Dressing the Dead: Gender, Identity, and Adornment in Viking Age Iceland (original) (raw)

Social Structures and Identity in Early Iceland

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2010

Iceland differed from other Norse colonies as it lacked social structures found elsewhere, but also because the Icelanders established their own complex social structures. This article examines aspects of these social structures to determine how they contributed to a new Icelandic identity. The emergence of these social structures may be attributed to factors such as new patterns of social liability that may have developed in response to the unusually scattered population. The settlement pattern may have contributed to the significance of the role of law in early Iceland: a legal framework was required to manage the settlers’ claims and rights to the land. There emerged in Iceland a sense of what defined the settlers, its basis being the law and ‘legal attachment’. The uniqueness of Iceland’s social structures was intertwined with the landnám itself. It was the unsettled land that gave the Icelanders the freedom to create their society.

Ulff-Moller The Origin of the Book of Settlement and Celtic Christianity in IcelandSMSR 2016 2.pdf

Many Icelandic settlers emigrated from the Viking colonies in the British Isles, where they had become acquainted with Christianity in the Celtic or Irish form. The purpose of this paper is first, to observe vestiges of this Christianity, as it appears in the Landnámabók and possibly in archaeology. Second, my aim is to observe the validity of the book as a historical document, by establishing an older core dating to the beginning of the 11th century, to which later compilers added orally transmitted information. About 100 settlers and their immediate descendants were unrelated to other families, which support an earlier date. The lack of internal evidence invalidates the idea that Ari wrote the book in the 12th century,