A History of the Vikings
Chapter 13
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ICELAND
TRADITION tells that it was Gardar Svavarsson, a Swede with estates in Denmark, who, first of the vikings, discovered and explored Iceland, having been driven there by wind and storm after a voyage to the Hebrides. But it was not much later that the Norwegian Naddod, sailing with his company to the Faroe, was also storm-driven upon Iceland; he gave the country the name of Snowland, and when at last he was safely back in Norway he had much to say in praise of it. Then followed the voyage of the Viking Floki Vilgerdsson who sailed by way of Scotland to Iceland; unlike Naddod, he did not speak very highly of the new country on his return, because his few cattle had all died for want of fodder during the winter and he had had several other unpleasant experiences in the course of a lengthy sojourn there. It was Floki who gave this country the name it still bears.
Nevertheless the Norsemen were not long in peopling the far-off island that Naddod had found so agreeable; for it must have been shortly after the middle of the ninth century that these voyages of discovery took place and it was as early as the year AD 874 (1) that the first of the Norwegian colonists in Iceland came as emigrants to their new home. These were Ingolf Arnarson and Leif Hrodmarsson.
The story goes that Ingolf and Leif, who were foster-brothers and cousins, after a viking voyage in the company of three young nobles, the sons of Jarl Atli of Gaular, quarreled with them and killed two of them in battle. As a result of this the law demanded the confiscation of Leif's goods (for he was the cause of the quarrel) and the two foster-brothers soon found that life in Norway was henceforth going to be a miserable business for them, so they decided upon emigration and as a first step they sailed off to the new country of which there was so much talk with the intention of seeing for themselves what Iceland was really like.
1. Ari Libellus Islandorum antedates the first settlement by four years. And see note as to as to possibility of still earlier settlements in Iceland and Greenland, p. 362.
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They passed a winter there and returned to Norway fully satisfied that they could live in this land; so Leif went off to Ireland on a viking raid in order to recuperate his fortunes and Ingolf sold his possessions in Norway. When Leif came back rich with Irish plunder and having ten Irish slaves in his following, the foster-brothers could afford to fit out two ships, and taking with them their wives, a selected band of both freemen and thralls, some cattle, and all their worldly goods, they set sail for their new home. On reaching Iceland the ships parted company; Ingolf made a temporary settlement at Ingolfshöfdi
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Before his departure from Norway Ingolf had duly sacrificed to the gods, and upon sighting Iceland, determined that the gods should direct him to his home, he had cast the pillars of his high-seat, whereon their sacred figures were carved, into the sea, vowing that wheresoever they came to shore there would he take up his abode. But Leif, perhaps because he had learnt something of Christianity in Ireland, would not sacrifice before
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he sailed to the new country, nor, when he came there, would he allow the pillars with their heathen carvings to decide for him where he should live. And miserable, therefore, was his fate, for in the spring after his arrival he and his companions were treacherously murdered by the Irish slaves in their party who subsequently fled to some neighbouring islands with the Norse women and what possessions they could lay hands upon. Some of Ingolf's men, during their search along the coast for the missing pillars, came upon Leif and his men lying dead, and Ingolf, who was brought to the scene of the tragedy, after moralizing upon the horrible fate of those who would not sacrifice to the gods, buried his unfortunate countrymen and took their ship; then he went in search of the slaves and put them to death. The islands where he found them are the beautiful and steep-cliffed Vestmannaeyjar, and they are so called because the Celtic slaves were known as Vestmenn, men from the West.
Ingolf took into his care the women who had been carried off and spent the winter at Leif's settlement. In the following year he sailed westwards along the coast and in the spring of 875 his pillars were found far away in Faxafjord on the southwest coast. And here this pious heathen made his permanent dwelling, calling the place, because of the steamy hot-springs there, Reykjavik (smoky creek). So came the first colonist to that lovely bay where on a low and grassy isthmus now stands the capital of Iceland.
Iceland, when Ingolf Arnarson arrived in the van of the Norse colonists, was not entirely uninhabited, for there were a few Irishmen living there, chiefly in the southeast of the country, hermits whom the vikings called papar, that is priests, because of the white gowns that they wore. This was the Thule of the Irish monk Dicuil who, in AD 825, recorded that some thirty years before he wrote a number of Irish clerics had spent a summer there. Celtic anchorites, too, said Dicuil, had lived in the Faroe Islands for a hundred years past, and he tells how one of these had made the voyage thither in a two-oared boat, taking only two summer days and a night for the journey.
Perhaps it was the Norse raids upon the religious houses of Ireland that had driven these pious men from Erin, sending them first to the Scottish islands, where also came the vikings, and then north to the Faroes, where for a while they found peace, and then north again to Iceland. But whatever impelled
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them to go thus far abroad, and withholding nothing of the respect properly due to the Norse as navigators of unknown seas, there surely can have been few more remarkable voyages in the whole history of European seamanship than these amazing journeys of the Irish anchorites who, in frail little boats and with the aid of no stalwart warrior crew, sought these faraway empty lands of the north, there in loneliness and quiet to worship Almighty God.
But the advent of the vikings even to their Thule drove them forth again. They would not live among the heathen, says Ari the Learned (not telling whether these heathen would allow their further sojourn), and soon sailed away, leaving behind them (such is his charitable expression) Irish books, bells, and croziers that proved the country of their origin. There is also mention of the papar in the Icelandic Landnámabók, where, besides recording (1) how these books and other relics were found in Papey and Papýli, (2) it is told how the papar had dwelt at a certain homestead known as Kirkjubaer in Sida in the south of the country; no heathen man thereafter could live upon this hallowed place and it was not inhabited again until the coming of the Christian viking Ketil Fíflski from the Hebrides. Subsequently, when all Iceland was Christian, it became the site of a nunnery.
The landnáma period of Icelandic history, the time of the settlement, the taking up of the land, by the early colonists, occupies a space of some sixty years following upon the coming of Ingolf Arnarson. And nowhere else in the world is there so complete a record of the first peopling of a country in ancient times, for the tale of it is fully told in the Landnámabók, set down in writing in the thirteenth century, wherein are preserved the names of some 400 of the original chieftain-settlers, together with those of over 2,500 other inhabitants. At the close of the landnáma time, that is about AD 930, there must have been, on the showing of the book and the sagas of early Iceland, a population in the new colony of not less than 20,000 souls, perhaps even half as many again.
1. But in one MS. only.
2. This name is papa-býli, priest's dwelling, but the place itself has not been identified; the island of Papey is on the east coast and there are said to be ruins of Irish religious cells upon it. The element papa (the same word as the Greek papp£j, Latin papa, the O. Slav. POPb, and our pope) is to be found in other Icelandic place-names such as Papos, Papafjord, and Papavik; it also occurs in the Orkneys and Shetlands, e.g. Papa Stour, Papilwater, etc.
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It is little likely that colonization on such a scale, so eager a rush to take land in the recently discovered island, could be due solely to the emigration of the truculent and exasperated chiefs who hated the harsh rule of Harald Fairhair. Yet this the Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturlason, alleges to have been the chief cause of the flocking of the Norwegian folk to Iceland, saying that after the battle in Hafrsfjord Harald laid all Norway under him and that those who would not submit to him fled to the Faroes and to Iceland and to the Scottish Isles, or to the remote and sparsely populated districts of their own country. Certainly some of the early settlers, in rebellion against Harald, chose a voluntary exile in Iceland rather than remain in a Norway no longer safe for them. Ketil Haeng was one; he migrated in the landnáma time with his wife and son because he was guilty of the murder of friends of King Harald; Kveldulf and his son Skalla-Grim were likewise at feud with the king; Thorolf Örnolfsson, Geirmund Heljarskinn, and many another of the Icelandic colonists had also incurred his displeasure; moreover, Harald's violent attack upon the vikings of the Scottish islands undoubtedly drove forth many of these already exiled folk to seek a new home in the great island of the north. But all this, much though it impressed Snorri, is not to say that Harald's conquest of western Norway and his expedition to the islands of the west were more than contributory causes of the great outpouring of the Norwegians into Iceland. (1) Ingimund the Old, another early colonist, had fought at Hafrsfjord on the king's side, and yet another, Hrollaug, son of Harald's good friend, Ragnvald Möre-jarl, made his home in Iceland at the suggestion of the king himself. So that not mere hostility to Harald, but some greater impulse was the cause of this notable emigration of the vikings. This was, in its practical expression for the Norse emigrants to Iceland, the wellnigh irresistible appeal of large estates, easily to be taken and free from all complications and restrictions of inherited tenures, in a land where each man was as good as his neighbour and none was lord; but in its larger setting the peopling of Iceland must be nothing
1. This subject has been debated again recently; for a summary of the arguments, see Johan Schreiner (who believes that Harald's harsh rule was the cause of the emigration), Historisk Tidsskrift, XXVIII (1928), p. 190. Note that Professors Finnur Jónsson and Halvdan Koht take the opposite view, and that if Hafrsfjord can be post-dated to the '90s, as Professor Koht believes, it is clear that the emigration to Iceland must have begun nearly twenty years before the decisive battle that brought all Norway under his strong arm.
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but a single aspect of that unrest, that longing for a freedom and a wealth greater than their own poor countries could offer, that for a hundred years past had sent the men of the north exploring and plundering west-over-sea and east-over-sea, had fired them to the winning of lands abroad in the hostile kingdoms of the Celt and the Englishman and the Frank and in the country of the Slavs, and had made their name to be feared on every coast in Christendom.
Familiar to the readers of the sagas are many of the names of the first Icelandic settlers. There was Skalla-Grim whose son, the great poet Egil, is hero of one of the best-known Icelandic tales; there was the family of old Ketil Flatneb (p. 304 ), the governor of the Hebrides, including Aud the Deepminded, his daughter, who was the widow of King Olaf of Dublin and subsequently the founder of a noble Icelandic family. There was Thorolf Mostrarskegg (Mostr-beard), the devout servant of Thor, exiled by Harald because he had harboured Ketil's son Björn the Easterner. There was Önund Tree-foot (p. 305 ), who had lost a leg at Hafrsfjord, from whom is descended Grettir Asmundarson, hero of the finest saga of them all. Also there was the widow Asgerd, who with her children and her brother took land in Iceland and whose son, Thorgeir, was the father of wise old Njal of Bergthorshvoll, the noble and tragic Burnt Njal of the famous saga. And many others there were whose names and deeds are told in the naive and enchanting literature of Iceland.
What Harald thought of the new-born colony where so many of his enemies now dwelt in security history does not reveal. He deplored, beyond a doubt, the loss to his own kingdom of so many members of the aristocracy with their retinues, and he attempted to stop the wholesale emigration to Iceland that was draining Norway; but his decree of prohibition was soon altered into a demand for a tax from all who journeyed thither. He must have believed himself, whether formally acknowledged or not, the legitimate overlord of Iceland, and once he sent Uni, son of Gardar, the discoverer of the country, to bring the island under the king's direct authority, promising him a jarldom if he succeeded. But the Icelanders boycotted Uni and he accomplished nothing. On another occasion Harald made a show of his supposed power over the colony, for upon hearing the complaints of later emigrants that the original settlers had taken to themselves too large a share of the land, he decreed that no one should possess more land in Iceland than he and his ship's crew could circumambulate in a day. Whether he was obeyed, or
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