Lögberg-Heimskringla - 17.12.1993, Page 18

18 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 17. desember 1993
Ultima
Thule
Westmann Islands
Arecent visitor to
Iceland overheard
two farmers talking
passionately in a field; they
were lamenting the prema-
ture death of a young man
whom they were sure would
have been a great credit to
the country. This sorely-
missed individual, it tran-
spired, was a certain
Skarphéðinn Njálsson, a
character in one of the cele-
brated Icelandic sagas, and
he had been dead for all of
1,000 years.
Various versions of this
story are told and retold by
travellers to Iceland, all with
the same kernel of truth:
Icelanders are quite
obsessed with their history,
or at least a select part of it.
The period they prefer to
remember is mostly set
between the years 930 to
1030, with little after the
13th century on which they
can reflect with any plea-
sure. The country’s current
prosperity has only come
about since World War II.
For the 600 or so years
beforehand, Iceland was a
grim and depressing place,
so much so that a 19th cen-
tury English visitor was
moved to complain that he
never saw an Ieelander
smile.
The roller-coaster ride
through history' has tentative
beginnings, with Irish
monks looking for a quiet
spot to meditate, and
becomes substantive with
Norwegian Viking settle-
ment, traditionally dated at
874. These same sword
wielding Vikings who noto-
riously reduced hapless
Europeans to prayers for the
deliverance of their throats
then performed an astonish-
ing about-face. Within gen-
erations, they took up intel-
lectual pursuits - without
ever quite putting down
their swords - and created a
literary legend which schol-
ars talk about in the same
breath as Homer and the
Golden Age of Greece.
These transformed Vik-
ings not only wrote their
own history as had been
passed down to them but
collected and saved the oral
prehistory and religion of
the whole Germanic race,
which includes most Europ-
eans who are not Latin.
‘They wrote in their own
tongue rather than in the
scholarly language of Latin,
on manuscripts made of
calf-skin, one of the few
commodities in Iceland
which, bar fish, was always
plentiful. A great number
of these manuscripts were
lost in a subsequent period
of extreme hardship —
turned ignominiously into
makeshift clothes and
footwear. Even so, those
Icelandic sagas that have
survived more than make
up for an almost total
absence of ancient monu-
ments in the country.
The uttermost end
of the earth
The cherished history of
Iceland is really quite short
by European standards. As
far as anyone can tell, no
human had yet set foot in
Iceland when, for example,
the Parthenon in Athens was
already some 800 years old
and the capital of the disin-
tegrating Roman Empire was
being moved to Constant-
inople.
The classic Greeks and
Romans were certainly inter-
ested in what existed at the
northern fringe of the
known world but were
invariably misinformed. The
most reliable information
came from Pytheas, a Greek
who lived in Marseilles. He
explored the north personal-
ly and returned with an
account of a country situat-
ed six days’ sailing north of
Britain and close to a frozen
sea. At summer solstice, he
said, the sun stayed above
the horizon all through the
night. The place was called,
he said “Thule”.
“Iceland” only came into
currency much later, appar-
ently coined by a Norwegian
named Hrafna-Flóki who
attempted to settle in the
West Fjords area but was
defeated by the bitter winter.
Earlier suggestions, which
obviously did not catch on,
were “Snowland” and even
“Butterland”, the latter by a
Norwegian who was there-
after known as Thórolf
Butter. He said the grass was
so rich that butter dripped
from every blade.
Nevertheless, it was not
Scandinavians who first set-
tled on Iceland but Irish
monks driven by the desire
to meditate undisturbed.
They set out in coracles
made of hides stretched over
a framework of branches
and twigs. With hardly any
seafaring experience, they
“sought with great labour ...
a desert in the ocean”. For
their purposes, the Shet-
lands, Faroe Islands and ulti-
mately Iceland were just the
ticket. The monks are
unlikely to have arrived
before St. Patrick’s celebrat-
ed missionary work in
Ireland, which began in 432,
so evidence of an even earli-
er presence, like a collection
of Roman copper coins,
recently found at an archae-
ological dig, were probably
booty or brought by chance
visitors.
Frozen gateway
to hell
Ireland was redoubt of
Graeco-Roman learning
when the Western Roman
Empire crumbled under bar-
barian pressure and Irish
chroniclers, familiar with
writers like Pytheas tended
to embellish their work with
borrowed, and sometimes
counterproductive, erudi-
tion. Thus the story of St
Brendan’s discovery of
“Thule” is made quite plausi-
ble by a description of a vol-
canic eruption which could
have been Mount Hekla, but
credibility suffers in more
than one sense when St
Brendan discovers that
“Thule” is inhabited.
St Brendan and crew
were bobbing about off-
shore in their little boat
when an inhabitant
appeared: “he was all hairy
and hideous, begrimed with
fire and smoke”. Sensing
danger, St Brendan made a
precautionary sign of the
cross and urged the oarsmen
to pull harder. “The savage
man . . . rushed down to the
shore, bearing in his hand a
pair of tongs with a burning
mass of slag of great size and
intense heat, which he flung
at once after the servants of
Christ...’Soldiers of Christ,’
said Saint Brendan, ‘be
strong in faith unfeigned and
in the armour of the Spirit,
for we are now on the con-
fines of Hell.” He was not
the last to believe that Mount
Hekla was the entrance to
Hell.
Sound information about
Irish activities in Iceland is
contained in the works of
Dicuil, author of On
Measuring the Earth, and the
Venerable Bede. Dicuil quot-
ed priests who said that
between February and
August it was light enough at
midnight to pick lice off
one’s shirt. It may be inferred
from evidence elsewhere-
because there is none in
Iceland - that the hermits
lived in beehive huts
arranged around a central
well, church and garden. The
monks came equipped with
Latin devotional literature,
little bells which were used
to summon the community
to prayer and to exorcise evil
spirits, and ceremonial
regalia like the crosier, a
cross which denoted an
abbot.
Since the communities
were exclusively male, they
would not have put down
roots and multiplied in the
usual way. ‘The settlements
were bound to wither, but
was their decline in Iceland
gradual? Peace of mind
would not long have sur-
vived the arrival of 9th cen-
tury Norwegians. Ari the
Learned, a 13th century
Icelandic chronicler, tells the
story from the Norwegian
point of view. ‘The disem-
barking Vikings encountered
“some Christians” who
shortly afterwards “went
away” because they were
unwilling to live among hea-
then. That may be putting it
mildly. Never the less, the
Vikings were usually very
candid about their atrocities,
and as there is no record of
anyone boasting about bury-
ing an axe in a hermit’s head,
scare mongering theories
about the fate of the Irish do
not necessarily hold water.
The surest mementoes of the
Irish occupation are the
“papar” (i.e. priest) place
names.
Viking Exodus
According to Snorri
Sturluson, the greatest of
Icelandic saga-writers, the
Norwegians who chased the
Irish away were themselves
fugitives, in their case from
the tyranny of Harald
Fairhair. He became the
undisputed master and first
king of Norway in 872 and
immediately set about mop-
ping up the opposition, seiz-
ing the property of defeated
chieftains and so forth. Of
the 400 names mentioned in
the Landnámabók (Book oí
Settlements), which list the
first settlers, 38 are known to
have been previously power-
ful chieftains.
Some historians prefer the
less dramatic impulse of poor
economic conditions in
Norway; others that the
majority of settlers did not
come from Norway at all but
were the descendants of
Norwegians who had already
emigrated to older colonies,
particularly in the British
Isles. “For the Icelanders,”
says one authority, “the
islands west of Scotland are
the cradle of their race in a
much higher sense than even
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