Readings in Times of Crisis: New Interpretations of Stories about the Settlement of Iceland

Abstract

The settlement of Iceland, at the end of the ninth century, has been vigorously discussed for decades by archaeologists and historians, place-name scholars, literary scholars, and theologians. Recently, the settlement has increasingly been examined from the perspective of environmental history, especially by archaeologists who have demonstrated how the settlement impacted the contemporary nature-culture dynamics. The literary sources describing the settlement have been used in various ways: sometimes as sources that have facilitated the finding and interpretation of archaeological material, and other times, they have been seen as irrelevant for understanding the actual historical settlement and have instead been regarded as evidence of sociopolitical issues during the thirteenth century when the texts were written. The main aim of this article is to add to this range of existing interpretations and to propose a new reading of the literary descriptions of the settlement of Iceland, based on the manuscripts where such stories are preserved, dating back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This period may be characterized as a time of environmental crisis, caused by the onset of the Little Ice Age at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the Black Death, which first hit Iceland at the beginning of the fifteenth century. This article will discuss the relevance of the stories about the settlement during such times of crisis. This new interpretation, based on the transmission of settlement stories, does not negate the impact of the original settlement on the nature-culture dynamics in the ninth and tenth centuries, nor does it negate that the sagas were most probably written to respond to sociopolitical and perhaps environmental conditions of the thirteenth century, as argued by previous authors. Rather, we will investigate why the stories continued to be copied and read, and what their relevance may have been during the environmental crisis of the Late Middle Ages.To illustrate this discussion, we will focus here on the story of the settlement of Iceland as described in Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, composed in the thirteenth century and preserved in younger manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The saga describes the settlement of southwestern Iceland, which has been excavated in major recent archaeological projects, such as the Mosfell Project and the Reykholt project. The “facts” of the settlement narrative—both archaeological and literary—are thus very well-known.I will begin the discussion by presenting what Egils saga, seen in comparison to a few other thirteenth-century literary sources, says about the settlement of Iceland. Second, I will turn to two paradigms of interpretations of these stories: the first concerning the nature-culture dynamics during the ninth–tenth century, and the second pertaining to the ecology of the thirteenth century. Third, based on the manuscript transmission of the saga, I will discuss whether a third interpretation is possible, one illustrating the nature-culture dynamics during the time when the manuscripts were produced, namely, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The article's aim is thus to discuss how literature and its transmission can illuminate various periods of the environmental history of Iceland, revealing both how people's activities may have impacted nature as well as how nature and environmental crises may have impacted what people needed to remember in order to deal with such crises. Even though the case-study and the main analysis pertain primarily to the meaning of medieval Icelandic literature, discussing possible new meanings of literature popular during environmental crises in the past may throw new light on literary, historical, and spiritual needs during other environmental (and pandemic) predicaments. Conclusively, the discussion leads to a few reflections on how the chosen method and source-critical premises condition what questions we may ask and what conclusions we may reach when conducting ecocriticism and environmental history.But before that, we will have a quick look at two contextualizing narratives: the first is a clarification of how environmental history is defined and conceived in this article, and the second concerns the major “facts” of the environmental history of medieval Iceland. Both of these serve as frames of reference for the subsequent reading of Egils saga and other texts.Acknowledging but further developing the seminal work of scholars like Donald Worster (1989) and the materialistic and dualistic view on nature-culture dynamics, most environmental historians today regard nature and culture as parts of a unified ecosystem (Cronon 1990; Schatzki 2003; Asdal 2003; Merchant 2010). Often inspired by Bruno Latour's actor-network theory and/or feminist theory, nature-culture relations may be defined as comprising ecology (energy, materials, resources), production (the usage of natural resources), reproduction (biological and cultural), and consciousness and attitudes (the way in which environment is perceived, understood, and interpreted) (Merchant 2010). Technology, society, and nature are seen as so bound together in history and as history that change in one of them results in simultaneous transformation of the other two. This theoretical development has also influenced archaeological theory, where nature is portrayed as a historical protagonist, and things, plants, and animals are credited with agency and personhood (Olsen 2010; Brunning 2013; Thomas 2015). According to this material, animal, post-humanistic turn in environmental humanities, humans are relational rather than exceptional beings (Rees 2017; Haraway 2003; Tsing 2015).The theoretical premises in environmental history have thus changed from crude Cartesian distinctions between nature as compared with society to theories of distributed agency where human and non-human entities have similar agency. However, the distinction between subject and object may be argued for, based on a very different ontology from Descartes's dualism and without denying that they belong to the same ecosystem (Hornborg 2017). According to Hornborg, the distinction between humans, other species, and things hinges on humans’ abilities for conscious awareness of their own agency and purpose. Non-living objects do not have agency, purpose, and intentions, but they can still have impact on their surroundings—they can constrain, be catalysts, and be attributed agency. Thus, things certainly have consequences, but not agency. Living organisms, plants, and animals, on the other hand, have agency, but do not have conscious awareness of it. The distinction between humans and other species lies in their awareness of their own agency. This is the same distinction as between symbolic as compared with non-symbolic phenomena, with language and culture being the primary tools of the symbolic. Hornborg shows that post-humanists delegate the responsibility of social and human-environmental relationships to things and other species, and may thus forget that they are often the authors behind these relationships. This reasoning implies that humans can also change their relation to nature, if they so choose.But how, and based on what premises do humans choose to change (or not) their practices and beliefs? How can they imagine the future (about their relationship to nature, for example)? What cognitive operations are activated in such processes? Such questions are discussed extensively by cognitive scientists and memory-scholars. According to Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002), for example, humans make choices by blending, compressing, and decompressing a myriad of ideas, including memories of past selves and events, and current inspirations from other selves and environments (see also Turner and McCubbins 2018). When analogies are compressed in the blend, these form the core of a sense of identity; when disanalogies are compressed, there is a sense of a change of that identity. However, choices are not made based on stable parameters. Even when presented with the same choices, we may choose differently depending on our changing epistemologies and experiences. In any case, memories of the past are crucial for the creation of the present and for the imagining of the future.Cognitive scientists, such as Arnaud D'Argembeau et al. (2010), have also shown that remembering the past and imagining the future activate the same part of the brain. To bring something to mind demands a reconstruction that is not so unlike the construction our brain engages in when we imagine the future. Further, it is exactly our own past and the memory of the past that functions as a framework for our own creation, imagination, and simulation of the future. Knowledge of past selves and past relationships are essential in the creation of one's future self and relationships. Memory is not just a storage space; it is rather part of the cognitive system that makes it possible to think of the future; it is an integrated part of cognitive time travel.To sum up, the theoretical starting point for this article is that nature and culture form part of a unified ecosystem, but that humans distinguish themselves in this ecosystem because of their cognitive capacities to be aware of their own relationship to that ecosystem. Making choices in the present and imagining the future are, however, cognitively linked and conditioned by memories of past selves and relationships. What comes to the human mind in times of crisis is thus very relevant for understanding how one can deal with the crisis and how one can imagine the future after the crisis. This ability of the human brain is seen here as an essential and integrated characteristic of the unified ecosystem between nature and culture.Related to such theoretical discussions of the nature-culture dynamics, the contention within environmental history demands that research address changes in nature and changes in culture (or lack of these), and the relationship between them; that research should aspire toward interdisciplinary approaches that combine methods of hard sciences and the humanities; and that research on environmental history should have a wider geographical and temporal scale, including ancient and medieval times, which are crucial when studying environmental history, as that was when human modes of environmental relationships and institutions originated and developed (Hughes 2008; McNeill 2003; 2010).Following this brief review, in this article, nature and culture will be seen as part of a unified ecosystem, where humans’ awareness and ability to choose to change (or not) their relation to nature is conditioned by memories of the same relationship. This takes us to a presentation of the main milestones of the environmental—that is, both ecological and cultural—history of medieval Iceland before we turn to what the transmission of Egils saga can tell us about it. Thus, the following discussion of the environmental history of Iceland will be based on both archaeological and literary sources, as the former describe to a greater extent how the environment was actually used, while the latter reveal how the environment was thought of, how it was remembered and imagined.The environmental history of Iceland may be divided in two phases: the period of the actual settlement through the thirteenth century, including the introduction of Christianity and other important societal transformations, and the fourteenth century onward. The main dividing line, as vague as it may be, is the transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age. The time frame of the Medieval Warm Period varies depending on what region of Europe is discussed, but the years of roughly 1000–1300 were relatively warm and followed by times of instability characteristic of the Little Ice Age. For the North Atlantic area, this meant high solar irradiance, which set a positive pattern to atmospheric circulation variabilities. The Greenland ice core shows peak temperatures around the year 1000 with a very gradual cooling, reaching a low point in the fourteenth century. In general, the period brought stable seasonal patterns with warm summers, despite local variations. This would have influenced the growth of various crops, such as wheat and grapes, which are also referred to in Old Norse sources (Hoffmann 2014, 322–3).Culturally and politically, the period saw the settlement of Iceland, its Christianization, the development of the Free Icelandic State, and Iceland's submission to the Norwegian king in 1262–1264. The settlement and the prehistoric phase of the environmental history of Iceland have been studied in numerous archaeological projects, such as the Mosfell Project, the Reykholt project (Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir and Helgi Þorláksson 2018), the excavations of Hofstaðir in Mÿvatnssveit (Lucas McGovern et al. 2017), and in the Eyafjöll region (Buckland et al. 1991). Such recent research, combining methods from archaeology and the natural sciences, conveys the complexity of the settlement of the North Atlantic in the late Iron Age and the Viking period. A major contention in recent research is that while earlier studies have focused predominantly on how the settlement led to deforestation and soil erosion, over-exploitation of fragile ecosystems, unsustainable management of key resources, and the social-ecological disaster following the settlement, recent scholarship provides “a more complex understanding of long-term human ecodynamics” (Brewington et al. 2015, 1676).1 Some of the main questions in much of this research concentrate on whether the stewardship of land and resources was successful, or whether it failed, or was merely under development due to changes in the management of wild and domesticated animals.The gradual adaptation process may also be traced through the development of settlement in Iceland, which included “earliest establishments,” to “large farms” belonging to a second stage, and to “planned farms” belonging to a third stage (Egill Erlendsson et al. 2018, 167). These phases are detectable, for example, in the Reykholt area, which is very relevant as a plausible provenance of Egils saga. The abandonment of some farms in the area, such as Norðland and Hœgindi, would have changed the access to natural resources at Reykholt, which also continued to be among the wealthiest estates during the thirteenth century when the saga was written (Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir 2012, 267). In fact, many other farms mentioned in Landnámabók or the Icelandic sagas were definitely or most likely abandoned by the time the texts were written (Bjarni F. Einarsson 1994). Some of the best-known examples are the decrease in positions of estates like Bergþórshvoll and Hlíðarendi, homes of Njáll and Gunnarr from Njáls saga, which were still wealthy but not the centers of their respective regions during the late Middle Ages (Orri Vésteinsson 2007, 128–9; Adolf Friðriksson and Orri Vésteinsson 2003, 149–51).Christianization introduced a new ideology toward nature. According to the Bible, nature on earth was an environment created by God. Man, blessed with the faculty of work, was generally seen as assisting God in improving the earthly home prior to reconnecting with God in his blissful paradise for eternity. Knowledge of nature was considered to lead to greater understanding of God; nature proved the existence of God, his plan, and his truth. There were, of course, variations on these topics throughout the period, but all scientific disciplines, such as physics, biology, astrology, and geography, were developed based on this theology. In Medieval Europe, people were concerned with how they modified the created environment and recognized their agency in environmental change through the quarrying industry (to support the building of numerous cathedrals throughout Europe); clearing tracts of forests and woodlands for villages, monastic orders, and agriculture; land drainage; and intensification of technology (White 1967; Hoffmann 2014). Although this theology is well-known, it is difficult to know whether the new ideology in fact led to a change in the actual modes of using the natural resources and the environment.2To sum up: with a generally warm climate and an ideology that inspired humans to exploit natural resources, the environmental history in this phase may be characterized by a great degree of correspondence between availability, use, and attitudes to the environment. Supported by their religion, Christians had the right and agency to use what was available in their environment, but over time, they adapted their modes of exploitation, as well as the size and number of their settlements, due to changes in the environment that they themselves contributed to.The fourteenth century saw the advance of the Little Ice Age. Cold summers (a decrease in average temperatures of 2 degrees) and ice-growth started between 1275 and 1300 (Miller et al. 2012). Bruce M. S. Campbell (2016) calls the fourteenth century the century of great decay. In Iceland, this led to failure of cereal crops, probably contributing to a decrease in population and the isolation of Iceland from the sociopolitical center (Stone 2004). Even at Reykholt, where the climate was relatively favorable, cereal cultivation may have even ceased completely because of the drastic reduction in the number of day-degrees over the summers (Egill Erlendsson et al. 2018, 170). The effects of climate change were probably intensified and made even more complex due to other disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, as well as plagues (Riddell et al. 2018; Callow and Evans 2016). The fifteenth century saw two major outbreaks of plague in Iceland, one in 1402–1404 and one in 1494–1495, and it is believed that the first killed at least half of the population of the island and left many farms deserted. This must have had a grave effect on the intensity of the use of environmental resources as well as the production of documents (Riddell et al. 2018, 13).Politically, after the Free State (c. 930–1262/64), Iceland became part of a union with Norway. While this has been seen as a tragedy and loss of independence by a past generation of historians, more recent historians have avoided national bias in their interpretations (Jón Viðar Sigurðsson Orri Vésteinsson 2000; Helgi þorláksson 2005), and argue for a cultural and political continuity to a greater extent: the elite competed for royal offices, and some of the old structures still persisted, with slight alterations. The new division was not between royal officials and the rest of the population, but between farmers and the elite, whether royal officials or not (Wærdahl 2006; Sigríður Beck 2011). Administratively, fourteenth-century Iceland was similar to any late medieval state. While the economic base was different—sedentary-pastoral rather than agrarian—Iceland was otherwise like any other poor, remote medieval state, governed by a distant king through his leader of the retinue (hirðstjóri), sheriffs (sýslumenn), tax officials, lawmen, or judges (lögmenn), but was otherwise not very present and influential. The power lay in the hands of a few: landed gentry, church magnates, and royal administrators. Iceland produced annals, documents, and a great many manuscripts in the vernacular, which distinguishes it from other medieval states, such as those mentioned earlier (Orri Vésteinsson 2000, 4).The big “break” in Icelandic history came first in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries: the union between Norway and Sweden in 1319 and the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in 1397, which left Iceland at the periphery to an even greater extent than previously; the plagues in 1402–1404 and 1494–1495 (see above); a few “Cod Wars” against England; and finally the halt in the writing of annals around 1430, only to be taken up anew in the mid-sixteenth century (Gunnar Karlsson 2003, 100–5). Even though few archaeological investigations document this late medieval period,3 there is a remarkable number of manuscripts from this period—some of which we will return to below—that may provide new insight into how people dealt with this environmental and cultural crisis.With this clarification of theory and short environmental history of medieval Iceland in mind, we may now turn to Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, composed during the second quarter of the thirteenth century, which tells us of the settlement of southwestern Iceland. The main aspects of the settlement of Iceland in Egils saga may be summarized as follows:4(1) Kveld-Úlfr and his son Skalla-Grímr, respectively, the grandfather and father of Egil, sail toward Iceland on two ships. Kveld-Úlfr is about to die, and a storm, with heavy rain and fog, separates the ships. Skalla-Grímr settles down and takes the area between where his ship lands, and where the coffin of his dead father comes to land, as the latter has recommended, before his death, that his men settle where the coffin comes in (chaps. 27–28).(2) When Skalla-Grímr explores the land, he finds numerous resources: great marshland and wide woods, plenty of seal to hunt, and good fishing (Egils saga 1979, 72; Egil's saga2004, 49–50). There is lots of driftwood west of Mýrar.5 There are whales and wildlife—animals that were not accustomed to men and were therefore easy to catch. Skalla-Grímr plants crops and raises livestock, and the animals fatten as they roam the mountain pastures; the sheep also survive in the mountain valley. Skalla-Grímr has many resources to rely on, and lands are called after the natural resources found there: Andakíl and Andakílsá (duck canal/river), Hvítá (white river), Norðurá (the network of North river), Gljúfurá (chasm river), and Þverá (cross river).6 In short, the richness of the land is abundant, making settlement in such a paradisiacal place very promising. The paradise-like qualities of the land may be argued for not only based on the available resources listed above, but also because of the rich literary symbolism in the description of the very settlement, to which we will return in greater detail below.(3) Skalla-Grímr, as the first settler, is the main agent who distributes land to newcomers (chaps. 30, 39). Of course, through this process, Egill recreates the pattern of dominance in his relations to the people to whom he gives land. The saga explicitly mentions that it was difficult to calculate how many people could live off the resources that the land offered. In chapter 78, the narrator tells us that the district was completely settled, the original settlers had died, and their sons and grandsons were living in the district. Up to that time, the site has been described as peaceful, in stark contrast to all the contemporaneous conflicts surrounding land and property in Norway.(4) With the first generation of settlers dying out, the conflicts start to pertain to both the Icelandic existence and mind-frame. Reasonable distribution principles are a necessity, and potentially a cause to fight for, which is seen as an unavoidable side effect of the availability of abundant resources. Soon enough, a serious conflict arises between Egill's son Þorsteinn at Borg and a neighbor, Steinarr, concerning where the cattle are allowed to be herded (chap. 83). The conflict is to be resolved by their fathers, Egill and Ǫnundr. Ǫnundr explains that because of their lifelong friendship, he is interested in reconciliation and not interested in dishonoring Egill's son (Egil's saga2004, 193). Egill reminds Ǫnundr of the days when neither of them could have imagined that they would quarrel with each other (Egil's saga2004, 194). Egill may be referring to the fact that they traveled and fought together, but he may also be referring to an attitude toward land, sustainability, and human relationships that obviously belongs to the past—a past when there was a common understanding of modes of distribution and a respect for this common understanding. Steinarr's father agrees and asks that they claim the case from their sons, as they know better than to fight over land (Egil's saga2004, 194). When Egill is given the opportunity to pass judgment on the case, it becomes clear that his nostalgic appeal was part of a strategic plan. Egill reminds everyone that it was his father who was the first settler and how he gave land to his friends when they came to settle. His judgment that Steinarr must leave his land only escalates the conflict. The settlement, originally founded using the guidance of storms and drifting coffins, is now portrayed as an intentional process that gives rights and power to the first-comers. The paradise-like site of abundance has now become a site of law, politics, and economy.(5) The last element that seems to influence the utilization of environment is Christianization, as described briefly in chapters 88–89. With the introduction of Christianity, Grímr from Mosfell is baptized and builds a church there (chap. 89). The saga refers to an oral narrative about Egill's bones being moved twice—from the burial mound at Tjaldanes, where he was originally buried, to the first church that Grímr built at Hrísbrú, which was then taken down and set up at Mosfell. Þorsteinn is also said to have received Christianity at Borg, where he builds a church and is himself later buried.The grand narrative of the settlement in Egils saga may thus be seen as a gradual development with three stages. In the beginning, the site of the settlement is conveyed as a supernaturally preconditioned “choice,” which positions human existence in a paradisiacal abundance and richness. Although the distribution of the land is done according to existing social relations, peace and harmony seem to be inert characteristics of the settled land. Slowly but surely, more complex human relationships and new versions of reality turn it into a site for competitiveness, power, and resource struggles, as well as legal discourse and politics. It is the heirs of the first settlers who have the upper hand in deciding such conflicts. The memory of the original settlement is thematized in the saga itself, and the saga makes it clear that various versions of the stories are simultaneously possible. Finally, the land is Christianized, churches are built, and bodies are moved from sites predetermined by nature to sites defined by the vicinity of God's house. Man's attitude to and use of landscape and nature develops in the saga from being represented as a natural symbiosis between man and nature to a relationship stirred by human politics, economy, and the new religion. Note that Christianization in itself is not claimed to have caused a change in the use of the resources immediately, as the farm and church are moved at a later stage, without much explanation in the saga.Since Egils saga tells us of the settlement at the end of the tenth century, some scholars have interpreted it as reflecting the environmental history of this period. This is, for example, the argument found in publications resulting from the Mosfell Archaeological Project, which focuses on the settlement of the same area, that is, southwestern Iceland. The project has employed the tools of history, archaeology, anthropology, forensics, environmental sciences, and saga studies, and its main aim has been to seek an understanding of how the countryside and landscape in this area evolved since the original settlement (Zori and Byock 2014).7 Sagas such as Egils saga are, in this project, read as historical documents, and their historicity is explained by existent oral tradition and place names, which inherently carry the stories in them. The project's leader, Jesse Byock, argues that it is necessary to employ “all available tools of analysis including history, literature, naming systems, local oral tradition, and scientific archaeology,” as well as modern high-tech archaeological methods of dating, such as tephrochronology (dating of volcanic ash-layers), radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, and artefact typology, which give independent dating of the sites, corresponding to the dates suggested by the saga (Byock 2014, 30–1).From the perspective of environmental history, and for us here, the most relevant results of the project, as they confirm the “facts” of the saga, include the time frame of the settlement and its positioning and movement in the landscape; the natural resources used at the settlement (types of wood, plants, archaeofauna); and the culture of economy, production, and reproduction at the settlement.Some of the most important archaeological structures excavated during the project include, among others, a large longhouse from the settlement period, abandoned early to mid-eleventh century, a conversion-age church, and a tenth- to eleventh-century Christian graveyard, with mixed pagan and Christian ritual elements at Hrísbrú (Byock and Zori 2014, 7–10). This site is located on the slope of Mosfell Mountain and is the original Mosfell settlement, referred to as Hrísbrú in the sagas. It has a strategic location with abundant freshwater springs, control over the western entrance of the whole valley, and a direct line of sight to the port at Leirvogur. In the twelfth century, the farm was moved 500 meters to the east. The project also excavated the new site and discovered the foundations of a medieval church, probably the new church mentioned in Egils saga. According to the saga, Grímr built the first church at Hrísbrú, and he moved Egil's bones there, and later a new church was built at Mosfell. The project localizes this church and a longhouse about 100 meters west of the farmhouse still standing there today. The reasons for this movement were probably complex: push-factors included the weather conditions at Hrísbrú (rather windy) and the change