Viking Age Iceland

by Byock, Jesse L.

• ISBN13: 9780140291155
• ISBN10: 0140291156
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-09-01
• Publisher: Penguin Books

Summary

Medieval Iceland was unique amongst Western Europe, with no foreign policy, no defence forces, no king, no lords, no peasants and few battles. It should have been a utopia yet its liberature is dominated by brutality and killing. The reasons for this, argues Jesse Bycock, lie in the underlying structures and cultural codes of the islands' social order. Viking Age Iceland is an engaging, multi-disciplinary work bringing together findings in anthropology and ethnography interwoven with historical fact and masterful insights into the popular Icelandic sagas.

Author Biography

Jesse Byock is a professor of Icelandic and Old Norse studies at UCLA. He is the translator of The Saga of the Volsungs and The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki for Penguin Classics.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xiii
List of Maps	xiv
Acknowledgements	xvi
Preface	xviii
Note on Names, Spelling and Pronunciation	xx
Introduction	1	(4)
An Immigrant Society	5	(20)
Language and the Term `Viking'	11	(2)
Leadership	13	(1)
Mord the Fiddle: A Leader and the Law	14	(7)
The Sagas: An Ethnography of Medieval Iceland	21	(4)
Resources and Subsistence: Life on a Northern Island	25	(18)
Turf Housing	34	(9)
Curdled Milk and Calamities: An Inward-looking Farming Society	43	(20)
Provisions, Subsistence Strategies, and Population	46	(9)
Bad Year Economics: Difficulties of Life in the North Atlantic	55	(8)
A Devolving and Evolving Social Order	63	(18)
Ranking, Hierarchy and Wealth	66	(3)
Complex Culture and Simple Economy	69	(4)
Privatization of Power in the Tenth Century	73	(2)
A Proto-democratic Community?	75	(2)
Icelandic Feud: Conflict Management	77	(4)
The Founding of a New Society and the Historical Sources	81	(18)
The Effect of Emigrating from Europe	82	(2)
Land-taking and Establishing Order	84	(5)
Dating the Settlement: Volcanic Ash Layers	89	(3)
Closing the Frontier and Establishing Governing Principles	92	(3)
Written Sources: The Book of Settlements and The Book of the Icelanders	95	(4)
Limitations on a Chieftain's Ambitions, and Strategies of Feud and Law: Eyrbyggja saga	99	(19)
Arnkel's Quest for Wealth and Power	103	(1)
Ulfar's Land Shifts to Arnkel	104	(4)
Thorolf's Land Shifts to Snorri Gooi	108	(2)
Ulfar Claims Orlyg's Land	110	(2)
Ulfar's Demise	112	(3)
The End of Arnkel's Ambitions	115	(3)
Chieftain-Thingmen Relationships and Advocacy	118	(24)
The Nature of the Goooro	119	(1)
Advocacy	120	(3)
Arbitration and Legalistic Feuding	123	(3)
The Flexibility of the Gooi-Thingman Relationship	126	(6)
The Social Effects of Concubinage	132	(2)
Distinctions of Rank	134	(3)
Hreppar: Communal Units	137	(2)
The Orkneys: A Comparison	139	(1)
Freedmen	140	(2)
The Family and Sturlunga Sagas: Medieval Narratives and Modern Nationalism	142	(28)
The Family Sagas	143	(3)
The Sturlunga Compilation	146	(3)
The Sagas as Sources	149	(2)
Modern Nationalism and the Medieval Sagas	151	(5)
Conclusions	156	(3)
The Locations of the Family Sagas	159	(11)
The Legislative and Judicial System	170	(15)
Thing: Assemblies	171	(12)
Options	183	(2)
Systems of Power: Advocates, Friendship, and Family Networks	185	(22)
Advocacy	186	(2)
The Role of Kinship	188	(2)
A Balancing Act	190	(2)
Friendship (Vinfengi and Vinatta)	192	(5)
Women and Choices of Violence and Compromise	196	(1)
Vengeance and Feud: Goading in Laxdæla saga	197	(7)
A Goading Woman from Sturlunga saga	204	(1)
Restraint Within a Major Chieftain's Household in the Sturlung Age	205	(2)
Aspects of Blood Feud	207	(12)
Territory	211	(3)
Marriage and Confused Loyalites	214	(3)
Some Conclusions	217	(2)
Feud and Vendetta in a `Great Village' Community	219	(14)
The Language of Feud	223	(2)
Norms of Restraint	225	(5)
Bluffing and Violence	230	(1)
Outlawry	231	(2)
Friendship, Blood Feud, and Power: The Saga of the People of Weapon's Fjord	233	(19)
Inheriting a Foreigner's Goods	236	(1)
Brodd-Helgi's Revenge against Thorleif	237	(4)
Struggle to Claim a Dowry	241	(2)
Skirmishes over a Woodland	243	(1)
Seeking a Thingman's Allegiance	244	(1)
Brodd-Helgi Breaks Vinfengi	245	(2)
Geitir Establishes Vinfengi	247	(5)
The Obvious Sources of Wealth	252	(20)
Sources of Income Available Only to Chieftains	253	(1)
Early Taxes	253	(2)
Price-setting	255	(5)
Additional Privileged Sources of Wealth	260	(1)
The Sheep Tax	261	(2)
Sources of Income Available to All Freemen	262	(1)
Trade	263	(5)
Slavery and the Rental of Land and Livestock	268	(4)
Lucrative Sources of Wealth for Chieftains	272	(20)
The Acquisition of Property in the Family Sagas	275	(1)
Disputed Property in the East Fjords: The Saga of the People of Weapon's Fjord	275	(3)
Disputed Property in the Salmon River Valley: Laxdæla saga	278	(5)
Inheritance Claims in the Sturlunga Sagas	281	(2)
The Struggle to Inherit Helgastaoir: The Saga of Gudmund the Worthy	283	(3)
Inheritance Rights to Heinaberg: The Saga of Hvamm-Sturla	286	(3)
Resurgence of the Dispute over Heinaberg: The Saga of the Icelanders	289	(3)
A Peaceful Conversion: The Viking Age Church	292	(16)
Pagan Observance	294	(3)
A Viking Age Conversion	297	(5)
Geography and the Church	302	(1)
Early Bishops, Priests and Nuns	303	(1)
The Beginnings of a Formal Church Structure	304	(4)
Gragas: The `Grey Goose' Law	308	(16)
Manuscripts and Legal Origins	309	(7)
Women and the Law	316	(4)
Marriage and the Church	320	(4)
Bishops and Secular Authority: The Later Church	324	(17)
Bishops	324	(2)
The Tithe and Church Farmsteads	326	(3)
Bishops and Priests in the Later Free State	329	(2)
The Church's Struggle for Power in the Later Free State	331	(5)
Priests	336	(2)
Monasteries	338	(3)
Big Chieftains, Big Farmers and their Sagas at the End of the Free State	341	(14)
Big Farmers and the Family Sagas	343	(1)
Advantages Enjoyed by the Storbændr	344	(3)
The Saga of the Icelanders in the Sturlunga Compilation	347	(1)
The Storgooar, Not Quite Rulers	348	(2)
Iceland's Jarl	350	(1)
1262-4: The Covenant with Norway's King and the End of the Free State	351	(4)
Appendix 1: The Law-speakers	355	(2)
Appendix 2: Bishops During the Free State	357	(1)
Appendix 3: Turf Construction	358	(11)
Appendix 4: A Woman Who Travelled from Vinland to Rome	369	(4)
Notes	373	(23)
Bibliography	396	(35)
Index	431

Excerpts

The Family and Sturlunga Sagas: Medieval Narratives and Modern Nationalism

Each society’s social drama could be expected to have its own ‘style’, too, its aesthetic of conflict and redress, and one might also expect that the principal actors would give verbal or behavioural expression to the values composing or embellishing that style.

Victor E. Turner,An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga

The Sagas differ from all other ‘heroic’ literatures in the larger proportion that they give to the meanness of reality.

W. P. Ker,The Dark Ages

The family sagas, dealing with the tenth and early eleventh centuries, and Sturlunga sagas, covering the years from approximately 1120 and 1246, are the most important, as well as the most extensive, source for a study of social and economic forces in medieval Iceland. These two related groups of vernacular prose narratives are rich mines of information about the normative codes of Iceland’s medieval community.

The Family Sagas

The family sagas are called in modern IcelandicIslendingasogur, ‘the sagas of the Icelanders’. They have no close parallels in other medieval European narratives, which are mostly in verse and are often of a more epic character than the sagas. Some family sagas tell us about the settlement of Iceland, but most of them concentrate on the period from the mid tenth to the early eleventh century. In a crisp and usually straightforward manner they describe the dealing between farmers and chieftains from all parts of the country and among families from diverse elements of the society. They explore the potential for an individual’s success or failure in the insular world of the Old Icelandic Free State.

Whereas the Sturlunga sagas are mostly about individuals engaging in the power struggles of an emerging overclass and give almost no information about the personal lives of ordinary farmers and local leaders, the family sagas tend to concentrate on precisely these concerns. With regularity the stories focus on private matters and offer insights into personal problems of families and the health, good of ill, of marriages. The family sagas often exaggerate situations of crisis. They deal less with extended kin groups, as the name ‘family sagas’ might imply, than with regional disputes in Iceland. Similar actions involving different characters are repeated in different locales. With constantly changing detail, the literature present potential issues and the responses that individuals in the society needed to make to them if they were to succeed. Among the matters stressed were methods of reacting to overly ambitious or otherwise dangerous characters, precedents for various legal positions and modes of action, successful interventions by advocates, different means of settlement, and the principles underlying the establishment and maintenance of ties of reciprocity.

In the oral saga, as elsewhere in oral tales, one may assume that adherence to strict fact was never an issue. Nor was the saga-teller required to memorize a fixed text; a general outline of a story that was perhaps of historical origin was sufficient. The medieval audience expected the narrator of a family saga to observe certain strictures. Most importantly, the saga had to be credible, that is, the story had to be portrayed as possible, plausible, and therefore useful within the context of Iceland’s particular rules of social order and feud. The sagas served as a literature of social instruction.

In an earlier book,Feud in the Icelandic Saga, I suggest that feud served as a cohesive and stabilizing force in Old Icelandic society. Because the rules of feuding, as they developed in Iceland, regulated conflict and limited breakdowns of order, violence was kept within acceptable bounds throughout most of the history of the Free State. The ways in which feud operated provided a structure for the sagas. In examining the question of the oral saga, I found probable the existence of a pre-literate stage of well-developed saga-telling employing a compositional technique that became the foundation for the written saga. This simple, easily adaptable technique was based on the use of active narrative particles that occur in no particular order and fall into three categories: conflict, advocacy, or brokerage and resolution. Guided by the parameters of socially recognized conduct, the storyteller or storywriter arranges these action particles in various orders and with different details. By using the particles he (or she) translates social forms into narrative forms. In anthropological terms the particles reflect the phases of Icelandic feud. These discrete units of action, the hallmark of the saga style, were a convenient means for an oral or a literature teller to advance the narration of a complex tale.

Working within a tradition of known characters, events and geography, the saga-teller chose his own emphasis. He (or she) was free to decide what details and known events to include and what new actions to introduce. These choices not only made for variety in the small clusters of actions that linked together to form chains of saga events, but also served to distinguish one saga from another. Although the medieval audience probably knew in advance the outcome of a particular dispute, the essence of a tale could be put forward differently each time. This economical and effective technique of forming narrative prose applied to both oral and written saga composition. Freedom from reliance on a fixed, memorized text allowed individual authors to incorporate new elements, such as Christian themes and changing ethical judgements.

Thirty or more major family sagas are extant. These texts vary markedly in length: some, likeHrafnkels saga, are approximately twenty pages in modern volumes; others, such asNjals sagaandLaxdoela saga, fill 300 or more pages. The family sagas are preserved in a wide variety of manuscripts, none of which is an original text definitely attributed to a specific author, despite the educated guesses of scholars. The oldest surviving examples of saga writing are fragments; the earliest are usually dated to the mid thirteenth century, although it is possible that some fragments pre-date 1200. Among the presumed oldest fragments are sections fromEyrbyggja saga, Heidarviga saga, Laxdoela saga, andEgils saga. These, like later copies of entire sagas, give no information as to when the earliest versions of the texts were compose; thus dating the sagas has always been a difficult task and scholarly conclusions are open to question. Decision on the age of the family sagas have been influenced by different theories of saga origins, a point underscored by Hallvard Mageroy: ‘A chief argument for placing the production of the family sagas in the thirteenth century us that only by this means can saga literature be seen as a natural branch of European literature in the High Middle Ages.’

Copies of complete family sagas are preserved in vellum books dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For example, the fourteenth century compilation ofModruvallabokis the chief source for many of the eleven sagas it contains. Many other sagas are preserved in paper manuscripts from the sixteenth century and later. In the medieval period there were many more family sagas than have survived.Landnamabok, for example, names several that are now lost. Except forDroplaugarsona saga, which notes at the end that a certain Thorvald, descended from one of the main characters, ‘told this saga’, all the family sagas are anonymous.