By Robert Wernick
The Vikings sailed to Iceland no longer as raiders yet as settlers. They sought farmland and items with which to exchange. For the land-hungry Norwegians, the decision of the hot state, the place tremendous stretches of genuine property have been open for the taking, should have appeared every piece as desirable as any treasure. As additional inducement to emigration, Norway's King Harald Fairhair was once consolidating his strength with a powerful hand, and, within the phrases of an Icelandic saga, "He made each person do something or the opposite: develop into retainers or give up the country." right here, during this short-form booklet, is the dramatic tale of ways the Vikings got here to dominate and populate Iceland.
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Winter can only have been wretched for these Viking explorers. The chronicles, perhaps mercifully, do not go into it. In any case, at the first sign of a fair spring breeze, Gardar put back to sea, departing so hastily that he failed to search for and find a crew member named Nattfari, along with a slave and a bondwoman who had become separated from the main party. ) Gardar now sailed northeast around the Melrakkasletta headlands, then generally south and east back to his starting point at the East Horn.
Geography had dictated that Iceland be a land of isolated farmsteads - of many farmers separated from their neighbors by river, fjord, glacier, or mountain, and forced to rely primarily on themselves for subsistence and security. But each settler was aware at the same time of being part of a larger community. Every June, after collecting the sea birds’ eggs and after the sheep had been driven upland to their summer pastures, every farmer would gather up his family and some of his servants and slaves and set off on a long, pony-backed journey to a spectacular, sunken, blackland plain just thirty miles from present-day Reykjavik.
As Skallagrim’s livestock grew in number, the animals started making for the mountains in the summer. He found a big difference in the livestock, which were much better and fatter when grazing up in the moorland, and, above all, in the sheep that wintered in the mountain valleys instead of being driven down. As a result, Skallagrim had a farm built near the mountains and ran it as a sheep farm. ” From the wind-swept sheep runs of farms such as Skallagrim’s came Iceland’s principal export: wool.