SIR GEORGE DASENT'S INTRODUCTION.
(ABRIDGED).
THE NORTHMEN IN ICELAND.
The men who colonized Iceland towards the end of the ninth century of
the Christian æra, were of no savage or servile race. They fled from the
overbearing power of the king, from that new and strange doctrine of
government put forth by Harold Fairhair, 860-933, which made them the
king's men at all times, instead of his only at certain times for
special service, which laid scatts and taxes on their lands, which
interfered with vested rights and world-old laws, and allowed the
monarch to meddle and make with the freemen's allodial holdings. As we
look at it now, and from another point of view, we see that what to them
was unbearable tyranny was really a step in the great march of
civilization and progress, and that the centralization and consolidation
of the royal authority, according to Charlemagne's system, was in time
to be a blessing to the kingdoms of the north. But to the freeman it was
a curse. He fought against it as long as he could; worsted over and over
again, he renewed the struggle, and at last, when the isolated efforts,
which were the key-stone of his edifice of liberty, were fruitless, he
sullenly withdrew from the field, and left the land of his fathers,
where, as he thought, no free-born man could now care to live. Now it is
that we hear of him in Iceland, where Ingolf was the first settler in
the year 874, and was soon followed by many of his countrymen. Now, too,
we hear of him in all lands. Now France--now Italy--now Spain, feel
the fury of his wrath, and the weight of his arm. After a time, but not
until nearly a century has pa**ed, he spreads his wings for a wider
flight, and takes service under the great emperor at Byzantium, or
Micklegarth--the great city, the town of towns--and fights his foes from
whatever quarter they come. The Moslem in Sicily and Asia, the
Bulgarians and Slavonians on the shores of the Black Sea and in Greece,
well know the temper of the Northern steel, which has forced many of
their chosen champions to bite the dust. Wherever he goes the Northman
leaves his mark, and to this day the lion at the entrance to the arsenal
at Venice is scored with runes which tell of his triumph.
But of all countries, what were called the Western Lands were his
favourite haunt. England, where the Saxons were losing their old dash
and daring, and settling down into a sluggish sensual race; Ireland, the
flower of Celtic lands, in which a system of great age and undoubted
civilization was then fast falling to pieces, afforded a tempting
battlefield in the everlasting feuds between chief and chief; Scotland,
where the power of the Picts was waning, while that of the Scots had not
taken firm hold on the country, and most of all the islands in the
Scottish Main, Orkney, Shetland, and the outlying Faroe Isles;--all
these were his chosen abode. In those islands he took deep root,
established himself on the old system, shaved in the quarrels of the
chiefs and princes of the Mainland, now helped Pict and now Scot, roved
the seas and made all ships prizes, and kept alive his old grudge
against Harold Fairhair and the new system by a long series of piratical
incursions on the Norway coast. So worrying did these Viking cruises at
last become, that Harold, who meantime had steadily pursued his policy
at home, and forced all men to bow to his sway or leave the land,
resolved to crush the wasps that stung him summer after summer in their
own nest. First of all he sent Kettle flatnose, a mighty chief, to
subdue the foe; but though Kettle waged successful war, he kept what he
won for himself. It was the old story of setting a thief to catch a
thief; and Harold found that if he was to have his work done to his mind
he must do it himself. He called on his chiefs to follow him, levied a
mighty force, and, sailing suddenly with a fleet which must have seemed
an armada in those days, he fell upon the Vikings in Orkney and
Shetland, in the Hebrides and Western Isles, in Man and Anglesey, in the
Lewes and Faroe--wherever he could find them he followed them up with
fire and sword. Not once, but twice he crossed the sea after them, and
tore them out so thoroughly, root and branch, that we hear no more of
these lands as a lair of Vikings, but as the abode of Norse Jarls and
their udallers (freeholders) who look upon the new state of things at
home as right and just, and acknowledge the authority of Harold and his
successors by an allegiance more or less dutiful at different times, but
which was never afterwards entirely thrown off.
It was just then, just when the unflinching will of Harold had taught
this stern lesson to his old foes, and arising in most part out of that
lesson, that the great rush of settlers to Iceland took place. We have
already seen that Ingolf and others had settled in Iceland from 874
downwards, but it was not until nearly twenty years afterwards that the
island began to be thickly peopled. More than half of the names of the
first colonists contained in the venerable Landnáma Book--the Book of
Lots, the Doomsday of Iceland, and far livelier reading than that of the
Conqueror--are those of Northmen who had been before settled in the
British Isles. Our own country then was the great stepping-stone between
Norway and Iceland; and this one fact is enough to account for the close
connection which the Icelanders ever afterwards kept up with their
kinsmen who had remained behind in the islands of the west....