This is 82 of our ongoing series about Viking Age Iceland. For centuries, this island country, unique in Medieval Europe, operated with no king, no great lords, no foreign policy, and no defense forces but which developed legal and judicial systems to limit the violence of bloodfeud and protect the rights of freemen. Far out in the North Atlantic, Iceland was where the famous sagas developed. To explore Iceland’s place in the medieval world, we present selections from Jesse Byock’s Viking Age Iceland that investigate the history, archaeology, culture, systems of feud, and sagas of this magical place.
All societies have authority structures and values concerning the allocation of authority. In stateless societies, the proper unit for the analysis of such phenomena is not the total society, where we are likely to mistake lack of a central political hierarchy for egalitarianism, but the maximal decision-making unit (or some cohesive subgrouping within it).
Robert A. LeVine, The Internalization of Political Values in Stateless Societies
In Iceland, where no such need of defence existed, where there was no foreign enemy, and men lived scattered in tiny groups round the edges of a vast interior desert, no executive powers were given to anybody, and elaborate precautions were taken to secure the rights of the smaller communities which composed the Republic and of the priest-chieftains who represented them.
James Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence
The medieval Icelanders possessed a well-developed vocabulary for describing social and political stratification. They employed the words and attendant concepts when writing the kings’ sagas about the rulers of Norway and Denmark or when composing saga histories about other Norse lands, such as Orkneyinga saga, an account of the Norse earls of Orkney. But when Icelanders wrote about their own society, whether in sagas, laws or stories, the roles and the vocabulary of statehood seldom appear. This striking contrast is the result of a central development in early Iceland: leadership evolved in such a way that a chieftain’s power and the resources available to him were not derived from an exploitable realm. Territorial lordship, an element of authority which permeated the Western concept of landownership and legal and economic jurisdiction, was largely absent in early Iceland; the lord-peasant relationship, so prevalent elsewhere in the medieval West, barely existed.
In more stratified European societies, religious and military hierarchies provided models for structuring social, legal and political relationships. Iceland developed differently. In place of overlordship, the early Icelanders, with their focus on law, developed their own set of mechanisms for maintaining order. As they modified traditions and customs they had known in their homelands, a new system of law and political behaviour emerged. It compensated for the absence of the executive institutions that accompanied territorial leadership in other Norse lands. This chapter concentrates on the basic relationships that underlay the operation of Iceland’s system of consensual governance. One, the goði-thingman bond, was defined by law. Another, which can best be described by the term “advocacy”, was not legally defined. It found its authority in private contractual agreements whereby one person, not necessarily a chieftain, gave support to another by speaking or acting for him, and so became involved as a third party to a dispute. The usefulness of advocacy was reinforced by the presence of additional extralegal arrangements, such as political friendships and frequent recourse to arbitration.
— Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland
