This is 87 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.
Advocacy and arbitration tended to cool hotheadedness by taking the conduct of a quarrel out of the hands of the original, perhaps more emotionally engaged, rivals and entrusting decisions to third parties. That is what eventually happens in Hallfred’s case. Hallfred’s brother is attacked at the thing and killed by the brother of the woman Hallfred seduced. When the killer is allowed to get away, Hallfred doubts the commitment of his advocate Thorkel and instead challenges the husband to a duel (hólmganga). Reason prevails, and in the end Hallfred withdraws his challenge to the duel, and the husband agrees to let Thorkel resume arbitration. Thorkel pronounces that the killings of Einar, the husband’s kinsman, and Galti, Hallfred’s brother, cancel each other out, with the provision that Hallfred’s visit with the wife made up for any difference that might have existed between the two fallen men. For the scurrilous verses he had composed about the husband, Hallfred has to pay one article of value. When Hallfred shows reluctance to do so, Thorkel chides him; Hallfred then gives the husband an arm-ring of great value.
Perhaps because of its efficacy, advocacy became the accepted procedure for guiding conflict and violence into legal channels – into the courts or private arbitration. This development, which influenced the alignments of the political networks between leaders and the social networks between leaders and followers, was determined largely by the status of the free farmers. As the ones who would suffer most if a case came to violence, Icelandic bœndr could demand that their chieftains show restraint, even during feuds. Thingmen were not beholden to their leaders by oaths of unswerving loyalty. Thingmen were mostly landowners and householders whose interests were better served by compromise solutions than by pitched battles. Advocacy, brokerage and arbitration facilitated problem-solving by compromise rather than by military victory.
— Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland
