Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Chapter 8: Thingvellir, Brattahlid and L’Anse aux Meadows. The Norse in the North Atlantic 835–1000

It was in the North Atlantic that the Vikings showed the full potential of their seafaring abilities. Using islands like stepping stones, the Vikings gradually explored the North Atlantic, sailing in stages from Norway to Shetland, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland until, finally, around 1000, they became the first Europeans to set foot on the North American continent. Unlike the Viking expansion in Britain, Ireland and Frankia, which was initially motivated by plunder, or the expansion into Russia, which was motivated by trade, the expansion into the North Atlantic was from the beginning a search for land to settle. Successful Viking colonies were founded in the Faeroe Islands and Iceland, and these became the only permanent extensions of the Scandinavian world to emerge from the Viking Age. Everywhere else that Vikings settled they were assimilated by the native populations within a few generations. In the Faeroes and Iceland, however, there were no native populations to assimilate the settlers and Scandinavian cultural traditions continued to flourish and evolve.

Although they made it their own, the Vikings were not the first explorers of the North Atlantic. For at least two centuries before the beginning of the Viking Age, Irish monks had been setting out in their curachs in search of remote islands where they could contemplate the divine in perfect solitude, disturbed only by the cries of seabirds and the crashing of the waves on the shore. The monks developed a tradition of writing imrama, travel tales, the most famous of which is the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis (The Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot). The Navigatio recounts a voyage purported to have been made by St Brendan (d. c. 577) in search of the mythical Isles of the Blessed, which were believed to lie somewhere in the western ocean. The imrama certainly show a familiarity with the North Atlantic – the Navigatio, for example, describes what are probably icebergs, volcanoes and whales – but they also include so many fantastical and mythological elements that it is impossible to disentangle truth from invention. There is no evidence to support claims that are often made that St Brendan discovered America before the Vikings, but Irish monks certainly did reach the Faeroe Islands and Iceland before them. Ash from peat fires containing charred barley grains found in windblown sand deposits at Á Sondum on Sandoy in the southern Faeroes has been radiocarbon-dated to between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. Although no trace of buildings has yet been found, the ash probably came from domestic hearths and had been thrown out onto the sand to help control erosion, which was a common practice at the time. As peat was not used as a fuel in Scandinavia at this time but was widely used in Britain and Ireland, this evidence suggests that seafaring Irish monks had discovered the Faeroes not long after Ireland’s conversion to Christianity. No physical traces of an Irish presence in Iceland have been found in modern times, but early Viking settlers claimed that they found croziers and other ecclesiastical artefacts there. There are also two papar place-names (see ch. 4) associated with Irish monks, Papos and Papey, in the east of Iceland. The monks, all being celibate males, did not found any permanent self-sustaining communities in either place: they were always visitors rather than settlers.

The Viking expansion into the North Atlantic was originally a by-product of the raids and settlements on the Scottish islands, which began around the end of the eighth century. There the Vikings came into contact with Irish monks and it was probably from them that the Vikings learned about the existence of other islands to the north. Just two full days’ sail north-west of Shetland, Vikings reached the Faeroes early in the ninth century. Writing around 825, the Irish monk Dicuil says that the Vikings had already forced his brother monks to stop using the islands as a retreat. The Vikings found the islands well populated with sheep, which had probably been introduced by the monks as a ready source of food. These sheep gave the islands their name, the fær-øer, the ‘sheep islands’. Though mountainous, windswept and treeless, the islands have a mild climate for their northerly latitude and have good pastures and plenty of rough grazing land. This made them attractive to settlers from western Norway and the Hebrides, where pastoralism was more important than arable farming. The islands’ huge seabird colonies offered a rich seasonal source of meat and eggs (though seabirds are very much an acquired taste), and pilot whales were also hunted.

According to Icelandic and Faeroese historical traditions, the first Viking settler of the Faeroes was Grímur Kamban. Grímur was said to have settled at Funningur, by a sheltered bay on Eysturoy, the second largest of the Faeroe islands. As Grímur’s second name is of Gaelic origin (from cambán, meaning ‘crooked one’), he had probably spent some time living in the Hebrides. He was probably not unusual in this. Recent DNA analysis of the Y chromosomes of modern Faeroese men indicates that 87 per cent of them have Scandinavian ancestry. Analysis of modern Faeroese women’s mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down only through the female line, indicates that 84 per cent of them have British or Irish origins. As it was in the Hebrides, the majority of Viking settlers in the Faeroes must have been single men who acquired wives en route. The number of settlers is not known but by the end of the Viking Age, the islands’ population was probably between 2,000 and 4,000. The isolation and small size of the Faeroese population has left it unusually vulnerable to diseases caused by recessive genes. One potentially fatal genetic disorder, carnitine transporter deficiency, is 1,000 times more common in the islands than anywhere else in the world.

The Vikings’ next step out into the Atlantic – the discovery and settlement of Iceland – is one of the best documented events of the Viking Age. Medieval Icelanders were fascinated by genealogy, not only because, as emigrants, they wanted to know where their families came from, but because such knowledge was essential when it came to establishing property rights. To begin with, family traditions about the settlement period were passed down orally from one generation to the next, but in the early twelfth century they were committed to writing in the two earliest works of Icelandic history, Landnámabók and Íslendingabók, both of which were written in the Old Norse language. Íslendingabók (‘The Book of the Icelanders’), a short chronicle of Icelandic history from the discovery of Iceland to 1118, was written between 1122 and 1132 by Ari Thorgilsson, a priest from Snæfellsness. Ari relied on oral traditions and, for more recent events, on eyewitnesses, but he took care to establish the reliability of his informants, naming many of them, and avoiding Christian prejudice and supernatural explanations of events. Though not proven, it is generally thought that Ari was also the author of Landnámabók (‘The Book of the Settlements’), which gives details of the names, genealogies and land claims of hundreds of Iceland’s original Norse settlers.

The first Viking to visit Iceland was Gardar the Swede, who in c. 860 set out on a voyage from Denmark, where he had made his home, to the Hebrides, to claim some land his wife had inherited. While passing through the Pentland Firth, the straits that separate the Orkney Islands from the Scottish mainland, Gardar’s ship was caught in a storm and blown far out into the Atlantic. Gardar eventually sighted the mountainous coast of an unknown land. What Gardar saw was not at all inviting, it was the rugged Eastern Horn on Iceland’s forbidding south-east coast, guarded by high cliffs and huge scree slopes tumbling into the sea. Undeterred, Gardar began to follow the coastline westwards, eventually circumnavigating Iceland and establishing that it was an island. Gardar spent nearly a year exploring his new-found land, wintering at Husavik on Iceland’s north coast. When he set sail in the spring, Gardar was forced to abandon a man called Nattfari, together with a male slave and a bondswoman, when the small boat they were in went adrift. These three survived, inadvertently becoming Iceland’s first permanent inhabitants. Naming his discovery Gardarsholm (Gardar’s island) after himself, Gardar sailed east to Norway, where he began to sing its praises.

Another accidental visitor to Iceland around this time was Naddod the Viking. He was sailing from Norway to the Faeroe Islands when he was blown off course and made landfall in Iceland’s Eastern Fjords. Naddod climbed a mountain to look for signs of habitation and, seeing none, left in the middle of a heavy snowstorm. Naddod too gave favourable reports of the island, which he decided to call Snæland (Snowland). Shortly after Naddod’s return, the Norwegian Floki Vilgerdarson set out from Rogaland with the intention of settling in Naddod’s Snæland. Floki had a reputation as a great Viking warrior but he was a hopeless settler. Floki spent his summer hunting seals at Vatnesfjörður on Breiðarfjörður in north-west Iceland but he neglected to make any hay, with the result that all the livestock he had brought with him starved to death over the winter. This doomed his attempt at settlement but pack ice in the fjord prevented him sailing for home. By the time the pack ice finally broke up it was too late in the year to risk trying to return to Norway, so Floki was forced to stay another winter, this time at Borgarfjörður further to the south. Thoroughly disillusioned by his experiences, Floki decided to re-name Snæland ‘Iceland’. Floki’s name was the one that stuck even though his men gave more favourable reports of the island: the most enthusiastic of them, Thorolf, swore that butter dripped from every blade of grass. For this reason he was known ever afterwards as Thorolf Butter.

Thorolf must have been a born optimist. Iceland is a large volcanic island lying exactly on the mid-Atlantic ridge, where magma welling up from the mantle is gradually pushing Europe and America apart. Despite lying only just south of the Arctic Circle, the influence of the warm Gulf Stream current keeps the climate mild for the latitude. Glaciers and ice sheets on the mountains cover about 14 per cent of Iceland but the rest of the island is free of permafrost. Iceland’s combination of ice and fire must have reminded the settlers of the Viking creation myth, in which the world emerges in the void between the fire realm of Muspel and the frozen realm of Niflheim. Today, less than a quarter of Iceland is vegetated, the remainder of the unglaciated area being mainly barren lava fields and ash deserts. However, when it was discovered by the Vikings, around 40 per cent of Iceland was covered with low, scrubby, birch and willow woodland, so it would have looked considerably less bleak than it does today. Even so, Iceland turned out to be a distinctly marginal environment for European settlement and the settlers were very vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather and volcanic eruptions.

Hearing the reports circulating about Iceland, two Norwegian foster-brothers, Ingolf and Hjorleif, made a reconnaissance trip to the Eastern Fjords in the late 860s to assess the prospects for settlements. The foster-brothers had lost their estates paying compensation to jarl Atli of Gaular for killing his sons and they urgently needed a safe refuge. Liking what they saw the foster-brothers made preparations to emigrate. Ingolf had the resources to fund his expedition, but Hjorleif did not, so he set out on a víking trip to Ireland. Even the Viking settlement of an uninhabited land involved violence. In Ireland, Hjorleif plundered a hoard of treasure from a souterrain and captured ten Irish slaves to take with him to Iceland. According to the Lándnámabók, Ingolf and Hjorleif set out for Iceland again in 874. Study of layers of volcanic ash called tephra confirm the date. One of these layers, known as the landnám layer, which is found over almost all of the island, has been dated to 871 – 2. Evidence of human impact on the environment is found above the layer but not below it. Ingolf sacrificed to the gods and gained favourable auguries. Hjorleif did not bother: he never sacrificed. The two sailed in company until they sighted land and then split up. Hjorleif settled at once on the south coast at Hjörleifshöfði (‘Horleif’s Head’). Ingolf, seeking the guidance of the gods, cast the carved pillars of his high-seat overboard, vowing to settle wherever they were washed ashore. Finding the pillars would take Ingolf all of three years.

After spending the first winter at Hjörleifshöfði, Hjorleif wanted to sow crops. He had only brought one ox, so he made his slaves drag the plough. It wasn’t long before the slaves had had enough of this: they murdered Hjorleif and the other men in his party, and sailed off with his possessions and the women, to a group of islands off Iceland’s south-west coast. These became known after them as the Vestmannaeyjar (‘isles of the Irish’). Shortly after this, two of Ingolf’s slaves, who were following the coast looking for his high-seat pillars, came to Hjörleifshöfði and found Hjorleif’s body. Ingolf was saddened by the killing, ‘but so it goes,’ he said, ‘with those who are not prepared to offer up sacrifice.’ Ingolf guessed that the Irish had fled to the Vestmannaeyjar and went after them. Surprising the Irish while they were eating a meal, Ingolf slew some of them. The others died leaping off a cliff in their panic to escape.

After spending a third winter in Iceland, Ingolf finally found his high-seat pillars. Ingolf named the place Reykjavik, the ‘bay of smoke’, after the many steaming hot springs in the area. It is now Iceland’s capital. Ingolf took into possession the whole of the Reykjanes peninsula west of the River Öxará as his estate and settled his followers and slaves on it as his dependents. More settlers soon followed. The Landnámabók gives us the names of 400 leading settlers, and over 3,000 other (mainly male) settlers, who migrated to Iceland in the settlement period. As the named settlers brought wives, children, dependents and slaves with them, it is possible that around 20,000 people had migrated to Iceland by around 900. By the eleventh century the population had probably reached about 60,000, though there was little fresh immigration after c. 930, by which time all the best grazing land had been claimed. Most of the named settlers came from western Norway but there were also a few Swedes and Danes, as well as a significant number who came from the Norse colonies in the Hebrides. Many of this last group were second-generation emigrants and several of them, such as the powerful matriarch Aud the Deep-Minded, were already Christian, while others, like Helgi the Lean, who worshipped both Christ and Thor, were partly so. However, the religion did not take root in Iceland and it died out with the first generation of settlers. Even Aud was given a pagan ship burial by her followers. Some of this group were the product of mixed Norse-Celtic marriages and two of the leading settlers, Dufthakr and Helgi the Lean, claimed descent from the Irish king Cerball mac Dúnlainge (r. 842 –88). Many settlers, like Hjorleif, also took with them significant numbers of British and Irish slaves. Recent analysis of the DNA of modern Icelanders has revealed just how significant the British and Irish contribution to the settlement of Iceland was. Analysis of the Y chromosomes of Icelandic men indicate that 75 per cent have Scandinavian origins, while 25 per cent have British or Irish origins. Strikingly, analysis of mitochondrial DNA of Icelandic women shows that the majority – 65 per cent – have British or Irish origins, with only 35 per cent having Scandinavian origins. The sexual imbalance suggests that, as in the Hebrides and the Faeroes, a majority of the Viking settlers were single men of relatively low social rank, who perhaps had been unable to marry at home because they had no access to land. Although only a bare majority of the settlers were Scandinavian, their social, political and cultural dominance was total. This is most clearly seen in the Icelandic language which, apart from some personal names, shows only insignificant Celtic influences. As a result of Iceland’s isolation and cultural conservatism, modern Icelandic remains close to the dönsk tunga (‘Danish Tongue’), the common Old Norse language spoken by all Scandinavians in the Viking Age.

According to the traditions recorded in Landnámabók, Íslendingabók, and the later Icelandic family sagas, the settlers of Iceland and the Faeroes were exiles fleeing the tyrannical rule that King Harald Fairhair (d c. 930) is supposed to have imposed on Norway after he defeated his rivals at the battle of Hafrsfjord. This is unlikely to be true. The date of Harald’s victory is not known but it is unlikely to have taken place before 885 and was perhaps as late as 900. By this time the Faeroes had been long settled and the settlement of Iceland was already in full swing. Iceland was not fully settled until around 930, so Harald’s rule could have played a part in sustaining emigration but certainly cannot have been the initial cause. However, the Icelandic traditions probably do contain a deeper truth. The leaders of the settlement of Iceland were all members of the hersir class, local chieftains who made up the lower ranks of the aristocracy: there were no jarls or kings among the settlers. The hersir were the main losers in the growth of centralised authority in Scandinavia during the eighth and ninth centuries, as it steadily undermined their local autonomy and began to turn them into agents of the crown. For men of this class, the opportunity to emigrate to a land that was beyond the reach of kings must have been an attractive one. Those settlers who came from the Hebrides may have found Iceland attractive also because it was unpopulated, and so would be able to hold their land in greater security than in the isles, where they were always exposed to attack by the Gaels.

Most of the leading settlers, or lándnámsmenn (‘land-takers’), arrived in their own ships. These were not longships but sturdy merchant ships called knarrs. With shorter, broader and deeper hulls than longships, knarrs relied on sails alone, carrying only a couple of pairs of oars for manoeuvring in harbour. At the time of the settlements, knarrs probably had a cargo capacity of 25 –30 tons; later in the Viking Age knarrs were being built that could carry up to 50 tons of cargo. Sea trials with modern replicas have proved that knarrs were very seaworthy ships. Saga Siglar, a replica of a 50-foot long knarr, known as Skuldelev 1, found in Roskilde Fjord in Denmark, circumnavigated the world in 1984 –6 (though it later sank off the Spanish coast in 1992). The voyage to Iceland could take two to three weeks, often with stop-overs in Orkney, Shetland and the Faeroe Islands. The voyage cannot have been a comfortable experience. Knarrs were basically just large open boats without cabins to give crew and passengers shelter in bad weather. Tents were stretched over ships’ decks to provide shelter in harbour but it is unlikely that this could be done at sea because the tent would catch the wind and drive the ship off course. People probably had to huddle under sealskin or greased leather cloaks in the hold, along with the livestock, to keep warm. Nor was there any possibility of enjoying any hot food on the high seas. Shipwreck was a real possibility. In one bad year, of the thirty-five ships sailing to Iceland all but eight were wrecked.

In the early years of the settlement the lándnámsmenn found plenty of land to go around and they needed no formal legal institutions for establishing ownership. Possession was all. The lándnámsmenn claimed as much land as they thought they needed to support themselves and their free and servile dependents. One of the most prominent lándnámsmenn was a woman, Aud the Deep-Minded, the daughter of the famous Hebridean Viking Ketil Flatnose and widow of King Olaf the White of Dublin. After her husband’s death, Aud left Dublin and settled with her son Thorstein in Caithness in northern Scotland. After Thorstein was killed fighting the Scots, Aud took over leadership of his dependents and made the decision to emigrate to Iceland. While Viking Age Norse society was male dominated, it was not unusual for a woman to exercise authority, even though she had no formal role in public life. Norse society was hierarchical and, while an aristocratic woman might be inferior to an aristocratic man, she was always superior to everyone of lower social rank, whether they were men or women. Free-born Norse women of all social ranks enjoyed higher legal status than they did in Christian Europe. Women had the right to inherit property and a woman retained her property rights after marriage – her property did not become her husband’s as it did in Christian countries. Women also had the right to divorce their husbands if a marriage was unsuccessful. Once Christianity had become established in Scandinavia, women’s rights were gradually undermined as laws were bought into line with those prevailing in the rest of Europe.

Gender roles were clear-cut. Men ploughed, hunted, fished, traded and fought. Physically demanding crafts like blacksmithing and carpentry were also male preserves. Women’s lives were mainly confined to the home or family farm: they baked, brewed, spun thread, wove cloth, made clothes, milked the cows, churned butter, nursed the sick and looked after the children and, in wealthier households, managed the servants and slaves. Women wore the keys to the house and family strongbox on their belts as a symbol of their domestic authority. When their husbands were absent on business or campaign, women held full authority over the family estate and if they were widowed they took the place of their husbands unless they remarried. As the widow of a king, Aud’s authority over her followers and dependents would have been unquestioned. However, there was one male role she could not fulfil – she could not offer leadership in war, and it was undoubtedly this that lay at the root of her decision to emigrate.

Aud claimed several hundred square miles of land around Breiðarfjörður, settling where her high-seat pillars came ashore at Hvamm. The Laxdæla Saga describes how Aud divided out the land between her followers:

‘The same spring that Aud set up household at Hvamm, Koll [one of her Norwegian followers] married her grand-daughter Thorgerd. Aud gave, at her own cost, the bridal-feast, and let Thorgerd have for her dowry all Laxárdalur (‘salmon-river valley’); and Koll set up a household there on the south side of the Laxá river.

‘After that Aud gave to more men parts of her land-take. To Hord she gave all Hörðudalur as far as Skraumuhlaups River. He lived at Hörðubolstaðr, and was a man of the greatest mark, and blessed with noble offspring... Aud spoke to her men and said: “Now you shall be rewarded for all your work, for now I do not lack means with which to pay each one of you for your toil and good-will. You all know that I have given the Irishman named Erp, son of Jarl Meldun, his freedom, for far away was it from my wish that so high-born a man should bear the name of slave.” Afterwards Aud gave him the lands of Sauðafell, between Tunguá River and Midá River... To Sökkolf Aud gave Sökkólfdalur, where he lived to old age. Hundi was the name of one of her freedmen. He was of Scottish kin. To him she gave Hundadalur. The fourth of Aud’s slaves was called Vifil and to him she gave Vifilsdalur.’ (trans. Magnus Maguusson and Herman Pálsson).

Aud was not unusual in freeing her slaves. Iceland’s cool climate is unsuitable for intensive agriculture and the land was most economically used as pasture with widely dispersed farmsteads. Slaves could not be closely supervised under these circumstances so it made more sense to free them and make them rent-paying tenants instead. Slavery soon died out as a result. Except in the south-west, which became the most densely populated part of Iceland, most of the settlements were close to the sea: the interior was, as it still is, uninhabited.

The Icelandic economy depended mainly on animal husbandry, primarily cattle and sheep but with some pigs. Cattle needed to be kept indoors during the long winters and needed good fodder if they were to continue to provide milk. For this reason the hay crop was of crucial importance. Horses were bred both for transport and meat. Barley was grown on a small scale in sheltered areas near the south coast but grain and flour were mostly imported luxuries. This provided a diet rich in meat and dairy products but with little bread or fresh vegetables. Fishing, hunting of seals, seabirds and waterfowl, gathering seabirds’ eggs, berries and shellfish, and scavenging beached whales provided a significant supplement to the Icelanders’ diet. Despite the unbalanced diet, studies of the skeletal remains of early Icelanders show that the population was well-nourished and healthy. Timber was the main building material in Scandinavia, but it was in short supply in Iceland. The settlers adapted, building the walls of their longhouses out of blocks of turf laid on stone foundations, so that wood was only needed for the roofs (which were covered with turf). The turf gave excellent insulation against wind and cold.

As Iceland began to fill up with settlers it became increasingly lawless, as disputes easily escalated into protracted blood feuds. Local leadership was assumed by the goðar, a small group of wealthy chieftains who could offer advocacy and protection to smaller landowners in return for their political and military support. Goðar literally means ‘priest’, and the word is used as such in Scandinavia, but in Iceland it was a wholly secular hereditary office. However, it was not a closed class and men could rise into it or fall out of it according to their fortunes. Without the support of a goði it was all but impossible for an ordinary freeman to hold on to his land, but this did not mean that the goðar could take the loyalty of their followers for granted. As freemen they could, and did, transfer their allegiance to another goði if their opinions were not taken into account or their interests were neglected. A consequence of this was that Icelandic chieftaincies were political rather than territorial units, as a goði’s followers could be scattered over a wide area.

The most important governmental institution of Viking Age Scandinavia after monarchy was the thing, an assembly of freemen at which local disputes and criminal offences were judged and at which new laws were made. Vikings took this institution with them when they emigrated and thing place-names are common in the areas of Britain where they settled, for example Tynwald (Isle of Man), Thingwall (Wirral), Dingwall (Ross and Cromarty), and Tingwall (one each in Orkney and Shetland). In Iceland the goðar set up district things to settle local disputes within a few years of the initial settlement. However, by the early tenth century the goðar recognised that there was a need for a higher authority to deal with wider disputes that the district things could not resolve. Appealing to the king of Norway was a possibility, but that would have limited Iceland’s independence, so around 930 the goðar set up an all-Iceland assembly, the Althing (Alþingi). An issue that had to be addressed before the Althing could meet was that Iceland had no national law. The settlers came from many different places and had brought with them their own local laws and customs, creating endless problems when trying to resolve disputes. In preparation for the setting-up of the Althing, a man called Ulfljot was sent to Norway for three years to adapt the Gulathing laws of western Norway to Icelandic conditions.

The law codes of Viking Age Scandinavia were not based on general principles but on specified penalties for specified offences. The bulk of law concerned the payment of mannbœtr (compensation) for injuries and killings. Penalties were usually financial, requiring compensation to be paid, for example in the case of injuries, so much for the loss of a hand, so much for the loss of an arm, and so on. The scale of compensation depended on the severity of the injuries and on the status of the victim. This last principle was not adopted by the Icelanders, all freemen were treated as being of equal worth. In the case of slaves, it was their owners who were compensated if they were killed or injured. Theft was usually punished by hanging as it was assumed that thieves would be too poor to pay compensation for their crime. The most serious penalty, outlawry, was reserved for those who refused to accept judgment or pay compensation. Outlawry literally placed the offender outside the protection of the law and meant that he could be killed with impunity by anyone. In Iceland, an outlaw could pay ransom for his life (usually a heavy silver ring), in which case his outlawry was limited to three years exile, and the outlaw continued to enjoy legal protection in specified places for up to three years while he arranged passage out of the country. If he failed to leave after three years, he was then sentenced to full outlawry, which was for life and involved total rejection from society. It was illegal to help a full outlaw in any way, including giving him food or shelter, and he was not safe even abroad. It was hard on his family too. He lost all his property and his children were declared illegitimate and lost their inheritance rights. The Icelandic laws allowed a full outlaw to redeem himself by killing another outlaw. This was a calculated measure to sow mistrust among outlaws and discourage them from forming bands. Scandinavian laws allowed cases affecting the honour of the disputants to be settled out of court by judicial duels. In Iceland, this was known as hólmgangr (‘island-going’), because the duels were usually held on islands in rivers. It was a right that was easily abused by good warriors.

While Ulfljot was learning about Norwegian law, his half-brother Grímur Geitskör was sent to survey Iceland to find a suitable site to hold the Althing. The site he chose was Bláskógar, afterwards known as Thingvellir (‘thing plain’), a dramatic place of ravines and waterfalls in the valley of the Öxará River in south-west Iceland. Thingvellir is a remarkable place in a country that is not short of remarkable places and it would be nice to think that Grímur was motivated by aesthetic considerations. However, the reasons for his choice were altogether more prosaic: the owner of the land had recently been outlawed for murder so the site could be taken over without paying anyone compensation. Being in the heart of the most densely part of Iceland also meant that most Icelanders would not have to travel too far to attend the Althing. Thingvellir is a lava plain lying almost right over the rift where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates are being forced apart. As the lava plain was stretched by the movement of the tectonic plates, its surface cracked forming chasms and ravines and it was in the shelter of one of these, on the western edge of the plain, that the Althing was held. The Althing met annually for two weeks during June, when travelling was easiest and there was almost twenty-four hour daylight. Meetings were always held in the open air. People attending the Althing lived in temporary booths, the turf foundations of some of which can still be seen, or in tents. Until a church was built there in the eleventh century, there were no permanent structures on the site. The main business of the Althing was conducted from two different locations, the Lögberg (‘Law Rock’), a natural platform for making speeches, and Neðri-Vellir, a level place on the west bank of the Öxará, where the Lögretta (‘Law Council’) met.

All freemen had the right to attend and speak, but the Althing was essentially an aristocratic and oligarchic form of government. All judicial and legislative power was in the hands of the thirty-six goðar, who alone had the right to vote in the Lögretta, the Althing’s legislative council (the number of goðar was increased to thirty-nine in 965 and to forty-eight in 1005). The Icelandic Free State (also described as a Commonwealth) had only one public office, that of the Lawspeaker (Lögsögumaðr). There are no precedents for this office in Scandinavia, so it was a uniquely Icelandic institution. The goðar elected the Lawspeaker on the first day of the Althing for a three-year renewable term immediately after the outgoing Lawspeaker had opened proceedings. It was quite common for Lawspeakers to be re-elected: the longest serving Lawspeaker, Skapti Thórodsson, served for nine successive terms (1004 –1030). The Lawspeaker’s most important duty was to recite the Icelandic laws from the Law Rock. Until the Icelandic laws were written down in 1117 –18, the Lawspeaker had to recite the laws from memory: one third of the laws were recited in each year of the Lawspeaker’s term of office. If in doubt, the Lawspeaker could consult with five or more lögmenn (legal experts) before reciting the laws. The Lawspeaker was also chairman of the Lögretta but he had no executive authority.

Although the Althing was ultimately controlled by the goðar, decision-making tended to be consensual as they needed to consider the opinions of their ‘thingmen’ (followers). Failure to do this might lead them to transfer their allegiance to another goði. From around 965, legal disputes that could not be resolved at the district things were heard at the Althing’s fjórðungsdómar (‘quarter courts’), named after Iceland’s four geographical quarters, the Court of the North Quarter, East Quarter, South Quarter and West Quarter. Around 1005 a fifth court was constituted to adjudicate in cases that had become deadlocked in the Quarter Courts. The goðar were expected to argue the cases of their followers at the Althing. The goðar were also expected to help enforce judgments on behalf of their followers as the Icelandic state had no law enforcement officers. In return for their advocacy and protection, the goðar could call upon the armed support of their followers in their feuds with other goðar. And those goðar with the largest numbers of followers to back them up, naturally enjoyed more influence at the Althing. For many of those who attended the Althing, however, legislation and litigation were side issues. The Althing brought the widely dispersed people of Iceland together like no other occasion, making it the most important social event of the year. There people could meet their friends and relatives, strike business deals and arrange marriages. Tradesmen and entertainers flocked to Thingvellir to tender to their every need.

The Althing was highly successful at resolving problems: not the least of its achievements was ensuring a peaceful conversion to Christianity in 999 or 1000. In 995 Olaf Tryggvason became king of Norway. Only a year before, Olaf had converted to Christianity and he now set about persuading his subjects of the virtues of the new religion by force rather than preaching. Like other Christian medieval European rulers, Olaf saw pagans as fair game, exempt from the normal rules of diplomacy. In 995 Olaf had intervened in Orkney to impose Christianity and it was clear that he would do the same in the Faeroes and Iceland as soon as the opportunity arose. By this time, many Icelanders had converted to Christianity as a result of missionary activity. The first missionary was a young Icelander called Thorvald Kodransson (‘the Far-Travelled’) who had converted while in Germany. He returned to Iceland around 981, but enjoyed little success and was eventually outlawed after killing two men, ending his days in a monastery in Russia. Other equally violent missionaries soon followed. Early in his reign, King Olaf sent Stefnir Thorgilsson, an Icelandic convert, to convert the Icelanders. He set about destroying pagan temples and in response the Althing called on families to prosecute any family members heard blaspheming the old gods. After Stefnir failed to make progress, Olaf sent an intemperate German priest called Thangbrand, who travelled the countryside with a small band of converts, preaching and killing anyone who spoke against him. Thangbrand’s mission also failed and, in 999, King Olaf turned to economic sanctions and hostage-taking. He closed Norwegian ports to Icelanders – a severe blow because Norway was Iceland’s main trading partner – and imprisoned all the Icelanders then in Norway. Olaf threatened to maim or kill his prisoners unless Iceland accepted Christianity.

Under this intense pressure, the Icelanders divided into pro- and anti-Christian camps. The Christians threatened to set up their own parallel system of things and courts, pushing the country to the edge of civil war. Things came to a head at the Althing in 1000, but violence was averted by treating the issue like a blood feud that needed settling and submitting it to arbitration. Mediators chose the Lawspeaker, Thorgeir Thorkelsson, to settle dispute. Thorgeir was a pagan but had strong links with Christians too, making him acceptable to both sides. According to the account of the conversion in Íslendingabók, Thorgeir spent a day and a night huddled under a cloak while he deliberated his decision. After receiving assurances from both sides that they would abide by his ruling, Thorgeir announced ‘that all people should become Christian and that those who here in the land were yet unbaptised should be baptized...’ If they wished, people might sacrifice to old gods in private but it would be outlawry if this practice were verified by witnesses. Even though pagans were in the majority, Thorgeir’s compromise was accepted peacefully and there was no pressure to revert to paganism, even when King Olaf was killed later that year. When he returned to his home in the north of Iceland, Thorgeir demonstrated his own commitment to the decision by demolishing his pagan shrine and throwing its idols into a waterfall, known since as Goðafoss (‘falls of the gods’). A few years later, with the crisis safely passed, pagan worship was outlawed completely.

By following their traditional methods for resolving disputes the Icelanders not only avoided violence but also denied King Olaf the pretext, which a civil war might have offered, to assert any kind of sovereignty over their country. Olaf was more successful in the case of the Faeroe Islands. In 1000, Olaf commissioned Sigmundur Brestisson, a Faeroese exile in Norway, to convert the Faeroe islanders to Christianity and to bring them under Norwegian sovereignty. The leader of the pagan party was Tróndur of Gøtu, who publicly cursed Christianity by Thor’s hammer. Sigmundur and his men broke into Tróndur’s home one night and offered him the choice of conversion or having his head cut off. Confronted with such a persuasive theological argument, Tróndur chose Christianity and the rest of the islanders took the hint and followed suit. Sigmundur’s methods of conversion made him a hated figure and he was murdered in 1005, but the islands remained under Norwegian sovereignty.

Once the Norse had settled Iceland, it was probably only a matter of time before some storm-driven seafarer discovered Greenland. Some time between 900 and 930, Gunnbjorn Ulf-Krakuson was blown off course on a voyage from Norway to Iceland and sighted a group of islands to the west of Iceland, known after him as the Gunnbjorn Skerries. This is generally reckoned to be the first European sighting of Greenland and, as Greenland is geologically part of North America, of the American continent. The exact location of the skerries is uncertain. Ivar Bardarson, a fourteenth-century Norwegian traveller, located them two days sail due west of Snæfellsnes on Iceland’s west coast. This makes it most likely that the skerries were the Sermiligaaq archipelago, a group of ice-free islands east of Angmagsalik on Greenland’s heavily glaciated east coast. Gunnbjorn did not land on the skerries and his discovery excited little interest at the time because there was still good land to be had in Iceland: Gunnbjorn himself settled there. As the Icelandic population grew, people were forced onto more marginal land. In 975 –6 there was a cold summer and the grass didn’t grow well enough for many farmers to harvest enough hay to keep their livestock alive through the winter. People died of starvation. Gunnbjorn’s skerries began to look more attractive and in 978 Snæbjorn Galti set off to look for them with twenty-four followers. They built a house on the skerries and spent a dreadful winter completely snowed in until the beginning of March. Confinement did no one’s mood any good, quarrels broke out, turned bloody and after Snæbjorn was murdered the would-be colonists left for Norway.

The first successful Norse settlement in Greenland was led by the red-bearded, red-haired Erik Thorvaldson, better known as Erik the Red. Born in Norway, Erik emigrated to Iceland while still a child, after his father was exiled for a blood feud. As all the best land was claimed, his family were forced to settle on Iceland’s barren and icy south-east coast. When he grew up, Erik’s attempts to claim better land for himself involved him in many disputes and several killings and in the early 980s he was outlawed for three years. As he had to leave the country anyway, Erik sailed off to look for Gunnbjorn’s skerries, promising to return if he found them. Erik made land on Greenland’s east coast, near a prominent glacier, which became known as Blåserk (‘blue shirt’), probably Rigny Bjerg, well north of the Arctic Circle. Erik followed the inhospitable coast south, eventually rounding Cape Farewell, Greenland’s most southerly point. Sailing north again Erik discovered Greenland’s eastern fjords, in the sheltered reaches of which he found good grazing land and birch woods. The land was completely uninhabited but Erik found the remains of boats and dwellings along the shores. These were relics of the prehistoric Dorset Inuit people who had abandoned the area a century before because of climate change. The Norse expansion into the North Atlantic coincided with the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period, a period lasting from c. 900 –c. 1250 when the climate of the North Atlantic region was warmer than the long-term average. The Inuit way of life depended on seal hunting, which was best done in late winter and spring when the seals were exposed on sea ice. In the warmer climate, the eastern fjords had become largely ice-free so the Inuit retreated north to better hunting grounds.

Erik spent three summers exploring Greenland before returning to Iceland, where he hoped to persuade others to join him in colonising the eastern fjords. A born salesman, Erik decided to call his discovery Greenland ‘because men would be drawn to go there if it had an attractive name’. Thanks to the recent famine, many families were interested and when Erik headed back to Greenland next summer, twenty-five ships set sail with him. Íslendingabók mentions that this happened fourteen or fifteen years before Iceland accepted Christianity, that is around 985 –6. Of the twenty-five ships that set out with Erik, only fourteen made it safely to the eastern fjords: the rest turned back or were lost at sea. Thorbjorn, a friend of Erik’s who emigrated to Greenland a few years after the initial settlement, brought thirty people with him in his ship. If this was typical, the Greenland colony would have started with little more than 400 people. However, this was still enough to found two settlements, the larger Eastern Settlement (Eystrbyggð) in the south around modern Qaqortoq, and the smaller Western Settlement (Vestribyggð) 300 miles further north around Nuuk. Later, a small Middle Settlement was founded half way between the two. The settlement was organised on Icelandic lines with an annual thing that Erik presided over in a role similar to the Lawspeaker’s.

Erik’s own estate was at Brattahlið (‘steep slope’), about 60 miles from the open sea at the head of Tunuliarfik Fjord, which in his day was known as Eriksfjord. Erik’s descendents continued to live at Brattahlið until the fifteenth century. Excavations at Brattahlið have uncovered the stone foundations of three longhouses with associated outbuildings, a probable thing place, a probable forge, and the foundations of a stone church. All of the stone structures date probably to the thirteeth or fourteenth centuries. In all likelihood, Erik’s farm was built of turf, like contemporary buildings in Iceland, and its traces have been destroyed by the later buildings. The church had an associated burial ground containing around 144 burials, some of which had gravestones: one was engraved with a short runic inscription reading ‘Ingibjørg’s grave’. In the middle of the burial ground excavators discovered the traces of a very small turf church with an interior space of little more than 6 feet broad and 11 feet wide. The turf walls are so thick that its external dimensions are around 12 feet broad by 15 feet long. This building can be directly connected to Erik’s wife, Thjodhild (another Icelander who could trace her descent back to Cerball mac Dúnlainge). While visiting King Olaf’s court in Norway in c. 1000, Erik’s son Leif converted to Christianity. When he was ready to return home, King Olaf asked Leif to preach Christianity in Greenland and provided him with a priest to baptise and instruct the people. Erik was not pleased by his son’s conversion and refused to accept the new faith. Thjodhild, however, embraced Christianity at once and built a small church near their farm, where she and other new converts prayed. Erik became even more unhappy after Thjodhild’s conversion: she refused to sleep with him any more because he was a pagan.

To begin with the Greenland colony flourished. By around 1100, the colony’s population had grown to around 4,000 people. The Eastern Settlement had 190 farms, twelve parish churches, an Augustinian monastery, a Benedictine nunnery, and a rather modest cathedral at Garðar (now Igaliku). The Western Settlement had ninety farms and four churches, while the Middle Settlement had twenty farms. Sheep, goat and cattle rearing formed the basis of the economy, but in sheltered areas it was even possible to grow a little barley. The colony was not self-sufficient as it lacked timber, grain and iron. Fortunately, the colony had unique access to valuable resources that were much in demand in Europe: walrus ivory and hide (used for making ships’ ropes), sealskin (for waterproof cloaks and boots), polar bear skins, and gyrfalcons. Gyrfalcons were the most expensive of all birds used for the elite medieval sport of falconry. In the Islamic world a gyrfalcon cost around 1,000 gold dinars, the equivalent of £120,000 ($186,000) today. Narwhal tusks were even more valuable: medieval Europeans believed them to be the horns of the mythical unicorn and would pay more than their weight in gold for them. The Greenlanders obtained these products on annual hunting expeditions to the Norðsetr, the area around Disko Island, about 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Recently, a probable Norse camp has been found at Tanfield Valley on Baffin Island’s south coast, suggesting that hunting expeditions may have been made to this area too.

The Norse Greenland colony was medieval Europe’s most remote outpost. To reach it from the European continent seafarers needed to cross almost 2,000 miles of open ocean. At the time, only the Malays in the Indian Ocean and the Polynesians in the Pacific undertook longer oceanic voyages, but they did so in warmer and more predictable seas. In the Icelandic sagas, Viking seafarers seem to show an almost casual confidence in their ability to make long open sea voyages but in reality Viking navigation was not an exact art. Viking skippers recognised this and whenever they could they hugged the coast, keeping a safe distance offshore to avoid shoals and reefs, and navigating using landmarks on shore. At night, or if bad weather was setting in, they would seek a safe anchorage, rather than risk getting lost or running aground in darkness or poor visibility. Danes and Swedes, who sailed mostly in the North Sea and the Baltic, very rarely had to sail out of sight of land: Norwegians, setting out for Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland or Greenland had no choice. When they had to make an open sea crossing, Viking navigators used a technique known as latitude sailing. Leaving his home port, the navigator would sail north or south along the coast to reach a point he knew to be on the same latitude as his intended destination. He would then wait until there was a favourable wind blowing in the right direction and head out onto the open sea and try to follow a heading due east or west to his destination.

In European waters, at least, Viking navigators were heirs to a vast body of seafaring lore and sailing directions that had been passed down orally from generation to generation for centuries. Navigation was a specialised occupation and the leiðsagnarmaðr (pilot) might be the only professional seaman on a ship. This did not mean he was the captain: the ship’s owner was always the captain irrespective of how competent a sailor he was. Successful navigators were experts at reading sea and weather conditions, interpreting the movements of wildlife, which could reveal the direction of land, and observing the positions and altitudes of the sun and stars to determine latitude accurately. However, in common with all navigators before the eighteenth century, Vikings had no means of determining their longitude. The best they could do was to estimate their position based on their speed and direction of travel. It is not known how Viking navigators estimated speed, as there is no evidence for use of the ship log before the fifteenth century, but the evidence of the sagas shows that they could do this with tolerable accuracy. In conditions of poor visibility even the most experienced navigators could suffer from hafvilla (‘confusion’), that is completely losing their bearings. This was most likely to happen when a ship was becalmed for a long period in fog, when it could drift imperceptibly far off its course on the ocean currents.

A navigator’s most reliable guide was the Pole Star, which, north of the Tropics, is always above the horizon and always points due north. The Pole Star is also a reliable indicator of latitude. As the still point around which the other stars rotate, the altitude of the Pole Star remains constant all night and, when viewed from any fixed location, remains the same all year round. From night to night a navigator could estimate the height of the Pole Star above the horizon: if it was higher than the previous night, the ship had sailed further north; if it was lower, the ship was further south. In summer in high latitudes the Pole Star could be invisible during the night long twilight. At such times navigators had to rely on the sun, which is due south at noon, for directions. The height of the sun at noon can also be used to determine latitude, though in this case higher means further south, lower means further north. Through observations like these, Norse navigators knew that Cape Farewell in Greenland (59º 46' N) was almost at the same latitude as Bergen, the main port in western Norway (60º 4' N). Sailing directions in one copy of Landnámabók advised navigators heading to Greenland to sail a slightly more northerly course, approximately 61º, in order to avoid the Shetland Islands, which share the same latitude as Bergen. A ship from Bergen should first sail north along the coast to Hernar (60º 36' N), then: ‘sail west but keep far enough north of the Shetlands so that these islands are barely visible in clear weather. One should stay far enough south of the Faeroes so that their steep and high mountains are just halfway up over the horizon. In addition, one should stay far enough south of Iceland so that you can’t see land but just the coast-bound birds. When you reach the east coast of Greenland you should keep a lookout for landmarks and follow the current west around Cape Farewell to the villages on the south-west point.’

The sailing directions do not rely on latitude sailing alone: the navigator is expected to know important landmarks and understand the movements of seabirds. These could provide important clues about the direction of land. During the breeding season (April-August), which was much the same as the Vikings’ sailing season, seabirds feed at sea but return regularly to land to feed their young and to roost at night. Different birds range further to feed than others. Kittiwakes may travel over 100 miles from land to feed, while smaller seabirds such as puffins and guillemots rarely travel more than 6 miles. Observing the flight of seabirds in the morning and evening gives reliable indications of the direction of land. In poor visibility, the presence of puffins and guillemots would also give early warning that land was very close. Some navigators took caged birds with them. When Floki Vilgerdarson set out for Iceland he took three ravens with him. When he released the first, it flew away in the direction of the Faeroe Islands, their last port of call. When he released the second, it circled round for a while before returning to the ship. When he released the third, it flew away straight ahead and by following in that direction Floki found land.

There were many other environmental clues for the navigator who knew how to read them. Whales have regular migration routes and feeding grounds. For instance, there is one south of Iceland, roughly halfway between the Faeroe Islands and Greenland. A build-up of cloud on the horizon may indicate the presence of land. If the sea suddenly slackens in a storm it may be a sign that the ship has sailed into the lee of an island hidden by rain, fog or darkness. The colour and clarity of the sea can provide further clues about a ship’s position. Rivers wash silt into the sea, sometimes clouding it for miles offshore. A seafarer sailing to Greenland would expect to see ice floes when he approached its coast.

Viking navigators were under no illusions about the dangers of seafaring and it is likely that for many the most important navigation aid was a Thor’s hammer amulet, the thunder god Thor being a protector of travellers and seafarers. Compasses or lodestones were unknown to the Vikings but they may have used other simple navigation aids. One of these was the sounding line, which the Vikings are thought to have adopted from the English late in the Viking Age. This was simply a rope with a weight tied on to one end that was lowered from the ship into the sea to measure its depth. It was especially useful in the shallow shoally waters of the Baltic or southern North Sea. English navigators liked to keep about 10 fathoms (60 feet/18.3 m) of water under their keels when coasting.

Vikings may have used two other navigation aids, the so-called sun stone, and a sun compass. The sun stone is mentioned in a small number of saga sources and is supposed to have been a crystal that was used to locate the position of the sun on overcast days. The Story of Rauð and his Sons describes the use of the sun stone on land:

‘The weather was thick and snowy as Sigurd had predicted. Then King Olaf summoned Sigurd and Dagur to him. The king made people look out and nowhere could they see a clear sky. Then he asked Sigurd to tell where the sun was at that time. He gave a clear assertion. Then the king made them bring the sun stone and held it up and saw where light radiated from the stone and thus directly verified Sigurd’ s prediction.’ (trans J. E. Turville-Petre, Viking Society for Northern Research 1947.)

The sun stone is thought to have been the transparent crystalline form of calcium carbonate known as Iceland Spar, which is known for its polarising qualities. However, modern experiments indicate that the polarising effect is not strong enough to locate the sun’s position under a heavy overcast and works only under a clear sky or light overcast when the sun’s position can be seen with the naked eye anyway. No sun stone has ever been found in a Viking context but one has been recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck off the Channel Island of Alderney, though this does not prove that it was being used for navigation.

The existence of the sun compass rests on even more slender evidence than the sun stone. In 1948, excavations of a Norse monastery at Narsarsuaq on Uunartoq Fjord in Greenland uncovered half of a small wooden disc, around 2¾ inches in diameter (7 cm) with a hole in the centre and equidistant notches cut around the edges. When complete, there were probably thirty-two notches. The surface of the disc is incised with lines, some of which are parabolic. It is these parabolic lines that have led to the disc being interpreted as part of a sun compass. If the disc had at its centre a gnomon, then these parabolic lines might represent the course of the sun’s shadow through the day. These devices are easy to make and would have been a useful aid to latitude sailing. If the course of the sun’s shadow was plotted onto the disc at the port of departure, a ship’s latitude relative to the starting place could easily be determined by measuring the length of the sun’s shadow daily at noon. If the shadow falls short of the line, the shorter shadow shows that the sun is higher in the sky, meaning that the ship has sailed south relative to its starting point. If the shadow crosses the line, the longer shadow shows that the sun is lower in the sky, meaning that the ship has sailed north relative to its starting point. Because the altitude of the sun varies with the time of year as well as with latitude, the device would have been absolutely accurate only on the day it was made and it would have become increasingly unreliable the longer a voyage was, limiting its usefulness. Another limitation is that the compass has to be held absolutely level while a reading is being taken – no easy thing in a small ship on a choppy sea. Floating the compass in a bucket of water might have solved this problem, but only if some way could be found to stop it spinning. The disc may simply have been part of a child’s toy or was perhaps a ‘confession disc’, similar to those used by Icelandic priests to count the number of people taking confession. In any case, the monastery at Narsarsuaq was built after the end of the Viking Age, so even if the disc was part of a sun compass, it is not evidence that they were used by Vikings.

It is possible that by the end of the Viking Age, navigators had access to written tables of astronomical observations. An Icelander called Oddi Helgasson (c. 1070/80–c. 1140/50), whose knowledge of astronomy earned him the nickname Star Oddi, compiled a chart showing the direction of sunrise and sunset through the year from different harbours in Iceland, which enabled navigators to take directions. It is very likely that such knowledge was also transmitted orally, from one generation of navigators to the next.

The final step on the Vikings ‘stepping stone’ route across the Atlantic was from Greenland to the North American continent. The story of the Norse discovery of America is told in the two ‘Vinland sagas’, Grænlendinga saga (‘The Saga of the Greenlanders’), written c. 1200, and Eiríks saga rauða (‘Erik the Red’s Saga’), written c. 1265. The Greenlanders’ saga is generally thought to be the more reliable and is the one generally followed here. Erik’s saga, which actually does not have much to say about Erik the Red, includes several fantastical elements, such as an encounter with a uniped (a mythical one-legged creature), which undermine its credibility. Once again, this step was made by accident. Bjarni Herjolfsson, an Icelandic merchant, returned home from a trip to Norway in 986 and found that his father had emigrated to Greenland with Erik the Red. Knowing nothing about Greenland other than that is was a mountainous land with glaciers, no trees and good pastures, Bjarni immediately set off after his father. It was a reckless thing to do. Three days into his voyage the weather turned, fog and a north wind set in and for many days he was unable to get his bearings. When at last the weather cleared, he found himself off the coast of a densely forested, hilly land. This was obviously not Greenland, so Bjarni turned his ship north and after two days made another landfall, this time off a flat, forested land. Bjarni’s crew wanted to land but he refused and continued to the north-east, and after three days encountered a rocky, mountainous and heavily glaciated land. This land seemed to Bjarni to be too barren to be Greenland. Putting it astern, Bjarni sailed west for four days and finally reached the Eastern Settlement and his father’s farm at Herjolfsnes.

Bjarni came in for a lot of criticism for his lack of curiosity about the lands he had discovered, but he was a merchant not an explorer. When Bjarni gave up trading, Leif Eriksson bought his ship and began to prepare an expedition to follow-up on his discoveries. This took place shortly after Greenland became Christian. Leif set off with thirty-five men, including Tyrkir the Southerner, who was probably a German. Leif asked his father to be joint leader of the expedition with him but he refused, citing that he was too old. Leif began by reversing Bjarni’s voyage. Sailing north-west, Leif first came to a land of bare rock and glaciers. Leif was determined to go one better than Bjarni; he went ashore and gave the land a name, Helluland (‘Slab Land’). Sailing south, they came to a low wooded land with white sand beaches. After going ashore to explore, Leif called this Markland (‘Forest Land’). Leif pressed on still further south and discovered a land where grapes grew wild and the rivers teemed with salmon. Leif decided to call this land Vinland (‘Wine Land’). The party built houses at a place afterwards called Leifsbuðir (‘Leif’s booths’), where they spent a comfortable winter. There was no frost and the days were much longer than they were in Greenland. In the spring Leif and his crew loaded a full cargo of timber and set off back to Greenland. On the way, Leif rescued fifteen shipwrecked Norwegian sailors from a reef near the Greenland coast. This earned him his nickname Leif the Lucky, though it was the shipwrecked sailors who were really the lucky ones. Or perhaps not; most of them died of an epidemic in the winter, along with Erik the Red.

The locations of Leif’s discoveries will probably never be known for certain. Leif’s description of Helluland is a good fit for Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, and Markland is almost certainly Labrador. Vinland is much harder to identify. The Hudson River is the southern limit of Atlantic salmon, while the St Lawrence is the northern limit of wild grapes, which would place Vinland in New England or the Canadian Maritimes. However, winters in these areas are certainly not frost free. According to Grænlendinga saga, Leif observed that on the shortest day the sun rose before 9 a.m. and did not set until after 3 p.m. but these are not clock times, as the Vikings did not have clocks, so they cannot help us determine Vinland’s latitude. What is certain, however, is that Leif and his crew were the first Europeans to set foot on the North American continent.

Leif’s voyage was followed-up by his brother Thorvald. Thorvald spent a winter at Leifsbuðir. The next summer Thorvald explored the coast to the north-east. The ship broke its keel when it was driven ashore in a storm. The party had to spend some time repairing the ship: they left the old keel on a headland that Thorvald decided to call Kjalarnes (‘Keel headland’). Sailing further east, the party landed to explore at the mouth of a fjord. Returning to the ship, they saw three humps on the beach. These turned out to be canoes, each with three men hiding underneath. So began the first encounter between Europeans and Native Americans. It did not go well. The Native Americans tried to run away from the strangers but Thorvald’s men captured eight of them and killed them, apparently without any provocation. Unfortunately for Thorvald, the ninth escaped in one of the boats and raised the alarm. Further up the fjord, the Norse could see low humps which they surmised to be houses. Soon a swarm of canoes was heading down the fjord towards them. The heavily outnumbered Norse defended themselves with their shields and the natives soon withdrew but not before Thorvald had received a fatal arrow wound. He died soon after and became the first European to be buried in North America. The rest of the party returned safely to Greenland.

The identity of the unfortunate native Americans is unknown: if Vinland really was as far south as Leif’s account implies, they would have belonged to one of the many Algonquian-speaking peoples who inhabited the east coast between Chesapeake Bay and the St Lawrence before European settlement. In the Icelandic sources, all native peoples encountered in North America and Greenland are described simply as Skrælings. The origins of the name are uncertain. One is that it means ‘screamers’, perhaps because the Norse found their language completely incomprehensible. Perhaps more likely, it may be derived from the Old Norse word skrá, meaning skin. This would probably be a reference to their animal skin clothing, which would have contrasted with the woven woollen clothing worn by the Norse.

A few years later Thorfinn Karlsefni set out from Greenland to found a permanent colony at Leifsbuðir. He took with him his wife Gudrid, sixty men and five women, and a variety of livestock. The party spent an uneventful winter during which Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri, the first European to be born in America. The following spring saw their first encounter with Skrælings, who came to Leifsbuðir to trade furs. The Greenlanders’ iron tools and weapons must have fascinated the Skrælings, who still had a Stone Age culture (small artefacts of native copper and meteoritic iron were used), but Karlsefni forbade his men to trade any of them. During a second encounter later in the year, one of Karlsefni’s men killed a Skræling for trying to steal some weapons. The rest fled but soon returned to get their revenge. Expecting this, Karlsefni had prepared an ambush and the Skrælings were easily driven off. Nevertheless, the next spring Karlsefni abandoned the settlement and returned to Greenland. He eventually bought lands in Iceland.

Erik’s saga adds that on the return voyage a ship owned by Bjarni Grimolfsson was blown far off course into Irish waters. The ship’s hull became infested with driftwood-eating worms and began to leak. The ship’s boat was only large enough to take half the crew. Bjarni decreed that lots would be drawn to decide who would go in the boat, and who would remain behind. Bjarni was one of those who drew a place in the boat. As Bjarni prepared to depart with the boat, a young Icelander asked:

‘Are you going to leave me here Bjarni?’

‘That is how it has to be,’ replied Bjarni.

The Icelander said, ‘But that is not what you promised when I left my father’s farm in Iceland to go with you.’

‘I see no other way,’ said Bjarni, ‘what do you suggest?’”

‘I suggest we change places, you come up here and I shall go down there.’

‘So be it,’ said Bjarni, ‘I can see that you would spare no effort to live and are afraid to die.’ (trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson.)

With that, Bjarni climbed back into the sinking ship and the Icelander took his place in the boat. Those in the ship’s boat reached safety in Ireland; Bjarni and everyone left with him in the ship were never seen again and presumably drowned. Bjarni was within his rights to refuse to change places with the Icelander, but could not have done so without also appearing to be afraid of death. The Icelander, perhaps intentionally, had put him in a difficult situation. Bjarni could save his life or save his honour, but not both. For a proud man like Bjarni, it was not a difficult dilemma to resolve. By giving up his place in the boat Bjarmi saved his honour, secured his posthumous reputation, and was remembered by future generations. No one knows the name of the cowardly Icelander, he was niðing and would have lived the rest of his life as a social outcast.

A second attempt at settlement was led by Leif’s half-sister Freydis, who, according to Erik’s saga, had already been to Vinland as part of Karlsefni’s expedition. She invited two brothers called Helgi and Finnbogi to join her, but she was a difficult, uncompromising woman who seemed set on causing conflict with them from the very start. Ill feeling grew during the winter and in the spring Freydis sent her men to kill the brothers and their followers after an argument over a ship. None of the men were willing to kill the five women so Freydis took an axe and did the job herself. Despite threatening to kill anyone who told of her evil deeds when they got home, people inevitably talked. Leif, who was now leader of the Greenland community, was horrified when he heard the rumours, but had not the heart to punish his sister, only predicting that her sins would blight her descendents’ fortunes.

The failure of Freydis’ expedition ended Norse attempts at settlement in America. The distances involved were too great and the small Greenland colony simply did not have the resources or the surplus population to support a colonisation effort so far away. Though iron weapons gave the Norse a military advantage over the natives, it was not marked enough to prevail against their superior numbers. The immediate consequences of the Norse discovery of North America were slight. The existence of Vinland soon became known in Europe but it was thought merely to be another island in the Atlantic Ocean, like Iceland or Greenland, so its significance was not understood. Erik Gnupsson, the bishop of Garðar, set off on a new expedition to Vinland in 1112 but its fate is not recorded. As a new bishop was sent to Greenland in 1115, Erik may not have returned and been given up for dead. After this interest in Vinland faded and by the time the Vinland sagas were written, it had largely been forgotten outside Iceland and Greenland. There is no evidence, for example, that Columbus knew of Vinland’s existence when he set off on his voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 in search of a route to China, only to find America in the way.

Voyages from Greenland to Markland and Helluland continued at least until the fourteenth century. The last recorded expedition was in 1347, when a small ship with seventeen Greenlanders was blown off course to Iceland while returning from cutting timber in Markland. As far as Native Americans were concerned, the Vinland voyages might as well have never happened: they had no impact whatsoever on North America’s cultural development. Despite this, the Norse discovery of North America does mark a significant moment in world history: it was the end of humanity’s 70,000 year journey out of Africa. The descendents of peoples who had left Africa and migrated east through Asia to the Americas had finally met the descendents of people who had left Africa and migrated west. The circle of the world was closed.

The first archaeological evidence for the Norse presence in North America was a runestone found at Kensington, Minnesota, in 1898, or so it briefly seemed. The text purported to describe the journey of eight Goths (i.e. Swedes) and twenty-two Norwegians from Vinland to Minnesota via the Great Lakes in 1362. Closer examination revealed that the runes were a mixture of types used from the ninth to the eleventh century and homemade symbols. The language used was the distinctive Swedish-Norwegian dialect spoken by Scandinavian settlers in Minnesota in the 1890s, while the date was based on the Arabic system of numeration that was not used in fourteenth-century Scandinavia. Although it still has its advocates, academics quickly recognised that the Kensington runestone was a forgery, presumably made by local Scandinavian settlers either as a joke or for reasons of ethnic prestige. The stone was the beginning of a minor tradition of providing the missing evidence that would prove beyond doubt that the Vinland sagas were not just romantic travellers’ tales about imaginary lands. Runic inscriptions have even been found in Oklahoma.

Real archaeological evidence of a Norse presence in North America finally came to light in 1961 with the discovery of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. L’Anse aux Meadows is a shallow, sheltered cove at Newfoundland’s northern tip. The cove faces west, with a clear view of the hills of Labrador 30 miles away across the Strait of Belle Isle. Although the landscape is open grassland, the name actually has nothing to do with meadows, it is an English corruption of the name given by early French settlers, L’Anse-aux-Méduses, meaning ‘Jellyfish Bay’. L’Anse aux Meadows was uninhabited when the Norse arrived but they were not the first to spot its attractions; there had been several phases of occupation by early Inuit seal hunters spread over thousands of years.

The Norse settlement consisted of eight buildings, all of them built of turf and lined with timber. Three of the buildings were longhouses, the others were probably workshops. The settlement could have accommodated up to about ninety people. Longhouses may have been the typical Viking dwelling but they are not unique to them. Longhouses were built by several Native American peoples including the Inuit; indeed, the foundations of long-abandoned Inuit longhouses in the Canadian Arctic have sometimes been mistaken for Viking longhouses. However, the large numbers of metal artefacts excavated from the settlement prove beyond any doubt that L’Anse aux Meadows was a Norse settlement. The majority of these objects were wrought iron ship rivets, suggesting that ship repair was a major activity on site. The rivets may have been manufactured at a small forge that was built a small distance from the settlement, probably as a precaution against fire. Native Americans made small tools from meteoritic iron and by cold-hammering native copper, but they lacked the technology to smelt iron. A typically Scandinavian bronze ring pin was also found on the site. The discovery of a soapstone spindle whorl confirmed the saga accounts that women went on the Vinland voyages as spinning was a female activity. Stone weights found in one building may have been part of a loom. A glass bead, a broken bone needle and a whetstone for sharpening needles and knives are also all typical of the sort of artefacts that are found in Norse settlements of the Viking Age. Radiocarbon-dating of organic materials indicates that the site was occupied c. 980-1020, which accords well with the saga traditions.

Even though the sagas say that the Norse took livestock with them, the excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows provided no evidence of farming or the presence of European domesticated animals. The settlers were, however, active hunters. The bones of caribou, wolf, fox, bear, lynx, marten, seal, whale and walrus and of many species of fish and wildfowl have been found on the site. The environment around L’Anse aux Meadows bears little resemblance to that of Vinland. Winters are severe and there are no wild grapes so, unless Leif greatly exaggerated the delights of Vinland, which is not impossible – his father had taught him the importance of good marketing – L’Anse aux Meadows is unlikely to be Leifsbuðir. It seems more likely that L’Anse aux Meadows was a base for expeditions further south. That such expeditions took place is proven by the presence of butternuts among food remains on the site. An American species of walnut, butternuts grow no further north than southern New Brunswick and the lower St Lawrence, more than 500 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows.

So far, only one Norse artefact that is generally accepted as genuine has been found in the United States. This is a worn silver penny minted during the reign of the Norwegian king Olaf Kyrre (r. 1067 – 93) that was found during excavations of a large Native American village at Goddard Point on the coast of Maine. The exact circumstances in which the coin was found are undocumented and the possibility that it was introduced to the site to manipulate the evidence cannot be ruled out. Even if this was not the case, it is not evidence that Norse seafarers visited Maine. The Goddard site provided abundant evidence that it was at the centre of an extensive trade network that extended as far as Arctic Canada. As the Greenland Norse continued to visit Labrador until the fourteenth century, the coin could originally have been acquired as an exotic curio by an Inuit and found its way to Maine along the native trade routes, probably changing hands many times.

The Norse Greenlander’s hunting expeditions to the Norðsetr continued long after the end of the Viking Age proper (c. 1100). The farthest north that the Norse can be proven beyond doubt to have got is Kingigtorssuaq, a small, rocky island about 72º north. Some time in the mid- to late thirteenth century, three Norsemen made a runic inscription on a small flat stone and placed it in a cairn on top of the island, where it was found in 1824: ‘Erlingur the son of Sigvaths and Baarne Thordars son and Enriði son, Washingday [Saturday] before Rogation Day [25 April], raised this mound and rode...’ The inscription ends with six unique runes presumed to be a secret code. For the inscription to have been made so early in the year, before the sea ice began to break up, the Norse must have spent the winter in the area. It is likely, however, that the Norse did sail much further north than this. In 1876, a British oceanographic expedition discovered two ancient cairns on Washington Irving Island, off northern Greenland, around 79º north and over 1,000 miles north of the Western Settlement. The British dismantled the cairns to see if earlier explorers had left a message hidden in them. Finding none, and not knowing of any other Europeans who had ventured so far north, the British concluded that the cairns must have been built by the Norse. If so, this may be where the Viking expansion finally fizzled out, less than 800 miles from the North Pole. Modern researchers who have examined the cairns agree that they are unlikely to be of Inuit construction.

At first the Norse had the Norðsetr to themselves but around 1170 they made contact with the Thule Inuit, who had recently migrated into the high Arctic from Alaska, displacing the earlier Dorset Inuit. The ancestors of the modern Inuit peoples, the Thule were superbly adapted to life in the high Arctic. The secret of their success was their mastery of whale hunting – earlier Inuit cultures could only exploit beached whales. The Thule pursued whales at sea in umiaks, open hide-covered boats, about 30 feet long, driven by paddles. Whales were killed using a toggling harpoon. These have detachable points that lodge inside the whale’s body and cannot fall out. The points are attached by ropes to inflated sealskin floats, which prevent the whale from diving and from sinking when it has been killed. This technology gave the Thule access to far more abundant resources than were available to earlier Inuit peoples, who had depended on seals. The Thule also used the bow and arrow, which earlier Inuit had not.

The initial encounters between the Norse and the Skrælings, as the Norse called the Inuit, are not recorded. Hunter-gatherer peoples vigorously defend their hunting grounds against interlopers and, as Thorvald had shown in Vinland, the Norse also had an instinct to fight first and ask questions later. Norse artefacts have been found on many Inuit archaeological sites in the Canadian Arctic and northern Greenland so there may also have been trade: there are however other explanations for their presence. The Inuit site that has so far produced the greatest number of Norse artefacts is Skraeling Island, a small island off Ellesmere Island nearly 78º north, which was occupied repeatedly by early Inuit peoples over a period of over 5,000 years. The Inuit were drawn to the island because of its proximity to the North Water Polynya, a large permanently ice free area in northern Baffin Bay (between Ellesmere Island and Greenland), which attracts large numbers of seals and whales. The Thule arrived on Skraeling Island in the thirteenth century and built a cluster of winter houses from stones, turf and whalebones.

The Norse artefacts from Skraeling Island include pieces of woven woollen cloth, iron ship rivets, knife and spear blades, a carpenter’s plane (with its blade missing), an awl, iron wedges (for splitting wood), pieces of mail armour, and fragments of boxes and barrels. Inuit artefacts included harpoon heads, pieces of meteoritic iron blades, and a small wood carving of a face with non-Inuit features. Similar carvings, known as kavdlunaits from the Inuit word for ‘foreigner’, have been found at other Inuit sites. Some are depicted wearing European-style hoods and cloaks and are thought to be Inuit portrayals of the Norse. Radiocarbon-dates for some of the Norse artefacts cluster around the middle of the thirteenth century. A similar range of Norse artefacts found at an Inuit site on Ruin Island, about 60 miles away on the Greenland side of the Nares Strait, has been dated to the same period.

The presence of Norse artefacts on these Inuit sites is usually interpreted as evidence of trade between them and the Norse. This may not be the case, however. The Inuit did have the furs, hides and ivory that the Norse needed to maintain their trade links with Europe but what could the Norse offer in return? Wood was a precious commodity this far north but the Greenland Norse were always short of timber too. Iron tools might have been traded but this was also always in short supply in the Norse colonies. The Inuit had access to meteoritic iron from northern Greenland, which they worked into blades by cold hammering. Norse wrought iron was better quality but might have been harder to work with without the technology of forges. Rather than indicating a regular trade, an alternative explanation for the presence of these artefacts is that they all come from a single Norse expedition to the far north, perhaps the same one that built the cairns on Washington Irvine Island. The ship rivets were not new when they came into Inuit hands, they look as if they have been salvaged from ship’s planks. The Norse would hardly trade the planks of their own ship so they were probably salvaged from a shipwreck along with the other artefacts. Or perhaps the Inuit fought the trespassing Norse and captured and looted the ship. Back in the settlements, this was just another expedition that set out on the dangerous Arctic seas bound for the Norðsetr and was never heard of again.