7 Were the Vikings Really Green? Environmental Degradation and Social Inequality in Iceland's Second Nature Landscape

Abstract

Iceland was settled by the Norse ca. 870 CE. Within the next few centuries, 40% of Iceland's soil cover was lost to deforestation and erosion. By the late medieval period, the social landscape had also changed from a population of nominally equal landowning households to one comprised mostly of tenant farmers subject to a small class of elite landlords. Interpretations of the changing landscape have described the Norse as unaware of the environmental consequences of their agricultural practices, or as thoughtfully responsive to degrading conditions. Using estimates of the available biomass in different regions and measurements of changing soil depth in lowland Langholt, Skagafjörður, we suggest that what appears to modern researchers as catastrophic environmental devastation was in part an agricultural benefit, at least to some people. While some farmers did well, others were forced to leave failing land and enter service or tenancy. At the same time, agricultural strategies focused on transhumant pastoralism and production of grass fodder created distinct changes to the landscape that reinforced the emerging social hierarchy until it came to seem natural and inevitable. We imagine the earliest Icelanders not as violent raiders of the landscape, nor as sensitive custodians of a changing environment, but as intelligent farmers and politicians who mobilized the transformed landscape into a political economy that would keep their farms productive and their descendants in power for a millennium.