The Vikings

Kristni Saga, a history of the introduction to Iceland of Christianity, written by an unknown author and dated by most scholars to the mid-thirteenth century, identifies Thorvald as a companion of Olaf Tryggvason, and says that Olaf dispatched him on the mission, at about the same time as he claimed the throne of Norway and began his attempts to impose Christianity on the people. The Ágrip credits Olaf with the conversion of Norway, Iceland, Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes. Later and unreliable sources imply his involvement in the conversions of Denmark, Greenland and the Kievan state.² As a Christian and a monarch, Olaf could consider himself a modern man twice over. A country without a king, a Heathen commonwealth, Iceland was, by contrast, an anomaly twice over, and Olaf saw himself as its natural corrective. There is a literary demonstration that this was a modern way of thinking in a tháttr called The Tale of Thorvald Chatterbox, in which Olaf Tryggvason entrusts the eponymous hero with the task of converting an obstinate Heathen chieftain named Bård the Stout to Christianity. When Bård has finally accepted the king’s faith he sums up what has happened to him: ‘I don’t trust any idol or devil. I’ve gone from one country to another and met both giants and black men, and they none of them got the better of me; so I have long trusted in my own strength and ability (trúa á matt ok megin).’ ‘I’ve thought myself very self-sufficient up to now,’ he adds. ‘I’ve served neither kings nor other noblemen. But now I want to become your man, king, and follow you as long as I live.’³ This was the model of kingship created 200 years earlier by Charlemagne, and it had become the standard model. Harald Finehair had hoped to make Iceland into an earldom under the Norwegian crown and, as his candidate for the title, backed Uni, son of the Gardar who was one of the first discoverers of Iceland. Olaf’s interest in Iceland was essentially an updating of this political ambition in the name of Christianity.

Olaf next sent an Icelander named Stefnir to preach the gospel in Iceland. Stefnir’s was a muscular brand of Christianity. Once he realized that persuasion was not working he turned to violence, riding about the countryside with his band of men and destroying temples and places of worship and idols. The Heathens gathered against him and he took refuge with his family at Kjalarness. During the winter his ship was badly damaged in a storm. The delighted followers of the old gods interpreted this as a sign that the Aesir did not wish Christ and his followers well:

Now Stefnir’s prow-falcon (sea
streams through the hollow ship)
is by fierce mountain flurry -
fell weather - entirely destroyed.
But we must believe that - bonds
must be in our land - such roaring
(the river rages with ice)
is ruled by the Aesir’s power.⁴

A scholarium in Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis notes that ‘Apud illos non est rex, nisi tantum lex’ (‘Among them there is no king, there is only the law’), and it is some indication of their alarm at Christianity’s intolerant nature that, in a direct response to Stefnir’s activities, the Icelanders now turned to the law to discourage the fanaticism of the followers of the religion.⁵ The new legislation was known as frændaskömm, meaning something like ‘relation-shame’, and it required a legal response to blasphemy that covered the damaging and dishonouring of sacred sites and images. Prosecution was mandatory. First refusal fell to those relatives of the accused who were closer than fourth cousins but more distant than second cousins, a condition that reinforced the principal responsibility of the family for the conduct of its individual members. At a practical level the stipulation ensured that, in the event of a conviction, the property of the blasphemer would remain within the family. The legislation thus underlined the role of the private and the familial in preserving the structure of Heathen society, in contrast to a centralizing and anti-individualizing tendency in Christianity that was well illustrated by the Church’s insistence that the dead be buried in public, church ground and not in private, family ground. Stefnir was prosecuted by members of his own family under the new legislation and sentenced to leave the country.⁶ Although there is no record of his having converted or even prime-signed anyone, his activities had inflicted further damage to the status of the religious traditions in Iceland.

Olaf sponsored a third mission, under a turbulent and self-willed Saxon named Thangbrand. Thangbrand was temperamentally similar to Thorvald, and allowed himself to be similarly provoked by verbal attacks. Kristni Saga tells us that numerous poets composed and broadcast offensive verse about him.⁷ Thangbrand killed one of them, Vetrlidi, as he was out cutting turf with his servants. Another, named Thorvald the Weak, was killed at Grimnes, in the south-west of the country. Thangbrand was outlawed that summer at the Althing. The weather prevented his first attempt to leave and he had to spend the winter in the west. He and his men were ostracized. The Heathens refused to trade with them, and they were driven to taking food by force and leaving behind payment for it. This was reported as theft, and a fight followed in which eight Heathens and two of Thangbrand’s men were killed. Another attempt to leave was thwarted when Thangbrand’s ship was carried out to sea and badly damaged, occasioning a second verse in which the weather was seen as an agent of the Aesir’s displeasure at the Christian presence. Thor was specifically credited with raising the storm in a verse by a woman poet named Steinun:

Thor drew Thvinnill’s animal,
Thangbrand’s long ship, from land,
shook the prow’s horse and hit it,
and hurled it against the sand.
On sea the ski of Atall’s land
Will not swim henceforth,
For a harsh tempest sent by him
Has hewn it into splinters.

Before the bell’s keeper (bonds
Destroyed the beach’s falcon)
The slayer of giantess-son
Broke the ox of seagull’s place.
Christ was not watching, when
The wave-raven drank at the prows.
Small guard I think God held
- if any - over Gylfi’s reindeer.⁸

Ari tells us that when Thangbrand at last got away and returned to Trondheim, he told king Olaf that it was ‘beyond all expectation that Christianity might yet be accepted here’.⁹ Due to what Theodoricus Monachus calls ‘the innate obduracy and savage nature of the inhabitants’, he had made only a small number of converts during the two years of his mission.¹⁰ Among them, however, were four very influential chieftains: Hall of Sida; Gizur the White; Gizur’s son-in-law, Hjalti Skjeggjason; and Thorgils of Ölfus.¹¹ The furious king ordered the detention of all Icelanders in Trondheim, confiscating their property and issuing threats to have them killed or disfigured. It seems that Gizur and Hjalti somehow got wind of what was happening and made the journey over from Iceland. They urged the king to stay his hand and to let them make a fresh attempt to convert their people. They pointed out that Thangbrand had killed men, and that his behaviour and demeanour were hard to accept from a foreigner. Being natives, they assured the king, they would have a better chance of success. Gizur was Olaf’s second cousin, and the family connection no doubt added weight to his plea that his fellow-countrymen in Norway be not held to account for the conservatism of Icelanders in Iceland. Olaf agreed to let them lead another attempt, but as insurance he held on to four hostages, one from each of the Icelandic Quarter districts. All four were related to leading chieftains.

Accompanied by a priest named Thormod, Gizurr and his party set off for Iceland the following summer, in June 999, in time to attend the althing meeting at Thingvellir at the end of the month.¹² They landed first on the Westmann Islands off the south-west coast of Iceland before proceeding to Landeyjar on the mainland. They had a journey of about 100 kilometres in front of them. At first they had to make their way along the coast on foot, for this was the territory of the goði Runolf, a chieftain whose name occurs in several sources as among those most passionately opposed to the introduction of Christianity, and none of his thingmen would sell them horses. Not until they reached Háfr, in the area around Holt, where Hjalti’s brother-in-law lived, were they able to ride. Travelling on from there, they joined a number of other Christians heading for the annual assembly.

It was the prelude to a day of extraordinary and intricate drama. After Gizur and Hjalti had finished saying what they had to say a procession of men, Christian and Heathen, approached the Lawrock, named witnesses, and declared that they would not live under the same set of laws as each other. Political and social chaos beckoned. Some of the Christians asked Hall of Sida to be their Lawspeaker, and to devise a separate law code for them. Hall declined and passed the request on to the assembly’s elected Lawspeaker, Thorgeir Ljosvetningagodi. Hall offered him a sum of money as a fee, presumably the funds provided for the party by its sponsor, King Olaf. In effect, Thorgeir was being asked to set up a separate law code that would have required a separate assembly with its own, Christian, hallowing rituals, so that two communities of faith could carry on separate but parallel lives. Presumably some kind of physical division of the land into separate administrative communities was also envisaged.¹⁴

Thorgeir was the grandson of a settler from Rogaland, in the west of Norway.¹⁵ He had three wives, by whom he had fathered nine sons and one daughter. He also had two sons outside marriage, one of whom was known as Finni the Dreamwise, well known for his gift of second sight.¹⁶ Thorgeir had been the Icelanders’ Lawspeaker for some fifteen years, since 985, and was almost certainly the finest legal mind in the country. He agreed to give the matter his full consideration and made his way back to his booth, as the summer shelters that housed those in attendance at the althing were known. Inside, he lay down. Both Ari and the author of Kristni Saga tell us, with peculiar precision, that he spread his cloak over his head, and remained in this position for the next twenty-four hours. While he lay thus, tensions flared again. Thorgeir was not a Christian, but to the Heathens this was not in itself enough to ensure a decision in their favour, and they determined to make a major sacrifice to the gods, offering two people from each of the Quarters. The Christians, with Hjalti taking the lead, took the moral high ground by offering to improve on the gesture. In a passage sometimes used to suggest that human sacrifice was in fact a disguised form of capital punishment, Kristni Saga reports Hjalti’s words to his fellow believers:

He began his speech, and said that he thought people’s affairs had come to a bad pass, if they were not all to have the same law in this country, and tried to persuade them in many ways that they should not let this happen, and said it would give rise to such discord that it was certainly to be expected that fights would take place between people by which the land would be laid waste. [. . .] ‘And it now seems advisable to me,’ he said, ‘that we too do not let those who most wish to oppose each other prevail, and let us arbitrate between them, so that each side has its own way in something, and let us all have the same law and the same religion. It will prove true that if we tear apart the law, we will also tear apart the peace.’ And he brought his speech to a close in such a way that both sides agreed that everyone should have the same law, the one he decided to proclaim. It was then proclaimed in the laws that all people should be Christian, and that those in this country who had not yet been baptised should receive baptism; but the old laws should stand as regards the exposure of children and the eating of horse-flesh. People had the right to sacrifice in secret, if they wished, but it would be punishable by the lesser outlawry if witnesses were produced.¹⁸

Thorgeir was a Heathen, and Heathens were in a majority in the land, and we can only suppose that his words were greeted with a stunned silence by most of those present. Yet his decision was accepted, and a mass baptism took place before the assembly broke up. Most are said to have submitted to the ceremony in the cold waters of the Öxará river that traverses the assembly site, but in what may have been a show of displeasure the people of the Northern and Southern Quarters postponed their immersion until they reached the hot springs at Reyk jalaug, in Laugardalr. The author of Kristni Saga duly records the baptism of the Heathen diehard Runolf, whose son was among the hostages being held by King Olaf. Runolf was probably the moving spirit behind the frændaskömm legislation, and is named in some sources as the man who prosecuted the case against Hjalti Skjeggjason for the blasphemy against Freyja.¹⁹ Hjalti’s pleasure at his discomfiture is evident in the words attributed to him when Runolf’s turn came: ‘Now we’re teaching the old goði to nibble on the salt,’ he reportedly said, referring to the practice of placing salt on the tongue as part of the ceremony.

Northern Heathendom had an end-time which was called Ragnarök, or ‘the fate of the gods’. Snorri describes it in some detail in the Glyfaginning section of The Prose Edda. Synthesizing detail from ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’, ‘The Sayings of the High One’, ‘Vafthrudnir’s Sayings’ and ‘Grimnir’s Sayings’ from The Poetic Edda, he tells us of the belief that it would be announced by the Fimbulvinter or ‘terrible winter’, three years of catastrophic snowfall, wind and frost separated from each other by summers of black sunlight that brought no respite. Abandoning all hope, the inhabitants of Midgard would surrender to greed, incest and civil war. At the climax of this long and dreadful night the enemies of the Aesir, the forces of chaos which they had for so long succeeded in containing, would finally burst from their restraints: Midgardsormen, the great world-encircling serpent, would come lunging out of the ocean, dragging the tides in over the land behind it and flooding the world. The giant wolf Fenrir, one of Loki’s monstrous offspring with the giantess Angerboda, whose destiny is connected with the idea of swallowing the sun, and who has been captured and bound by a chain forged by dwarves from the incorporeal things of the world, like the breath of the fish, the sound made by a cat in motion and the roots of a mountain, will break free and fulfil his destiny. The frost-giants will arrive on board a ship made from the uncut fingernails of the dead. In a last act of betrayal, Loki will be at the helm. The skies will open, and the fire-giant Surt and his hordes come flaming forth across the heavenly bridge called Bifrost. These furious and violent forces will seek together and head for the plain called Vigrid with the single and consuming aim of wiping out the gods. Heimdall, the watchman of the Aesir, will sound a great warning blast on his horn, at which the gods and every fallen warrior whom Odin ever called to join him in Valhalla will ride to Vigrid to face them in a last great battle to preserve the world, even knowing they are predestined to fail. Odin, wearing a golden helmet and carrying his spear Gungnir, takes on the wolf Fenrir. Close beside him Thor with his hammer fights against the world-serpent that he once so nearly caught in an earlier adventure, when he cast his fishing-line into the ocean using a bull’s head as bait, and the serpent took the bait. Frey confronts Surt, Heimdall faces Loki. Thor kills the serpent but is himself mortally wounded by its venom. He staggers away nine paces, collapses and dies. Heimdall and Loki kill each other. The wolf swallows Odin, the fire-giant Surt disposes of Frey and then spreads fire across the earth until everything is consumed and the light vanishes. But in an elegiac coda Snorri describes how the sun returns, and reveals that not all the gods were killed, nor every human being either. Life and worship start up again, but this time the world is repopulated by a just and happy generation whose goodness is to be rewarded by the coming of ‘the mighty god from on high, who is ruler of all’.²⁰ This coda, with its prediction of the advent of a single and omnipotent god, is one of several places at which the story is coloured by ideas of the imminence of Judgement Day, an apocalyptic mood that was especially prevalent in Christian culture in the years 1000 and 1033. The prophecy also shows the influence of Christian thought in recognizing the link between cause and effect, and an ethical acceptance of the relationship between guilt and punishment.

A recent theory suggests that the myths of the Fimbulvinter and Ragnarök may have historical origins in a huge volcanic eruption, at an unknown location but recorded in ice-core analysis from the Antarctic in the form of a distinct layer of sulphate dated to 533-534 plus/minus two years. Though the Byzantine historian Procopius does not mention the eruption itself, there may be a literary echo of it in his De Bello Vandalico or the Vandal War, where he relates that in 536 ‘a remarkable wonder was observed, for throughout this whole year the sun shone like the moon, with no radiance, as though in perpetual eclipse, its light feeble and not at all as normal. With this phenomenon came war, hunger and other mortal threats.’ Tree-ring analysis from the Scandinavian countries reflects the onset of a dramatic short-term change in the climate at about this time. The long near-eclipse, which was also recorded in China, lasted until the autumn of 537, and it has been related to the striking increase in the number of gold hoards buried across the Scandinavian north in the middle of the sixth century, with the suggestion that these were offerings made to placate the gods and bring release from the frightening and unnatural absence of a summer. The Fimbulvinter of 536-537 was followed by a decade of relatively cold summers and the pandemic of the Justinian plague of 541-542, which is estimated to have wiped out half the population of Europe. It is not hard to see how memories of this dreadful time, and the fear of its return, might have been passed down through the generations and evolved in folk-memory into the potent myth of Ragnarök, in which the decimation of the population of Europe was recast as the death of all but two of the inhabitants of Midgard, a woman named Life and a man named Leifthrasir (‘tenacious of life’), in an apocalyptic war that pitted the gods of Asgard against the forces of hostile natural chaos, symbolized in the myth by the sun-eating wolf Fenrir and the fire-hurling giant Surt, along with their company of giants, monsters and serpents, in which the gods were almost - but not quite - wiped out.²¹

When it did arrive, the ‘doom of the gods’ bore little resemblance to the dramatic scenarios and heroic deaths of ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’, ‘Vafthrudnir’s Sayings’ and Gylfaginning. Instead it turned out to be a low-key affair, a sober speech delivered by a middle-aged legal expert standing beside a rock, which probably took not much more than an hour or so to deliver. Even wearing his euhemeristic hat in the Ynglingasaga, Snorri had given Odin a more heroic death than this: ‘Odin died in his bed in Swithiod; and when he was near his death he made himself be marked with the point of a spear, and said he was going to Godheim, and would give a welcome there to all his friends, and all brave warriors should be dedicated to him.’²² This was a unique day in the bloody and violent history of those times - a set of gods was abandoned and an entire cultural heritage condemned to obsolescence at the insistence of a handful of fanatics. And yet beyond some light skirmishing, no violence occurred at all. It is reasonable to ask why.

To the cynic or realist it seems obvious that the money handed by the Christian Hall of Sida to Thorgeir was a bribe, or at the very least an inducement, intended to influence the decision. Another realist explanation points to the fact that relatives of four of the most powerful men in Iceland were being held as hostages by the Christians pending the mission of 999, among them a son of the leader of the Heathens. Much the most widely accepted explanation, one that was accepted even by the author of the Kristni Saga, is that the decision reflected the political and cultural good sense of the Lawspeaker. In a word, Thorgeir’s was a rational solution to a difficult and dangerous problem. From the Birka heathens who rebuked Herigar for choosing to go it alone in becoming a Christian and accused him of cultural treason, to the thought attributed to Louis the Pious by Saxo Grammaticus, ‘that there could be no agreement between minds which embraced opposing forms of faith’, the highest demand of reason was that a society be united and integrated.²³ This was recognized to be the overriding condition for the achievement of the most desirable of all goals, peace. In his speech from the Lawrock, Thorgeir provided what was probably a literary or legendary example of the futile warring between neighbouring kings in Scandinavia, Dagr and Tryggvi, and the contentment that came when peace was agreed between them.²⁴ It is possible that his understanding of the dangers faced by a community divided by religion and law owed something to his knowledge of events in England following the invasion of the Great Heathen Army and the share-out of land around 880. No formal integration of the revised population had taken place between English and Danes since the 865 divisions of the land. We noted earlier certain paragraphs of King Edgar’s ‘Wihtbordesstan’ law code of 962 that acknowledged this lack of integration: ‘It is my will that secular rights be in force among the Danes according to as good laws as they can best decide on. Among the English, however, that is to be in force which I and my councillors have added to the decrees of my ancestors, for the benefit of all the nation.’²⁵ As we shall shortly see, the continuing existence of separate Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian cultural identities on the same island had momentous consequences for the stability of English society.

Another possible explanation for the passive acceptance of Thorgeir’s decision is that northern Heathendom in general, and Icelandic Heathendom in particular, was in a moribund state by the year 999, and that a passionate minority was able to roll over with relative ease a majority grown at first insecure and finally indifferent in its religious faith. We noted earlier the possibility that ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’ was composed as an act of liturgical defiance, an Old Norse parallel to the Jewish-Christian sibyl-oracle tradition, with Heimdall as a Heathen prototype of Christ as Saviour.²⁶ Hjalti Skjeggjason’s disrespectful verse about Freyja may have been only a prominent example of a tendency in the times, perhaps affecting the young in particular, to regard the Aesir not as awe-inspiring beings but rather, as Snorri Sturluson learnt to know them, the harmless and even half-comic heroes of an obsolete folk-tale. The eddic poem ‘Trymskvadet’, describing how the red-bearded giant-killer Thor was obliged to dress up as a very unconvincing bride in order to recover his hammer, and the tale of how Odin stole the mead of poetry in a raid on the mountain home of its owner, the giant Suttung, and of his flight home as an overweight eagle whose emergency defecation of his surplus burden brought bad poetry into the world, entirely lack the sense of the numinous that we associate with gods and are closer to the harmless fun of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. There is an air of almost affectionate contempt to such stories that is not far removed from the mood of Hjalti’s ditty at the Lawrock in 998.

A grave excavated at Skriddalur, on the banks of the Thórisár river in eastern Iceland, in 1995 and dated to a period shortly after 955- 957 by the find of a single English coin minted by King Eadwig, has been described as one of the wealthiest ever found in the country. The occupant, a man of between thirty and forty years of age, had been buried with his horse, his sword, shield, axe, spear and arrow points, whetstones for sharpening his sword, as well as weights for trading purposes and a flint for making fire, and it has been suggested that this comparative wealth may reflect a deliberate attempt to revive the status of Heathen practices and customs in the northern world in the face of Christianity’s advances, much as the elaborately Heathen Île de Groix ship-burial off the coast of southern Brittany may record a reaction against the Christianization of Rollo and his forces in nearby Normandy after 912.²⁷

The expression of Heathen spirituality could take different forms. We have seen how Ingolf, the first settler, threw his high-seat pillars into the sea on sighting the coast of Iceland, vowed to build his home at the place where they came ashore, and kept his vow. Thorolf Mostrarskegg sanctified a mountain on his land and forbade anyone even to look it at with an unwashed face. In Hrafnkels Saga we met a chieftain so devout that he killed the boy who blasphemed against Frey by riding the horse as though it were just any stallion. Literary creations or historical beings, it is hard to imagine men of the stripe of Ingolf, Thorolf and Hrafnkel wandering away from the Lawrock after Thorgeir’s speech and calmly taking their place in a queue to be baptized in the Öxará river. By the summer of 999, Heathendom may have declined into something men were less willing to kill for, and not at all willing to die for.

These are all modern attempts at understanding that offer rational explanations of why Thorgeir’s decision was accepted. As such they have a natural attraction: when Thorgeir lay down in his booth and covered his head with his cloak, he was ‘thinking through’ the pros and cons of the decisions he had to take. With a little more concern for their personal comfort, this is the approach modern politicians might take when faced with an important decision. Rational theories to account for the enigma of Thorgeir’s decision have at times been supplemented by explanations that invoke the irrational. The Christian author of the History of the Ancient Kings of Norway, Theodoricus Monachus, believed that divine intervention had taken place at the Althing meeting and that god had touched Thorgeir’s mind.²⁸ In more recent times the theory of divine intervention has been revived, though the divinity in question is not the god of the Christians. Scholars have noted the precision with which Ari tells us that the Lawspeaker lay down and covered his head with his cloak, though he does not explain why this was important. Taken with the clear implication that he then lay undisturbed, and presumably fasting, for the following twenty-four hours, the suggestion has been made that he was engaged in a religious act, that Thorgeir sent his spirit on a journey to discover the will of the gods in the matter. The great Icelandic scholar, Sigurdur Nordal, was among the first to raise the possibility, suggesting that Thorgeir’s deliberation was an exercise to gain divine strength.²⁹ Comparisons have been drawn with scenes in saga literature which appear to describe the behaviour of poets engaged in the mystical act of seeking inspiration for a composition. The most familiar is from Egil’s Saga: ‘And as the autumn passed, Egil became very depressed, and often sat with his head down in his cloak. Arinbjørn spoke to him and asked among other things: “. . . What are you composing now? Let me hear it”.’ For the author of the saga the state of inspiration, whether in the mystical art of composing poetry or in divination, was associated with this covering of the head with the cloak.³⁰ In the Geirmundar tháttr, the poet Bragi appears to use mystical techniques associated with composing poetry to acquire supernatural information concerning three children who are playing on the floor in front of him, at the conclusion of a scene in which he is described as sitting in a high-seat, playing with a stick in his hand and ‘mumbling into his cloak’. Ari does not tell us that Thorgeir mumbled or muttered, but the use of a cloak around the head or face to withdraw from the visible into the interior and invisible world seems to have been a part of the practices of both composition and divination. The shaman described in the Historia Norwegie seance covered himself with a cloth or cloak for the duration of his spirit journey to ensure that no living being, such as a fly, could disturb the trance with its presence.³¹

The suggestion that Thorgeir engaged in an oracular consultation of a shamanic nature provides a credible explanation of why the Heathen majority accepted his decision. It was because they knew how it had been taken. It was the way things were done, and they accepted the result of the process, whether they liked it or not. Odin was well known for his enigmatic and inscrutable ways and, while it may have disappointed them that the king of the gods should have solicited his own demise in this way, it may not entirely have surprised them. Indulging the further implications of this for a moment, it affords us the rare spectacle of an old god finally wearying of the demands of his position and with a sigh of relief handing over to a younger god with fresh ideas. Unlike the god of the Christian, Odin felt that he understood little of the world he had created, and an insatiable curiosity to know more about it was his outstanding characteristic. His resignation would leave him free to wander the world with his staff and his long coat, broad-brimmed hat pulled down over his one good eye, in pursuit of more knowledge and more understanding.

Rimbert writes that, as soon as the chieftains were assembled, ‘the king began to discuss with them the mission on which our father had come. They determined that inquiry should be made by the casting of lots in order to discover what was the will of the gods.’³² The procedure followed was probably similar to that observed by Tacitus among the Danes.³³ This involved cutting a branch from a fruit-bearing tree and dividing it up into a number of smaller sections on which markings were made. These were then tossed on to a cloth spread on the ground. Three were picked up, studied, and their oracle interpreted by the priest or soothsayer, who was then able to give a categorical answer to the question asked. Continuing his narrative, Rimbert writes that ‘the lot decided that it was the will of God that the Christian religion should be established there’. It did not surprise Anskar, who had been assured in a vision that the outcome would be favourable, but it did surprise almost everyone else. An elderly chieftain rose to address the ‘noise and confusion’ in the crowd. He referred to personal experience of the benefits of Christianity in peril on the sea and at times of crisis, and stressed that the power of Christ lay in his being above fate, in his being always reliable, always trustworthy, always helpful to his worshippers. ‘Consider carefully,’ he said in conclusion, ‘and do not cast away that which will be to your advantage. For, inasmuch as we cannot be sure that our gods will be favourably disposed, it is good for us to have the help of this God who is always and under all circumstances able and willing to succour those who cry to Him.’ Despite support like this, King Bjørn was unable to give Anskar permission to preach at Birka until he had put the matter to a second assembly, in the southern part of his territory. Those in attendance were told what had happened at Birka, and ‘by divine providence the hearts of all became as one, so that they adopted the resolution passed by the former assembly and declared that they too would give their entire and complete assent’.³⁴ As we have seen, it proved a temporary triumph only for the Christian mission to the Swedes.

In both these cases, the decisive factor was unity. Whether the words he spoke were his own, or were dictated to him by Odin, there is no mistaking that this is what Thorgeir saw as the heart of what he had to say about the prospect of Iceland being divided along religious and legal lines: ‘let us all have one law and one religion. For this will turn out to be true, that if we rend asunder the laws we shall also rend the peace.’ From its beginnings in the 870s, Icelandic society, with its Heathens, its handful of Christians, its smattering of godless men who trusted only in their own might and main, and its syncretic gamblers who were happy enough to take out extra insurance against a bad harvest by adding Christ to their personal pantheon, had been what we would today call a pluralistic and multi-faith society. But when crisis threatened in 999 there was no doubt at all in the Lawspeaker’s mind: everyone should believe in the same god, or at least pretend to do so.

Abortion as a method of birth-control enjoys the advantage that the unborn child remains unseen during the process. Viking Age societies faced a harsher reality where newly born children, in certain circumstances, could be left outside to die of exposure. The practice seems always to have been regarded as shameful. ‘In those days poor people were permitted to carry their children out to die. But it was always considered bad,’ says the author of the Saga of Thorstein Oxfoot. The same point is made in the Saga of Gunnlaug Snaketongue,³⁶ though the example given there is not caused by poverty. An Icelander named Thorstein, a son of Egil Skallagrimsson, describes to a Norwegian friend skilled in the interpretation of dreams one in which two eagles on the roof of his house began a fight to the death for a lovely swan that belonged to him. The Norwegian told him it meant that his wife was pregnant with a daughter, and that the swan on the roof symbolized the child grown to a marriageable age. The eagles were two suitors who would both die in the fight for her hand. Like the Kievan prince Oleg, Thorstein attempted to outwit fate and told his wife that if she gave birth to a girl she must leave it outside to die. The author of the saga explains: ‘For when the land was still entirely Heathen, it was by way of being a custom that those men who had few means and many dependants would have their children left to die of exposure, though it was always considered a bad thing to do.’ His wife Jofrid rebuked him:

Both stories indicate that the children left out to die in this way were normally females. Women, as the bearers of children, were regarded as a biological liability in times of famine; and in times of war, the numbers of men killed set a greater premium on replacing lost males. Another factor in the economic equation that sustained the practice may have been the financial burden among poor farmers of the bridal dowry. There were exceptions to the general rule, though we need to reach ahead into the Christian era to find them. In the Swedish Dalalagen law code, preserved in a manuscript from the middle of the fourteenth century, with its content dated to about a century earlier, a passage on the punishment for killing a bride set the compensation due to her husband for his unborn daughters at double the rate for his unborn sons. But that Viking society was male-oriented is beyond all doubt: on memorial rune-stones in the east-coast Swedish province of Södermanland the number of sons commemorated could be as many as five and was often more, while the number of daughters referred to never exceeded two.

Below infant girls on the scale of human values were children born with severe physical deformities. Even when we have nominally come to terms with the fact that different periods of time use the mind in very different ways, the credence of the most learned men of the early medieval period such as scholars Alcuin, Rimbert and Adam of Bremen, to whom cynicism, suspicion, doubt or downright disbelief of some fantastical story or claim seemed utterly foreign, is still remarkable to us. In Adam we may read of the dog-headed offspring of the inhabitants of the Baltic terra feminarum, whose heads are down in their chests and who communicate by barking; or of the Alaner or Albanere, men born with grey hair; or of an unusually long-lived race of pale green people - and presume these to be essentially confessions of ignorance, a literary version of ‘here be dragons’. But deformities suggestive of some of these descriptions are mentioned in Viking Age law codes: children with their faces twisted down on to their chests; or with toes where their heels should be; or having skin like a dog. On, into the age of the written law code, it remained the law that such children could not be baptized but must be left outside to die of hunger or cold.³⁸

Among the many grave-mounds and fields excavated in Viking Age Scandinavia, only a handful of children’s graves have been identified. In the ten, large-scale Viking Age graveyards that have been completely excavated on Gotland, only three children had their own graves. Two small graves from the Mulde parish of Fröjel, dated to the eighth century, contained the remains of infants who had been cremated and laid to rest with beads, bracelets and animal-shaped bronze brooches. The grave-goods were proportionately smaller than normal size. Another grave at Vallstena, dated to the middle of the tenth century, was that of a girl of about five or six years of age. Her assortment of grave-goods included, among the beads and brooches, a brooch with a key, a pair of tweezers, a comb, and a knife on a chain. Unlike the Fröjel grave-goods, these were full-size. In Viking Age societies the key that was worn pinned at the breast was the symbol of a woman’s authority in the family, and the presence and significance of such a key-brooch in this particular little girl’s grave remains an enigma.

At the Ire grave-field in the parish of Hellvi, on the north of the island, the body of a boy aged about twelve was found, buried with a horse and a dog. Weapons, including a large sword, two spearheads, a penanular ring pin, a knife, and items pertaining to horses including a horse-comb, bridle and rings were found with him. A second boy of about the same age was also buried with horse and dog and a selection of grave-goods associated with the grave of an adult. The boys may have been from families of high standing; or the burial may only confirm the theory that, in a society in which infant mortality was common, perhaps as high as 50 per cent, children became adults and were treated as such beyond the age of twelve.³⁹

Thorgeir’s second important exemption was that old laws should stand as regards the eating of horse-flesh. We noted in earlier chapters the central importance of the preparation and consumption of horse-meat in the rituals of Heathen culture. Christians saw this as a blasphemous equivalent of the bread and wine taken at Holy Communion, and in the long and slow process of the conversion of the north generated a taboo against it that grew so powerful that even today horse is hardly eaten in the Scandinavian countries. Under the circumstances, this was a remarkable concession Thorgeir was offering. Even so, according to Ari, the dispensation was withdrawn a few years after the adoption of Christianity. This must have occasioned at the very least a change of diet, for at the time of the conversion the main form of subsistence in Iceland was livestock farming that included the management of herds of half-wild horses for food.⁴⁰ Once the critical early decades of cultural transition had been successfully negotiated, however, the use of horses as food seems to have resumed.⁴¹

Nothing to support Kalf’s accusation was found on Hallfred, but the poet’s record of resistance to the new religion was well known to the king and Kalf’s accusation was a gamble that might have paid off. Hallfred Ottarson was a historical person. Some time in the middle of the tenth century his father emigrated from Norway and settled at Vatnsdal, in the north of Iceland. The short saga about him is one of a handful set in the tenth century that tell the stories of young Icelandic poets who fall in love and whose love is either unrequited or in some other way troubled. They compose erotic poetry about the objects of their desire that brings them into conflict with rivals, or with the law. Some of them, like the rivals symbolized by the two eagles in the Saga of Gunnlaug Snaketongue, die as a direct result of their love. The sagas are improvisations woven around the contents of the poetry these young men left behind them. Unlike the sagas themselves, their verses are probably contemporary survivals and what can be gleaned from them has a high degree of historical credibility.⁴³ Poetry had a status close to divine in northern Heathendom. If the goði were responsible for maintaining the practical relationship that existed between men and gods, the skalds were the curators of the metaphysical superstructure of lore that lay behind the rituals. In both of Snorri’s variant accounts of his origins, Odin is equally the inventor of poetry. A special relationship existed between him and his poets and they will have felt the cultural threat that lay behind Christianity more keenly than most. What makes Hallfred Ottarson so fascinating as a poet is that his verses, and the short saga in which they are embedded, afford us a rare insight into a mind tormented at the personal level by the enforced change of faiths.

In Snorri’s view Hallfred was one of the greatest skalds and he uses many examples of his work to illustrate and explain the poetic art in the textbook skáldskaparmál section of the Prose Edda. Hallfred had the unique distinction of being a court-poet to the Heathen earl Håkon the Bad, for whom he composed the Hákonardrápa in about 990; and to Håkon’s Christian successor as ruler of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason. According to his saga, Hallfred and Olaf met for the first time shortly after Olaf came to power. Hallfred and his crew were trying to leave Norway to avoid being forced to become Christians, but were prevented from sailing by bad weather. Kristni Saga suggests that they were among those detained by Olaf in Trondheim after the outlawing from Iceland of Thangbrand the missionary.⁴⁴ The king preached to them at his court in Lade. Despite Olaf’s proven record of force against those who opposed him, Hallfred dared to set conditions for his baptism: the king must grant him a permanent attachment as his court poet, and he must be his godfather at the baptismal ceremony. Olaf agreed, Hallfred was baptized and his religious instruction began. The saga relates that one day not long afterwards he approached the king and asked him to listen to some verses he had composed in his honour. When the king replied that he was too busy Hallfred said that was his prerogative, but that if he refused to listen, then he would abandon the new faith. He went on to express his disappointment at the quality of the lore associated with the new faith which the king had forced upon him. The king complained that he was a vandrædaskáld, a troublesome poet, but agreed to listen, and the nickname stuck. Hallfred’s guarded hostility towards the new faith, and the fact that it had been forced on him, came close to getting him in very serious trouble with the king. In a remarkable scene involving the two and played out before an audience of Olaf’s retainers, Hallfred composes a short series of verses that flirts perilously with his love of the old gods, driving the king to growing anger and frustration as he uses all his art to delay the revelation of the real subjects of his kennings or metaphorical disguises until the very end of his verses.⁴⁵ It is almost as though, in this virtuoso display of his art, Hallfred is bidding a last farewell to the religious culture that had so enriched his poetry and brought him so much pleasure. Although the love-story then takes over for much of the rest of the saga, the theme of Hallfred’s troubled relationship with Christianity returns at the end. The poet, now about forty years old, is sailing back to Iceland with the intention of settling down at last. He falls ill on the voyage, and in his dying moments sees his female guardian-spirit, dressed in a coat of chain mail, striding across the waves behind the ship. He rejects her, but in his last verse remains uncertain of his fate after death.⁴⁶

Olaf, tormentor, mentor and finally gift-giver, was by this time long dead. He survived the conversion of the Icelanders by no more than two or three months. The Ágrip relates that he had married a sister of his former Viking raiding partner Svein Forkbeard, now securely in possession of the throne of Denmark. The marriage was the subject of obscure complications involving a ruler of Poland to whom she had already been married against her will. In Olaf’s view, though seemingly not in Svein’s, this invalidated the marriage. The old rivalry for power in south and eastern coastal Norway between Danes and Norwegians revived, with Svein withholding his sister’s dowry, and Olaf gathering an army with which he intended to confront him in Denmark. Unfortunately for him, his violent imposition of the new religion had left him with few friends in his hour of need. He sailed to Wendland with eleven ships, but the army that he was expecting to follow him simply turned back once he was out of sight. Olaf sailed on, hoping to link up with friends across the Baltic who had formed part of his hird in his days as a Viking leader. Svein was much the more powerful and influential leader of the two, however. He persuaded the Swedish King Olaf and the Norwegian Earl Erik, a son of Håkon the Great, to join forces with him, and their vast fleet encountered Olaf Tryggvason’s flotilla in a battle at Svolder. Despite the overwhelming odds against them, Olaf’s forces are said to have acquitted themselves bravely, but in the end they were defeated. As the battle neared its close he was seen alive astern on the high-deck of his enormous longship, the Long Serpent. Earl Erik moved aft to confront him, ‘a light flashed before him, as though it were lightning, and when the light disappeared, the king himself was gone’.⁴⁸ Olaf’s body was never found. Remarkable rumours attended upon his disappearance, including one that he had escaped with his life and wandered to the Holy Land and entered a monastery. To others it seemed obvious that he had fallen or jumped overboard. With obvious admiration for his missionary work, the Ágrip concludes that, however Olaf died, ‘it is likely that God has his soul’. Had Olaf Tryggvason’s body been found at the time then perhaps he, and not the next Olav to rule the Norwegians, would have become the patron saint of Norway.

If, in the longer perspective, the enrolment of the Icelanders in the gradual unification of European peoples within a single religious faith was both unavoidable and desirable, in the shorter run the benefits were perhaps harder to identify. At the individual level, as travellers and traders, the conversion may have spared them the simple embarrassment of being old-fashioned in a modern world, country bumpkins clinging to outmoded ideas at the rim of the known world. Politically it may have preserved their proud independence by averting the immediate threat of an invasion from Norway, though Olaf Tryggvason’s death preserved that even more surely. And yet one cause of the decline and eventual fall of the commonwealth was that it never managed to harmonize the two social realities that were present at its birth, the democratic and the aristocratic. To the medieval mind, the idea of a society with no formal leadership, or at best an ad hoc leadership, was astonishing to the point of being unnatural. Something of the same surprise in Adam of Bremen’s observation Apud illos non est rex, nisi tantum lex (‘Among them there is no king, there is only the law’) lies behind Dudo of St-Quentin’s recording of Rollo’s response to the Frankish emissary who had asked for the name of their leader. ‘We have no leader. We are equal. You will have to negotiate with all of us.’ But even Rollo, once he had become a respectable, landowning Christian leader, saw the necessity of abandoning the egalitarian model of leadership if his duchy were to survive and prosper.

Adam died in 1060, well within living memory of the Saga Age, but in its own way his description of life among the Icelandic settlers is as much an idealization as the dramatizations of the Family Sagas in the thirteenth century. A harsher and more disturbed picture of life in post-conversion Icelandic society emerges from the pages of the sagas collectively known as the Sturlunga Saga, after a leading family whose fortunes are among those described in them. After 100 years or so of relative stability, in about the middle of the twelfth century Icelandic society entered a period of violent chaos. The Sturlung Age, as it was known, was characterized by a power struggle of a particularly vicious kind. In the Sturlunga Saga we meet chieftains who have their enemies tortured, maimed, castrated and blinded; who kill the old as readily as the able-bodied; and priests who abuse their calling and openly take mistresses. This helpless spiral into barbarism may have been encouraged by the half-hearted abandonment of one set of cultural mores and values, and the imperfect and unconvinced adoption of another and very different set that led, over time, to a state of confused moral disorientation from which it proved too hard to recover. ⁵⁰ In 1263 the exhausted combatants handed over control of the country to the crown of Norway. Almost seven centuries would pass before Iceland regained its independence.