From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: Residence in local branches
Date: 21 Jul 92 05:38:24 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca
Organization: SCA

Unto the good gentles of the Rialto does Hossein Ali Qomi send greetings and
prayers for the blessings of Allah.

Brynjolfr Myrkjartanarson recently posted in reply to a portion of my
posting on overlordship and liegancy:

>Uh uh. Iceland was the *first* of the Scandinavian nations to convert
>permanently to Christianity. (Technically, Norway was the first, in c. 995,
>but after the King who converted them died, they reverted...)
>
>They weren't fleeing Christianity. They were fleeing King Harald Finehair,
>the first King to unite Norway. While doing so, he made a number of
>enemies, and generally wiped them out. Most of the survivors left
>(surprisingly enough :-) and many of them went to Iceland. At this point,
>the majority of the Icelanders as well as Harald were all pagan.
>Christianity was *not* an issue.
>
>Many of the Vikings who lost in various wars over the next few years went
>to Iceland. Before c. 930, Iceland was *extremely* attractive to
>ex-Vikings, as it had literally no legal system... and even after that,
>until the 13th century, long after the Viking era was over, it had no King
>to make life difficult for people who like many Vikings had troubles with
>Kings...

You are entirely right that the first settlers were fleeing Harald Finehair.
However, I was not speaking of the first wave of emigration, but of the
pattern of emigration taken as a whole.  Examination of the limited parish
records extant in Norway and Sweden suggest that whole families fled to
avoid penalties for apostacy from Christianity to paganism (frequently in
the form of notations of parallel ancestoral lines, usually indentifying
the emigrants as apostates).  Furthermore, the wars to which you allude
and which accounted for the ensuing waves of emigration were largely over
royal attempts to impose Christianity and forms of political organization
which went with it.  The absence of a legal system was extremely attractive
in light of the Scandanavian legal system being used to persecute apostates.
The best evidence suggests that, while Iceland was "officially" Christian
quite early, the actual process of conversion wasn't anything like complete
until late in the thirteenth century. And there's a lengthy correspondence
between the church in Iceland and the papacy which strongly supports this
contention.

My point wasn't that a lot of Norsemen didn't think Harald Finehair was a
_bitka sonnr_, but that the use of the term "overlord" was duplicitous in
sense.  In the case of Iceland it was used to mean any oppressive political
leader.  In the remainder of the original posting to which I was responding
it was used in its technical, feudal sense.  I was pointing out that
feudalism didn't exist in Scandanavia at the time, and that the poster's
argument depended on the duplicity of sense.

I stand by my original assertion.  It is based on the weight of evidence and
deals with the central tendency of the emigration (like all analyses from
central tendency it is subject to counterexample, because most distributions
have outliers -- but if this were pernicious, statistical analysis wouldn't
be possible).

Best Wishes,

Hossein/Greg