The Vikings (25 page)

One redaction of the
Book of the Icelanders
supplements the tale of the finding of the bells, books and staffs with the information that these were found ‘in Papey and in Papyli’, the former an island off the east coast of Iceland, the latter a region in the south-east of the country. Such place-names are based on the word
papar
and derive from Latin
papa
via the Irish
pabba
or
pobba
. The same
pap
element occurs in Scotland as Papil in the north of Shetland (Unst), Pabbay in the Outer Hebrides (Barra), and Papadil in the Inner Hebrides (Rum), as well as on the Isle of Man and the Faroes. The
Historia Norwegie
tells us that, as in Iceland, monks were living on the Orkneys before the Vikings came and that they, too, left books behind them when they fled the Vikings, though here the author makes the surreal claim that these identified their former owners as followers of Judaism from Africa.
¹²
Ari tells us that the monks left Iceland because of an aversion to living among Heathens, but it is inherently unlikely that they would deliberately have left behind their bells and books and staffs. Ari’s story is possibly a euphemistic glossing-over of the fact that these too, like so many other members of Christian communities on remote islands around Britain, were simply killed by the first wave of Heathens to arrive.
¹³

 

In the
Saga of Harald Finehair
, Snorri nicely weaves together the three main strands of his story: the tale of how Harald acquired his after-name; an account of the first unification of Norway; and an explanation of when and why the first settlers emigrated to Iceland.
¹⁴
The first element is a love-story, for it seems Harald was attracted to the daughter of a local Hordaland king, a girl named Gyda, and sent his men to ask if she would become his mistress. Gyda replied that a petty king like Harald was not good enough for her: why could he not do as Gorm in Denmark or as Erik in Swedish Uppsala had done and raise himself up to be king of a whole country? Only then would she consider his proposal. The returning messengers assumed the king would simply take the girl by force. Instead her spirit and ambition inspired him. Snorri puts the following words into his mouth: ‘I make this vow, and the god who made me and rules all things shall be my witness, that never shall my hair be cut or combed till I have possessed myself of all Norway in
scot
, dues and rule - or else die.’
¹⁵
Little is known of the details of Harald’s subsequent campaign to unify Norway and so make himself worthy of Gyda’s love, but the violence involved precipitated a mass emigration to Iceland, led by chieftains who saw no benefit to themselves in the introduction of a monarchy.

Among the scholars who created the idea of the Viking Age towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was natural to relate the high concentration of Viking Age monuments found in Vestfold, on the western side of the Oslo fjord - like the sumptuous Oseberg and Gokstad burials and the stately field of mounds at Borre - to the impression given by Snorri in the saga that Vestfold was the seat of royal power from which Harald’s campaign began, and the cradle of modern Norway. However, Harald’s only certain connection to Vestfold is a reference, in Torbjorn Hornklovi’s contemporary poem ‘Haraldskvæthi’, or ‘the Lay of Harald’, to Halvdan the Black, Harald’s father, as a king from the east of Norway. In recent years the story has been rewritten by Norwegian historians and archaeologists in a way that reveals much more clearly the logical connection between the first unification and the settlement of Iceland. One of the main sources believed to have been used by Snorri for the genealogies that led him to place Harald in the east of Norway was the ‘Ynglinga tal’ or ‘Genealogy of the Ynglings’, a poem by Tjodolf of Hvin believed to date from about 900. In 1991 the Norwegian historian Claus Krag analysed the ‘Ynglingatal’ and found that its intellectual world was incompatible with composition by a ninth-century Heathen Scandinavian, and much more credibly the creation of a Christian Norwegian or Icelandic historian of the twelfth century. He concluded that, rather than being a contemporary Norwegian source from about 900, the poem had evolved over a considerable period of time before reaching the form in which Snorri used it, and that it probably reached this final form in Iceland, perhaps as late as 1200.
¹⁶
Krag’s arguments are widely, though not universally, accepted.
¹⁷
The location of Harald’s seat of power in Vestfold had always contained anomalies which the diminished credibility of ‘Ynglingatal’ as a source went some way towards resolving. Norwegians now generally accept that the heart of Harald’s territory and the starting-point of his unification was not Vestfold, but Avaldsnes on the south-western coast of Norway, in Rogaland. Archaeological excavations currently being carried out close to the site of the Olav Church in Avaldsnes, on the island of Karmøy near Haugesund, seem poised to confirm this new scenario. Finds made in three different locations, including a layer of stones that was probably flooring, two spinning weights and a griddle for baking, identify the site as a large, Viking Age estate. A trial shaft dug in the car park by the church revealed a substantial post-hole dated to 900-1030 and so within the period of Harald Finehair’s reign. A burnt post to the south of the car park has been dated to 690-840: all the datable finds from the royal palace and its environs have been identified as Viking Age.

It was hardly a country Harald was fighting to gain control over, more a coastal route; the term ‘Nordvegr’ or ‘the north way’, used by the trader Ottar for his home-country, implies as much. A decisive battle in the campaign was fought at sea off Hafrsfjord, not far from Stavanger. It is traditionally dated to 879, though many historians prefer a date closer to about 890 as this better accounts for a particularly intense period of emigrations to Iceland between 890 and 910, with refugees that responded to Harald’s campaign as to a short-period pressure that, while it lasted, created an emergency.
¹⁸
Snorri tells us:

King Harald set the law wherever he won land, that he was possessed fully of all the land by
odal
right and he made all bonders, great and small, pay him a land tax. Over each shire he set a jarl who should administer the law and justice in the land and gather the fines and land dues, and every jarl should have a third of the tribute for living and costs. Every jarl should have under him four or more district chiefs, and each of them should have an income from the land of twenty marks. Each jarl should muster for the king’s army sixty warriors and each district chief [
herse
] twenty men. But so much had King Harald increased the tribute and land taxes, that his jarls had greater incomes than the kings had had aforetime, and when that was learned in Trondheim, many great men sought King Harald and became his men.
¹⁹

It may well be imagined that those who found themselves excluded from Harald’s new aristocracy of earls, and paying rather than collecting taxes, had little liking for their first taste of the monarchical way and felt the desire to leave and make a fresh start elsewhere. Those in the south-west of the country would have felt the desire most pressingly, and it was from this region that the majority of Iceland’s earliest settlers came. As we saw earlier, Harald’s determined campaign to make himself monarch of all Norway was the reason given in the
Orkneyinga Saga
for the settlement of the Orkneys and Shetland, from where dispossessed and discontented chieftains harried the coastline of their former home so frequently that Harald moved against them, leading a fleet across the North Sea in about 890 and asserting his dominance over the islands. Snorri writes that Harald’s authority at this point even extended to the Isle of Man, and quotes verse by Torbjørn Hornklofi that refers to his fighting in Scotland.

At this point in his narrative Snorri ties up his tale of Harald’s after-name. Having met Gyda’s challenge and now king of a unified Norway, he sent men to claim his prize. The romance of it all is diluted by the fact that, while waiting for her, he had taken a number of other wives and concubines and Gyda turned out to be only one of at least ten women who bore him sons, sixteen of them in some sources, twenty in others.
²⁰
She did not even have the honour of finally cutting and combing his hair. That went to Ragnvald, earl of Møre, whom Snorri also credits with coining the king’s new after-name, turning Harald Thickhair into Harald Finehair. The gesture of combing is peculiarly appropriate, for across the geographical and temporal spread of Viking Age culture the single item most commonly found in graves remains, as we have sometimes seen earlier, the humble comb.

Natural factors also played their part in the settlement, in particular the serendipity of an interlude of climate change, known to climatologists as the Medieval Warm Period or Little Optimum, that lasted from about 800 to 1200 and made these centuries among the warmest of the past 8,000 years, opening up previously inaccessible regions of the northern seas to the intrepid sailor.
²¹
Ottar made no mention to Alfred of Harald’s campaign, but then Hålogoland may have been too far north for him to have noticed its effects. As we noted earlier, he stressed to Alfred the poor quality of the farming land in Norway: ‘whatever of it can be used for grazing or ploughing all lies along the coast. Even that is very rocky in some places, and wild mountains lie to the east and above, all along the cultivated land.’
²²
To those who struggled to eke a living out of this inhospitable soil, the lure of free land in an uninhabited country not too far away must have been strong, and made even stronger by persistent mild and stable weather all across the region. By the 870s the amount of pack-ice in the waters of the North Atlantic had fallen dramatically and ice conditions around Iceland, Greenland and Labrador remained unusually favourable for voyaging throughout the Viking Age.
²³
The analysis of ice samples obtained by boring to great depths, in the extreme case of north Greenland to a depth of 3,085 metres, and the snow that fell 125,000 years ago, provides an almost year-by-year record of the degree of severity of successive winters and, on a larger scale, of the progress of successive ice-ages.
²⁴
The ‘ice-thermometer’ readings suggest that Floki Vilgerdason and his would-be settlers were unfortunate enough to reach Iceland at the end of a run of cooler decades in the middle of the Medieval Warm Period. The tale of his sighting of an Icelandic fjord ‘filled with ice’ is about the last time mention is made of sea-ice around the coast of Iceland for the next 300 years and we do not get reports of drift ice in the Icelandic annals until the thirteenth century.
²⁵

In Norway the warmer climate led to the clearance, settlement and cultivation of valleys and hillsides over 100 metres above levels that had not been attempted for over 1,000 years. Even the bizarre, volcanic landscape of Iceland would have looked fertile and inviting. As Ari informed us, at the time of the settlement, Iceland was ‘covered with woods between the mountains and the seashore’, and the first settlers would have been heartened to find the sedges and grasses and dwarf woodlands of birch and willow familiar to them from Norway. Somewhere between 40 and 75 per cent of the total area seems to have been available as pasture, in stark contrast to today’s figure of 20 per cent.
²⁶
Settlers were able to grow barley and oats, although animal husbandry, fishing and bird-trapping remained the main sources of food.

 

The
Book of the Settlements
is a full and often dramatic account of the colonization of Iceland. Based on a lost original from the early twelfth century it contains the names of over 3,000 people and 1,400 places.
²⁷
After Floki’s false start, the first permanent settlers are named as two Norwegian foster-brothers, Ingolf and Leif, Viking adventurers who fell out with some of their associates and killed them. A court awarded their estates to the family of their victims, and the brothers decided to make a fresh start elsewhere. A preliminary reconnaissance trip established that the south of Iceland seemed more inviting than the north, and on a date traditionally given as 874 they set sail.

The author contrasts the approaches of the brothers to the great adventure: Leif was the one who ‘would never sacrifice’; Ingolf ‘offered up extensive sacrifices and sought auguries of his destiny’ before departing.
²⁸
As Floki had done, he made use of natural means to aid his decision-making and on first sighting land threw his high-seat pillars overboard and swore to make his home at the place where they came ashore. They were not found immediately and Ingolf built a temporary home at Ingolfshofdi or ‘Ingolf’s Head’. Leif settled at Hjorleifshofdi. Each year slaves went out to look for Ingolf’s pillars.

In the meantime, Leif’s slaves had risen up, killed him and his family and abducted their women. In the spring of the second year Ingolf’s men came across the dead bodies and returned with the news to Ingolfshofdi. The author puts a sorrowing response into Ingolf’s mouth: ‘This was a sorry end for a brave man, that thralls should be the death of him; but so it goes, I see, with such as are not prepared to offer up sacrifice.’
²⁹
It is almost as though this Christian-era writer believed Heathen piety to be better than no piety at all. Ingolf’s devout nature was rewarded when, in the third year of searching, his posts were finally washed ashore. He kept his word and moved his farm to the location indicated by his gods.

In the
Book of the Icelanders
Ari gives special prominence to four main settlers as founding fathers and mothers: Rollaug, a son of Ragnvald, that earl of Møre who finally gave Harald his haircut; Ketilbjørn Ketilsson; Aud, the daughter of Ketil Flatnose; and Helgi the Lean, the son of Eyvind the Easterner. Ari stresses the Norwegian origins of each of them, ignoring the fact that Rollaug’s family were earls in Shetland and Orkney, that Aud spent much of her adult life in Dublin and Caithness and arrived in Iceland from the Hebrides, and that Helgi’s maternal grandfather was an Irish king, Helgi himself having been raised in the Hebrides and Ireland. In this way Ari, and Snorri after him, by explaining the settlement solely as the result of Harald’s tyranny, both intend to convey an impression of the aristocratic origins of the new community. Even so, there are hints in the sagas that emigration to Iceland was regarded, by some, as a soft option. When Rollaug asked for the succession to the earldom of the Orkneys, his father Ragnvald was categorical in his rejection: ‘You may not be earl, you have no disposition for war. The path that you must follow leads rather to Iceland.’
³⁰
Iceland is surprisingly poor in archaeological remains from the Viking Age, but the chieftains’ graves that have been found lack monumentality and are poorly furnished by comparison with those from Norway. Only five boat-graves have been discovered, and in all cases the coffins were small rowing-boats.
³¹
The likely explanation is that the Icelandic chieftains who cut such proud figures in the later Family Sagas came originally from modest farming backgrounds, and that the literary sources have been prone to glamorize their status prior to emigration.
³²
The compendious
Book of the Settlements
gives what is clearly a more accurate picture of the mixed origins of the settlers than Ari, without disturbing the fundamental premise that most of them came originally from western Norway.