Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 175

Hostellers in Landnámabók
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but still internally consistent and bears strong similarities with the more institu-
tionalized hostelry that the Norse would have met in Ireland.
While these first Icelandic incumbents of the hosteller function seem to have
had reputations enhanced by their hospitality, there is no mention of these halls
or this generosity being maintained by the following generation. The story of
Geirríðr and her son Þórólfr points in the opposite direction: a son dissatisfied
with his inheritance and bent on acquiring more land through legally permissible,
socially condoned violence. It would be speculation of a different order than the
above, on lexical and oral traditional elements linking Ireland with early Iceland,
ifl were to address the question ofwhy the institution of hostelry did not continue
in Iceland or was not considered sufficiently prominent to warrant mention in
other significant media of record such as the law code or other family sagas. The
emerging institution of the goði with its apparently early quantification into a
fixed number of chieftainships, along with the fully claimed and thus ‘finite’ and
limited natural resources of pasture land, valley bottoms and coastal plains,
seashore and islands, may have left no manoeuvring room for brokers in services
less tangible than stocking farms, helping out in times of shortage, providing
protection and legal support, for which the free farmers turned to the local
chieftain (or sought comparable aid in his rival). Indeed it is difficult to imagine
any continuous, indiscriminate yet institutionalized hospitality being provided
without at least the tacit authorization of the area chieftain.29 Later leaders,
prominent men, and ecclesiastical authorities certainly recognized the advantages
of enhancing and controlling roads, tracks and ferry crossings, whether to gain
news and exert influence, or to assist parishioners in getting to services (Helgi
Þorláksson 1989, 72—79). The family sagas reveal close and functional ties
between substantial farmers not of chieftain rank such as Gunnarr and Njáll, but
in structural terms the early Icelandic socio-economic matrix may simply have
had no room or too small a population on the move for a hosteller of the kind
permitted by Irish demographics, social structure and pastoral economy.30 In the
post-Settlement period with its considerable increase in population, the medium-
sized farm that earlier provided relative well-being seems to have been under
pressure toward either ongoing division among heirs or incorporation in the
landholdings of the increasingly powerful chieftain families, possibly leaving no
properly scaled economic base for the kind of institutionalized hospitality sugge-
sted by Landnámabók.M The Icelandic circumstances were also without the Irish
29 The Irish briugu too operated under the authority of the local tribal king. To judge by the saga
evidence, the largesse of chieftains was in proportion to the rank and importance of the recipient,
and to the likely usefulness of a counter-gift in the fiiture. The hostellers would seem to have
had a more egalitarian objective - equal treatment for all passers-by - and this too may have
been a source of tension.
30 Icelandic herds would also have been smaller than those in Ireland, more favored in the matter
of winter pasture, so that hosteller hospitality in Iceland is unlikely to have been on the scale
assumed for the Irish briugu (Patterson 1994, 96, Kelly 1988, 36f.). Þorláksson (1989, 75)
interprets the Landnámabók evidence as negative examples of non-chieftain hospitality.