V

PRIMITIVE ICELAND

ICELAND is known to most men as a land of volcanoes, geysers and glaciers. But it ought to be no less interesting to the student of history as the birthplace of a brilliant literature in poetry and prose, and as the home of a people who have maintained for many centuries a high level of intellectual cultivation. It is an almost unique instance of a community whose culture and creative power flourished independently of any favouring material conditions, and indeed under conditions in the highest degree unfavourable. Nor ought it to be less interesting to the student of politics and laws as having produced a Constitution unlike any other whereof records remain, and a body of law so elaborate and complex that it is hard to believe that it existed among men whose chief occupation was to kill one another.

With the exception of Madeira and the Azores, Iceland is the only part of what we call the Old World1 which was never occupied by a prehistoric race, and in which, therefore, the racial origin of the population is historically known to us.

None of those rude tribes who dwell scattered over

1 Though geographically Iceland belongs rather to North America than to Europe, geologically its affinities are with the Cape Verde Islands, the Canaries, Madeira, and possibly the Azores to the South, with Jan Mayen to the North, as it seems to owe its origin to a line of volcanic action stretching from the Cape Verde Islands to far beyond the Arctic Circle.

the north of Asia, Europe and America-Lapps, Samoyedes or Esquimaux-ever set foot in it. Adamnan, Abbot of Iona from A. D. 679 to 704, reports in his famous Life of St. Columba 1, a prophecy of the saint regarding a holy man named Kormak, who, in Columba's days (A.D. 521-597), made three long voyages from Ireland in search of the 'Desert in the Ocean' (eremum in Oceano), a term so happily descriptive of Iceland that one is tempted to believe it to be the region referred to. A little later the Venerable Bede (A. D. 673-735) speaks of contemporaries of his own who, coming from the isle of Thule, declared that in it the sun could be seen at midnight for a few days. Still later the Irish monk Dicuil (writing about A. D. 825) tells3 of an isle lying far to the North-West where monks known to him had spent the summer some thirty years before. And our earliest Icelandic authority, the famous Landnámabók (Book of the Land-takings), mentions that when the first Norwegian settlers arrived they found a few hermits of Irish race already established there, who soon vanished from the presence of the stronger heathen, leaving behind books, bells and staves (probably croziers). The Norse settlers called them Papas (i. e. priests), or Westmen, a term used to describe the Scots of Ireland. No doubt, then, the earliest 1 Vita S. Columbae, cap. vi.

2 Comment. on 2 Kings xx. 9. The extreme northernmost point of Iceland just touches the Arctic Circle.

In his book De Mensura Orbis Terrae, cap. 7, he identifies the isle with Thule; and the reports of the monks point rather to Iceland than to the Faeroe Isles, a group which Dicuil mentions elsewhere, and which therefore he cannot mean by his Thule. The name Thule has of course been applied by different writers to different lands. When Tacitus says that it was seen in the distance by the fleet of Agricola, he probably means either Shetland or the Fair Isle between the Shetlands and the Orkneys.

discoverers of the isle were these Celtic hermits, who had crossed the wide and stormy sea in their light coracles of wood and leather, consecrating themselves to prayer and fasting in this inclement wilderness. But they contributed no element to the population of the island, and can hardly be said to have a place in its history, which begins with the great Norwegian immigration.

The first Teuton to reach Iceland was a Norse Viking named Naddod, who was driven to the isle by a storm in the latter half of the ninth century. He called it Snæland, or Snowland. A second visitor, a Swede named Gardar, sailed round it; a third (Flóki, a Norseman) landed, and gave it the name it still bears. But though the news of the discovery soon spread far and wide through the whole Northland, the isle might possibly have lain unoccupied but for the events that were passing in Norway. King Harald the Fairhaired was then in the full career of his conquests. The great battle of Hafrsfjord had established his power in Central and Southern Norway, and he was traversing the fjords with his fleet, compelling the petty chieftains who stood at the head of the numerous small independent communities that filled the country to acknowledge his supremacy, and imposing a tax upon the land-holding freemen.

The proud spirit of the warriors who for more than a century had been ravaging the coasts of all Western Europe could not brook subjection, and, being unable to offer a united opposition, the boldest and bravest among them resolved to find freedom in exile. Some sought the Orkneys, Shetlands and Faeroe isles,

already settled by Northmen. Some joined the Norwegian settlers in Ireland, and drove the Celtic population out of some districts on its eastern coast. Others, again, followed Hrolf Ganger (Göngu Hrolfr) ('the Walker'), or Rollo as our books call him, a Viking who, having incurred the wrath of Harald, sailed forth from his home on the fjords near Bergen to found in Northern Gaul a dynasty of Norsemen whence came the long line of Norman dukes and English kings, Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae. And yet others, hearing the praises of the lately-discovered isle far off in the ocean, turned their prows to the west and landed on the solitary shores of Iceland. They embarked without any concert or common plan; each chieftain, or head of a household, taking his own family, and perhaps a group of friends or dependents; and they settled in the new land where they pleased, sometimes throwing overboard as they neared the shore the wooden columns, adorned with figures of Thor and Oðin, of the high-seat in their old Norwegian hall, and disembarking at the point to which these were driven by the winds and currents. At first each took for himself as much land as he desired, but those who came later, when the better pastures had been already occupied, were obliged to buy land or to fight for it; and a curious custom grew up by which the extent of territory to which a settler was entitled was fixed. A man could claim no more than what he could carry fire round in a single day; a woman, than that round which she could lead a two-year-old heifer. So rapid was the immigration, many colonists from Norwegian Ireland and the Scottish isles, Orkneys, Shetlands and

Hebrides (the two former groups being then Scandinavian) joining those who came direct from Norway, that in sixty years the population had risen (so far as our data enable it to be estimated) to about 50,000, a number which seems not to have been exceeded down to the census of A. D. 1823. With those who came from Ireland and the Hebrides there came some small infusion of Celtic blood, which we note in such names as Njál, Kjartan, and Kormak, given to men descended from the daughters of Irish chieftains.

Planting themselves in this irregular way, and in a country where the good land lay in scattered patches, and where deserts glaciers and morasses, as well as torrents, passable only with difficulty or even danger, cut off one settlement from another, the first settlers did not create, and indeed felt little need of, any political or social organization. But after a time a sort of polity began to shape itself, and the process of its growth is one of the most interesting phenomena of mediaeval history. The elements out of which it sprang were of course those two which the settlers had brought with them from Norway, and both of which were part of the common heritage of the Teutonic racethe habit of joint worship at a temple, and the habit of holding an assembly of all freemen to discuss and dispatch matters of common interest, and more especially lawsuits1. This assembly resembled the Old English Folk Mot, and was called the Thing, a name which survives in our English word Hustings (Husting or

1 Not but what the habit of holding such an assembly has existed among peoples of very diverse race in many parts of the world. It existed among the Greeks. It exists among the Kafirs of South Africa.