The Vikings

by Robert Wernick

  The Icelandic sagas exalt Icelandic heroes. But even heroes must earn a living, and, although they certainly did not beat their swords into plowshares, the settlers did take to the grinding agrarian life with a determination that knew no rank. “It was then the custom,” says a saga, “for rich men’s sons to put their hands to something useful.” No one was surprised to see a highborn man tending his flocks or seeding or spreading manure on his fields. The Hávamál, a collection of sayings supposedly handed down by Odin, god of knowledge, is a veritable fount of homely pioneer observation and advice, with even a salting of human. “Two goals and a poor-roofed cot,” it advises, “are better than begging.” “A man with few helpers must rise early and look to his work.” “Out in the fields I gave my clothes to two scarecrows. The thought themselves champions once they had trappings. A naked man is shorn of confidence.”

  Prototypical of Iceland’s pioneer farmers was Skallagrim Kveldulfsson, father of the great warrior-poet, Egil Skallagrimsson, and the hero of Egil’s Saga. Skallagrim was a huge, dark, bald, ugly man of enormous strength. The saga recounts how once, needing an anvil for a smithy he had built, he dived into the waters of a fjord and came up with a boulder such as four ordinary men could not lift. He was also a man of towering temper, and it is not difficult to imagine the many and bloody fights that eventually resulted in his being forced to depart from Norway.

  In selecting his property in Iceland, Skallagrim followed not the traditional pillars but rather the coffin of his father, who had died during the voyage. The coffin was tripped over the side at sea, and it came ashore at one of the most felicitous places in all Iceland, rich with grass and sweet water. In the days before limits, Skallagrim promptly claimed a 400-square mile territory - “all the land,” according to the saga, “bounded by the rivers right down to the sea.”

  As it turned out, Skallagrim was much more than a mere blood-lusting warrior. And now, as farmer, blacksmith, fisherman, boat builder, and sailor, he was in his natural element. On his claim was extensive marshland, teeming with wild fowl and broad pastures for livestock; farther inland the mountain streams were choked with salmon and trout. “Skallagrim,” says the saga, “was a great man for hard work. He always had a good number of men working for him to get in all available provisions that might be useful for the household, for in the early stages, they had little livestock, considering how many of them were there.”

  Because of the lack of suitable wooded land, most Icelanders depended upon Norway for their boats. But Skallagrim was doubly fortunate. Not only was he a master shipwright, but he also found a treasure-trove of driftwood on part of his land. “So he built and ran another farm at Alptanes,” continues the saga, “and from there his men went out fishing and seal hunting and collecting the eggs of wild fowl, for there was plenty of everything.” His third farm he built by the sea in an even more favorable location for finding driftwood and whales.

  “As Skallagrim’s livestock grew in number, the animals started making for the mountains in the summer. He found a big difference in the livestock, which were much better and fatter when grazing up in the moorland, and, above all, in the sheep that wintered in the mountain valleys instead of being driven down. As a result, Skallagrim had a farm built near the mountains and ran it as a sheep farm. So the wealth of Skallagrim rested on a good many foundations.”

  From the wind-swept sheep runs of farms such as Skallagrim’s came Iceland’s principal export: wool. And within the fantasies of the later sagas lies a pleasant little story with a ring of truth. One summer in the 960s, an Icelandic ship arrived at Hardanger, Norway, with a cargo of great, shaggy, woven-wool cloaks - for which the traders could find no buyers. Their leader complained of his ill fortune to King Harald - a later and more benign Harald that the fearsome Fairhair of earlier history. And this Harald, being, says the saga, “very condescending and full of fun,” came with a retinue to inspect the goods. “Will you give me a present of one of these gray cloaks?” he asked. “Willingly,” the man replied. The king wrapped the cloak around his regal shoulders and departed - but only after every man in his following had purchased a gray cloak for himself. “In a few days,” says the saga, “so many men came to buy cloaks that not half of them could be served with what they wanted.” For having thus set a style - to the Icelanders’ considerable profit - the king became known to history as Harald Graycloak.

  Even as they turned their hand to the shear and the plow, the Icelanders remained a people of the sea. It had brought them to the new land, it sustained them there, and it was their commercial link to European markets. The cod and salmon that teemed in Iceland’s waters were domestic dietary staples and, when salted, a valuable export. Wild swans and other aquatic birds provided their feathers for quill pens, and the down of Iceland’s eider ducks filled the feather beds of Europe. Ivory from the tusks of Iceland’s walruses sold at premium prices. Seals gave their skins, and every so often a floe-born polar bear’s luxuriant fur was worth a king’s ransom.

  There were enormous and magnificent white falcons, the finest in all the world for hawking, a sport that was almost as popular as war with European kings and nobles of the day. And drifting ice packs sometimes crowded whales onto Iceland’s beaches, providing the islanders with a feast and with oil for use both at home and in foreign trade.

  Although the average Icelander was a hard-working farmer and trader, he was also the son of Vikings, with his ancestors’ lust for wandering and adventure in his blood. From time to time, if his farm was in good hands - or even if it was not - he would sail off across the broad sea to the British Isles and continental Europe.

  Many Icelanders simply headed in the direction of the nearest fight. Everyone knew and cherished the story of the Icelander named Thorstein, son of Hall, who in 1014 fought in the Viking army at the Battle of Clontarf, near Dublin. While his comrades were in headlong flight, he stooped down calmly to tighten his bootlaces. The victorious Irish came upon him and asked why he was not fleeing with the rest. “Because,” he said, “I can’t get home tonight since my home is out in Iceland.” Admiring his coolness, they spared his life.

  And there was Halldor Snorrason, another Icelander, who had gone as far as a man could go in Christendom to join the Varangian Guard, which protected the emperor in Constantinople. He formed a bluff and hearty friendship there with Harald Hardrada, commander of the guard. When Harald later became king of Norway, Halldor stayed with him. But Harald as king was less of a friend, and he was also late in paying Halldor some money he owed him. The dauntless Icelander burst with drawn sword into the king’s bedroom and forced the queen to give him the solid-gold ring on her finger. Then he was down to the docks and off on his ship home to Iceland. The king’s men, in three longships, tried to catch him but soon gave up the chase. Halldor lived comfortably on his farm. Though Harald often urged him to come back and promised him a higher position than anyone else in the land not nobly born, he always refused. Said Halldor, the crafty Viking, “I know his temper well enough; he’ll keep his promise and hang me on the highest gallows.”

  There was a steady flow of tough, clever, and self-reliant young men from Iceland to Norway. The Icelander Hrut Herjolfsson shared the bed of Gunnhild, the queen mother of Norway, and returned a rich man. Years later, his nephew Olaf Peacock found the queen just as amorous and just as generous. Olaf’s son Kjartan made the voyage to Norway, too, taking half shares in a cargo ship. One day he went swimming in the icy river off the port of Nidaros - now Trondheim - and noticed an especially strong swimmer in a group ahead of him. He decided to challenge him to a typically Viking sport.

  As related in the Laxdaela Saga, “He made for this man and forced him underwater at once and held him there for a while before letting go of him. No sooner had they come to the surface than this man seized hold of Kjartan and pulled him down, and they stayed under for what seemed to Kjartan a reasonable time. They surfaced for a second time, and still they exchanged no words. Then they went under
a third time, and now they stayed down much longer than before. Kjartan was no longer sure how this game would end and felt that he had never been in such a tight corner before. At last, they came to the surface and swam ashore.” As they stood on the bank, the man praised Kjartan for his strength and courage and revealed that he was none other than the king of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason, the greatest Viking of his age. He gave Kjartan his richly embroidered cloak and showered him with favors afterward.

  Olaf may have been moved by something more than admiration for the young man’s strength and pluck, just as Harald Graycloak may have been interested in something more than setting a new style in men’s fashions in his kingdom. As kings of Norway, they knew that most of the Icelandic colonists had come from their land, and they felt a natural urge to extend their dominion over Iceland as they had gradually done over the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and the Faroes.

  But the Icelanders were far away, and, at this time, in the flush of their success as colonists and as traders and as Vikings, they felt safe and self-reliant. They had no wish for any foreign master and desired to remain, as one of them put it, “free of kings and criminals.” Moreover, on their outpost of civilization, they had established a self-governing republic, something Europe had not seen since the early days of Rome.

  Geography had dictated that Iceland be a land of isolated farmsteads - of many farmers separated from their neighbors by river, fjord, glacier, or mountain, and forced to rely primarily on themselves for subsistence and security. But each settler was aware at the same time of being part of a larger community. Every June, after collecting the sea birds’ eggs and after the sheep had been driven upland to their summer pastures, every farmer would gather up his family and some of his servants and slaves and set off on a long, pony-backed journey to a spectacular, sunken, blackland plain just thirty miles from present-day Reykjavik.

  Here, beginning in 930, was held the meeting of the Althing, the people’s general assembly. Following the oral and mnemonic tradition that gave rise to the sagas, an elected law speaker would each year recite from memory one third of the legal code of the land; the entire code took three years, and then a new man would start again.

  If necessary, the laws were amended. Suits were brought and adjudicated, marriages and other business deals were arranged and gossip exchanged, to an accompaniment of games and merrymaking and sometimes bloody fights over grievances old and new.

  The Althing was Western Europe’s first parliament. It was by no means democratic, for all real power was vested in thirty-six prominent landowners. Such a landowner, called a godi (priest), maintained a god’s shrine on his property. The godi’s function was to protect the interests of the neighboring, smaller farmers. In return, the thirty-six had a right to demand the help of their neighbors in their own disputes and feuds.

  This arrangement was not ironclad and immutable, as it was in feudal Europe. If a godi was weak or unreliable, his men could, and often did, transfer their allegiance to another. Nor was the average Icelandic farmer afraid of speaking up to his own or any other godi when he felt his family honor was at stake. There was more freedom of both thought and deed in Iceland than in virtually any other nation on earth at that time.

  There was one grave weakness in the structure of the Icelandic commonwealth, however, one that would, after three centuries, of health and prosperity, lead to anarchy and the loss of national independence. The Althing was both parliament and high court, and it lacked an executive branch to enforce its decisions. Iceland had no army, no navy, no police, no taxes, and no civil service of any kind. A blessed state, some would say. But it meant that if a man won a lawsuit at the Althing, he had no way to enforce the judgment or collect payment if the other party chose to be stubborn - no way, that is, unless he and his friends were strong enough to overawe the opponent and if necessary overcome him by brute force. This, in turn, could lead to attacks and counterattacks, battles, burnings, ambushes, killings, maimings, and endless bloodshed.

  Feuds remained very much a party of daily life for these proud, touchy, battle-hardened men. And they could go on for generations - and leap far overseas, as in the tale of Grettir the Strong and his brother.

  Grettir was a great warrior, and a conqueror of trolls and ghosts. But, alas, while exorcising a spirit, he fell under its spell, and thereafter was plagued by a murderous temper that soon got him outlawed. For twenty years, Grettir roamed the bleak interior until, at last, he returned to civilization - where his enemies quickly found him and slew him.

  His slayer, who soon became an outlaw himself, thereupon went off to Constantinople via Norway and, for an adventure, enlisted in the Varangian Guard. But Grettir’s half brother, who lived in Norway, swore vengeance. He embarked for the same destination, and he, too, enlisted in the Guard.

  One day as they were lining up for parade, the killer boastfully pointed out the nick in his sword where it had broken Grettir’s skull. The brother asked to inspect the weapon. When it was handed over, he brought it down on the killer’s own skull. Redeeming family honor came before obedience to the regulations of any emperor, and the soldiers of the Guard loudly defended the deed of Grettir’s brother.

  There were only two ways of settling feuds, short of the complete extermination of one or the other party. One was a formal reconciliation, either privately or at the Althing, with payment of wergild, or “blood money” for each man slain. The other was for the Althing to declare one party guilty and condemn him to an existence outside the protection of the law for a period of years or for life - “unfeedable,” as the law put it, “unferriable, unfit for all help and shelter.”

  An outlaw might choose to disregard this decree, and many roamed the wilderness of Iceland’s interior for years, living off blackmail and robbery. But such a man was fair game for anybody. He could be killed in any fashion at any time, and no retribution money need be paid. Restless and desperate, hungering for refuge, some outlaws turned their eyes to the west, across trackless oceans. And it was an outlaw named Eirik the Red who led the way.

  Eirik Thorvaldsson Raudi - Eirik the Red - was red of hair and red of beard, bloody of heart and bloody of hand. He was a murderously bad neighbor, a scoundrel on a grand scale, a heathen to the core, and to the last of his life he remained unregenerate. Yet, he was a towering figure of a Viking. And others would follow him to the end of the world and live with him at the end of human existence.

  Cast out by his own society and driven by the forces of his own nature, Eirik thrust boldly toward the western horizon, where, on the perilous rim of Greenland’s great permanent ice cap, he founded a settlement that would survive for nearly five centuries as a monument to human endurance. Eirik’s son Leif was less of an outcast. Yet within him stirred the same burning desire to reach westward beyond the wilderness of the ocean - and that hungering took him to the apogee of Norse explorations: America, which Christopher Columbus was not to encounter for another half millennium.

  Thus, step by step - from Norway to the Faroes to Iceland, Greenland, and finally to America - the Vikings traversed the formidable North Atlantic, a perilous distance of more than 3,000 miles from the fjords of Norway, entrusting their lives to their own seamanship and their doughty little vessels. The sagas’ accounts of the Norse adventure in America - or, as Leif named it, Vinland - are obscure, fragmentary, and often exaggerated. Precisely where the Vikings went, how long they stayed, what they did, and why they left are pieces of a tantalizing puzzle. Equally baffling is the sudden and still unexplained disappearance of the Norsemen from the Greenland settlements they had clung so tenaciously to for so long. Yet whatever the immediate (and perhaps inconsequential) details, the Norse withdrawal from Vinland and then from Greenland was part of the wormwood process of decay that brought an end to the great age of the Vikings.

  Just as the Viking colonists faded into the mists of the sagas, so the Viking warriors, those “valiant, wrathful, purely pagan people” of the early Irish lament, gradually found
themselves tamed and assimilated by the very peoples they had conquered in both east and west. Viking traders, too, saw themselves superseded by more powerful and sophisticated rivals. And though no one ever sailed more beautiful ships, the master builders of other lands constructed crafts that were so much larger and more useful that the Viking knarr and longship passed from the seas.

  Eirik the Red was a sign and symbol of the famed Viking Age and of its demise. He was born around 950 on a farm in southwest Norway. His violent nature found an early outlet. While Eirik was in his late teens, he and his father Thorvald plunged - joyously, in all certainty - into one of the innumerable and interminable blood feuds that so fortified yet depleted Viking manhood. In the offhand words of a saga, there were “some killings.” Eirik and Thorvald were outlawed, and, like so many outlaws before them, they followed their fate to Iceland.

  They arrived late. By then, in the 960s, all of Iceland’s good land had been taken, and what was left for recent outcasts was a rocky, hardscrabble tract on the cruel northwestern coast. Thorvald soon died, and Eirik was left to fend for himself - which he set about to do with a vengeance. He married Thjodhild, daughter of a prosperous family and, as it turned out, one of the few persons on earth whose willfulness matched Eirik’s.

  Eirik moved south and - probably with the help of his in-laws and perhaps by force - took and cleared land at Haukadal, an area of grass and birch woods on an arm of the Breidafjord. But Eirik was never much for peaceful coexistence. Violence was always surging in his soul, and soon another feud resulted in the bloody deaths of two of his neighbors. Again Eirik was forced to flee. He dismantled his house, timber being too valuable in wood-scarce Iceland to leave behind, and moved on Oxney, on a Breidafjord promontory about fifty miles west of Haukadal.