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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'A joyously peculiar book' - The New York Times'A fascinating insight into Icelandic culture and a fresh perspective on her global influence. Warning: may well make readers wish they were Icelandic, too.' - Helen Russell, author of The Year of Living DanishlyThe untold story of how one tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic has shaped the world for centuries.The history of Iceland began 1,200 years ago, when a frustrated Viking captain and his useless navigator ran aground in the middle of the North Atlantic. Suddenly, the island was no longer just a layover for the Arctic tern. Instead, it became a nation whose diplomats and musicians, sailors and soldiers, volcanoes and flowers, quietly altered the globe forever. How Iceland Changed the World takes readers on a tour of history, showing them how Iceland played a pivotal role in events as diverse as the French Revolution, the Moon Landing, and the foundation of Israel. Again and again, one humble nation has found itself at the frontline of historic events, shaping the world as we know it - How Iceland Changed the World paints a lively picture of just how it all happened.'Egill Bjarnason has written a delightful reminder that, when it comes to countries, size doesn't always matter. His writing is a pleasure to read, reminiscent of Bill Bryson or Louis Theroux. He has made sure we will never take Iceland for granted again.' A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of Thanks a Thousand and The Year of Living Biblically'Bjarnason's intriguing book might be about a cold place, but it's tailor-made to be read on the beach.' - New Statesman'Egill Bjarnason places Iceland at the center of everything, and his narrative not only entertains but enlightens, uncovering unexpected connections.' Andri Snær, author of On Time and Water'Icelander Egill Bjarnason takes us on a high-speed, rough-and-tumble ride through 1,000-plus years of history-from the discovery of America to Tolkien's muse, from the French Revolution to the NASA moonwalk, from Israel's birth to the first woman president-all to display his home island's mind-opening legacy.' Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Real Valkyrie and The Far Traveller'I always assumed the history of Iceland had, by law or fate, to match the tone of an October morning: dark, gray, and uninviting to most mankind. This book challenges that assumption, and about time. Our past, much like the present, can be a little fun.' Jón Gnarr, former mayor of Reykjavík and author of The Pirate and The Outlaw'How Iceland Changed the World is not only surprising and informative. It is amusing and evocatively animates a place that I have been fascinated with for most of my life. Well worth the read!' - Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres'An entertaining, offbeat (and pleasingly concise) history of the remote North Atlantic nation ... perfect for a summer getaway read' - The Critic
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iii
HowIceland Changed the World
The Big History of a Small Island
EGILL BJARNASON
v
Fyrir Val & Frey
CONTENTS
x
INTRODUCTION
The town of Selfoss is a rare find. Nearly all of the sixty-three towns and cities in Iceland were first established out of nautical convenience, in sight of approaching ships, but Selfoss sits inland, away from the stony coast. I grew up there, landlocked.
The town is on the eastern banks of the Ölfusá River, the country’s largest, streaming from a glacier 105 miles inland. For the first nine hundred years of Selfoss’s settlement, the area saw few travelers because crossing the river on horseback or rowboat was a life-threatening endeavor and, let’s be honest, not worth it. Finally, in a symbolic gesture, Icelandic and Danish authorities joined forces on the construction of a suspension bridge. Completed in 1891, thirteen years before the arrival of the first automobile, the bridge connected western and southern Iceland. Selfoss became a rest stop for long-distance travel—the place to dry your clothes and catch up on weather conditions from travelers heading in the opposite direction. Today, people stop for a hot dog.
The bridge still brings plenty of traffic through town and serves as the central landmark around which everything else is oriented, just as a harbor would in a seaside town. Where other towns have a fish factory, we have a dairy plant. And instead of watching ships sail in and out of port, we can watch xiiour cars drive around and around and around—the main roundabout is impressively big. “Big city” big—after all, with about eight thousand people, Selfoss is one of Iceland’s largest towns. So don’t be intimidated by its size if you walk around; and don’t be alarmed if you find yourself alone out there—walking in Selfoss is practiced solely by children and the odd drunk driver with a suspended license.
Along Selfoss’s Main Street are, among others, five hair salons, three bank branches, a bookstore owned by my parents, a store for yarn, a store with only Christmas items, and a supermarket named Krónan. At the entrance of that store, I began my career as a reporter, holding a notebook and the cheapest camera I could borrow from Sunnlenska, a local newspaper. Every day I waited to snag passersby for “The Question of the Day,” a column in which innocent pedestrians were prompted to articulate, for the record, a view on a contemporary issue they usually knew next to nothing about and—after guaranteed intellectual embarrassment—have a portrait taken to accompany the answer.
Over time, I worked my way up to the news desk. these masks are not for swimming: a bag of sex toys found at the swimming pool, read an early headline. Another was a crime story about a tomato farmer who turned to growing marijuana in an abandoned slaughterhouse. Being a secret drug kingpin in a small community was very stressful, he confessed. So he consumed most of the weed himself.
Sunnlenska stayed in business through my early twenties, thanks to its very resourceful owner. Among his fine ideas for survival was a reliance on the barter system: he liked to pay people in things rather than money, the kind of stuff local businesses might trade for advertising. Christmas bonuses, for xiiiinstance, consisted of fireworks and a stack of books given to the paper for review. For one payday in spring, he came riding to work on a twenty-seven-gear Mongoose bicycle, a touring bike with fat tires and a rear rack. “It’s yours,” he said with enthusiasm, prompted more by this apparent advertising deal. Zero paper money this month.
To properly enjoy my salary, I was obliged to take it for a spin. And one of the very best things about Selfoss, as one guidebook is quick to note, is how easy it is to leave. Route 1, the famous Ring Road, plows right through town.
Loaded up with a tent and an impressive amount of couscous, I cycled past the dairy plant and around the roundabout, headed east.
Officially, the Ring Road is an 821-mile loop that connects most towns and villages in the country. Done in one stretch, that’s a little more than fifteen hours of driving. Cycling takes a bit longer. The landscape of Iceland is famously uneven, and along the coast the wind blows hard. On top of that, statistics and meteorological patterns simply cannot explain how often the wind blows directly against you while bicycling. Always, I tell you. Always.
My bartered bicycle held up admirably, but between the fickle headwinds and the long uphill climbs, by the time I got halfway around the country, I was exhausted. I decided to rest for a bit in the town of Húsavík.
Húsavík sits on the north coast, overlooking the wide Skjálfandi Bay. The bay’s mouth gapes toward high north, toward the Iceland Sea, the Greenland Sea, the Arctic Ocean, and, beyond that, the North Pole.
While strolling around the harbor on a sore knee, I struck up a conversation with the captain of a wooden schooner xivwhose crew was one person short. Soon I learned that “one person short” meant that the crew was just one man: him, Captain Hordur Sigurbjarnarson, a cartoonish version of an old skipper, the classic image minus the wooden pipe (he was vehemently opposed to smoking). Raspy voice, gray hair, grim face, strong handshake. Warm smile.
I told him about my theory on wind direction, how it magically never works in your favor. He did not seem to follow.
“So, do you get seasick?” he asked, his opening question in a sudden job interview.
How would I know? This was like asking if I’d be prone to space sickness (motion sickness for astronauts). The high seas were beyond my experience, so my body had never been put to the test. I had no idea that knowing how to tie a bowline was an essential life skill.
He scratched his head and rolled it to the side as if he were attempting to pour water out of his ears. “Come this afternoon and we’ll see what happens.”
As it turned out, I do not belong to the 35 percent of people highly susceptible to seasickness. I locked the bike and called the newspaper to say I would not be back that summer. The owner was about to land a big advertising deal with a new Jacuzzi distributor. After weeks of cold days out at sea, I did sometimes question my choice: owning a hot tub would have been nice.
I got a crash course in knots and halyards, worked twelve hours at a stretch in freezing conditions, and wore the bright-yellow fleece hat the captain had given me. “It’s the first color the eye detects, in case you fall overboard,” he explained reassuringly.
The captain was a seafarer through and through. His five xvfavorite pizza toppings were five different things from the ocean—essentially, a fish buffet served on bread—and he could always point in the direction of north, even when standing on land in a hardware store. My own lack of orientation puzzled him. He’d been sailing the Hildur out of Húsavík for twenty-five years, taking passengers on whale-watching voyages and pleasure cruises.
After that first serendipitous summer, the ship’s cabin became my annual summer home. Each year I would travel out to Húsavík in early May, and we’d sail in and out of the harbor with passengers who were eager to watch whales and puffins from beneath nearly 2,700 square feet of taut sails. Each day we told the same stories, the same jokes, and watched the same horizon, from spring to fall, until the whales swam out of the bay, from Iceland to all corners of the globe.
It was my first time at sea, but it was my first time, too, witnessing Iceland’s strange position as both a marginalized curiosity and a global hub. Well-meaning tourists asked questions that ranged from baffling to mildly insulting, like whether the country had enough educated people to run a functioning government. Each visitor seemed to have a preconceived narrative of what Iceland was. Iceland the alien planet. Iceland the frozen wasteland. Iceland the expensive playground. Iceland the Viking fortress. The captain and I, while we scouted the sea for whales, sometimes tried to untangle these myths or figure out which felt most true.
“Whales capture people’s imagination,” the captain once told me. “All it takes is a tiny glimpse and people feel like they’ve seen an entire whale, mouth to fluke.” That’s Iceland too.
This book tells the story of Iceland by taking a second look xviat the canon of Western history. At first sight, it may seem bold to position Iceland as a central player on the global stage. After all, Iceland has never had a military. Never shot at another country. Never plotted against a foreign leader, nor fought proxy wars, nor laid claim to being a hegemonic power of any kind. But how, then, to explain its fingerprints all over Western history? Without Icelanders, no one would have recorded Norse mythology and the medieval history of Nordic kings. Without Iceland, the world from England to Egypt would not have suffered a major famine, cultivating a fragile political climate that culminated in the French Revolution. The anti-imperialist struggle would have been one hero short. Neil Armstrong would never have practiced the moon landing on earth. A Cold War–defining chess game would have had nowhere to take place. The world would have had to wait years longer to see the first woman elected head of state. And the North Atlantic might have wound up under the control of the Nazis instead of the Allies during World War II, with all the fallout that would entail.
Here I present a new perspective on Iceland’s history, one that revolves around the lives of various known and unknown Icelanders, in order to tell a story built on both the latest research and neglected narratives. Together the chapters chronicle the remarkable history of Iceland: 1,200 years of settlement that began when a frustrated Viking captain and his useless navigator ran aground in the middle of the North Atlantic. Suddenly the island was no longer just a layover for the Arctic tern. Instead, it became a nation of diplomats and musicians, sailors and soldiers, who found themselves suddenly faced with enormous responsibility, and who quietly altered the globe forever.xvii
Captain Hordur wound up becoming a lifelong friend, one who enabled key research for this book as we sailed to Greenland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
On our first voyage abroad, three years after that initial meeting, a small crowd of twenty-some people stood on the harbor’s quay waving goodbye. It was a bright summer day. The first mate’s wife blew kisses from the dock. Swept up in the moment, some tourists wandered over from a nearby hot dog stand to join in the farewell. The spring line loose, the vessel drifted off, and the captain’s five-year-old grandson raised his voice louder and louder the farther away we sailed, with such eagerness I was afraid he might suffer a heart attack. Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!
Life at sea was simple, if incredibly unpredictable. The only constant was worry—about winds and weather patterns. Tailwinds might push the vessel ahead eight nautical miles; unfair winds and currents might slow our progress to four or five knots. Time unspooled strangely, measured less by hours than by the slow course we plotted across the water. That water stretched on and on, in every direction, endlessly, day after day. Water. Water. Water. Land!
We’d reached our destination: the coast of Greenland. There we sailed passengers around Scoresby Sound, the longest fjord in the world and one of the largest natural areas in the world not yet touched by mass tourism. Large icebergs calve from the outlets of Greenland’s massive ice cap. Toward the end of summer, melted ice waters down the ocean’s salt ratio to the point where it can be used in cooking, to boil pasta or potatoes. As the cook on board, I could even use the sea for dishwashing and bread making, kneading dough for a “seawater loaf.” Captain Hordur ate the bread with enthusiasm, xviiidespite its ridiculously salty taste, because the man loved thrift.
The captain sincerely struggled, therefore, with watching our vacationing passengers. Watching people stand on the deck and do nothing made him uneasy. Unless people were manic photographers, or compulsive knitters, or were engaged in some constant and productive activity, he tended to come up with tasks for them. By the end of each eight-day trip, everyone on board would typically have been assigned some nautical responsibility, answering to the captain on evening iceberg watch and the morning anchor heave.
The fjords we sailed and the mountains we hiked generally had two names: one from the time the area was initially charted by Europeans, and one used by the local Inuit. The local Inuit names were descriptive—the Fjord with the Red Mountain, the Twin Peak Ridge—enabling locals to guide travelers with verbal directions. Our European nautical charts, however, were a monument to stuffy long-dead explorers and sailors who named the area after themselves, their mothers, and everyone they (nominally) respected. Carlsberg Fjord. Liverpool Land. Charcot Bay. One English whaling ship, zigzagging the coastline a century ago, exhausted its list of names all the way down to the deck scrubber.
It’s a stunt as old as Greenland.* Erik the Red, forced into exile from Iceland, led others from Iceland to establish the first European colony in Greenland, one he dubbed Eriksfjord. One of the people who joined him for this venture into a xixstrange new land was a remarkable woman, one of the greatest explorers in Iceland’s history: Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir.
In Eriksfjord, having just settled into life in southwest Greenland, Gudrid heard rumors of a richly forested landmass across the sea, a land even farther west, past the edge of any map they’d seen. After two separate failed attempts, Gudrid finally completed that voyage west, though the attempts had cost her a husband each. She reached North America five hundred years before Columbus, and there she gave birth to the first European American.
Icelanders found uncolonized America somewhat disappointing, though, and they ditched it, more or less forgetting about the vast continent for the next eight centuries. History books, in turn, forgot about Gudrid and her bravery. Ultimately, she sailed back to Europe. She traveled to Rome. She finally returned to her farm in Iceland, and there she died. The American settlement disappeared, rotted away by time, and sank under the grass.
When Captain Hordur and I finally sailed back into harbor two months later, the same crowd of people stood around, still waving, as if they had never left.
At sea, when every day is an endless set of twists and risks, two months is a long time. But as the daily life I had abruptly left behind resumed, my memories of icebergs the size of skyscrapers and roaming polar bears felt less like recent events and more like a vivid hallucination as described by an eccentric. With maps and satellites and photographs at our disposal, it was easy to trace where we’d been, but it’s difficult to imagine Gudrid’s experience, returning to Iceland after years away, trying to tell others about this continent, far across the sea, that no one else had ever seen.xx
Here we’ll attempt to uncover and reclaim Gudrid’s story, along with other key threads of Iceland’s history that have been neglected and lost in time. To understand Iceland’s role also means to undo certain beloved myths of the heroic explorer, the eccentric chess genius, or the noble-hearted northerner—but it leaves us with a historical tapestry that is richer and far more complex. And it starts—no surprise—with a ship.
* The name of the country in the indigenous Greenlandic language is Kalaallit Nunaat, the Land of the Kalaallit. Passport stamps at border control use this name.
1
The Discovery of the West
Iceland from Settlement—AD 1100
The Icelanders are the most intelligent race on earth, because they discovered America and never told anyone.
—oscar wilde
Somewhere in the vast northern ocean, between Iceland and Norway, Thorsteinn Olafsson got himself involved in the biggest mystery of the Middle Ages by making an honest mistake: he turned his ship a few too many degrees west. His passengers would have preferred to arrive in sweet home Iceland, but instead they had to settle for an iceberg. They got nice and close. Closer. Closer: wham. The wooden ship made a sound like a massive tree branch wrenching and splitting. There was no fair fight here between the ship and the iceberg; frozen glacial water is older and far stronger. Damaged and doomed, the ship’s direction was suddenly the same as the iceberg’s: wherever the currents pulled and the wind blew, there the ship went. Adrift.
Lucky for them, the winds and currents eventually blew them to land, albeit not the one they were hoping for. “By winter,” a loose and pretty all-encompassing term in the Arctic, “the ship made it to the East Village of Greenland,” according to a short report written roughly five years later.2
The ship had arrived at the world’s biggest island. From an administrative point of view, Thorsteinn had technically delivered his passengers to Iceland: this was Iceland’s colony of southern Greenland.
Despite rolling around the northern North Atlantic for months, the folks on board apparently continued to enjoy one another’s company. Over the next four years, none of them chose to hop on a boat to Iceland (although it remains unclear whether there were any ships available to be hopped on). Thorsteinn, probably a decent guy despite his poor sense of direction, developed a crush on a lady passenger, Sigrid Bjornsdóttir. So he asked her uncle for her hand, and they decided to marry inside that massive stone church the Greenlanders so prided themselves on.
When Sigrid Bjornsdóttir walked inside the stone church one calm September morning, her future looked as steady as the turn of the seasons. The grand arched window of the majestic fieldstone church cast light onto the crowd of “many noble men, both foreign and local,” as noted by local authorities. With “a yes and a handshake,” the two happy castaways were presented as husband and wife.
The wedding certificate, signed by Greenland’s pastor Pall Hallvardsson, was later delivered to the bishop of Iceland and stored in Skálholt for centuries, until some historians dug it out and did a double take at the date: September 16, 1408. This was the last-ever day on record in Erik the Red’s Greenland. Shortly thereafter, following roughly four hundred years of Norse settlement, the entire vibrant community disappeared. Vanished. To this day, no one knows exactly why.
Icelanders in the Viking age had discovered Greenland in the search for more land and had turned its stock of walrus 3and narwhals into a global enterprise. Hungry for wood and wheat, the Icelandic Greenlanders had then launched even farther west, and thereby discovered sailing routes from Europe to North America five hundred years before Columbus. Greenland hadn’t just hosted a single flimsy settlement; it had been the burgeoning site of a trade empire, a crucial link between the raw resources of North America and the powerful Viking civilization in Norway. Archaeological evidence today suggests a far bigger presence than we’d initially assumed from written records.
So how did a community of thousands, after five centuries, simply disappear without a trace? How could an entire island nation become a ghost town? And what was it like in that early America?
To unravel the mystery, we’ll follow Iceland’s three most famous explorers—Erik, Leif, and Gudrid—through the bizarre, violent, and lucky events that shaped their lives. Many of us know the simplified versions of their stories, but, as usual, the truth is a lot more complicated. Our heroes murdered people, got lost a lot, converted to Christianity, got lost again, murdered some more people, rescued castaways, lied, benefited from bribes, murdered a few more people, and finally died on a farm. What’s more, despite what you’ve heard about the legacies of Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson, the true explorer here is the neglected heroine Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, who left behind a comfortable life and bonded with the natives in North America while the men tossed rocks at one another. Incredibly, all these explorers were part of the same family by blood or marriage. Their family tree is the starting point for our Greenland mystery.4
The story ends with a disappearance. But it begins with exile.
Like many people, I used to romanticize stormy ocean crossings. Waves crashing over the deck. Scissors flying through the galley. Sailors straining to save their ship in the face of the ocean’s immeasurable power. Reef the main! Stretch the sheet! Ten degrees starboard! During my own sea crossing a few years ago, I found storms considerably less romantic.
The mayhem forces you to raise your voice and scream, even during face-to-face conversations. Your fingers grow numb as they grip your shipmate’s shoulder. Get some damn rest! Down in my cabin, I discovered I couldn’t undress without completely lying down. Late in the night, I woke up with cold seawater dripping through the deck and onto my bed. A drop landed on my cheek and slowly traveled inside my ear. I gave up on sleep. I heaved myself up, constantly gripping the railing, the ladder, anything. Up on deck, I nearly stepped on the sea chef who was “just getting some fresh air” while unable to stand upright. When we’d first sailed from the harbor mouth in northern Iceland with spirits high, we’d joked that it would make for exciting television to film a cooking show inside the galley of a rocking ship. Now, looking a bit green, he seemed very unlikely to host such a show. “The worst thing about seasickness,” he told me from his hands and knees, “is knowing that you are not going to die.” Food was canceled for the day.
This antiromantic venture took place during the crossing from Iceland to Stavanger in Norway. Coincidentally, we were 5sailing the first voyage of Erik the Red in reverse, tracing the route he had taken a millennium earlier, to bring our wooden schooner, the Opal, to the dry dock of Scandinavia’s finest boat builders. Erik the Red is, of course, the founder of the first Icelandic settlement in Greenland—but his story didn’t begin very nobly.
When Erik was just a toddler, he was forced to flee Norway along with his father, Thorvald, who was exiled after committing “some murders.” They fled west to Iceland, boarding a knarr, a broad-beamed ship designed for a small crew and large cargo, and spent about a week making that stormy ocean crossing. Knarrs were the crucial tools for Viking voyages in the open North Atlantic. Much, though, was still left up to Njördur, the god of the sea. The captain could maneuver with a rudder attached to the starboard side, but ultimately the wind of fortune dictated his journey. A single strong gust, and the one-masted boat could lose its most important piece of wood. No wind, and the crew could spend days watching the coast of their destination without getting any closer. Fair wind at last, and the knarr could reach a top speed of eight knots (for comparison, a harbor seal’s top swimming speed is about ten knots).
Erik and Thorvald headed west across the Norwegian Sea. When the wind was harsh, Erik got cold. When it rained, he got wet. When the boat broke the waves, splashing them over the deck, he hardly slept. A knarr has limited space below deck, nowhere to hide from the elements. Assuming the journey went normally, he would have reached Iceland after seven to ten nights. The knarr averaged 6.5 knots on long journeys—modern rebuilds of knarrs by curious archaeologists have established the vessel’s efficiency—but speed, of course, was not the only determinant of his journey’s success.6
The schooner I sailed hundreds of years later was no faster than the knarrs; after all, the wind still blows the same way after a thousand years. In good weather and fair winds, the ship sailed at eight knots. In swell and currents, we were down to four or five nautical miles per hour: Jogging speed, running speed, jogging speed, running speed. Of course, we had the benefit of cabins below deck, waterproof jackets, and a nauseated chef—but our greatest advantage was being able to navigate without looking for Norwegian birds, whales, leading stars, or the position of the sun. For we—lucky modern sailors—had a compass.
To say that Iceland, Greenland, and mainland North America were initially discovered by men blown off course assumes that a course could be set in the first place. These men invented sailing centuries before the art of navigation was anything more than an educated guess. Just as the Icelandic dictionary has 156 entries describing wind, the early seafarers had their own word for getting lost at sea: hafvilla. Old texts don’t tell us how Iceland’s first settlers navigated without a compass. Did they use a quadrant and a sundial? If they did, this would have been challenging in a part of the world defined by long dark winters and cloudy skies. Stars? In summer, when most crossings to Iceland were made, the stars would have been hidden by the midnight sun.
This limited yet impressive degree of navigational ability was crucial to the course of history. Had Erik the Red and his father been unable to find Iceland—had they aimed just a few degrees too far south and missed the island completely—hundreds of years of settlement in Greenland and North America may have gone down differently. This balance, between pinpoint navigation and finding oneself unavoidably lost at sea, 7was the determining factor for much of the way Nordic history occurred. No two sailors had the same degree of success. As we shall see, Erik sailed straight to his destination, Leif followed someone who was lost, and Gudrid was shipwrecked midocean: each a random stroke of maritime luck, each crucial for what came next.
Iceland is the only country in Europe that remembers its beginnings as a nation, as noted by author Magnus Magnusson, as the founding is “enshrined in the works of her early historians.” The remote North Atlantic island had existed for millions of years, serving merely as a festive bird colony for its only terrestrial mammal, the Arctic fox, when humans suddenly figured out a way to get there. Half the size of the United Kingdom and the same size as the state of Ohio, Iceland was the last major territory to be settled in the Northern Hemisphere. When New Zealand was settled by the Maori population some centuries later, the entire world was occupied by humans, minus a few small islands (Cape Verde, for example) and places of extreme weather conditions (Svalbard).
First, the country was visited by three explorers, arriving one after the other, who had each come to Iceland mostly out of curiosity and the desire to verify one another’s boasts about finding a vast empty island. Flóki Vilgerdarson, the third explorer to arrive, allegedly gave Iceland its name while standing on top of a mountain overlooking the wide Breida Fjord, packed with sea ice. Other proposed early names included Snowland, Gardar’s Isle, and Thule.
But those explorers showed up, looked around, and then left. 8The real day number one in Iceland’s history—the beginning of actual settlement—was a summer afternoon in AD 874, when Norwegian farmer Ingólfur Arnarson, his family and slaves in tow, walked from Cape Ingolfshofdi to modern day Reykjavík (Rayk-ya-veek) in the Southwest. Iceland’s first history book, The Book of Settlements, tells the story of Ingólfur, and then goes on to detail the names and farm holdings of the thousands of settlers who came after him. This was a kind of Viking VIP list written by the country’s first nerd, Ari the Learned, to highlight the country’s respectable genealogy—to show that it was populated by more than slaves and murderers. Iceland, as Ari explains in 102 chapters, was the land of brave Norwegians.
But in a brief aside in the prelude, thrown out like a hand grenade for modern scholars to toss around, Ari mentions that prior to Norwegian settlement “there were those men” called Papar—Irish monks. Ari repeats the story in the later Book of the Icelanders, claiming that the monks abandoned Iceland because they didn’t want to live alongside Norse heathens, leaving behind “Irish books and bells and canes.”
Historians and archaeologists have tried hard to verify Ari’s testimony, but as of today the jury remains out. Certain old place-names, such as Papar Island in the East, do suggest that early settlers believed certain areas had initially been occupied by the mysterious monks. And in the early twentieth century, three silver coins dating back to Roman times were discovered at three different locations on the southeastern corner of Iceland, a place that would serve as the most convenient landing spot for an Irish ship. What’s more, some English texts, penned by an Irish monk half a century before Iceland’s settlement, speak of a religious community on a northern island called Thule, which had eternal summer light.9
But critics of the pre-Viking settlement theory suggest that the word Papar had more than one meaning, in this case referring to uneven landscapes. They dismiss the coin findings, saying it only proves that old coins indeed travel—just check your own sofa cushions. And the description of Thule, the skeptics argue, could easily refer to the Faroe Islands, the Shetland Islands, Saaremaa (an Estonian island), Greenland, or Smøla, Norway, where residents claim to inhabit the mysterious northern land. But one element of the monk notion is certainly no myth: Icelanders have significant Irish heritage. In 2018, scientists at the Reykjavík-based genetic company deCODE were able to sequence the genome of twenty-five ancient Icelanders, preserved at the National Museum, and compare them with those of Celtic Britons and Scandinavian populations. According to the results, the early settlers were of 57 percent Norse origin; the rest were of Celtic and “mixed” origin. The mixing is believed to have taken place in Britain and Ireland, and women of the time were more likely than men to have Celtic Britons’ origin. This could mean that some Vikings stopped over in Ireland on their way to Iceland, where they may have kidnapped women for a voyage west. One British tabloid interpreted the results in a headline that read: viking sex tourists lived happily ever after with britons.
It’s impossible to tell from gene sequencing alone, however, whether a part of the early Icelandic population consisted of Irish people who couldn’t outrun the Vikings. It’s fully possible that Irish women were in fact charmed by the roaming Scandinavians who had mastered the art of sailing the northern seas. For one, they had steep personal hygiene standards, based on excavations of burial sites that have turned up tweezers, razors, combs, and ear cleaners made from animal bones 10and antlers. They spoke Old Norse, arrived with their own cultural habits, and, perhaps most important in pagan Ireland, did not believe in Jesus.
Scandinavia—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—remained Europe’s last heathen region. A lack of religions was in fact the primary definition of Viking, a word whose strict meaning remains unknown, though there are plenty of educated guesses. How one interprets the term depends largely on our view of the Vikings’ primary calling. If we view them mainly as bandits, the definition of “a pirate who stays close to shore” seems logical, as vik is the Norse word for creek. But the Vikings also established an advanced trade network running through Western Europe and the Baltic. The evolution from raiders to traders over time could be due to many factors, including the scarcity issues that accompany villainy: there is only so much land that one can grab, and people one can kidnap.
Unless, of course, one discovers new territory.
Thus, about one hundred years after the Viking age began, Iceland became a hot spot for the Viking sprawl. By the time Erik the Red and his father arrived, around AD 960, all the best agricultural land in Iceland had already been claimed. They were fifty years too late to snag prime real estate.
At the time, in the Viking economy, a man’s territory was determined by a peculiar method: to claim land, the sagas say, the early settlers would set fire to it when the sun was in the East. Then they would walk until the sun was in the West and set a new fire. In this way, no one could claim more land than he could cross on foot in a day. This was an effective way to balance land ownership—it prevented one person from taking it all—but it also meant that when all the resources were 11utilized, the last settler to arrive was out of luck. When Erik and his father stepped off their knarr, soaked to the bone and exiled to a strange new island, they discovered that they had to eke out their existence near Hornstrandir, the last place in Iceland to be inhabited. Their farm sat on a cliff by the ocean. Seaweed was more or less the only vegetation around. Snow and thick fog could descend throughout the year. Polar bear attacks were not unheard of. Erik the Red, our hero, was stuck in the Icelandic boondocks, bored to death. He was not having it. The moment his father passed away, Erik started looking for a way out.
The details of our story come from two books, Erik the Red’s Saga and The Saga of the Greenlanders. The stories are written by two different authors, neither aware of the other’s version of the oral history, and both were recorded about 250 years after the events they describe. The Vinland Sagas, as the two stories are jointly known, are part of the famous Icelandic literature genre called The Sagas of the Icelanders, settlement stories penned over a period of two centuries, from about 1200 to 1350. Altogether, the Íslendingasögur (ees-lehnd-eeng-ah-sö-khör) are thirty-eight separate family stories that remain an intrinsic part of the Icelandic identity. To read them all, according to one man who lived to tell about it, takes a solid four weeks of hard work; the narrative is often drowning in dry pages of genealogy and serial murders that the reader struggles to make sense of. Most Icelanders are only familiar with the more stylistically sophisticated and entertaining sagas, such as Njáls Saga, The Laxdæla Saga, and Egil’s Saga.
Professor Sigurdur Nordal once said that the sagas (a word Iceland has contributed to the English language) began as 12science but ended as fiction. The Vinland Sagas are penned relatively close in time to the actual expeditions, “only” some three generations apart, and two distinct versions exist. There is reason to believe that the combined Vinland Sagas are truer than many of the other sagas, somewhere between a saga with a narrative arc and the “historically accurate” documentation of Ari the Learned’s settlement history. So we can be relatively confident that the story of Erik the Red is based in truth. Even Ari, in fact, mentions Erik the Red’s travel to Greenland in his lengthy tale of name-dropping, and some experts believe him to be the author behind Erik the Red’s Saga. One last interesting element that sets The Vinland Sagas apart from the rest is that the characters are actual Vikings—sea dogs embarking on bloodthirsty voyages. The “Vikings” in most other sagas are really just farmers fighting with other farmers.
Unlike most people with sagas named after them, Erik the Red is not introduced to the reader with a page-long genealogy and a vivid description of his physical attributes, and this is unusual. The author of Njál’s Saga, for example, repeatedly brings up Njál’s lack of a beard, almost as if to explain why a man named Gunnar fought his battles. Gunnar, the author notes, could swing his sword so rapidly “that there seemed to be three swords in the air at once.” The peculiar-looking Egil, from Egil’s Saga, is described in such detail that modern doctors suspect he had Paget’s disease of bone. We even know that he could, charmingly, touch his nose with his tongue as a child.
Erik the Red, on the other hand, is a blank slate. The saga does not even mention his hair color, from which his nickname is believed to be drawn. The reader has to judge the man entirely through his actions. Was he brave? Cunning? Cruel? 13Dense? Was he an intrepid explorer, or a really lucky exile? What we do know is that he bailed on his miserable far-flung plot of land and managed to marry Thjodhild, the daughter of a rich farmer in western Iceland. Tall, dark, and smooth-talking? Shortly after Erik moved to a farm overlooking the Hvamms Fjord, two of his slaves were killed by his neighbors. The neighbors claimed the slaves had used witchcraft to start a landslide. Erik promptly walked over and stabbed his neighbors to death.
The idiot! Erik the Fool! In tenth-century Iceland, there was no eye-for-an-eye justice when slaves were involved. Guilty of an uneven retribution, Erik was forced to flee (yet again) to a nearby island. At this point, drawing from what we know so far, we can assume that Erik was either short-tempered and politically immature, or that he held the bizarre belief that all men are equal. His next move supports the first conjecture.
Now living on the small island of Brokey, Erik tried to start over. In a friendly fashion, Erik asked his new neighbor to hold on to some settstokr, ornamented beams of mystical value, brought over from Norway by his father. When he finished building his new house and went back to fetch his magic beams, they “could not be obtained.” Naturally, Erik then killed his neighbor, and his neighbor’s friend, along with “a few others.”
At this point, the authorities condemned Erik as a fjörbaugsmaður, an outlaw, for three years. If seen in Iceland within the next three years, he could be assassinated without consequence. Erik was a man without a country. Again. Whatever his character, his next move was momentous.
Back when he lived in the Northwest with his father, Erik had heard the tale of a man named Gunnbjörn Úlfsson, who 14had gone astray and seen land in the West. And so, just as his own father had grabbed him by the wrist after getting blood on his hands, Erik now carried his two sons, Thorsteinn and Leif, on board a knarr. They set off for a mysterious land they knew nothing about, across more than four hundred nautical miles of rough seas. A strange island of extremes awaited them.
In retrospect, the death penalty may not have been such a bad deal for Erik. It would have been less risky for his family and the crew who accompanied him. Rates of survival for the journey were, after all, roughly fifty-fifty, as evidenced by the convoy of twenty-five ships that departed for Greenland after Erik returned from his three-year exile—eleven ships either sank or retreated back to Iceland.
On this foolhardy expedition, the group could only hope that the small boat would not come too close to a breaking wave, or a skerry (a lonely rocky outcrop in the middle of the sea), or an iceberg appearing from the fog. If the ocean grabbed them, it would never let go. In the open sea, the number of degrees the water temperature registers on the Celsius scale is roughly equal to the number of minutes it takes you to reach hypothermia. Crossing to Greenland one summer, I measured the water temperature as a balmy 6˚C. That’s six minutes for a person to tread water until it’s all over.
At the first sight of land, Erik and his crew saw alpine mountains capped with ice, far higher than anything in Iceland. Besides the mountains, the country looked a lot like the farm where Erik had grown up in the West Fjords, the place 15he was determined never to return to. With nothing to lose, the ship slid along the coast farther south.
Due to ocean currents and Greenland’s ice pack, the southern part of the island is in fact much colder than latitude would indicate. While being significantly farther south than Iceland, average summer temperatures do not exceed 50˚F in Greenland, the bare minimum for trees to grow. In Iceland, the average summer temperature is around 60˚F and in January, 32˚F; people thus sometimes joke that Iceland really has just two seasons: high winter and low winter. In South Greenland, the seasons have sharper contrasts. You would feel a difference between the occasional 70˚F summer day and a minus 40˚F day in winter. At minus 40˚F, bare skin exposed to the air will freeze in minutes.
In the summer of 983, Erik the Red sailed his ship past Greenland’s southern cape. He sailed into a wide fjord, sixty miles inland, until he jumped out of his knarr and promptly named the country (which is 80 percent ice) after the color of grass. Was the name just one man’s deception? Was Erik the Red a con man for the ages? Alive today, would he be the one to stamp Chinese-made woolen sweaters as “knitted from Icelandic wool”? According to the saga’s authors, “he believed people would be attracted to go there if it had a favorable name.” But in fact, Erik had sailed with a small group of men around the southern tip of Greenland and arrived at the greenest part of the country, on the west coast. They settled on an island at the bottom of Eriksfjord (a fjord he named after himself, today Tunulliarfik Fjord), which would have been considered valuable land in Iceland, at least during summer. And so, at the time, the name of Greenland was in fact a sincere advertisement.16
Incredibly, for the first hundreds of years that Norsemen wound up living in Greenland, they most likely never realized that they were not alone. Hundreds of miles north, Inuit lived in conditions no other society was able to handle, thriving on a diet of raw fish and blubber. Trying to replicate the lifestyles to which they were accustomed in Norway and Iceland, Vikings stayed in the South, where they could graze livestock and launch ships.
Erik grew rather lonely. It’s a lesson in human desire that the man who had the nasty habit of killing his neighbors could not bear to live without them. After three years of exploring north and west of Eriksfjord, bestowing place-names left and right, Erik returned to Iceland to gather more settlers. A fjord with your name on it awaits you in Greenland! Erik traveled around West Iceland appealing to folks like himself—late settlers, reduced to farming the grimmest outposts of the nation, hungry for a better life. About two hundred people eventually departed from West Iceland with their livestock in tow. Those who made it went on to settle two areas of southwestern Greenland: West Village, where the capital Nuuk is located today; and East Village, near present-day Narsarsuaq, which today boasts the unique Greenlandic Arboretum, an Arctic botanical garden where stands of dwarf willow are called forests.
In the sagas, you’ll find understatement used to great effect. Listen hard, and you’ll even detect a sense of humor. The first pages of The Saga of the Greenlanders introduce a man named Bjarni Herjolfsson as he was returning from Norway to his home in South Iceland. Fresh off the boat, he learns that his father has left Iceland for a new life in Greenland, a country people had just heard of. “Bjarni thought this was quite 17the news,” the saga says. Quite the news! He was completely thrown; enraged; ballistic, even. The old man had left their estate, given to them by his cousin and Iceland’s first settler, Ingólfur Arnarson, for a voyage led by murderer-turned-colonialist Erik the Red. This called for an intervention! Fuming, Bjarni turned to his shipmates and announced that they were heading to Greenland. One crewman awkwardly pointed out that none of them had ever sailed the Greenland Sea, calling it unwise, just as they pushed the ship back out to sea.
For days and days, Bjarni and his crew sailed west without seeing anything but the open ocean and the occasional seabird. On the fourth day, a northerly wind blew hard, and by the time the weather had calmed, the crew noticed unknown species of birds all flying in the same direction, toward land. Was this Greenland? Bjarni told the crew to sail along the coast so they could scout the area for houses, livestock, smoke—whatever clues they could find. He was mildly skeptical of what they saw, the trees and low-lying mountains. That’s not Greenland, he concluded, “because Greenland has large glaciers.” The crew wanted to get on land, just the same, for water and wood. But for Bjarni, their mission was to find his father, not some silly unexplored continent.
Three times over, the crew noticed land, which, Bjarni concluded, was not Greenland (because what they saw was actually green). Based on the way the trees and vegetation got significantly less spectacular each time they spotted a new landmass, experts think they sailed up the Canadian coast, from today’s Newfoundland to the Labrador coast and on to Greenland across the Baffin Bay. For Bjarni, who did not bother naming any of the new territory, all of this was the same country: No-dad-land.18
The fourth sighting turned out to be, at last, Greenland.
When Bjarni finally disembarked, mentioning the funny sightings of an unknown continent, the settlers of Greenland had about a million questions. But Bjarni could offer only vague answers because he had merely sailed along the coast. People (understandably) gave him a hard time for this, the saga says, for not being more curious.
In Bjarni’s defense, Iceland and Greenland were also first spotted by sailors blown off course, vaguely annoyed by their inconvenient historical findings. Like those explorers before them, members of Bjarni’s crew got home and began to spread their news in town. They would have exaggerated with tall tales, lending the gossip wings beyond their circle of drunken sailors. And so we can say there’s a good chance that bar gossip changed the course of North American history, as the story of a distant land eventually reached the ears of Leif Eriksson, Erik the Red’s oldest son.
