That poignant comment, “The richness of the land in those days” tells us that the saga author, putting pen to parchment in the 1200s, knew things had changed in the three hundred years since Ingimund’s day. The sheep had eaten the willows’ buds and twigs, the pigs had rooted them up, and what the animals had spared fed the fires of the smithy and the family hearth. By the 1200s, Icelanders were burning sheep dung to cook, had given up on pigs as well as goats and geese, and spent much of the summer making hay, for the sheep could no longer feed themselves. The woods had not grown back. The bare hills collapsed in frequent landslides. The rushing rivers and ceaseless wind worried at the edges of the fields, erosion eating what the lambs had left.
The Landnámabók, literally the “Book of Land-Taking” but commonly called The Book of Settlements, is a compendium of fact and fancy about the first settlers of Iceland. Written at about the same time as the sagas, it reads like a series of saga abstracts linked by a thread of nostalgia for the richness of the land, and particularly for the long-lost woods. The first people to spend a winter in Iceland, it says, were a Swede and his clair-voyant mother, who had guided their ship there by second sight. “In those days,” we read, the island “was wooded all the way from the mountains right down to the sea.” Of a site claimed by an Irishman, the book says: “At that time there was such a great wood there that he was able to build an ocean-going ship from the timber.” Botanists Throstur Eysteinsson and Sigurdur Blondal have determined that birch and rowan trees tall enough to make ship strakes could have grown in the lowlands before grazing animals were introduced. (Though there was never a tree in Iceland that would serve as the keelson of the Sea Stallion, the 98-foot-long dragonship retrieved from the Skuldelev harbor floor: That one vital part, which supported the mast, required a straight oak trunk almost 60 feet long.)
Once the virgin forests were cut down, the shoots grew scrubby and crooked for two reasons. One was the constant pruning by sheep. The second, in the case of the downy birch, was genetic introgression with dwarf arctic birch, which seldom grows taller than 20 inches high and is more resistant to grazing. The crossing is natural, but “in the absence of sheep,” the botanists say, “hybrids would have been at a disadvantage at lower elevations and been shaded out by taller trees.”
The settlers considered land covered with brushwood “useless for farming.” In one saga, a wealthy Norwegian who bought a large tract of it is complimented for his industry: He “had lots of clearings made in the woods, where he started farming.” The standard way to claim a plot of land, according to The Book of Settlements, was to “carry fire around it.” That may mean the claimant rode around his proposed acres on horseback with a flaming torch in his hand. More likely it means exactly what the wealthy Norwegian did to clear his land of brush: He burned it. Archaeologists have found a layer of charcoal under two-thirds of the earliest Viking houses.
But Iceland was not like Norway, where a farmer fought constantly, with fire and axe, to keep the dark, encroaching forest from reclaiming his fields. Iceland’s ecology was much more fragile. With the trees gone, the snow did not stick. Without this insulating blanket, the low-growing succulent herbs did not last the winter, leaving only tough, stemmy, cold-hardy species. The soil froze and thawed, bucked and heaved, and re-formed itself into the hummocks now so common in Icelandic fields that city-folk claim to be able to spot a farmer by the lurching, awkward way he walks down the street. In windy weather, sheep tuck themselves into the lee of these hummocks and munch on whatever grass they can reach without moving. Once they eat a patch down to bare dirt, the wind takes over, peeling the surrounding sod and whisking away the soil until the hummock is a pedestal. Unless someone intervenes—removing the sheep, creating a windbreak—the pasture turns to desert. Scientists estimate the wind has stripped off a quarter of Iceland’s topsoil since the settlement. More than half of the landscape that was woods and grasslands a thousand years ago is now gravel and sand—and modern Icelanders are hard at work planting trees and experimenting with various grasses and legumes, like Alaskan lupines, to reclaim the wasteland.
Not all the blame for Iceland’s “landscape of ruins” and her “nakedness,” as scientists have named it, should land in the Viking farmers’ laps. Climate change also played a large part. The Little Ice Age hit Iceland in the 1200s, dropping the summer highs just enough to hurt the haymaking and end the growing of grain, while the sea ice, creeping near in springtime—not autumn—put the new lambs at risk. The length of time the sheep could graze their summer meadows in the highlands grew shorter; overgraze by a week, and each year’s grazing would be noticeably poorer until the pasture all but disappeared.
But the choices the first settlers made, of where to live and how to make a living, both in Iceland and, later, in Greenland, “had resonance for good or ill throughout all the subsequent history of political, economic, and environmental interactions in both islands,” write archaeologists Tom McGovern, Orri Vesteinsson, and Christian Keller. “Over the succeeding 1100 years, these interactions proved intense and often disastrous.”
A description of those choices and interactions can be found in Egil’s Saga. Egil’s father, Skallagrim (“Bald Grim”), was miffed, adventurous, and fleeing for his life—all three. He brought two shiploads of men and all the trappings of aristocratic Norway to a fjord in western Iceland, where he found wide marshlands and thick woods, with good fishing and seal hunting. He claimed the land “from the mountains to the sea.” His land-claim later sufficed for four chieftains—and three hundred individual farms.
Like Unn the Deep-Minded, Skallagrim shared his land with the people who had followed him to Iceland, and the saga is clear that he didn’t divvy it up haphazardly. He put a man at Swan Ness to collect driftwood and gulls’ eggs, to fish, and to hunt swans and seals. At Grain Fields he sowed barley and set a man there to farm. Another was sent offshore to Whale Islands. Two men he established beside two salmon rivers. Finally, he set up a sheep farm in the highlands, having noticed the sheep that had strayed into the mountains were fatter than the ones kept close to home. He parked himself, with his cows and pigs, beneath a fortresslike hill in a little bay that guarded the entrance to the fjord; by the water he set up his smithy. He placed his closest friend on the opposite shore, so they could control both banks. He divided what was left of his land-claim among his seven followers and their families, with enough remaining to grant his father-in-law a sizable plot when he showed up a year or two later.
Orri Vesteinsson believes the saga’s author got it right when he says, “Skallagrim’s farm stood on many feet.” The grandson of Ludvik Kristjansson—whose masterly compilation of lore, common sense, and natural history of the sea and all its creatures, Sjávarhættir, in five oversized volumes, is renowned throughout Iceland—Orri travels easily between his personalities as historian and archaeologist. He is as confident of his argument when he dissects a saga scene as when he describes Sveigakot, the barren little highland farm he has been excavating for seven years. On both counts, he takes delight in turning accepted theory on its head.
“The saga was written by somebody with a keen academic understanding of these processes, somebody who has put a lot of thought into what is necessary when you’re starting a new colony,” he told me. “And he was closer to these events than we are. He could imagine them better than we can. But it’s clearly a model. It betrays its academic origins. It’s too neat a picture. Reality is never like that.”
Other sagas present a competing model of how Iceland was settled, one that was preferred, said Orri, by the Icelanders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “the single settler who claims a reasonable bit of land. This was the independent farmer, the man who seeks political freedom as much as economic prosperity. It’s still a part of the Icelandic psyche, this idea that our origins are as yeoman farmers.” Orri added, “That model comes with all sorts of baggage about democracy. I don’t believe in it.”
Orri’s own mo
del takes the Skallagrim story and gives it a cynical twist. A farm that stands on many feet needs many hands to keep things running. But Iceland was a hard sell. There were precious few ship-sized trees, and hardly many more tall enough for house timbers. Grain was not easy to grow; the rice, sugarcane, dates, lemons, and strawberries the Muslims at this time were introducing into Spain were unthinkable. Cows had to be kept indoors, some years, into June. Nor were there reindeer or bears or other woodland creatures to provide meat and skins and salable furs. There was no silver and no wine, two luxuries that drew Norse settlers east and south. The reports that came home to Norway were mixed. One of the earliest explorers, Raven-Floki, landed beside a fjord that was “teeming with fish,” the saga says, but his people “got so caught up with the fishing that they forgot to make hay, so their livestock starved to death the following winter.”
Unn the Deep-Minded and Skallagrim went to Iceland because they had nowhere else to go, having fallen afoul of the new king of Norway, and many of the later settlers named in the sagas were killers and troublemakers kicked out of the old country. Once the word got out that the new land was, as Ingimund the Old put it, “a poor exchange for Norway,” peaceful farmfolk were not lining up at the Trondheim docks. “How do you get people to come?” Orri asked. “The bulk of the population was either enticed, duped, or bought.
“One of the archaeological results we have is that the settlement occurred extremely rapidly,” he said, hurrying to back up his intentionally offensive statement. “The shittiest places were occupied just as soon as the best—even places at high altitude, with limited capacity, like Sveigakot up north, a place nobody in his right mind would have chosen to live in after coming a thousand miles. Even compared to the most horrible places in Norway, it’s desperate.”
Sveigakot today is a thousand acres of desert—just sand and stones and a marbling of moss, not a tree on the horizon—900 feet above sea level, more than 30 miles from the sea. The foundation stones of the Viking Age houses are barely covered with soil. Yet the site was occupied for over 200 years. Close by is a chieftain’s farm comprised of almost 4,000 acres, with a 2,000-square-foot feasting hall, the biggest ever found in Iceland, its exterior decorated with the horned skulls of cattle knocked on the head to serve up at the feast. Nor was beef the only thing on the menu, as the archaeologists learned by sifting through the garbage heap. The point of holding feasts, Orri and his colleagues write, was “to cement bonds of friendship and dependence and to impress competitors.” A feast that included codfish, eggs, milk and cheese, lamb, and beer was a clear declaration that “this farm stands on many feet.”
Sveigakot was apparently one of the feet. The house itself was a small sunken room, 200 square feet in all, a so-called pit house—literally a pit dug a yard or less into the ground with a turfed-over roof, making the whole thing roughly tepee shaped. The Vikings generally used them as temporary shelters until a longhouse went up; at Sveigakot, that interval took two or three generations. Next to the pit house, however, they immediately built a large byre, with stalls for fourteen cows. “They seem to have begun very optimistically,” Orri said, “but things didn’t quite turn out the way they expected. These people seem to have been extremely poor in terms of material culture.” The only artifact found in the pit house was a nail.
“I think it was a planned settlement,” Orri told me. “Somebody organized it, and the greatest problem the organizers had was getting people to go. One easy solution is simply to buy them and transport them.” The slaves, Orri believes, were not only Irish and Scottish, but Poles, Slavs, Balts, Frisians, Finns, English, and other Scandinavians—all of whom were for sale in the markets of tenth-century Europe.
“That would explain why people had to put up with this place,” he said. “Once you’re stranded in Iceland, it’s hard to get away.”
By 930, the sagas say, Iceland was fully settled and the new settlers had set up a system of government. Or at least, a few dozen of the richest and most powerful men (they were all men: Unn the Deep-Minded was one of a kind) had proclaimed themselves goðar, a word that is usually translated as “chieftains.” These chieftains then worked out a way to share power. The country was divided into quarters, North, East, South, and West, and each landowner had to attach himself to one of the chieftains in his quarter. He could change his allegiance once a year, and was free (at least in theory) to sell his farm and move to a different quarter if he didn’t like his options. Laws were made and customs established to even out inequalities in wealth and status, to make sure that no one chieftain grew strong enough to become a King Harald Fine-Hair. It was, for instance, dishonorable (and often fatal) to be labeled an ójafnarðarmaður, a man who was unfair, unjust, overbearing: a man who upset the balance of the world.
Each summer the chieftains and their followers—perhaps a thousand people in all—met in Thingvellir, the “Meeting Plains” in the southwest of Iceland, to reaffirm their laws and to handle any disputes that could not be resolved at a more local level. Their meeting, called the Althing, was also the social event of the year, where marriages were made, goods traded, tales told, ale drunk, and politics discussed. It was at the Althing, in 1022, that the Icelanders ratified a trade agreement with Norway, permitting them to cut as much wood in the royal forests as they wished; and at the Althing, in 1024, that they learned the king of Norway wished to be given the offshore island of Grimsey as a token of the Icelanders’ esteem. They refused. Alone of their time, the saga people bowed to no king. With law is our land built, they declared.
Scholars have called the system they designed a democracy. In 1930, at the Althing’s thousand-year fete, the United States spokesman lauded the first Icelanders for seeking freedom and democracy and equal rights. The representative of Britain’s House of Lords called the Althing “the grandmother of parliaments” (the English parliament being the mother). These statesmen “told the audience what it wanted to hear,” writes Helgi Thorlaksson, a historian at the University of Iceland. To the Icelanders of 1930—struggling for their own independence from the Danish crown—the people of the sagas were “democratic, law-abiding, peace-loving parliamentarians.” To some, Viking Iceland still seems rooted in the values of America. In 1995 William Pencak, a philosophy professor at Pennsylvania State University wrote: “Iceland and its sagas depict a nation of free men, abetted by formidable women.”
To anthropologist Paul Durrenberger, also of Penn State, this romantic notion is bunk. When he read the sagas, he saw no “nation of free men” but an aristocracy of chieftains who “had no inclination toward egalitarianism.” The balance of power among them broke down within a hundred years—well before Gudrid’s birth. By then the Icelandic settlers had learned three things. One, their only crop was hay. Two, their only export was wool cloth, but the number of sheep a farm could keep over winter was fixed by the amount of hay the farm’s laborers could bring in. And three, a man ate just about as much as his labor was worth. There was no profit in keeping slaves, so they were freed—that is, kicked out of the chieftain’s longhouse. Some of these freedmen made a go at farming on small rented plots, perhaps like the desperate Sveigakot. Their sons worked summers for the chieftains or other large landowners; winters, the family fended for itself. With seasonal labor so cheap, some chieftains saw a new way to increase their power: Take the neighbor’s hayfield. It was against the law—land-claims were “holy,” sacrosanct—but the law, writes Durrenberger in The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland, couldn’t be enforced. Iceland had no king’s men (or police) and no castle dungeons. “Law or no, courts or no, decisions or no, one could do just as much as one’s influence, cunning, and power at arms allowed,” he writes. Rather than “farmers at fisticuffs” (as one eighteenth-century writer described the plots of the sagas), or free men and formidable women, to Durrenberger the sagas show the cunning and unprincipled rich out for as much power as they can grab, and happy to exploit the labor of anyone who can’t stand up to them.
Like
any good literature, the sagas support both viewpoints—what you get out of them depends on what you read into them. The chieftains are not static caricatures. Snorri of Helgafell, friend and supporter of Gudrun the Fair, sometimes seems democratic, law-abiding, and peace-loving, and sometimes aristocratic, unprincipled, and exploitative. He is always, however, cunning, or, as Jon Vidar Sigurdsson of the University of Oslo puts it, shrewd. “Shrewdness is the characteristic which the sagas emphasize most in descriptions of the chieftains,” Jon writes in Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth. Their battles were fought with wits more often than weapons. Fate, or “the will of God,” never explains why one chieftain succeeds and one fails. “The cleverest chieftains, who could also ignore the political rules when necessary, became the most powerful ones.”
In the 1930s, scholars knew exactly what those political rules were. Icelandic schoolchildren learned them by rote: Each of Iceland’s four quarters had three spring assemblies (except in the North, which was too big and needed four). At each spring assembly, three chieftains met. The chieftains appointed judges, who would hear both sides of a dispute and agree on a settlement. The loser might pay a fine in silver, goods, or land, or he might be outlawed: either kicked out of the district or out of the country altogether, for three years or forever. If a conflict was not resolved at the local spring assembly, it went to the appropriate Quarter Court at the Althing. If that failed, there was a Fifth Court, a supreme appeals court.
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