Into Marginal North Atlantic Environments

Abstract

AbstractIn the North Atlantic islands, the Norse—as the diasporic Viking Age Scandinavians in the North Atlantic are called—encountered no substantial populations and found pristine environments that were unaltered by humans. The motivations for Norse expansion onto the North Atlantic islands were also different from those driving incursions into Europe and the British Isles; raiding and trading were absent, since there were no people there to raid or with which to trade. From the outset, the Norse came to the North Atlantic islands to settle and to farm. These remote and northerly unsettled landscapes imposed constraints on traditional Scandinavian subsistence and political economies, at the same time as they offered immense opportunities. Interacting with the local environment and with one another, the migrants colonizing the North Atlantic islands developed a new culture related to, but distinct from, the society of mainland Scandinavia. This new migrant society is visible above all in Iceland, where textual, archaeological, and scientific sources of information combine to offer a vivid picture of a transplanted Viking society. This chapter focuses on the motivations for migration, the social structure of the settlement, and the adaptation of Viking Age society to the Icelandic environment. In exploring these key issues, the chapter engages the themes of correspondence, complementarity, and contradiction in the available data sets that derive from written sources, archaeology, and the sciences of geology, botany, palynology, and genetics.