Laura Gormley is an independent researcher who is currently studying for a postgraduate library qualification with Robert Gordon University. Her DPhil in Old Norse and Icelandic Literature from St John’s College, Oxford investigated the representation of land and landownership in Medieval Icelandic texts. She has an article on Njáls saga forthcoming in The Medieval North and Its Afterlife: Essays in Honor of Heather O’Donoghue. Find Laura on Twitter @LAGormley
The geographical reality of Iceland is that of an island in the North Atlantic with inhabited coastal areas (especially in Reykjavík and the rest of the southwest) and an uninhabited interior, the highlands (hálendið), which comprise a mountainous, glacial landscape and which is impassable in the long Icelandic winter. Most of the routes that brave the interior are manageable for only a very short season; the first bus of the year often lays down the track for the rest of the journeys to come. A four-wheel drive is a must for the independent traveller, and yet still most Icelanders wouldn’t recommend that visitors attempt a traverse (there are recognised routes that have been used for centuries). I’ve heard too many horror stories about flipped cars and roadside recoveries. Often the main road around the island, “Route 1” or the hringvegur (ring road), can be tricky enough, with glacial flooding and snow blockages in the winter.
Living on the edge is, one might say, a condition of Icelandic existence. Its centre is relatively unknown and unpredictable, with its shifting glacial and volcanic landscape: but the edge is known, with centuries-old settlements representing stability and security. Iceland exists, Overing and Osborn suggest, as a “socialised margin [which] interacts with and is conditioned by the spatial centrality of wilderness,” or as Hastrup puts it, “Icelandicness seems premised by an acute sense of liminality being the normal state of affairs…”.
As readers of this blog will readily recognise from other contexts, this liminality also challenges what we conceive of as boundaries. To the Norse voyagers who colonised Iceland the sea doubtless represented to them not a hard geographical border but an opening, a possibility, maybe even an invitation. It was perhaps only the Little Ice Age, the country’s bleakest moment, when pack ice advanced to surround the island and disrupt sea currents and therefore the established routes, which would have brought a sense of being hemmed in between the shore and mountain.
And so how was Iceland’s edge settled? As Schmid et al. point out, it’s one of the last places on Earth to be populated, and therefore a relatively recent event, meaning that there is greater potential to learn fascinating details about how people approached and utilised “new” space.
We have potential early references from writers such as Pytheas of Massalia and the Irish monk Dicuil about a strange, Other-worldly place at the edge of the then-known world which could be Iceland, but we can’t be certain that these texts are definitely referencing the country, and many other locations have been posited over the years. Because the native Icelandic settlement narratives come much later, it has been left “to a handful of archaeologists to worry about the settlement of Iceland” (Orri Vésteinnson). Amongst the many things discovered by archaeologists is that the earliest sites are to be found in the southwest of the country where the soil is more fertile, and that then, as now, this was the most populous part of the country. The majority of settlements were made in the 870s CE and “all inhabitable part of the island were most likely occupied by the tenth and eleventh centuries” (Schmid et al.).
These dates can be given with confidence because of tephrochronology, a key method in the dating Iceland’s archaeological sites. Layers of tephra, the deposits of ash emitted in a volcanic eruption, settle on the ground and form a “chronological marker” which can then be dated relatively or alongside dateable evidence of specific eruptions. One particular layer of tephra, the so-called Landnám-tephra, holds special importance. Just above this layer there is evidence of human habitation in early archaeological sites (although in more recent years evidence has been found underneath it in a very small number of sites in the south-west part of the country). This key layer is dated by analysing the tephra record of Greenland’s ice-core samples, whose annual cycle of thaw and re-freeze leave the equivalent of tree rings in the ice-cap. The archaeological data continue to be gathered, analysed and reassessed (such as the key tephra isochrons), and is now able to give us insights not just into the date of initial settlement, but now, excitingly, also on the “tempo, timing and scale” of settlement patterns in Iceland (Schmid et al.).
In the twelfth century the native historical accounts of the settlement emerge. There are two texts of central importance in examination of Iceland’s settlement: Landnámabók (The Book of Land-taking) and Íslendingabók (The Book of the Icelanders). The formerdetails the land claims of all the first settlers. Its first version (for which some have posited multiple authorship) has not survived, but we have five later extant medieval manuscripts of which the Sturlubók and Hauksbók versions are the most consulted. Íslendingabók was written in the early twelfth century by the priest Ari Þorgilsson and recounts important events in the country’s history, such as the foundation of Iceland’s parliament (the Alþingi), the conversion to Christianity and the Norse discovery of Greenland.
Both texts record and organise the detail of the settlement in an orderly fashion: Íslendingabók with its careful, concise chapters, thematically organised; and Landnámabók with its gradual approach to the Icelandic shore, the tentative increase in contact with the new country by the first explorers, and the geographical organisation of the description of the land-take, moving clockwise round the island whilst noting the settlements and the settlers. Both texts also mention how the land was divided into quarters, which formed the organisational basis for the regional assemblies as well as the local law courts. This highlighting of the quartering makes the reimagined new country from its textual beginnings as a controllable and controlled area.
There is another important way in which the settlement of Iceland is represented as an ordered affair. Ari describes that before the Norsemen there were Christian hermits dwelling on the island who left behind “bækr írskar ok bjöllur ok bagla” – Irish books, bells and croziers. Nothing like this has been discovered by archaeologists to date; however, Kristján Ahronson has found carved crosses in caves in south-west Iceland close to the pre-Landnám tephra settlements already mentioned. Whatever the pre-Norse reality of Iceland, it can be seen that Ari clearly understands Lefebvre’s idea that “[i]n space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows.” It’s important for him to establish Iceland as a Christian space right from its beginning, even though Iceland’s official adoption of Christianity at the Alþingi came later in the year 1000 CE.
However, despite these careful, orderly representations at the national level, there is no uniform roll-out of settlement pattern at the level of the individual in Landnámabók. Many of the settlers have their own stories attached to their land-take. The text recounts their different approaches, their different reasons for being there, their different means of making their claims, and their different ways to determine their destiny. These are far from being dry details: some entries in the landnáma are like a miniature saga, with tantalising glimpses of now obscure practices (such as throwing overboard one’s high-seat pillars as one approached the Icelandic shore) or post hoc explanations of how certain placenames came to be, or brief introductions to some of saga literature’s most famous characters, such as Egill Skalla-Grímsson or Auðr the Deep-Minded. These tiny narratives preserve for us family stories and local myths, and the deep imprint of names on the landscape.
To a greater or lesser degree, the famed Icelandic sagas (Íslendingasögur) incorporate details of land-taking in their wider narratives, and although these details can set up key territorial or family disputes which are central to the story, the settlement itself is often not their primary concern. Also, the sagas (probably composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) are in a different vein to Íslendingabók and Landnámabók with regards to genre. Both Íslendingabók and Landnámabók are intended as histories, but saga narrative is something altogether different. Its implacable, matter-of-fact style lacks “any statements, explicit or implicit, of intent” (O’Donoghue). The saga author barely intrudes in the text; again, as O’Donoghue writes, “it remains difficult in a genre in which the highest art is the most convincing impersonation of history, to disentangle traditional truth from novel fiction.” The diagnosis of fictionality in these texts is a challenge; it leaves you constantly wondering what you are reading, and why it was written, and why you feel compelled to seek out the “moral of the story”.
We’ve looked at how the Iceland came to be settled around its edge, but how is the centre of the island represented? In short, there is scant mention. In the Hauksbók manuscript of Landnámabók, it is related that those people who had first come out to the island had taken land from the sea up to the mountains (“næstir fjallana”) and had laid claim to the best parts, and so later arrivals complained that they had taken too much.[1] These mountains, one surmises, are those of the interior, and it’s in this mention of the ‘best parts’ that one can see the hints about the quality of the land of the coastal margin and the inferiority of the inland regions as suitable settlement.
After the initial settlement, the archaeological evidence suggests that there was a century of expansion inwards, a period of experimentation, but then, in many cases, abandonment of these inland settlements which were often at a higher elevation (it’s interesting to note in the sagas there is sporadic mention of derelict farmsteads and sheep pens). There seems to have been some early use of the interior for seasonal grazing, and this still happens to this day; Laufskálarétt, the September round up of horses which have been grazed in the mountains of the north-west, is perhaps the most famous example. Icelanders travel from across the country for this much-loved event to watch the riders bringing the horses back from their summer pasture down into Hjaltadalr.
According to Ari, Iceland was “albyggt” – fully settled – within the space of sixty years. Fully settled must surely mean that, after a while, people stopped coming to the island. Because of the unsettled interior, the word cannot have implied that the entire country was farmed and habited to its fullest extent. It seems as though albyggt might be a convenient short-hand term which implied that those parts of Iceland which could be settled were taken, without the author having to engage with the question of numbers or the large, intractable space with its hazards at the centre of the country. The term lends a notion of completeness that any mention of the uninhabitable area might destabilise.
Orri Vésteinsson suggests another interpretation: albyggt only has to mean that all the land had been claimed, not that all the land was already utilised by 930. In fact, it is natural to expect the full utilisation of the land to have been a long process of exploration and making mistakes; woods had to be cleared, the land worked and knowledge of the area established in order to make the most of available resources. Perhaps, then, Ari was envisaging that all the people who moved to Iceland had done so within sixty years of the initial settlement and that in geographical terms, the settlement was still happening beyond that point as the inhabitants moved inland in search of new resources. His concept of albyggt might have been a purely demographic one.
Therefore, the impossibility of successfully settling the centre renders it textually absent to these medieval authors; in their histories, the interior is simply not represented, and not factored in. The country is settled and complete, ordered and quartered, without reference to its highlands. Iceland’s edge is missing nothing.
[1] Landnámabók, p. 337 and p. 339 (H).
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ari Þorgilsson, Íslendingabók, ed. Halldór Hermannsson, Islandica 20. Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 1930.
Ari Þorgilsson, Íslendingabók Ara Fróða A.M. 113a and 113b, fol., introduction Jóhannesson. Reykjavík: University of Iceland, 1956.
Jakob Benediktsson, ed., Landnámabók, Íslenzk Fornrit 1 (two volumes). Reykjavík: Íslenzka Fornritfélag, 1968.
Hermann Pálsson and P. Edwards, The Book of Settlements. Landnámabók. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1972.
K. Ahronson, Into the Ocean: Vikings, Irish, and Environmental Change in Iceland and the North. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015.
K. Hastrup, A Place Apart: An Anthropological Study of the Icelandic World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
H. O’Donoghue, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
G.R. Overing and M. Osborn, Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
M. Schmid, A.J. Dugmore, Orri Vésteinsson and A.J. Newton, “Tephra Isochrons and chronologies of colonisation”, Quaternary Geochronology 40, (2016), 56-66.
Orri Vésteinsson, “Patterns of Settlement in Iceland: A Study in Pre-history”, Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research 25 (London, 1998), 1-29.
We welcome article submissions on a rolling basis. If you would like to contribute an article to The Edge, please contact joanna.rodgers@uhi.ac.uk
Find out more about The Edge programme – featuring seminars, images, articles & a conference on our website.
Enchantment and Wonder 