Then the mighty gods met to give judgement
the holy gods took counsel together:
who had filled the air with evil speech,
offered to a giant the goddess Freyja?— The Völuspá (trans. Terry)
Perhaps the most noted interpreter of Old Norse poetry in 21st-century English letters was Seamus Heaney. Heaney hailed from Northern Ireland and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Throughout the 20th century, Heaney’s work fixated on Scandinavia—prehistoric bog bodies as well as Old Norse alliterative verse. These sources provided symbols, so Heaney could comment upon his own political present, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In “North,” the titular poem of his 1975 collection, Heaney uses a viking longship as an entrance point into a history of infighting and revenge—one reminiscent of that which the Völuspá depicts.
The longship’s swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight—
it said Thor’s hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,the hatreds and behindbacks
of the Althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubated by the spilled blood.— Seamus Heaney, “North”
Most of “North” mimics the quatrain structure of Norse alliterative verse. Icelandic politics and its central body, the Althing, play an outsized role in Heaney’s poetics. He describes the origin of Icelandic settlement in positive terms (“Thor’s hammer swung,/to geography and trade”) before sharply pivoting to a different history, marked by “thick witted couplings and revenges.” The separation between these two registers—lofty and base—is only a comma, implying a natural progression from one to another.
Why is Heaney so eager to point out “the hatreds and behindbacks/of the Althing”? How was Iceland settled, fought over, and lived in? And how can learning the context behind the place where the Völuspá was first written down inform our reading of the text? We’ll begin with a discussion of the settlement of Iceland, before moving into a brief discussion of the Althing. We’ll linger on blood feud as a locus both in Icelandic society and in the Völuspá, before focusing on material sources, and what leisure might have looked like in Viking Age Iceland.
Landnám
For the first half of the 9th century, Iceland was empty. The only inhabitants were a small group of Irish monks, for whom the island’s solitude was the distinct selling point (Byock 11). Jesse Byock, a viking scholar who in 2001 wrote the book on the settlement of Iceland, describes the island as “pristine” and “of striking beauty” when the Icelanders began their landnàm: ‘land- taking,’ a sixty-year settlement (9). In Byock’s book, he emphasizes how the settlers “established a society” out of a political vacuum, created a state from the unformed matter of geography (11). The Völuspá also begins with an unformed world, albeit of different kind:
Nothing was there before time began,
neither sands nor seas nor cooling waves.
Earth was not yet, nor the high heavens,
but a gaping emptiness nowhere green.— The Völuspá (trans. Terry)
The beginning of the Völuspá depicts not a political vacuum, but a literal vacuum, “gaping emptiness.” The world has no edges—“neither sand nor seas”—nothing to visually differentiate one thing from the next, maybe no thing to differentiate at all. But out of this void several individuals create something extraordinary:
Then Bur’s sons lifted up the land
and made Midgard, men’s fair dwelling;
the sun shone out of the south
and bright grass grew from the ground of stone.— The Völuspá (trans. Terry)
The Völuspá depicts an invention of a livable place. In the Norse mythos, “Midgard” is where humans live; the inauguration of humanity is a conscious and collective effort, marked by physical labor (“lifted”) and cooperation between individuals, the formation of groups (“Bur’s sons”). The origin of human life gives way to other kinds of life: “and bright grass grew/from the ground of stone.” Could such a line be a reflection of the origins of agriculture in Iceland, displacing the ice, creating life from a floor of basalt and shanty soil cover (Byock 26)?
Soon, Iceland was well and truly transformed. An island with only two native mammals was overrun with “dogs, cats, pigs, goats, sheep, cattle and horses.” The husbandry of cattle and sheep were the most important (28), though inhabitants also hunted, fished, and gathered (29). Settlers built turf farmhouses (34), largely isolated and rural but self-sustaining (31). At first, Iceland had native birch forests, though they soon became almost extinct, and “good timber had to be imported” (33). From this practical basis, a society was formed; by the mid-9th century, the Icelanders inaugurated their political body, “the Althing” (11).
The Althing
Among of our most important sources for the landnàm are sagas. They were written in Iceland as histories of what we now call the Viking Age and the time soon thereafter (Byock 22). “Medieval Icelanders wrote the sagas about themselves and for themselves,” Byock argues (24). They show us how descendants of the people who settled Iceland saw their ancestors’ project— or how they wanted their ancestors’ project to be seen. In one of these sagas, The Tale of Thorstein Bull’s Leg, we see a glimpse of the Althing’s founding. A character in the sage, Ulfljot, went from Iceland to Norway and there established a legal code:
And when he came back to Iceland, the Althing was established and from that time on all the people of the country were governed by the same law.
— The Tale of Thorstein Bull’s Leg (trans. Clark)
The later Icelanders saw the creation of the Althing as a paradigm shift. Its genesis was sudden, its influence schematic. Immediately afterwards, “all the people of the country” are unified, “governed by the same law.” The focus on law, political structure, is notable, and corresponds neatly with a more formal geographic differentiation of Iceland described later in the same text:
At that time the country was divided into four quarters and there were to be three assemblies in each quarter and three chief temples in each assembly district.
— The Tale of Thorstein Bull’s Leg (trans. Clark)
The island is divided into thirty-six units. The “chief temples” and “assemblies” create gathering places for what is already a relatively small island to have local-scale political relations; these are in turn mirrored by the large scale Althing, where representatives from each quarter can meet and discuss law for the island as a whole. Governance in Iceland thus occurs over both small and large scales, with both an overarching law for the island (Byock 174) and opportunities for individual landholders to have their voices heard (171).
This structure has its counterpart in the beginning of the Völuspá. Soon after “Bur’s sons” create a livable world in the cosmos, there is an assembly of the gods, reminiscent of the Althing:
Then all the gods met to give judgement
the holy gods took council together.— The Völuspá (trans. Terry)
The gods, much like the people of Iceland, “all” met in a central place, “met to give judgement,” to work in a prescribed system of justice. The purpose of the meetings was communicative as well as legal; the gods also sought advice from one another, “took council together.” Finally, the meeting of the gods is “holy,” granting religious heft to political governance in the early Icelandic settlement.
Blood Feud
Political organization is aligned with religion in the Völuspá, but it is also marred by violence. In “North,” Heaney wrote that the violence of the Althing was ancient and long- brewing, “memory incubating the spilled blood.” How did the Icelandic society deal with violence? And how was this violence mirrored by the Völuspá?
Christopher Dunn argues that the theme of conflict is fundamental for the Old Norse lays, writing: “Essentially, the leitmotif of all their songs, though variously developed by the singers, was the human dilemma of divided loyalties” (xxi). Byock defines one more or less formalized way for violence to be expressed: “Icelandic blood feud was a form of vengeance taking. It involved deep, smouldering animosities leading to repeated reprisals” (208). Despite the best efforts towards unity in Iceland, bloodshed seemed inevitable. In the Völuspá, too, the political organization of the gods eventually breaks down:
vows were broken, promises betrayed,
the solemn treaties both sides had sworn— The Völuspá (trans. Terry)
The breaking of “vows” and “treaties” eventually gives way to the chaos of Ragnarök itself: Brothers will die, slain by their brothers,
kinsmen betray (…)
Brothers will die, slain by their brothers,
kinsmen betray their close kin;
[…] until the world goes down.— The Völuspá (trans. Terry)
Relations between symbolic brothers intensify to true familial violence. The mythic proportions of the Völuspá create a progression: the breakdown of political structures (“vows were broken“) gives way to the breakdown of familial structure (“kinsmen betray/their close kin”), which in turn gives way to a breakdown in the functioning of the natural world (“until the world goes down.”) Here, the Völuspá reflects what its scribes found most terrifying. Early Iceland was a harsh, isolated place, and breakdown in the political order was the furthest thing from trivial. It was a matter of life and death, so its consequences were depicted as of cosmic proportion.
Gold and leisure
Patricia Terry writes that those who wrote the Völuspá are distant enough as to seem “unimaginable” (xi). The text’s obscurity and complexity can only augment this difficulty: all we see in the poem are fights with massive serpents, oracles speaking with the weight of prophecy and the pyrotechnic end of the world. What sense is there to make?
In his 1996 introduction to the text of The Elder Edda, Charles Dunn describes the default mode of the Norse gods in the Poetic Edda, and especially in the Völuspá, as “awesome, remote, and serious beings” (xxv). This perspective, while largely true, is not conclusive. At the beginning and end of the Völuspá, before and following the destruction wrought by Ragnarök, we find a glimpse of how the Icelandic elite used leisure to conceptualize the genesis of a society in their poetry.
The Völuspá begins with the origin of the world, and continues with a history of the world’s first conflict. Nested between these events, we have a striking moment breaking from what Hermann Pálsson would term the poem’s “principal mood… of sustained anxiety” (Pálsson 43). We find the gods at peace:
Sitting in meadows, smiling over gameboards,
they never knew any need of gold— The Völuspá (trans. Terry)
The leisure of the gods is conveyed by the image of a “gameboard,” a symbol not necessarily abstract from Icelandic society. The National Museum of Iceland displays a set of small, equal sized stones that were valuable enough to bury with someone, apparently part of a game. To spend time playing—doing nothing productive, only “smiling” and enjoying leisure—one must have time to burn in the first place.
Gaming Pieces from burial at Baldursheimur, Iceland.
Walrus ivory.
(source: Wikimedia)
The gods are playing the role of a high class Scandinavian or Icelander. They have no need to execute the back-breaking labor of finding food; their peace isn’t yet broken by Ragnarök. They are in what Hermann Pálsson would term a “golden age,” perhaps ironic, given that one of the few pieces of information the poem gives us is that the gods do not, and indeed never had, “any need for gold.”
When society is reformed after Ragnarök at the end of Völuspá, the gameboard re-emerges as a symbol, but its relationship with gold has shifted.
Later they will find a wondrous treasure,
gold gameboards lying in the grass
where they had left them so long before.— The Völuspá (trans. Terry)
After the chaos associated with creating a new world order, gameboards are apparently undisturbed: “lying in the grass/where they had left/them so long before.” The apparatus of leisure has remained. But instead of representing the irrelevancy of gold, the gameboards are themselves “golden.”
Gold is an interesting substance with which to consider the Icelandic settlement. It is intrinsically useless, but gains importance as a society is established as a marker of status and wealth. Before the landnám, when Iceland was still a vacuum, gold wouldn’t have had any use. But as Icelandic society was established, gold gained a monetary value (Byock 315) as well as a cultural one; it can be read as a symbol for the rules, excesses, and incurrent beauty that come with settlement and social order.
Written poetry, in an early society, is set down by the rich. Only an elite class can spend valuable time and resources towards fixing a narrative instead of working for subsistence. It makes sense that an elite class might be preoccupied with the symbols of wealth and power. Perhaps the paradigm shift of Ragnarök is comparable to the one that created a livable society on Iceland. Here we might find the Icelandic elite hearkening back to a nostalgic world prior to the landnám, when leisure was free and life was without even the memory of hardship. Either way, we see that the Völuspá was an outlet for later Icelanders to reflect—critically and symbolically—on the history of their people, the origins of their place.
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