5. Land of Fire and Ice

Unlike the North Sea, these waters stretch on forever, an unrelenting grey seascape.

One of undulating peaks and troughs of dark hidden valleys of the boating crags flipped with foam. The boat rides the swell, rising and plunging, waves crashing over the prowl.

“The only thing between life and death is a few inches of Norwegian oak.”

This ship is more chunky than the usual kind, not the light swift dragon boats used for some erading and river hopping. It's a cargo vessel, a canar, wider, heavier, sturdier. It can accommodate over 60 people, men, women and children, not raiders here but craftsmen, trades people, farmers, builders, hunters, settlers. And they have all taken a giant leap of faith to establish a colony in a land on which none of them has ever set foot,

and whose location is only vaguely known.

To boldly go, as one might put it, where no man or woman has gone before. The passengers huddle them to the spare sails, strung across the deck as an awning. In pens at the stern a cattle, there are uneasing creases the tension. And at the helm, is the man to whom the travellers have pledged their trust,

“an artisan of the fjords, a boat builder.”

A man called Floki Vilgatharsen. Someone, it is whispered, who is a kinsman of the great Ragnar Lothrock. Though there are few men in the Viking realms who don't boast of a connection. According to the accounts of sea fairers, the land they seek as a large island. And the best soil, it is said, the most farmable, lies way round to the west,

warned by what we know today as the Gulf Stream. Floki blinks into the spray. His furs and levers are drenched. His hand on the steerboard numbed by the coal.

“Three days out from the fairer islands and they should by now have cited it.”

Supplies are limited, time is running out. With traditional methods of navigation failing, Floki resorts to his own. In a wooden cage sit his three black ravens, the bird of Odin. Ravens have a homing instinct. Unable to locate a place to roost, they will instinctively fly back to the coup.

Floki will release them in succession until one doesn't return. Over the coming hours in relay, the ravens take to the sky.

The first disorientated head straight off to the southeast, back towards the fairers,

never to be seen again. The second after disappearing out of sight eventually comes flapping home. But the third source off determined, it is hell bent on flying north. This is it. As the boat steers in the bird's direction, it coincides with the glimps through a bank of fog.

The silhouette of a rugged coastline. The island. Vikings are famously wary of fog, believing it to be cursed. But Floki plows his ship right through, and his crew will follow the shoreline round,

dropping anchor eventually in the far north west. A settlement is established, at a place named Ovattens Fierd here. But life will prove unbearably harsh. The magic of summer's near 24-hour daylight, so bright you can pick the lights from your clothes at midnight.

Will be offset by a winter's so dark, so cold, so brutal, that none of the colonies cattle survive. Come the spring thaw, the outpost is disbanded. Haravana Floki, or Raven Floki, as he is now known, will return to Norway. His testimony will be presented to the royal court.

It is, as he puts it, an ice-land.

“I'm the Inglant, and from the noise upon Cosnetwork, this is Real Vikings Part V.”

In this series, we've covered many aspects of the Viking Age. We've watched our piracy and pillaging have evolved into settlement and trade. We've witnessed hit and hit. In this series, we've covered many aspects of the Viking Age. We've watched our piracy and pillaging have evolved into settlement and trade.

With witness hit and run skirmishes escalate to military campaigns,

waged by great heathen armies.

We've seen warlord territories morph into political entities, fledgling kingdoms. As Danes have settled in Anglo-Saxon England,

“so Norwegian's have interacted with Scotland and Ireland.”

We have followed Northmen into Francia, and seen Swedish Vikings edge-down mighty rivers into the heart of Russia. Until now, as impressive as their seamanship is, there has been something characteristic about Viking navigation. It is all about shorehugging, edging along coasts or inland waterways.

Never putting out into the open sea for more than a day or two.

The North Sea, hopefully it can't cut up rough, is essentially a shallow basin, a contained body of water. So, too, is the Baltic. Cast off from Scandinavia, west or east, and you will soon hit land. No. For Viking navigators, there remains one final frontier.

A wide grey yonder. The North Atlantic. William Fitzhew is the director of the Arctic Studies Centre and curator of the Department of Natural History of the Smithsonian National Museum. The story of the expansion across the North Atlantic was a totally different ballgame. It was done by people who were farmers who were looking for ways to keep their families going to discover new resources.

The Viking Times was not just a time of carnage and pillaging and so forth, but very real story about people and their families and their lives. Not just rather gore at biased impression, mostly described by people who are at the wrong end of the Viking sword. I mean, as these guys crossed the North Atlantic, they were not really Vikings at all. As North sailors make passage round for what we call today the North of Scotland, they have come across two sets of islands. Both are settled relatively quickly.

Orcney, 10 miles off the mainland and Shetland, 50 miles to Orcney's northeast, are grouped together in Viking terms as the northern Isles. They will become part of the kingdom of Norway in 875. With rich pasture and sheltered anchorage, they are perfect spots to settle.

“The climate, if you remember, is in the throes of the medieval warm period, several degrees more equitable than today.”

In both locations, North invaders quickly supply the local Pictish population. They have been part of a community known as Becat or Catty, people. Their name lives on today in Mayland, Kathness. The conveyance of settlers necessitates an upgrade in ship technology. Initially, it was the Coastal Travel, but after the raids began and so forth they realized they had to carry a lot of other material.

You know, you had to bring your cows, your families, and all your channels and everything. The open long boats that were the raiding kind of boats were not suitable at all for that kind of life. And that became the canars that then were the vehicles for the expansion. These twin archipelagoes, comprising between them over 200 Islets and Scaries, also serve another practical function.

They are waste stations, pit stops, a place to replenish on route to a final destination. Settlement of the Hedredees, maybe, the Islet of Man, Island, or a new set of islands that have since come into focus. Fifty years on from the settlement of the northern Isles, North Seaman were put to shore on fresh terrain, 200 miles to Shetland's northwest.

Their name literally means "sheep islands".

“It's a good place, too, to build up supplies of a handy non-perishable foodstuff, salted cod.”

And so, the Fero is a similarly brought into the Viking orbit. There was a tremendous lore that was developing, so it really was an opening of a new era. Like many of the Atlantic discoveries, it is by accident that the Fero is a found. A typical case of sailors being blown off course. Not that these islands can claim to have been discovered as such.

Their existence was recorded by an Irish monk, Dick Wealus, writing in the mid-800s.

Indeed, the first Norse landings confirmed that there had been prior settlement by Celtic monks, Hermit's known as Papar.

“They had sought sanctuary here, pursuing a monastic existence far from civilization.”

The experience of the Papar will add air twist to Nordic adventuring. The Feroes are about to assume a role in a brand new phase of Viking expansion. Not for the purpose of trade. Nor for conquest. The Feroes are to become the staging post in an Exodus. Amines for the likes of Floki to escape, just as those monks had done, from the strictures of everyday politics and society.

A stepping stone for people, dissenters, pilgrims, in search of a new life, a new world.

The last part of coal before a voyage into the unknown. That's the beauty of the North Atlantic because it has these bridging islands.

“The Norse also had an idea that wherever they traveled, Gord de West, they would find more land.”

This just became a kind of like a basic doctrine. Scandinavia is changing. There is a growing sense of interconnectedness with other European nations. As trading has taken off, so the importance of the ports and the market centres has increased. In a nod to continental tradition, warlords have begun to style themselves as kings.

If only to gain them credibility when dealing with foreign courts. As rulers of these ports and their hinterlands, territories are refashioned and expanded as petty kingdoms and fiefdoms. And Viking rulers are also playing their part in their seismic cultural shift, a conversion to Christianity. These societal changes are having repercussions at the lower end of the social order. Humble farmers, fishermen and tradesmen, whose loyalties are only ever been local,

find themselves being re-designated as subjects. They are obliged now to pay tribute, failty, and taxes to their increasingly distant royal and now Christian overlords. They must attend the spanking new churches that these new vomonics insist on throwing up. For many, the old pagan traditions can still be practiced on the sly or simply adorned with a bit of biblical window dressing. Even the legend of Floki carries echoes of Noah and the flood. As the Saxons found before them, the Scandinavians are able to fuse their beliefs with these new ideas.

The spring fertility rituals of the pagan gods conveniently aligned with Christian holy week, making for a hybrid festival that the Noah's call, Ostara, Easter. The winter solstice feast, you, with its burning logs and winter greenery, continues untrammeled, simply spliced onto Christmas. Dr. Pragyavora. And this kind of syncretism between the old religion and the new religion is seen in multiple places. And it's clearly part of that sort of transitional period when people are learning to perform their new religion,

but it's being taught to them through the lens of their old stories and their old gods and myths. In a land of epic story tellers, the sedate nativity has some way yet to compete with the bambastic yarns of the Noah's sagas, tales of giants and monsters and the mighty deities come to smash them.

It is the star of one such legend, one classic folk story, will push things to tipping point.

“It's the year 860, we're in Norway, an adwelling on what is today's Oslo fjord.”

In the long haul, the dead of night, a local cheap can lies on his deathbed. His name is "Half Dunder Black". As his usual, when a leader is about to expire, his faithful gather at the bedside. There is much to pick over the spoils of his estate as to pay loss respects.

In the shadows, behind Half Dunder's wife and sobbing attendants, stand the earths, the yars, each posturing for a place in the line of succession.

Half Dunder has only one son, you see, Harold, and Harold is but ten years old.

“It is a situation right for exploitation, where he ought to be appointed as his regent, the power behind a throne, or perhaps for Half Dunder bypass his son altogether,”

and place the kingdom in safer, more mature hands. It is wishful thinking, with what little strength he has, Half Dunder clutches his boy to his bosom. It is he, he confirms with his dying breath, who is his anointed successor, and don't let anybody say otherwise. The yars are each other, the life expectancy of a child king as everyone knows is incredibly short. Ten-year-old Harold is more likely to die by assassination of some mysterious accident than he is of natural causes.

Harold, poem, is a bright lad. He has enough wits about him to play the yars off against each other, to keep a firm grip on the crown as he navigates his way into young adulthood. And it is here, as a no doubt, Pimpley had a lesson, that young king Harold also it goes, falls head over heels in love with a princess, Princess Gida of Hordland. In true fairy tale fashion, Princess Gida has certain conditions about their match, sure refuses to take Harold's hand in marriage until he fulfills her request that he becomes king of all Norway.

Harold in return vows to honour her wish. What's more, as a symbol of his devotion, he pledges never to cut his hair, or wash it, until he has made good on his promise.

And thus, the legend of Harold fair hair, or fine hair, as he is sometimes called, comes to pass. With the love in his heart, his flax and mane flowing, if a tad greasy, king Harold fair hair will become the overlord of a united Norwegian kingdom. It's a nice story, thoroughly Disney, testament to the skills of Harold's PR people. In reality, fair hair's clan can rival the most murderous royal houses in history, in terms of bloodletting, an intonessigned slaughter. Gida, it turns out, will be just one of seven or more damsels Harold takes his wife during his lengthy reign, making for at least 20 sons.

Some say 200, or vying to rip his realm a sunder. The most notorious of whom, in typical unsuttle fashion, is dubbed Eric Bloodaxe. But it is true that after crushing his rivals at the Battle of Haffes fared, King Harold fair hair secures rule of a pro-to-know region state.

“This will form an important part of modern Norway's creation myth.”

Later, in the 19th century, Harold will be totaled as a symbol of resistance during Norway's struggle for independence from its union with Sweden. In the fields and fjords for men like Floki, the unfolding chaos and violence is destabilizing to a traditional way of life. And there's that Christian God again, the one that Harold insists on imposing a status symbol, sign of his own elevation. Europe was being transformed by Christianity and King's assuming control.

And as the kings began taking authority and you know, turning a lot of these independent farmers into vassals and so forth, the unrest was palpable.

For some hardy souls, enough is enough.

“The only solution is to strike out, to get away from the death and the religious repression.”

And with all the good land now taken in the northern Isles and pharaohs, it means seeking land in you. Professor David A. Zare. The saga sources tell us about Scandinavians settling Iceland partially as a response to the state formation that's going on in Norway as Harold fair hair is uniting that country and taking away free former rights.

As Iceland is discovered, this information about a vast unsettled landscape with wide open pasture origin, forests and stretch from the sea to the mountains as spreading across the Viking world.

“Floki is by no means the first to voyage to Iceland. A Greek explorer, Pythias, putting out from Masalia, Montnabase, had sailed its waters as long ago as 325 BC.”

Pythias had been mesmerized by the phenomenon of the midnight sun, and then there are those monks again, those papar. According to a later chronicle, Ari the Wise, a monastic retreat, long since abandoned, was established on Iceland as early as 770, a whole century before the Viking arrivals. The textual sources mention papar, but the texts say that the monks, the Irish monks, quickly left. There's an island called Papay from the name that the Norse used for the monks, but people have not been able to find anything that is convincing archaeological evidence of their presence.

“I mean, we have to admit they have a kind of self-limiting population strategy. They are a group of single men living in isolation. So they were never going to be permanent settlers.”

In the mid-9th century, an Norwegian called Nadothor, had overshoped the pharaohs and detailed as snowy landscape rising on the horizon. It's discovered in the way that most of the islands are discovered. Someone's blown off course. In fact, we can think of the island hopping of the Vikings as having kind of three phases as they move across the North Atlantic.

That is, there's a phase of discovery, usually accidental. Then there is a phase of exploration, and then the third phase is this permanent settlement.

Nadothor's claims are influential on a Swedish marina who goes on to circumnavigate Iceland, confirming it to be an island. His name is Garther Swaversner. He's got a pretty high opinion of itself, so he calls the island Garther's island, but doesn't settle permanently. The third attempted exploration, that's by a character named Raven Floki. And as we know from our opening scene, Raven Floki's attempt to set up shop is short-lived. In Iceland, with several followers and animals to try out this permanent settlement, and he sets into broad-feared brave if you're a western Iceland. The summer is pretty good, so he's not so worried.

The winter sets in the animal's start-to-start, and this is part of the story of dealing with Iceland. It might look okay in the beginning, but then it gets rough. Icelanders have this expression, it's called glucovether, window weather. So when you're sitting in your house, you look at the window, it looks pretty nice, and then you go outside and you realize how miserable it is. Even with its existence established, for Scandinavian navigators, out in the open sea with no coastline to follow, locating Iceland is still a shot in the dark.

When they left Bergen to head toward Iceland, you took a certain wind, and when you got close to Iceland, you began to be aware of birds which would come down from the north. So they were masters at looking at the signs, following the waves, the winds, the birds, the animals.

And so they were then able to follow this latitude line, and mostly that's what they did. They were sailing westward, or eastward, and then they were interrupted by storms, of course, and many, many stories about those were created.

“Like Floki, some prefer their own methods. An Norwegian seaman called Ingol for Arnoldson puts out from Ireland in a ship laden with Celtic slaves. On sighting Iceland in the distance, he simply throws two pieces of timber over board.”

The twin pillars of his high-cheaped and seed, wherever they pitch up he says, he's going to make landfall. The current carries the word to a western cove, but the steam from hot gaysers rises in the background. Arnoldson calls it Smokey Bay in Old Norse, a rake of it. And it is here, in 874, just six years after Floki's aborted mission, during the first flush of Harold Fairhares rule, that Arnoldson will establish Iceland's first permanent settlement.

In truth, his crest is less to do with dissension than refuge. He is an outlaw, wanted for murder back in Norway.

“It is clearly in the blood. On landing, there is soon conflict with some of the Celtic slaves who rise up to kill members of Arnoldson's party, including his own brother.”

The slaves will feet the offshore Westman Islands as they are known today, Westman meaning Celt. Arnoldson will track them down and exact his bloody revenge, but in the new wild west, anything goes.

Arnoldson has far the starting gun, and the word "viking" with its piraticular associations will soon fade when it comes to Scandinavian forays into the North Atlantic.

“Instead, Arnoldson will be the first of what will become known as the Lan-Nansmen, the Lan-Grabbers.”

Iceland is an Elderado, a place for pioneers, opportunists, and renegade. The Lan-Grabbers, the Lan-Nans, is on. This April, on the Neuser Podcast Network, Real Vikings continues as the Norsemen journey through the Med over to Ireland and across to North America. On short history of, we witnessed the U.S. Civil War and follow the remarkable life of Bob Dylan.

On real survival stories, when marooned in the Indian Ocean, in a survival story, truly for the ages.

And in Sherlock Holmes' short stories, an Australian expat is found dead near a body of water and his son is in the frame, in the Boscom Valley mystery. With all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Neuser Plus. And if you haven't already, get your hands in a copy of Neuser's book, a short history of ancient Rome. Available in all good bookshops and wherever you get your audiobooks. Floki, it turns out, has been way too dismissive of this Iceland. The sub-Arctic Iceland of the late 9th century turns out to be temperate, with a pleasant summer climate.

An unlike today its rich and vegetation. Between the Bogs and Wetlands, its landmass is covered by up to 40% with forest, with bantiful pasture to boot. And no mosquitoes. The Volcanoes and lava flows do land a certain end of days feel, evoking visions of a ragnarok, the Viking Armageddon. But Iceland's hot springs and geothermal heat can ease the torment of winter. It has one deficiency. The sulfurous soil does not support the growing of cereal crops. The colony is dependent on imported grain. But as the sea roots become well established, Iceland can be well supplied. The 600 mile root from Norway, via Shetland and the Faros, can be sailed in 7 to 10 days.

Sea fares can be guided now by an established nautical landmark. The 7,000 foot dome of the Vatnear Cooge glacier.

As well as plentiful sea birds for the eating particularly puffin.

“Compared to the Norse people still in Norway, this is a new area of economic activity.”

What is a little surprising when you think about the Norse economy is that it doesn't seem to be much of attempt to utilize seals, which are very plentiful in that area. And it seems like the Norse had this preoccupation being economy on land and sheep and goats and cattle and horses and so forth. Within 50 years, Iceland's population swells from just a few hundred to around 60,000, around 3 to 4,000 families, including a substantial contingent of Celtic stock, just like those that aren't also brought with them. Slaves or throus.

“Modern DNA research has to an extent confirm the stories that we have from the sagas in that a mixed population of Scandinavians and peoples from the British Isles were part of the settler population to Iceland.”

On the wide chromosome sides, so with the males, about 75 to 80 percent of the wide chromosome haplogroups in Iceland are comparable to Scandinavians.

And leaves 20 percent circa as non- Scandinavian probably from the British Isles. On the mitochondrial DNA side, so the mitochondrial transfers from the mother to the daughter, a surprise here is that only about 40 percent of the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups are comparable to Scandinavian haplogroups. So you have more than 50 percent of the women coming from the British Isles.

All genetic indications are that this is a mixed population with more Celtic females than we at first believed.

It accounts for an untypically nose showing in the modern Icelandic population of dark eyes and hair. One of the big surprises was that the rats in Iceland are all British rats from the DNA they came in the British ships. Iceland's location, it's isolation from the Norse mainstream, puts it in a unique position for today's historians, making for almost a time capsule of Viking life. For archaeologists, layers of ash from volcanoes over the centuries, such as the one whose plume drifted over Europe in 871, have provided useful markers in terms of dating different phases of Norse settlement, as well as preserving all manner of artifacts.

In Iceland, tales of trolls and elves live on. Even the Icelandic language has developed in a relative vacuum, more akin to old Norse than modern Norwegian Danish or Swedish. So, one of the more recent areas of academic research has been the question of mutual intelligibility between old Norse and old English. And particularly the Icelandic sagas claim that the language in England at the time was the same as they spoke in Iceland. One sagag in particular, the sagag of a good-looking serpent tongue tells us that the language changed when William the bastard took the throne, and then the English started speaking French.

The old Norse-patronomic naming system remains in place in Iceland to this day. A son of a man named Magnus, for example, will assume the surname Magnusum, the daughter taking Magnus daughter.

“And then there is Iceland's literary tradition, walking back to its writers and travelling poets or skulls. Their prowess as raccoon tours made them famous throughout the Norse realms, an essential addition to every royal court.”

Due to its Celtic connections and later willingness to embrace literacy, Iceland has become an important repository of record for early Viking history. Either through its sagas, its poetic edder, or especially its land-nammer-box, the book of settlements, the most comprehensive recorded work on the earlier rivals in Iceland. Dr. Eleanor Baraclav. The old Norse-patronomic sagas are a really interesting but tricky source. They're tricky because although they have long oral tales that stretch back into the Viking age itself, they are written down in manuscripts from around the 13th century onwards.

Many of them are being told round the winter fires, you know, on those farmsteads, juniors, long, dark Icelandic winters, and so things crop up in them that we really wouldn't expect to see in a historical source.

“And they really do inhabit that hazy borderline between what we would think was fact, what we would think of as fiction.”

Just when you think you have a handle on what's going on, suddenly a dragon pops up and you're just not quite sure where you are with that.

What the sources do agree upon is that for the early pioneers, life in Iceland is hard, rudimentary. Houses are built from cut-earth with sod roofs over timber frames, animals through the winter to avoid the fate that the fell flukees cattle must be brought indoors at night time, sharing the same cramped accommodation. The diet is limited with few vegetables and almost no fruit, just what you can gather by way of berries. With farmsteads miles from each other and no village life are which to speak, it is a struggle for survival in isolation, humans against nature.

And as ever, it is the women who are the backbone of the communities. In a new land with no official coinage, they find themselves inadvertently the creators of wealth. We often find evidence for women. And the archaeological remains of textile rooms on the farmsteads where the women would have woven the wool from the goats from the sheep that they would have turned into cloth. That becomes an actual form of currency in medieval Iceland.

“You take away the women, you take away their weaving, you take away their incredibly intricate, important technologically advanced cloth.”

Well, then you take away the sales of the Viking ships. You take away their clothes, you end up with some naked men sitting in a ruined boat. That was very different from the European pattern of the male dominance society.

So there was this rather interesting evolution of the big powerful men, but also the big powerful women, you know, who were maintaining the settlements, keeping the economy going,

while people were either Viking expeditions or scurring lands. It is in Iceland, as recorded in the land number box, that we meet one of the most remarkable people of the Norse Age of Discovery, one of its famous misfits. Ord, the deep minded. Ord is the widow of Olaf the White.

“In the late 9th century, Olaf had coooled Dublin with Eva the boneless, one of the sons of Ragnar Lothbrock.”

As the story goes, in the late 800s, on the run in northern Scotland, her family in danger, or decides to strike out for Iceland's brave new world.

She was a very powerful woman in her own right and ends up leading an expedition.

She builds a knor secretly in the woods, and nobody will know what she's up to. And she gets her supporters, animals, everyone else including a grandson, and they moved to Iceland as a unit. So she's the leader of this group of settlers. On a acquiring land in the western region of Tala Sistra, she proceeds to divide it up equally between her party, freeing her slaves into the bargain. Ord, the Norse world's first female chieftain, will on her death be accorded a full Viking ship burial, the first known woman to be honoured in that way.

But it has a racked of land distribution that sets something for pattern for Iceland settlers. There is no concept of a unified nation yet. Iceland is still a collective of homesteaders, notionally Norwegian subjects, but to its people. This is no longer a land governed by decadent old world rule, and monarchical hierarchies. It is egalitarian, proto-republican.

Iceland comes to represent not just a land of opportunity, but a land of the free, and one that must be governed by a common law. It is the present day, where I am recgiving, in a modest stone to story 19th century building. The unassuming structure is the seat of the Icelandic government, the old thing, Icelandic for general meeting.

If it all seems fairly unremarkable, it's because Iceland gets on with life without much of a fuss, pursuing its own independent line.

“It is a tradition of collective problem solving that goes back 1,100 years.”

Founded in 930, the old thing holds a unique distinction. It is the oldest democratic parliament in the world. The sight of the old thing has moved since it was founded.

It began 30 miles away, in the spectacular valley of Thinkvetlia, or assembly fields, right on the continental divide, with a tectonic plait of Europe meets Bat of North America.

Here, the great log bag, or law lock, looms high over the Ax River, so-called because sessions commence with an axe being tossed into the water.

“At this geological crossroads, a democratic medieval polity is being borne.”

For two weeks every June, Freeman from all over Iceland will descend to discuss issues of a farming, lad, sheep grazing, and given airing to disputes and squabbles. It is decided over by a law speaker, a log suremage, who rings the bow, and sits alongside his castle, to pass judgment according to principles governing property and ownership. They are known as the grey goose laws, so-called because of the quill that was used to pen them. Iceland's territories divided up into four quarters, or farthings, each with its own regional assembly, or thing.

“Within each quarter a local representative's known as Goddard, a word derived from pagan priest or godman, who can act as deputies for the local farmsteaders.”

The receiving a system of hooray poor, an embryonic social services, a means of welfare for the hardhead. Professor Stefan Brink. Iceland was a unique political construction, a real, with no king, the major thing assembly was the al-thinge, a thingwetler, where a man assembled once a year at mid-summer. So it was a beautiful kind of picture organization of a hierarchy, with the al-thinge at the top, and then we had the quarters with their thing, and the gold over with their thing. This was a remarkable contribution to the history of Western civilization.

They established the first parliament ever in Europe, and it lasted for a thousand years.

And if it all sounds too good to be true, way too utopian certainly for the early medieval world, then it probably is. Because Iceland is about to have all those old world problems rebound upon it. Floki does return to Iceland a few years later, by the way. He sails back and settles in the island's north, on the scare of your fair field. But even by then, he will have noticed that Iceland is beginning to change, its opportunities becoming increasingly limited. The once abundant farmable land is now a scarce resource. New arrivals are left to scramble in the rocks for any ground vaguely worthy of tender.

And the remarkable thing is that once Iceland was discovered around 870, it filled up immediately within 100 years, there were no new lands, no lands available for new settlers. The old thing is fast becoming an arbiter for old turf wars, disputes over land that be deviled coastal Norway, and now being replayed on this rocky refuge in the north Atlantic. Iceland is a victim of its own success, and there are those Norwegian royals again, covetous of Iceland's riches, eager to unfold this heathen outpost into the bosom of Christendom.

An entirely different system of government evolved there in a remarkable way because of the independence of the people who arrived there, and were biting desperately to keep the kings from asserting control over their lives, and ultimately not too successful in the end. In 1262, rule will revert to the Norwegian crown, the old thing's full legislative power won't be restored until 1904.

Or the deep minded was herself said to be a convert, though the extent of a faith has possibly been exaggerated in retrospect, as Norse history was refashioned, viewed through a Christian lands.

It was not until the 980s that the new religion began to make serious inroads. Till then Icelanders had traditionally given missionary short tripped. They had viewed the monks and their wares as somehow soft, unmanly, incompatible with Norse warrior ethos.

“Iceland sees conversion attempts by missionaries, most of which the saga records tell us were rebuffed, sometimes quite brutally culminating in the murders of these evangelizing missionaries.”

It will take 70 years from the all things inception for the speaker to pronounce Iceland an officially Christian nation.

Significantly, this happens in the year 1000, prompted in part by a millennial fatalism, a sense of the world is about to end.

This mood is boosted by the vast changes in Iceland's ecology that are taking place, the depletion of natural resources, the old gods not providing as they used to. When Ingle for Arnelson had founded Reykjavik, Iceland's only native land mammal was the Arctic fox. Now, the introduction of cattle, sheep, goats, horses and deer is rapidly destroying the grassland.

“The reliance on dairy farming has taken its toll. Workable land initially three quarters of the island is fast on trap to becoming just the fifth that remains today.”

At sea, meanwhile, local warriors were their prized tasks have been hunted to extinction, the cod and salmon are being overfished.

Most significantly, the forests, once so plentiful, are chopped down to such an extent that Iceland's soil becomes eroded. It is fast on the road to becoming barren, devoid of trees all together, just as it exists today, the main source of timber now driftwood. It only increases the tensions as neighbour begins to turn upon neighbour. In 982, a tall, urban haired Norwegian will emerge from the far north-western settlement of Honstrandish. He had been brought to Iceland as a child by his father, who like Ingle for Arnelson before him had been exiled from Norway for manslaughter.

H32, along with his wife and four children, the man relocates to a farm in Herkha delu, for the south, a valley full of steaming, thermal pools and spectacular spurting gases. Just like his father, he is soon heading for trouble. When the man's thrills cause a landslide, damaging a neighbour's property, a dispute breaks out. It involves the neighbour that delightfully named Aioff the foul, killing the offending thrills, and the man taking brutal retaliation. Moving again, he is soon in dispute with an old friend, an argument breaks out over the ownership of a cow and some wooden boards that it'd be used in construction of a new longhouse.

“Forgoing the niceties of the grey goose laws, the man settles matters in the only way he knows how, killing his old pal, and his sons.”

This time he is home before the Brader Field thing. The grey goose has rules that regulate the Icelandic society. For example, how to deal with feuds, if you kill someone, the law states that you should publically acknowledge shortly after the act was done. This was considered a vague manslaughter, and that was solved by arbitration and settlement, and a compensation was to be paid. A concealed killing, or one which was not publicly announced, was considered a more of the murder.

He lost his property, and it was outlawed for three years from Iceland.

“Condemned, an unable to return to Norway either, it will force this man onto the high seas.”

According to the land number box, his name is Eric Torfelser, who he is better known to all as Eric the Red.

We will come to his adventures in a future episode.

“For it is Eric the Red, who is about to write a brand new chapter in the Viking Age of Discovery.”

In the next episode, Bjorn onside leads a Viking fleet into the Mediterranean, intent on sacking Rome.

Eastern Vikings, meanwhile, mount an audacious attack on Constantinople.

“The Byzantine Emperor establishes a Varangian god made up of elite Norse warriors.”

From Spain to Persia, the legend of the Vikings is spreading. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Reel Vikings right now, without waiting and without ads, by joining Noiser Plus. Click the banner at the top of the feed or head to Noiser.com/subscriptions to find out more. The Royal G.S. Podcast with Martina Yara and Nikita Farnois.

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