The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (12 page)

“Iceland got the chancers, the losers,” Agnar told me. “Going to Iceland was no package tour. It was not easy to go to a place with no infrastructure and where you had to start from scratch. The idea that they were chieftains who were miffed—that idea is wrong. There may have been some chieftains, but they were chieftains who were in trouble.”

With her to Iceland came many high-born men who had been captured by the Vikings. One of them was named Vifil. He had been taken captive in the Western Isles and was a so-called bondsman until Unn released him. When Unn gave farm sites to her ship’s crew, Vifil asked why she didn’t set him up with a farm like the other men. Unn answered that it didn’t make any difference. He would be thought a man of quality wherever he lived. Still, she gave him Vifil’s Dale.

—
The Saga of Eirik the Red

T
HE DALES, UNN THE DEEP-MINDED’S LAND-CLAIM IN
Iceland, looks today much like the Hebridean bay where the chessmen were found and where I wanted to poke into those oddly shaped hills: open moorlands, high, rounded hills, rivers tumbling to a fjord with a sandy shore. Only on some days can you see a distant ice cap. Hvamm, the farm Unn kept for herself, means “Grassy Hollow,” and grass is the dominant theme—a windswept grass like the
machair,
thin and barely holding back the sand, interwoven with heather and blueberry shrub, sandwort and sedges, cinquefoil and creeping willow. Nearby are places with Icelandic names that mean “hot springs,” “grain fields,” “wooded mountain above the dark river,” and “wooded mountain above the river through the hay meadows” (these last two names derive from Gaelic), as well as “salmon river,” “fish lakes,” and “ptarmigan hill”; “sheep hill,” “horse lake,” and “swine valley”—which gives you some idea of what Unn and her people had on their minds. They were Vikings, but first of all they were farmers. In their boats they brought not only bedsteads, swords, and treasure chests, but sheep, cows, horses, goats, pigs, hens, geese, dogs, cats, mice, lice, fleas, beetles, and seeds of barley and flax. Archaeologists have found signs of all these in the detritus of a Viking Age house.

They have also learned, by counting and comparing the various pollen grains found in different depths of bog soil, how these Viking farmers transformed the landscape, trying to turn a wilderness into the dairy farms of home. The sagas hint at this transformation. Ingimund the Old, for instance, spent the first winter in a place he named “Willow Valley,” but decided it was “a poor exchange for Norway.” Next summer he packed the family up and set off on horseback. Just as they reached a rushing glacial river, his wife suggested they make a stop. “I’m not feeling well,” she said, in classic saga understatement, and promptly gave birth to a girl. Ingimund named the spot after his new daughter. Exploring the river valley, he saw “fine land with good grass and woods. It was lovely to behold.” He built his house on the edge of Smithy Lake—though deficient in many things, Iceland did, at least, have bog iron, lumps of ore found in stream banks and turf bogs and raked up from lake bottoms that could be worked into scythes and swords, given sufficient wood to make charcoal. Says the saga, “The richness of the land in those days can be seen from this: The sheep could fend for themselves outside all year. Also, some of Ingimund's pigs disappeared and were not found until the following fall. By then there were a hundred of them.”

That poignant comment, “The richness of the land
in those days”
tells us that the saga author, putting pen to parchment in the 1200s, knew things had changed in the three hundred years since Ingimund’s day. The sheep had eaten the willows’ buds and twigs, the pigs had rooted them up, and what the animals had spared fed the fires of the smithy and the family hearth. By the 1200s, Icelanders were burning sheep dung to cook, had given up on pigs as well as goats and geese, and spent much of the summer making hay, for the sheep could no longer feed themselves. The woods had not grown back. The bare hills collapsed in frequent landslides. The rushing rivers and ceaseless wind worried at the edges of the fields, erosion eating what the lambs had left.

The
Landnámabók
, literally the “Book of Land-Taking” but commonly called
The Book of Settlements,
is a compendium of fact and fancy about the first settlers of Iceland. Written at about the same time as the sagas, it reads like a series of saga abstracts linked by a thread of nostalgia for the richness of the land, and particularly for the long-lost woods. The first people to spend a winter in Iceland, it says, were a Swede and his clair-voyant mother, who had guided their ship there by second sight. “In those days,” we read, the island “was wooded all the way from the mountains right down to the sea.” Of a site claimed by an Irishman, the book says: “At that time there was such a great wood there that he was able to build an ocean-going ship from the timber.” Botanists Throstur Eysteinsson and Sigurdur Blondal have determined that birch and rowan trees tall enough to make ship strakes could have grown in the lowlands before grazing animals were introduced. (Though there was never a tree in Iceland that would serve as the keelson of the Sea Stallion, the 98-foot-long dragonship retrieved from the Skuldelev harbor floor: That one vital part, which supported the mast, required a straight oak trunk almost 60 feet long.)

Once the virgin forests were cut down, the shoots grew scrubby and crooked for two reasons. One was the constant pruning by sheep. The second, in the case of the downy birch, was genetic introgression with dwarf arctic birch, which seldom grows taller than 20 inches high and is more resistant to grazing. The crossing is natural, but “in the absence of sheep,” the botanists say, “hybrids would have been at a disadvantage at lower elevations and been shaded out by taller trees.”

The settlers considered land covered with brushwood “useless for farming.” In one saga, a wealthy Norwegian who bought a large tract of it is complimented for his industry: He “had lots of clearings made in the woods, where he started farming.” The standard way to claim a plot of land, according to
The Book of Settlements,
was to “carry fire around it.” That may mean the claimant rode around his proposed acres on horseback with a flaming torch in his hand. More likely it means exactly what the wealthy Norwegian did to clear his land of brush: He burned it. Archaeologists have found a layer of charcoal under two-thirds of the earliest Viking houses.

But Iceland was not like Norway, where a farmer fought constantly, with fire and axe, to keep the dark, encroaching forest from reclaiming his fields. Iceland’s ecology was much more fragile. With the trees gone, the snow did not stick. Without this insulating blanket, the low-growing succulent herbs did not last the winter, leaving only tough, stemmy, cold-hardy species. The soil froze and thawed, bucked and heaved, and re-formed itself into the hummocks now so common in Icelandic fields that city-folk claim to be able to spot a farmer by the lurching, awkward way he walks down the street. In windy weather, sheep tuck themselves into the lee of these hummocks and munch on whatever grass they can reach without moving. Once they eat a patch down to bare dirt, the wind takes over, peeling the surrounding sod and whisking away the soil until the hummock is a pedestal. Unless someone intervenes—removing the sheep, creating a windbreak—the pasture turns to desert. Scientists estimate the wind has stripped off a quarter of Iceland’s topsoil since the settlement. More than half of the landscape that was woods and grasslands a thousand years ago is now gravel and sand—and modern Icelanders are hard at work planting trees and experimenting with various grasses and legumes, like Alaskan lupines, to reclaim the wasteland.

Not all the blame for Iceland’s “landscape of ruins” and her “nakedness,” as scientists have named it, should land in the Viking farmers’ laps. Climate change also played a large part. The Little Ice Age hit Iceland in the 1200s, dropping the summer highs just enough to hurt the haymaking and end the growing of grain, while the sea ice, creeping near in springtime—not autumn—put the new lambs at risk. The length of time the sheep could graze their summer meadows in the highlands grew shorter; overgraze by a week, and each year’s grazing would be noticeably poorer until the pasture all but disappeared.

But the choices the first settlers made, of where to live and how to make a living, both in Iceland and, later, in Greenland, “had resonance for good or ill throughout all the subsequent history of political, economic, and environmental interactions in both islands,” write archaeologists Tom McGovern, Orri Vesteinsson, and Christian Keller. “Over the succeeding 1100 years, these interactions proved intense and often disastrous.”

A description of those choices and interactions can be found in
Egil’s Saga.
Egil’s father, Skallagrim (“Bald Grim”), was miffed, adventurous, and fleeing for his life—all three. He brought two shiploads of men and all the trappings of aristocratic Norway to a fjord in western Iceland, where he found wide marshlands and thick woods, with good fishing and seal hunting. He claimed the land “from the mountains to the sea.” His land-claim later sufficed for four chieftains—and three hundred individual farms.

Like Unn the Deep-Minded, Skallagrim shared his land with the people who had followed him to Iceland, and the saga is clear that he didn’t divvy it up haphazardly. He put a man at Swan Ness to collect driftwood and gulls’ eggs, to fish, and to hunt swans and seals. At Grain Fields he sowed barley and set a man there to farm. Another was sent offshore to Whale Islands. Two men he established beside two salmon rivers. Finally, he set up a sheep farm in the highlands, having noticed the sheep that had strayed into the mountains were fatter than the ones kept close to home. He parked himself, with his cows and pigs, beneath a fortresslike hill in a little bay that guarded the entrance to the fjord; by the water he set up his smithy. He placed his closest friend on the opposite shore, so they could control both banks. He divided what was left of his land-claim among his seven followers and their families, with enough remaining to grant his father-in-law a sizable plot when he showed up a year or two later.

Orri Vesteinsson believes the saga’s author got it right when he says, “Skallagrim’s farm stood on many feet.” The grandson of Ludvik Kristjansson—whose masterly compilation of lore, common sense, and natural history of the sea and all its creatures,
Sjávarhættir,
in five oversized volumes, is renowned throughout Iceland—Orri travels easily between his personalities as historian and archaeologist. He is as confident of his argument when he dissects a saga scene as when he describes Sveigakot, the barren little highland farm he has been excavating for seven years. On both counts, he takes delight in turning accepted theory on its head.

“The saga was written by somebody with a keen academic understanding of these processes, somebody who has put a lot of thought into what is necessary when you’re starting a new colony,” he told me. “And he was closer to these events than we are. He could imagine them better than we can. But it’s clearly a model. It betrays its academic origins. It’s too neat a picture. Reality is never like that.”

Other sagas present a competing model of how Iceland was settled, one that was preferred, said Orri, by the Icelanders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “the single settler who claims a reasonable bit of land. This was
the independent farmer,
the man who seeks political freedom as much as economic prosperity. It’s still a part of the Icelandic psyche, this idea that our origins are as yeoman farmers.” Orri added, “That model comes with all sorts of baggage about democracy. I don’t believe in it.”

Orri’s own model takes the Skallagrim story and gives it a cynical twist. A farm that stands on many feet needs many hands to keep things running. But Iceland was a hard sell. There were precious few ship-sized trees, and hardly many more tall enough for house timbers. Grain was not easy to grow; the rice, sugarcane, dates, lemons, and strawberries the Muslims at this time were introducing into Spain were unthinkable. Cows had to be kept indoors, some years, into June. Nor were there reindeer or bears or other woodland creatures to provide meat and skins and salable furs. There was no silver and no wine, two luxuries that drew Norse settlers east and south. The reports that came home to Norway were mixed. One of the earliest explorers, Raven-Floki, landed beside a fjord that was “teeming with fish,” the saga says, but his people “got so caught up with the fishing that they forgot to make hay, so their livestock starved to death the following winter.”

Unn the Deep-Minded and Skallagrim went to Iceland because they had nowhere else to go, having fallen afoul of the new king of Norway, and many of the later settlers named in the sagas were killers and troublemakers kicked out of the old country. Once the word got out that the new land was, as Ingimund the Old put it, “a poor exchange for Norway,” peaceful farmfolk were not lining up at the Trondheim docks. “How do you get people to come?” Orri asked. “The bulk of the population was either enticed, duped, or
bought.

“One of the archaeological results we have is that the settlement occurred extremely rapidly,” he said, hurrying to back up his intentionally offensive statement. “The shittiest places were occupied just as soon as the best—even places at high altitude, with limited capacity, like Sveigakot up north, a place nobody in his right mind would have chosen to live in after coming a thousand miles. Even compared to the most horrible places in Norway, it’s desperate.”

Sveigakot today is a thousand acres of desert—just sand and stones and a marbling of moss, not a tree on the horizon—900 feet above sea level, more than 30 miles from the sea. The foundation stones of the Viking Age houses are barely covered with soil. Yet the site was occupied for over 200 years. Close by is a chieftain’s farm comprised of almost 4,000 acres, with a 2,000-square-foot feasting hall, the biggest ever found in Iceland, its exterior decorated with the horned skulls of cattle knocked on the head to serve up at the feast. Nor was beef the only thing on the menu, as the archaeologists learned by sifting through the garbage heap. The point of holding feasts, Orri and his colleagues write, was “to cement bonds of friendship and dependence and to impress competitors.” A feast that included codfish, eggs, milk and cheese, lamb, and beer was a clear declaration that “this farm stands on many feet.”