The Vikings (24 page)

Given the state of affairs in Wessex and England during most of Alfred’s reign, and bearing in mind the extreme suspicion with which Louis the Pious had greeted his Rus visitors in 839, our inclination is to find Ottar’s presence at Alfred’s court in every way remarkable. The non-warlike Scandinavian native was not unknown in Wessex. On visiting a newly opened monastery at Athelney, Asser wrote of his surprise at finding among the largely foreign brotherhood a young monk ‘of Viking parentage’. He provided his own explanation of the presence of so many foreigners there: Viking terror had been so effective against the Church that few free-born natives could be found willing to risk their lives by taking holy orders.
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Even so, and even though a specific goal of his journey seems to have been to see the king, for the report tells us that ‘he still had unsold 600 tame deer at the time when he had left to visit the king’, and though Alfred is referred to as ‘his lord’, it seems inconceivable that Ottar should have arrived in England alone and on his own initiative.
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It is possible, though unlikely, that he was one of the party who spent twelve days with Guthrum at Alfred’s court as part of the baptismal agreement after the battle at Edington. More credibly, he may have been one of Guthrum’s advisers later, at the negotiations for the treaty of Wedmore.

In about 890 a merchant from the north of Norway named Ottar described his travels to King Alfred’s courtiers. His route from Hedeby to London is conjectural.

The homely account Ottar gives of life in the far north of Norway is in striking contrast to the violence otherwise associated with the Scandinavian homelands during the Viking Age, and his talk of his tame reindeer and twenty pigs is a world away from Odin, human sacrifices, blood-eagles and raven banners. The description of his journey down the west coast of Norway to the trading town at Sciringsheal in the south, now identified as Kaupang, just outside present-day Sarpsborg, is uninterrupted by any sudden urge to go ashore and plunder an isolated settlement, and the next leg of the voyage from Sciringsheal to Hedeby, still thriving eighty years after the forcible resettlement of Reric’s traders there in 808, is described entirely in terms of the navigational challenges involved.

The form in which the information occurs in the narrative often suggests that Ottar, or Ohthere as the Anglo-Saxons called him, was answering a question. We might see him seated and ringed around by one or more of the curious scribes at Alfred’s cosmopolitan Winchester court. A learned courtier leans forward, chin in one hand, quill pen in the other:
Could you make the journey from Hålogoland to Sciringsheal within - say - a month? If you had the wind with you?
And duly makes a note of Ottar’s reply: ‘He said, that you could not sail there in a month, even if every night you sheltered and every day had a favourable wind.’ The question of his economic and social status comes up:

He was a very wealthy man by the standards they use to judge wealth, that is to say, in deer. At the time of his visit to the king he had six hundred unsold tame deer. They call these animals reindeer, and six of them are decoy-deer. These are very valuable among the Sami, for they use them to trap the wild reindeer. He was one of the most powerful men in his country, yet he owned no more than twenty cows, twenty sheep and twenty swine, and the little bit of earth he ploughed, he ploughed with a horse. But their wealth consists mainly in the tax paid to them by the Sami. This tax takes the form of hides, feathers, whalebone, and rope made of whaleskin and sealskin.
⁴⁵

The tone implies that Ottar struggled to convince his Anglo-Saxon hosts to share his own idea of himself as a wealthy man. But he freely admitted that the farming land in his country was poor: ‘whatever of it can be used for grazing or ploughing all lies along the coast. Even that is very rocky in some places, and wild mountains lie to the east and above, all along the cultivated land.’ The land of the Norwegians in the late ninth century was ‘very long and very narrow’, which is an accurate description of modern Norway, and from Ottar’s report it is clear that the main regional identities as ‘Norwegians’, ‘Danes’ and ‘Swedes’ were already in existence at that early date.

One of the many enigmas of the report arises in Ottar’s description of his journey south along the coast of Norway to Sciringsheal:

He also said that one had to sail along the coastline. And on his starboard side he had first Ireland, and after that the islands that lie between Ireland and this land. After that it is this land, until he arrives at Skiringssal, and all the way Norway is on the port side.

Ireland, the Orkneys, Hebrides and Britain would not have been visible landmarks for Ottar on his journey south, and this information may have been provided by the scribe for the benefit of native readers of the
Orosius
in which this was to appear. It has also been suggested that, if Ottar himself provided this information, he was in fact referring to embarkation points for journeys to these particular destinations when sailing from the west coast of Norway.
⁴⁶
This may explain the apparent oddity of his having ‘Ireland’ and not ‘Ice land’ on his starboard side. Some assume it to be a scribal error and amend the name. One argument for letting ‘Ireland’ stand is that, from the perspective of an observer in Wessex, it might have been natural to regard Ireland as an island in the north. Another is that the discovery and settlement of Iceland was so recent that it could not possibly have had time to establish itself as geographical reference point.

8

The settlement of Iceland

Traditions preserved in the
Landnámabók
or
Book of the Settlements
tell us that the first to set foot on Iceland was a Norwegian named Nadodd who set out for the Faroe Islands and was blown off course and ended up off the east coast of the island. Going ashore in the vicinity of what was later named Reydarfjord, he climbed a mountain, but saw neither smoke nor any other sign of human habitation from the top. On his way back out to sea it began to snow heavily, and he decided to call his discovery Snæland, or ‘Snowland’. Another story credits the discovery to a Swede named Gardar Svavarsson, who was sailing through the Pentland Firth on his way to the Hebrides to claim property inherited by his wife when he too was blown off course. After a cautious circumnavigation of the island he went ashore at a place he called Husavik (‘house point’) and spent the winter there before leaving. He gave the island his own name, Gardarholm or ‘Gardar’s Island’. In another version of the story his mother, a seer, saw the island in a vision and gave Gardar directions on how to get there.
¹

The first attempt to settle was a small venture led by Floki Vilgerdason, a Norwegian from Rogaland. Before setting out on his voyage Floki is said to have sacrificed three ravens. The
Book of the Settlements
explains that this was done because at that time ‘sailors in the Northlands had no loadstone’ with which to navigate.
²
Floki’s techniques of natural navigation were successful and earned him the nickname ‘Raven’ Floki: ‘When he loosed the first, it flew aft astern; the second flew high into the air, then back to the ship; the third flew straight ahead in the direction in which they found land.’
³
Going ashore in Vatnsfjord they found the waters so well stocked with fish and seal that they neglected to make hay in the autumn, an oversight that cost the lives of the sheep and cattle they had taken with them, and put paid to the plan of permanent settlement. At the start of a bitterly cold spring Floki climbed a high mountain and saw in the north a fjord full of drift ice which led him to give the island its third and defining name of
Ísland
or Iceland. The demands of colonization seem to have been beyond this particular little group, for they delayed their departure until too late in the summer and found themselves driven back and had to spend another winter there, sustained this time by a whale they found washed up on the west bank of the fjord. When they eventually did get back to Norway Floki did not speak of the new land with any enthusiasm.

These sightings and landings probably took place sometime in the 860s. The commencement of the settlement proper is dated by Ari Thorgilsson in the
Book of the Icelanders
, the earliest written history of Iceland, to 870, ‘. . . when Ivar, son of Ragnar Lothbrok, had St Edmund, king of the Angles, killed’, striking incidental evidence of the significance Edmund’s death had acquired throughout the Christian world by the time of Ari’s writing (1122-33). In the topographical description of Iceland given in the
Historia Norwegie
, probably written some time between 1160 and 1175, the author notes its ‘innumer able mountains overlaid with unmelting glaciers’, and that among these rises Mount Hekla, ‘whose whole surface twitches like Etna and when it has shaken with a horrifying earth tremor, it belches up sulphurous fireballs’.
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Analysis of the tephra layers deposited in the terrain by such eruptions has confirmed, to within a year either way, the accuracy of the date given by Ari. Previous to this there are no signs of human habitation in the soil below the
landnám
or settlement layer.
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Two other tephra layers, the Katla R layer from about 920 and the Eldgjá from about 935, likewise confirm Ari’s statement that within sixty years Iceland was fully settled, and that no significant immigration took place after about 930.

It has been observed that many of the most important actors in Ari’s version of events were his own relatives, and that the book is as much a family history as it is an ecclesiastical or national history.
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Perhaps because his ancestors were not involved he makes no mention of the earlier stories concerning the discovery of the island, and by contrast with other sources he is summary in his account of the arrival of the first permanent settler:

It is said with accuracy that a Norwegian called Ingolf travelled from there [Norway] to Iceland for the first time when Harald Finehair was sixteen years old, and a second time a few years later; he settled in the south in Reykjavik. The place to the east of Minkthakseyr where he first came ashore is called Ingolfshofdi, and the place to the west of Olfossa which he later took possession of is called Ingolfsfell.
⁷

The only other items of information Ari adds about the earliest days of the settlement is that the country was at that time richly forested, evidently in contrast to the state of affairs at the time of his own writing, and that there were Christians living on the island, whom the immigrants called
papar
, who left ‘because they did not wish to stay here with Heathens’. He writes that they left behind them some of the paraphernalia of Irish Christianity, including the small bells made of iron or bronze that were rung to call monks to prayer, psalters, gospels and other devotional books, and the croziers or staffs that were used as signs of office and as walking sticks.

Dicuil’s
Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae
, written in about 825, adds background to Ari’s brief and enigmatic observations. Irish monks of the time practised a peculiar form of devotion known as
peregrinatio
which involved seclusion in remote and wild places, far from the temptations of the world, in search of mystical communion with God. Skellig Michael, off the Kerry coast, where in 824 Viking raiders carried off the hermit Éitgal, was an example of such a retreat. Dicuil relates that some of the most devout of these Irish Christians made their way north in small boats as far as Iceland (which, following Roman usage, he calls
Thule
), to spend the spring and summer months there. Still others made the shorter journey of two summer days and a night’s sailing north of Ireland to what were almost certainly the Faroe Islands. Dicuil writes that monks from Ireland had been using these islands as retreats for about 100 years up to the time of his writing, but that now, ‘because of Norse pirates, they are empty of anchorites, but full of innumerable sheep and a great many different kinds of seafowl’.
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Among the
Immrama
, the collective name given to these tales of intrepid Irish monks, are accounts of the voyages made by St Brendan, which include his description of ‘a great hellish mountain which appeared full of clouds and smoke about its summit . . . And the brink of the island was of an appalling height, so that they could scarcely see the top of it, and it appeared full of firebrands and red sparks, and was as steep as a wall.’
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These vivid images might well describe a volcanic eruption witnessed by Brendan, possibly of Katla, currently shrouded beneath the immense glacier Myrdalsjokull, on the south coast of Iceland.

No archaeological evidence has been found so far to confirm Ari’s claim of an early Christian presence in Iceland, and the existence of similar traditions concerning the Faroes has led to suggestions that it is a topos, introduced by medieval Church historians to establish Christ as the spiritual occupant of the islands even before the arrival of the Heathen settlers.
¹⁰
Crosses carved on the walls of man-made caves in southern Iceland, like those at Kverkarhellir and Seljalandshellir, seem to bear a stylistic resemblance to crosses from Argyll, the Hebrides and the Shetlands, leading some archaeologists to suggest a possible link between the stories told by Ari and Dicuil, and monks from the pre-Viking Age Christian settlements associated with Iona engaged in
peregrinatio
, though the link remains speculative.
¹¹