The Medieval Icelanders

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The island had no people in it. When the first boats came up over the southern horizon, sometime around the year 870, there was no one on the black beaches to meet them — only, by the oldest account, a few Irish hermits who had rowed out ahead of the heathen and who now withdrew rather than live among them. Everywhere else the Norse went in their age of sailing they came as a second people, into lands already owned and farmed and prayed over. Here alone they wrote on a clean page. What they made of that emptiness — a society with no king, and then a library of nearly everything the North would remember of its gods — is the strangest of all the Viking-age stories, and the one with the longest reach.

The taking of the land

The medieval Icelanders were the descendants of the people who carried out the landnám, the “land-taking,” in the two generations after about 870. They came chiefly from western Norway, and chiefly, the later tradition says, to escape the consolidating power of King Harald Fairhair, who was breaking the old independence of the regional chieftains. But they did not come only from Norway. A great part of the founding stock had passed through the Norse colonies scattered across the British Isles — Ireland, the Scottish mainland, the Hebrides, Orkney, the Isle of Man — and carried Gaelic blood and Gaelic slaves with them. The genetic record has since confirmed what the sagas only hint at: a large share of the island’s female ancestry traces to Britain and Ireland, while the male line runs back overwhelmingly to Scandinavia. The first Icelanders were a mixed people from the start, Norse in speech and law, Celtic in much of their descent.

Tradition gives the honor of first settler to Ingólfr Arnarson, a Norwegian who, the Íslendingabók records, came to stay around 874 and raised his farm at a smoking bay he named Reykjavík, the “bay of smokes,” after its steam. The story is too tidy to be literal history, and modern scholars treat the founder-tale with caution; archaeology suggests people were already trickling in slightly earlier. But the broad shape holds. Within sixty years the habitable rim of the island was claimed, farm by farm, fjord by fjord — a coastline of grass and a green interior that the settlers soon stripped of its low birch woods, leaving the treeless country travelers know today. By about 930 the land was, in the old phrase, albyggt: fully settled.

What these scattered farmers did next had no precedent. They did not send for a king. Around 930 they founded, instead, a single assembly for the whole island — the Althing, which met for two weeks each summer on a plain of black lava fissures in the southwest, at the place now called Thingvellir, the “assembly fields.” There, from a rock outcrop called the Lögberg, the Law Rock, the law was recited aloud. Power in this commonwealth ran through some three dozen chieftains — the goðar, of whom there were eventually thirty-nine — who held not territories but followings: a free farmer attached himself to a chieftain and could, in principle, transfer his allegiance to another. The single salaried officer of the whole republic was the lawspeaker, the lögsögumaðr, elected for three-year terms, whose duty was to know the law and to recite a third of it from the Law Rock each year, before there was any way to write it down.

A folio of Möðruvallabók (c. 1330–1370), the largest surviving collection of the family sagas. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

This was the thing that astonished later ages, and that astonishes still. The Icelandic Free State — the Commonwealth — had a legislature, a court system, and a spoken constitution, and it had no executive whatever. No king, no army, no sheriff, no one whose office was to carry out the verdicts the courts reached. A man who won his lawsuit had to enforce the judgment himself, with his kin and his chieftain behind him. The system worked, after a fashion, for more than three centuries, held together by the law, by the assembly, and by the dense web of feud and settlement that the law existed to channel. Around the year 1000 the same assembly did something rarer still: facing a split between heathen and Christian factions that threatened to break the country in two, it referred the question to the lawspeaker Thorgeir, a heathen, who lay a day and a night under his cloak and then rose and declared that all should take the new faith, that the old gods might be honored quietly in private, and that the island would have one law because a people divided in law could not be one people. The conversion of Iceland was, by this account, a legislative act.

The keepers of the myth

It is what these farmers did with parchment that sets them apart from every other people of the medieval North. The Norse of Scandinavia raised their carved stones and sailed their long ships and then, when they took the cross, largely let the old stories go. The Icelanders wrote them down.

They wrote, first, their own history. Ari Þorgilsson, called the Wise, composed in the early twelfth century the Íslendingabók, the “Book of Icelanders,” a short sober chronicle of the settlement and the conversion and the lawspeakers — the foundation of all Icelandic history. Someone, or several someones, compiled the Landnámabók, the “Book of Settlements,” an extraordinary genealogical roll that names some four hundred of the original settlers, their farms, and their descendants — a whole society accounting for where it came from. No other people of early medieval Europe kept so exact a memory of its own origins.

Then they wrote the sagas. The Íslendingasögur, the sagas of the Icelanders, set down mostly across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are long prose narratives of the settlement generations and the feuds that ran among the founding families — Njáll and his sons burned in their house, the outlaw Grettir hunted across the moors, the poet-warrior Egill, the doomed loves of the Laxdæla people. They are unlike anything else medieval Europe produced. Where the literature of the Christian South dealt in saints and miracles and chivalry, the sagas are sober, spare, and worldly, told in a flat reportorial voice that withholds judgment and almost never enters a character’s head, and that achieves its terrible effects precisely by understatement. A man rides home knowing he will be killed and remarks on the weather. The form is anonymous — the recorders, as one finds again and again, are largely unknown — and it reads, at this distance, less like art than like memory grown precise.

And they preserved the gods. This is the debt that outweighs all the others. Almost everything later ages know in any detail of Odin and Thor, of the world-tree and the war of the divine families and the burning of the worlds, survives because the Icelanders chose to record it — and chose to, remarkably, two centuries and more after they had become Christian. Two books carry the weight. The first is the collection now called the Poetic Edda, a gathering of old mythological and heroic poems — the seeress’s prophecy of the world’s making and ending, the wisdom-verses put in Odin’s mouth, the lays of gods and of the hero Sigurd — preserved chiefly in a single small vellum codex, the Codex Regius, written around 1270 by a hand now nameless. Many of the poems in it are far older than the manuscript; parts reach back, on the evidence of their language and meter, to the heathen tenth century, carried across the gap by memory and by the discipline of verse.

Snorri Sturluson, drawn by Christian Krohg for an 1899 edition of Heimskringla. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The second book has an author, and he is the central figure in the whole story of the saving of the myth. Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) was a chieftain of the greatest family of his age, twice lawspeaker of the Althing, for a time the richest and most powerful man in Iceland, and a writer of genius. Around 1220 he composed the Prose Edda, ostensibly a handbook to teach young poets the difficult art of the old court verse — the skaldic poetry, knotted with allusive compound metaphors called kennings that no one could decode without knowing the myths behind them. To explain the poetry, Snorri had to set out the mythology in order: the making of the world from the body of a giant, the gods and their halls, the binding of the wolf, the death of the bright god, the doom of the powers. His Gylfaginning, the “tricking of Gylfi,” is the single most complete and orderly account of Norse cosmology that exists, and without it the scattered hints of the poems would be very nearly unreadable. Snorri also wrote the Heimskringla, the great history of the kings of Norway, whose opening pages give the fullest single portrait of Odin as a master of magic. The keeper of the myth was no priest of the old faith. He was a Christian scholar reconstructing, with antiquarian care, a religion his ancestors had abandoned ten generations before.

That source-distance is the unavoidable condition of all Norse mythology, and it must be held steadily in view. The poems and the Prose Edda alike come to us through Christian Icelanders writing long after the conversion, and the material is shaped by that passage. Snorri’s own prologue derives the gods from refugees of Troy and presents them as deified human kings — a learned medieval gloss, not a heathen teaching. Where the old poems describe a wounded, self-given god hanging nine nights on the windy tree, readers from the first have heard a resonance with the cross, and scholars still divide over how much of the world’s ending in Völuspá is ancient and how much is colored by Christian apocalyptic. None of this makes the record false. It makes it a record kept by one age of the faith of an earlier one — which is what nearly all surviving testimony to a vanished religion must be.

Within the frame those texts preserve, the world they describe is whole and grave and doomed. The great ash Yggdrasil holds the worlds in its branches and roots; beneath one root, at the well of fate, the Norns carve the lives of gods and men. Odin gives an eye for wisdom and hangs himself on the tree to win the runes; Thor guards the middle world against the giants with his hammer; the gods are not eternal but mortal, fated to fall at the last battle when the wolf breaks loose and the serpent rises from the sea and the world burns and sinks, to rise once more, green, from the water. That this vision can be entered at all — that it has shape, names, an order, an ending — is the achievement of a few thousand farmers and chieftains on a cold island, working in ink against the loss that took almost everything the rest of the Norse world had known.

The long centuries and the saving of the books

The Commonwealth did not last. Across the thirteenth century the old balance of many chieftains collapsed into the hands of a few great families — Snorri’s own among them — who fought for the whole island in a bloody generation the Icelanders remember as the Sturlung Age. Snorri, drawn into the rivalry and into the schemes of the Norwegian crown, was killed in the cellar of his estate at Reykholt on 23 September 1241, by men acting in the king’s interest; his reported last words, Eigi skal höggva — “do not strike” — are among the most quoted in the language. The feuds exhausted the country. In 1262, and over the two years following, the chieftains swore allegiance to King Hákon of Norway under the agreement called the Gamli sáttmáli, the Old Covenant. The republic without a king had lasted some three hundred and thirty years, and now it had one.

What followed was long and hard. Norwegian rule gave way, by inheritance of crowns, to Danish; the island grew poor and remote, its people thinned by plague, famine, and, in 1783, by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of recorded history, the Laki fires, whose poison killed much of the livestock and a fifth of the people. Through all of it the manuscripts survived in the worst conditions imaginable for parchment — in damp turf farmhouses, passed down, copied, cut up to patch clothes and bind other books, read by firelight in a country that had almost nothing else. That so much came through at all is a kind of accident of poverty: too poor to throw the old books away, the Icelanders kept them.

Þingvellir, the assembly plain of the Commonwealth, in a painting by Gunnar Gestsson (1970). Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the seventeenth century the collecting began. Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson found the small worn codex of the Poetic Edda in 1643 and, recognizing it, sent it to the king of Denmark — which is why it bears, to this day, the name Codex Regius, the King’s Book. The greatest of the gatherers was Árni Magnússon (1663–1730), an Icelander who became a professor at Copenhagen and spent his life combing the farms of his homeland for every scrap of vellum he could find, assembling the largest collection of Old Norse manuscripts in the world. In the great Copenhagen fire of 1728 his house burned; with friends he saved most of the manuscripts, though many of his printed books were lost, and the disaster is said to have hastened his death two years later. He left the collection to the university, and it became the Arnamagnaean collection, the chief treasury of medieval Iceland’s written memory.

The books came home in the end. After Iceland regained its independence — home rule, then a sovereign state in union with Denmark, then a full republic declared at Thingvellir itself in 1944 — the new nation asked for its manuscripts back, and Denmark, in an act with few parallels, agreed. On 21 April 1971 the Codex Regius and the great Flateyjarbók were carried by ship, under naval escort, across the cold water to Reykjavík, where crowds met them at the harbor. They are kept now in the institute that bears Árni Magnússon’s name.

A historiated initial in Flateyjarbók (late 14th century), showing the boy Harald Fairhair. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The reach of what those farmers preserved is hard to overstate. Nearly every later telling of Norse myth — the operas, the children’s books, the comic-book Thor, the fantasy worlds whose dwarves and elves and doomed gods all run back through a single line to Iceland, the modern Heathen and Ásatrú revival that takes the old poems as scripture — depends on the two Eddas and on what the saga-writers set down. Some of that inheritance has been ugly: nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial movements seized on Germanic antiquity for a mythology of blood, a misappropriation that reached its nadir under the Third Reich and that lingers in fringe extremism still, to the dismay of most who love the material; the inclusive currents of modern Heathenry have worked, by formal declaration and otherwise, to refuse it. But the source itself was never that. It was a small, mixed, mostly poor people, Norse and Gaelic, governed for three centuries by law and not by a crown, who looked back at a faith their grandfathers’ grandfathers had left, and decided it was worth the cost of the parchment to remember. The gods of the North are mortal; in the old poems they die. What kept them from dying altogether was the ink of the Norse at the edge of the world.

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