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.
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