Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (54 page)

The most consistently entertaining of the Íslendingasögur must be
Egils
saga,
which is based on the life of the tenth-century skald Egil Skalla-Grímsson. How closely the Egil of the saga resembles the real-life Egil is unknowable, but he is a larger than life character who embodies in a single person all of the contradictory faces of the Viking Age, appearing in turn as a warrior, merchant, farmer and skald, a man of remorseless violence who was nevertheless capable of composing verse of great sensitivity about the loss of his children. Like all the Íslendingasögur,
Egils
saga
is anonymous, but it is generally thought on stylistic grounds that it was written by Snorri Sturluson (
c.
1179 – 1241), medieval Iceland’s leading literary figure. Like Egil, Snorri was a man of many parts, a poet, historian, lawyer and politically ambitious chieftain of the powerful Sturlung family who dominated western Iceland. From the age of three, Snorri was fostered by Jón Loftsson of Oddi, the most influential chieftain of southern Iceland. This fostering was the most decisive event in Snorri’s life. Oddi was Iceland’s main cultural centre and Jón, a learned man in his own right, saw to it that Snorri received a good education in theology, law and Latin literature. When Snorri was nineteen, his foster-brother Sæmundr arranged for him an advantageous marriage to Herdís, the only child of Bersi the Wealthy, through whom he inherited his first chieftaincy in 1202. Over the following years Snorri acquired many more chieftaincies, making him one of Iceland’s most influential
stórgoðar
. Elected three times as Lawspeaker, Snorri’s legal skills helped him advance his interests and those of his friends, but his ambitions inevitably made him enemies. Snorri was not a violent man and many of his contemporaries thought him to be a coward at heart. Unfortunately for Snorri, in thirteenth-century Iceland, the politically ambitious could not afford to be squeamish about violence.

Reykholt

In 1206, Snorri settled at the bleak manor at Reykholt, in Reykholtsdalur in western Iceland, and set about improving his new home. Snorri built a channel from a nearby hot spring to feed an outdoor hot tub and, a sign of the times, he also built substantial fortifications of turf and timber to protect his home. The timbers of Snorri’s home have long rotted and the turf walls have slumped into low banks that today give no impression of what archaeological investigations have revealed to have been an impressive castle-like home. The stone-lined hot tub alone remains. It was at Reykholt that Snorri wrote his major works,
Heimskringla
and the
Edda
, each of which has, in very different ways, contributed mightily to our knowledge of the Viking Age.

Snorri’s
Heimskringla
(‘The Circle of the World’) is a monumental history of the kings of Norway from legendary times down to the death of Magnus IV in 1177, written as a sequence of sixteen
konungasögur
. Drawing on a multitude of histories, genealogies and skaldic poems (he quotes from the works of more than seventy skalds), Snorri created for Norway a thrilling national epic that sustained Norwegian national identity through centuries of foreign rule but questions remain about its reliability. His vivid battle scenes and convincing dialogue are mostly invented. Like the Classical historians he read in his youth, Snorri used dialogue as a dramatic rhetorical device for analysing the motives and characters of his subjects, so it cannot be taken literally. Few modern historians would put as much faith in the veracity of skaldic poems as Snorri did – they were propaganda rather than history – but he brought a keen understanding of human psychology to his work and his marked reluctance to invoke supernatural causes makes
Heimskringla
one of the most impressive, coherent and readable works of medieval historiography: despite its shortcomings all historians of the Viking Age rely on it heavily.

Snorri was also the author of a unique handbook to the Viking art of composing skaldic verse. This was a genre of alliterative verse that was composed and publicly recited by skalds to praise the deeds of their royal patrons. Good skaldic verse was committed to memory and passed down through the generations, helping to secure their subjects’ posthumous reputation – something that was always close to a Viking ruler’s heart. Skalds were usually also warriors. They accompanied Viking armies into battle and composed verses on the spot to encourage their fellow warriors to greater feats of heroism: skaldic poems are, therefore, often the nearest thing we have to eyewitness accounts of the Vikings in battle. By Snorri’s time, skaldic verse was a dying art. Young poets no longer understood the allusions to pagan mythology that provided the genre with much of its colour and vitality. It was with the intent of reviving the art of the skalds that Snorri wrote the
Edda
(the meaning of the title is uncertain), providing his readers with a full account of Scandinavian mythology from the creation of the world to Ragnarok, the doom of the gods, as well as a discussion of poetical devices, such as metre, alliteration and kennings (poetic similes). Snorri prefaced his work with a Christian rationalisation of the pagan religion, presenting the old gods merely as deified ancient heroes, so protecting himself from any accusation of apostasy. As with his historical writing, Snorri drew on a variety of oral and written sources, some of which are preserved in an anonymous collection of mythological and heroic verse known as the
Poetic
or
Elder
Edda
. The most important of these poems are ‘Voluspá’ (‘The Prophecy of the Seeress’), which Snorri quotes in his
Edda,
describing the creation of the world and Ragnarok, and
Hávamál
, a collection of short verses offering common-sense wisdom about everyday social conduct in Viking society, along with spells and verses about the high god Odin. Snorri’s
Edda
failed to revive skaldic verse – soon after his death, the Icelanders were writing and reading the chivalric romances that Snorri so obviously disapproved of – but without it our knowledge of Scandinavian paganism would be much poorer.

It is perhaps ironic that Snorri played a significant role in the downfall of the Icelandic Free State: he was the first of the
stórgoðar
to become a vassal of the king of Norway, accepting a knighthood from Håkon IV while visiting Norway in 1220. Snorri shamelessly flattered the young king and the powerful jarl Skuli Bardarson by writing skaldic praise poems for them. Jarl Skuli was so pleased he gave Snorri a ship and other fine gifts. Before he returned home, Håkon commissioned Snorri to use his influence in the Althing to bring Iceland under Norwegian rule. This had predictably destabilising consequences. Snorri’s attempts to consolidate his power caused a civil war and in 1237 he was forced to flee to Norway. Håkon was less than pleased to see him; Snorri had opened the door to royal influence but now he had outlived his usefulness. Håkon switched his support to Gissur Thorvaldsson, chieftain of the rival Haukadalur family. Håkon ordered Snorri not to return to Iceland, which, as Snorri’s feudal lord, he had every right to do. However, Snorri felt compelled to return home to protect his own interests there and in 1239 he fled Norway with the help of his friend jarl Skuli. Snorri’s association with Skuli proved fatal. After Skuli attempted to seize the throne later that year, Håkon ordered Gissur to kill Snorri. A sympathiser sent Snorri a coded warning of the intended attack, but he was unable to decipher it and took no special precautions to protect himself. Backed by sixty men, Gissur broke into Reykholt on the night of 23 September 1241. Taken completely by surprise, Snorri was chased into a cellar and killed. True to his nature, he offered no resistance. Snorri’s killing caused outrage in both Iceland and Norway, but it showed how great Håkon’s influence in Iceland now was. Conflict continued for another twenty years, but the struggle now was not for Iceland’s independence, only for which family should exercise the greatest influence when it finally was annexed by Norway. The Icelanders’ Viking ancestors had emigrated to escape the rule of kings but they had, in the end, fallen victim to the same centralising forces. Competition for power had torn their society apart, the rule of kings was the only way to restore peace and in 1263, the Althing voted to accept direct Norwegian rule.

Darkness falls on the Norse Greenland colony

Even during the Medieval Warm Period Greenland had been a very marginal environment for European colonisation: the onset of the Little Ice Age pushed the Norse colony over the edge into extinction. The climatic deterioration undermined the Greenland colony at several different levels. The Thule Inuit began to migrate south and took over the vital Norðsetr hunting grounds by around 1300. Without the Norðsetr’s valuable commodities to attract European merchants the colony’s trade links to Europe began to fade. These were already in decline in the thirteenth century, because increased trans-Saharan trade gave European craftsmen access to plentiful supplies of elephant ivory, which was much superior to Greenland’s walrus ivory. Grain, iron and salt were everyday essentials in medieval Europe, but they must have become increasingly scarce luxuries in Greenland. In 1261, the Greenlanders acknowledged Norwegian sovereignty in return for a guarantee of one trade ship a year from Bergen. Increasing sea ice made it harder for the few ships that still set out for Greenland to get there. Ivar Bardarson, a priest who was sent to Greenland in 1341, wrote that the old route to the Greenland settlements, via the Gunnbjorn Skerries, had been given up because of pack ice. Ships now had to sail much further south to get around Cape Farewell. The increasing pack ice also reduced the Greenlanders’ already limited wood supply by preventing driftwood reaching the shore. The voyage to Markland in 1347 (see ch. 8) was probably an attempt to improve the situation. Without the ability to build ships, the Greenlanders’ dependence on the annual ship from Norway was absolute.

The colder conditions adversely affected the Greenlanders’ farming economy and animal bones from middens show an increasing dependence on wild caribou and seals. Skeletal remains from cemeteries show that the Greenlanders became prey to diseases associated with poor nutrition, such as chronic inner-ear infections, and had a reduced life expectancy. Everything depended on the hay harvest. The longer winters meant that livestock had to be kept in the byres for longer so the Greenlanders’ dependence on hay was increasing even as their ability to provide it was declining. If the summer was too cool for the grass to grow well, there would not be enough hay to feed the livestock through the winter, and if the livestock starved so too, soon after, would the people. At Sandnes in the Western Settlement, archaeological evidence suggests that the entire parish starved to death in a hard winter in the mid-fourteenth century. At the chieftain’s farm, the skeletons of nine hunting dogs were found on a stable floor: they had been butchered. This was an act of desperation indeed. When the houses of the parish were abandoned, even the valuable timbers were left. With wood in such short supply in Greenland, this would not have happened if there had been survivors. When Ivar Bardarson visited the Western Settlement in the 1340s, he found it completely uninhabited. By around 1380, the Middle Settlement had been abandoned too.

Although the archaeological evidence says otherwise, Ivar Bardarson believed that the Western settlement had been destroyed by the Inuit. The potential for conflict was clearly there, over hunting grounds, for example, and, as they did not own domestic animals themselves, the Inuit may have seen the Norse Greenlanders’ livestock as just another kind of game to be hunted. There certainly was some violence between the Norse and the Inuit, though how serious a factor it was in the decline of the colony is impossible to judge. The Icelandic annals record that in 1379 Skraelings killed eighteen Greenlanders and took two boys into slavery. Inuit folk tales collected by Danish missionaries in the nineteenth century tell of conflicts with the Norse, but also of friendships. One tale tells how the Inuit avenged a Norse attack on one of their villages. Using white skins to make their kayaks look like icebergs, the Inuit approached a Norse farm undetected. When everyone had retired inside the house for the night, the Inuit packed bundles of juniper branches around it and set them on fire. Those Norse who tried to escape were shot down with arrows as they emerged from the house, the rest perished in the flames. In contrast, another tale tells how the Inuit agreed to help the Norse against pirates who had raided the settlements. When the pirates returned the Inuit rescued five women and two children. When the Inuit discovered that the pirates had carried off the rest of the Norse as captives, the survivors were adopted into their community. English, German and Moorish pirates raided Iceland in the fifteenth century, seizing people to sell as slaves on the Barbary Coast, and there is one record in a papal letter of a pirate raid on the Eastern Settlement in 1418, so the tale has the ring of truth about it. The impact of a slave raid on the small Norse community could have been much more devastating than any skirmishes with the Inuit.

A
wedding
at
Hvalsey

In the later fourteenth century, contacts between Greenland and Norway became increasingly sporadic. In 1367, the official trade ship was lost at sea and there is no evidence that the Norwegian crown replaced it. Álfur, the bishop of Garðar, died in 1378, but it was not until 1385 that the news reached Norway. A new bishop was duly appointed, but he never sailed to take up his seat. One of the last recorded ships to visit the Greenland settlement arrived in 1406, after it was blown off course on a voyage from Norway to Iceland. Pack ice in the fjords prevented it from setting sail again for four years. While there, the ship’s captain Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdottir in the small stone church at Hvalsey, in the Eastern Settlement. Many guests attended the ceremony, which was held on 16 September 1408. The banns had been read publicly on three Sundays before the wedding and afterwards the priest Paul Hallvardsson gave the happy couple a marriage certificate: it is the only document written in the Norse Greenland colony that has survived. At this time, it would seem that all was well with the Eastern Settlement. It was a fully functioning medieval European community in which the church enforced conformity to Christian values. Only a year before the wedding a man called Kolgrim had been burned alive after being found guilty of using black arts to seduce a widow. This may be behind the Norse Greenlanders’ striking failure to learn anything from the Inuit. Inuit hunting technology was far superior to that used by the Norse but even as their dependence on seal meat increased – isotope analysis of skeletal remains indicates that by this time Greenlanders relied on seal meat for 80 per cent of their nutrition – they adopted none of it. Inuit clothing was wonderfully adapted to survival in Arctic conditions but items of clothing recovered from a cemetery at Herjolfsnes in the Eastern Settlement show that the Norse continued to wear European-style woollens. Perhaps their Christian way of life was so central to the Norse that adopting Inuit ways would have challenged their sense of identity.