Vikings (36 page)

So when it came to the Vikings’ continuing adventures in the north and west, the Faroe Islands were the ideal launching pad. It was only a matter of time before some of the settlers looked farther afield once more. The first Viking footprints on Iceland, however, the next of the stepping stones across the North Atlantic, were apparently made not by would-be settlers, but by a lost mariner. According to the
Historia Norwegie
, it was a Norwegian man named Naddodd, or Nadd-Oddur, who first set foot on the place, sometime around
AD
850 or 860. By all accounts he was an outlaw, probably the victor of a duel and therefore a killer, cast out from among decent folk and condemned to live elsewhere. Naddodd had set sail for the Faroe Islands, but either bad weather, bad seamanship or a combination of both saw him blown far off-course. When he finally sighted land beyond the swell it was the peaks of an island as yet unknown to his people. Having managed to get ashore, he seemingly did no more than climb a nearby peak before deciding there was nothing there for him. As he returned to his boat it began to snow, and when he eventually reached the Faroe Islands he told the people there he had discovered ‘Snowland’.

It is also in the
Historia Norwegie
that we read about the second Norwegian to make landfall on Iceland, this one called Floki Vilgertharson. It was he who gave the place the name we know it by today. The first winter he spent there was so bitter,
the cold so unrelenting, he called it ‘Iceland’ and it was Floki’s description that stuck. A Swede named Garthar Svavarsson led another expedition to Iceland, either just before or just after Floki. But according to the
Landnámabók
– the twelfth-century Book of Settlements compiled by the Icelandic historian Ari Thorgilsson – it was a Norwegian called Ingolfr Arnarson who first put down permanent roots on the island. Like Naddodd, Ingolfr was an outlaw, a man with a violent past and drawn to the Viking equivalent of the Wild West by the prospect of starting afresh. Apparently aware of the lack of trees on Iceland, he had come with timber for building a house. As his ship drew closer to land he flung overboard two
instafar
, the main structural posts, and watched which way the currents took them.

By all accounts it was some time after he made landfall himself that he was able to find his timbers – but they had come ashore in a location where geothermal steam was vented from the earth. Mistaking the steam for smoke, he named the place Reykjavik – literally, ‘smoky bay’ – and eventually made his home there.

After the false starts of Naddodd, Floki and Garthar, the settlement pioneered by Ingolfr inspired a flood of immigration. According to the Book of Settlements and also the
Íslendingabók
, ‘the Book of the Icelanders’, the period between 870 and 930 witnessed the arrival of as many as 20,000 newcomers. By the end of this time, Iceland was fully occupied, with all the available farming and grazing land claimed. As with the Faroe Islands, it is unclear just who else might have been resident on Iceland when the Norse settlement began.

The sixth-century voyage of the Irish explorer St Brendan – thought by some to have taken him as far as North America – may have reached Iceland as well. Testimony from Dicuil, who wrote about Irish monks on the Faroe Islands, also places Irish holy men on Iceland before anyone else. Again there is
the ‘papa’ element in several place names – but also, frustratingly, a lack of conclusive archaeological evidence. There is a general consensus, however, that it was not just Scandinavians who were drawn to the island in the years after 870. Study of the genetic make-up of modern Icelanders has revealed a Celtic component that suggests settlers from the British Isles – Irish and Scots among them – were part of the first wave.

Like the Book of Settlements, the Book of the Icelanders is attributed, in large part, to Ari Thorgilsson (also known as
Ari hinn frodi
or
Ari Frodi
– Ari the Wise). Since he was at work centuries after the events he was writing about, all the usual caveats apply as to the likely accuracy of his words. He may have applied liberal amounts of artistic licence, but his account does seem to make plain that Iceland was settled by would-be chieftains. Ingolfr and Naddodd, and others like them, were men whose ambitions and violent tempers had made them outcasts in the land of their birth. In order to establish themselves as leaders and landowners of note, they had first to find the space, and the freedom, in which they might fulfil such destinies. Iceland has a total land area of around 40,000 square miles. It is therefore one-fifth again as large as Ireland and yet even today has a population of just over 300,000. For people intent on reinventing themselves in a new place, it must have seemed perfect.

I often think the Norwegian Vikings were a people caught, quite literally, between a rock and a hard place, or indeed a succession of hard places. Their homeland was short on land and resources and, by the ninth century, ruled by increasingly authoritarian figures. Those with the will and the opportunity were prepared to leave their old lives behind them and seek what luck betide them. Those were brave men and women and yet the places they found, after perilous journeys across the North Atlantic, were often at least as challenging as their
homeland: wind-blasted and rain-lashed Shetland and Orkney, blighted by winters as long and dark as those in Norway; more of the same in the Faroe Islands.

Iceland may well have seemed the harshest yet. Of all the places I told people I would be visiting in search of Vikings, it was mention of Iceland that captivated most. Even in the twenty-first century the sound of the name excites curiosity. Imagine the impact such a wild and dangerous place must have had on those ninth-century pioneers and settlers: active volcanoes spewing lava; barren, sterile expanses of newborn rock; geothermal springs of boiling water, belching steam; the rotten-egg fug of sulphurous gases. Modern Reykjavik retains something of the feel of a frontier town, of being on the edge of the wild. The steam still belches out of the ground, the volcanoes still grumble and moan and the hot water coming out of the showers in the hotels still smells like old-fashioned stink bombs. As recently as April 2010 a massive pall of dust and ash from the Eyjafjallajükull volcano in south-west Iceland forced 20 countries to close their airspace, for fear the debris might bring down passenger planes. In some fundamental ways, Iceland is still a scary place where nature and geology continue to have the upper hand.

Perhaps it was in Iceland too that the Vikings finally found a landscape that made sense of their gods and legends. Where else but in the blazing heart of a volcano would Wayland the Smith have his forge? Surely the thunder of eruptions sounded like Thor at war against the giants, mighty Mjölnir in hand?

Theirs was a violent, dramatic cosmology and Iceland provided a violent and dramatic backdrop. The Vikings’ universe comprised several worlds, all of them coexisting. Asgard was the world of gods like Odin and Thor who lived and feasted in Valhalla, the great hall of the warriors. Midgard was the world
of mortals. At the centre of it all was Yggdrasil, a towering ash tree, perpetually green:

I know where grows an ash,

It is called Yggdrasil,

A tall tree, speckled,

With white drops;

From there comes the dew

Which falls in the valley;

It flourishes for ever

Above the wells of Urd.

All the world’s rivers sprang from between Yggdrasil’s roots. From one Odin drew his wisdom, from another came the destiny of mankind. Everything – Yggdrasil, the worlds of gods and men, a rainbow bridge linking heaven and Earth – was supported on the back of a giant serpent.

Straddling, as it does, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge – the faultline between the Eurasian and the North American tectonic plates – the island is quite literally torn between worlds.

It was and is a geologically dynamic environment. At Stöng, in the valley of Thjorsardalur, in the south-west of the island, archaeologists excavated a farm settlement dating from quite late in the Viking Age. Once consisting of a large hall, with an adjoining dairy and indoor toilet, and also a separate byre and smithy, it would have been home to a prosperous family. Iceland is a largely tree-less place today and the majority of the deforestation was undertaken by farmers like those at Stöng, in the first decades of settlement. What makes the Stöng farmstead so attractive to archaeologists is the spectacular preservation of the remains. Even the lower courses of the turf walls have survived intact. But while so much of the world of the Vikings has been preserved for us elsewhere by the airtight blanket
provided by peat, on Iceland the miracle has been performed by volcanic eruptions.

In 1104 the farm at Stöng was buried beneath several feet of tephra, some of the millions of tons of cinders and pumice spewed out by nearby Mount Hekla. The eruption was on such a scale it made Hekla famous all across Europe as the location of ‘the gates of hell’. Although there was no lava involved the tephra smothered half the island and forced the abandonment of vast areas. Since the 1104 event, Hekla has erupted around 20 times, most recently in 2000 – and it is in fact vulcanologists rather than archaeologists who have been able to put a precise date on the first Viking arrivals.

Dig into the subsoil in parts of Iceland and you will eventually encounter a uniform layer of what looks, to the untrained eye, like the kind of dusty, grey aggregate used by road-builders. This is in fact the 1104 tephra layer, many inches thick and testament to the destructive power of nature. Dig down further, however, and there are yet more layers of grey, interspersed with organic browns and blacks. In any given section dug through Icelandic subsoil you might find evidence of three or four of Hekla’s eruptions, the thick bands of organic material sandwiched between them representing the centuries that separated the variously catastrophic events. (The whole effect is of a layer cake – chocolate sponge separated by thick grey icing.) Deepest of the tephra layers is one dated by vulcanologists to
AD
874. No archaeological evidence of human habitation has been found beneath it, and therefore before that ancient eruption – meaning that Ingolfr and the rest of the first settlers must have arrived sometime after that date.

The Norse society that evolved on Iceland was quite unlike anything that had existed before. It was a peculiarity of the Vikings – Norwegian, Danish and Swedish – that they seemed disinclined to foist much of their own native culture upon the
peoples they encountered. Wherever they went they practised their pagan religion at first (though that was soon negotiable as well), but the imposition of much else seems to have been low on the list of Viking priorities. Business was business and if the wheels might be oiled by learning a new language or donning new garb, then so be it. Among the Franks, in what would become the Duchy of Normandy, they became French. By 1066 and the Norman invasion of England, they were hardly Vikings at all. In Russia they adopted the ways of the Slavs they lived with – and whom they rose, in time, to dominate. In England, Ireland and Scotland Vikings happily wed their ways to those of the various resident populations. It was the same almost everywhere they went.

This ability to blend in was almost certainly a key to their success but it so happened that in Iceland there was no one to blend in
with.
Instead they had to make something of their own for once. It was a free-for-all to begin with, scattered families and communities existing in isolation, and without the need for much in the way of a formal structure. The earliest records suggest an initial population of just a few hundred people – perhaps the trusted emissaries of leaders who would follow later, once the houses were built and the first fields cleared. But from around
AD
930 onwards, with the land fully occupied and boundary disputes and other clashes becoming increasingly commonplace, action was taken to establish order. The 36 leading landowners – known as
gothar
, or chieftains – came together to establish an assembly that might provide governance and guidance based on collective decision-making. This was the
Althing
and whether or not they realised it at the time, those 36 men laid the foundations for the oldest extant democracy in the world.

The concept of the
thing
was already long established in Scandinavia and other parts of Germanic northern Europe.
Free men had always gathered at appointed places and times to discuss disputes and make decisions affecting the wider community. Our modern word ‘thing’, referring to an object, has the same root. Local matters were discussed at local things, while those of greater import were dealt with at national things. What made the Icelandic Althing different was the absence of any king. Elsewhere a thing would, from time to time, elect a new monarch; in Iceland no one leader ever outranked any other.

They say necessity is the mother of invention and it was the circumstances of the Vikings’ settlement of Iceland that led to such an innovation. Since no one individual gothar had the wealth or the following necessary to dominate all of his fellows, they made themselves subject instead to the rule of law. Historian Jesse Byock, a specialist in Viking Age Iceland, says the first colonists simply had to make the best of things and find new ways to get along with one another. The society they had left behind was one that had only recently learnt to accept a chief. Beneath and around that alpha-male, the apparatus of a fledgling centralised government was slowly growing. But in Iceland, where no man had the clout to make himself a king, there evolved what Byock has called ‘a headless polity’. ‘As part of the colonisation process, the settlers experienced a de-evolutionary change: the immigrant society moved down a few rungs on the ladder of complexity. This diminished level of stratification, which emerged from the first phase of social and economic development, lent an appearance of egalitarianism – social stratification was restrained and political hierarchy limited.’

The Iceland Althing met for 15 days every year, at the time of the summer solstice, and one of the most important tasks was the election of the
logsogumadhr
– the law speaker. For a society without a written language, memory was key, and the man who could recite the law acted with the authority of a judge. A
written body of laws emerged in Iceland eventually – called, inexplicably, the
Gregas
or Grey Goose law – but at first the whole lot of it was learnt by heart and remembered by just one man at a time.