Early Settlement History of Iceland

Naddoddr

• According to the Landnámabók (Book of Settlement) Naddoddr was a Viking who was the first person to touch land in Iceland around 825 A.D.

• He named the country Snæland (Land of Snow)

Iceland Voyages(9th Century A.D.)

• Gardar Svavarsson was the first to make it through a winter

• He reached Iceland due to a storm that blew his ship off course in 860 A.D.

• He was also the first person to confirm that Iceland was an island

Hrafna-Flóki

• Another Norseman who traveled with three ravens (Hrafna) to help lead him to Iceland

• Also made it through the winter, but lost all his cattle

• Vatnsfjordur• Borgarfjordur• He named Iceland (ísland)

Ingólfur Arnarson

• A Norseman who had instigated a blood feud in Norway

• He and his adopted brother Hjörleifur set out to explore Iceland

• They made it through a winter and returned the following year with other settlers

• Built a farmstead in Reykjavík

Archaeology

• Landnámabók and Sagas as guides to sites• However, these sources left out many

settlement areas including the Mývatn region (Mývatnssveit) in the northeast, which features a farm at Sveigakot and an iron-smelting site and farm at Hrísheimar (Edvardsson, 2003)

Early life

• Encountered birch woodlands (Smith, 1994; Vésteinsson, 1998, 2000)

• Most early settlers farmed in wetland areas that did not require clearing

• Areas prone to glacial flooding would allow for easy movement into the inland areas

• Egalitarian farm distributions

Resource Depletion

• Needed plants/trees for building materials, grazing, fuel (domestic and iron-smelting), farm land

• Birch pollen greatly declines between 871 CE and 920 CE tephra layers

• 1200 CE lack of fuel availability halted iron-smelting at Hrísheimar

• Many sites abandoned due to erosion issues (Sveigakot)

Food

• Domesticated cattle, wild fish and birds, arctic fox, porpoise, seal and whale (McGovern et al. 2006)

• Must have used internal trade for sea resources (caught and processed elsewhere and brought inland)

• High presence of eggs (versus hunting birds) suggests some management practices

Domesticated Animals

• Goats, sheep, pigs, horses and cattle

• Later in the records sheep take over and cattle decline while pigs and goats virtually drop out

• This may be due to less available grazing land or attempts to control erosion problems

Environmental Effects

• Now 73% of Iceland suffers from erosion issues (Arnalds et al., 2001, cited in Simpson et al., 2004)

• Overgrazing prevented forest regeneration• Volcanic nature of soils makes them

particularly susceptible to erosion• Although seasonal grazing was practiced at

sites such as Sveigakot winter grazing seems to have gone unchecked

Environmental Effects• Some farms in southern Iceland show evidence

of land management practices that have maintained soil quality to present day.

• It has also been suggested that some farms just had a string of bad seasons and that climate affected grazing seasons

• Larger farms with greater resource access and knowledge of previous farm failures had a greater chance of survival

• Volcanic activity, glacial flooding and climate changes should also be recognized as contributing factors

Icelandreview.com