate the exercise of power and to deal with inter-district disputes. Wherever Norsemen came together, they would establish a local assembly, or þing. We are told that such local assemblies were established when local disagreements had to be settled by the chieftains in their areas. They were, in effect, specially appointed courts, judicial rather than legislative.

However; there was still a need for a common law, a common system of authority, which would cover the whole country. To this end the Icelanders combined to establish a General Assembly, or Alþingi (‘Althing’) at Þingvellir (cf. Chapter 7). The precise date of this pioneering development is unknown; it happened sometime towards the end of the Settlement period, and when the thousand-year anniversary of the event approached, it was arbitrarily decided to make 930 the founding year of the Icelandic Alþingi and to celebrate its millennium in 1930.

The law-code which was adopted was based on Norwegian law, but with one fundamental difference – there was no provision for a monarchy. Iceland was to be a parliamentary commonwealth without a king – a unique experiment in medieval republicanism which was to stand for the next three centuries. There was a rudimentary state apparatus, but no executive power: Iceland was a headless polity.

Slavery

The workforce of hired farmhands and other dependants was supplemented by slaves or ‘thralls’. In the Icelandic sagas slaves are mentioned often – mainly captives who had been taken during viking raids, mainly in Ireland, or bought by Icelanders abroad from professional slave-dealers (cf. Chapter 15, Melkorka in Laxdæla Saga). More rarely, the slaves were Icelanders enslaved by their creditors, while people had the right to sell their children into slavery if they could not pay for their upbringing.

Slavery was never widespread in Iceland, and there is no evidence that slaves played a significant part in the economy. The word ‘slavery’ now has profoundly emotive associations, with echoes of clanking chains and oppressive cruelty; but ‘slaves’ in Iceland seem to have been accorded much more sympathetic treatment than was common elsewhere. They enjoyed certain legal privileges, and could earn their freedom and even some land of their own through exemplary service or loyalty to their masters. Iceland, it seems clear, was never a proper slave-owning society in the fullest sense of the term; and the pioneering conditions of the Age of Settlement would have made it difficult in any case to maintain the formal distinction between slavery and freedom.

Curiously enough, slavery was never abolished by law in Iceland, as far as is known, but it was quietly abandoned in Iceland in the eleventh or twelfth century – the first of the Scandinavian nations to do so.

Christianity

The law-code was the first major milestone in the history of the newly-fledged nation. The second was the adoption of Christianity as the formal religion of Iceland around the year 999 or 1000 (cf. Chapter 10). Quite apart from its extraordinary importance for the future cultural and spiritual development of the country, the occasion itself provided one of the most spectacular scenes from the whole Iceland Saga: the passion and drama of debate in the magnificent open-air setting of Þingvellir – pure theatre for the mind and the senses. It was one of the innumerable times when the saga landscape gave an added dimension to the saga itself.

The introduction of Christianity had little immediate effect on the political or social structure of Iceland. Pagan priest-chieftains simply became Christian chieftains, with the added power and influence of church patronage at their disposal. Overall, the times became a little less turbulent, perhaps; the period from 1030 to 1120 is familiarly known as the Age of Peace, to differentiate it from the more disputatious decades of the Settlement and the early commonwealth. That earlier period, indeed, is known as the Saga Age – because it was during those first 160 years that most of the events occurred which were to be chronicled in the Icelandic sagas.

The Icelandic sagas

The Icelandic sagas were the major and most enduring achievement of medieval Iceland. Indeed, they were the outstanding achievement of European medieval literature. And to understand the nature and quality of that achievement, it is essential to see the sagas in the perspective of the landscape in which they grew; because the sagas did not simply happen. They were the outcome of a long process of cultural development, the ultimate flowering of a unique literary experience.

It was the Church which first brought books to Iceland and thereby introduced Iceland into the mainstream of European intellectual thought. The art of writing was brought to Iceland early in the eleventh century by missionary English priests, but by the middle of the century the first native Icelandic bishop was appointed, based at his ancestral chieftain’s estate at Skálholt, which became the bishopric of Skálholt in 1082 (cf. Chapter 11). In 1106 a second diocese was established in the north, at Hólar (cf. Chapter 13), and these two sees were the educational and cultural powerhouses of Iceland until late in the eighteenth century, when Reykjavík became the de facto capital of the country.

As in other countries, the Church was the patron of learning and learned works. But the difference in Iceland was that the Church was national, rather than international. Its leading figures were the scions of the country’s noblest families, men who were steeped in the country’s traditions and culture; the churches themselves were under the control of lay patrons who would either take ordination for themselves or take clerics into their service. So Iceland did not develop an exclusive clerical caste with a monopoly of literacy and learning; education at church schools was widespread and open to all – both men and women. Most important of all, literacy was taught not just in the official language of the Church – Latin – but in the vernacular, in Icelandic.

A key factor which influenced the way in which literacy began to flourish in Iceland was the saga landscape. Iceland was a totally rural country. There were no towns, no villages, no hamlets even. There was no single central point, like a royal court, to act as a magnet for the nation’s talents and create a social and cultural élite. Priest, farmer, aristocrat, scholar, poet – they were all one and the same person. People lived on farms, often in considerable isolation, where going to church every Sunday was not a feasible proposition for most of the population; so the Church had to go to the people, through the medium of books. Widespread literacy was necessary to ensure that at least one member of each household should be able to read aloud the homilies and edifying sermons which would otherwise have been preached from the pulpit; and to be comprehensible to the people, these sermons had to be in Icelandic, not in Latin.

Naturally enough, the very first books which came to Iceland were in Latin. And the very first historical writing in Iceland, by Sæmundur fróði (‘the Learned’) Sigfússon (cf. Chapter 12), was also composed in Latin. But from the earliest years of the twelfth century, people started to write in Icelandic. At first this vernacular prose-writing of learned works was purely functional: the earliest known work in Icelandic was a transcription of the complex code of secular laws of the old Icelandic commonwealth in the winter of 1117-18, followed by a code of church law in 1123.

Throughout the twelfth century the written language was exercised extensively on all the familiar subjects of medieval scholarly literature – saints’ lives, chronicles, translations, mathematics, geography, navigation, travel, astronomy, philosophy, poetics, grammar, and so on.

Hand in hand with all this literary activity went the need for book-production, the making of manuscript books. At first these manuscripts were made in the scriptoria of the cathedral schools and monasteries; but they were never the exclusive possession of ecclesiastical libraries. Books were available to all, and treasured by all, and soon were being made in farmhouses all over the country, using calfskin (vellum). The quills used were made from swans’ feathers, for the most part, and the ink was made by boiling the bearberry plant (sortulyng: Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), which provided a thick, glossy and happily durable substance. Many manuscripts were also enhanced with elaborate decorations involving the initial letters of each chapter, often cameo illustrations of the subject matter of the chapter. Many of them were coloured – not as rich and sophisticated as the illuminations in the best medieval manuscripts of Europe, perhaps, but pleasing none the less.

While all this writing of learned works (frœði) was going on, there was evolving a unique type of literary activity called ‘saga’. The Icelandic word saga simply means ‘something said’, and is cognate with the Old English word saw, meaning ‘saying’, but it has come to have the more specialised meaning of ‘prose narrative’. In that sense it covers the same sort of ground as the Latin word historia, which means both ‘history’ and ‘story’; but it also has the connotations of a word like ‘legend’, which comes from the Latin legenda, meaning ‘things to be read’. And that is what ‘saga’ has come to mean: it is a comprehensive term which encompasses history, story, biography and legend.

In the same way, what are known collectively as the Icelandic sagas encompass several different kinds of writings. The earliest, in chronological terms, were ‘Sagas of Saints’ (known in Icelandic as heilagra manna sögur), the biographies of various holy men and saints such as the Apostles, or martyrs such as Stephen and Sebastian, or Church Fathers such as Ambrose, Gregory and Augustine. These religious writings were at first translations or adaptations of Latin originals; they were being written by the middle of the twelfth century and, judging by the number of early manuscripts which have survived, they were immensely popular. In style and diction they can be considered the forerunners of the ‘classical’ Icelandic sagas of the next century; one of their major characteristics is the vigour and vividness of their story-telling, and their love of a good yarn, however far-fetched.

Another strand of saga-writing which was developing more or less simultaneously was that of ‘Kings’ Sagas’ – synoptic or individual biographies of kings of Norway (konungasögur). The first known work of this nature was a contemporary saga written by an Icelandic historian named Eiríkur Oddsson in the 1160s, covering the historical events in Norway from 1130-60. His book, which was called Hryggjarstykki (‘Backbone Piece’), is now lost but was much used by other historians, and from them we know that the author was scrupulous in citing the names of eye-witness informants. In Norway in the 1180s a visiting Icelandic cleric, Abbot Karl Jónsson (c.1130-1212) from the monastery of Þingeyrar (cf. Chapter 13), wrote a biography of King Sverrir of Norway (Sverris Saga