A Brief History of the Vikings

by Jonathan Clements

  If Gardar truly had relatives and colleagues in the Hebrides, then his accidental trip to Iceland probably owed more to stories heard from the Irish and those who associated with them. The tale of his journey seems to exist for one reason only, as a means of retroactively crediting a Norseman with the first circumnavigation of the island, and thereby its ownership.2 Gardar supposedly spread the word about his discovery, but even so, the next Viking arrived in Iceland by crashing into it. His name was Naddod, and he was supposedly a Viking of some high standing, forced to leave his native Norway for reasons undisclosed. Hitting a storm somewhere off the Faeroes, Naddod and his crew were blown to Iceland’s eastern coast, once again, close to the sites of earlier Irish settlement. Naddod, it is said, put ashore with his men and climbed the hill of Reydarfjall, hoping to see the smoke of cook-fires, or some other evidence of human habitation. Conveniently for later claimants, Naddod and his men reported no sign of human life whatsoever, and set off back to the Faeroes amid a punishing snowstorm. Unhappy with their experience, they chose to call the putative Gardarsholm by a new name – Snowland.

  Despite such unpromising beginnings, the place soon attracted another sailor, this time intentionally. Floki Vilgerdason later gained the name Raven-Floki for his legendary assistants – a trio of ravens cast out from the ship, whose flights were closely watched for signs of land sighted. The first raven, set free early in the trip, turned and flew back to the Faroes. The second, released later, returned to Floki’s ship, unable to find another place to land. The third (and we may wonder why the second raven was not reusable) flew ahead of his ship, confirming that land lay beyond the horizon. Like so many other sagas, the tale of Raven-Floki seems too neat to be taken at face value – with its avian navigational aids, it bears too close a resemblance to the story of Noah. However, other elements of the Raven-Floki tale ring true, such as the miserable time he had once he arrived.

  Raven-Floki and his fellow Vikings eventually made landfall in the north-west of the island, and spent the summer clubbing seals and netting fish. They were obviously planning on staying for the long haul, since they had brought a considerable amount of livestock with them. But they were fooled by the deceptive Arctic summer – on a coast warmed by the Gulf Stream, and with long days to offset the cold latitude, Raven-Floki’s group made poor preparations for the turn of the seasons. When the autumn arrived, its severity took the Vikings by surprise. Raven-Floki’s livestock all died, supposedly for lack of fodder. After a bitter winter, Raven-Floki decided to return home, but was forced by spring storms to put back to land and wait another year. When he did finally make it back to Norway, he had nothing positive to say about his trip at all, and gave the place of his torment the name it bears today – Iceland.

  Despite such unpromising beginnings, Iceland was colonized. Perhaps it was thanks to Raven-Floki’s more positive associate Thorolf, who claimed that Iceland’s pastures were so rich they dripped with butter. Possibly there were other pressures, political and logistical, that led large numbers of colonists to arrive between 870 and 930. Iceland’s sagas of settlement mention good Vikings wrongly accused of crimes, or fleeing the land reforms that accompanied Harald Fairhair’s consolidation of power in Norway. The age of the great land-rush to settle Iceland is also roughly contemporary with Viking difficulties elsewhere – defeats in France, Ireland and Scotland, and internal strife in the Orkneys, for example. Iceland was a chance for a new beginning, a fresh start far from the warring troubles of Old Europe. In later generations, the descendants of the first settlers would mythologize their arrival as a triumph of liberty, telling tales remarkably similar to those of later colonists who would flee further west on the Mayflower.

  The Icelanders, so say the stories, fled the tyranny of Harald Fairhair, although he was not even born when the migrations began. The most famous of their number were Ingolf Arnarson and Leif Hrodmarrson, relatives who had become embroiled in a bitter vendetta over Leif’s rivalry with an unwelcome suitor for the hand of his betrothed. When the two kinsmen ended the feud in traditional Viking style, by murdering the suitor and his supporters, their estates were confiscated. With nothing to lose, they went in search of Raven-Floki’s Iceland.

  For some reason, they had a lot of Irish people with them. Despite their Norwegian blood, the brothers appear to have spent a while pillaging Ireland – indeed, Leif was the proud wielder of a sword he had personally liberated from the tomb of an Irish warrior. Supposedly, their Irish slaves revolted, stole their remaining possessions and women, and set up on the Vestmannaeyjar – the Isles of the West Men to the south of the Icelandic coast. Ingolf killed them all in revenge, although the story sounds suspiciously like a rationalization for the removal of earlier Irish settlers, or perhaps even a joint colonization effort that went sour with the Norwegians emerging on top.3 The remaining Irish monks on the island soon quit their scattered hermitages, often in such a hurry that their religious paraphernalia was left behind to inspire later stories among the Icelanders.

  The Icelanders’ own records mention around 400 original settlers, over 50 of whom had names that implied mixed Irish ancestry, or Celtic nicknames denoting considerable time spent outside Scandinavia. Their slaves and concubines (the mothers of many later generations) were also predominantly Irish, some of impressively noble birth. The Saga of the People of Laxardal mentions a haughty slave-girl with no appreciation of her duties, brought to Iceland already pregnant with the child of her Viking captor. She is eventually revealed as Melkorka (Mael-Curchaich?), the daughter of the Irish king Mýrkjartan (Muircertach?), kidnapped at 15 years of age. Faced with feuding women and clearly unable to control his Irish mistress, her owner eventually installed her in a homestead of her own across the river, recorded as the now-deserted site of Melkorkustadir.4

  Not all of the Irish who accompanied the first settlers were ill treated. The Norse matriarch Aud the Deep-Minded, who figures large in the Icelanders’ tales of the first settlers, brought many Irish slaves with her from Dublin where her late husband Olaf the White had been king.5 After unsuccessfully relocating to Caithness, where her son Thorsteinn the Red was killed, Aud and her entourage gave up on the harsh life on the Hiberno-Scottish fringe and set out for pastures new. Aud would eventually free several of her slaves and set them up on their own – freedmen including Vifil, whose great-grandson would become the first European to be born in America, and Erp, a thrall whose mother was supposedly Myrgiol, an Irish princess sold into slavery in Britain.6 Although such tales often have the ring of truth, it is important to remember who was telling them – later generations of Icelanders hoping to put a polish on concubine ancestors by inventing noble backgrounds for them. Irish names certainly persisted among the Icelanders for many generations, including Njall, Kormakr, Brjan and Patrek.

  Such was the place where agents of Crowbone arrived, spreading the word of God, or, more properly, the news that Crowbone was boss in Norway. Sources on the conversion of Iceland are, as with so much about the Viking Age, chiefly written long after it was over, and by the winning side. Although numerous medieval documents, contracts and church materials were collated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the Diplomatarium Islandicum collection, there are very few extant sources from the first couple of centuries of Christianity in Iceland. We do, however, have Ari the Learned’s Íslendingabók, written by a man who claimed to have heard stories of the conversion from old men who had been children at the time. Ari’s version, even though it was written down a hundred years after the event, is the closest we have to a reliable account – if Heimskringla matches it, it is perhaps only because Íslendingabók was there for Snorri to use as reference.7

  According to Íslendingabók, by the summer of 1000, heathens and Christians in Iceland were preparing to fight over their religion, in what would likely become only the first skirmish of a religious war. The one chance to head off the disaster came at the summer assembly meeting. The ‘law-speaker’, Thorgeir Thorkelsson w
as the master of ceremonies, the arbitrator of disputes, and had been so since 985. With impressive wisdom and foresight, he realized that if he made no attempt to settle the dispute, the 1000 assembly would be the last time that Icelanders could claim to be self-governing. If he failed to come to a solution, the following year would see two rival assemblies, and before long they would be at each other’s throats.

  Somehow, Thorgeir’s agents managed to bring both sides into negotiations. He heard the arguments for and against, and took over a day to reach his decision. A heathen himself, Thorgeir nevertheless had enough support among the Christians to still command their respect.

  Thorgeir demanded assurances from both sides that they would abide by his decision, to which they agreed. He then decreed a compromise that pleased everybody. Iceland, as a nation, would accept baptism en masse. Crowbone would be assured that the entire country was now Christianized. Meanwhile, the Icelanders also remained free to practise the old ways. Thorgeir specifically assured the heathens that the exposure of children and the eating of horseflesh were still permitted – a tantalizing reference to two particular sacrificial practices that may have formed part of the worship of Frey, Thor or Odin. As for actual heathen religious ceremonies, they were to be declared illegal, but only if accusers were able to produce witnesses to verify that such heathenism was taking place. Crowbone had his assurances, and unless he spied on the hearthside activities of every Icelandic family, he would never hear that anyone was not as Christian as their baptism implied.8

  Thorgeir had done it; he averted the crisis. He was replaced as Law-Speaker by 1001, so probably had had to call in every single available favour. The Christians were fully aware of the nature of the compromise, and that pagan ways continued in secret, but such was the conversion experience all over medieval Europe. A few years after Thorgeir’s landmark decision, the ‘old ways’ were officially criminalized by a larger Christian majority, and the new religion was the victor.

  But Iceland was not the last bastion of Viking culture. Restless settlers were soon looking beyond it, particularly after 930, when the initial land-rush had claimed the best settlement sites. On Iceland’s western tip, on the promontory of Snaefellsness, it is possible to climb the towering 1,446 metres of an extinct volcano that looks out to sea. On the rare clear days when it is not surrounded by clouds, it is sometimes possible to another coastline in the distance – floating upside down above the horizon in an arctic mirage.

  Early in the tenth century, the mariner Gunnbjörn Úlfsson overshot Iceland in a storm, and turned his ship around at a series of remote rocks known thereafter as Gunnbjörn’s Skerries. He was, however, convinced that there was land even further to the west. For those living in the west of Iceland, the existence of further territories became a matter of faith. Others may have reported similar looming lands in the distance on remote fishing trips, and many noted the flights of migrant birds that periodically headed beyond the western horizon.9

  One family in particular was to become instrumental in the colonization of points even further west, partly through their roving Viking spirit, but mainly through their habit of getting into trouble. Their patriarch was Thorvald Asvaldsson, a man from Jaeder in south-west Norway, forced to relocate to Iceland ‘because of some killings’, as the sagas bluntly put it.10 With him went his son Erik, known to prosperity as Erik the Red, for his flame-coloured hair and beard, and as he reached manhood, his inheritance of his father’s belligerent ways.

  Although Erik tried to settle into the peaceable life of an Iceland farmer, bad luck seemed to follow him. He reached maturity during a period when Iceland suffered one of its harsher famines, and tempers among the farmers were frayed. Icelandic conservatism was already settling in, with the earlier settlers established on the best land, and unwelcoming towards newcomers, particularly those with doubtful pasts. Erik’s slaves somehow caused a landslide that destroyed the farm of a fellow Icelander, Eyjolf. Eyjolf killed the slaves, causing Erik to kill Eyjolf himself sometime later. His saga also mentions offhandedly that he also killed someone called Hrafn the Dueller – Erik was clearly getting out of hand.11

  The local population took limited action, and were happy merely to banish Erik from the area. He resettled in another part of Iceland, where he soon quarrelled with his neighbour Thorgest over the loan of some bench-boards. When Erik took back his furniture by force he was pursued by Thorgest’s sons, two of whom he also killed. Perhaps it did not escape the attention of the local Assembly that Erik’s crimes, although murderous, had not been without provocation. He and his men (who had also fought in the skirmish) were banished from Iceland for three years, leading Erik to turn his ship towards the west, and go in search of the fabled land beyond Gunnbjörn’s Skerries.

  Erik was not even the first. Around 978, one Snaebjorn Galti had led a disastrous attempt to settle the coastline beyond Gunnbjörn’s Skerries. The small party of colonists did not last the first mercilessly harsh winter, and ended up slaughtering each other. Erik, however, had more time on his hands to go exploring, and ignored the forbidding, glacier-strewn east coast of the new land. Instead, he sailed down the coast and around the southern tip, to discover the far more welcoming lands of the western coast. Warmed, like Iceland, by the Gulf Stream, and with long fjords penetrating deep inland, the new area seemed deceptively like Erik’s native Norway. It was also apparently deserted, with land for the taking, meadows of green grass, and plenty of fish. Erik and his men spent their three-year exile exploring the new land, realizing that it presented the ideal settlement opportunity for the younger sons and newer arrivals of Iceland. If the old settlers in Iceland were refusing to budge, then this new island would be an excellent site for colonization. Erik even decided to help things along by picking a name that suggested a far more hospitable climate – he called it Greenland. He also may have neglected to widely publicize another important fact – although he and his men had encountered nobody in Greenland, they were patently not the first people to visit it. Scattered all around their new ‘discovery’ were the tell-tale artefacts of previous visitors, people who had arrived in small boats made from animal skins, with no metal but enough skills to make spearheads and arrowheads of stone.12

  Erik and his men did a good job of talking up their discovery. After a triumphant return to Iceland and a grudging reconciliation with those he had wronged, Erik set out again in 986, in a fleet of 25 ships. These were not only longships but also wide-beamed high-capacity knorrs, loaded with livestock. It is a testament to the perils of navigation at the time that only 14 of the ships made it to Iceland – many of the knorrs were unable to make it through the cross-currents, and it is assumed that the vessels with more oars were more successful in the journey than the ones with larger cargoes.13

  Approximately 450 people formed the initial Greenland colony, scattered across the fjords of the western settlement in two main locations. They explored their new land as far north as possible, to the point where the stony ground gave way to endless ice, and they soon formed a loose-knit community of homesteads in imitation of the Icelandic model. The colony prospered slowly, and the people were forced to adapt to the absence of some basic necessities. Although there were attempts to tease crops from the soil, grain was in short supply, and bread all but disappeared from the Greenlanders’ diet. Trees were also thin on the ground, and there was no metal to be had locally. The Greenlanders were forced to improvise, and to trade with the Icelanders across the dangerous strait. Perhaps the greatest lack of all was people – they had found Greenland to be ‘deserted’, without a local population that they could prey upon, trade with, and ultimately marry into.

  But for all Erik and his fellow colonists knew, there would be yet more lands further on, with yet more space for colonization. Although Greenland was destined to become the farthest edge of the Viking world, there was one more shore further to the west that would also briefly be visited by the Vikings. Our sources for it comprise two sagas, which unhelpful
ly contradict each other – each seemingly an attempt to assign credit for certain discoveries to a different person. They have, however, become the two most discussed sagas in the English-speaking world, because of their subject matter, and because later, tantalizing scraps of archaeological evidence have revealed them to be true, at least in their general narrative.

  The existence of this new land was first mooted very soon after the initial settlement of Greenland, as usual by a sailor who had got lost. Bjarni Herjolfsson was a young merchant who plied the seas between Norway and Iceland on a two-year cycle that allowed him to sail in seasons when drift ice was not a hazard. He would load up with goods at his father’s farm in Iceland, and make the long voyage back to his ancestral home in Norway. There he would spend the winter selling his wares, before loading up with materials likely to sell back in Iceland. He would set off the next year and then repeat the process. Bjarni was thus rather surprised to arrive back in Iceland to discover that his father had left. He was told that Herjolf had tired of the declining state of Iceland, and decided to seek new lands with Erik the Red, to the west.

  The news, so reports the Greenlander Saga, was a surprise to Bjarni, but his merchant’s mind was already working.14 Rather than unload his cargo in Iceland, he decided it would be more prudent to head after his father – presumably reasoning that colonists in Greenland would be pleased to find a ship of Norwegian luxuries turning up on their shores. Bjarni’s men were in agreement, although they did note that the route to Greenland was unknown to them, and that it might prove difficult.

  Bjarni’s ship overshot Greenland by several days, possibly due to his ignorance of the route and currents, although his saga is swift to plead poor weather conditions. Beset by a severe fog that made it difficult to get their bearings by sun or stars, Bjarni sailed ever onwards, and when he did eventually sight land, it did not fit the description he had heard of Greenland’s eastern coast. Bjarni’s ship was the first European vessel to record a sighting of the place now known as North America, although Bjarni did not put ashore. Realizing that he was significantly to the south of his chosen destination, he sailed north along the strange shore for a further two days, but at no point did he see the glaciers that would identify the coastline as Greenland. His men did, however, note that the coastline was thickly forested – a fact that would encourage later explorers to seek it out from tree-starved Greenland. The exact location of Bjarni’s voyage is unknown – he never dropped anchor, but merely tracked the Canadian coast north. Somewhere in the region of Baffin Island, he stared out at the icy shore and pronounced it worthless.15 Turning back to the east, Bjarni sailed for several more days, until he reached a coastline that did indeed turn out to be Greenland. He found his father’s new homestead and supposedly turned to a farmer’s life, although by the next paragraph the Greenlander Saga reports that he began trading once more, with Norway.