The Vikings (47 page)

15

Ragnarök in Iceland

The
Book of Settlements
names several baptized Norwegians among the first settlers in Iceland: Helgi the Lean, Orlyg the Old, Helgi Bjola, Jorund the Christian (a woman), Aud the Deep-minded (also a woman), and Ketil the Fool. These remained Christians for the rest of their lives. Once they were gone, it seems that their children reverted to the old beliefs and resumed the practices of sacrificing to Odin and Thor. There were Christian Icelanders, not least among the wives and slaves, many of whom were from Christian communities in the British isles, but for a long time Christianity remained a minority culture. The religion began making dramatic inroads into Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula during the second half of the tenth century, and in the final two decades its austere demands began to sound with some urgency in Iceland.

Among ordinary Icelanders, Thor was probably the most popular of the gods, and it was to Thor that Heathens looked as their champion in the hardening struggle to resist Christianity. In many ways this was a war of words, with poetry playing a prominent part in the campaigns. Heathen poets impugned the manhood of the Christians, and Christian poets mocked the Heathens for their superstition and stupidity. The first missionaries to preach the gospel in Iceland were a Saxon bishop named Fredrik and a native convert and former Viking known as Thorvald the Far-Traveller. On an occasion when Thorvald and Fredrik were preaching in the west of the country, a priestess named Fridgerd enacted a sacrificial ceremony within hearing distance of the two. Thorvald captured his disappointment in verse:

Though they allocated Thorvald the active and less shameful position in putative acts of male sexual intercourse involving Bishop Fredrik, the
nid
verses composed about him had so provoked Thorvald that he killed two of his tormentors, for which he was outlawed and driven from Iceland. We should not, however, rule out the possibility that this proof of a vigorous sense of personal honour in a convert made men more respectful of Christianity, lessening the view of it as an alien, perverse and remote faith.

Kristni Saga
, a history of the introduction to Iceland of Christianity, written by an unknown author and dated by most scholars to the mid-thirteenth century, identifies Thorvald as a companion of Olaf Tryggvason, and says that Olaf dispatched him on the mission, at about the same time as he claimed the throne of Norway and began his attempts to impose Christianity on the people. The
Ágrip
credits Olaf with the conversion of Norway, Iceland, Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes. Later and unreliable sources imply his involvement in the conversions of Denmark, Greenland and the Kievan state.
²
As a Christian and a monarch, Olaf could consider himself a modern man twice over. A country without a king, a Heathen commonwealth, Iceland was, by contrast, an anomaly twice over, and Olaf saw himself as its natural corrective. There is a literary demonstration that this was a modern way of thinking in a
tháttr
called
The Tale of Thorvald Chatterbox
, in which Olaf Tryggvason entrusts the eponymous hero with the task of converting an obstinate Heathen chieftain named Bård the Stout to Christianity. When Bård has finally accepted the king’s faith he sums up what has happened to him: ‘I don’t trust any idol or devil. I’ve gone from one country to another and met both giants and black men, and they none of them got the better of me; so I have long trusted in my own strength and ability (
trúa á matt ok megin
).’ ‘I’ve thought myself very self-sufficient up to now,’ he adds. ‘I’ve served neither kings nor other noblemen. But now I want to become your man, king, and follow you as long as I live.’
³
This was the model of kingship created 200 years earlier by Charlemagne, and it had become the standard model. Harald Finehair had hoped to make Iceland into an earldom under the Norwegian crown and, as his candidate for the title, backed Uni, son of the Gardar who was one of the first discoverers of Iceland. Olaf’s interest in Iceland was essentially an updating of this political ambition in the name of Christianity.

Olaf next sent an Icelander named Stefnir to preach the gospel in Iceland. Stefnir’s was a muscular brand of Christianity. Once he realized that persuasion was not working he turned to violence, riding about the countryside with his band of men and destroying temples and places of worship and idols. The Heathens gathered against him and he took refuge with his family at Kjalarness. During the winter his ship was badly damaged in a storm. The delighted followers of the old gods interpreted this as a sign that the Aesir did not wish Christ and his followers well:

A scholarium in Adam of Bremen’s
Gesta Hammaburgensis
notes that ‘
Apud illos non est rex, nisi tantum lex
’ (‘Among them there is no king, there is only the law’), and it is some indication of their alarm at Christianity’s intolerant nature that, in a direct response to Stefnir’s activities, the Icelanders now turned to the law to discourage the fanaticism of the followers of the religion.
⁵
The new legislation was known as
frændaskömm
, meaning something like ‘relation-shame’, and it required a legal response to blasphemy that covered the damaging and dishonouring of sacred sites and images. Prosecution was mandatory. First refusal fell to those relatives of the accused who were closer than fourth cousins but more distant than second cousins, a condition that reinforced the principal responsibility of the family for the conduct of its individual members. At a practical level the stipulation ensured that, in the event of a conviction, the property of the blasphemer would remain within the family. The legislation thus underlined the role of the private and the familial in preserving the structure of Heathen society, in contrast to a centralizing and anti-individualizing tendency in Christianity that was well illustrated by the Church’s insistence that the dead be buried in public, church ground and not in private, family ground. Stefnir was prosecuted by members of his own family under the new legislation and sentenced to leave the country.
⁶
Although there is no record of his having converted or even prime-signed anyone, his activities had inflicted further damage to the status of the religious traditions in Iceland.

Olaf sponsored a third mission, under a turbulent and self-willed Saxon named Thangbrand. Thangbrand was temperamentally similar to Thorvald, and allowed himself to be similarly provoked by verbal attacks.
Kristni Saga
tells us that numerous poets composed and broadcast offensive verse about him.
⁷
Thangbrand killed one of them, Vetrlidi, as he was out cutting turf with his servants. Another, named Thorvald the Weak, was killed at Grimnes, in the south-west of the country. Thangbrand was outlawed that summer at the
Althing
. The weather prevented his first attempt to leave and he had to spend the winter in the west. He and his men were ostracized. The Heathens refused to trade with them, and they were driven to taking food by force and leaving behind payment for it. This was reported as theft, and a fight followed in which eight Heathens and two of Thangbrand’s men were killed. Another attempt to leave was thwarted when Thangbrand’s ship was carried out to sea and badly damaged, occasioning a second verse in which the weather was seen as an agent of the Aesir’s displeasure at the Christian presence. Thor was specifically credited with raising the storm in a verse by a woman poet named Steinun:

Ari tells us that when Thangbrand at last got away and returned to Trondheim, he told king Olaf that it was ‘beyond all expectation that Christianity might yet be accepted here’.
⁹
Due to what Theodoricus Monachus calls ‘the innate obduracy and savage nature of the inhabitants’, he had made only a small number of converts during the two years of his mission.
¹⁰
Among them, however, were four very influential chieftains: Hall of Sida; Gizur the White; Gizur’s son-in-law, Hjalti Skjeggjason; and Thorgils of Ölfus.
¹¹
The furious king ordered the detention of all Icelanders in Trondheim, confiscating their property and issuing threats to have them killed or disfigured. It seems that Gizur and Hjalti somehow got wind of what was happening and made the journey over from Iceland. They urged the king to stay his hand and to let them make a fresh attempt to convert their people. They pointed out that Thangbrand had killed men, and that his behaviour and demeanour were hard to accept from a foreigner. Being natives, they assured the king, they would have a better chance of success. Gizur was Olaf’s second cousin, and the family connection no doubt added weight to his plea that his fellow-countrymen in Norway be not held to account for the conservatism of Icelanders in Iceland. Olaf agreed to let them lead another attempt, but as insurance he held on to four hostages, one from each of the Icelandic Quarter districts. All four were related to leading chieftains.

 

Accompanied by a priest named Thormod, Gizurr and his party set off for Iceland the following summer, in June 999, in time to attend the
althing
meeting at Thingvellir at the end of the month.
¹²
They landed first on the Westmann Islands off the south-west coast of Iceland before proceeding to Landeyjar on the mainland. They had a journey of about 100 kilometres in front of them. At first they had to make their way along the coast on foot, for this was the territory of the
go
ð
i
Runolf, a chieftain whose name occurs in several sources as among those most passionately opposed to the introduction of Christianity, and none of his
thingmen
would sell them horses. Not until they reached Háfr, in the area around Holt, where Hjalti’s brother-in-law lived, were they able to ride. Travelling on from there, they joined a number of other Christians heading for the annual assembly.

At the
althing
the previous year, Hjalti had been convicted of blasphemy and outlawed for declaiming a verse about Freyja from the Lawrock:

There was no point in the party advertising its contempt for the legislations of a lawful assembly, and Hjalti was persuaded to stay behind with a small group of men at a place called Laugardal. Gizur and the others continued their journey. At their overnight lakeside camp they received word that their opponents would prevent them, by force if necessary, from entering the assembly grounds, and so sent a message to their supporters at Thingvellir asking them to ride out to meet them. The headstrong Hjalti decided that the issue was so momentous it justified breaking the law anyway, and he and his men rejoined Gizur.

The Christians reached the assembly site at Thingvellir. With a convicted outlaw among them, the provocation could hardly have been greater. The tension was so great, says Ari, that ‘it came so close to a fight that no one could tell how things would work out’.
¹³
It was perhaps at this point that the Heathen leaders learnt that King Olaf was holding hostages, for, as the complexity of the situation became apparent, the tension lessened sufficiently overnight for Gizur and Hjalti to make their way to the Lawrock the following day and deliver speeches to the crowd gathered on the grassy slope below.

It was the prelude to a day of extraordinary and intricate drama. After Gizur and Hjalti had finished saying what they had to say a procession of men, Christian and Heathen, approached the Lawrock, named witnesses, and declared that they would not live under the same set of laws as each other. Political and social chaos beckoned. Some of the Christians asked Hall of Sida to be their Lawspeaker, and to devise a separate law code for them. Hall declined and passed the request on to the assembly’s elected Lawspeaker, Thorgeir Ljosvetningagodi. Hall offered him a sum of money as a fee, presumably the funds provided for the party by its sponsor, King Olaf. In effect, Thorgeir was being asked to set up a separate law code that would have required a separate assembly with its own, Christian, hallowing rituals, so that two communities of faith could carry on separate but parallel lives. Presumably some kind of physical division of the land into separate administrative communities was also envisaged.
¹⁴

Thorgeir was the grandson of a settler from Rogaland, in the west of Norway.
¹⁵
He had three wives, by whom he had fathered nine sons and one daughter. He also had two sons outside marriage, one of whom was known as Finni the Dreamwise, well known for his gift of second sight.
¹⁶
Thorgeir had been the Icelanders’ Lawspeaker for some fifteen years, since 985, and was almost certainly the finest legal mind in the country. He agreed to give the matter his full consideration and made his way back to his booth, as the summer shelters that housed those in attendance at the
althing
were known. Inside, he lay down. Both Ari and the author of
Kristni Saga
tell us, with peculiar precision, that he spread his cloak over his head, and remained in this position for the next twenty-four hours. While he lay thus, tensions flared again. Thorgeir was not a Christian, but to the Heathens this was not in itself enough to ensure a decision in their favour, and they determined to make a major sacrifice to the gods, offering two people from each of the Quarters. The Christians, with Hjalti taking the lead, took the moral high ground by offering to improve on the gesture. In a passage sometimes used to suggest that human sacrifice was in fact a disguised form of capital punishment,
Kristni Saga
reports Hjalti’s words to his fellow believers: