Ok er hestrinn kemr fyrir dyrr, hneggjaði hann þá hátt.

And when the horse came in front of the door, then he neighed loudly.

There is a scene in Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, famous among saga scholars, in which a horse and a man communicate, and more than one person dies as a result. It is a remarkable moment in which the horse, Freyfaxi, uses his voice and body to provoke his human into action, and alter the course of the narrative: the animal acts, and the man responds.

On hearing the neigh, Hrafnkell immediately recognises the sound as that of his horse and calls on his serving woman to go to the door. When he eventually ventures out to see Freyfaxi himself, he speaks to the horse, calling him fóstri (foster-kin), acknowledging that he has been poorly treated, and vowing revenge against the perpetrator of the ill-treatment. He tells Freyfaxi to return to his followers, and Freyfaxi understands the command, returning to his pasture and his stud-mares. Although the episode may seem quite remarkable to a modern reader, the wording of the episode, Hrafnkell’s initial casual response and immediate recognition of the neigh suggests something mundane. Hrafnkell seems used to such visits, and this interspecies communication may have been nothing out of the ordinary – but scholarship has often made it out to be so. Interpretations of Freyfaxi have frequently neglected his status first and foremost as a horse, and a horse who can act for himself; and Hrafnkell’s reference to his horse as fóstri can be read simply as an expression of affection for a favoured animal. It is, however, a relationship beyond affection. Freyfaxi is a figure with whom communication and mutual understanding can take place, he is a foster-kin to Hrafnkell and is punished for his actions. In the relationship between Hrafnkell and Freyfaxi we see action and response, sociality and obligation: an animal participating in ‘human’ social networks – or perhaps the ‘human’ nature of these social obligations breaking down. Freyfaxi is loud and provocative and does more than simply provide a way for the saga compiler to demonstrate Hrafnkell’s immoderate behaviour.

We have seen in the preceding chapters that animal-human interactions in the Íslendingasögur are closely entangled with the formation and continuation of the household-farm. The farm is represented as a place of status and productivity for both humans and animals; and animals can be depicted as guardians, respected visitors, and valued members of the human household. They can also be agents of destruction that need to be vigorously controlled, and the attempted integration of animals into the home-place is often viewed with suspicion or leads to a dramatic change of circumstances (for better or worse). This chapter examines the destructive nature of animals (particularly cattle as the largest of the domesticates), and focusses specifically on actions of cattle against haystacks, home, and householder. In all cases the agency of the animals is considered, competing with human and paranormal influences.

Positive relationships between domestic animals and humans in medieval Icelandic society were of vital importance. When something is relied on for survival and economic prosperity, disruption to that relationship would cause serious issues for a household. In the Íslendingasögur, conflicts between animals and humans range from causing the mildest inconvenience to resulting in the death of the householder. In some sagas it is animal deviance from human control that causes the conflict; in some it is the over-attachment of a figure to their animal(s). Lesser consequences are applied to less personal conflicts, for example when an anonymous herd of cattle are driven to cause chaos in the homefield, while the more intense and personal the animal-human relationship, the more significant the consequences for the community in the saga – and perhaps the more judgement passed on the relationship by the storyteller or compiler of the saga. It is often the case that close animal-human relationships appear to be viewed with ambivalence if not downright condemnation by the saga. The story of Freyfaxi and Hrafnkell (pp. 145–55) might be included among these cautionary tales: Hrafnkell’s devotion to his horse leads to serious trouble, though he is permitted to survive his misjudgement. As we will see, Þóroddr in Eyrbyggja saga is not afforded the same luxury.

The importance of domestic animals in both the material and narrative settlement of Iceland, and in the way in which the Icelandic home-place physically and legally developed, is interwoven into the stories that medieval Icelanders told about their past. However, it should not be assumed that the functional importance or affectionate esteem of domestic animals automatically set them up for inclusion in these stories. The attachment of animals and animal-human interactions to these texts was dependent on their usefulness to the narrative of the saga; yet their very nature of being useful to the narrative tells us something rather poignant about the animal-human relationships rooted in these tales. Domestic animals, as co-creators of the Icelandic community, were entangled with their human partners not just as objects for consumption but in affective relationships.

It has been previously argued that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to fully understand medieval Icelandic texts, although the breadth of such an interdisciplinary approach has only recently been extended to include archaeology. Reading animal-human relations in the sagas with a perspective enhanced by the examination of settlement narratives, spatial-functional analyses of farm sites, and the exploration of legal definitions and classifications undertaken in the preceding chapters, enables deeper understandings of these narratives to be formed in relation to the world in which they were produced and which they wished to emulate. This chapter will analyse three examples of animals in the Íslendingasögur who show recognition of the human home-farm, and whose interactions with these places form a component of their relationship(s) with human figures. It will take this discussion onwards to the figure of Grettir Ásmundarson, who is notoriously without a place to belong throughout much of his saga but for whom animals seem to become a way through which his character is developed. Grettir’s final place to belong is an island of sheep, on which he forms a multispecies flock of individuals, brought together by the need to be somewhere close to other animals.

Animals at Home in the Íslendingasögur

The Íslendingasögur present many examples of animal interaction with and within the farm and homefield, and the humans interacting within these spaces.

Having started the thread of this book with the physical and ideological settlement of Iceland, this chapter will dig deeper into the settlements themselves, to investigate the ways in which the building and development of farms might be said to influence and be influenced by animals and their relationships with humans. The act of building, and where and how one builds, codifies conscious decisions to dwell in a certain way, which create and enable meeting points: encounters between agents that can leave lasting impressions in the material record and, I would argue, in the stories of places. This chapter will focus on potential meeting points between animals and humans in the physical remains of the Viking-Age Icelandic farm, drawing on not only the more substantial animal places on sites, such as byres, but also more ambiguous features that may have been formed from the actions of animals. It aims to demonstrate the value of thinking about the experiences of animals when interpreting archaeological sites and reconstructing the ways in which humans would have experienced animals. Meeting points like those discussed below would have formed the roots of the literary and legal depictions of animal-human relationships discussed in the proceeding chapters, and a grounded approach to animal-human relations in the medieval Icelandic imagination and experience necessarily requires examining the places of interaction on the physical farm. By applying spatial analysis, in conjunction with the data from careful excavation and post-excavation analyses (where available), a cycle of animal-human interactions and relationships at archaeological sites can be investigated. These sites and these relationships show us some threads of the wider multispecies communities that produced the legal ideals and regulations discussed in Chapter 3, and the saga literature analysed in Chapters 4 and 5.

The space of the farm was built in a specific way, with preconceived ideas of how animals and humans should relate to each other, in turn shaped by the taskscape of the farm: that is, the daily ensemble of tasks that constituted dwelling, performed by both humans and animals as agents working together in the business of settling and subsisting within the Icelandic environment.

As to be expected from a society in which domestic animals were vitally important, the earliest written laws we have surviving from Iceland contain extensive descriptions, regulations, and stipulations around the care, control, and nature of these animals. What perhaps is unexpected is the way certain animals are considered in these laws: as legal agents. Examining how these legal traditions structure the animal-human relationship and the animal-human boundary deepens our understanding of the interspecies interactions discussed in this book and can be brought together with the physical landscape of Iceland to construct the building blocks of medieval Icelandic social experience of animals. The animal-related content of Grágás has been little examined by scholars of early Iceland, and references to these laws are often used for contextualising discussion of the Icelandic sagas rather than analysed for their own sake. The value of these animal-laws, when placed alongside material and other textual evidence of animal-human interactions, has never been fully explored. Such is the purpose of this chapter: to unpick the representation of domestic animals in these laws, and to consider how the role of animals in the legal society and landscape of medieval Iceland can be brought into constructive dialogue with the other sources examined in this book.

These laws offer a narrative of daily life in an agro-pastoral Christian society and enable the visualisation of the relations between people and things, structures, and animals within this daily practice. The laws present ideal interspecies relations in medieval Icelandic society, but explicitly emphasise the variation in such encounters. Domestic animals were not part of one homogenous legal category but were placed on a spectrum of rights and protections, and each animal could be subject to differing levels of legal status and permitted agency. While the laws seem designed to control both men and animals, the capability for certain animals to act outside of this control, to shape their own actions, and work with (or against) humans is recognised by the texts. The disruptive potential of domestic animals is strongly emphasised in the focus on control we find in many of these laws, and the regulations suggest that working with animals, and the responsibility for their actions, were the domains of certain skilled individuals within the household.