The Norsemen, or Vikings, stemmed from the Teutons, whose ancestors migrated north through Denmark into Norway and Sweden, a part of the world until then outside European history. The new arrivals took up settlements along the viks, or bays of the rugged coastlines and their populations swelled. These were pagans whose ideas of conscience and sin were in direct variance to Christianity. Drink, women, and song were embraced with the same fervor as war, pillage, and slaughter. Such was the disposition of the “Northmen,” but additionally, these people were creative craftsmen and hard workers. Their structured society was based on a divinely ordained class system, within which prevailed a curious blend of monarchy and democracy. Kings were selected from royal blood; landowners acted as legislators and judges. The laws were strict and harsh punishments helped to keep law and order — a parricide, for example, would be suspended by the heels side by side with a starved wolf similarly hung. Literacy was not universal, but it was highly respected and a rich literature came to be written. A vast collection of sagas has been bequeathed us — narratives written on sheepskin that detail heroic episodes of Norwegian and Icelandic history, accounts considered among the finest of medieval literary achievements.
The art of Viking shipbuilding produced the finest vessels ever to that time. Their slender and flexible boats were capable of withstanding the roughest North Atlantic seas, and at the same time of navigating rivers and shoals. The drawings are of two freight ships, one fifty-three feet in length and the other forty-five feet.
Vikings were polygamous, which only exacerbated the high birth rate. With the rapid growth of settlements, the limited agricultural possibilities of the coastlines were insufficient fully to meet community needs. Hunger eventually became a fact of life in many parts of the regions — or as one historian put it, “the fertility of women … outran the fertility of the soil.” The Vikings were master woodworkers whose talents were brilliantly reflected in the construction of sturdy sea-going vessels. Shipbuilding and accomplished seamanship were essential for the maintenance of intercommunity contact along the vast coastlines, made difficult otherwise by generally high mountains. Those who now found themselves in want, or simply the young and restless, took to their boats to forage for sources of food farther afield.
The hunt for food, coupled with the seemingly insatiable thirst for plunder expanded into a pursuit of slaves, women, and gold. Accounts of Viking invasions of the nearby British Isles and of continental coastal towns are legion, and within a century the scourge of the Norsemen was strongly felt in most coastal parts of northern Europe. The rich monasteries of nearby Britain and Ireland, with their gold chalices and silver plate, offered especially attractive targets for plunder; the depredations wrought by the Viking invaders were horrific.
Around 890 A.D. one Viking expedition sailed to the northernmost reaches of Scandinavia, and rounding Lapland it passed the North Cape at 71°N, the Kola Peninsula, and penetrated the White Sea. One of its stated objectives was “desirous to try how far that country extended north,” while another was to hunt for walrus whose ivory tusks were greatly valued throughout Europe. Heading the expedition was a Norwegian nobleman called Othere and since the North Cape and most of the Kola Peninsula are well above Arctic Circle, to him falls credit for being the first European to explore the Arctic in that part of the globe. Othere found himself not only at the backyard of the Slavs — soon to be overcome by his kin— but at the mouth of what was to become known as the Northeast Passage, or the Northern Sea Route.
Fatalism was as much a part of the Norse character as tenaciousness and daring. Their gods would attend them one way or another, for they were allies and companions in adventure and battle, not paternal guides to behaviour and right conduct. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in the quest for food and plunder these fearless seamen eventually braved the open waters of the Atlantic, westward and to the north, into the unexplored where others had feared to sail — into the “bottomless pit where perpetual darkness reigns.”
Credit for the penetration of the Atlantic’s Arctic regions and for the discovery of the “New World” is popularly given to the Viking chieftain, Erik the Red, of whom much is written. Erik did indeed uncover the New World, but his springboard was the already discovered and populated Iceland, lying in mid-Atlantic at the Arctic Circle. If claims to earlier discovery of Iceland by Irish monks are discounted, the credit undoubtedly falls to the Vikings, and in particular to a certain Floki “of the Ravens.” It is this bold seaman who first ventured into the far reaches of northwest Atlantic and who in 870 made landfall in Iceland two centuries before Erik’s arrival. Floki was pleased to find that sections of the land’s coastline were cultivatable and suitable for cattle grazing, and he also judged the climate hospitable. (Climatic conditions were at the time more clement than they are at present.)
Within a few short years of Floki’s landing, Viking settlers arrived in numbers and successfully established themselves at Reykjavik and along the island’s western and northwestern coasts. These were not the hungry nor the restless; these were political refugees who quit their Scandinavian homes to escape the tyrannical hand of King Harold, “The Fairhair.” Harold, having “murdered, burnt and otherwise exterminated all his brother kings who at that time grew as thick as blackberries in Norway,” went on to abrogate the udal rights of landholders and to impose every sort of restriction on the population. The landowners were men “with possessions to be taxed, and a spirit too haughty to endure taxation” — individuals who cherished liberty and for whom freedom of possession and of movement was a sacred birthright. Lord Duffern describes an aspect of these astonishing early settlers:
They were the first of any European nation to create for themselves a native literature … almost all the ancient Scandinavian manuscripts are in Icelandic. Negotiations between the Courts of the North were conducted by Icelandic diplomats. The earliest topographical survey with which we are acquainted was Icelandic … The first historical composition ever written by any European in the vernacular was the product of Icelandic genius.[3]
And what was this land that beckoned to the Norwegian emigrants? Iceland continues today as a country of startling contrasts — a geologist’s paradise. The irregularly shaped island is home to rugged mountains, roaring rivers and waterfalls, subterranean thermal springs, geysers, and sparkling glaciers. With the exception of a small island off the north coast, the entire country lies just below the Arctic Circle, but in structure, relief, and climate, the land is definitely sub-Arctic. The settlements then and now are found along the island’s periphery where conditions are quasi-maritime and where farming is possible with careful cultivation. Iceland is one of the few Arctic territories in which no indigenous population existed at the time of European discovery.
Within seventy years of Floki’s arrival, the population of Iceland had blossomed from naught to forty thousand, and the figure doubled in the century that followed. In that lawless society the need for some form of political organization became apparent, and in order to attain this, the resourceful citizens established the Althingi, the world’s first parliament. The “Thing” lasted for over three centuries until 1262 when the island’s unique status as an independent republic was lost by a Norwegian takeover. It remained under the colonial rule of Norway until 1944 when it regained its independence, at which time the Althingi was re-established. (As an aside: if the British Parliament founded in 1295 is regarded as the “Mother of Parliaments,” surely Iceland’s Althingi may legitimately lay claim to being its godmother.).
The thirteenth-century Saga of Erik the Red tells us that Erik’s family had been forced to flee Norway on account of “some killings,” and that they fled to Iceland where the boy was raised. In 980, Erik became involved in a heated dispute with a neighbour — over a shovel, of all things. One confrontation led to another and the short of it