Gripla - 2023, Side 131
129S L Í M U S E T U R IN EARLY ICELANDIC LAW
near-peers in medieval Iceland, and sometimes served to cement bonds
between chieftains and their closest followers.38 But Herrschaftsgastung
in one form or another was never an element of typical commonwealth
leadership, even as it transformed into territorial lordship towards the final
stages of the commonwealth era. There are several reasons for this. The
Icelandic theater of power was much smaller than that of, for example,
Norway, and its actors played on a comparatively small stage. Despite
their best efforts, they were in no way comparable to or in the same league
as the foremost Norwegian notables (including, of course, the king), let
alone major European figures. They operated in a rural economy without
cities, and Iceland’s population was small. They fought over human and
other resources that were poor and limited compared to most other places
in Western Europe at the time. Much has been written on the financial
basis of commonwealth chieftains that cannot be reviewed here,39 but it
remains clear that they neither needed nor had the capacity to perambulate
their domains on a regular basis and exact hospitality as a form of taxation
and a display of political dominance. Prior to the formation of territorial
domains in the thirteenth century and the consolidation of power into the
hands of the few, a chieftain’s sphere of power would in any case not have
spanned great distances.
Guðmundr dýri (d. 1212) is the single chieftain in the corpus of contem-
porary sagas reported to have imposed regular visits on his kinsmen and
þingmenn. He was a chieftain in Eyjafjörður, living at Bakki in Öxnadalur.
The saga briefly reports:40
Guðmundr átti fjölða þingmanna út um Svarfaðardal ok náfrændr,
ok fór hann þannig at heimboðum haust ok vár.
Guðmundur had many thingmen and kinsmen in Svarfaðardalur,
and went there for heimboð in autumn and spring.
One assumes these visits were imposed, yet the reference is too brief and
38 See Viðar Pálsson, “Forming Bonds with Followers in Medieval Iceland: The Cases of
Thordr kakali and Thorgils skarði,” in Nordic Elites in Transformation, c. 1050‒1250, ed. by
Kim Esmark, Lars Hermanson, and Hans Jacob Orning, vol. 2: Social Networks, Routledge
Research in Medieval Studies (Routledge: New York, 2020).
39 For an introduction, see Gunnar Karlsson, Goðamenning: Staða og áhrif goðorðsmanna í
þjóðveldi Íslendinga (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 2004), 166‒78, 316‒33.
40 Sturlunga saga, 1: 176.