The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (13 page)

Sveigakot was apparently one of the feet. The house itself was a small sunken room, 200 square feet in all, a so-called pit house—literally a pit dug a yard or less into the ground with a turfed-over roof, making the whole thing roughly tepee shaped. The Vikings generally used them as temporary shelters until a longhouse went up; at Sveigakot, that interval took two or three generations. Next to the pit house, however, they immediately built a large byre, with stalls for fourteen cows. “They seem to have begun very optimistically,” Orri said, “but things didn’t quite turn out the way they expected. These people seem to have been extremely poor in terms of material culture.” The only artifact found in the pit house was a nail.

“I think it was a planned settlement,” Orri told me. “Somebody organized it, and the greatest problem the organizers had was getting people to go. One easy solution is simply to buy them and transport them.” The slaves, Orri believes, were not only Irish and Scottish, but Poles, Slavs, Balts, Frisians, Finns, English, and other Scandinavians—all of whom were for sale in the markets of tenth-century Europe.

“That would explain why people had to put up with this place,” he said. “Once you’re stranded in Iceland, it’s hard to get away.”

By 930, the sagas say, Iceland was fully settled and the new settlers had set up a system of government. Or at least, a few dozen of the richest and most powerful men (they were all men: Unn the Deep-Minded was one of a kind) had proclaimed themselves
goðar,
a word that is usually translated as “chieftains.” These chieftains then worked out a way to share power. The country was divided into quarters, North, East, South, and West, and each landowner had to attach himself to one of the chieftains in his quarter. He could change his allegiance once a year, and was free (at least in theory) to sell his farm and move to a different quarter if he didn’t like his options. Laws were made and customs established to even out inequalities in wealth and status, to make sure that no one chieftain grew strong enough to become a King Harald Fine-Hair. It was, for instance, dishonorable (and often fatal) to be labeled an
ójafnarðarmaður,
a man who was unfair, unjust, overbearing: a man who upset the balance of the world.

Each summer the chieftains and their followers—perhaps a thousand people in all—met in Thingvellir, the “Meeting Plains” in the southwest of Iceland, to reaffirm their laws and to handle any disputes that could not be resolved at a more local level. Their meeting, called the Althing, was also the social event of the year, where marriages were made, goods traded, tales told, ale drunk, and politics discussed. It was at the Althing, in 1022, that the Icelanders ratified a trade agreement with Norway, permitting them to cut as much wood in the royal forests as they wished; and at the Althing, in 1024, that they learned the king of Norway wished to be given the offshore island of Grimsey as a token of the Icelanders’ esteem. They refused. Alone of their time, the saga people bowed to no king.
With law is our land built,
they declared.

Scholars have called the system they designed a democracy. In 1930, at the Althing’s thousand-year fete, the United States spokesman lauded the first Icelanders for seeking freedom and democracy and equal rights. The representative of Britain’s House of Lords called the Althing “the grandmother of parliaments” (the English parliament being the mother). These statesmen “told the audience what it wanted to hear,” writes Helgi Thorlaksson, a historian at the University of Iceland. To the Icelanders of 1930—struggling for their own independence from the Danish crown—the people of the sagas were “democratic, law-abiding, peace-loving parliamentarians.” To some, Viking Iceland still seems rooted in the values of America. In 1995 William Pencak, a philosophy professor at Pennsylvania State University wrote: “Iceland and its sagas depict a nation of free men, abetted by formidable women.”

To anthropologist Paul Durrenberger, also of Penn State, this romantic notion is bunk. When he read the sagas, he saw no “nation of free men” but an aristocracy of chieftains who “had no inclination toward egalitarianism.” The balance of power among them broke down within a hundred years—well before Gudrid’s birth. By then the Icelandic settlers had learned three things. One, their only crop was hay. Two, their only export was wool cloth, but the number of sheep a farm could keep over winter was fixed by the amount of hay the farm’s laborers could bring in. And three, a man ate just about as much as his labor was worth. There was no profit in keeping slaves, so they were freed—that is, kicked out of the chieftain’s longhouse. Some of these freedmen made a go at farming on small rented plots, perhaps like the desperate Sveigakot. Their sons worked summers for the chieftains or other large landowners; winters, the family fended for itself. With seasonal labor so cheap, some chieftains saw a new way to increase their power: Take the neighbor’s hayfield. It was against the law—land-claims were “holy,” sacrosanct—but the law, writes Durrenberger in
The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland,
couldn’t be enforced. Iceland had no king’s men (or police) and no castle dungeons. “Law or no, courts or no, decisions or no, one could do just as much as one’s influence, cunning, and power at arms allowed,” he writes. Rather than “farmers at fisticuffs” (as one eighteenth-century writer described the plots of the sagas), or free men and formidable women, to Durrenberger the sagas show the cunning and unprincipled rich out for as much power as they can grab, and happy to exploit the labor of anyone who can’t stand up to them.

Like any good literature, the sagas support both viewpoints—what you get out of them depends on what you read into them. The chieftains are not static caricatures. Snorri of Helgafell, friend and supporter of Gudrun the Fair, sometimes seems democratic, law-abiding, and peace-loving, and sometimes aristocratic, unprincipled, and exploitative. He is always, however, cunning, or, as Jon Vidar Sigurdsson of the University of Oslo puts it, shrewd. “Shrewdness is the characteristic which the sagas emphasize most in descriptions of the chieftains,” Jon writes in
Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth.
Their battles were fought with wits more often than weapons. Fate, or “the will of God,” never explains why one chieftain succeeds and one fails. “The cleverest chieftains, who could also ignore the political rules when necessary, became the most powerful ones.”

In the 1930s, scholars knew exactly what those political rules were. Icelandic schoolchildren learned them by rote: Each of Iceland’s four quarters had three spring assemblies (except in the North, which was too big and needed four). At each spring assembly, three chieftains met. The chieftains appointed judges, who would hear both sides of a dispute and agree on a settlement. The loser might pay a fine in silver, goods, or land, or he might be outlawed: either kicked out of the district or out of the country altogether, for three years or forever. If a conflict was not resolved at the local spring assembly, it went to the appropriate Quarter Court at the Althing. If that failed, there was a Fifth Court, a supreme appeals court.

This picture of Viking law is—like the description of Skallagrim’s settlement—a rationalization. Historians used to think that the laws, known from a medieval lawbook called
Grágas
(“Gray Goose”), were exempt from the problems of veracity that plague the sagas. Yet the first lawbook was not written until 1118, nearly two hundred years after the fact, and it no longer exists. The two manuscripts of
Grágas
that remain for us to read were penned in the late 1200s, after Iceland had become part of the kingdom of Norway. They differ greatly. No one knows why both are called “Gray Goose,” or what their purpose was. No one knows if they contain the actual laws of the land or, as Helgi Thorlaksson suggests, “simply learned reflections and speculations.” In Jon Vidar Sigurdsson’s view,
Grágas
is even less reliable than the sagas. The saga author, writing for the public, had to stay within the bounds of his listeners’ prior knowledge of his characters and his story. Writing for scholarly colleagues, the editor of
Grágas
was free to settle on “the simplest explanation,” the academic model.

In this case, the model is wrong. Only 10 percent of the conflicts in the sagas are resolved by courts of law; 90 percent hang on negotiation. “Farmers who felt that their rights had been infringed usually asked their chieftain for support,” Jon writes. “The validity of the case or the underlying circumstances were of secondary importance; what mattered was the kind of support that could be mustered.” Or, as Paul Durrenberger says, what mattered was the chieftain’s “influence, cunning, and power at arms.”

Paul argues that chieftains bought their influence, flattering and cajoling their neighbors with feasts and presents. Jon considers wealth just one of several important qualities. Without money a chieftain had no men, but a good chieftain was also “generous, helpful, and loyal,” as well as shrewd. He made strategic marriage alliances and supported his kin. He maintained peace among his own men. He could be either “aggressive, keen, bold, decisive, hard, and ambitious” or “peaceful, clever, good-natured, moderate, and unassuming”—both strategies worked, or at least, each worked sometimes. For the most obvious characteristic of a chieftaincy in the sagas, according to Jon, was that they “did not last for very long.” A chieftaincy was not a dynasty. A man could inherit, buy, or be given a chieftain’s ring, but that alone didn’t make him a chieftain.

Nor were there just thirty-nine of them, as the academic model of Viking law would tell us. From the settlement of Iceland until the time of Gudrid’s death, about 1050, anyone could claim the title. One of the fifty or sixty chieftains that Jon suggests were knocking around Iceland in the late 900s could have been Gudrid’s father, Thorbjorn Vifilsson, as
The Saga of Eirik the Red
claims. He just wasn’t a very successful chieftain, and he was, by the time the saga begins, an old man with money problems living in territory claimed by the young and aggressive Snorri of Helgafell. Although a chieftaincy was not defined geographically, no chieftain liked to have a rival on his doorstep.

As
The Saga of Eirik the Red
tells us, Gudrid’s father refused to shore up his tottering chieftaincy by wedding his young daughter to a rich—but slave-born—merchant. His only other source of wealth, as for all Icelanders, was the hay that fed the sheep that provided the wool that Gudrid and the other women on the farm could spin and weave into homespun cloth, the only goods Icelanders had to trade with Norway. By 985, when Gudrid was born and Eirik the Red convinced twenty-five shiploads of Icelanders to sail off with him to start over in Greenland, many of the first settlers’ choices had already proved disastrous. Many farms had been abandoned; many settlers’ hopeful expectations had turned to dust. There’s no way to say if Gudrid’s father’s farm suffered from overgrazing a thousand years ago, but erosion is one possible explanation for his “money troubles.”

As Icelandic historian Gunnar Karlsson writes, “Iceland may have been a good country for the first generations of Icelanders, but it was not equally good to all its children.”

Gudrid’s family were among those for whom it was not so good.

Some students of genealogy find it questionable that Gudrid could be the granddaughter of Vifil, the highborn captive from Scotland, as the sagas say. The problem is that this Vifil sailed in the ship built by Unn the Deep-Minded, while Karlsefni, Gudrid’s husband, is Unn’s great-great-great-great-grandson. That gives a difference of several generations between Gudrid’s and her husband’s ages. Yet it is possible. Unn was a grandmother when she sailed to Iceland, with two granddaughters of marriageable age. Her youngest grandchild, Olaf Feilan, may have been about five. If Vifil was Olaf Feilan’s age, there would be only two generations’ difference between Gudrid and Karlsefni. If Gudrid’s father and grandfather were in their fifties when their children were born, and Karlsefni's were in their twenties, the age difference is erased.

Assuming Vifil was a tot when Unn took him along, what was his status? Some translators call him a slave, but it’s clear that he and his sons didn’t think of themselves like the poor folk at Sveigakot, stranded and struggling. What slave would challenge his owner, saying, “Why didn’t you give me a farm, like everyone else?” as Vifil challenged Unn, some years after they had arrived in Iceland? And what slave owner would then give that arrogant upstart a whole valley, as Unn did? When Vifil’s son, Thorbjorn, was considering the marriage offer for Gudrid made by the rich young merchant, Einar of the fancy clothes, he said to his friend Orm, “To think that
I
would marry my daughter to the son of a slave!” It was apparently a sore point with Thorbjorn.

Vifil may instead have been a royal hostage. When Unn’s son Thorstein the Red was setting himself up as king of Scotland, he needed to guarantee the loyalty of the Scottish aristocracy. Throughout the Middle Ages, a common way to ensure loyalty was to take prisoner a nobleman’s young son, and to tie the boy’s life to his father’s good behavior. Young Vifil’s life was forfeit when Thorstein was betrayed and killed by the Scots, but Unn instead took him with her when she fled. It’s likely he married late; it was difficult to start a farm from scratch when you had no assets but a sense of your own importance. Unn might have rented him a cow and some sheep, so he could build up his herd. He would have turned to her for help if his hay crop was scanty, and her grandson Olaf Feilan, when he became a chieftain, could count on his sword.

The relationship was reciprocal, though, and it seems Olaf Feilan—or Thord Gellir, the next chieftain at Hvamm—let Vifil down.
The Book of Settlements
tells us that after Vifil settled in Vifil’s Dale, he quarreled with another of Unn’s shipmates, Hord, who had been granted Hord’s Dale, the seaward end of Vifil’s Dale. Doubtless it was a border dispute. We know who won by the nickname given Hord’s son—Asbjorn the Wealthy—and by the fact that this Asbjorn married Thord Gellir’s sister-in-law, while his daughter married the rising young chieftain Illugi the Black. Asbjorn was not only wealthy, he was well connected.