Byock in his Medieval Iceland(1988) and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson in his Frá ..... could call upon the help of their chieftains, or whose petty quarrels became fuel for.
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t is a view of long standing that before the political turmoil of the thirteenth century, political power in Iceland was in the hands of a uniformly free and independent class of farmers. These farmers are not only supposed to have owned their own farms by and large, they are also supposed to have had political influence through a system of near-democratic assemblies and through their freedom to associate themselves with whichever chieftain they chose. The chieftains are considered to have had relatively limited authority, their powers kept in check by each other and by the farmers’ right to move their allegiance between chieftains. There were in theory thirty-nine chieftains in Iceland from ca 965 to the end of the Commonwealth in 1262. These were the owners of goðorð and they were called goðar or goðorðsmenn. According to Grágás every householder had to choose a goði or goðorðsmaðr to follow. This did not incur any formal responsibilities on behalf of the householder except that he had either to follow the goði to the Alþing or pay a fixed sum towards the travel expenses of those who did. It is clear from the sagas that the power of the goðar, their ability to be active chieftains, relied in large part on their following, the þingmenn (lit. ‘assembly men’). Unsuccessful goðar lost followers to other goðar, and there are many cases where such failures result in them handing over their goðorð to their competitors rather than suffer the humiliation of not having a following and/or not being able to act successfully as chieftains.1
1
For example when Þórðr Böðvarsson in Garðar gave Snorri Sturluson half of his goðorð to stop defections to Snorri’s brother Þórðr Sturluson (Sturl 210), or when the brothers Jón and Ásgrímr gave Guðmundr dýri their goðorð in Fljót as the only way to restore order in the area (Sturl 130). In Ljósvetninga saga Guðmundr ríki owns two goðorð (Björn Sigfússon 1960, 57–58) and in
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This fairly unique system was seized upon by the nationalistic historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as good evidence for what they considered to be the just and sensible form of government which the Norse settlers of Iceland created for themselves. Although alternative interpretations have been on offer for a very long time (see especially Boden 1905), Icelandic scholarship has continued to ascribe to the nationalistic view of constitutional uniqueness (e.g. Gunnar Karlsson 1972, 1977, and 2004). Even quite recently scholars, in particular Jesse Byock in his Medieval Iceland (1988) and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson in his Frá goðorðum til ríkja (1989), have attempted to show that the right of householders to chose their own chieftain was very much a political reality in the late twelfth century.2 By analysing Contemporary Sagas describing events in the late twelfth century they have shown that the followers of chieftains were not concentrated in the areas around a chieftain’s residence — which would have suggested territorial dominance based on economic dependence or the need for defence — but rather that they were scattered very widely so that neighbouring householders often followed a different chieftain, and a chieftain’s neighbour often did not follow him but some other more distant one. The inference drawn from this is that power in Commonwealth Iceland was not territorial and that each and every householder was politically free to a remarkable degree. In this article I will try to show that this inference is wrong, that power was territorial in essence but more importantly that what has become the standard view fails to appreciate the fundamental division of the Icelandic farming class into leaders and landowners on the one hand and farmers — more rightly termed peasants — on the other.
What Is a Goðorð? The fundamental problem is that it is not at all clear from Grágás what a goðorð really was. This problem needs to be solved before we start attaching great significance to the relationship between the goði and his þingmenn. A goðorð was clearly
Laxdæla saga (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1934, 197) Þorgeir Hölluson simply takes by force the goðorð of Þórarinn in Langidalur. Gunnar Karlsson (2004, esp. 179–202) has the most recent detailed discussion of this system. 2
In a more recent work, Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth (1999), Jón Viðar Sigurðsson has changed his mind on this score and suggested that the power of the chieftains was in fact territorial, based on the hreppur, or commune of more than twenty households. Byock reaffirms his earlier views in his more recent Viking Age Iceland (2001).
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something that could be owned, sold, given, and inherited. These qualities mean that it is quite remarkable if it really was a unit of power in a political structure as completely decentralized and chaotic as the Icelandic one apparently was. This is even more remarkable because the owning of a goðorð was not associated with specific places, centres, or even wealth. It is simply not credible that the Icelanders were able to decide that a fixed number of men were henceforth to be those who were to wield power, when there was no executive power in the country to enforce such a decision. It is even less likely that the symmetry of three goðorð to every region, three regions to every quarter, and therefore twelve goðorð to each quarter actually reflected the distribution of real power when the system was first introduced. Neither is this tidy political landscape at all reflected in the sagas, whether the Sagas of Icelanders or the Contemporary Sagas. Despite the wealth of information on twelfth- and thirteenth-century Icelandic politics it has proved impossible to identify all the thirty-nine goðorð or their owners (Lúðvík Ingvarsson 1986; Gunnar Karlsson 2004, 205–315). It is also clear from the sagas that many a powerful chieftain did not own a goðorð while some goðar seem to have had little authority. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (1999) has therefore suggested that the thirty-nine goðorð were an invention of the thirteenth century and that in earlier periods they were much more numerous. This explanation creates more problems than it solves because it supposes a pretty fundamental change — for which there is no direct evidence — and leaves us with an incomprehensible system before the proposed change. Helgi Skúli Kjartansson (1989) has proposed a solution which resolves the problem much more neatly. He suggests that the goðorð was not originally a unit of power but simply a right of representation at the Alþing, or rather, its most august institution the Lögrétta (Law court). It is much easier to see how this sort of system could have come into being. Very soon after the initial phase of settlement, a political need would have arisen for venues where chieftains and leaders of men could meet, make alliances, and settle differences. It is usually assumed that the assembly, the þing, was an institution which the settlers would have been well acquainted with from their homelands and which they would have established fairly quickly once they were settled in a new land. Assemblies and their principal institutions, the courts, did not need ‘permit-holding’ chieftains to function. Assemblies could be convened by the mutual agreement of neighbouring householders, leaders, and chieftains, and courts could pass sentences if generally accepted procedures were followed and if they were backed by enough political authority. These activities cannot have been binding on absent third parties, and the participants were hardly bound to repeat the exercise if they did not like the company. It was only when a national assembly was to be organized that more complex and permanent arrangements became necessary.
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There is a fundamental difference in the nature of the local assemblies and the general assembly, the Alþing, in that the latter required a permanent agreement by a large group of people (who otherwise were not in regular contact on account of long distances) to assemble at a particular location at a given time every year. The exercise would have been futile unless a significant proportion of those who wielded power in the country agreed to attend. It is certain that once the most powerful began to attend regularly others would have followed suit, because not to be present would then have risked being left out of the political game. Once general attendance was assured, the need for a body which could make binding decisions on laws and procedures would soon have arisen. The more the general assembly grew in political importance the more need there would have been for a formal procedure to achieve consensus on technical matters. This was the tricky part because in order to accomplish such a consensus a method had to be found which guaranteed that no one individual, group, or region became too influential and that the resolutions were generally accepted. The organization of the Lögrétta seems to have been just such a compromise. It seems originally to have been made up of thirty-six goðar, three from every þing, or spring-assembly area, of which there were originally twelve, three in each quarter (Gunnar Karlsson 2004, 63–68).3 By dividing the country into more or less equally-sized constituencies and giving each constituency three representatives in the Lögrétta, its founders not only guaranteed that no single family or region would dominate the proceedings, they also guaranteed that the membership of the Lögrétta would reflect regional political landscapes rather than that of the whole country. It is not known how the first thirty-six goðorðsmenn were selected. Because a goðorð was regarded as property — which could be sold and inherited — the selection had only to be done once, at the outset. It is impossible to know how important representation in the Lögrétta was in the beginning, and there may well have been powerful chieftains who shunned the whole business and took no part. It is likely, however, that as the Alþing grew in importance as a venue for high-level politics, no major chieftain could have afforded not to participate; fairly soon membership of the Lögrétta would have become as much a prerequisite for local authority as the result of such power. The establishment of the Lögrétta would therefore have helped to stabilize local politics and consolidate powers in the hands of those families which happened to be influential when the Lögrétta was initiated. We can therefore assume that within a few decades of
3
This is the accepted interpretation, but it is quite possible that the original arrangement included the thirty-nine goðar.
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the establishment of the system each goði — the owner of a seat in the Lögrétta — was one of three of the most powerful chieftains in his spring-assembly area. That, of course, does not mean that the thirty-six goðorðsmenn were the thirtysix most powerful chieftains in the country. In the Eastern Quarter, for instance, although there were nine goðorð attributed to it, it seems there were always fewer than nine families which held real power. There may have been as few as four or five families in the eleventh century and there were certainly only two in the twelfth century and only one by the beginning of the thirteenth. In this region it seems that the chieftains either owned more than one goðorð each or that the families arranged matters in such a way that junior members or side-branches were allowed to own a goðorð even if they did not have much real political authority. In other regions, the west and the north in particular, it seems that up until around 1200 there were always more than nine or twelve chieftains who wielded real power in each quarter respectively. In those regions there were quite powerful chieftains who held either no goðorð at all or only part of one but who were nevertheless movers and shakers in regional politics.4 It is therefore a fallacy to consider the goðorð simply as a unit of power. In technical terms it was only the right to representation at the Lögrétta, a body which while no doubt august, was nevertheless not really significant in regional politics. The Lögrétta interpreted existing laws and ratified new law (Gunnar Karlsson 2004, 106–11) but was not an instrument which could be manipulated for political ends — a political fact in a society where legal procedure was only one of several ways available to solve conflicts (Byock 1982; Miller 1990, 179–299). A seat in the Lögrétta therefore did not bring automatic influence for the holder. On the other hand it seems to have become a necessary accoutrement to real power — without a goðorð a chieftain could not hope to be taken seriously by the powerful members of society. A goðorð was therefore rightly considered a necessary possession for those who strove to wield influence and wanted to be accepted among those who considered themselves as the country’s leaders. It was, however, only a possession. A weak chieftain did not automatically grow stronger if he happened to inherit or was able to buy a goðorð. And a chieftain could grow quite strong without owning a goðorð. The relationship between the goðorðsmaðr and his followers, the þingmenn, was no doubt based on political reality. That is, a chieftain’s power was measured in the 4
Markús Gíslason in Saurbær in Rauðisandur (d. 1196) and Jón Brandsson in Staður in Steingrímsfjörður (d. 1211) are examples of chieftains in the west who did not own a goðorð. Grímr Snorrason in Hof in Höfðaströnd (d. 1196) is an example from the north.
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number of followers he managed to acquire and maintain. Without a following a chieftain would be little more than a pirate — a situation which is not in fact recorded in our sources. The law required of all householders in the country that they proclaim themselves for one goðorðsmaðr, but we cannot assume that these groupings were always coterminous with real political groupings. That is, householders who were de facto followers of one of the powerful chieftains of the Eastern Quarter might be persuaded to proclaim themselves for one of the puppet goðorðsmenn of the quarter so that they could hold their family’s seats in the Lögrétta. Conversely householders who were de facto followers of one of the chieftains of the west who did not own a goðorð would have had to declare themselves for some other goðorðsmaðr. Such a retinue could be enormously significant for the goðorðsmaðr if the chieftain and all his followers declared themselves for him, but it could also be completely meaningless if the chieftain’s followers declared themselves for many different goðorðsmenn, a fact, incidentally, which explains the influence goðorð-less chieftains were sometimes able to wield. The support of such a chieftain with all of his following could make or break a goðorðsmaðr.
Who Were the Þingmenn? There is no reason to doubt the traditional view that in many cases, possibly the majority, the following of a goðorðsmaðr represented a political grouping of some sort. This certainly seems to have been the case in the late twelfth century — the only period prior to the break-up of the goðorð system for which we have fairly detailed historical accounts of political machinations in some parts of the country. In both Dalir and Eyjafjörður, the regions studied by Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (1989) and Jesse Byock (1988) respectively, all the principal chieftains in the late twelfth century owned a goðorð and their þingmenn seem to have been real political followers. Yet it can still be argued that this pattern does not give an accurate picture of the political landscape in these regions. The fact that all the powerful chieftains in these regions owned a goðorð gives a false impression of the nature of their support. Following the argument presented above the goðorð was not the essence of their power, and their professed þingmenn varied enormously in their relationships with their chieftain. Some were clearly personal followers often connected to the chieftain through blood-ties or marriage.5 Others were much
5
The sons of Þórðr Laufæsingr followed their uncle Guðmundr dýri although their father was a þingmaðr of another chieftain (Byock 1988, 116–17).
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more distant and do not appear in supporting capacities but rather as allies who could call upon the help of their chieftains, or whose petty quarrels became fuel for the more serious political struggles of their goðorðsmenn.6 What all these þingmenn which our sources identify as such7 have in common is that they were themselves owners of major estates and many of them were clearly leaders of men. It is also important to note in this context that the legal definition of a þingmaðr was, more precisely, that of þingfarararkaupsbóndi, that is a householder who owned a stipulated minimum amount of property. Only þingfararkaupsbændr had to pay their peers for accompanying their goðorðsmaðr to the Alþing and only they could take part in the proceedings at the assembly (Grágás Ia, 44, 63, 159–60; Grágás II, 320–21; Grágás III, 173, 431–32; DI I, 536). In other words there were farmers who did not qualify, on grounds of poverty, for political participation. Whether they could be called þingmenn or not is a moot point, but they were clearly inferior and we do not see their type described in the sources (compare Gunnar Karlsson 1972, 25–26). When we look at the maps of the ‘locations’ of goðorðsmenn and their þingmenn in Dalir and Eyjafjörður (Jón Viðar Sigurðsson 1989, 26, 28) it immediately becomes apparent that the information is based on a very small sample of the total number of householders. In the region of Eyjafjörður (including Fljót and the western half of Þingeyjarþing) there were about five hundred farmsteads, but the sources only contain information about the political allegiances of twenty-seven householders. In Dalir there were about 180 farms and there the sources contain information on the allegiances of just fifteen householders. This would not be a problem if we could be sure that the sources give a representative view of the political landscape in twelfth-century Iceland. In recent historiography, nearly all the inferences drawn from the Icelandic sagas, both the Sagas of Icelanders and the Contemporary Sagas of the Sturlunga compilation, are based on the assumption that these sources give a balanced view of Icelandic society — that all classes and types of people are equally represented and that the sources deal equally with the high and the low. This assumption is not only naïve but demonstrably wrong.
6
Sumarliði Ásmundarson in Tjörn in Svarfaðardalur, a þingmaðr of Guðmundr dýri, is an example of such a follower (Sturl 134–37). 7
A different group from the þingmenn listed by Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (1989, 25–29) and Byock (1988, 16–17), many of whom are included on the basis of inference.
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Tax Values and Social Status In the Sturlunga compilation and Árna saga biskups, which together contain the bulk of historical information on Icelandic society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some 598 different farmsteads are named. That is just less than 15% of the total number of the ca four thousand farmsteads of Iceland (Björn Lárusson 1967, 33).8 Of these 598 farmsteads, tax values can be attached to 477. Information on tax values is only available for the country as a whole from the end of the seventeenth century, but enough examples of individual farmsteads’ tax values exist from the Middle Ages that we can be sure that these were as a rule not subject to change (Björn Lárusson 1967, 32). Of the rest, ninety-five were benefices (tax-exempt church property), four were cottages assessed as parts of other farmsteads in the early eighteenth century, eleven had been long abandoned when the land registers were compiled, and eleven cannot be identified. If we compare the distribution of the tax values of the 479 farmsteads to the distribution of the country as a whole a clear picture emerges (see Fig. 1). The poorest farms, those valued at 12 hundreds or less, and the poor to middle-sized, valued at 13–24 hundreds, are heavily under-represented in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources. In fact only 1.2 % of farmsteads in the 1–12 hundred category are mentioned in the Sturlunga compilation and 3.9 % of farmsteads in the 13–24 hundred category. The middle-sized farms (25–36 hundreds) are slightly better represented, but the large ones are heavily over-represented and would be even more so if benefices, which were generally the very largest estates but for which values are not always given in the later sources, were also included in these figures. Of the farmsteads mentioned in the Sturlunga compilation and Árna saga biskups, 403 are associated with named individuals. This is important because the tax value of a farmstead can reasonably be expected to give an indication of the social status of its householder vis-à-vis other householders of known farmsteads. Of those 403 farmsteads, 307 have known tax values and their distribution is also shown in Figure 1. This distribution follows the one described above, but the trend is even more marked, with even fewer farmsteads in the poorest categories and even more in the richer group.
8
Björn Lárusson’s statistical analysis of the late seventeenth-century land registers will be used in the following comparison. His number of 4020 farmsteads is a useful median of the 3812 taxpaying farmers counted in 1311 (DI IV , 9–10) and the 4247 farmsteads named in fourteenthcentury charters (Sveinn Víkingur 1970, 219).
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Figure 1. The proportion of farmsteads mentioned in the Sturlunga compilation (and Árna saga biskups) in different tax-value ranges according to late seventeenth-century land registers (Björn Lárusson 1967, 33). This leads to the conclusion that the Sturlunga compilation and Árna saga biskups deal almost exclusively with the rich — the wealthy landowners and the well-off independent householders — and shed virtually no light on the majority of the householders in the country, the three quarters that occupied farmsteads with tax values less than 24 hundreds. In fact when we look at the twenty cases of named individuals associated with the very poorest farms, those in the 1–12 hundred category, the cottages, and the abandoned farms, we find that some of these are actually due to changes in the tax values of the farms in question. The estate of Svínafell, home to the powerful Svínfellingar in the thirteenth century, is a good example. It was valued at only 12 hundreds in 1695, but had been valued at 23 2/3 hundreds as recently as 1686 (Björn Lárusson 1967, 333); it was no doubt valued much higher in the Middle Ages. A quirk of farm valuation also helps to explain why some of these farms with low values are mentioned in the thirteenth century. In the north-west, farmsteads tended to have lower tax values than elsewhere and so some four farmsteads valued at 12 hundreds might really be classified as mid-sized, for example, Hvalsker in Patreksfjörður. Occasionally, though, we do seem to be getting glimpses of the real underclass. Among them are Guðmundr guðiþekkr in Ásgrímsstaðir and Snæbjörn in Sandvík (abandoned farms by the seventeenth century) who both had visions in 1238 (Sturl 411, 427); Hallr Þórðarson, the house-carl who saved up money to build his own cottage in a marginal valley (Sturl 52); Steinunn Þorsteinsdóttir, the concubine of irresponsible adventurer Ari Þorgeirsson and mother of Bishop Guðmundr góði,
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a truly lower-class girl it seems (Sturl 102); Indriði from Rauðsgil (10 hundreds) and Sigurðr in Kálfanes (a cottage) who were among the retinue of Bishop Heinrekr when he crossed Hvítá in 1253, mentioned only because they were saved from drowning at the ford (Sturl 614); and Erlendr from Svínaskógur in Dalir (12 hundreds), the deceased husband of Ólöf, a concubine of the chieftain Sturla Þórðarson (Sturl 52). In these examples we do not get a clear picture of these people’s relationships with chieftains or their political status, except for Hallr Þórðarson who is said to have loved Sturla Þórðarson when he was young and to have become his fosterer. Hallr deserves further discussion. He seems to have been a trusted member of the household of Þórðr Gilsson at Staðarfell and to have been some sort of a father figure to the young Sturla, who was later to become the region’s major chieftain. Hallr seems to be mentioned in the saga because his sons were later involved in political conflict in the region (Sturl 69, 75). However it would be wrong to identify Hallr as a þingmaðr of Sturla Þórðarson, as Jón Viðar Sigurðsson does (1989, 29). The text does not use the term þingmaðr, and there is no reason to assume that Hallr ever acquired that status even though he managed to build himself a cottage on the property of Staðarfell and raise a family. It is interesting, however, that while one of his sons became a householder (probably through his marriage to a daughter of Sturla Þórðarson) and stood surety for Sturla in a peace agreement in 1171, another of Hallr’s sons, who seems not to have risen to the householder class, befriended Sturla’s enemies and became his opponent (Sturl 69). There are six examples of householders on farms valued at 12 hundreds or less being involved in political conflict. Most of them were victims. One is Jón Pálsson, householder at Gröf in Dalir (10 hundreds), who was mortally wounded by the agents of Kolbeinn ungi in a raid in Dalir (Sturl 508), presumably on account of Jón’s participation in some foray of the Sturlungar against Kolbeinn, although this is not spelled out. It may be that he was just a randomly picked victim in a revenge spree aimed at demoralizing the Sturlungar by striking terror among their tenants. Another example is Eyjólfr tjúga from Hvarfsdalur in Dalir (12 hundreds), who refused to give some raiders food and board. He killed one of the unwelcome guests and took flight. Unfortunately for Eyjólfr, he later had to relinquish his land to his relative and (more powerful) neighbour, Þorbjörn from Búðardalur, who settled the case with the dead raider’s chieftains (Sturl 362–63, 369). This is a rare example of a minor householder owning his farmstead, but one which also suggests just how precarious the hold of such free-holders was over their property when they ran into trouble.
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A third victim is Magni of Múli (12 hundreds) who had long been a house-carl of Kolbeinn ungi and had received a horse from him and taken on the task of keeping a look-out for Kolbeinn’s enemy Þórðr kakali. Þórðr’s spies came to Múli to attack Magni. Although Magni managed to sneak out the back door, he was caught by his attackers and swiftly killed. When his wife arrived at the scene, the killer dried the blood off his sword on her clothes (Sturl 500). The text does not say whether Magni owned his farm, but it may be surmised that he was Kolbeinn’s tenant. In 1194 one Nikulás Runólfsson, householder in Mjóafell in Fljót (10 hundreds), described as ‘poor and of rather insignificant parentage’ (‘Hann var félítill og heldur kynsmár’), led his fighting horse to a bout with the horse of a Nikulás Bjarnarson, son of the householder at Griðill (35 hundreds), described as ‘rich and well respected among householders’ (‘Hann átti vel fé og var í góðra bónda virðingu’). When the fight had started the poor Nikulás felt that his namesake’s horse was being given an unfair advantage on account of their unequal status, and he decided to intervene by striking the rich Nikulás’s horse with his staff. The rich Nikulás saw what his opponent was up to and raced to intervene — only to be hit himself. He then slammed his axe against the head of the poor Nikulás who was not, however, seriously wounded. Runólfr, son of the poor Nikulás, then struck the rich Nikulás between the shoulders so that he was seriously wounded. He recovered, but Runólfr absconded. The rich Nikulás was a close relative of Kolbeinn Tumason, the greatest chieftain of Skagafjörður, but he was a þingmaðr of chieftain Guðmundr dýri. A settlement was reached where the two Nikulás’s were deemed to have been equally at fault, but Runólfr was made an outlaw from the region ‘and was not to reside anywhere where Guðmundr or Kolbeinn were in control of men’ (‘og skyldi hvergi vera þar er þeir ættu mannaforráð Guðmundur og Kolbeinn’) (Sturl 145). All this is told as a prelude to how Runólfr managed to stir up further enmity between the chieftain Guðmundr dýri and his main competitor, Önundr, whose aid Runólfr eventually sought after having made submissive gestures to both Kolbeinn and Guðmundr. The saga does not state that the poor Nikulás was a þingmaðr of Önundr (as in Jón Viðar Sigurðsson 1989, 27), and Önundr is not mentioned as having had anything to do with the settlement when the two Nikulás’s were found to be equally at fault, something Önundr would have been bound to do if he really was the goðorðsmaðr of the poor Nikulás. As the saga records it, Önundr only gets involved when he manages to dupe Runólfr into giving him horses which he had already promised to Guðmundr dýri as recompense for his transgression. It seems therefore that the poor Nikulás was either not a þingmaðr, or at most, that whichever goðorðsmaðr he followed considered his support to be of so little consequence that he could not be bothered to try to defend him and his
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son. Either way this is further evidence that there was a class of householders who could not count on the same level of protection and support from the chieftains as other more wealthy ones could. Önundr may have taken the family of the poor Nikulás on as his clients, but his interest in them was only roused when he saw a way of using Runólfr to humiliate Guðmundr dýri and to recruit into his following a band of desperate young men in Runólfr and his two brothers. Such young men, compromised because of some crime or political mistake, and therefore dependent on the protection of a chieftain, were becoming increasingly important to the chieftains as their struggle for power intensified in the last years of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth. The chieftains’ armed bands seem predominantly to have been made up of such men. The only example of an instigator of conflict in this group is Þorgils Skeggjason in Tunga in Lundarreykjadalur (10 hundreds). He lost an eye trying to defend his daughter’s virtue and later took part in an attack on the seducer (Sturl 184–85), leading to the conflict known as Rauðsmál which we will consider at greater length below.
The Social Status of Householders in the Sagas of Icelanders The examples recounted above are the exceptions. As I have already demonstrated, the Contemporary Sagas deal primarily with chieftains and householders of middle- to large-sized farmsteads. I have not studied the Sagas of Icelanders in the same way, but it is clear that the same general pattern holds for them as well, even if it is less marked. For one thing it is quite common that primary settlers are said to have built their first farm at sites which later were either small cottages or abandoned altogether — Geirmundarstaðir on the estate of Skarð is one such example recorded in both Sturlunga saga and Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) (Sturl 3; Jakob Benediktsson 1968, 153). This is a topos used systematically by the authors of Landnámabók (Adolf Friðriksson and Orri Vésteinsson 2003) and was not meant to indicate the low status of the settlers as they or their descendants invariably moved to sites that became major estates. Another difference between the Contemporary Sagas and the Sagas of Icelanders is that the former clearly reflect later, more stable medieval settlement patterns in that the greatest chieftains are invariably placed at the richest and most strategically placed estates which were political and ecclesiastical centres throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, whereas the Sagas of Icelanders sometimes place their heroes on estates or farmsteads which were not centres later on. To give two famous examples, neither Bergþórshvoll nor Hlíðarendi, the estates of Njáll and
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Gunnarr of Njáls saga, were centres of their respective regions in the later Middle Ages and Bergþórshvoll did not even have a chapel as far as is known. They were not, however, typical properties — Bergþórshvoll was valued at 30 hundreds, and Hlíðarendi at 60 hundreds had its own church, which clearly placed both heroes among the aristocracy. The reason saga authors sometimes chose to place their heroes on farmsteads which were not centres in their own times may be literary: that is, they wanted to create a sense of distance by making the past a slightly different land, but it is equally likely that in the majority of cases the authors were making use of traditions which connected their heroes to particular farmsteads. That would then indicate a shift in the location of centres between the tenth century, when the events described in the Sagas of Icelanders take place, and the thirteenth century, when the late medieval pattern had been established. Another example of this might be Grund in Svarfaðardalur in northern Iceland, one of two estates established by the settler Þorsteinn svörfuðr, according to Svarfdæla saga, and thereafter his descendants’ main bastion in their conflicts with the men of Vellir from the other side of the valley. Grund was a major estate with its own church in the late Middle Ages, valued at 80 hundreds in 1550 (DI XI, 877), and the householders of Svarfaðardalur held their local assemblies there. The parish church, however, was at neighbouring Tjörn and it is a householder at Tjörn that we meet in the Sturlunga compilation as a powerful bully and a þingmaðr of Guðmundr dýri in the 1190s (Sturl 134). The surviving property boundaries between Tjörn and Grund suggest that Grund is the earlier farm because it would have included precious meadowland along the Svarfaðardalsá river in front of Tjörn and several other smaller farmsteads. Svarfdæla saga’s account is therefore entirely believable and we must assume that the householders of Tjörn managed, in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to outshine the men of Grund and establish their farmstead as the centre of the parish. It is likely that the establishment of permanent ministries and tithe areas — the foundations of the late medieval parishes — in the twelfth century (Orri Vésteinsson 1998b; Orri Vésteinsson 2000, 97–101) shifted the balance of power in some areas, so that original centres became overshadowed by neighbours who were quicker to establish churches and permanent ministries of priests. In many cases this kind of change might explain the discrepancies between the political landscape of the Sagas of Icelanders and the Contemporary Sagas. There are episodes in the Sagas of Icelanders, however, where relationships between aristocratic householders and poor farmers are described. A good example is that of Atli from Grenjar (12 hundreds), a tenant of chieftain Þorsteinn Egilsson who was ordered by his landlord to accompany him, along with a house-carl and
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a Norwegian, and bring a spade and shovel to rebuild a booth at the local assembly site (Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson 1938, 53). Atli plays no role in the narrative as far as can be seen other than to reassure the reader that Þorsteinn would not actually do manual labour himself. This group includes people of questionable integrity like the Hebridean sorcerers Kotkell and Gríma who were first settled at Urðir in Skálmarfjörður — a cottage holding not farmed in later times — and later became tenants of Þorleikr Höskuldsson at Leiðólfsstaðir in Laxárdalur (16 hundreds) (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1934, 95 and 101). Such poor farmers are, however, never principal players or protagonists; their appearances in the sagas always serve as anecdotes or embellishments to the descriptions of the main characters, who invariably belong to the aristocracy. That these characters occur more often in the Sagas of Icelanders is, however, one of the stylistic differences between them and the Contemporary Sagas.
Settlement Patterns, the Church, and Social Status A study of medieval settlement patterns in Iceland (Orri Vésteinsson 1998a) has suggested that from the outset properties were very unequal in size and value. The major estates of medieval Iceland tend to have been situated on the best land for haymaking, providing a base for major cattle farms. In the late Middle Ages these estates were often divided into a main farm and several small cottages, either within the homefield or on the edges of the property. Estate owners therefore not only ruled their own household, they were also lords over a small — and often fluctuating — number of cottagers’ households (Orri Vésteinsson 1998b). As a rule we find a number of small farmsteads in the immediate vicinity of the great estates, and when medieval written evidence is available it shows that such farms were owned either directly by the estate householder or by his church. Again the householders of these small farms would be dependent on the estate householders as his tenants and as parishioners of his church, but their social status would be a rung higher than that of the cottagers. Further afield we find basically two types of farmsteads. On the one hand there are small estates, situated on good quality land, usually with their own church or chapel, but rarely an attached parish and with as few as just one dependent household. On the other hand there are small to middle-sized farms often strung out along valley floors or coasts, situated on reasonably good land, but nowhere near as good as the estates. The existence of groups of such farms seems to represent organized settlement. They seem to have been planned by the first generations of estate householders who were able to claim large tracts of land and decide how it
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was settled. It can be assumed that these estate owners either rented out the properties or sold them, but either way they would have secured some degree of authority and control over the settlers. The renting of livestock — one of the most conspicuous features of the Icelandic land tenure system — seems to have been the principal way of maintaining the economic dependency of householders on the planned settlements (Orri Vésteinsson and others 2002). We can also assume that the chieftains used this and other methods to secure the support of the householders on the planned settlements. It is them, along with the cottagers, about whom our sources are largely silent, but whose subjection was the basis of the territorial rule of the chieftains. As a rule parish churches came to be situated on most of the major estates in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. There were some 330 of these in the country, but as we have already seen not all the estates became centres of parishes, so the total number of ‘great estates’ is probably closer to four hundred. In addition there were some three hundred small estates, with their own church but no parish (Orri Vésteinsson 1998b). It is the householders of these two types of estates which we find as the political players in both Sagas of Icelanders and the Contemporary Sagas. The other 3300 householders in the country hardly figure at all and those that do had farms mainly in the intermediate category of farms in the 20–40 hundreds range which often had their own chapel, probably indicating some kind of economic independence and social respectability although negligible political clout. If we work on the assumption that the seven hundred or so householders running the large and small estates represent the aristocracy of medieval Iceland, a very different political landscape from that of traditional historiography emerges. Instead of thirty-six or thirty-nine chieftains who were primes inter pares among the four thousand or so householders of the country, we have a situation where almost five-sixths of the householders were economically and politically dependent, no doubt largely tenants of the remaining one-sixth of the householders, the estate owners. This still fairly large group makes up the society of the sagas. The majority of the estate owners was neither influential nor particularly rich. The majority would own little more than their own estate, maybe one or two dependent farms, but this would be enough to make them leaders of men at the parish or commune level, a commune being an association of twenty householders (Magnús Már Lárusson 1962). Major landowners would have been an even smaller group, and it is among those that we find the chieftains who in turn had to compete for the thirty-nine goðorð. If the estate owners were in control (either directly or indirectly) of some 85% of the households in the country then it makes sense that
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the chieftains had to be concerned mainly with the allegiances of these aristocrats. By securing the support of an estate owner a chieftain was effectively gaining control of a much larger number of households. It is these estate owners who we find labelled as þingmenn in the sagas; even if ordinary householders might technically be þingmenn it was only the estate owners who were politically significant as such. A dispute which took place in Lundarreykjadalur in Borgarfjörður in 1195, alluded to earlier, illustrates these relationships well. Lundarreykjadalur is a long and narrow valley with typical planned settlements on both sides of the river running along the valley floor (Orri Vésteinsson 1998b, 23–24). The political centre of the valley was on the northern side, in the shape of two small estates, Lundur (60 hundreds) with the parish church and Oddastaðir (40 hundreds) with its own chapel. Unlike other farms in the valley these owned large tracts of heathland providing good summer pasture and they also divided between them the only good meadowland in the valley. Lundur seems to have been the traditional seat of power, and its owners had once owned a goðorð, Lundarmannagoðorð, but by 1195 it had passed into the hands of the Garðamenn from Akranes. The householder at Lundur was Hámundr Gilsson who is said to have been a þingmaðr of Þórðr Sturluson in Snæfellsnes, some 90 km away; the householder of Oddastaðir, Þórðr rauðr, was a þingmaðr of Kolbeinn Tumason in faraway Skagafjörður. We are told that Hámundr and Þórðr had a disagreement over firewood rights and that there was an ongoing rivalry between them. After them, two lesser householders are introduced: Þorsteinn brattsteinn at Reykir (16 hundreds) and his sons, Guðmundr and Steinn, and Þorgils Skeggjason from Tunga (12 hundreds), whom we have already met. Guðmundr Þorsteinsson had a friendship with Þórðr in Oddastaðir while Þorgils Skeggjason was a cousin of Hámundr in Lundur. So the sides were clearly drawn: any local dispute was likely to set Þórðr rauðr, Þorsteinn, Guðmundr, and Steinn against Hámundr, Þorgils, and Finnr. The dispute which is described starts when Guðmundr Þorsteinsson leads Þorgils’s daughter away from a church service one day. Seeing this, the worried Þorgils runs after them only to receive an accidental blow from Guðmundr’s axe and thereby lose an eye. After this Hámundr from Lundur tries to reconcile the two but no settlement is reached. Later in the winter Guðmundr, Finnr (a son of Þórðr in Oddastaðir), and a third man are on their way past Lundur, but when the household becomes aware of this Hámundr, Þorgils (who seems to be staying at Lundur), and two house-carls run after them and a fight breaks out. Finnr, Guðmundr, and Hámundr are all wounded before people come and stop the brawl. Next we are told that in the following spring a settlement is reached with the men
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of Reykir, the amorous, axe-bearing Guðmundr, but that the cases of Hámundr and Finnr were prepared for the courts at the Alþing. All the major chieftains’ families took sides in the issue and fighting broke out at the assembly between the Sturlungar and their allies on the one hand and the Haukdælir and the Ásbirningar and their allies on the other (Sturl 184–85). This story is told at the start of Íslendinga saga, the central piece of the Sturlunga compilation, and it is clearly selected to draw attention to early differences between the Sturlungar and the Haukdælir/Ásbirningar — the families who were to battle for control over Iceland throughout much of the thirteenth century. The details are interesting to us, however, because they give a rare glimpse into the everyday political reality of a late twelfth-century community. It was a community split by strife for reasons unknown to us, but it seems that matters had become so volatile by this point that a seemingly innocent amorous overture could spark armed conflict (although it is of course possible that Guðmundr was taunting his opponents by taking a public interest in the daughter of one of them). The instigators of the conflict, Guðmundr Þorsteinsson from Reykir and Þorgils from Tunga, quickly disappear from the scene and the dispute is taken up by their respective leaders, Þórðr from Oddastaðir and Hámundr from Lundur. These two we can regard as petty chieftains. Each led his faction in the valley competing with the other for dominance of the community. It is these two who are identified in the saga as þingmenn. It is not said whose þingmenn Þorsteinn and Þorgils were, and it is easiest to assume that they were not followers of a goðorðsmaðr, or at least that such support was only nominal, and that their allegiance was primarily to the petty chieftains of their valley. In this sense power was territorial in medieval Iceland. The ordinary householders of every community had no choice but to ally themselves with the nearest petty chieftains, and it does not matter in this context whether they did so because they were economically dependent on the chieftains or whether they had to plead allegiance to get protection. The geographical extent of the authority of such petty chieftains would usually have been quite small, and not necessarily an unbroken territorial block — this was clearly the situation in Lundarreykjadalur — but the authority of men like Hámundr in Lundur would have been limited to his immediate vicinity. It is interesting that neither Hámundr from Lundur nor Þórðr from Oddastaðir were þingmenn of the goðorðsmenn in the region, the Garðamenn in Akranes — heirs to the old goðorð centred on Lundarreykjadalur — or the Reykhyltingar in the next valley to the north. Instead they allied themselves with stronger but more distant goðorðsmenn in completely different parts of the country. This must indicate that Hámundr and Þórðr were both trying to guard their
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independence vis-à-vis the chieftains of their own region: they were preserving their own status as petty chieftains by side-stepping the chieftains of the region and seeking the protection of faraway goðorðsmenn. For goðorðsmenn the support of þingmenn in different regions can have had little value except in terms of prestige, although they could probably count on their support in disputes at the Alþing. An extreme example of this sort of arrangement is that of Markús Gíslason in Rauðasandur who was the þingmaðr of Jón Loptsson in Oddi in the South (Sturl 892). Markús was a petty chieftain who seems to have been in complete control of his home turf, and even though he was the cousin of the region’s goðorðsmaðr (Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson) he allied himself with the distant Jón, an arrangement clearly intended to preserve Markús’s independence. In Dalir we see the same basic pattern but on a smaller scale. The region seems to have had at least three chieftains in the late twelfth century, Einarr of Staðarhóll, Sturla at Hvammur, and Snorri at Skarð. The latter pair each owned a half of the same goðorð, but the men of Skarð were mostly passive in the political struggles described in our sources and can be counted as supporters of Sturla in Hvammur. In truth it is only for the northern part of Dalir that we have information on political struggles — the men of Laxárdalur or Miðdalir do not figure in the sources and we can assume that they had their own leaders or chieftains. From the 1150s onwards Sturla of Hvammur was in continuous dispute with the chieftain Einarr of Staðarhóll, with Sturla slowly but surely eclipsing Einarr’s power. Sturla’s original sphere of influence seems to have been Fellsströnd and the southern part of Hvammssveit and his move to Hvammur from Fell seems to have been strategic, designed to encroach on the authority of the men of Staðarhóll who seem to have been in control of most of the region in the early twelfth century. By the early 1170s Sturla could claim þingmenn not only in Hvammssveit where Einarr had previously had followers but also much closer to Einarr’s home turf, in Fagridalur. The exceptions are interesting: Staðarhóll was one of two estates with parish churches in the Saurbær area and the other, Hvoll, was in the hands of a þingmaðr of Sturla in Hvammur. Conversely, Hvammur was one of three estates with parish churches in the Hvammssveit area, one of which, Sælingsdalstunga passed from Einarr’s to Sturla’s control by 1166 but the other, Ásgarður, was in the hands of a þingmaðr of Einarr. That is, the nearest neighbours of significance to the two goðorðsmenn chose to follow the more distant goðorðsmaðr, no doubt in order to preserve their own independence as petty chieftains. The same principle explains why two of the other few householders we know of in this region, Þórhallr at Hólmlátur and Tanni of Galtardalstunga, chose to follow the more distant Þorleifr from Hítardalur rather than either Einarr or Sturla.
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Indeed the same picture emerges when we consider the map of Eyjafjörður. There we have a fairly clear picture of four core regions each dominated by a goðorðsmaðr: Fnjóskadalur ruled by Þorvarður Þorgeirsson of Ljósavatn; Fljót ruled by the brothers Jón and Ásgrímr, who later gave their goðorð to Guðmundr dýri; Öxnadalur ruled by Guðmundr dýri; and the lower parts of Hörgárdalur ruled by Önundr Þorkelsson. The upper part of Hörgárdalur was an area of mixed allegiances as were many other areas, Ólafsfjörður and Galmaströnd for instance, all no doubt representing similar conditions as in Lundarreykjadalur, with petty chieftains fighting each other and staving off the encroachments of neighbouring chieftains by allying themselves with more distant ones. Kálfr Guttormsson in Auðbrekka, a major estate (80 hundreds) with its own church across the river from Laugaland, the estate of Önundr Þorkelsson, is yet another example of an influential petty chieftain who resisted the overlordship of a neighbouring chieftain by allying himself with a more distant one. In that case Kálfr’s alliance with Guðmundr dýri was very significant in terms of local politics because Kálfr held a large estate with many households right in the middle of Önundr’s sphere of influence, thus breaking it up and no doubt making it harder for Önundr to consolidate his grip on other lesser neighbours.
The Territorial Nature of Power in Commonwealth Iceland The Sagas of Icelanders contain many references to territorial divisions of power. Sometimes a goðorðsmaðr is said to have ruled or owned the goðorð in this or that area (Miðfjörður in Þórðar saga hreðu (Kjalnes 170); Ísafjörður in Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings (Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson 1943, 291); Ölfus, Flói, Grímsnes, and Laugardalur in Harðar saga (Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson 1991, 25)) indicating at least a territorial centre of his authority. In other sagas limits of domains are defined: ‘Ásbjörn hafði goðorð um Flateyjardal ok upp til móts við Þorgeir, mág sinn’ (Kjalnes 253) (Ásbjörn had a goðorð in Flateyjardalur up to the area of his brother-in-law Þorgeirr) and ‘Özurr var höfðingi mikill, því at hann hafði goðorð um inn efra hlut Skagafjarðar ok út til móts við Hjaltasonu’ (Kjalnes 190–91) (Özurr was a great chieftain because he had a goðorð in the upper part of Skagafjörður, out towards the sons of Hjalti). Two sagas clearly state that a goðorð had territorial limits: chapter one of Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls refers to the goðorð of Þorgrímr as covering the area between Jökulsá and Lómagnúpur, and Kjalnesinga saga (Kjalnes 6–7, 41) states that Brunndælagoðorð lay between Nýjahraun and Botnsá.
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Most of these sagas were written relatively late and may therefore reflect thirteenth-century or later divisions of the country into petty states or administrative areas, but the idea of territorial power was clearly there and we cannot preclude the possibility that it was an old one. The analysis of the Contemporary Sagas presented here suggests, however, that the territoriality of power was much more complex before the formation of the petty states around and after 1200. All chieftains had a nuclear territory which might comprise little more than their own estate and nearby dependent farmsteads. The more powerful the chieftain the larger this nuclear area and the more complex the relationships between him and his followers. It is safe to assume that householders who lived within one of these nuclear territories were firmly under the heel of their chieftains and could not freely decide to follow some other chieftain. The process of power consolidation which was taking place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries involved extending these nuclear areas to cover whole regions and thus creating petty states. The ‘freedom’ of householders to choose their own goðorðsmaðr was therefore very variable indeed. It is arguable that the vast majority of householders never had this freedom, and that their status as þingmenn was either not recognized at all by the chieftains or was a meaningless definition invented by lawyers. Within the group of these non-þingmenn status no doubt varied considerably, from cottagers eking out a meagre existence in a chieftain’s home-field to independent householders, who might even be free-holders and who followed their chieftain into armed conflict and could expect their support. In Vopnfirðinga saga we hear of Þórðr of Tunga in Sunnudalur in north-east Iceland who was a þingmaðr of goðorðsmaðr Brodd-Helgi and who came to him seeking help in a quarrel with his neighbour. Helgi refused him help but offered to buy the disputed piece of woodland. Having bought the woods Helgi ordered his tenants to accompany him, his housecarls, and gestir (guests) to the woods where he had them cut up every tree and bring the wood home to his estate (Jón Jóhannesson 1950, 38–39). Here we have, on the one hand, a householder so insignificant that his chieftain refuses him help and, on the other, a nameless group of tenants obliged to do the bidding of their landlord and chieftain. Both were no doubt technically þingmenn and both were politically insignificant, but we can be sure that the difference in status between Þórðr in Tunga and Helgi’s tenants will have been considerable and significant in the local community. On a level above this we find the estate owners, a much smaller group but more significant in political terms. It is their dealings that are described in the sagas and it is to them that the relationship between þingmaðr and goðorðsmaðr applies.
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Conclusion The traditional interpretation of the Commonwealth political structure as made up of about four thousand politically equal householders following thirty-nine goðorðsmenn is wrong. The evidence on which this interpretation is based only relates to a part of the political landscape of Commonwealth Iceland. A study of the householders mentioned in the Contemporary Sagas with reference to the size and location of their farms or estates reveals clearly that this is a very select group. In fact only the very richest householders who owned estates with many dependent households are mentioned as þingmenn, and it is rare for inhabitants of farmsteads with low or medium tax values ever to be mentioned in these texts. If the scattering of followers is looked at against the background of territorial division between estates and their dependent cottages and farms it becomes clear that, as a rule, the chieftains occupied the largest estates with large hinterlands of small or mediumsized farms. Their followers were generally those who owned the slightly smaller estates and it is clear that these men, who were often local leaders with their own aspirations to power, preferred to ally themselves with chieftains who were not a direct threat to their local interests. There is a clear pattern in the twelfth century whereby the more powerful a local leader grew the further afield he placed his allegiance. Looking at Commonwealth society in this way it appears a very unequal society with a large class of economically dependent and politically powerless householders forming the base of each chieftain’s power. These ought rightly to be labelled peasants. Governing these was a much smaller group of estate owners, local leaders, and chieftains who formed an elite which dominated not only Icelandic politics but also the narratives created by and for that same elite.
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Bibliography Primary Sources Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson, eds. 1943. Vestfirðinga sögur [. . .], Íslenzk fornrit 6, Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag DI 1857–1972. Diplomatarium Islandicum, Íslenzkt fornbréfasafn 834–1600, I–XVI, Copenhagen: Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag Einar Ól. Sveinsson, ed. 1934. Laxdœla saga, Íslenzk fornrit 5, Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag Grágás Ia–Ib Vilhjálmur Finsen, ed. 1852. Grágás: Elzta lögbók Íslendinga, útgefin eptir skinnbókinni í bókasafni konungs, 2 vols, Copenhagen: Fornritafélag Norðurlanda Grágás II Vilhjálmur Finsen, ed. 1879. Grágás efter det Arnamagnæanske Haandskrift Nr. 334 fol., Staðarhólsbók, Copenhagen: Gyldendal Grágás III Vilhjálmur Finsen, ed. 1883. Grágás: Stykker, som findes i det Arnamagnæanske Haandskrift Nr. 351 fol., Skálholtsbók og en Rœkke andre Haandskrifter, Copenhagen: Gyldendal Jakob Benediktsson, ed. 1968. Íslendingabók, Landnámabók, Íslenzk fornrit 1, Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag Jón Jóhannesson, ed. 1950. Austfirðinga sögur, Íslenzk fornrit 11, Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag Kjalnes Jóhannes Halldórsson, ed. 1959. Kjalnesinga saga, Íslenzk fornrit 14, Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson, eds. 1938. Borgfirðinga sögur, Íslenzk fornrit 3, Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag Sturl Örnólfur Thorsson and others, eds. 1988. Sturlunga saga. Árna saga biskups. Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar hin sérstaka, 3 vols, Reykjavík: Svart á hvítu Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, eds. 1991. Harðar saga, Íslenzk fornrit 13, Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag
Secondary Sources Adolf Friðriksson and Orri Vésteinsson. 2003. ‘Creating a Past: A Historiography of the Settlement of Iceland’, in Contact, Continuity and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic, ed. James Barrett, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 5, Turnhout: Brepols, 139–61 Björn Lárusson. 1967. The Old Icelandic Land Registers, Lund: Gleerup Björn Sigfússon. 1960. ‘Full goðorð og forn og heimildir frá 12. öld’, Saga 3, 48–75 Boden, Friedrich. 1905. Die isländische Regierungsgewalt in der freistaatlichen Zeit, Breslau: Marcus Byock, Jesse L. 1982. Feud in the Icelandic Saga, Berkeley: University of California Press Byock, Jesse L. 1988. Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas and Power, Berkeley: University of California Press Byock, Jesse L. 2001. Viking Age Iceland, Harmondsworth: Penguin Gunnar Karlsson. 1972. ‘Goðar og bændur’, Saga 10, 5–57 Gunnar Karlsson. 1977. ‘Goðar and Höfðingjar in Medieval Iceland’, Saga-Book 19.4, 358–70
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Gunnar Karlsson. 2004. Goðamenning: Staða og áhrif goðorðsmanna í þjóðveldi Íslendinga, Reykjavík: Heimskringla Helgi Skúli Kjartansson. 1989. Fjöldi goðorða samkvæmt Grágás: Erindi flutt á málstefnu Stofnunar Sigurðar Nordals 24.–26. júlí 1988, Erindi og greinar 26, Reykjavík: Félag áhugamanna um réttarsögu Jón Viðar Sigurðsson. 1989. Frá goðorðum til ríkja: Þróun goðavalds á 12. og 13. öld, Sagnfræðirannsóknir/Studia historica 10, Reykjavík: Menningarsjóður Jón Viðar Sigurðsson. 1999. Chieftains and Power in Commonwealth Iceland, Viking Collection 12, Odense: Odense University Press Lúðvík Ingvarsson. 1986. Goðorð og goðorðsmenn I–III, Egilsstaðir: [n.pub.] Magnús Már Lárusson. 1962. ‘Hreppr’, in Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagge, VII, 17–22 Miller, William I. 1990. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Orri Vésteinsson. 1998a. ‘Íslenska sóknaskipulagið og samband heimila á miðöldum’, in Íslenska söguþingið 28.–31. maí 1997, Ráðstefnurit, 2 vols, Reykjavík: Sagnfræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands. Sagnfræðingafélag Íslands, I, 147–66 Orri Vésteinsson. 1998b. ‘Patterns of Settlement in Iceland: A Study in Pre-History’, Saga-Book 25.1, 1–29 Orri Vésteinsson. 2000. The Christianization of Iceland: Priests, Power and Social Change 1000–1300, Oxford: Oxford University Press Orri Vésteinsson, Thomas H. McGovern, and Christian Keller. 2002. ‘Enduring Impacts: Social and Environmental Aspects of Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland’, Archaeologia islandica 2, 98–136 Sveinn Víkingur. 1970. Getið í eyður sögunnar, Akureyri: Kvöldvökuútgáfan
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