Ingolfr Arnarson sees the coast of the island,
and drops his pillars.
The totems that mark him as a chieftain into the water.
Wherever they wash up, he decides, will be his home.
Let Thor choose the place.
Three years later, the party finds the pillars,
washed up in a rocky bay.
Steam from volcanic springs masks the shore.
He Christens the place Smoky Bay, after it's volcanic steam.
And so, Ingolfr made his home in a place
Called Reykjavik
[Opening Theme]
Medieval Scandinavians were talented:
Boat builders,Sailors and Warriors.
Navigation however;
lets just say it wasn't their strongest suit.
Oh, they could chart a basic path via the stars and signs of course.
But they tended to stick within sight of the shore
and island hop when they had the option.
In bad conditions viking navigation
was more dead reckoning than anything
and sometimes that led to embarrassment
Like when one party of vikings cruised the Mediterranean.
Bragging how they'd sacked the mighty city of Rome.
Only to find out; they'd gotten lost,
and attacked a smaller city instead.
He,he I'd be so embarrassed.
But at other times, those mistakes led to discovery's.
as it was with Iceland.
The Norwegian who "dicovered" it had in fact aimed at
the Faroe islands,and missed.
He glimpsed the glacial interior and named it:
"Snow Land".
A second accidental explorer reached the coast in a storm,
and circumvented it. Proving that the new territory
was an island. Neither knew that
Irish monks had lived there decades before.
Finally, someone got there on purpose.
A man named Floki
Who'd heard stories from the first two men.
He sailed northwest from the Faroe islands. Locating the island by
the somewhat dubious method of releasing ravens in different directions
and heading toward the one that didn't come back.
Still, he got there even though it won him the derisive nickname:
Raven Floki.
He found the summers plesant and green but,
decided to pack up after the first long dark winter.
Raven Floki returned with stories of a harsh land.
Difficult to settle,
riven by glaciers and volcanos
he named it Iceland.
But there was one very attractive thing about Iceland:
It was free, and in more ways than one.
Land was becoming hard to get back home.
A fact that may have driven the Viking expansion as a whole.
And rising kings, like Harald Fairhair,
were building a centralized state, cracking down
on the freewheeling frontier spirt of the scandinavian homelands.
Iceland offered a tempting soulution
to those who were tired of scratching out a living on shrinking plots of land,
those who had been caught up in blood fueds,
those with authority problems.
Misfits, who didn't fit into Scandinavian society,
or were too wild for their homelands.
and as an added bonus, this island was uninhabited.
After all, not everyone who wanted land
was willing to stab Anglo-Saxon warriors to death for it
that was dangerous.
Here, there were farms for the taking. With no armed opposition.
So when Ingolfr settled at Reykjavik.
He set off a land scramble.
and not everyone who settled there was what you'd expect.
For example, the sagas tell us of Aud the Deep Minded,
widow of the famous Dublin ruler, Olaf the White.
When both her husband and son were killed.
the story goes Aud ordered a Knarr built, and loaded
her remaining family and retainers into it.
She personally captained the ship to Iceland
Claiming a bay in the northwest and heading the community there.
When she died she was given a ship burial.
An honor usually reserved for men.
Indeed, the Icelandic Sagas are full of
tales where women some of them Irish or English slaves.
Run settlements and serve as influential members in settler families.
and the archaeological records appear to bear this out.
With a large number of women from the British Isles
among Icelandic burials
Sometimes with high status grave goods.
And let's talk about those sagas for a moment.
because its from Iceland where we get the greatest collection of Scandinavian sagas.
Whether it was due to the long winters giving time to write,
The wide availability of parchment from cattle raising
or the need to develop community identity in a land without traditional poltical divisions.
Medieval Iceland experienced a literary explosion.
and since there was no central authority
serving as patron or censor. There were no limits
on what could be put down.
The works included: family histories, settlement narratives, stories of war
and Scandinavian religious myths.
These tales were transmitted orally until the 13th century.
When people started to write them down in the form we know today.
As one of Iceland's greatest cultural treasures.
And the uniquely decentralized society
that allowed this literary revolution
also had a decentralized form of government.
after all these misfits and independents
had fled to Iceland to get away from lords like Harold Fairhair.
So, after 930
This Icelandic commonwealth; also known as the Icelandic free state.
Operated on a system similar to village legal assembles back in Norway.
The chieftains would gather together
a representative assembly called an Althing.
A type of early parliament, that settled disputes and made or amended laws.
Uniquely, the legal code was not written.
and depended on an office holder called:
The Lawspeaker, who could recite the code from beginning to end.
Trials would involve parties bringing a lawsuit.
which were then judged by members of the assembly
forming a jury, later versions even
had a national assembly and an early supreme court.
and in the year 1000,
the Althing addressed what would be it's most momentous decision.
Christian missionary s had nearly completed Europe's conversion.
and as one of the few pagan lands left
Iceland was under pressure from trade partners to convert.
But, that was only half the issue.
Many Icelanders were now Christian as well.
and it seemed like a civil war was brewing.
So, the Althing gathered and chose one chieftain;
himself a pagan, to mediate the dispute.
Would Iceland convert, or stay Pagan?
After mulling it over for a day and night.
He gave his decision:
Iceland would be Christian.
But, Pagans could practice their beliefs in private without fear.
The Althing was not a perfect system.
Gradually, a few powerful families became entrenched in power.
Bending or breaking institutions as it suited them.
Centuries later, these conditions led to what the Althing feared:
A civil war.
Though it was a political one, not religious.
That eventually left the island under Norse control.
But despite how it would end,
this relatively equitable self governing commonwealth.
Did govern itself for nearly two centuries.
At a time when most of western Europe
lived under kings and princes.
But Iceland wasn't for everyone
Erik the Red arrived at the age of ten.
When his father was banished from Norway after a killing.
Violence must have run in the family.
Because in 982 Erik quarreled with his neighbor
and ended up killing a man.
The family brought a lawsuit, and the Althing banished him from Iceland for three years.
So, he relocated to an island off England.
But, he almost immediately got into an argument with his new neighbor.
and ended up killing a few more men.
Clearly, that wasn't going to work out.
So he had to find somewhere new to settle.
Preferably, somewhere with even fewer laws, and NO neighbors.
And that's when Erik remembered stories he'd heard about a man who'd blown off course,
and sighted a new land north-west of Iceland.
Another Norwegian had tried to settle there but given up.
Speaking of it as harsh and empty.
Sounded like Erik's kind of place.
He packed up his family and went there.
Rounding the southern tip of the island
and cruising up it's western side.
Erik found a land locked in ice
the kind of place Iceland would be like, if it didn't have the warmer Atlantic currents,
or volcanic activity to moderate the chill.
And Iceland was already tough.
Only those who worked hard raised enough to eat.
But this land was tougher.
If he wanted to survive here he'd need more colonists than just his family.
Only a community could support human life.
In other words, you guessed it,
He'd need some neighbors.
and he saw opportunity here.
Iceland was getting overcrowded, it's small areas of cultivated land unable to support the swelling population.
So three years later
Erik arrived back in Iceland to recruit more colonists
Ever persuasive,
He spun tales of the lush new land he discovered to the west.
Where there were farms for the taking and men could truly live free.
and like any shady real estate developer, he gave it a name that,
while maybe not completely accurate
rang with the sound of prosperity. He called it...
Greenland.