Viking Age Iceland

by Jesse L. Byock

Overview

The popular image of the Viking Age is of warlords and marauding bands pillaging their way along the shores of Northern Europe. In this fascinating history, Jesse Byock shows that Norse society in Iceland was actually an independent one-almost a republican Free State, without warlords or kings. Combining history with anthropology and archaeology, this remarkable study serves as a valuable companion to the Icelandic sagas, exploring all aspects of Viking Age life: feasting, farming, the power of chieftains and the church, marriage, and the role of women. With masterful interpretations of the blood feuds and the sagas, Byock reveals how the law courts favored compromise over violence, and how the society grappled with proto-democratic tendencies. A work with broad social and historical implications for our modern institutions, Byock's history will alter long-held perceptions of the Viking Age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140291155
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/01/2001
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	506,145
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.82(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jesse Byock is a professor of Icelandic and Old Norse studies at UCLA. He is the translator of The Saga of the Volsungs and The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki for Penguin Classics.

Read an Excerpt

The Family and Sturlunga Sagas: Medieval Narratives and Modern Nationalism

Each society’s social drama could be expected to have its own ‘style’, too, its aesthetic of conflict and redress, and one might also expect that the principal actors would give verbal or behavioural expression to the values composing or embellishing that style.

Victor E. Turner, An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga

The Sagas differ from all other ‘heroic’ literatures in the larger proportion that they give to the meanness of reality.

W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages

The family sagas, dealing with the tenth and early eleventh centuries, and Sturlunga sagas, covering the years from approximately 1120 and 1246, are the most important, as well as the most extensive, source for a study of social and economic forces in medieval Iceland. These two related groups of vernacular prose narratives are rich mines of information about the normative codes of Iceland’s medieval community.

The Family Sagas

The family sagas are called in modern Icelandic Islendingasogur, ‘the sagas of the Icelanders’. They have no close parallels in other medieval European narratives, which are mostly in verse and are often of a more epic character than the sagas. Some family sagas tell us about the settlement of Iceland, but most of them concentrate on the period from the mid tenth to the early eleventh century. In a crisp and usually straightforward manner they describe the dealing between farmers and chieftains from all parts of the country and among families from diverse elements of the society. They explore the potential for an individual’s success or failure in the insular world of the Old Icelandic Free State.

Whereas the Sturlunga sagas are mostly about individuals engaging in the power struggles of an emerging overclass and give almost no information about the personal lives of ordinary farmers and local leaders, the family sagas tend to concentrate on precisely these concerns. With regularity the stories focus on private matters and offer insights into personal problems of families and the health, good of ill, of marriages. The family sagas often exaggerate situations of crisis. They deal less with extended kin groups, as the name ‘family sagas’ might imply, than with regional disputes in Iceland. Similar actions involving different characters are repeated in different locales. With constantly changing detail, the literature present potential issues and the responses that individuals in the society needed to make to them if they were to succeed. Among the matters stressed were methods of reacting to overly ambitious or otherwise dangerous characters, precedents for various legal positions and modes of action, successful interventions by advocates, different means of settlement, and the principles underlying the establishment and maintenance of ties of reciprocity.

In the oral saga, as elsewhere in oral tales, one may assume that adherence to strict fact was never an issue. Nor was the saga-teller required to memorize a fixed text; a general outline of a story that was perhaps of historical origin was sufficient. The medieval audience expected the narrator of a family saga to observe certain strictures. Most importantly, the saga had to be credible, that is, the story had to be portrayed as possible, plausible, and therefore useful within the context of Iceland’s particular rules of social order and feud. The sagas served as a literature of social instruction.

In an earlier book, Feud in the Icelandic Saga, I suggest that feud served as a cohesive and stabilizing force in Old Icelandic society. Because the rules of feuding, as they developed in Iceland, regulated conflict and limited breakdowns of order, violence was kept within acceptable bounds throughout most of the history of the Free State. The ways in which feud operated provided a structure for the sagas. In examining the question of the oral saga, I found probable the existence of a pre-literate stage of well-developed saga-telling employing a compositional technique that became the foundation for the written saga. This simple, easily adaptable technique was based on the use of active narrative particles that occur in no particular order and fall into three categories: conflict, advocacy, or brokerage and resolution. Guided by the parameters of socially recognized conduct, the storyteller or storywriter arranges these action particles in various orders and with different details. By using the particles he (or she) translates social forms into narrative forms. In anthropological terms the particles reflect the phases of Icelandic feud. These discrete units of action, the hallmark of the saga style, were a convenient means for an oral or a literature teller to advance the narration of a complex tale.

Working within a tradition of known characters, events and geography, the saga-teller chose his own emphasis. He (or she) was free to decide what details and known events to include and what new actions to introduce. These choices not only made for variety in the small clusters of actions that linked together to form chains of saga events, but also served to distinguish one saga from another. Although the medieval audience probably knew in advance the outcome of a particular dispute, the essence of a tale could be put forward differently each time. This economical and effective technique of forming narrative prose applied to both oral and written saga composition. Freedom from reliance on a fixed, memorized text allowed individual authors to incorporate new elements, such as Christian themes and changing ethical judgements.

Thirty or more major family sagas are extant. These texts vary markedly in length: some, like Hrafnkels saga, are approximately twenty pages in modern volumes; others, such as Njals saga and Laxdoela saga, fill 300 or more pages. The family sagas are preserved in a wide variety of manuscripts, none of which is an original text definitely attributed to a specific author, despite the educated guesses of scholars. The oldest surviving examples of saga writing are fragments; the earliest are usually dated to the mid thirteenth century, although it is possible that some fragments pre-date 1200. Among the presumed oldest fragments are sections from Eyrbyggja saga, Heidarviga saga, Laxdoela saga, and Egils saga. These, like later copies of entire sagas, give no information as to when the earliest versions of the texts were compose; thus dating the sagas has always been a difficult task and scholarly conclusions are open to question. Decision on the age of the family sagas have been influenced by different theories of saga origins, a point underscored by Hallvard Mageroy: ‘A chief argument for placing the production of the family sagas in the thirteenth century us that only by this means can saga literature be seen as a natural branch of European literature in the High Middle Ages.’

Copies of complete family sagas are preserved in vellum books dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For example, the fourteenth century compilation of Modruvallabok is the chief source for many of the eleven sagas it contains. Many other sagas are preserved in paper manuscripts from the sixteenth century and later. In the medieval period there were many more family sagas than have survived. Landnamabok, for example, names several that are now lost. Except for Droplaugarsona saga, which notes at the end that a certain Thorvald, descended from one of the main characters, ‘told this saga’, all the family sagas are anonymous.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Viking Age Iceland"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Jesse L. Byock.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Preface
Note on Names, Spelling and Pronunciation
Introduction

1. An Immigrant Society
Language and the Term 'Viking'
Leadership
Mord the Fiddle: A Leader and the Law
The Sagas: An Ethnography of Medieval Iceland

2. Resources and Subsistence: Life on a Northern Island
Turf Housing

3. Curdled Milk and Calamities: An Inward-Looking Farming Society
Provisions, Subsistence Strategies, and Population
Bad Year Economics: Difficulties of Life in the North Atlantic

4. A Devolving and Evolving Social Order
Ranking, Hierarchy and Wealth
Complex Culture and Simple Economy
Privatization of Power in the Tenth Century
A Proto-democratic Community?
Icelandic Feud: Conflict Management

5. The Founding of a New Society and the Historical Sources
The Effect of Emigrating from Europe
Land-taking and Establishing Order
Dating the Settlement: Volcanic Ash Layers
Closing the Frontier and Establishing Governing Principles
Written Sources: The Book of Settlements and The Book of the Icelanders

6. Limitations on a Chieftain's Ambitions, and Strategies of Feud and Law: Eyrbyggia saga
Arnkel's Quest for Wealth and Power
Ulfar's Land Shifts to Arnkel
Thorolf's Land Shifts to Snorri Godi
Ulfar Claims Orlyg's Land
Ulfar's Demise
The End of Arnkel's Ambitions

7. Chieftain-Thingmen Relationships and Advocacy
The Nature of the Godord
Advocacy
Arbitration and Legalistic Feuding
The Flexibility of the God-Thingman Relationship
The Social Effects of Concubinage
Distinctions of Rank
Hreppar: Communal Units
The Orkneys: A Comparison
Freedmen

8. The Family and Sturlunga Sagas: Medieval Narratives and Modern Nationalism
The Family Sagas
The Sturlunga Compilation
The Sagas as Sources
Modern Nationalism and the Medieval Sagas
Conclusions
The Locations of the Family Sagas

9. The Legislative and Judicial System
Thing: Assemblies
Options

10. Systems of Power: Advocates, Friendship, and Family Networks
Advocacy
The Role of Kinship
A Balancing Act
Friendship (Vinfengi and Vinatta)
Women and Choices of Violence and Compromise:
Vengeance and Feud: Goading in Laxdaela saga
A Goading Woman from Sturlunga saga
Restraint Within a Major Chieftain's Household in the Sturlung Age

11. Aspects of Blood Feud
Territory
Marriage and Confused Loyalties
Some Conclusions

12. Feud and Vendetta in a 'Great Village' Community
The Language of Feud
Norms of Restraint
Bluffing and Violence
Outlawry

13. Friendship, Blood Feud, and Power: The Saga of the People of Weapon's Fjord
Inheriting a Foreigner's Goods
Brodd-Helgi's Revenge Against Thorleif
Struggle to Claim a Dowry
Skirmishes over a Woodland
Seeking a Thingman's Allegiance
Brodd-Helgi Breaks Vinfengi
Geitir Establishes Vinfengi

14. The Obvious Sources of Wealth
Sources of Income Available Only to Chieftains
Early Taxes
Price-setting
Additional Privileged Sources of Wealth
The Sheep Tax
Sources of Income Available to All Freemen
Trade
Slavery and the Rental of Land and Livestock

15. Lucrative Sourcees of Wealth for Chieftains
The Acquisition of Property in the Family Sagas
Disputed Property in the East Fjords: The Saga of the People of Weapon's Fjord
Disputed Property in the Salmon River Valley: Laxdaela saga
Inheritance Claims in the Sturlunga Sagas
The Struggle to Inherit Helgastadir: The Saga of Gudmund the Worthy
Inheritance Rights to Heinaberg: The Saga of Hvamm-Sturla
Resurgence of the Dispute over Heinaberg: The Saga of the Icelanders

16. A Peaceful Conversion: The Viking Age Church
Pagan Observance
A Viking Age Conversion
Geography and the Church
Early Bishops, Priests and Nuns
The Beginnings of a Formal Church Structure

<17. Grágás: The 'Grey Goose' Law
Manuscripts and Legal Origins
Women and the Law
Marriage and the Church

18. Bishops and Secular Authority: The Later Church
Bishops
The Tithe and Church Farmsteads
Bishops and Priests in the Later Free State
The Church's Struggle for Power in the Later Free State
Priests
Monasteries

19. Big Chieftains, Big Farmers and their Sagas at the End of the Free State
Big Farmers and the Family Sagas
Advantages Enjoyed by the Stórbaendr
The Saga of the Icelanders in the Sturlunga Compilation
The Stórgodar, Not Quite Rulers
Iceland's Jarl
1262-4: The Covenant with Norway's King and the End of the Free State

Appendix 1: The Law-speakers
Appendix 2: Bishops During the Free State
Appendix 3: Turf Construction
Appendix 4: A Woman Who Travelled from Vinland to Rome
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Byock brings several disciplines to his work, crossing the boundaries between history, literature, law, and archaeology. This well-written book takes up a wide variety of subjects, including the social fabric, domestic realities, cultural codes, politics and legal infrastructures, and the mechanisms that defused conflicts among the fiercely independent early Icelanders." —Viking Heritage Magazine

"A vital and original reinterpretation both of the sagas and of the society which created them. Byock's book is an essential guide at once to living conditions and to mentalities."—The London Review of Books

Editorial Reviews

"Byock brings several disciplines to his work, crossing the boundaries between history, literature, law, and archaeology. This well-written book takes up a wide variety of subjects, including the social fabric, domestic realities, cultural codes, politics and legal infrastructures, and the mechanisms that defused conflicts among the fiercely independent early Icelanders." —Viking Heritage Magazine

"A vital and original reinterpretation both of the sagas and of the society which created them. Byock's book is an essential guide at once to living conditions and to mentalities."—The London Review of Books

From the Publisher

The Icelandic Vikings, according to Byock, professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian at UCLA, were far more than fur-clad, flea-bitten, mead-swilling raiders, as legend would have them. In this survey of their surprisingly complex society, spanning the three centuries from the island's settlement to 1260 when the king of Norway took control of it, Byock shows the Icelanders as a strong-willed and legally minded people who managed to carve a living as farmers out of an inhospitable environment while creating a remarkably modern free state governed by powerful laws and notions of honor instead of warlords and kings. He introduces readers to the Icelandic economy, social life (especially blood feuds) and home and family life, including a wonderful illustrated appendix on construction using turf. While this book will appeal to some readers of popular social surveys, in particular The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D, by James Reston Jr., Byock's tone is generally academic and so more similar to that of, say, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, by James Davidson. Byock's approach to his material also threatens an academic dust-up. He defies historiographical convention, but not without good and well-stated reason, by mining the Icelandic sagas for historical truths. Some may consider this approach akin to mining Cheever for truths about the lives of 20th-century suburbanites, but he certainly puts those facts he finds to cogent use. Illus. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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