Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 131

Enduring Impacts: Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland
the leader of a neighboring settlement
was forced to emulate him if he was not
going to be completely overshadowed by
the former’s growing power based on a
high number of dependent families. In
this way it is perfectly possible that the
process of landnám in both Iceland and
Greenland was not so much driven by
population or other pressures in the
home-country (i.e. Norway and the
Scottish isles for Iceland, Iceland for
Greenland) but to a large extent by the
political needs of a relatively small group
of early settlers to consolidate their set-
tlements and land claims by rapidly fill-
ing their freshly defmed landscapes with
dependent farmers. It is precisely this
that medieval Icelandic traditions claim
for Eiríkr rauði, who was supposed to
have named Greenland in an effort to
recruit settlers with a name attractive to
pasture-hungry late lOth century
Icelanders (Viðar Hreinsson ed. 1997,
vol. 1, 3).
The available evidence therefore sug-
gests that the colonization of both
Iceland and Greenland was carried out by
groups led by men of the Skallagrímr
type, who claimed larger areas than they
could possibly farm or make use of them-
selves and planted small farmers on less
accessible and poorer quality land who
became their economic dependants
and/or political followers. This pattern
may be reflected in the character of later
medieval land holding in both Iceland
and Norway. In this economic system
landowners made do with collecting a
proportion of the produce as rent from
their tenants without either directly man-
aging the dependent farms or affecting
the existing settlement pattern (Widgren
1997, esp. 34-37). This is in distinct con-
trast to the land holding system in
England, France and Germany, where
signeurial intervention in settlement
planning was often far more extensive,
and where direct management of hold-
ings (especially ecclesiastical) was not
uncommon. The anomalous situation of
Garðar in Greenland in the later Middle
Ages may reflect both the success of an
early Nordic Skallagrímr and the mana-
gerial training of the suceeding bishops
and bishops’ stewards in the 12th-14th
century, as well as the executive power of
the church versus that of the laymen who
had to maintain their power by means of
more direct bonds and allies.
If the Skallagrímr strategy of wide
claims and specialized single-purpose
settlements is an at least partly accurate
memory of the wild days of fírst settle-
ment, it is clear that only a small number
of settlement leaders would have had the
administrative capacity to run such vast
estates for sustained periods. However, it
is also clear that despite their structural
management problems, elites at sites like
Hofstaðir were early able to fill substan-
tial feasting halls and to accommodate
large feasts providing their guests with a
rich variety of foodstuflfs in an impres-
sive setting. The lOth-early 1 lth c. hall at
Hofstaðir totalled over 200 sq meters in
floor area (Adolf Friðriksson & Orri
Vésteinsson 1997), while the floor area
of an average sized holding (such as
Granastaðir, Bjarni Einarsson 1994)
would be in the 55-60 square meter
range. This massive turf structure would
have consumed an estimated 2000 sq
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