The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  The slaves succeeded in murdering Hjorleif and his companions. Then they loaded the ship’s longboat with all the chattels it would hold, together with the women, and fled from that place which is now called Hjorleifshöfdi. They steered for some islands they saw out to sea to the southwestward, and took up their abode there.

  Ingólf had sent two of his slaves, Vifill and Karli, westward from Ingólfshöfdi to look for his high-seat posts. When they came to Hjorleifshöfdi they found the dead men and hurried back to tell Ingólf the tidings.

  Now Ingólf sailed west to Hjorleifshöfdi and, when he saw his foster brother’s corpse, exclaimed, “Small things led to the undoing of this brave, true man; but so it goes with those who will not sacrifice.”

  Ingólf buried Hjorleif and his companions and took charge of their ship and chattels.

  Then he climbed a headland and seeing some islands to the southwest concluded that the slaves might have gone there in the longboat.

  He found Hjorleif’s slaves on the islands at a place called Isthmus, eating a meal. Though the slaves scattered in terror, Ingólf slew them all. The place Dufthak was killed is now called Dufthak’s Scar. Most of the slaves threw themselves off the cliffs and these islands have since been called Vestmannaeyjar [Westman Islands]. Taking the widows of his murdered countrymen with him, Ingólf went back to Hjorleifshöfdi, where he and his people passed a second winter.

  After their first raiding voyage to Tilli, during which they had reconnoitred the island’s coasts, the foster brothers came to a temporary parting of the ways. Raids on Tilli would have been less risky than attacks on British or Continental targets, but also less rewarding. When the next Viking spring came round, Leif opted to try his luck in Ireland, while Ingólf chose to have another go at Tilli.

  Leif, or Hjorleif, as he came to be called, seems to have made the right decision, for he returned considerably richer in loot and slaves.

  At this juncture something traumatic happened at home in Norway. Perhaps the old quarrel with the Atli clan flared up, or the foster brothers became embroiled in a new feud involving “manslaughters” and were banished from Norway just as, in later times, Erik the Red would be banished from Iceland.

  Whatever the extremity may have been, Ingólf asked the gods for advice and an oracle told him his future lay in Iceland. Thereupon the brothers departed their homeland, taking portable wealth, slaves, and family with them.

  For unknown reasons (perhaps another difference of opinion between two stiff-necked warriors) the brothers went ashore at widely separated points in Tilli. Most significantly, neither selected a good, or even marginal, settlement site. Instead, both chose places along the southeast coast, most of which was an almost uninhabitable desert of lava and outwash plains. Although inhospitable to human settlement, it was well suited to marauding Vikings looking for safe places to lair.

  Ingólf wintered at Ingólfshöfdi (as it is still called), a wind- and sea-swept pimple of rock and sand only a few acres in extent, lying under the brooding bulk of the glacier-capped Oroefa volcano sixty miles west from Horn. Tenuously linked to the mainland by a seven-mile sand and gravel bar criss-crossed by tidal gulleys, it is now frequented only by seals and seabirds. It can be reached from the landward side at low tide, but only after fording scores of fresh- and salt-water rivulets running through extensive quicksands and quagmires. Screaming multitudes of skuas pursue those with the hardihood to intrude upon these sodden wastelands.

  Hjorleif rejected this, his foster brother’s choice, in favour of a volcanic rock embedded in the sterile coastal plain below the mighty Myrdalur Glacier seventy miles west of Ingólfshöfdi. This triangular outcrop was almost surrounded by a morass of black, quaking sand and protected on three sides by steep cliffs.2

  Ingólfshöfdi was almost inaccessible from the land. Hjorleifshöfdi was hardly more accessible. Ingólfshöfdi offered no sustenance for a settler; Hjorleifshöfdi, precious little. However, both were so difficult to reach, either by land or sea, that men roosting on them could have felt reasonably secure no matter how much enmity their presence in Tilli might have aroused.

  Vikings were not masochists. It is inconceivable that they would voluntarily have chosen such desolate sites as these, had they been able to winter in one of the well-sheltered havens lying to the east or to the westward.

  Historians have generally accepted Landnámabók’s thesis that the Westman Islands3 derived their name from Ingólf ’s slaughter there of the slaves who killed Hjorleif. However, as we have seen in chapter 14, the Vestmannaeyjar had been inhabited by people the Norse deemed Westmen, since the mid-seventh century. I conclude it was from these people that the little archipelago took its name, that its Westman inhabitants received Hjorleif ’s fleeing slaves, and that the vengeful Ingólf raided Heimaey, the chief and the only habitable island in the group, and slaughtered some or all of its inhabitants, together with the fugitive slaves.

  Such a raid would have invited retaliation from any surviving islanders and from the residents of the adjacent coast of Tilli proper. I believe the likelihood of such retaliation is why Ingólf retreated to the cold comfort of Hjorleifshöfdi, there to put in his second winter in comparative safety.

  Insofar as homesteading was concerned, Ingólf ’s second summer on Tilli’s coasts proved as unrewarding as the first. Although any amount of good land existed, it clearly was not his for the taking.

  Up to this point, the existing version of Landnámabók presents a relatively comprehensive account of events. But the remainder of Ingólf ’s story is severely truncated, confused as to time and place, and consists mainly of what seem to be snippets that have somehow survived a dissolution of the narrative matrix in which they were originally embedded. In what follows I have attempted to arrange these bits and pieces in meaningful order. All the information preserved in Landnámabók is included, together with what little is contained in the single paragraph Íslendingabók devotes to Ingólf. Nothing has been added.

  The following summer Ingólf cruised the coast to the westward. He built a house at Skálafell and passed the third winter there. Then said Karli, “To an evil end did we pass by goodly countrysides that we should take up our abode on this outlying headland.”

  In those seasons Vifill and Karli found the high-seat pillars on Orns Knoll beneath the heidi [lava barrens]. In the following spring Ingólf went down over the heidi and took up his abode where the high-seat pillars had come ashore. He dwelt south of Reykjavik. His high-seat pillars are still there, in the Eldhouse [fire house].

  Afterwards Ingólf seized land between Olfus River and Hvalfjördur, west of Brynjudaisá River, and all between that and the Axe River, and all the headlands to the southward. Ingólfsfjall west of Olfus River is where he seized land for himself. Some say he was buried there.

  Ingólf gave Vifill his freedom and he settled at Vifillstofts and from him is named the mountain called Vifillfel. There he abode for a long time and was an upright man. Karli ran away with a bondswoman. Ingólf saw smoke against Olfus Water, and found Karli there.

  Ingólf was the most renowned of all the Icelandic settlers for he came here to an uninhabited land and was the first to set up an abode upon it, and the others who settled there afterwards did so induced by his example.

  We can imagine Ingólf’s mounting frustration as, in his third season, he cruised northwest beyond the Westman Islands to Olfus Water—the estuary of the Olfus River. Behind this coast lay some of the most fertile land in Tilli, but its inhabitants were not about to let him settle any part of it.

  Instead of returning to Hjorleifshöfdi at the approach of the third winter, this time Ingólf pressed westward along the Reykjanes peninsula. This largely desert tongue of volcanic rock juts thirty miles out into the Atlantic, a waste of relatively recent lava barrens. Modern visitors to Iceland landing at Keflavik airport must drive the length of the peninsula in order to reach the capital. They are generally appalled by its almost lunar sterility. Indeed, it would b
e hard to find a more inhospitable and forbidding place. Only outlaws with every man’s hands against them would have chosen to linger in its desolation.

  The exact spot where Ingólf wintered is uncertain but the references to Skálafell and Reykjavik provide clues. There is a field of bubbling hot springs at the extreme southwestern tip of the peninsula, from whose steaming emanations (particularly visible in cold weather) the feature derives its name: Reykjanes—Smoking Headland. Most historians have assumed that the existing Reykjavik, capital city of the island, is the one referred to in the Ingólf narrative. The original Reykjavik was more likely to have been one of several harbours at the head of the Reykjanes peninsula.

  The springs themselves are only a hundred yards from a prominent hill which is still called Skálafell—House Hill—perhaps in recognition of the fact that it was here Ingólf built his skála.

  The best indication of where the party wintered is to be found in the caustic comment of the slave, Karli: “To an evil end did we pass by goodly countrysides that we should take up our abode on this outlying headland.”

  During this third winter Karli and Vifill are said to have found the high-seat posts Ingólf had thrown overboard on first sighting Iceland. A major lacuna then occurs in the Landnámabók account. “Afterwards,” we are told, Ingólf seized what amounted to most of southwestern Iceland.

  After what?

  It is nowhere stated in the surviving sources (nor admitted by latter-day historians) that the Norse encountered any resistance in settling Iceland, yet everything points to such a conclusion. How else are we to account for the Norse failure to plant their initial settlements in the south and east of the island unless they were prevented from doing so? Landnámabók is emphatic in stating that these were, in fact, the last regions to be settled, although they were closest to Europe; had plenty of good land; thriving birch forests; a multitude of safe and convenient harbours; and had nearly limitless resources of wildfowl, fish, and flesh. Here, surely, was where the first incomers from Europe would have settled. Indeed, this is where the earliest immigrants did make their homes. Only . . . they were not Norse.

  I think it self-evident that Ingólf and those who had preceded him were unable to make a lodgement in the east and the southeast because these districts were firmly in the possession of a population that had no intention of relinquishing them. The same was undoubtedly true of most of the rest of habitable Iceland.

  The several years Ingólf spent coasting the island would have made it clear that he could never establish himself there through his own unaided efforts. This being the case, I believe he did what other Norse “pioneers” had earlier done in Shetland and Orkney, and what Erik Rauda would later do in Greenland.

  I believe Ingólf sailed back to Norway, there to assemble a fleet manned by land-hungry adventurers whom he then led in an invasion of Iceland.

  He would have had little difficulty raising such a force. Apart from the Norsemen’s natural appetite for loot and land, there was the fact that King Harald Fairhair was then engaged in particularly brutal fashion in forcibly unifying Norway. Many independently minded warriors preferred to emigrate rather than submit to Harald’s mercies. The names of a number of such are to be found in the pages of Landnámabók (the emphasis is mine):

  Thord went to Iceland and, under Ingólf ’s direction, took land between Ulfars River and Leiruvag.

  Hall went to Iceland and, with Ingólf ’s direction, took land from Leiruvag to Mogils River.

  Helgi Bjola went to Iceland from the Hebrides and was with Ingólf the first winter [of settlement] and settled under his direction the whole of Kjarlarnes between Mogils River and Myrdalur River.

  Orlyg settled land by direction of Helgi [see above] between Mogils River and Osvifs Brook....

  Brief as these notes are, they indicate that a far-reaching and massive occupation of western Iceland took place under Ingólf ’s aegis. Ingólf probably launched his invasion in the almost uninhabitable, and so perhaps undefended, lava landscape around present-day Reykjavik. Having consolidated a bridgehead there, his forces struck northward to the Hvitá valley and eastward into the Olfus valley. Ingólf himself eventually seized land in Olfus, land where he reputedly lies buried below Ingólfsfjall, the mountain that bears his name.

  The success of Ingólf’s invasion would have paved the way for further incursions in the west; then in the southwest; and finally, as Alban resistance crumbled, in the southeast and east. It is certain that, by the time of Ingólf ’s death, c. 900, Norsemen had occupied most of habitable Tilli.

  If there should be any lingering doubts as to what actually took place, this ingenuous statement from Íslendingabók should help dispel them.

  At that time [the time of the land taking] Iceland was wooded between mountains and seashore. Then Christian men, whom the Norse called papar, were here; but afterwards they went away, because they did not wish to live here together with heathen men.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CRONA

  THE MAJORITY OF VALUTA CLANS SEEM TO HAVE emigrated to Crona before Viking raids on Tilli became a major threat. Some of the more prescient crofters probably followed suit; however, it took Ingólf ’s invasion to trigger a mass exodus.

  History does not answer the question of what happened to the Christians “who did not wish to live together with heathen men,” nor tell us where they might have gone. Not that they had any great range of choice. To have attempted an eastward flight to their old homelands would have meant flying into the dragon’s mouth. No reliable sanctuary was then to be found in the British Isles, and there was precious little assurance of safety in the western reaches of continental Europe.

  The most sensible course for fugitive papar would have been to head westward to Crona and, if necessary, beyond. I have no doubt but that this is what most of them did.

  Those who owned large vessels doubtless loaded them to the gunwales with stock and chattels and sailed direct for southwestern Crona. Those possessing only small craft would have crossed from western Iceland to the nearest point on the east Greenland shore before coasting south. Some overloaded or storm-tossed vessels may have foundered in passage, but the fate of their crews and passengers would hardly have been less dire than that of any of their fellows who attempted to survive the new regime in Tilli.

  Either because they had no boats, or because they possessed a particularly strong faith in the efficacy of the Lord’s protection, some people evidently did remain in Tilli, although taking the precaution of withdrawing into regions which would have been of little or no interest to the first waves of Norse invaders.

  One such refuge was the gnarled maze of mountains and icy fiords of the northwestern peninsula. This desolate and now largely depopulated region boasts a singularly high concentration of place names derived from cross or church (such as Krossi, Krossfjall, Kirkjuhammar, Kirkjugólf) which seem to predate the Christianization of Iceland. The implication is that the northwest may still have been inhabited by papar, at least until latter-day Norse land takers such as Erik Rauda’s father descended upon it.1

  Other fugitives may have withdrawn into the interior, to the isolated southern valley of the Skaftá River, and to the shores of Lagarfljót, deep inland from the eastern fiords.

  However, wherever they went, those who failed to flee the island would sooner or later have found themselves enmeshed by the Norse doom. Writing fifty years ago in Herdsmen and Hermits, Tom Lethbridge asked:

  Is it beyond the bounds of probability that some people, not monks but perhaps genuine farmers, were living in Iceland at the time of the [Norse] Settlement? Who, for instance, were the cave dwellers [mentioned in Landnámabók]? “Torfi slew the men of Kropp, twelve of them together. He also promoted the slaughter of the Holmesmen [Islanders], and he was at Hellisfitar, with Olugi the Black and Sturla the Godi, when eighteen cave dwellers were slain there.”

  The silence of the Landnámabók [as to the identity of these victims] may just cover a fe
eling of shame because the chronicler’s Viking ancestors had murdered the lot. The passage quoted above reads very much like an account of the early Tasmanian farmers’ actions against the Aborigines.

  Those were rough days in Norse Iceland, when your neighbours might burn your house over your head at night because of some rude remark you made when you were drunk at a feast. And it was much better not to have any scruffy looking men living around in earth houses or on islands. Why, they might steal your lambs, or anything.

  Norse land-takers in Iceland were certainly a rough lot. The book of settlement, Landnámabók, chronicles twelve pitched battles between Norsemen; five bloody ambushes; seven “burnings-in” (when whole households went up in smoke and flame); thirty-six murders (always called manslaughters); and twenty-four feuds and duels causing loss of life. I tallied 260 violent deaths of Norsemen at the hands of Norsemen in a span of less than thirty years. Apart from the references cited by Lethbridge, there is, however, almost no mention of how lesser breeds were treated.

  Fugitives who took refuge in the northwest amongst the crags and fiords surrounding the Dranga glacier may have survived the longest; but, in the end they too would have been overwhelmed as Norse latecomers penetrated into even the most peripheral places. Death or slavery would have been their lot.2

  Rounding Crona’s South Cape, fugitive Albans entered a region that seemed to beg for settlement. Beginning just north of Cape Farewell, a fretwork of islands and headlands stretched for 160 miles to the northwest. Behind this protective screen lay some two dozen fiords and major waterways. Although the land between and around these channels was mostly rough and rolling, it was surprisingly well vegetated. The wall of Inland Ice stood far enough to the north and east so that its frigid presence was only indirectly felt. All in all, this new country ought to have looked almost as good to Alban incomers as the one they had left behind.