Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Chapter 12: Largs, Reykholt and Hvalsey. The Viking Twilight

If the growth of state power had brought the Viking Age to a close in Scandinavia by 1100, it enjoyed a lingering twilight in areas where royal authority was weak or non-existent. In Orkney and the Hebrides, Norse and Norse-Gaelic chieftains still supplemented the income from their estates by leading Viking raids, while in Iceland and Greenland an essentially Viking Age society of local chieftains and free tenant farmers continued to make their own laws and settle disputes at the representative things. However, by 1200 these societies were an anomaly in a Europe of increasingly centralised kingdoms and were living on borrowed time.

Magnus Barefoot’s reign marked the peak of Norwegian power in the Northern Isles and the Hebrides. Magnus’s campaigns more than paid for themselves with a great hoard of plunder and his conquests provided a potential source of revenue and manpower for the Norwegian crown but, and this was a big ‘but’, only if they could be controlled in the long term and at acceptable cost. Magnus was only able to assert royal authority in the isles because he was there in person with an army and a fleet at his back. This was not a situation that could be maintained indefinitely. Garrisoning the isles would have been prohibitively expensive and there still remained much to be done to establish royal authority firmly in Norway itself, never mind the remote islands around Scotland. Magnus’s achievement, therefore, proved ephemeral and did not long survive his death in battle in Ireland in 1103.

The only measures that Magnus had taken during his short life to consolidate royal authority in the Northern Isles was to depose the joint earls of Orkney, Paul and Erlend, in 1098, and appoint his eight-year-old son Sigurd in their place. In 1102 Magnus added the Kingdom of Man and the Isles to Sigurd’s nominal domains. If this arrangement had endured it might have helped create a tradition of loyalty to the Norwegian royal house, but Sigurd would have none of it. Once his father was dead, Sigurd sailed home to Norway to claim his share of the kingdom alongside his brother Eystein and he never returned. While Sigurd crusaded, his brother Eystein was focused entirely on building stable government and prosperity in Norway, so the islanders were left to fend for themselves. When Sigurd died in 1130 (he had ruled alone since Eystein’s death in 1123), a civil war broke out – a consequence of the Viking Age laws of succession that so often left kings with too many heirs – and only twice in the next 150 years did Norwegian kings visit their western dependencies. In the absence of the kings, royal authority predictably withered, creating a power vacuum that no one else was in a position to fill. The kings of the Scots certainly aspired to rule all the islands around Scotland’s coast, but there were still many areas of the mainland, such as Argyll, Caithness and Galloway, which they considered part of their kingdom but did not actually control. England was too distant and the Irish kings were too preoccupied with their struggles over the high kingship to try to impose any authority in the region. Within a few years of Magnus’s death, the Earldom of Orkney and the Kingdom of Man and the Isles reasserted their traditional autonomy, but neither of these polities was strong enough to prevent Norse and Gaelic Norse chieftains continuing to lead Viking raids for decades to come. Despite the establishment of Christianity, even monks could not feel secure: Iona was sacked by Norse pirates as late as 1240.

Before setting out on his crusade, King Sigurd gave up the Earldom of Orkney to Håkon Paulsson (r. 1105 – 26), son of the deposed Earl Paul. Håkon was soon joined by his cousin Magnus Erlendsson (r. 1105 – 16), the son of Earl Erlend. The earldom was back in the hands of its original ruling family. Earls Håkon and Magnus at first ruled Orkney and Shetland amicably enough, dispensing justice and rounding up and executing many Viking pirates who were disturbing the peace. However, in 1114 the pair fell out. Though it is not clear what the cause was, there was certainly a faction among the Orcadian chiefs that was not happy with joint rulership, and they had the ear of Earl Håkon. A meeting was arranged in April 1116 on the Orkney island of Egilsay, ostensibly to patch up a peace between the two. Each earl was to be allowed to attend with two ships full of retainers, but when Magnus saw that Håkon had turned up with eight ships he knew that he meant to kill him. Magnus first tried hiding but then gave himself up to Håkon and tried to save his life by offering to go into exile or even be imprisoned. The chiefs, however, wanted a decisive outcome and demanded that one of the earls be killed. ‘Better kill him then,’ said Håkon. ‘I don’t want an early death: I much prefer ruling over people and places.’ Magnus had a reputation for piety – he had been present with Magnus Barefoot at the Battle of the Menai Straits in 1098 but had refused to fight because he had no quarrel with anyone there, and had read psalms instead – and he prepared for his execution with all the humility and composure of someone who knew he was destined to become a saint. Magnus asked his executioner to strike him on the head because it was not appropriate that someone of his birth be beheaded like a common criminal. A cult soon developed around Magnus’s memory but, even though he was recognised as a saint in 1135, Håkon’s reputation was not tarnished at all by the killing. Orkneyinga Saga describes him as a popular ruler, an able administrator who brought firm peace and made good laws. For the Orcadians it probably seemed like an ideal arrangement, one earl in Heaven to care for their souls, and another on Earth to provide them with security and good government. Håkon, however, lived with a burden of guilt for the killing and later in his reign made the long pilgrimage to Jerusalem as penance.

In 1137, Magnus’s nephew Rognvald Kali Kolsson (r. 1137 – 58), who had been born and brought up in Norway, overthrew Earl Håkon’s son and successor Paul the Silent. Rognvald would have made a good PR man in the modern world: his given name was Kali and he adopted ‘Rognvald’ to associate himself more closely with earlier earls of Orkney, two of whom shared the same name. Among the promises that Rognvald made to the islanders to win popular support was that he would build a stone church more magnificent than any in Orkney to house Magnus’s relics. Rognvald immediately ordered work to begin at Kirkwall under the direction of his father Kol. The church was built in the weighty Norman Romanesque style, using red and yellow Orkney sandstone, by masons who had learned their skills on Durham Cathedral in northern England. The stylistic similarities between the two buildings are very obvious. Though it was still far from complete, St Magnus’s remains were enshrined in the cathedral when it was consecrated about fifteen years later. A skull with a prominent head wound that was found in a casket in a cavity in the cathedral’s walls in 1917 is generally accepted as Magnus’s. There was politics as well as piety in Rognvald’s actions. The recognition of Earl Magnus as a saint put the Earldom of Orkney on a par with the kingdoms of Norway and Denmark: by giving the earldom a church to rival anything in the Scandinavian kingdoms, Rognvald was making a powerful statement about his own status.

Rognvald further emulated the Scandinavian kings by leading his own crusade to the Holy Land with a fleet of fifteen ships in 1151, in the process establishing himself as a figure of Europe-wide stature. Rognvald returned to Orkney in time for Christmas in 1153, but the situation he found was probably an unwelcome reminder that he was not, after all, a king. Rognvald had left the earldom in the care of his junior co-earl Harald Maddadsson, the grandson of Earl Håkon Paulsson (r. 1139 – 1206), with whom he had ruled amicably since 1139. While Rognvald was away, King Eystein II became the first Norwegian king to visit Orkney since Magnus Barefoot’s death while he was on his way to plunder the east coasts of Scotland and England. In Orkney Eystein learned that Harald was at Thurso in Caithness with only a single ship. Eystein sent three ships to capture him: suspecting nothing Harald was taken without a fight. The price of Harald’s freedom was a ransom in gold and an oath of allegiance to the Norwegian crown. Worse followed when Harald’s cousin Erlend Haraldsson turned up to claim a share of the earldom, sparking a complex dynastic struggle that was only resolved with Erlend’s killing in 1161. Rognvald did not live to see the end of the dispute: he was killed in a skirmish with outlaws in Caithness in 1158 and was buried in the cathedral he had founded in Kirkwall. Miracles were soon being reported and in 1192, Rognvald was recognised as Orkney’s second saint.

The insecurity caused by the dispute between the earls was a heaven-sent opportunity for one of the last of the old-fashioned Viking freebooters, Svein Asleifarson, a chieftain from the small island of Gairsay in Orkney. In a career of piracy that lasted over thirty years, Svein raided the coasts of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, taking ships on the high seas, and plundering villages and (despite him being a Christian) monasteries too. Just as it had been for the earliest Vikings, piracy for him was a seasonal activity to be fitted into the cycles of the agricultural year:

This was how Svein used to live. Winter he would spend at home on Gairsay, where he entertained some eighty men at his own expense. His drinking hall was so big, there was nothing in Orkney to compare with it. In the spring he had more than enough to occupy him, with a great deal of seed to sow, which he saw to carefully himself. Then, when the job was done, he would go off plundering in the Hebrides and Ireland on what he called his ‘spring-trip’, then back home just after midsummer, where he stayed until the cornfields had been reaped and the grain was safely in. After that he would go off raiding again, and never came back until the first month of winter was ended. This he called his ‘autumn-trip’. Orkneyinga Saga (trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, Hogarth Press, London, 1978).

Svein’s band of eighty warriors was large enough to make him a major power in Orkney, but he seems to have had no political ambitions beyond maintaining his autonomy. When the dispute between the earls broke out, Svein sided with Erlend so that he could legitimately plunder Orkney and Shetland, capturing ships belonging to Harald and Rognvald and stealing their rents and taxes. Once Erlend was dead, he and his victims were quite easily reconciled. Svein, after all, had his uses and, as there was little they could do about him anyway, it was best to be pragmatic. Sometimes the earls loaned him ships for his raids for a cut of the plunder and, if there was someone they wanted killing, Svein was usually happy to oblige, being well-aware that such favours could always be called in. Around 1170, Earl Harald urged Svein to give up raiding, telling him that ‘most troublemakers are fated to end up dead unless they stop of their own free will’. All too aware that his high status could only be maintained by a continuous stream of plunder, Svein continued, meeting a predictably violent end in 1171 when he joined Asculf Ragnaldsson, the exiled Ostman king of Dublin, in his doomed attempt to recapture the city from the Anglo-Normans.

Earl Harald’s sole rule saw the gradual decline of the Earldom of Orkney. In 1194, Harald supported an unsuccessful rebellion against King Sverre of Norway and was once again forced to recognise the overlordship of the Norwegian crown. As punishment for the rebellion, Sverre took Shetland under direct royal authority. The earldom’s possessions on the Scottish mainland, Caithness and Sutherland, also came under growing pressure from the kings of Scotland. Scottish influence in Orkney had grown almost imperceptibly as a result of intermarriage between the Norse and Scottish aristocracies. Harald himself was the product of one such marriage: his mother was the daughter of Earl Håkon Paulsson and his father was Matad the mormaer of Atholl, through whom he had inherited Scottish royal blood. Because of his family connections, Harald’s claim to a share of the earldom had been supported by King David I. David’s successors, likewise, used family disputes in the earldom to increase their influence there. In 1201, King William the Lion of Scotland used a dispute over the rights of the bishopric of Caithness as a pretext to invade the province in overwhelming force. Harald kept the provinces but was forced to surrender a quarter of their revenues to King William. This prepared the ground for the definitive Scottish takeover of Caithness and Sutherland after Harald’s son and successor Jon Haraldsson was murdered in Thurso in 1231. Jon’s death brought the direct line of Norse earls to an end (his family was lost at sea on their way to Norway after his murder). In 1236, Håkon IV (r. 1217 – 63) appointed Magnus mac Gille Brigte, the mormaer of Caithness, as earl. Magnus was descended from the Norse earls through his mother but was culturally a Scottish Gael. For the remainder of its history the earldom would be ruled by Scottish families, although it remained Norse in culture, language and sovereignty.

The situation further south in Man and the Hebrides in the years immediately following Magnus Barefoot’s death is far from clear because the main source, the Cronica Regum Mannie et Insularum (‘Chronicles of the Kings of Man and the Isles’) is chronologically unreliable. It is likely, however, that the island was under Irish control until 1114 when Olaf Godredsson (r. c. 1114 – 53) returned from his exile in England and, with Henry I’s support, restored Norse rule in Man and the Isles. Olaf strengthened his position with marriage alliances with neighbouring rulers, all of whom had an interest in containing the power of the Scots kings. Olaf’s first wife was Ingibjorg, a daughter of Earl Håkon Paulsson of Orkney, and he married one of his daughters by this marriage, Ragnhild, to Somerled, the Norse-Gaelic king of Argyll. Olaf’s second marriage was to Affraic, daughter of Fergus, the king of Galloway, and his wife, an unnamed illegitimate daughter of Henry I of England. Olaf’s wide-ranging alliances gave his kingdom security. The Manx chronicle describes him as ‘a man of peace… in such close alliance with the kings of Ireland and Scotland that no one dared disturb the Kingdom of the Isles in his lifetime.’

In 1152, Olaf sent his son Godred to pay homage to King Inge in Norway. In Godred’s absence the three sons of Olaf’s brother Harald, who had been exiled in Dublin, gathered a fleet and invaded the Isle of Man to demand that their uncle give them half of the kingdom. Olaf agreed to meet the brothers at Ramsey to discuss their demands. However, the meeting was a trap and Olaf was taken by surprise and beheaded. The Haraldssons had little popular support and they did not rule the island for long. Godred returned the next year, raised a large army in the Hebrides, and captured the brothers, blinding two of them and killing the third. According to the Manx chronicle, once he had crushed all opposition, Godred began to rule like a tyrant. His popularity may also have suffered as a result of a failed attempt to seize Dublin and other unsuccessful interventions in Irish politics. In 1155, a powerful Norse-Gaelic chieftain from the Hebrides, Thorfinn macOttar, went to Somerled and asked him to make his young son Dugald king over the Isles in place of Godred. Somerled obligingly handed his son over to Thorfinn, who duly paraded the boy through the isles, subjecting them to his rule and taking hostages. Godred acted quickly when the news of Thorfinn’s coup reached him, raising a fleet and sailing to the Hebrides to regain control, even though it was mid-winter. Somerled raised a fleet of eighty ships and fell upon Godred’s fleet on the night of Epiphany (5 – 6 January) 1156. The location of the battle is not known but it has been plausibly identified as being off the west coast of Islay. The fighting was hard but the outcome was indecisive. When day dawned the two leaders negotiated an agreement by which Godred ceded all of the Hebrides to Somerled, except for Skye, Harris and Lewis. This was not enough for Somerled. Two years later he landed at Ramsey in the Isle of Man with a fleet of fifty-three ships and forced Godred to flee into exile to Norway. Although he had ostensibly gone to war against Godred on behalf of his son, it seems that Somerled took the whole of the Kingdom of Man and the Isles under his personal rule and began to style himself Rex Insularum – ‘King of the Isles’. Somerled’s victory began the final stage of the assimilation of the Norse of the Hebrides into the indigenous Gaelic population.

Several major Highland clans, including Clan MacDougall, Clan Donald, Clan MacRory and Clan MacAlister, consider Somerled to be their direct patrilinear ancestor and later clan histories have cast him in the role of champion of the Gaels against both the Norse and the feudalising Scottish monarchy. In reality Somerled was a typical chieftain of his time and place, defending his own lands and opportunistically raiding the lands of his neighbours irrespective of whether they were Gaels or Norse: his name is derived from Old Norse Sumarliði, meaning ‘summer warrior’, a common alternative name for ‘Viking’. Irish annals and later clan histories preserve several, mutually contradictory, traditions about Somerled’s ancestry but modern genetic studies have shown fairly conclusively that his patrilinear ancestors were ultimately Norse. Five chiefs of different branches of Clan Donald, who can all trace their descent back to Somerled, shared a distinctive genetic marker, identified as a sub-group of haplogroup (i.e. a distinctive sequence of genes) M-17, on the Y chromosome, which is inherited only through the male line. This marker is common in Norway but rare in indigenous British and Irish populations. The same marker was found to be shared by 40 per cent of men with the surname MacAlister, 30 per cent of MacDougalls, and 18 per cent of MacRorys: Somerled may have a lot of descendents. Although Somerled had Norse ancestry, his family had travelled the road to full integration with the local Gaels some generations before he was born as his father and grandfather had Gaelic names. Somerled was much more a Gael than a Norseman in language, culture and identity.

It is not known how Somerled came to be the ruler of Argyll, but he must already have been a considerable figure when he married Olaf Godredsson’s daughter around 1140. The kings of Scots regarded Argyll, the heartland of the original Scots kingdom of Dál Riata, as part of their kingdom, but it is clear that from his first appearance in the historical record that he considered himself to be an independent ruler, a king in his own right. After his conquest of Man, nothing is known of Somerled’s activities until 1164, when he invaded Scotland, sailing down the Clyde with a Norse-Gaelic fleet of 160 ships from Argyll, the Hebrides, Man and Dublin. Somerled’s motive was probably defensive: King Malcolm IV had recently deposed Fergus of Galloway so Somerled was probably trying to pre-empt a similar move against him. At Renfrew, Somerled was engaged by a hastily gathered Scottish army and was killed in fierce fighting. As Somerled’s Gaelic and Norse warriors fled back to their ships, a priest cut off his head and gave it to the bishop of Glasgow. His body was later released to his kin and taken for burial on Iona. Somerled’s sea kingdom broke up after his death. In accordance with the Gaelic custom of partible inheritance, his lands were divided between his many sons, while Godred came back from exile and, with Norwegian support, recovered Man, Lewis and Harris. However, the rest of the Hebrides remained permanently under the rule of Somerled’s descendents, who, though they styled themselves kings, continued to acknowledge the kings of Norway as their ultimate overlords.

It was the growing power of the kings of Scotland that finally brought Norse influence in Man and the Hebrides to an end. Around 1200, the Scots seized the island of Bute and signaled their intention to become a power in the Isles by building a state-of-the-art castle at Rothesay. The Scots king Alexander II (r. 1214 – 49) entered into negotiations with Håkon IV (r. 1217 – 63) to buy the Hebrides from Norway. The negotiations came to nothing. Håkon had restored political stability to Norway after years of civil wars and had adopted his own expansionist policy, which aimed at uniting all the Norse Atlantic colonies under his rule: giving up part of his kingdom was not part of his plan. Frustrated, in 1249 Alexander decided to seize the Hebrides by force, but his campaign was abandoned after he fell ill and died on the island of Kerrara, off Oban. Alexander’s son Alexander III (r. 1249 – 86) made a second offer to purchase the islands in 1260 but when this was rebuffed he sent the earl of Ross to invade Skye. Another Scottish force seized the island of Arran. Lurid accounts of Scots atrocities and the political chaos in the isles convinced Håkon that he needed to intervene personally to restore royal authority in the area. Apparently, at the height of his power – Greenland and Iceland had just submitted to Norwegian rule – Håkon set sail for the Hebrides in July 1263 with what was claimed to be the most powerful fleet ever gathered in Norway. King Magnus Olafsson of Man and Dugald MacRory, whose lands had been ravaged by the Scots, both greeted Håkon warmly when he landed on the Isle of Skye. Other chiefs and petty kings, opposed equally to both Norwegian and Scottish domination, were less enthusiastic and only submitted after Håkon’s forces wasted their lands. By late summer Håkon had thoroughly cowed the Hebrides and he moved his fleet to Lamlash Bay on Arran in the Clyde estuary, where it was well-placed to strike into the heartland of the Scottish kingdom. Alexander III sent a party of Dominican friars to negotiate with Håkon, but this was just a delaying tactic. The Scots deliberately drew out the negotiations, making offers that they knew would be unacceptable, waiting for the onset of autumn to force Håkon’s withdrawal. Some bored members of the Norwegian army carved their names in runes on the wall of a local cave to entertain themselves while they waited. When Håkon became impatient of making any progress he sent sixty ships to sail up Loch Long to Arrochar. From there, their crews dragged the ships across a narrow isthmus into Loch Lomond, whose shores they plundered for weeks. The rest of Håkon’s fleet anchored off the Cumbrae Islands, close to the Ayrshire coast.

At the end of September the weather turned bad. Ten ships returning from the raid on Loch Lomond were wrecked in a storm and on the night of 30 September/1 October a supply ship and a longship were driven ashore on the Scottish mainland at Largs, now a small seaside resort town. When day broke, the Scots tried to seize the beached ships but their crews fought them off until the main Norwegian fleet arrived and chased them away. The next morning King Håkon came on shore to supervise the recovery of the ships. While this was proceeding a large Scots force arrived and fierce fighting broke out as it tried to surround an isolated Norwegian scouting party on a hill overlooking the shore. The outnumbered Norwegians began to run back towards the ships in disarray, suffering many casualties, but they somehow managed to regroup and counter-attack. The Scots fell back under the unexpected assault, gifting the Norwegians enough time to reach their ships and escape. The Norwegians waited at anchor overnight and in the morning recovered their dead and sailed for home. The Battle of Largs had been in reality little more than a skirmish but, with the benefit of hindsight, it came to be seen as a decisive Norwegian defeat.

As he sailed north back through the Hebrides Håkon must have felt that his great expedition had been in vain. King Alexander’s delaying tactics had worked perfectly, he had reached no diplomatic agreement that would prevent the Scots interfering in the Isles and he had been forced to withdraw without even fighting a proper battle. He must have been painfully aware, too, that his authority over the chiefs and petty kings of the Isles would last no longer than it took him to sail home to Norway. Shortly after he arrived in Orkney in early November, Håkon was taken ill and, sending most of his fleet home, he took up residence for the winter in the bishop’s palace at Kirkwall. Håkon’s condition steadily deteriorated and he was soon bed-ridden. As the king lay dying, he gathered the shades of his Viking ancestors around him. He could not sleep, so to help the long winter nights pass more easily, Håkon asked his attendants to read him all the sagas of the kings of Norway beginning with the legendary Halfdan the Black, the father of Harald Fairhair. Shortly after he had finished listening to the saga of his grandfather King Sverre, Håkon lost the power of speech and three days later, in the early hours of the morning on 16 December, he died aged fifty-nine: he was the last Norwegian king to lead a hostile fleet into British waters.

Within a few months of Håkon’s death, Alexander led a fleet to the Isle of Man and forced King Magnus Olafsson to become his feudal vassal. When Magnus died in November 1265, leaving only an illegitimate son called Godred, the rule of Norse kings over Man came to an end. Alexander also sent fleets to plunder and burn their way through the Hebrides. Håkon’s successor, his son Magnus VI (r. 1263 – 80), concluded, rightly, that trying to maintain sovereignty over Man and the Isles would cost far more than they were worth. By the Treaty of Perth in 1266 Magnus gave up all claims to the Kingdom of Man and the Isles in return for a payment of 4,000 marks (approximately 20,000 pounds of silver), an annuity of 100 marks, and a Scottish recognition of Norwegian sovereignty over Orkney and Shetland. It is thought that Norse language in the kingdom died out soon after the Scottish takeover.

It proved to be just as hard for the kings of Scotland to control the Isles as it had been for the kings of Norway. The Scots easily crushed a Manx rebellion under Godred Magnusson in 1275, but in 1290 the Isle of Man was occupied by the English. Thereafter the island changed hands several times before passing permanently to the English crown in 1399. The Gaelic chieftains of the Hebrides defied pacification and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the area was effectively autonomous under the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, who ruled from Finlaggan Castle on Islay. The lords maintained their authority with fleets of galleys called birlinns, direct descendants of the Vikings’ longships from which they differed only in having a stern-post rudder in place of a side rudder. Even after the lordship collapsed in 1493, the Hebrides remained turbulent and they did not finally come under firm government control until after the crushing of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. The Scots king James VI (r. 1567 – 1625) even considered genocide as a way to bring the islands under effective royal control.

The cession of the Kingdom of Man and the Isles to Scotland left Orkney and Shetland as the last Norse possessions in the British Isles. Although the islands were ruled by Scottish earls after 1236, their Norse character remained unaltered. In 1380 Norway and its Atlantic possessions came under the Danish crown through a dynastic union. The Danes took little interest in the islands until 1468 when King Christian I arranged the marriage of his daughter Margaret to the Scottish king James III. The cash-strapped Danish king could not afford to pay his daughter’s dowry and so offered the Orkney Islands to King James as surety for a loan of 50,000 Rhenish guilders. The following year Christian added Shetland to the bargain for an additional 8,000 guilders. It was Christian’s firm intention to redeem the islands as his agreement with King James included guarantees to preserve Norwegian law and customs, but the money was never paid so the arrangement became permanent. In 1471 King James abolished the earldom and annexed the islands as crown lands. The following year the bishopric of Orkney passed from the control of Nidaros to St Andrews. Gradually the islands became more Scottish in character. In 1611, Norwegian law was abolished and Norn, the local Norse dialect, finally died out in the eighteenth century, supplanted by English.

Though they did not lose their Norse culture and identity, the Norse colonies in Iceland and Greenland also lost their independence to the growing power of kings. Both also suffered severe population declines, which in Greenland’s case proved fatal, as a result of plague, economic isolation and climate change. Around 1250, the climate in the North Atlantic began to deteriorate as the Medieval Warm Period came to an end. By 1350, average temperatures had fallen substantially below those of the present day, beginning a period of intensely cold winters and cool summers to North America and Europe, which has become known as the Little Ice Age. During this period, which lasted until around 1850, the River Thames froze so hard in winter that Londoners held fairs, and even lit bonfires, on it; Venetians skated on the Lagoon; and once the Bosphorus froze at Istanbul so that it was possible to walk across it from Europe to Asia. Harvests often failed in the cool summers, bringing hunger to millions. One of the reasons why the Black Death which ravaged Europe in 1347 – 51 caused such massive mortality (up to 50 per cent of the population died) was that it fell on a weakened population.

The Little Ice Age hit Iceland hard, but this was only part of its problems. As well as climatic deterioration, medieval Icelanders also had to cope with the consequences of major volcanic eruptions and serious environmental problems of their own making. The human impact on Iceland was massive and rapid. Most of Iceland’s woodlands had been felled for fuel and building materials by the end of the Landnám period (c. 930) and over-grazing by sheep and cattle prevented any regeneration. Continued over-grazing began to expose the thin Icelandic soils to erosion by wind and rain. The impact was worst in the highlands, where large areas became cold deserts, but by 1300 soil erosion was also affecting the lowlands and it continued into modern times, causing a serious decline in the farming economy due to the poorer quality grazing. Only in the last few decades has this process been reversed with an ambitious woodland restoration programme. Volcanic eruptions also damaged agricultural productivity both by smothering grazing land with ash and by causing destructive flooding by melting the glaciers, which capped so many volcanoes. One of the worst incidents came in 1362 when an eruption burst through the vast Vatnajokul ice cap triggering massive floods that swept away two entire parishes and buried hundreds of square miles under knee-deep ash. The combined impact of these environmental disasters caused frequent famines that halved Iceland’s population by the fifteenth century.

By this time Iceland had lost its independence. The Althing provided Iceland with stable government while all the goðar were of roughly equal status, but it proved unable to cope with the emergence in the early thirteenth century of six pre-eminent chieftains, the stórgoðar (‘great chieftains’). These families competed for power, taking over the chieftaincies of lesser goðar in their attempts to create regional lordships, and imposing heavy burdens of taxation and military service on their followers. The country was riven by blood feuds and civil wars that eventually destroyed the Free State. To strengthen their positions many of the stórgoðar sought the support of Norway’s expansionist King Håkon IV and became royal vassals in return for promoting his ambitions to rule Iceland. Håkon steadily extended his influence over Iceland and in 1263 the Althing voted to accept Norwegian sovereignty. The rule of the goðar was abolished and, though the Althing continued to meet annually at Thingvellir until 1798, the members of the Lögretta were now royal appointees, whose decisions were subject to royal approval. Along with the loss of political independence, Iceland lost its economic autonomy. After the end of the Landnám period, Icelanders became increasingly dependent on foreigners to maintain their trade links. The lack of timber suitable for shipbuilding meant that once the original settlers’ ships had rotted they could not be replaced allowing Norwegian and, later German and English, merchants to take over Iceland’s trade and impose their own terms. Until it regained its independence in 1944, Iceland would remain one of Europe’s poorest countries.

In stark contrast to the political decay, the thirteenth century was also the age of Iceland’s greatest cultural achievement, its saga literature. Perhaps more than anything else, the sagas have helped give the Vikings, despite their many unsavoury habits, an undeniable aura of romance. Without the sagas, the Vikings would probably be just one more half-remembered bunch of barbarians like the Vandals and the Goths. In Icelandic, saga means ‘what is said’, so the tradition probably grew out of the oral storytelling that must have been a major source of entertainment on the long winter nights. Sagas cover many different subjects, including myths and legends, romances and saints’ lives. However, the two most important genres are the Íslendingasögur (‘sagas of Icelanders’) and royal biographies or konungasögur (‘kings’ sagas’). The anonymous Íslendingasögur are historical novels, in the form of family histories, based on the real people and events of Viking Age Iceland. The Íslendingasögur were a powerful response to Iceland’s troubled times, and they catered for an escapist desire to recreate a ‘golden age’ of a more heroic past while, at the same time, addressing present-day anxieties. It is no surprise that in such a strife-torn society, a common theme of these sagas is the working out of a blood feud and its tragic consequences across the generations. In Njáls saga, which many critics regard as the finest of all the Íslendingasögur, ties of kinship, personal loyalty and friendship inexorably draw Njal, a good and peaceable man, into other people’s disputes, leading him ultimately to his own violent death when his enemies trap and burn him in his hall. Though the authors of the sagas are much concerned with the workings of fate, their characters are rarely helpless victims, they are in control of their own destinies, they have choices, and they usually meet their ends as a result of their own flawed characters and misjudgements. This gripping psychological realism gives the Íslendingasögur a strikingly modern feel, especially when compared with the chivalric romances then fashionable in Europe, with their stereotyped characters and frequent supernatural and fantastical elements.

The most consistently entertaining of the Íslendingasögur must be Egils saga, which is based on the life of the tenth-century skald Egil Skalla-Grímsson. How closely the Egil of the saga resembles the real-life Egil is unknowable, but he is a larger than life character who embodies in a single person all of the contradictory faces of the Viking Age, appearing in turn as a warrior, merchant, farmer and skald, a man of remorseless violence who was nevertheless capable of composing verse of great sensitivity about the loss of his children. Like all the Íslendingasögur, Egils saga is anonymous, but it is generally thought on stylistic grounds that it was written by Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179 – ​1241), medieval Iceland’s leading literary figure. Like Egil, Snorri was a man of many parts, a poet, historian, lawyer and politically ambitious chieftain of the powerful Sturlung family who dominated western Iceland. From the age of three, Snorri was fostered by Jón Loftsson of Oddi, the most influential chieftain of southern Iceland. This fostering was the most decisive event in Snorri’s life. Oddi was Iceland’s main cultural centre and Jón, a learned man in his own right, saw to it that Snorri received a good education in theology, law and Latin literature. When Snorri was nineteen, his foster-brother Sæmundr arranged for him an advantageous marriage to Herdís, the only child of Bersi the Wealthy, through whom he inherited his first chieftaincy in 1202. Over the following years Snorri acquired many more chieftaincies, making him one of Iceland’s most influential stórgoðar. Elected three times as Lawspeaker, Snorri’s legal skills helped him advance his interests and those of his friends, but his ambitions inevitably made him enemies. Snorri was not a violent man and many of his contemporaries thought him to be a coward at heart. Unfortunately for Snorri, in thirteenth-century Iceland, the politically ambitious could not afford to be squeamish about violence.

In 1206, Snorri settled at the bleak manor at Reykholt, in Reykholtsdalur in western Iceland, and set about improving his new home. Snorri built a channel from a nearby hot spring to feed an outdoor hot tub and, a sign of the times, he also built substantial fortifications of turf and timber to protect his home. The timbers of Snorri’s home have long rotted and the turf walls have slumped into low banks that today give no impression of what archaeological investigations have revealed to have been an impressive castle-like home. The stone-lined hot tub alone remains. It was at Reykholt that Snorri wrote his major works, Heimskringla and the Edda, each of which has, in very different ways, contributed mightily to our knowledge of the Viking Age.

Snorri’s Heimskringla (‘The Circle of the World’) is a monumental history of the kings of Norway from legendary times down to the death of Magnus IV in 1177, written as a sequence of sixteen konungasögur. Drawing on a multitude of histories, genealogies and skaldic poems (he quotes from the works of more than seventy skalds), Snorri created for Norway a thrilling national epic that sustained Norwegian national identity through centuries of foreign rule but questions remain about its reliability. His vivid battle scenes and convincing dialogue are mostly invented. Like the Classical historians he read in his youth, Snorri used dialogue as a dramatic rhetorical device for analysing the motives and characters of his subjects, so it cannot be taken literally. Few modern historians would put as much faith in the veracity of skaldic poems as Snorri did – they were propaganda rather than history – but he brought a keen understanding of human psychology to his work and his marked reluctance to invoke supernatural causes makes Heimskringla one of the most impressive, coherent and readable works of medieval historiography: despite its shortcomings all historians of the Viking Age rely on it heavily.

Snorri was also the author of a unique handbook to the Viking art of composing skaldic verse. This was a genre of alliterative verse that was composed and publicly recited by skalds to praise the deeds of their royal patrons. Good skaldic verse was committed to memory and passed down through the generations, helping to secure their subjects’ posthumous reputation – something that was always close to a Viking ruler’s heart. Skalds were usually also warriors. They accompanied Viking armies into battle and composed verses on the spot to encourage their fellow warriors to greater feats of heroism: skaldic poems are, therefore, often the nearest thing we have to eyewitness accounts of the Vikings in battle. By Snorri’s time, skaldic verse was a dying art. Young poets no longer understood the allusions to pagan mythology that provided the genre with much of its colour and vitality. It was with the intent of reviving the art of the skalds that Snorri wrote the Edda (the meaning of the title is uncertain), providing his readers with a full account of Scandinavian mythology from the creation of the world to Ragnarok, the doom of the gods, as well as a discussion of poetical devices, such as metre, alliteration and kennings (poetic similes). Snorri prefaced his work with a Christian rationalisation of the pagan religion, presenting the old gods merely as deified ancient heroes, so protecting himself from any accusation of apostasy. As with his historical writing, Snorri drew on a variety of oral and written sources, some of which are preserved in an anonymous collection of mythological and heroic verse known as the Poetic or Elder Edda. The most important of these poems are ‘Voluspá’ (‘The Prophecy of the Seeress’), which Snorri quotes in his Edda, describing the creation of the world and Ragnarok, and Hávamál, a collection of short verses offering common-sense wisdom about everyday social conduct in Viking society, along with spells and verses about the high god Odin. Snorri’s Edda failed to revive skaldic verse – soon after his death, the Icelanders were writing and reading the chivalric romances that Snorri so obviously disapproved of – but without it our knowledge of Scandinavian paganism would be much poorer.

It is perhaps ironic that Snorri played a significant role in the downfall of the Icelandic Free State: he was the first of the stórgoðar to become a vassal of the king of Norway, accepting a knighthood from Håkon IV while visiting Norway in 1220. Snorri shamelessly flattered the young king and the powerful jarl Skuli Bardarson by writing skaldic praise poems for them. Jarl Skuli was so pleased he gave Snorri a ship and other fine gifts. Before he returned home, Håkon commissioned Snorri to use his influence in the Althing to bring Iceland under Norwegian rule. This had predictably destabilising consequences. Snorri’s attempts to consolidate his power caused a civil war and in 1237 he was forced to flee to Norway. Håkon was less than pleased to see him; Snorri had opened the door to royal influence but now he had outlived his usefulness. Håkon switched his support to Gissur Thorvaldsson, chieftain of the rival Haukadalur family. Håkon ordered Snorri not to return to Iceland, which, as Snorri’s feudal lord, he had every right to do. However, Snorri felt compelled to return home to protect his own interests there and in 1239 he fled Norway with the help of his friend jarl Skuli. Snorri’s association with Skuli proved fatal. After Skuli attempted to seize the throne later that year, Håkon ordered Gissur to kill Snorri. A sympathiser sent Snorri a coded warning of the intended attack, but he was unable to decipher it and took no special precautions to protect himself. Backed by sixty men, Gissur broke into Reykholt on the night of 23 September 1241. Taken completely by surprise, Snorri was chased into a cellar and killed. True to his nature, he offered no resistance. Snorri’s killing caused outrage in both Iceland and Norway, but it showed how great Håkon’s influence in Iceland now was. Conflict continued for another twenty years, but the struggle now was not for Iceland’s independence, only for which family should exercise the greatest influence when it finally was annexed by Norway. The Icelanders’ Viking ancestors had emigrated to escape the rule of kings but they had, in the end, fallen victim to the same centralising forces. Competition for power had torn their society apart, the rule of kings was the only way to restore peace and in 1263, the Althing voted to accept direct Norwegian rule.

Even during the Medieval Warm Period Greenland had been a very marginal environment for European colonisation: the onset of the Little Ice Age pushed the Norse colony over the edge into extinction. The climatic deterioration undermined the Greenland colony at several different levels. The Thule Inuit began to migrate south and took over the vital Norðsetr hunting grounds by around 1300. Without the Norðsetr’s valuable commodities to attract European merchants the colony’s trade links to Europe began to fade. These were already in decline in the thirteenth century, because increased trans-Saharan trade gave European craftsmen access to plentiful supplies of elephant ivory, which was much superior to Greenland’s walrus ivory. Grain, iron and salt were everyday essentials in medieval Europe, but they must have become increasingly scarce luxuries in Greenland. In 1261, the Greenlanders acknowledged Norwegian sovereignty in return for a guarantee of one trade ship a year from Bergen. Increasing sea ice made it harder for the few ships that still set out for Greenland to get there. Ivar Bardarson, a priest who was sent to Greenland in 1341, wrote that the old route to the Greenland settlements, via the Gunnbjorn Skerries, had been given up because of pack ice. Ships now had to sail much further south to get around Cape Farewell. The increasing pack ice also reduced the Greenlanders’ already limited wood supply by preventing driftwood reaching the shore. The voyage to Markland in 1347 (see ch. 8) was probably an attempt to improve the situation. Without the ability to build ships, the Greenlanders’ dependence on the annual ship from Norway was absolute.

The colder conditions adversely affected the Greenlanders’ farming economy and animal bones from middens show an increasing dependence on wild caribou and seals. Skeletal remains from cemeteries show that the Greenlanders became prey to diseases associated with poor nutrition, such as chronic inner-ear infections, and had a reduced life expectancy. Everything depended on the hay harvest. The longer winters meant that livestock had to be kept in the byres for longer so the Greenlanders’ dependence on hay was increasing even as their ability to provide it was declining. If the summer was too cool for the grass to grow well, there would not be enough hay to feed the livestock through the winter, and if the livestock starved so too, soon after, would the people. At Sandnes in the Western Settlement, archaeological evidence suggests that the entire parish starved to death in a hard winter in the mid-fourteenth century. At the chieftain’s farm, the skeletons of nine hunting dogs were found on a stable floor: they had been butchered. This was an act of desperation indeed. When the houses of the parish were abandoned, even the valuable timbers were left. With wood in such short supply in Greenland, this would not have happened if there had been survivors. When Ivar Bardarson visited the Western Settlement in the 1340s, he found it completely uninhabited. By around 1380, the Middle Settlement had been abandoned too.

Although the archaeological evidence says otherwise, Ivar Bardarson believed that the Western settlement had been destroyed by the Inuit. The potential for conflict was clearly there, over hunting grounds, for example, and, as they did not own domestic animals themselves, the Inuit may have seen the Norse Greenlanders’ livestock as just another kind of game to be hunted. There certainly was some violence between the Norse and the Inuit, though how serious a factor it was in the decline of the colony is impossible to judge. The Icelandic annals record that in 1379 Skraelings killed eighteen Greenlanders and took two boys into slavery. Inuit folk tales collected by Danish missionaries in the nineteenth century tell of conflicts with the Norse, but also of friendships. One tale tells how the Inuit avenged a Norse attack on one of their villages. Using white skins to make their kayaks look like icebergs, the Inuit approached a Norse farm undetected. When everyone had retired inside the house for the night, the Inuit packed bundles of juniper branches around it and set them on fire. Those Norse who tried to escape were shot down with arrows as they emerged from the house, the rest perished in the flames. In contrast, another tale tells how the Inuit agreed to help the Norse against pirates who had raided the settlements. When the pirates returned the Inuit rescued five women and two children. When the Inuit discovered that the pirates had carried off the rest of the Norse as captives, the survivors were adopted into their community. English, German and Moorish pirates raided Iceland in the fifteenth century, seizing people to sell as slaves on the Barbary Coast, and there is one record in a papal letter of a pirate raid on the Eastern Settlement in 1418, so the tale has the ring of truth about it. The impact of a slave raid on the small Norse community could have been much more devastating than any skirmishes with the Inuit.

In the later fourteenth century, contacts between Greenland and Norway became increasingly sporadic. In 1367, the official trade ship was lost at sea and there is no evidence that the Norwegian crown replaced it. Álfur, the bishop of Garðar, died in 1378, but it was not until 1385 that the news reached Norway. A new bishop was duly appointed, but he never sailed to take up his seat. One of the last recorded ships to visit the Greenland settlement arrived in 1406, after it was blown off course on a voyage from Norway to Iceland. Pack ice in the fjords prevented it from setting sail again for four years. While there, the ship’s captain Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdottir in the small stone church at Hvalsey, in the Eastern Settlement. Many guests attended the ceremony, which was held on 16 September 1408. The banns had been read publicly on three Sundays before the wedding and afterwards the priest Paul Hallvardsson gave the happy couple a marriage certificate: it is the only document written in the Norse Greenland colony that has survived. At this time, it would seem that all was well with the Eastern Settlement. It was a fully functioning medieval European community in which the church enforced conformity to Christian values. Only a year before the wedding a man called Kolgrim had been burned alive after being found guilty of using black arts to seduce a widow. This may be behind the Norse Greenlanders’ striking failure to learn anything from the Inuit. Inuit hunting technology was far superior to that used by the Norse but even as their dependence on seal meat increased – isotope analysis of skeletal remains indicates that by this time Greenlanders relied on seal meat for 80 per cent of their nutrition – they adopted none of it. Inuit clothing was wonderfully adapted to survival in Arctic conditions but items of clothing recovered from a cemetery at Herjolfsnes in the Eastern Settlement show that the Norse continued to wear European-style woollens. Perhaps their Christian way of life was so central to the Norse that adopting Inuit ways would have challenged their sense of identity.

There are few recorded contacts with Greenland after Thorstein and his wife left for Norway in 1410. The Danish cartographer Claudius Clavus visited Greenland around 1420, travelling as far north as the Nordsetr and encountering Inuit, and it was probably he who took news of the pirate raid in 1418 to the outside world. In 1426, a Greenlander called Peder visited Norway, but it is not known if he ever went home. Clothing preserved in graves from the cemetery at Herjolfsnes shows that the Greenlanders were still managing to keep up to date with European fashions until around 1450, but there is no evidence for contacts after that time. By the late fifteenth century, the Norse Greenland colony had become a distant memory. No sea captains who knew the way to Greenland could be found at Bergen in 1484. In 1492 Pope Alexander VI wrote about Greenland as a lost land:

‘The people there have no bread, wine or oil but live on dried fish and milk. Very few sailings because of the ice on the sea and these only in the month of August, when the ice has melted. It is thought that no ship has sailed there for eighty years and that no bishop or priest has lived there during this period. Because there are no priests, many of the people there who were formerly Catholics, have renounced the sacrament of baptism and have nothing else to remind of the Christian faith than a sacred altar cloth which is exhibited once a year, which was used by the last priest to say mass a hundred years ago.’

Ironically, Alexander was writing in the same year that Christopher Columbus made his first trans-Atlantic voyage. Europeans now possessed the technology to achieve what had been beyond the resources of the Greenlanders’ Viking ancestors, the colonisation of the Americas.

The fate of the last Norse Greenlanders may never be known for certain, but it is likely that, by the time Pope Alexander was writing, their settlements were already deserted and abandoned. Certainly, seafarers who visited Greenland in the sixteenth century met only Inuit. It is romantic to imagine the last Norse Greenlanders, doomed by their cultural conservatism, struggling stubbornly to maintain their European ways as every winter the glaciers advanced a little further down the valleys. Forgotten and abandoned by the outside world, they died one by one of malnutrition and cold until none were left or until a few desperate survivors begged the Inuit to take them in. The fate of the settlement might have been altogether less desperate, however. Among fifteenth-century burials in the settlements there is a marked lack of women of child-bearing age. Death of complications associated with childbirth was sadly very common in Medieval Europe, so this absence must be significant. Sigrid Bjornsdottir had relations in Iceland and that was where she eventually settled after she left Greenland with her husband. Faced with increasing social and economic isolation and a choice between living on seal meat or starving, was Sigrid the only young woman who, seeing a way out, took it? The evidence of the cemeteries suggests not. This is part of a pattern of rural depopulation the world over. The young men, who stood to inherit farms, would have stayed longer, but as it became impossible for them to find wives, they would have begun to drift away too, perhaps signing on as crew on the few ships that still came to Greenland. Only those who felt too old to start a new life would have remained and, with the young people gone, the extinction of the colony was just a matter of time. The last outpost of the Viking world may simply have died of old age.