CHAPTER 5

The Land-Taking

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

 

The 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 clairvoyant 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.”

Sveigakot was apparently one of the feet. The house itself was a small sunken room, 200 square feet in all, a so-called pit house—literally a pit dug a yard or less into the ground with a turfed-over roof, making the whole thing roughly tepee shaped. The Vikings generally used them as temporary shelters until a longhouse went up; at Sveigakot, that interval took two or three generations. Next to the pit house, however, they immediately built a large byre, with stalls for fourteen cows. “They seem to have begun very optimistically,” Orri said, “but things didn’t quite turn out the way they expected. These people seem to have been extremely poor in terms of material culture.” The only artifact found in the pit house was a nail.

“I think it was a planned settlement,” Orri told me. “Somebody organized it, and the greatest problem the organizers had was getting people to go. One easy solution is simply to buy them and transport them.” The slaves, Orri believes, were not only Irish and Scottish, but Poles, Slavs, Balts, Frisians, Finns, English, and other Scandinavians—all of whom were for sale in the markets of tenth-century Europe.

“That would explain why people had to put up with this place,” he said. “Once you’re stranded in Iceland, it’s hard to get away.”

 

By 930, the sagas say, Iceland was fully settled and the new settlers had set up a system of government. Or at least, a few dozen of the richest and most powerful men (they were all men: Unn the Deep-Minded was one of a kind) had proclaimed themselves goðar, a word that is usually translated as “chieftains.” These chieftains then worked out a way to share power. The country was divided into quarters, North, East, South, and West, and each landowner had to attach himself to one of the chieftains in his quarter. He could change his allegiance once a year, and was free (at least in theory) to sell his farm and move to a different quarter if he didn’t like his options. Laws were made and customs established to even out inequalities in wealth and status, to make sure that no one chieftain grew strong enough to become a King Harald Fine-Hair. It was, for instance, dishonorable (and often fatal) to be labeled an ójafnarðarmaður, a man who was unfair, unjust, overbearing: a man who upset the balance of the world.

Each summer the chieftains and their followers—perhaps a thousand people in all—met in Thingvellir, the “Meeting Plains” in the southwest of Iceland, to reaffirm their laws and to handle any disputes that could not be resolved at a more local level. Their meeting, called the Althing, was also the social event of the year, where marriages were made, goods traded, tales told, ale drunk, and politics discussed. It was at the Althing, in 1022, that the Icelanders ratified a trade agreement with Norway, permitting them to cut as much wood in the royal forests as they wished; and at the Althing, in 1024, that they learned the king of Norway wished to be given the offshore island of Grimsey as a token of the Icelanders’ esteem. They refused. Alone of their time, the saga people bowed to no king. With law is our land built, they declared.

Scholars have called the system they designed a democracy. In 1930, at the Althing’s thousand-year fete, the United States spokesman lauded the first Icelanders for seeking freedom and democracy and equal rights. The representative of Britain’s House of Lords called the Althing “the grandmother of parliaments” (the English parliament being the mother). These statesmen “told the audience what it wanted to hear,” writes Helgi Thorlaksson, a historian at the University of Iceland. To the Icelanders of 1930—struggling for their own independence from the Danish crown—the people of the sagas were “democratic, law-abiding, peace-loving parliamentarians.” To some, Viking Iceland still seems rooted in the values of America. In 1995 William Pencak, a philosophy professor at Pennsylvania State University wrote: “Iceland and its sagas depict a nation of free men, abetted by formidable women.”

To anthropologist Paul Durrenberger, also of Penn State, this romantic notion is bunk. When he read the sagas, he saw no “nation of free men” but an aristocracy of chieftains who “had no inclination toward egalitarianism.” The balance of power among them broke down within a hundred years—well before Gudrid’s birth. By then the Icelandic settlers had learned three things. One, their only crop was hay. Two, their only export was wool cloth, but the number of sheep a farm could keep over winter was fixed by the amount of hay the farm’s laborers could bring in. And three, a man ate just about as much as his labor was worth. There was no profit in keeping slaves, so they were freed—that is, kicked out of the chieftain’s longhouse. Some of these freedmen made a go at farming on small rented plots, perhaps like the desperate Sveigakot. Their sons worked summers for the chieftains or other large landowners; winters, the family fended for itself. With seasonal labor so cheap, some chieftains saw a new way to increase their power: Take the neighbor’s hayfield. It was against the law—land-claims were “holy,” sacrosanct—but the law, writes Durrenberger in The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland, couldn’t be enforced. Iceland had no king’s men (or police) and no castle dungeons. “Law or no, courts or no, decisions or no, one could do just as much as one’s influence, cunning, and power at arms allowed,” he writes. Rather than “farmers at fisticuffs” (as one eighteenth-century writer described the plots of the sagas), or free men and formidable women, to Durrenberger the sagas show the cunning and unprincipled rich out for as much power as they can grab, and happy to exploit the labor of anyone who can’t stand up to them.

Like any good literature, the sagas support both viewpoints—what you get out of them depends on what you read into them. The chieftains are not static caricatures. Snorri of Helgafell, friend and supporter of Gudrun the Fair, sometimes seems democratic, law-abiding, and peace-loving, and sometimes aristocratic, unprincipled, and exploitative. He is always, however, cunning, or, as Jon Vidar Sigurdsson of the University of Oslo puts it, shrewd. “Shrewdness is the characteristic which the sagas emphasize most in descriptions of the chieftains,” Jon writes in Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth. Their battles were fought with wits more often than weapons. Fate, or “the will of God,” never explains why one chieftain succeeds and one fails. “The cleverest chieftains, who could also ignore the political rules when necessary, became the most powerful ones.”

In the 1930s, scholars knew exactly what those political rules were. Icelandic schoolchildren learned them by rote: Each of Iceland’s four quarters had three spring assemblies (except in the North, which was too big and needed four). At each spring assembly, three chieftains met. The chieftains appointed judges, who would hear both sides of a dispute and agree on a settlement. The loser might pay a fine in silver, goods, or land, or he might be outlawed: either kicked out of the district or out of the country altogether, for three years or forever. If a conflict was not resolved at the local spring assembly, it went to the appropriate Quarter Court at the Althing. If that failed, there was a Fifth Court, a supreme appeals court.

This picture of Viking law is—like the description of Skallagrim’s settlement—a rationalization. Historians used to think that the laws, known from a medieval lawbook called Grágas (“Gray Goose”), were exempt from the problems of veracity that plague the sagas. Yet the first lawbook was not written until 1118, nearly two hundred years after the fact, and it no longer exists. The two manuscripts of Grágas that remain for us to read were penned in the late 1200s, after Iceland had become part of the kingdom of Norway. They differ greatly. No one knows why both are called “Gray Goose,” or what their purpose was. No one knows if they contain the actual laws of the land or, as Helgi Thorlaksson suggests, “simply learned reflections and speculations.” In Jon Vidar Sigurdsson’s view, Grágas is even less reliable than the sagas. The saga author, writing for the public, had to stay within the bounds of his listeners’ prior knowledge of his characters and his story. Writing for scholarly colleagues, the editor of Grágas was free to settle on “the simplest explanation,” the academic model.

In this case, the model is wrong. Only 10 percent of the conflicts in the sagas are resolved by courts of law; 90 percent hang on negotiation. “Farmers who felt that their rights had been infringed usually asked their chieftain for support,” Jon writes. “The validity of the case or the underlying circumstances were of secondary importance; what mattered was the kind of support that could be mustered.” Or, as Paul Durrenberger says, what mattered was the chieftain’s “influence, cunning, and power at arms.”

Paul argues that chieftains bought their influence, flattering and cajoling their neighbors with feasts and presents. Jon considers wealth just one of several important qualities. Without money a chieftain had no men, but a good chieftain was also “generous, helpful, and loyal,” as well as shrewd. He made strategic marriage alliances and supported his kin. He maintained peace among his own men. He could be either “aggressive, keen, bold, decisive, hard, and ambitious” or “peaceful, clever, good-natured, moderate, and unassuming”—both strategies worked, or at least, each worked sometimes. For the most obvious characteristic of a chieftaincy in the sagas, according to Jon, was that they “did not last for very long.” A chieftaincy was not a dynasty. A man could inherit, buy, or be given a chieftain’s ring, but that alone didn’t make him a chieftain.

Nor were there just thirty-nine of them, as the academic model of Viking law would tell us. From the settlement of Iceland until the time of Gudrid’s death, about 1050, anyone could claim the title. One of the fifty or sixty chieftains that Jon suggests were knocking around Iceland in the late 900s could have been Gudrid’s father, Thorbjorn Vifilsson, as The Saga of Eirik the Red claims. He just wasn’t a very successful chieftain, and he was, by the time the saga begins, an old man with money problems living in territory claimed by the young and aggressive Snorri of Helgafell. Although a chieftaincy was not defined geographically, no chieftain liked to have a rival on his doorstep.

As The Saga of Eirik the Red tells us, Gudrid’s father refused to shore up his tottering chieftaincy by wedding his young daughter to a rich—but slave-born—merchant. His only other source of wealth, as for all Icelanders, was the hay that fed the sheep that provided the wool that Gudrid and the other women on the farm could spin and weave into homespun cloth, the only goods Icelanders had to trade with Norway. By 985, when Gudrid was born and Eirik the Red convinced twenty-five shiploads of Icelanders to sail off with him to start over in Greenland, many of the first settlers’ choices had already proved disastrous. Many farms had been abandoned; many settlers’ hopeful expectations had turned to dust. There’s no way to say if Gudrid’s father’s farm suffered from overgrazing a thousand years ago, but erosion is one possible explanation for his “money troubles.”

As Icelandic historian Gunnar Karlsson writes, “Iceland may have been a good country for the first generations of Icelanders, but it was not equally good to all its children.”

Gudrid’s family were among those for whom it was not so good.

 

Some students of genealogy find it questionable that Gudrid could be the granddaughter of Vifil, the highborn captive from Scotland, as the sagas say. The problem is that this Vifil sailed in the ship built by Unn the Deep-Minded, while Karlsefni, Gudrid’s husband, is Unn’s great-great-great-great-grandson. That gives a difference of several generations between Gudrid’s and her husband’s ages. Yet it is possible. Unn was a grandmother when she sailed to Iceland, with two granddaughters of marriageable age. Her youngest grandchild, Olaf Feilan, may have been about five. If Vifil was Olaf Feilan’s age, there would be only two generations’ difference between Gudrid and Karlsefni. If Gudrid’s father and grandfather were in their fifties when their children were born, and Karlsefni’s were in their twenties, the age difference is erased.

Assuming Vifil was a tot when Unn took him along, what was his status? Some translators call him a slave, but it’s clear that he and his sons didn’t think of themselves like the poor folk at Sveigakot, stranded and struggling. What slave would challenge his owner, saying, “Why didn’t you give me a farm, like everyone else?” as Vifil challenged Unn, some years after they had arrived in Iceland? And what slave owner would then give that arrogant upstart a whole valley, as Unn did? When Vifil’s son, Thorbjorn, was considering the marriage offer for Gudrid made by the rich young merchant, Einar of the fancy clothes, he said to his friend Orm, “To think that I would marry my daughter to the son of a slave!” It was apparently a sore point with Thorbjorn.

Vifil may instead have been a royal hostage. When Unn’s son Thorstein the Red was setting himself up as king of Scotland, he needed to guarantee the loyalty of the Scottish aristocracy. Throughout the Middle Ages, a common way to ensure loyalty was to take prisoner a nobleman’s young son, and to tie the boy’s life to his father’s good behavior. Young Vifil’s life was forfeit when Thorstein was betrayed and killed by the Scots, but Unn instead took him with her when she fled. It’s likely he married late; it was difficult to start a farm from scratch when you had no assets but a sense of your own importance. Unn might have rented him a cow and some sheep, so he could build up his herd. He would have turned to her for help if his hay crop was scanty, and her grandson Olaf Feilan, when he became a chieftain, could count on his sword.

The relationship was reciprocal, though, and it seems Olaf Feilan—or Thord Gellir, the next chieftain at Hvamm—let Vifil down. The Book of Settlements tells us that after Vifil settled in Vifil’s Dale, he quarreled with another of Unn’s shipmates, Hord, who had been granted Hord’s Dale, the seaward end of Vifil’s Dale. Doubtless it was a border dispute. We know who won by the nickname given Hord’s son—Asbjorn the Wealthy—and by the fact that this Asbjorn married Thord Gellir’s sister-in-law, while his daughter married the rising young chieftain Illugi the Black. Asbjorn was not only wealthy, he was well connected.

Vifil’s connections were not so good. His wife is not named in the sagas—she is clearly not a chieftain’s kinswoman. His two sons, Thorbjorn and Thorgeir, married sisters, the daughters of a prosperous farmer named Einar of Laugarbrekka (“Hot-Springs Slope”), who lived on the farthest western tip of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, right beneath the Snow Mountain’s Glacier. Neither of Vifil’s sons continued farming at Vifil’s Dale.

Hellisvellir, or “Fields by the Cave,” the farm where Gudrid was born, was the dowry of her mother, Hallveig. Gudrid’s Uncle Thorgeir and Aunt Arnora lived next door, taking over the main estate of Laugarbrekka after Einar’s death. Gudrid had a cousin there of about her own age, a girl named Yngvild, who would later marry a son of the chieftain Snorri of Helgafell.

Gudrid’s father was not happy at Hellisvellir. He was perhaps the younger brother, married to the younger sister and given the smaller farm. His wife seems to have died young—Gudrid was an only child, and she was raised next door at Arnarstapi by Orm and his wife. Besides, Thorbjorn and his brother did not always see eye to eye, especially when it came to Thorbjorn’s friendship with Eirik the Red.

Eirik the Red is the classic case of the independent farmer, the seeker of freedom whose “don’t tread on me” attitude gets him into trouble. He was quick-tempered and quick to draw steel, and seems to have had an inflated opinion of himself. He also seems to have been justified in thinking people were trampling on his rights.

He came to Iceland with his father “because of some killings,” and they set up a farm in the far northwest of the country, in one of the last areas to be settled. It was not the kind of place Eirik thought he deserved. When his father died, Eirik quickly looked for a way out. He married a widow’s daughter; his mother-in-law was the famously buxom Thorbjorg Knarrarbringu, or Ship-Breast, and when she remarried and moved south to the Dales, Eirik and his wife followed her.

Eirik’s new father-in-law was an important man, related by marriage to Olaf the Peacock, the strongest chieftain in the district. But for all his importance, he was not overly generous. He gave Eirik the Red a small plot of land at the northeast tip of a big lake. The site is pinched between the river and the mountain, hard up against the neighbor’s farm. Here at Eiriksstadir (“Eirik’s Homestead”), Leif Eiriksson, discoverer of Vinland, was born.

Eirik’s troubles start with a landslide. In the sagas, these are often blamed on witchcraft. We know now that when steep slopes are stripped of their trees and grass by grazing goats and sheep, they become unstable and landslides are more likely. Archaeologists working at Eiriksstadir have found signs of a landslide that destroyed Eirik’s house, forcing him to rebuild. But this was not the slide that led to his being ousted from the Dales. That particular landslide wiped out a neighbor’s farm (probably killing the neighbor). Another neighbor decided two of Eirik’s slaves were to blame, and so killed them. Someone who kills another man’s slaves had three years by law in which to pay for them, but Eirik retaliated by killing the neighbor and another man who stepped in to help. Influential men in the district then decided Eirik was a troublemaker. Eirik’s father-in-law did not intervene, despite his influence with Olaf the Peacock, and Eirik the Red was banished from the Dales.

He decided to move to an island in the fjord nearby, but it took him a while to find the right spot; meanwhile, the saga says, he lent his “bench boards”—another translator calls them “bedstead boards”—to a man named Thorgest the Old. When Eirik was ready to build his new house, Thorgest refused to return the boards. Eirik lost his temper. He rushed into Thorgest’s house, grabbed the boards, and rode off. Thorgest’s two sons went after him. Eirik killed them “and several other men.” After that, the two sides gathered their friends together into armed camps.

Thorgest the Old was married to the chieftain Thord Gellir’s daughter, so all the “influence, cunning, and power at arms” of the Hvamm clan fell in behind him.

Eirik had no chieftain on his side, unless we can count Gudrid’s father. For Thorbjorn, backing Eirik the Red was a bad move: Ranged against him were his own father-in-law, Einar of Laugarbrekka, and Einar’s two brothers, one of whom was related by marriage to Eirik’s enemy, Thorgest the Old. Even Thorbjorn’s brother sided with the enemy.

The dispute was heard at the local spring assembly in about 982. Knowing he was overmatched, Eirik readied his ship and hid it in a tiny bay, deep within the many islands in the fjord. Outlawed for three years by the law court, he fled just ahead of his pursuers. (An outlaw could legally be killed if he was caught.) Gudrid’s father escorted him out of the fjord in his own ship, as did his other supporters. Eirik promised to return the favor if they were ever in need of his help. He set his course west, away from Iceland, toward a mountainous land that had been glimpsed in the fog by another mariner—the land Eirik would name Greenland. With him sailed any possibility Gudrid’s father had of becoming a true chieftain.

It’s no surprise that Thorbjorn and his daughter ended up in Greenland, too. The only puzzle is why Thorbjorn waited so long to follow his friend. Likely it was because of Gudrid. She was probably born in 985, the year Eirik the Red returned from exile, bragging about vast green pastures up for grabs. His salesmanship convinced twenty-five shiploads of Icelanders to try to colonize this new world. Only fourteen ships, carrying three to four hundred people, made it there safely. Some ships were lost at sea—a poem from the period makes reference to a hafgerðing, an ocean “fence” described in one medieval sailors’ manual as looking as if all the waves and tempests of the ocean had been collected into three heaps out of which three billows are formed. These hedge in the entire sea, so that no opening can be seen anywhere; they are higher than lofty mountains and resemble steep, overhanging cliffs. Modern observers attribute these terrifying waves to an earthquake or the eruption of an undersea volcano. A few ships in Eirik’s flotilla escaped this catastrophe by turning back to Iceland. Their reports of the journey would have convinced Gudrid’s father—or mother, if she had survived childbirth—that the trip was too risky for an infant. It would be fifteen more years before Thorbjorn, embittered and impoverished, miffed that a slave-born boy considered himself Gudrid’s match, would assuage his honor by emigrating to Greenland.

 

At their heart, Eirik the Red’s troubles were not about honor, but about house building. After spending a few days learning about turf houses with Sirri Sigurdardottir at Glaumbaer and Gudmundur Olafsson at Iceland’s National Museum, I better understood how much time and effort Eirik had spent clearing the land and building his house—two houses, since the first was damaged by a landslide—at Eiriksstadir, only to be kicked out of the Dales. And I could guess how frustrated he was, after having put considerable thought into where to build his house on the island he had purchased, when his house building was short-circuited by the man he’d trusted with his “bench boards.”

As curator of the Skagafjord Folk Museum, for nearly twenty years Sirri Sigurdardottir has been responsible for keeping the turf roof and walls of the circa 1750 farmhouse on the Glaumbaer grounds in good repair. June 2005 was unusually sunny and pleasant for Iceland, and Sirri spent much of the month on the roof with a garden hose praying for the weather to return to normal. “It was like a nightmare to keep the grass green on the roof,” she said. A sunburned roof will crack, letting the next rainfall trickle down into the wall. A wet wall will eventually freeze, buckle, and have to be replaced, which means tearing the whole thing down to the layer of foundation stones and starting over again. Or walking away and rebuilding elsewhere.

Northern Iceland has quite a collection of slumped and crumpled, roofless turf ruins. Here and there a turf farmhouse is in better repair, crammed with tools and old toys, or turned into a sheep barn. There used to be many, many more: Before concrete was introduced in the 1940s, the most common house was owner-built of turf. Traditionally, a turf house was patched, rebuilt, expanded, and renewed, the new parts erected on top of, or adjoining, the old, sometimes changing the footprint every few years. Today there are only four men in Iceland who have lived in a turf house they had made.

In the 1990s, Sirri and her assistants took a camera and interviewed the oldsters on each farm. “We went through all of Skagafjord to learn where they got the turf, what kind it was, and how the timber frame was built. Most of these houses are gone now,” she said. It was the same method Arne Emil Christensen had used on the coast of Norway to learn how Viking ships were built while there is still time. If the tools are the same, the technique must be the same.

Sirri and her brother went out into the bogs with the old men and their turf-cutting tools and tried it. “They use a spade and a short-handled scythe. It’s difficult, let me tell you,” Sirri said.

Just how difficult I heard from a friend who had helped build a turf house as a boy. “First you cut off the top layer using a shovel or a curved peat knife. The better turf is at a certain depth,” he had said. “You need a sharp thin blade and a very firm grip. You use the weight of your body, plant your feet to press with your leg muscles, and saw into the ground—it’s like cutting bread.”

Sirri agreed. “You have to know how to do it. You need to have good iron edges on your tools—you can’t cut turf with a wooden spade. This could be a problem. There wasn’t much iron in the old days, and you had to take care of it. So when they cut turf, they cut as little as possible and thought carefully about how to cut it.”

They also thought carefully about what kind of turf to cut, Sirri continued. “The best turf is called reiðingur. A reiðingur is a packsaddle, but also what you make one out of. We used the best turf, with the thickest root system, to make pads for the horses. And we used it as a mattress for beds. It’s very soft.”

To find reiðingur turf, you tramp along the edges of a bog, just beyond where the grasses give way to sedges, looking for the little white flowers of the bogbean plant. It flowers only if its roots are soaked. “The best turf was always in the water. When you dig it up, it runs with water. When it dries, it is all roots. No earth at all. No sand, no dirt. It’s good for saddles—you cut it on the horse so it’s the best shape for that horse when it dries. It fits perfect.”

But while the old men all agreed that reiðingur was the “best” turf, they didn’t use it for walls. They backed off from the bogbean a couple of paces, and cut building blocks from the firmer grass-and-sedge margin.

“Reiðingur is so wet you can’t build the walls high,” Sirri explained. “In a wall, it compresses every year more and more, and the roof comes down with it. It stops on the wooden frame. If you don’t do anything about it, the frame will cut through the turf. It’s good to have a little bit of clay in the turf because when it dries, it becomes a block, almost a stone. But not too much clay, or it will destroy the root system as it dries. When you cut turf in a bog, you cut living roots. They die in the walls, and too much clay makes the roots rot, then the wall breaks. So how to choose the perfect turf for the wall is not how you choose the perfect turf for the horse.”

Sometimes there simply wasn’t time to be so choosy—such as when half of your house had disappeared under a landslide. A block of turf needs three weeks to a month to dry out properly, and house building or repair was always on the to-do list beneath making hay. It was an eve-of-winter chore. “If you’re in a hurry,” said Sirri, “you pick the turf you have. You just do it. If you’re lucky it will last for decades. Or if not, just for two years.”

The shape of the blocks you cut also depended, to some extent, on time. The best walls are made of klömbrahnaus, “clubshaped hunks.” One end is fat (called the neck), the other is thin and tapered (the tail). “The tail goes inside the wall, and you see the neck,” Sirri explained. Each hunk is about a foot in length—but the wall is three to six feet deep. You built an inside stack of turfs and an outside stack, and filled in between with rubble. Old turf—the torn-down wall—was often used, along with gravel, clay, or dirt. You packed the rubble down firmly, “trampling it with a horse or a heavy man.” Sirri said, “When you can’t see the sign of your foot, it’s done.” Every few courses, a long straight piece of turf would be placed lengthwise across the rubble, to tie the two stacks together.

The faces of a wall built this way have a distinctive herringbone pattern. “It’s good-looking and it’s very strong. If the weather is not very wet, you have walls like that standing for eighty to a hundred years,” Sirri said, “and I know much older walls made this way. Gudny saw klömbra in the walls of the longhouse that was found in Keldudalur, under the churchyard, so we know the people of Gudrid’s time knew this technique.”

Lazy housebuilders, or those in a rush, however, didn’t always use it. They cut the simpler, diamond-shaped snidda, without the lagging tail. “If you weren’t too clever with building, it was easier,” Sirri said. “Klömbra is bigger and it’s very heavy. Snidda is much easier to carry about. But the turf that’s fastest to cut and easiest to build from is also the one that falls down first.”

 

Finding, cutting, drying, and stacking the turf was only half the work of building a Viking longhouse—and not even the half that determined how big a house you would have. “When you start to build a house,” Sirri told me, “you first look at the timber you have.”

Although it looked like a low green hill—a hobbit hole—a Viking house was actually a wooden house tucked inside a man-made mound. The turf walls blocked the wind and kept in the warmth, but what held up the roof was a post-and-beam wood frame. The inside walls and ceiling were also wooden, the thick paneling sometimes intricately carved. A house in Laxdaela Saga had “glorious sagas carved on the wallboards and the rafters. They were so well done that people thought the hall looked more splendid when the tapestries were not hung up.” The householder, Olaf the Peacock, had cut the wood he needed in the king of Norway’s forests.

Gudmundur Olafsson believes that’s where many of the Icelanders’ house timbers came from, that emigrants—whether Vikings fleeing the king or those of their descendants who moved to Greenland—literally pulled up stakes and brought the posts and beams and paneling with them.

Gudmundur is the chief archaeologist at Iceland’s National Museum in Reykjavik. Although he has been excavating Viking houses since 1972, he is disinclined to speculate; he often answers a question with We don’t exactly know yet.

For six summers he worked in Greenland, excavating a Norse farm that had been discovered in 1991 when two reindeer hunters spotted a stick of wood protruding from the bank of a glacial river, close to the inland ice pack. Greenland is as treeless as Iceland; as one account of the discovery remarks, “the sight of large pieces of wood is not an everyday occurrence.” The hunters called the authorities.

The stick was part of a Viking woman’s loom. What now is a barren plain of sand had been, from Gudrid’s day to the fourteenth century, an attractive Viking farm site, with grassy pasture, wet meadows, and a meandering oxbow river. Its name is long forgotten. The archaeologists, digging through yards of sand to uncover eight layers of houses, called it the “Farm Beneath the Sand.” Each winter the river dumped a new load of sand onto their work site. All summer, while they dug, it threatened to wash their work away. In the seventh year it succeeded; the site no longer exists. But in those six years, archaeologists learned more about a Norse household than they ever had before.

“The permafrost makes all the difference,” Gudmundur told me. “When you come down to the floor layer, you can smell the cows and sheep.” The stumps of the roof-bearing posts, preserved in postholes, were a bit under six inches across, about the size of sturdy fence-posts. They had been reused again and again as the house changed shape over the centuries. Just as in Iceland, the great hall favored by the first settlers had given way to a warren of small, interconnected rooms, presumably to save on firewood. But the earliest house on the site gave Gudmundur a queasy feeling of déjà vu.

“It was almost the same size as Eiriksstadir,” Gudmundur said, “a little wider, but the same length. We have no idea who lived at the Farm Beneath the Sand. It was not by the sea, but far inland. It was probably not anyone important. But it has led me to conclude that the people who went to Greenland with Eirik the Red were the same sort of farmer: middle-class farmers who wanted to get bigger, who wanted this opportunity to get rich. I think they lived quite similar a lifestyle as they had in Iceland.”

And they lived in quite similar—even exactly similar—houses.

“If you’re moving to Greenland or a new place, and you want to be a more important man, why wouldn’t you build a bigger house than you had at home, if you had the means?” Gudmundur said. “I think the reason they are building the same size of house is that they took all the timber with them on the boat.”

Gudmundur knows just how to do that. He helped design a Viking longhouse that was built in Iceland and then taken apart and shipped to Greenland. It was set up near Eirik the Red’s farm at Brattahlid to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the Norse settlement in Greenland. He showed me a photograph of a standard 20-foot shipping crate about half full of lumber—a precut Viking house kit. “This is all the wood for one house. It took a couple of months for the carpenters to make it, but only a couple of days to take it down and pack it. And it took up so little space on the boat.”

It was the second Viking house kit with which Gudmundur had been involved. In 1997 the Icelandic National Museum was approached by a committee of citizens from western Iceland who wanted to commemorate the thousand-year anniversary of Leif Eiriksson’s discovery of Vinland by reconstructing the house where he was born in the Dales. There was no question here of discovering the house, as John Steinberg had discovered Gudrid’s house at Glaumbaer. “It has never been lost,” said Gudmundur. “According to the local traditions, this was the site where Eirik the Red lived. The sagas are very much alive with the local farmers. They know their saga heroes.”

Eiriksstadir was first excavated in 1895 by Thorsteinn Erlingsson, an Icelandic poet. Archaeologists of his day had no feeling for turf. As Sirri had told me, “It was just turf and they threw it away. They dug down until they reached the foundation stones.” As a result, Eiriksstadir was well and truly ransacked. Most of the information a modern specialist would read in the turf—such as when the turf was cut and whether it was long-lasting klömbra or the lazy man’s snidda—was lost. In Thorsteinn’s drawings and descriptions, Eiriksstadir is square. The house is divided longitudinally into two parallel rooms, with an offset door connecting them.

“In 1938 Eiriksstadir was revisited by the state antiquarian, Matthias Thordarson,” said Gudmundur. “He discovered there was no room in the back. It was a landslide that had formed the depression. So that’s what we knew in 1997.”

Gudmundur told the committee he would have to reexcavate the ruins before he could help with the replica. In his experience, the Vikings in Iceland before the year 1000 built two kinds of houses: longhouses and pit houses. A longhouse, or skáli, was a single rectangular room with a longfire, a narrow hearth running longways down the center. Earthen sleeping benches flanked the fire. The walls were slightly bowed out in the middle. The door was off-center, on a long wall close to one end. Longhouses are generally about 65 feet long and 20 feet wide.

Most longhouses had a pit house nearby. The much smaller pit houses—about 13 by 10 feet, roughly square, and sunk 18 inches into the ground—had benches along three walls, a fireplace in one corner, and no apparent doorway. People may have come down by ladder through the roof, which was not high: The rafter tips rested on the ground.

Early archaeologists thought the pit houses were saunas. Today some think they were housing for slaves—as at Sveigakot in the north—or temporary quarters for traders: Two to four people could live in them. “These houses are found all over Northern Europe,” Gudmundur explained. “They were probably quite easy to build. They don’t need much material. These were the first buildings you put up when you came to a new country.” Gudmundur believes the pit house became the women’s weaving room once the longhouse was built. “We find loom weights, small knives, and other artifacts connected with women in them.”

At Eiriksstadir, Gudmundur found both a longhouse and a pit house. Charcoal pieces from the longfire were dated, using the carbon-14 method, to between the years 900 and 1000; Eirik had presumably lived there around 980, so it could be his fire. But Gudmundur also found a second fireplace. It was hard to tell which was older because the floor layer had been dug away by the earlier excavations. He found three possible doors: two offset, front and back, and one in the center. He could not be sure where the western gable was; the end wall was indistinct, and the foundation stones may have been scavenged when a telephone pole was erected close by.

“There had been an earlier building destroyed by a landslide,” Gudmundur told me. “Then it was put up again. It’s quite small, but not the smallest longhouse we have found. Probably Eirik had no choice. He was living there on the mercy of his mother-in-law. He had no land. This house site was just on the border of the next farm. He was probably always in conflict with the neighbor because his sheep were grazing on the neighbor’s land.”

The basic floor plan Gudmundur arrived at shows one room, a great hall 41 feet long and 13 feet wide in the middle, narrowing at both ends. There is a central longfire and both a front and a back door—a good idea since Eirik the Red had so many enemies. What Gudmundur calls “a hypothetical reconstruction” of Eirik’s house was built on the site in 1999. He explained, “If we did it again, it wouldn’t look exactly the same because our knowledge improves with every reconstruction. We discussed what we knew about every little detail in the house—and what was possible. How big the posts should be. How high the roof should be. Sometimes we had to compromise, because the archaeologists didn’t always agree with the architects.”

The beds, for instance, are too short. The earthen benches along the walls on both sides of the longfire were boxed with wood and covered with furs and blankets to make comfortable seats by day and double (or triple) beds by night. Each bed was separated from the next by a footboard joined to the posts that hold up the roof. The length of the beds at Eiriksstadir, said Gudmundur, “was a compromise after long discussion. We had to speculate about the posts because the early excavations had destroyed the evidence. But they had drawn a map of where they had found stones that had supported the roof posts, so our house is based a little on that. We archaeologists wanted narrower posts. To get them we had to shorten the beds. The engineers wanted to be sure the roof wouldn’t fall in. It’s calculated to hold the maximum weight of snow. I don’t think that was a problem for Eirik.”

He paused. “All things considered, I think this is probably the best reconstruction of a Viking Age house that I’ve seen.”

I took Gudmundur’s advice and went to the Dales to visit Eiriksstadir. It was the weekend of the yearly Viking festival, Leif’s Holiday, very much a family event. There was ring dancing and folksinging. A man worked a furnace and made trinkets out of nails. A woman sold bone flutes. Another played hneftafl or “tables,” the Viking board game, beating all comers. A Greenlander sold walrus-ivory amulets. Other merchants hawked felt hats, cured skins, and soap. A man turned four sheep carcasses on spits over a fire. Wearing special straps around their waists and legs for their opponents to grip, boys and girls competed at glíma, or Viking wrestling. A group of young toughs tried to lift huge stones. (The smallest of three was marked 75 kilograms, or 165 pounds.) Young and old in Viking garb competed in a sort of tug-of-war: A long rope was tied in a loop and laid behind the necks of two contestants; the goal was to pull each other forward past a bone marker.

A Viking tent with carved wooden tent-poles was filled with reproductions of Queen Asa’s housewares from the Oseberg ship: A Viking reenactor was living inside. The seven-footlong bed was full of rumpled furs and blankets.

Up the hill, Eirik the Red’s house looked tiny from the outside, an earthen hovel. Inside, it was snug.

The architects had put in two wooden dividers, turning the single open room of Gudmundur’s excavation into three: a small entry room, with storage space for tack and farm equipment; the main living room; and a small pantry, with a grindstone and a food chest, at the back door. The two anterooms were rough, the turf walls exposed, and each had a loft. The great hall was completely paneled and very pretty in a blond Scandinavian way. Furs and skins hung on the walls and were draped over the wide wooden benches along the walls. Tools and weapons hung from pegs or on crossbars that ran from the posts. At the base of each post, a carved footboard divided the benches into sleeping berths—for children or midgets, but not six-foot-tall men. Gudmundur was right: The posts were too close together.

The longfire was small, just one stick of wood burning on a bed of coals, and the room was rather dark and smoky, though warm. Over the fire, on an iron chain, hung a big black pot full of soup, simmering slowly. As I sat on a bench by the fire, imagining Gudrid minding the soup, there was just enough room for the tourists to walk past my knees.

The ceiling was higher than I had expected. It made the lofts over the anterooms into usable space, but it seemed odd to send the fire’s heat away from the people.

“According to the sagas,” the docent told me, “houses were as tall as they were wide.”

Presumably that was an architect’s reading of the sagas. According to Gudmundur, the height of a Viking house was one of those things we don’t exactly know yet.

I told the docent, who was dressed in a pinafore gown with tortoise brooches, that I was working with an archaeological crew digging up Gudrid’s house in the north, at Glaumbaer.

“Then can you explain why the beds in this house are so short?” she asked.

A man listening in on our conversation replied, “Because Vikings slept sitting up.”

“That’s nonsense,” she said.

I had heard that theory, too, but I wasn’t sold. The sagas include numerous episodes in which husbands and wives were clearly stretched out full length.

But the docent didn’t call on the sagas this time; she stuck to the archaeological record. “Have you seen the bed in the tent down there? The one from the Oseberg ship? No way would they sleep in those big beds while they were traveling and then come home to a short bed.”

I repeated what Gudmundur had told me about the post placement and the snow-load problem, and she was reassured to learn that we don’t exactly know the size of a Viking bed.

But because of this theoretical reconstruction of Eirik the Red’s house, Gudmundur did know a few other things. For instance, it took the carpenters weeks to build the wall panels. Based on the wall panels found in Greenland, they were over an inch thick, planed as smooth as a ship’s strake, and then decoratively carved.

The crucial scene in The Saga of Eirik the Red, when Eirik’s temper snaps and he kills his neighbor’s sons in a rage—the murders for which he is outlawed from Iceland, forcing him to sail west in search of the land believed to be beyond—is due to a couple of these boards.