This is 85 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.
Seeking an advocate was a basic step in building the partisan support required for success at the assemblies. People often turned first to kinsmen, as Hallfred did, since kinship was a basic field of relationship that provided a claim to potential supporters. Shared blood, however, beyond providing an entry to ask for assistance was no guarantee that support would be forthcoming. If only partly reliable during feud, kinship relationships did have more dependable features throughout the Free State: cognatic kinship ties (placing nearly equal value on both the mother’s and the father’s families) remained important in determining inheritance rights and deciding who should take the responsibility for seeking vengeance. Like the goði-thingman relationship, kinship ties were often augmented by extralegal arrangements, for once a right or a duty had been ascertained, a farmer or a chieftain might need help in validating his claim or carrying out his responsibility. In the absence of court-appointed officials to warrant that justice be done, who was to supply the assistance? Private advocates filled the void by undertaking specific aggressive or defensive action. These voluntary relationships, whether entered into with an individual’s regular chieftain or with another leader, supplied the support required to achieve a sense of security. A large part of saga narrative is devoted to descriptions of people seeking advocates. Individuals are routinely shown protecting their rights through specific advocacy agreements, rather than simply relying on the goði-thingman bond or on kinship.
Third-party advocacy relationships complemented rather than supplanted goði-thingman alliances and kinship ties. Informal, voluntary, and sometimes covert, the different advocacy roles provided a framework within which individuals could manipulate political forces at different stages of a dispute. Icelandic feuds tended to survive many attempts at resolution. Settlements, both those that were final and those that were temporary, were frequently arrived at through arbitration.[i]
[i] On arbitration see Heusler 1911: esp. 40-41, 73-95; and Heusler 1912: 43-58; Lúðvík Ingvarsson 1970: 319-80; Miller 1984; Byock 1982: 102-6, 260-65.
— Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland
