Using sagas and other sources to assess political change. Iceland was colonised from scratch in the Viking Age and eventually emerges as a fairly conventional-looking western European society by the fifteenth century, although always remaining a relatively poor community of pastoral farmers. The sources for its medieval history are, however, anything but conventional. Sagas form a large and interesting corpus of information which we have to make use of for the period of Iceland's history before 1300, providing significant challenges to historians for various reasons. I will offer my view on how we can assess the power of Iceland's 'chieftains' in the period before Icelandic leaders formally submitted to the Norwegian king in the 1260s, considering the sagas but in the light of other forms of evidence such as archaeology and more conventional documents.
Chris has been Lecturer in Medieval History at University of Birmingham since 2005 and his research interests lie in the Middle Ages with particular specialisms in Iceland and the Vikings. Prior to 2005 Chris held temporary posts in the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at Birmingham including the Ironbridge Institute, Birkbeck College and UCL.
