Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Of all the territories of the diaspora, Iceland, in particular, cut across the social and political currents that were swirling around Scandinavia. It was never an easy combination—an island of pioneer settlers, established without rulers in an age of monarchs, a republic of independent-minded farmers in a time of burgeoning nation states. These tensions were already apparent when it was first colonised in the late ninth century, against the background of the sea-kings’ growing power. Iceland’s founding population was a complex mixture, as we have seen—men from Norway and from the settlements in the Scottish Isles, some Scandinavian women but many more from the Irish Sea region. Within a century of the landnám, the land-taking, more and more settlers had homesteaded along the rivers and fjords.

  These districts became worlds in miniature, their families rising and falling in prominence and leaving their mark in the sagas. The tidal pool and inlet around which Reykjavík would later develop was inhabited early on, and the remains of several longhouses have been found by the water, but soon the whole of the west coast was covered in settlements. The Snæfellsnes Peninsula, slightly to the north, is especially rich in history, folklore, and legend; Laxárdalr, in nearby Breiðafjörður, was home to some of the most prominent families; and so on round the country, every valley claimed and worked.

  Iceland’s increasing prosperity in the tenth century attracted not only the envy of the Norwegian kings, but increasingly too the attention of the Church. When the marginal agricultural economy and climate were added to the mix, it is clear that the Icelanders faced a number of challenges.

  Resources were always an issue in the North Atlantic. Investigation of the post-landnám flora shows the opening of the land and tree felling on a massive scale. It is important to understand that the dramatic and barren landscape that attracts tourists today was not at all what the Vikings found: it was what they created. When the Norse arrived, Iceland was heavily forested, but the trees were quickly cut for building materials—an entire society needing to construct places to live and work—while the scrub cover was exhausted for use as fuel. Within a generation of the first landfall, the nature of the place had changed irrevocably. In addition to causing accelerating soil erosion, this also led to a constant demand for timber that increased sharply from the tenth century onwards. With the trees gone, driftwood became a vital resource, and the rights to gather it were strictly partitioned and controlled. Driftwood is useful for many household purposes but very difficult to work, being both hard and also impregnated with too much sand and soil.

  The earliest structures on the island were built of local timber, but thereafter it had to be imported. Some of the wealthiest settlers even brought their homes with them, as portable ‘kit’ structures: they could be disassembled into their component parts in only two or three days by a team of workers. In prefabricated form, they were transported to Iceland from Norway, and later also onwards to Greenland. This partly explains why the basic size of the structures is broadly constant across the North Atlantic colonies.

  A combination of necessity and the practicalities of insulation and waterproofing meant that turf became the main material used in the construction of dwellings and other structures. In a typical North Atlantic longhouse, the basic housing unit of the region under Norse settlement, between 1,000 and 1,500 square metres of cut turf were required to construct its walls. Even today, especially in Greenland, large expanses of turf cuttings can still be seen in the vicinity of Viking-Age farms; it is clear that the management and extraction of turf resources were carefully supervised activities. A farm might consist of a main building and several outhouses—workshops and byres, maybe a smithy, perhaps quarters for the thralls. In the later Viking Age, and more so on into the Middle Ages, these ancillary spaces were incorporated into the main farmhouse for increased warmth, resulting in complex modular structures of conjoined buildings.

  Throughout the North Atlantic, peat was also an important resource, commonly used as household fuel, in metalworking, and as a building material. As with turf, large-scale peat cuttings are identifiable even today around the Viking-Age settlements, and it seems that special areas in the landscape were set aside for the purpose.

  Iceland never adapted to a monetary economy in the Viking Age, and there are very few silver hoards. Other commodities played a leading role in its systems of exchange, foremost of which was probably vaðmál—the rather coarse and heavy wool twill cloth, also known as tabby, that was employed universally in the Viking world as the basic textile for household use. It was therefore not only a viable and easily traded product for the domestic market, but also a valuable item for onwards exchange. The island was never isolated, and conducted a lively trade to the other North Atlantic colonies and back to Scandinavia. The sagas are full of passages to Norway in particular, despite political tensions with the royal powers there, and contact was always maintained.

  Thinking of the diaspora as a mental condition as much as a physical one, it is interesting that Landnámabók, the ‘Book of Settlements’, lists the Scandinavian origins of only about 10 percent of the first homesteaders in Iceland. As in many frontier narratives, the forward-looking new lives that people made for themselves were often deemed more important than what was left behind in the ‘old country’.

  The settlement of the North Atlantic colonies also precipitated the institution of a new type of legal system. This drew on the traditional use of thing sites that had long been a feature of life in mainland Scandinavia. In contrast to the situation in Norway, where kings were asserting their authority over the assemblies, governance in Iceland was placed almost entirely in the hands of parliaments, where legislation was created and renewed, and legal cases were heard. One of the first was on Þingnes, a windswept peninsula near Reykjavík, and there were regional assemblies around the country. Around 930, a national parliament, the Alþingi, was established at the location now known as Þingvellir—a spectacular rift valley formed by the divergent movements of the Eurasian and North American Continental plates. The law of the Alþingi was upheld by thirty-six goðar, or chieftains, who became the major players in Icelandic politics. In 960, the system was redeveloped when the island was divided into four quarters, each of which was made up of three regional assemblies, which in turn were led by three goðar.

  Despite the aspirations of the Icelanders to devise a new system of government, their brave new world was far from a peaceful utopia. The core narratives of many saga accounts describe the long and bloody feuds that developed between competing families and political factions along the valleys, neighbourly quarrels that escalated to theft and killings. As the power of the goðar grew into the medieval period, so did the stakes in these disputes, propelling the feuds forward. The resulting civil conflicts would ultimately prove to be the end of the Icelandic republic, as the continuing spiral of violence was finally terminated when direct control was asserted from Norway in the thirteenth century.

  Another serious threat to social stability was posed by outlaws, especially due to their stock raiding. A number of their hideouts are known, and some have attracted a rich accretion of folklore. Such tales are, of course, a fundamental part of the Icelandic narrative—literally so in the form of the famous sagas encountered throughout this book. The individuals who populate the stories are true Viking-Age characters, albeit filtered through the medieval prose of the saga-writers, with the variable reliability of an assumed oral history on which the whole edifice rests. For a modern Icelander, reading the Old Norse of the sagas has about the same level of difficulty as Shakespearean prose for an English speaker. Many Icelanders today trace their descent from saga protagonists and the early settlers, and the corpus of stories is, in every sense, a national treasure.

  There is Aud the Deep-Minded, stranded as a widow in Caithness on the north Scottish shore, who commissioned her own ship and captained it first to Orkney and then to the Faroes and Iceland; she became one of the country’s great landholders, and one of its first Chr
istians. And Flosi Thordarson, who burnt his enemies in their hall after a reluctant campaign of revenge, only to hear someone chanting poetry down among the flames. “Was Skarphedin alive or dead when he spoke that verse?” asks one of his men, and Flosi’s reply, “I shall not make any guesses about that.” There is Gudrún Ósvífrsdóttir, widowed four times after a tangled cycle of love, vengeance, and feud—at the end of a long life, she looks back on her late husbands with the most famous line in the sagas, “I was worst to the one I loved the most”; people still debate who she meant. Or Thorodd the Tribute-Trader, who drowned with his men on a fishing expedition, their bodies never found; every night of the funeral feast, he and his companions walked in to sit by the hearth, water streaming from their clothes, “until the fire began to burn very low, then they went away”. And Gunnhild, sorceress-queen of Jorvík, who once perched in a window in the shape of a bird, twittering all night trying to break a poet’s concentration. Then there’s the outlaw anti-hero Grettir Ásmundarson, who fought the terrible revenant Glam, and always said the only thing that ever frightened him was the sight of the undead man looking up to stare at the moon.

  Some of these people were definitely real, others perhaps not. Few of them can have done precisely the things ascribed to them in the texts—but in a sense, it does not really matter. Please, read the sagas.

  The Viking-Age experience behind the literary lives of the medieval texts can be vividly revealed by archaeology. The site of Hofstaðir in northern Iceland can serve as a useful window onto the colony. An unusual and extraordinary place with strong ritual overtones, excavations there revealed a remarkable level of preservation: in the floor deposits, for example, it is possible to see the imprints of furniture and household effects, and even the curving scrape made every time a badly fitting door was opened. Hofstaðir was settled soon after 940 with the construction of a hall, a smithy, and a sunken-floored building. Between the 980s and the 1030s, the hall was greatly expanded. The main building was lengthened, a smaller one was constructed nearby, a larger smithy was built, and a new latrine was dug.

  From this second phase onwards, there are indications of a much bigger population for the complex, but also a suggestion that this was something seasonal, and that the hall was purpose-built for large gatherings of people on specific occasions. This is supported by the size of the hearth, which was not sufficient to heat the structure, and also by specialised butchery patterns in the animal bones that imply the meat was brought to the site already processed for feasting. Environmental studies on the animal bones reveal the pigs kept on-site were being fed on trout, a diet that produces exceptionally fatty pork. This is an uncommon practice, with no other regional parallels, and indicates that the pigs were being purposely reared for their meat to be used in high-status feasting. Hofstaðir is also the only site to preserve evidence for the consumption of suckling pig, another delicacy.

  This was the place where bulls were sacrificed, two-person teams killing them in great spectacles of blood, as we saw earlier. The skulls of the cattle seem to have been afterwards fixed around the walls of the hall. Up to thirty-five crania were recovered from the excavation, bearing witness to many years of such rites—radiocarbon dating suggests the sacrifices may have been spread out over as much as a century. It also appears this was done in the second half of June; these were summer rituals during the period of permanent sunlight. Most of the sacrificial bulls did not come from the Mývatn area, but were brought to Hofstaðir from outside the district—another expensive practice. The killing of cattle seems to have come to an end at the same time as the adoption of Christianity, suggesting an obvious link between the introduction of the new faith and the decline of such public pagan events (even if non-Christian rites continued behind closed doors for a time).

  Many other finds testify to Hofstaðir’s unique status, although some are hard to interpret; for example, the site has large concentrations of cat bones, which are found nowhere else. The settlement was dismantled and abandoned in the 1070s, when the buildings were taken apart and each structure was ritually closed with burials of animal skulls.

  Iceland officially converted to Christianity around the year 1000, although there is a complex story behind it. The new faith had been infiltrating the island for decades, arriving actively or passively with every new ship, as rumour or conviction. The progress of conversion in Scandinavia, not least in Norway, made itself felt in Iceland too. The settlers looked to the future and debated their options accordingly. The Book of Icelanders records that the decision to accept the Christian religion was made by the lawspeaker of the Alþingi, in response to increasing unrest resulting from friction between adherents of the new beliefs and stubborn traditionalists. Having meditated under a cloak in something resembling a shamanic trance, the speaker came down on the side of conversion but with some interesting provisos: Icelanders would thenceforth call themselves Christians, but could still practise the old rituals in private, eat horseflesh, and expose unwanted children if they wished (which, not least, implies they were really doing these things). As in mainland Scandinavia, early Christianity seems to have been a relatively private affair, with many farmsteads possessing their own churches—a situation that would continue into the Middle Ages.

  The latter half of the tenth century saw Icelanders venturing even farther west, leading to the colonisation of Greenland in the 980s. The reasons for this remain a matter of debate, but it is possible that the areas in Iceland available for settlement were being steadily locked in by established chieftains. The story of the Norse presence in Greenland, and later the New World, is preserved in two Icelandic tales—the Saga of Eirík the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders. They differ substantially in the details, but convey a broadly similar big picture of the westward expansion.

  Greenland was discovered accidentally by travellers blown off course in a storm. On their return to Iceland, they told others of what they’d seen, and the news of a great land to the west began to circulate. This coincided with a local drama in the west of the country, when a sentence of outlawry—exile literally beyond the law—was pronounced on a man called Eirík the Red, as a result of a series of killings in a neighbourly feud. A difficult, violent, but intrepid man, with limited options, Eirík decided to try his luck in these new lands and sailed there with a small group of followers. A year later he was back in Iceland, full of tales of the wonderful place he had decided to call Greenland—chosen, according to the saga, because people would want to go there if it had a nice name.

  Eirík’s persuasions found a ready audience. It must have been tempting to head out there to an unsettled country (as Iceland had been only a century earlier) in search of new lands for colonisation. In addition to pasture, the availability of game, including reindeer, seal, and walrus, also acted as a draw for new settlers. This first Norse presence, which would become the so-called Eastern Settlement (Eystribygð), was established around the southern tip of Greenland. Archaeologists have recorded some five hundred farms there, spreading northwards along the coast and extending to a smaller community sometimes known as the Middle Settlement.

  Its social and political centre was at Brattahlíð, the site of Eirík’s farmstead complex on what he characteristically had named the Eiríksfjord (today the place is known by its Inuit name, Qassiarsuk, and the fjord is Tunulliarfik). Remains of Eirík’s house have been found; it was an imposing structure with a flagstone floor, surrounded by ancillary buildings, including byres for animals. Nearby stood a tiny turf church, made (according to the sagas) for his wife, Thjodhild. Eirík never shared her faith and remained faithful to the old traditions until his death, and their spiritual differences caused tensions between them. At an unknown location near Brattahlíð was the site of the first thing assembly in Greenland. This district would continue in prominence for centuries, with a later Christian focus around the bishopric at Garðar, founded in the twelfth century on the next fjord to Brattahlíð.

  Another major sit
e in the Eastern Settlement was at Herjolfsnes; it was located away from the main centre but cleverly placed to form the natural first landfall of ships arriving from Iceland. Founded by Herjólf Bárdarson, who came over in the first ships with Eirík, Herjolfsnes thrived effectively as a port of transit—receiving the first news from the east and doing a brisk trade in outfitting travellers with the things they didn’t know they needed.

  Farther north, up the coast, a second Norse colony was soon founded and became known as the Western Settlement (Vestribygð). Around one hundred farms have been identified here. In both settlements, the Norse sited their settlements in the more temperate areas along the coast, where the fjords and valleys allowed a pastoral agricultural system. As elsewhere in the North Atlantic, they adhered to their cultural roots when constructing and managing their homes. The turf and stone farmhouses still visible as ruins there today were, in many respects, similar to those found in Iceland and the Faroes, as was the continued use of the infield/outfield farming methods whereby the areas closest to the dwellings were cultivated while the land farther away was used for pastured grazing. An important part of the economy was the annual walrus hunt, conducted far to the north in the waters of what is now Disko Bay. This hazardous trip to the northern hunting grounds (Norðrsetur) took many weeks, but provided the raw materials for the colonists’ own use and to keep trade going with Iceland and Scandinavia.

  In other ways, too, the harsh environment demanded that the colonists adapt their way of life in order to survive, and there is some evidence they tried to do so. In the Western Settlement, around eighty kilometres from the modern-day Greenlandic capital of Nuuk, excavations by Danish archaeologists at a site they named Gården Under Sandet (Farm Beneath the Sand), or GUS, found eight phases of superimposed occupation, revealing compound structures combining dwellings, animal stabling, and outhouses in conglomerate buildings that maximised heat retention and warmth. At GUS there is a constant sensitivity to the environment, as buildings of different kinds changed usage to fit the season and the climate. Both in Iceland and Greenland, the ability to feed livestock over the winter was of fundamental importance. Fodder plants unsurprisingly predominate in the environmental record, and in the faunal record there is a high proportion of goats, useful as hardy animals that could be fed on woody fibres such as twigs. Preserving food was an equally important part of the annual cycle, especially for the winter months, and the settlers applied their ingenuity to this as to all other challenges of their new home. There is good evidence, for example, for the use of seaweed ash as a source of salt, which was vital to the preservation process.