VIKING HERITAGE MAGAZINE

Editorial IN THIS ISSUE The first year of the new millennium is soon at an end . At the same time Transformation 3-5 as the millennium change has brought visions of the future, it has also in volved a great deal of historical retrospection. Vikings and the Viking The recently found Age have been highlighted, especially in North America due to the 1000- hoards from Spillings year anniversary of the first Norsemen reaching the continent. All this farm on Gotland, Sweden 6-8 focus on the Viking Age, which is actually a rather short period of the Nordic pre-history (ca 800-1050 AD), has resulted in a growing interest from a wide international public. Another great Viking Feast! 9 This year Viking Heritage Newsletter has also expanded to become a Magazine. Your responses to this change have been very en couraging. For the coming ye ar we have a lot of visions and new ideas. A big The round towered churches of problem, however, is how to fi nance ou r activities, as the Viking Heritage Norfolk and northern Europe 10-12 pro ject has form ally ended. Ev en though there is more interest than ever in what we are doing, it seems really hard fo r us to raise enough funds Nordic research project about the to carry on the activities . In orde( to con tinue we need to re-organise. Viking Age costume at Birka 12 Th is issue will unfortunately be the last paper version for a while. Our intention is to develop our magazine into a digital magazine that you can read and down load from t he Viking Heritage website. Reykholt - Snorri Sturluson's To all of you subscrib ers who have al ready renewed your subscription farm in Iceland 13-14 we are offering an an niversary issue including fi ve years of interesting articles fro m earlier issues of the Magazine, but also including new material. We hope that you all will find that good value for your money. Sagas and society 2 The fall of the free state 15-16 We cannot, fo r obvious rea so ns, register an y new subscriptions for the moment, but we will kee p you updated with information about our

doings on our website. Frdjel Discovery Programme 17 We would like to ta ke the opportunity to thank everyone who has participated in this yea r,s issues . Th ank you all fo r interesting articles! To all of you from all of us here at Vi king Heritage: A Merry Christmas Display of the Vikings 18-19 and A Happy New Year! And of course: pleasant rea ding!

Marita, Olle, Therese, Maj-Britt and Dan The "Ale in the Viking Age" project 20 Viking Heritage Gotland University College DESTlNA TlON VIKING E-mail: [email protected] A major new initiative 20-21

Tablet Weaving 22

Ribe VikingeCenter Words of Wisdom bringing history to life 23-24

Never reproach another for his love: It happens often enough That beauty ensnares with desire the wise While the foolish remain unmoved. Viking Viewpoints 25

From " Havamal" ("The High One")

About the front page: Heritage News Tablet weaving woman. Read more about this handicraft on page 22. Photo: Ny-Bjorn Gustafsson, Viking Heritage. http://viking.hgo.se 2 VIKING HERITAGE MAGAZINE

Th e stability of the Icelandic system of society was based mainly on the balance between two completely different Sagas and society 2 principles. According to the ideology of the settlement phase all freeborn had equal rights before rhe law. O n the other hand The fall of the free state an aristocratic principle dominated the polirical structures of the free state. As we have already learned, gooar and Pingmenn By MICHAEL NEIB formed the leading cl asses in Icelandic society. The Icelandic social contract originared from rhe times when the land owners led to rhe impoverishment of the farm because of the comperition between was fully sertled. Consequently the Icelandic middle class. Wirh the gooar and churchowners. Then the fathers pressure of a growing popularion co uld no weakening of rhe power of their gooar and of the church were also concerned with a longer be mitigated by a colonisation of their clans, it became more and more prohibition of infanticid e and eating new areas. Insread, fo r many freeborn and difficult for common people to come into horsemeat. Yet these heathen practices former equals rhe only chance for surviva l their own. This extreme distortion of were most important for the nourishment was to become dependents of a rich justice dramatically disturbed the former of large numbers of the population on one landowner, a development naturally feeling of solidarity between all freeborn. hand and birrh control of slave class on overshadowc;d by deep social conflicrs. To This development would not be the other. Naturally, the consequences of solve rhis problem all freeborn were without co nsequence for the institution of that development do not become evident subj ecred to rhe same law and a common slavery. Yet, for the moment, let us return to their full extent until a few generations insritution was creared: rhe great Alrhing, to the beginning again. Investigating the later. We need mention that the preachers which represented a compromise between specific co nditions of the colonisation of God were nor particularly engaged in an ideological demand and social reality. phase we have to conclude that there had the destiny of slaves. The end of the peaceful era (frioar­ never been any real economical need for Ironically it would be the breakdown of old) began when Chrisrianity was slavery! The fact that settlers took slaves society caused by the introduction of introduced to Iceland. Afrer failure by a with them to Iceland can of course be Christianity that would bring about the couple of other missionaries, the north­ explained by the cultural condirions back disappearance of slavery on Iceland. German Dankbrand fi nally succeeded in in Norway: Many slaves were rherefore The third destructive conflict converting some ofIceland's leading captured during the journey, quite often happened when church within rhe scope gooar. This, of course, alienated them from the Celtic nations on the Britis h of the movement of libertas ecc!esiae began from rheir own Pingmenn. That tension Isles. However slavery on Iceland is to claim possession of land and property would finally burst into an open schism nothing more than an ideological import. donations. As a problem, the definition of when at the great Althing of the year 1000 Slavery's disappearance is ass umed to have property as we find it in ecclesial law the two hostile parties declared themselves occurred sometime around the end of the completely contradicted the conception of to be "ur logum "; the Icelandic social Viking Age. Actually, there was never any the church owners who, fo llowing the old contract threatened to break up. Only law to abolish slavery on Iceland. Rather idea of ooal as family land, had only thanks to the dexterity of the law speaker some demographic changes were needed meant.to lease property out ro the church. could rhe threat of a civil war be adverted. to make the system of slavery unbearable. Las ti ng more than one hundred years that According to his judgement Christianity Firstly we have to consider the co nfl ict fi nally led to a complete change in became the official religion of the free diminishing livelihood on the average the common defi nition of land ownership. state, while heathen practices were still Henceforth the power tradi tionally allowed if carried out in secrecy. Preserving associated with land ownership no longer the customs of child abandonment and rested with the fami ly clans but became eating horsemeat can be explained by their the personal and freely transferable economic importance. The second conflict About the author: belonging of an individual. In the end we caused by Chrisrianity arose from the Michael NeiB has studied find social structures that had not much in Archaeology and Scandi navian introduction of church taxes. The church common with the conditions during the studies at the Humboldt University owner, in particular, benefited from beginning phase. T he particular Icelandic of Berlin . In 1998 he continued his of the tithe. As receiving the greatest share studies of Archaeology at the social contract has become invalid; there a result rich landowners started to build University of Stockholm and now he are hardly any parrners left with equal their own churches. As we recall, the is a student of comparative religion rights. The frioar old is superseded by an principal of gooorOwas founded mainly on at the same University. His special era of discord. A handful of fam il ies now the economic equality of bdmdr and gooar. interests are : later Iron Age, moves into the focus of hisrory, becoming However now the gooar were forced to ornamental art and iconography n(':w factors of influ ence. T hat is the make up for the extreme accumulation of interspersed with religion and prelude to the age of the Sturl unga r. power by raising the leasing rentals for society. Due to an active marriage policy the their tenants and acquiring new five or seven important family clans would guardianships. In the long run the E-mail: [email protected] be so interwoven around the year 1220 competi tion between gooi and church that traditional conceptions of family no

15 http://viking.hgo.se VIKING HERITAGE MAGAZINE

The powerfol d!ttir ofthe Sturlunga-age. SVINF~

SVINFELLlNGAR I ~ longer had any practical meaning. Instead {If territorial bonds became more important, making the t£ttir reside in their own separate territories, so to say. Puning the total breakdown of traditional structures in the context of the individualization of power gives us a key to a new understanding of the bloody conflicts of the Sturlunga-Age. Consequently it was more likely a maner of personal batries than just cruel feuds between family clans ... between ecclesial and profane erudition. It came when the firs t monasteries were A remarkable characteristic of all began when the first bishop was founded on the island. In that context we Icelandic culture is the strong connection ordained in 1056. However its real heyday ought to remember that pupils to be educated here also were members of the leading families. That is why education undoubtedly had to pay some respect to Somerled the specific interests of that social class. As a matter of fact, most sagas are supposed AND THE EMERGENCE to originate from or at least have been wrinen down in the monasteries. As far as OF GAELIC SCOTLAND can be determined that specific Icelandic erudition is considered to have reached its By JOHN MARSDEN importance for the church on Iona, and his climax in the stormy days of the extraordinary invasion of tlle Clyde which Stulungar. With reference to that one ISBN 1-86232-101-9 was cut short by his violent death at Renfrew in 1164. might wonder to what extent the Sagas Thtough most of eight hundred years, Perhaps most impressive is its reflect the ideal of a bener society. Most Somerled of Argyll has been variously demonstration of how almost everything Sagas are placed in the days of the frioar denounced as an intractable rebel against that is known of or has been claimed for old, between the years 930-1050. Despite his rightful king and esteemed as the Somerled reflects the same characteristic the fact that they were written down at a honoured ancestor of the later fusion of Norse and Celt which binds the time when slavery had disappeared for medieval Lords of the Isles, cultural roots of but he can be recogriised now Gaeldom. It is this centuries these pieces of literature show an as a much more complex recognition which has astonishingly uniform stereotype picture figure of major prominence led its author to his of the conditions of slavery. In any case we in twelfth-century Scotland proposal of Somerled's have to deal with a deep gap in tradition and of truly landmark wider historical between the time the when the Sagas were significance in the long importance - beyond believed to have taken place and when history of the Geal. that of the founding Exhaustively researched dynast of the Lordship of they were recorded on parchment. yet eminently readable, this the Isles or the forebear of Accordingly we need to wonder about the first book-length account the Clan Donald and its ways in which that picture of slaves could of the historical Somerled related kindreds - as the have been handed down to the Icelandic assembles, evaluates and one personality who, more Sagas. interprets the full than any other, represents spectrum of evidence - the first fully-fledged from Scottish and Manx emergence of the medieval In the next issue, the article will continue chroniclers, Irish annalists Celtic-Scandinavian under the title: How credible is the picture and Gaelic tradition­ cultural province from of slavery in Icelandic literature? bearers - for his life and legend. Individual which is directly descended chapters investigate his emergence in the the Gaelic Scotland of today. Literature sources: forefront of the Gaelic-Norse aristocracy of John Marsden is the author of a number the western seaboard, his part in Gaeldom's of books on the early history of Scotland Hastrup, Culture and society on medieval challenge to the Canmore kings of Scots, and Northumbria and in recent years has Iceland, 1985; Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei his war on the Manx king of the Isles, his made his home in the Western Isles. auf Island, 1978

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