Hello. In the news recently there's been a lot of talk about the discovery of the
oldest and largest Icelandic settlement ever found
but what wasn't so clear in these stories is that it will rewrite the
sagas with slavery, extinction and wealth beyond the most Vikings dreams. All
brought on by a Muslim war going on thousands of miles away. So welcome to
the real story about the oldest and largest Viking settlement in Iceland and
welcome to Crecganford. To paint a picture of Icelandic history the story
of the first settler in Iceland goes something like this. Once upon a time there was a
brave Viking chief called Ingólfur Arnarson and he took to the oceans with
his family and farmhands to seek out a land far across the sea, that only a few
had travelled to. When Ingólfur saw this new uninhabited land rise from the sea
knowing nothing of his opportunities or the challenges it would present,
he asked the gods for direction, on where to settle. Ingólfur through his high
seat pillars overboard swearing an oath to build his farm where ever they came
ashore. The gods directed the pillars to Reykjavík where Ingólfur made his
home in the year 874. This saga has long been accepted as the origin story of
Iceland settlement and in the Icelandic book of settlements, the Landnámabók,
and the saga literature composed in the 11th to 14th centuries, Iceland was said
to have been settled by noble Viking chieftains fleeing tyranny of the
Norwegian crown. But these recent archaeological studies are showing us
that we need to reconsider this story, and this recent news is that a lot of
support and information to this and to allow us to really understand what
happened the real story of the first Icelanders. You see the Icelandic sagas
provide the Icelanders with a trove of stories to help understand how Iceland
came to be and as discussed in previous videos and like many
established stories people
believe these sagas hold complete truths but without doubt these
things would have changed in the storytelling. They're based on real
people and so this is wanting us to cling to them as truths and this
sometimes acts as a barrier to to accept to new things. And the Saga's
have put this wall up in Icelandic history of the year 874 and this wall was
so strong that even some scholars seem to be afraid to look beyond this and
earlier into Iceland's history because of a strength of belief in these sagas.
And so to the news about the findings and the excavations and this is from a
viking site on a farm known as Stöð located in Stöðvarfjörður fjord in
east Iceland, which you'll see on a map and this farm as well as several other sites
across Iceland are now providing clear proof of human presence in Iceland
decades before the date in Ingólfur was said to have settled in Reykjavík.
So the excavations in Stöð first started in the autumn of 2015 and
they've discovered finds that give evidence of when the early settlement in
Iceland began and why. The current excavations have found a Viking age farmstead
dating back to about 860 CE, so not long before Ingólfur and the
building technology and the artifacts unearthed show a settlement farm run by
someone who was very wealthy, and the longhouse in this farm is among the
largest found in Iceland at 31 meters or just over a hundred feet long and to
understand how significant that is in Scandinavia only chieftain farms had
long houses larger than 28 metres or 92 feet long, so this is someone very
important. And within the site there were 92 beads found as well as 29 silver
objects and these included Roman and Middle Eastern coins and this makes it
twice as large as the next two largest bead finds in Iceland combined, and
one of the largest ever bead hordes found in Viking Age sites in the whole
Scandinavia. The people who lived here were very wealthy and important.
So what makes his site even more fascinating is the fact that this farm
is built on the ruins of an old farmhouse and this older site whilst
it's still being pieced together what's going on,
excavations are still continuing, this older structure appears to be huge at 40
meters or 131 feet long so to put this in context. The largest farmhouses found,
longhouses found, in Scandinavia measure about 50 metres 164 feet long
and so this older longhouse which have been radiocarbon dated and with other
evidence appears to be at least as old as the oldest structures ever found in
Iceland. It's dated to around that 800 CE, so 70 years older than when Ingólfur
is said to set foot on Iceland. So one of the interesting features of the
older structure is the absence of bones of domesticated animals. Now this was not
a farm that was used all year round and the theory is that the older longhouse
was in fact a seasonal hunting camp operated by a Norwegian chief who
outfitted voyages to Iceland to gather valuable resources and goods and brought
them back across the sea to Norway. So these types of camps weren't unusual and
several sites in Iceland have already been confirmed as having human presence
before the year 874, and they were particular sites in Reykjavik and
Hafnir for example, and again there been no associated domesticated animal
bones in these sites either so these were seasonal camps, but they would
have played a vital role in the settlement of Iceland, as any permanent
settlement would require prior exploration. And that would have been a
considerable risk and cost these people would have followed that largely
hunter-gathering existence until livestock had become established and was
breeding, so we have to ask ourselves why were the Vikings come to Iceland in the
first place? What were they transporting back? and
then why would hundreds, maybe thousands,
of them embark on voyage across the ocean
over the span of just a few decades without a firm knowledge of what awaited them? and
so they must have known what was there, and so the version of events in the
Icelandic book of settlements sounds very unlikely to have happened. It just
wouldn't make sense and it would be too big of risks to flee somewhere if you
didn't know what was there the Vikings needed a motivation,
a powerful motivation to make people want to take on this journey now a risky
journey across the ocean to Iceland from Scandinavia. It makes little sense to
arrange these voyages if you're only going to bring back goods that have little
value and bulky, you need high value smaller goods and Iceland had this, and
it came in the form of ivory for walrus tusks. Now for those of you who study
wildlife you may say where did his walrus ivory come from because there's
no walruses on Iceland? Well in 2019 DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating of wars
tusks found in Iceland we feel that they belong to a previously unknown
subspecies of Atlantic Walrus and the assumption until now have been that had
belonged to stray animals from either Greenland or the Svalbard
archipelago but analysis found that Iceland was in fact home to a distinct
subspecies of walrus now known as the Icelandic walrus, and if we take a look
at the Carta Marina which is the first map of Scandinavia that gives place
names and it was made in 1539 you can see hints of animals believed to be Walruses
in various locations around Scandinavia. The Icelandic Walrus appears
to have lived along Iceland's shores for thousands of years only to disappear
within hundred years after the arrival of the settlers, and it could be many
factors for this, there are several factors that could be
contributed to the disappearance, climate changes, volcanic eruptions, but
let's be honest the most likely explanation is hunting. The
total population was probably relatively small maybe just hundreds if not
thousands of of animals and they would been
completely unaccustomed to humans and so it'd have been easy to approach and kill
these animals, hence hunting could have wiped out the Icelandic Walrus
in a really short space of time so the next question to ask then is, why was
ivory such a valuable commodity? Was it in demand? And here we find
that in Europe ivory was a material with the rich and Noble and admired, and
so therefore valued, but just before the time of this settlement in Iceland what
had actually happened is that the traditional supply of elephant ivory
from Africa and India would have been disrupted, as it would have come from the
Middle East. And at this time the Muslims had just conquered the Middle East and
northern Africa and by doing that they affected the trade routes to Asia and
Africa and so Icelandic walrus ivory was a very valuable and available
alternative. In effect the Vikings had come across an alternative
source of a very useful and valuable commodity. But walruses were far
more valuable than just their ivory, and ivory was not the
only thing the Vikings were after. Viking seafaring made significant advances
with the walrus trade and their hides were considered the most durable material
really good for ropes, essential for securing the large sales of Viking ships,
and the oil will from Walrus blubber layer for waterproofing of the ships
hulls and protected the hides from parasites, and then you had the added
bonus the walrus meat was considered a really good flavoursome food. the walrus
provided a plethora of good and valuable resources for the Vikings so another
thing that was also considered valuable items of prestige were the teeth of
marine mammals, narwhals, sperm whales, and walrus teethf
these are known as "tannvara" or tooth wear and they were used by Chiefs to
signal and cement their position and they were used to buy access into royal
courts you know in a way like a an alternative to gold coins and whilst we
don't know this specific value of sperm whale tooth
Iceland would have had an abundant source littered with the skeletons of
sperm whales and walruses, as their teeth are extremely hard and survived
centuries, and with each sperm whale skull containing 50 to 70 teeth the
first explorers could have gathered boatloads of tannvara just by scavenging the
jaws so to put the value into context we do know that just one single walrus tusk
was worth the early wages of one farm worker so from this it's easy to
consider that Iceland's discovery was a kind of gold rush
boomtown moment the propelled the expansion of the Viking world westward
and it's certainly worth considering that the colonisation of Greenland came
from when the depletion of the esthetic wars population happened you know
excessive hunting and then this then drove the Vikings to discover North
America and with these things considered hunting camps like those are stuff and
in Reykjavik would have been crucial to the settlement of Iceland they would
have served as key staging points for further colonization of the east and
west points of the island and new settlers would have arrived at these
sites to gather information there they would have found experienced guides with
knowledge of the land ocean currents good harbors where rivers could be fuel
did which dreams and lakes had the best catch of salmon trout you know which
bays and fjords were hunted the largest Birds colonies it's easy to imagine that
alongside war was hunting Scouts and hospitality would have been the
cornerstone occupations of the first inhabitants of Iceland so but people
settled from all over the Norse world and genetic research shows that they
came from Scandinavia and the British Isles but there was an intriguing
imbalance of genders in terms of where they came from
so while 75 to 80 percent of men came from Scandanavia
as many as 60% of women came from the Gaelic regions of the British Isles
Scotland and Ireland and it's thought that the Vikings were literally
collecting wives for these shores on the way to Iceland. The excavation at Stöð
has added a whole new layer to our understanding of what was going on
alongside the walrus trade, there's been also discoveries of a large
number of stone tools tips of Jasper opals and Flint
created by stone working and stone age stole tools were found in abundance here
too that's interesting because why would this technology be being used by Vikings
who are an Iron Age culture well it became clear that these tools that she
used by this Sami a nomadic group who lived alongside the Norse in northern
Scandinavia and the Sami craftsmen were expert bone carvers and could have
provided they would have provided skilled labor for the Icelandic Aryans
industry so this makes dot you know unique yeah we don't know much else
about the economy of earlier Icelandic settlements but the number of beads and
pearls and silver at Stod certainly suggests that there was significant
wealth and trade you know and war was hunting would have played a vital role
during the early exploration initial settlement of Iceland
you know this potentially generated enormous riches for the first settlers
but the majority of immigrants who arrived arrived in the late 9th and
early 10th century and they think come to hunt walrus on a large scale so what
we're seeing here is a picture of where great Chiefs who were described in the
sagas as the first circle of Iceland you know they didn't arrive until after
society had been established. Land would only be an asset to the
wealthy if people were there working it, and a social structure was
there to support these people you know they had to be established before the
world he would arrive and so to summarize even now historians have still
yet to write conclusively that the walrus trade and seasonal hunting
camps were part of the early history of Iceland however we can be sure that the
saga tells where the first settlers were noble freedom-loving Chiefs escaping
the taxation of Norwegian central power guided by the divine hand that steered
the high seat pillars to Reykjavik or these soldiers just aren't true instead
we have nameless inhabitants of hunting camps like the one of stuff looking for
riches, walrus hunters and Sami craftsmen and thousands of people of all ranks
have followed in their footsteps to make a fresh start at what was the edge of
the world and that is the true story of the largest and oldest Icelandic
settlement and how Iceland came to be a Viking colony so I hope you liked that
story hope you learned something if you did please like the video and subscribe
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this was Crecganford. Thank you