The Vikings (26 page)

At least, most of the male settlers did. A study of the mitochondrial DNA of Icelandic women carried out in 2001 found that it was most closely related to Welsh and British mitochondrial DNA in some 63 per cent of the samples. A parallel study of the Y-chromosomes of a group of Icelandic men showed that about 80 per cent of them were of Norse origin, with the remainder tracing their descent to the British Isles.
³³
The likely explanation for the imbalance is that the women came as slaves and concubines of the men, having been taken from their homelands in Viking raids.

 

King Harald initially tried to extend his authority to Iceland by sponsoring the claim of Uni, son of the Gardar who was one of the first discoverers of Iceland, to be his earl there. When he tried to press this claim Uni was ostracized by the other settlers and presently killed.
³⁴
The rejection of Harald was not universal, however. The first settlers to arrive had taken large, even exorbitant claims, and the
Book of the Settlements
tells us that a second apparent attempt at interference by Harald, when he tried to set limits to the size of claims that could be made, was actually in response to a plea from frustrated late arrivals for the authoritative regulation of such an important matter.
³⁵
It was a potentially dangerous precedent, and must have brought home to the Icelanders the need to take stock of their situation and create effective leadership of their own that would satisfy the majority and reduce the possibility of the aggrieved appealing for help to Norway.

Their solution was to adapt the principle of government by local assembly or
thing
, familiar to them from Norway in the days before Harald Finehair. The island was divided into a number of regional institutions called
go
ð
or
ð, each under the control of a chieftain called a
go
ð
i
(plural
go
ð
ar
). Normally, but not inevitably, a
go
ð
i
was the leader of the people living within his
go
ð
or
ð, who were known as his
thingmen
; but a farmer was not bound to commit himself to the protection of his local
go
ð
i
if he did not choose to do so, and a
go
ð
i
’s supporters or
thingmen
could be spread over a wide area. A
go
ð
or
ð was the property of the individual
go
ð
i
. It could be bought, sold, borrowed and inherited. Initially the number of these institutions was set at thirty-six. Later reforms increased it to thirty-nine and then to forty-eight. This was possible since it seems that, in the early years, there were more chieftains than there were
go
ð
or
ð, owing to the flexible nature of the office.
³⁶
In return for a
thingman
manifesting his authority when called upon to do so, the
go
ð
i
offered protection and support in disputes in which his
thingman
became involved. The larger the
go
ð
or
ð, the larger the force the
go
ð
i
could put into the field in any contentious matter requiring that he support a
thingman
.

Legal disputes and matters of common concern were taken up each spring at local meetings of the
thing
. The earliest such assembly to be created was probably that at Kjalarnes, in the south-west of Iceland, where the
go
ð
i
was Thorstein Ingolfsson, a son of the first settler, Ingolf. Another was Thorolf Mostrarskegg’s assembly at Thorsnes, on Breidaford, which was ringed about with Thorolf’s injunctions forbidding men to look on Helgafell, or the ‘Holy Mountain’, with an unwashed face, and requiring them to leave the assembly grounds for the privacy of a nearby skerry when answering the call of nature.
³⁷
The
Landnámabók
enlarges on the sacral aspect of the
go
ð
i
’s obligations at
thing
meetings: he must ensure that

A ring of two ounces or more should be on the stall in each principal
hof
[temple], each
go
ð
i
should wear that ring on his arm at all established assemblies in which he himself should participate, and redden it beforehand in gore from the blood of the beast he personally sacrificed there. Everyone who needed to perform legal duties there at court should previously swear an oath on that ring.
³⁸

By 930, with the available land taken, an awareness of Iceland as a country and of themselves as no longer settlers but Icelanders had arisen among the farmers. This manifested itself in the desire for an assembly that would serve the needs of the entire population. It is thought the decision to establish such an institution may have been taken at the Kjalarnes
thing
.
³⁹
This general assembly, the
althing
, convened annually for two weeks in late June at Thingvellir, or ‘the Assembly Plain’, a dramatic open-air site on the northern shore of a lake in the south-west of the country. The
althing
and the first Icelandic law code probably came into being at about the same time. Ari tells us that ‘when Iceland had been settled widely, an Easterner called Ulfljot first brought laws out here from Norway (Teit told us) and they were subsequently called Ulfljot’s laws’.
⁴⁰
Ulfljot’s laws ‘were for the most part modelled on the laws of the Gulathing’, says Ari, a natural choice of model, given the west Norwegian origins of the majority of the male settlers. The oldest surviving version of the Gulathing code is the
Codex Rantzovianus
, dated to about 1250, and comparisons of this with the early tenth-century treaties drawn up between the Kievan Rus and Constantinople preserved in the
Russian Primary Chronicle
reveal similarities in the regulation of certain practices, suggesting that parts, at least, of the Gulathing code date from the early 900s.
⁴¹

The
althing
’s presiding officer was the Lawspeaker, a man with an approved reputation for wisdom and a lawyer well versed in the technicalities of the law. He was elected for a period of three years and could be re-elected. It may well be that Ulfljot himself was the first Lawspeaker, since the most important duty of the office was to recite a third part of the law code each year, addressing the assembly from a prominent natural pulpit known as the Law Rock perched on a hillside above the site. Attendance at these annual recitations was mandatory for
go
ð
ar
, who also sat on the
althing
’s legislative body, known as the
lögrétta
. Another of the Lawspeaker’s duties was to inform the assembly of any new laws passed by the
lögrétta
. He was the assembly’s legal oracle and his advice would be sought on problems or disputes over the interpretation of the law as they arose.

We know little of the organization of the
althing
and of the content of the law code prior to the reforms of the 960s, which Ari describes in Chapter 5 of the
Book of the Icelanders
. The first laws were not recorded until 1117-18, and the overriding impression conveyed by the collection of early laws, compiled in the middle of the thirteenth century and known as
Grágás
, or ‘Grey Goose’, is of a staggering attachment to procedural complexity.
⁴²
The spirit that invests these, and other Viking Age law codes generally, is more readily grasped. As we noted in an earlier chapter, the Viking Age conception of law differed from the Roman conception in the degree to which it was based on a communal rather than an individual response to law-breaking, and the compulsory involvement of members of the community in the processes of confession, arrest and punishment. The law was so intrinsically a part of communal life in Iceland that a man who was not ‘in
thing
’ with a
go
ð
i
did not even have a legal existence.
⁴³

 

The slaves who were bought or captured and taken out to Iceland by the settlers had a legal existence, but only as the property of their owner, on a par with his cattle. Whether slavery was imported as an economic necessity, or was a culturally conditioned import from the old country, remains a matter of debate. The ‘Rigsthula’, a poem dated as early as the tenth century by some scholars and as late as the thirteenth by others, and thought variously to originate in Ireland, Iceland and Norway, provides a fatalistic anthropology of Viking Age Scandinavian society, though the uncertainty about its provenance means that its source value remains provisional.
⁴⁴
It describes how Heimdall, the watchman among the Aesir, under the name Ríg, visits three households in turn and in each has sex with the woman of the house. The first is a great-grandmother, named Edda. Nine months later she gives birth to the first slave, a swarthy, rough-skinned child, coarse-fingered and scabby-faced, with a crooked back and big feet. When he grows up he marries a knock-kneed woman with a hooked nose and dirty feet. They give birth to numerous children whose names, such as Stumpy, Smelly, Horse-Fly, Foul, Lump, Coarse, Brawler, reflect their destinies as the slaves of the world. Ríg’s remaining unions are with the successively younger Amma (grandmother), on whom he fathers the first of the free yeomen, and Móthir (mother), from whom are descended the race of kings. The point of the divine origin of the three classes is not that all are fundamentally equal but that class divisions are divinely ordained and immutable.
⁴⁵

Under Viking Age Scandinavian law, slaves, whether
thræll
(male) or
ambátt
(female), were property before they were people. Early Viking Age societies answered any unease that might have surrounded the institution by the cultivation of a circular logic that showed slaves to be lesser beings, whose inherent contemptibility was demonstrated by the fact that they had failed to prevent themselves from becoming slaves. For Ingolf, the special tragedy of his brother Leif’s death was the humiliation of having been killed by slaves. Among the laws of the Swedish Västergötland was a provision that, in the event of such an abomination taking place, no credit at all must be given to the slave as the killer of a free man. The rigidity of the codification was complete: in
Egils Saga
a slave who dares to treat a free man as an equal by challenging him to a fight is killed while bending to tie his shoelaces. Codes of honourable behaviour simply did not apply between the free and the enslaved.
⁴⁶

It required a great cultural effort to preserve the lowly status of the slaves, and the echoes of this sounded on into the era of Christianity and the written word in Iceland. The
Book of the Settlements
is careful to tell us that when Ingolf caught up with Leif’s killers, hiding out on the Westmann Islands, he surprised them in the ignoble act of eating. Nor did they stay to fight but panicked, scattered and ran, some jumping to their deaths over a cliff. In the Family Sagas, dealing with events between about 930 and 1030, slaves feature only incidentally, and then usually as stock figures of fun or villains. Most are male, reflecting perhaps the fact that the slave population was controlled by the practice of leaving infant females out to die. In the
Saga of Gisli
, Gisli has a slave named Thord whose after-name is ‘the Coward’. The author tells us that he had ‘as much sense as he had spirit, for he had none of either’.
⁴⁷
When, in
Egils Saga
, the old Viking decides to spite his family by burying his wealth he gets two slaves to carry the chest for him. Once the digging is done and the treasure is buried he kills them. Egil is old and blind by this time, and it is unnecessary for the sagaman to point out to his listeners that only slaves would be stupid enough to allow themselves to be killed by such a man. In any event, it was not illegal for a man to kill his own slaves - all Egil had to do afterwards was announce the deaths for that to be the end of the matter. Arnkel meets his death in the
Eyrbyggja Saga
because his slave is so preoccupied with the haymaking he forgets the instructions he has been given to send for help.
⁴⁸

Perversely, the absence of a fully human status sometimes worked to the benefit of the slave. Under the Gulathing law, a slave who accompanied a free man in a robbery had no guilt in the matter, since ‘the man who steals with another man’s slave steals by himself’. And a remarkable legal exemption in Icelandic law stated that: ‘A thrall has the right to kill on account of his wife, even though she is a bondmaid. But a free man is not allowed to kill on account of a bondmaid, even though she is his woman.’
⁴⁹
The children of slaves were also slaves; where only the mother was a slave, the child took the social status of the father. The law also showed occasional glimpses of humanity: a slave who was physically injured was allowed to keep a third of the compensation paid to his owner for the damage to his ‘property’.

There were less extreme forms of slavery than outright ownership. Debtors unable to meet their debt could work it off by entering the service of their creditor for an agreed period of time with no other reward than the cancelling of the debt. And for the very poor, an arrangement existed whereby one man could hand over himself and all he owned to another, in return for the promise of being looked after for the rest of his life. Another option was to hand over a child, and in certain circumstances a petty thief could be sentenced to become the slave of his victim.
⁵⁰
As we noted earlier, the right of an owner to kill his slave was sometimes used to sacrifice someone to accompany a dead master into the grave. Even this was too much familiarity for some: the ghost of a settler buried with his slave at Asmundarleidi was graceless enough to complain so bitterly about the company that the mound was opened and the slave removed.