Norse and Aztecs · CHAPTER 3 ·
Settlement of Iceland
Chapter 3 of Climate and Innovation: The Norse and the Aztecs, c. 790–1521: “Iceland: A Society on a Volcanic Island”
Norse settlers reached Iceland from the 870s, and within about sixty years the landnám had claimed every usable valley; many came from Ireland and Scotland, often enslaved. The Althing assembly met at Þingvellir from 930, while woodcutting and grazing stripped birch woodland that once covered a quarter to two-fifths of the land.
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The map above is the world of The Norse North Atlantic, 930 — The Althing; Normandy granted; York English again.
Part of IB History: The Norse and the Aztecs →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In the 870s people began arriving on an island with no settled population. Ari Þorgilsson, writing in the twelfth century, described Iceland as wooded “between fell and fore-shore”. During roughly sixty years of landnám, or land-taking, settlers claimed its usable valleys in a rush comparable to a gold rush. They brought sheep, cattle and barley from Norway, and people from Ireland and Scotland, many of them enslaved. The map shows Iceland turning red by 930; the arrows trace the Norwegian and Gaelic routes. Within two generations a farming society occupied the island.
The settlers needed rules as well as farms. At Þingvellir in 930 they founded the Althing, an open-air assembly where chieftains and farmers met each June to make laws and settle disputes. It combined functions familiar from a parliament and a supreme court, although Iceland had no king, army or tax collectors to enforce its decisions. In 999 or 1000 rival parties accepted one respected man’s ruling on Christianity, as parties might accept an arbitrator, and avoided civil war. The farms had a less durable foundation: cutting and grazing prevented birch from recovering, while volcanic soil began to erode. The society preserved its law while losing its woods.
The full story
The names in Landnámabók, the Book of Settlements, give the migration a scale: nearly 400 leading settlers and about 1,400 places. Population geneticists estimate that 8,000–16,000 people came altogether. Yet the named leaders tell only part of the story. DNA from early settlers’ skeletons led Sunna Ebenesersdóttir’s team in 2018 to estimate their average ancestry at about 57 percent Norse, with most of the rest Gaelic; earlier work found that more than 60 percent of founding female lineages came from Ireland and Scotland. Many Gaelic women and men had been captured in raids and brought as slaves. Their labor helped establish farms in a society whose literary history gives Norwegian leaders greater prominence.
Those farms required supplies for a long winter. Farmers cut hay in summer and stored it for as much as seven months; barley could grow only in the milder south and west. At settlement birch may have covered a quarter to two-fifths of the island. Trees furnished fuel and building material, but sheep ate the young birch that might have replaced them. By the twentieth century woodland covered less than 1 percent. Without its cover, light volcanic soil was exposed to wind and water; perhaps 20,000 square kilometers of soil cover have eroded since settlement. The damage accumulated, while eruptions could change a district suddenly: around 1104 Hekla buried Þjórsárdalur in pumice.
The Althing addressed a problem the land could not solve: how could armed farmers settle disputes without a king? Chieftains, or goðar, combined the roles of local lords and representatives, somewhat like modern political party leaders. They and their followers gathered at Þingvellir for about two weeks each June. There were 36 chieftaincies at first; a reform around 965 made them 39 and established courts for the four quarters of Iceland. Around 1005 a Fifth Court was added to hear appeals. An elected lawspeaker recited a third of the law each summer until it was written down in 1117–18. Judgment and enforcement remained separate: a successful litigant had to carry out the decision. Even so, the system lasted more than three centuries before civil war and submission to Norway in 1262–64.
FULL EXPLANATION
Dating the land-taking
The dating of Iceland’s settlement rests on records made in quite different ways. Ari Þorgilsson wrote Íslendingabók in the 1120s; Landnámabók survives in thirteenth-century versions and assigns the first settler, Ingólfr Arnarson, to 874. Beneath early turf walls over much of the island lies the Landnám tephra, a volcanic ash layer. Its fragments reached the Greenland ice cores, where Karl Grönvold’s 1995 reckoning dated it to 871 plus or minus two years; Magdalena Schmid used a revised timescale placing it in 877 in 2017. Walls built above the ash came after the eruption. Pollen provides a further record: birch declines above the layer as grass and cereal pollen increase. Some archaeologists point to structures that may predate the ash as evidence of earlier visits. The convergence of written tradition, ash and changing vegetation nevertheless places the main land-taking in the decades after the 870s.
What the genomes reveal about the settlers
The sagas name Norwegian chieftains, but the people buried in early Iceland reveal a wider founding population. Agnar Helgason examined mitochondrial DNA, passed from mother to child, and in 2001 estimated that about 62.5 percent of founding female lineages were Gaelic. Sunna Ebenesersdóttir’s 2018 study used 27 ancient genomes to estimate ancestry more broadly: the early settlers averaged about 57 percent Norse ancestry, with uncertainty of 43–70 percent, compared with about 70 percent among Icelanders today. Why did that proportion change? The authors suggest that people of Norse ancestry left more surviving children. Written evidence that many Gaels arrived enslaved, with fewer opportunities to marry and raise families, fits that possibility, although ancestry alone cannot establish an individual’s status. The evidence brings into view people the literary accounts seldom name and shows that Norse expansion included forced migration.
Deforestation and erosion: a debate about blame
The woodland and soil were lost, but assigning blame requires us to consider what settlers knew and what their farming practices encountered. The Icelandic Forest Service estimates that birch covered 25–40 percent of Iceland at settlement; soil layers show erosion accelerating after the land-taking. Andrew Dugmore and colleagues stress that farming methods came from Norway, where deeper soils and denser forests recovered differently from grazing. Icelandic birch and volcanic soils recovered slowly, and settlers had little way to anticipate the difference. Sheep consumed the seedlings that might have replaced trees cut for fuel and buildings, leaving soil exposed. After 1300 colder summers shortened the growing season and barley cultivation contracted. Ólafur Arnalds has shown that the worst erosion crosses highland margins where grazing continued longest. A familiar system caused unintended damage on a scale no institution was designed to manage. The Althing could judge a quarrel over a meadow; it did not manage the island’s soil.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
An empty island within reach of the ships. The crossing was within reach of the ships described in Chapter 2: Iceland is about 970 kilometers west of Norway and about 450 from the already-settled Faroe Islands. Irish hermits may have visited before the Norse, but there was no settled population to conquer. Newcomers could claim land and build a colony from the ground up.
Land hunger and politics in Norway. Later Icelandic writers explained the migration as flight from Harald Fairhair’s tyranny after he united much of Norway in the late ninth century. Historians approach that flattering account of the settlers’ ancestors cautiously. Scarce farmland and growing royal power nevertheless seem to have encouraged ambitious families to leave. In Iceland a chieftain could hold land without a king above him; early claimants took large estates and divided them among kin and followers.
Captives from the Gaelic west. Raids in Ireland and Scotland supplied captives whom settlers took to Iceland as slaves. They cleared land, herded animals and wove cloth. Genetic evidence shows the size of the Gaelic contribution to the founding population. Without forced labor, clearing the island’s usable land in about sixty years would have been much slower. Violence in the Gaelic west helped make the new farms possible.
The need for law without a king. Freedom from royal power left settlers with disputes over land, livestock and killings, and feuds could destroy families. Norwegian regional assemblies, called things, offered a means of resolving such quarrels. Icelanders adapted the tradition to an island-wide assembly, giving people a common procedure without placing one chieftain in command of the others.
THE TURNING POINT
Þingvellir, 930 — and the decision of 999/1000. The Althing founded at Þingvellir in 930 gave scattered farmers a place and a procedure for settling disputes. Its importance became clear in 999 or 1000, when divisions between Christians and pagans threatened civil war. Both parties agreed to accept the lawspeaker Þorgeir’s decision. After a day and a night beneath his cloak, he ruled that Icelanders should be baptized, while allowing some pagan practices in private. Agreement on how to decide enabled a society without a king to make a momentous change peacefully.
What it changed
A springboard further west. Iceland became a base for the next westward voyages. Erik the Red had been outlawed for killings first in Norway and then in Iceland. He sailed west in the early 980s and returned with plans for a colony; in 985 or 986 a fleet left Iceland for Greenland, as Chapter 4 follows. People who had lost their place in an earlier settlement helped carry the frontier farther west.
A durable legal culture. Iceland lost independence when its chieftains accepted the Norwegian crown in 1262–64, but its legal tradition endured. Law first recited and later written in the Grágás codes remained part of Icelandic identity. The Althing met almost every summer until 1798 and was revived in the nineteenth century; Icelanders count it among the world’s oldest parliaments.
An environment slowly degraded. Fewer trees meant less timber for houses and ships, so Icelanders turned to driftwood and imports. Erosion reduced grazing land as cooling after 1300 brought further pressure. Iceland survived, unlike Norse Greenland, but grew poorer and more dependent on trade with Norway. Chapter 5 follows the colder centuries.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Althing a successful innovation if Iceland still fell into civil war and lost its independence in 1262–64?
For more than 300 years the Althing helped armed chieftains make law and settle disputes without a king, army or taxes. The peaceful adoption of Christianity in 999 or 1000 shows how much an agreed procedure could accomplish. Yet a judgment depended on the winner’s followers for enforcement. When wealth and power accumulated in a few great families in the thirteenth century, that dependence became dangerous: rivals fought the civil wars of the Sturlung Age and accepted the Norwegian king. The institution had worked under a rough balance of power and struggled when that balance changed, a problem no medieval assembly had fully solved. It nevertheless survived as a symbol and later as a parliament.
An interesting fact
The Arctic fox was Iceland’s only native land mammal when the settlers arrived, probably having crossed sea ice at the end of the last Ice Age. Norse ships brought sheep, cattle, horses, goats, pigs, dogs and cats; mice came as stowaways. Icelandic plants had not previously been grazed by anything larger than a goose. The arrival of livestock helps explain the pressure on birch woodland and thin volcanic soils.
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