Trees, Woodlands, and Forests in Old Norse-Icelandic Culture

INTRODUCTION

We live in an unprecedented era of climate change, mass wildlife extinction and large-scale deforestation. On an existential, practical, and ethical level, this is the great contemporary challenge of our time. When the future feels so uncertain and the present so critical, one may well question the value of studying the past. Yet these global changes, by their very nature, cannot be understood in an ahistorical vacuum. In taking a deeper chronological view, it is possible to shed light on how past human cultures have impacted on the physical world around them and responded to these changes both practically and psychologically. By interrogating the past, we can better understand our current circumstances, and in doing so perhaps provide both hope and forewarning for the future.

Medieval Iceland offers a unique perspective in this respect, since it was—to all intents and purposes—uninhabited before the ninth-century landnám ("settlement," lit. "land-taking") by settlers predominantly from Norway and the British Isles. Such unusual circumstances invite a number of important questions: How did the first generations of Icelanders respond to their physical surroundings? How did they shape and alter the world around them? How was their own view of the world affected in return? The following analysis seeks to address these questions through a particular case study: the representation of trees and woodlands in the Old Norse-Icelandic textual tradition, and the Íslendingasögur ("Sagas of Icelanders") in particular. Through it, I aim to explore how medieval Icelanders thought about and engaged with the physical environment around them, as well as the broader nonhuman natural world beyond their homeland. At the heart of the discussion is the nature of the connections between geographical space—both real and imagined—and the way humans think about the world they inhabit, their place within it, their present and their past. Beyond the medieval Icelandic context, the analysis has broader implications for our understanding of how historical cultures have engaged with threshold or marginal geographical spaces, particularly those undergoing modification as a result of human activity.

Trees and woodlands offer a particularly suitable focus for such a case study, not only because they were so fundamental to the functioning of medieval Norse societies (e.g., for heating, charcoal production, ship construction, building materials, tools, storage containers, pannage, food) but also because of the long-held view that Iceland was deforested extensively in the first few decades of settlement. This picture is now undergoing scientific and archaeological modification, as will be discussed below. Nevertheless, the question of how a culture continued to think about trees even as woodland resources diminished remains significant. In the following, I seek to demonstrate that attitudes towards wood, woodlands, and wooden products in the Íslendingasögur reflect to a large extent the reality of resource availability and use in medieval Iceland, with recent developments in archaeology illuminating the sagas' testimonies in new and important ways. In the case of these texts, the key consideration will be "land—its quality, organization, and management," for, as a recent study by Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir and others notes, this is "an aspect of society-environment relationships that has received little attention until recently in studies of landnám."¹ By juxtaposing archaeological and/or scientific evidence for tree presence and woodland resources in medieval Iceland with the way in which the sagas depict this aspect of the physical world, it is possible to see a remarkable degree of concord between the two very different data sets.

In Old Norse texts, more than one word was used to describe areas of land covered in trees, particularly skógr, viðr, and mǫrk. As might be expected, all had their nuances and cultural connotations, but it is important not to translate them in a way that means they take on additional layers of meaning and interpretation that did not exist originally. Skógr seems to be the word most frequently employed, and I have translated this as "woodland" or "a wood," which is also the primary translation in Cleasby-Vigfússon.² Elsewhere, and deriving ultimately...