Gripla - 2020, Page 222

221
It is possible that the king of Agder was a vassal under the Danish king just
like the king of Vestfold.64 Naturally, the most prominent leaders (of those
who had not fallen) must have had the most compelling reasons to flee the
country after such a decisive battle as Hafrsfjord. People further down the
social ladder would have had better opportunities to come to terms with
the new rulers. On this assumption, it follows that a substantial number of
the settlers coming late to Iceland from Agder would have been prominent
aristocrats in the then fallen kingdom of Agder, and this circumstance may
have strengthened their identity as Egðir even long after they had arrived
in Iceland, as a precious family memory.
These people from Agder, including the veterans of Hafrsfjord, would,
however, amount to only a small minority of the settlers in Iceland, and
they must have come later than most other immigrants, about a generation
after the first settlers in the 870s. A passage of Landnámabók (see below)
indicates as much, and it is also evident from a plain count of generations
based on genealogies in Landnámabók and other sources. Archaeological
excavations indicate that large parts of Iceland were settled within a rela-
tively short period of time; the archaeologist Orri Vésteinsson claims that
the best land was taken already by the 880s.65 That is relatively long before
the battle of Hafrsfjord, which most likely was fought in the last decade of
the ninth century or as late as around the year 900.66 In other words, the
64 Krag, vikingtid og rikssamling 800–1130, 89.
65 Orri Vésteinsson, “The Archaeology of Landnám”, 167.
66 The traditional dating of the battle of Hafrsfjord to 872 cannot be correct, as pointed out by
Halvdan Koht, “Um eit nytt grunnlag for tidrekninga i den elste [sic] historia vår”, in idem,
Innhogg og utsyn i norsk historie (Kristiania: Aschehoug, 1921), 34–51. Koht relied to a large
extent on the number of generations in otherwise uncertain royal lineages when he argued
for a dating of the battle closer to the year 900. A more reliable method would be to base
the dating on the fact that the son of Haraldr hárfagri, Eiríkr blóðøx, must have been still
going strong and able to bear arms when he fell in combat in 954 on Stainmore in Cumbria
on the Yorkshire border, and he was thus probably born around 895 at the earliest (so also
Koht, “Um eit nytt grunnlag”, 41; Claus Krag, “Eirik 1 Blodøks”, norsk biografisk leksikon,
vol. 2, Bry–Ernø, ed. by Jon Gunnar Arntzen (Oslo: Kunnskapsforlaget 2000), 435–36).
Even though the kings’ sagas say that Eiríkr took over the kingdom after his father because
he was the only queen-born of the brothers, it is more likely that Eiríkr inherited the
kingdom by virtue of being the eldest (pace Krag, “Eirik 1 Blodøks”); he was probably born
about the same time as the battle, and not more than twenty years later (as the traditional
dating implies). This is confirmed by the fact that his mother, Queen Ragnhildr, is men-
tioned in Haraldskvæði, in a manner that on the one hand gives the impression that she had
been married to Haraldr for a while, and on the other lends confidence to the authenticity
Gí SLI Sú RSSON AS E G ð A A n D s P I L L I R