Outlaws and the Undead 175

Chapter 7 Outlaws and the Undead: Defining Sacred and Communal Space in Medieval

Justin T. Noetzel

The story of medieval Iceland, from its Viking settlements to its innovation as a democratic state, is a story of competing spaces and conflicting cultural iden- tities. With the migration from Norway to Iceland, the brave men (and some women) who sailed their ships across the North Atlantic literally translated their sacred spaces from their familial homeland to the wild frontier of Iceland. For example, the thirteenth-century Eyrbyggja saga, which narrates the ninth- century settlement of the Snæfellsnes peninsula on the west coast of Iceland, tells how a man named Þórólfur Mostrarskegg [Mostur-beard] discovered his new home in Iceland. When he reaches the Icelandic coastline he throws over- board his öndvegissúlum [high-seat pillars] that he has brought from his temple to Þor [Thor] in Norway.1 These high-seat pillars were physical aspects of Þórólfur’s sacred space in the temple, and by settling where the öndvegissúlum wash ashore and naming the new land Þórsnes [Thor’s Headland], he allows the god Thor to choose and sanctify his settlement in the new country.2 On such divinely-appointed sacred land, Þórólfur and many settlers like him build their first farmsteads and temples, while maintaining a careful distinction between these sacred spaces of religious activity and the profane spaces where

1 Guðni Jónsson, trans., “Eyrbyggja saga,” Íslendinga Sögur: Þriðja Bindi (Offsetmyndir: Prentverk Odds Björnsonnar, 1986), at 5 and 28. The best translation of the saga is Eyrbyggja Saga, trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (New York, 1989). I would like to thank Tom Shippey, Paul Acker, and my colleagues at Saint Louis University for their invaluable support and contribu- tions to this project. 2 Heather O’Donoghue, in -: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004), describes this same practice in the Landnámabók, The Book of Land Takings, and she adds, “it seems likely that these [pillars] formed part of the throne on which the head of the family might sit on formal occasions, and that they might have been carved, and had a reli- gious significance,” 20. Many of the first settlers of Iceland chose their new homes through this practice, including Ketill Flat-nose and his daughter Unn the Deep-Minded, members of the first generation of settlers in the famous Laxdæla saga. For more information, see “The Saga of the People of Laxardal,” trans. Keneva Kunz, in The (New York, 2000), at 277 and 279.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004358331_009 176 Noetzel they would otherwise live their lives – raising their livestock, drinking and feasting, and occasionally killing each other. The Íslendingasögur, [Icelandic sagas] come from the thirteenth and four- teenth centuries and describe the settlement of the country in the ninth and tenth centuries.3 These sagas include love stories and the adventures of war- riors and poets, as well as folktales and myths from the Icelanders’ Viking ancestry; and collectively they define medieval Icelandic culture.4 Many scholars have remarked on the preponderance of violence in this culture, where the code of the blood-feud led to ever-escalating tensions and murders. Jesse Byock describes this culture thusly: “Icelandic blood feud was a form of vengeance-taking. It involved deep, smoldering animosities leading to repeated reprisals… The taking of vengeance was understood as action that satisfied honor, and exchanges of violence could go on for a very long time, frequently over generations.”5 In addition to this internal strife, the threat of the Otherworld was never far from Icelandic life – trolls lurked in the moun- tains, and even a member of one’s own family could become a , (pl. draugar) a revenant or demonic walking corpse, and return after death to assault and kill people and animals. Consequently, Icelandic society had to insulate itself from the dual threats of blood-feuding men and blood-thirsty monsters. As medieval Iceland forged and stabilized its democratic structure, it identi- fied the threats to its collective communal identity, and so outlaws and the undead, as the enemies defined by medieval law and ancient myth, were nec- essarily excluded and pushed to the borders of society. Outlaws were forced either to leave the country or be hunted throughout Iceland, and they were consequently forced to occupy the borderlands of society: the highlands of Iceland’s interior and the small outlying Islands. As Kendra Wilson notes, out- lawry “reflects and shapes native conceptions of social and geographical space

3 Kendra Wilson, “Inside and Outside in Gísla saga Súrssonar and Freysgoða,” The Book of Nature and Humanity in The Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. David Hawkes and Richard C. Newhauser (Turnhout, 2013), 292. 4 For a very thorough presentation on the history of criticism of the Family Sagas, see Carol J. Clover, “Icelandic Family Sagas (Íslendingasögur),” Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide, ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow (Toronto, 2005), 239-315. 5 Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London, 2001), 208. For more detail on the legal stratagems employed within the feud culture, and the narrative ways that feuds manifest themselves in the sagas, see Jesse Byock, Feud in the Icelandic Saga (Berkeley, 1982), 114-142, and William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago, 1990), 179-220.