He Was By No Means Pleased
With The Country, Influenced, No Doubt, By The Unfavourable Impression He
Had Imbibed By
Spending a long protracted winter on the dreary northern
shore, amid almost ever-during arctic ice, and surrounded by the
Most
unpromising sterility; and though some of his companions represented the
land as pleasing and fertile, the desire of visiting Iceland seems, for
some time, to have lain dormant among the adventurous Norwegian navigators;
probably because neither fame nor riches could be acquired, either by
traffic or depredation, in a country which was utterly destitute of
inhabitants.
At length, in 874, two friends, Ingolf and Lief, repaired to Iceland, and
were so much satisfied with its appearance, that they formed a resolution
of attempting to make a settlement in the country; induced, doubtless, by a
desire to withdraw from the continual wars and revolutions which then
harassed the north of Europe, and to escape from the thraldom which the
incipient monarchies of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, were then imposing
upon the independent chiefs or vikingr of the Normans. In pursuance of this
determination, Ingolf transported some people to Iceland, about the year
878, with several cattle, and all kinds of implements, to enable him to
commence a colony. At this period his friend Lief was absent in the English
wars; but went soon afterwards into Iceland, to which he carried the booty
which he had acquired in England.
The first discoverers of Iceland are said to have found some Irish books,
bells, and croziers on the coast; whence it has been imagined, that some
people from Ireland had resided there previous to its discovery and
settlement by the Normans. But it seems a more probable supposition, to
account for these articles having been seen, that a party of Norman pirates
or vikingr, who had previously landed in Ireland, or perhaps on Icolmkil,
and had carried away the plunder of some abbey or monastery, had been
driven to Iceland by a storm, and wrecked upon the coast, where these
articles might have been washed on shore: Or they may have attributed the
storm, by which they were driven so far beyond their knowledge, to the
anger of the God of the Christians, for their sacrilegious robbery of a
holy institution, and may have left these articles behind, in hopes of
propitiating a more favourable termination to their voyage. The first
settlers found extensive forests in the valleys of Iceland; and we know,
from authentic documents, that corn was formerly cultivated with decent
success in that northern region; whereas, in the present day, not a tree is
to be found in the whole island, except some stunted birches, and very low
bushes or underwood, in the most sheltered situations, and no corn will now
ripen, even in the most favourable years. But the roots and stumps of large
firs are still to be seen in various parts; and the injurious alteration of
its climate is known to have been occasioned by the straits between
old Greenland and Iceland having been many years choked up with ice,
which the short summers of that high latitude are not sufficiently powerful
to dissolve.
About the present period, Harold Harfagr, or the fair-haired, one of the
petty sovereigns or vikingr of Norway, began to subjugate the other
chieftains of the country under his paramount authority, and was so
successful as to establish the Norwegian monarchy in 875. Gorm, likewise,
about the same time, united the petty states of Jutland and the Danish
islands into one kingdom, as Ingiald Illrode had done long before in
Sweden. Such independent spirits as found themselves dissatisfied with this
new order of affairs, found a sure asylum in Iceland; and the emigrations
to this new country became so numerous, that Harold at length deemed it
expedient to impose a tax of half a mark of silver, equal to five pounds of
our modern money, on every one of his subjects who were desirous of going
to settle in that island.
[1] Fragm. Vet. Islandic. ap. Langebeck, II. 31. - Forster, Hist. of Voy.
and Disc. in the North, p. 50.
SECTION II.
Voyages of Ohthere to the White Sea and the Baltic, in the Ninth
Century.[1]
Some of the Norwegian chieftains, who were dissatisfied with the usurpation
of supreme authority by Harold, took refuge in England, where Alfred had
recently settled many of the vanquished Danes and Nordmen in the northern
part of his dominions, which had been almost entirely depopulated and laid
waste, by their long-continued and destructive ravages. Among these was one
Ohthere, who had made himself famous by his voyages to unknown parts of the
north, and who was invited to court by Alfred, to give an account of the
discoveries and observations he had made during his unusual expeditions.
This person had been a chief of some note in his own country, and dwelt at
a place which he called Halgoland, supposed by some to have been in
Numadalen, while others say in Nordland, the most northerly p province of
Norway proper. In the succeeding paragraph, he is said to have dwelt
opposite to the West Sea, and as Alfred only uses the word sea to
denote a confined expanse or narrow channel, while he calls the ocean
Garsecg, it seems highly probable, that, by the West Sea, the west
ford was intended, - a channel or strait which divides the Luffoden
islands from the coast of Nordland, which would clearly place the residence
of Ohthere in this northern province. The account which he gave of his
voyages to his royal patron, is as follows.
Ohthere told his lord King Alfred, that lie lived to the north of all the
Nordmen or Norwegians; and that he dwelt in that land to the northward,
opposite to the west sea; and that all the land to the north of that sea is
waste and uninhabited except in a few places, to which the Finans[2] or
Fins repair in winter for hunting and fowling, and for fishing in the
summer.
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