seemed to her a reasonable thing to do—we need to know first how and why her ancestors left their own homes in the late 800s and created a new society in Iceland. Some of the answers were here, on the Hebrides and across the rough waters of the Minch on mainland Scotland. According to the sagas, Unn the Deep-Minded—a Norse chieftain’s daughter, and the discarded second wife of Olaf the White, king of Dublin—set sail for Iceland from one of these coves. Gudrid would have known the story of Unn the Deep-Minded as thoroughly as her own genealogy, for in Unn’s ship, fleeing from Scotland, was a Gaelic boy, Vifil, who was Gudrid’s grandfather. All her life, she would have kept Unn in mind as an example, a paragon of women.
To the Vikings, the Hebrides were the
Hafborðey
, the “Islands on the Edge of the Sea,” or they were the Southern Isles, being south of Shetland and the Orkneys on the direct sea route from Norway to Ireland. That voyage took about a month, with an island rest-stop each evening. Well before 841, when the Norse established a trading post at Dublin, the route had become routine, and the havens along the way were in friendly hands, known by Norse names. No one knows if the first Norse settlers married into native families, or found no one there, or drove them out: The Viking homesites that have been excavated in this part of the world show signs of all three approaches. In Orkney, archaeologists found a Viking building that had been erected on top of an earlier Gaelic house, but the artifacts inside—particularly a distinctive style of bone dress pin—remained Gaelic. In Caithness, on the Scottish mainland, there is no sign of any settlement for a century before the Vikings came. But in Uist, everything Gaelic was destroyed when the Norse arrived—evidence, said the archaeologists, “as conclusively in favor of conquest as we are ever likely to get.”
Anthropologist Agnar Helgason, on the other hand, finds “conquest” more likely closer to Norway—in Orkney—than as far south as Uist. Agnar, whom I met at DeCode Genetics in Reykjavik, compared the genes of modern people living in Scandinavia and the British Isles with those from the Shetlands, Orkneys, Hebrides, and Iceland. He found DNA markers, harmless mutations, that labeled a person “Norse” or “Gaelic.” Tracking these markers in the mitochondrial DNA (passed down from mother to daughter) and in the Y chromosome (father to son), he could tell from which side, sword or distaff, the mutations had come. Men and women in the Orkney Islands, he found, are 30 percent Norse. In the Hebrides, the men are 22 percent Norse, but the women are only 11 percent Norse. The Orkney Islands, Agnar concludes, were settled by Viking families. In the Southern Isles, Viking men at loose ends took Gaelic mates.
Whether or not the women were willing, the genes
cannot
say, but once the Vikings were in the islands, we can assume they acted as they had in Norway. They were loyal to their king and considered anything in another kingdom fair game. Given that the coast of Norway alone had seven or eight “kingdoms” in the 700s, that made for some fairly loose rules.
Strandhögg
—literally “beach strike”—was a common practice: A party of Norsemen would row over to the next fjord, run their lapstrake boats up onto the beach, round up the cattle, slaughter them, load the boat, and row home. As historian Gwyn Jones puts it in his classic
History of the Vikings,
“Robbing your richer neighbors was a simple way of redressing the injustices of nature.”
Sometimes these raids had aims other than cattle. Jones tells the story of Gudrod the Hunting King, who took a fancy to Asa, the daughter of another king in Norway. When his suit was refused, Gudrod gathered his men, descended on the kingdom, killed Asa’s father and brother, and “carried her off with much booty.” He then made her his queen. When their son was a year old, Queen Asa took her
To the Vikings, the Hebrides were the
Hafborðey
, the “Islands on the Edge of the Sea,” or they were the Southern Isles, being south of Shetland and the Orkneys on the direct sea route from Norway to Ireland. That voyage took about a month, with an island rest-stop each evening. Well before 841, when the Norse established a trading post at Dublin, the route had become routine, and the havens along the way were in friendly hands, known by Norse names. No one knows if the first Norse settlers married into native families, or found no one there, or drove them out: The Viking homesites that have been excavated in this part of the world show signs of all three approaches. In Orkney, archaeologists found a Viking building that had been erected on top of an earlier Gaelic house, but the artifacts inside—particularly a distinctive style of bone dress pin—remained Gaelic. In Caithness, on the Scottish mainland, there is no sign of any settlement for a century before the Vikings came. But in Uist, everything Gaelic was destroyed when the Norse arrived—evidence, said the archaeologists, “as conclusively in favor of conquest as we are ever likely to get.”
Anthropologist Agnar Helgason, on the other hand, finds “conquest” more likely closer to Norway—in Orkney—than as far south as Uist. Agnar, whom I met at DeCode Genetics in Reykjavik, compared the genes of modern people living in Scandinavia and the British Isles with those from the Shetlands, Orkneys, Hebrides, and Iceland. He found DNA markers, harmless mutations, that labeled a person “Norse” or “Gaelic.” Tracking these markers in the mitochondrial DNA (passed down from mother to daughter) and in the Y chromosome (father to son), he could tell from which side, sword or distaff, the mutations had come. Men and women in the Orkney Islands, he found, are 30 percent Norse. In the Hebrides, the men are 22 percent Norse, but the women are only 11 percent Norse. The Orkney Islands, Agnar concludes, were settled by Viking families. In the Southern Isles, Viking men at loose ends took Gaelic mates.
Whether or not the women were willing, the genes
cannot
say, but once the Vikings were in the islands, we can assume they acted as they had in Norway. They were loyal to their king and considered anything in another kingdom fair game. Given that the coast of Norway alone had seven or eight “kingdoms” in the 700s, that made for some fairly loose rules.
Strandhögg
—literally “beach strike”—was a common practice: A party of Norsemen would row over to the next fjord, run their lapstrake boats up onto the beach, round up the cattle, slaughter them, load the boat, and row home. As historian Gwyn Jones puts it in his classic
History of the Vikings,
“Robbing your richer neighbors was a simple way of redressing the injustices of nature.”
Sometimes these raids had aims other than cattle. Jones tells the story of Gudrod the Hunting King, who took a fancy to Asa, the daughter of another king in Norway. When his suit was refused, Gudrod gathered his men, descended on the kingdom, killed Asa’s father and brother, and “carried her off with much booty.” He then made her his queen. When their son was a year old, Queen Asa took her
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