NORSE MEANS OF LIVELIHOODS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT

OF SETTLEMENTS

The settlers of the North Atlantic societies transferred their whole farming economies to the new homelands (Øye 2005: 366), a process which is referred to by Amorosi et al. (1997: 499, 501) as the “Landnám pack-age”. The farming activities included mainly cereal cultivation (barley and oats) and ani-mal husbandry, the main domestic aniani-mals being cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, geese and possibly hens (McGovern et al. 1988:

227; Arge et al. 2005: 601; Øye 2005: 363).

The Norse settlers of the Faroe Islands also imported economic strategies from their previous homelands. According to the Færeyinga saga, the main element in this strategy was farming. The domestic animals were initially sheep and cattle (Young 1979:

100). The Saga does not mention that the Faroese people kept horses or ponies, pigs or poultry, although Norse settlers would generally include these in their Landnám package. Horses or ponies were required for work on the farms, and horse meat and pork were favoured as food. Thus horses may well have been present on the Faroe Islands. It is almost certain that peat was the main form of fuel (Young 1979: 100).

Goats and pigs may were still being kept in the Middle Ages, but not after the Reforma-tion (Thorsteinsson 1990: 21). As a supple-ment for the imported domestic animals, the Landnám settlers caught fi sh, whales, seals and birds (Arge 2005: 23). The land was

cul-tivated only for the people’s own consump-tion (Thorsteinsson 1990: 21).

The practices involved in the manage-ment of land resources were also imported from the previous homelands. The Norse societies managed their land resources, for example, by means of a practice called shieling. Shielings were mainly used for cattle grazing (Thomson et al. 2005: 758), and according to Mahler (1990: 32-33), the shieling system was based on the moving of animals from the main farms to other graz-ing areas at the beginngraz-ing of the growgraz-ing season. In this way the grassland near the farm could be protected from grazing in the summer and harvested for winter use. The system was thus an intensive form of sea-sonal land use that took place outside the daily circle of the main farmsteads, where the livestock would otherwise have grazed.

When animals were moved away from the main farms, many related daily activities followed, including milking. One advantage was that the seasonal stay in the shielings could be supplemented with other activities such as the gathering of winter fuel, peat cutting, fi shing, and so on.

Shielings required extra land that was not otherwise used. Arge et al. (2005: 615) point out that the keeping of them was an effective means of utilizing land resources and grazing potential as long as the number of farm units was limited and there was room for the shielings. As the population increased, however, and the settlements cor-respondingly expanded, all the suitable lo-cations for shielings came to be occupied.

It then became necessary for the Faroese to adapt the organization of the grazing areas to these new conditions of a sparser amount of land. A more formal and effi cient grazing system was needed.

Since the Norsemen established the ba-sis for a permanent settlement pattern on the Faroe Islands, the settlers’ background as farmers may be considered to have ex-ercised an important infl uence on the de-velopment of the Faroese settlement pat-tern. When the Faroese chose locations for their settlements, an opportunity to contin-ue their economic activities with the skills and knowledge they already possessed oc-cupied a central role (Mahler 1990: 32). This provided the connection between the eco-nomic strategy that was chosen and the set-tlement pattern that developed.

The basis for the Faroese settlement pat-tern was established in the Landnám period.

Arge (2005: 25) suggests that the locations where settlements were fi rst established were those where people stayed throughout the history. The initial settlement pattern is illustrated in Figure 3.1, where it can be seen that the location of the settlements was es-sentially infl uenced by access to the sea and by the topography of the islands. The inland areas with steep mountains were uninhab-ited. Villages were established in areas near the coast and in bays, because the best land for cultivation was to be found there (Arge et al. 2005: 615). The coastal or near-coastal location of the settlements also optimized the use of marine resources and meant that the bird cliffs were close to the settlement (Edwards 2005: 591). A coastal location also provided the settlers with good transporta-tion opportunities.

Only a few of the Faroese settlements were established more than 2 kilometres in-land from the coast, and such villages usu-ally had several shieling sites. If the settle-ments were located on a slope, they most often faced south or east. Some settlements faced towards the west, but only a few

set-DEPARTMENT OF GEOSCIENCES AND GEOGRAPHY A

tlements were established so that they faced northwards (Arge et al. 2005: 599, 605, 608).

The settlement pattern continued to de-velop after the initial phase, as the settle-ments were soon divided up into smaller farms, which thus made up parts of the

vil-lages. One village could consist of sever-al quarters (Joensen 1980b: 119). As the amount of cultivated land was extended and new villages were established, the set-tlement pattern became increasingly scat-tered (Høgnesen 1968: 45; Schei & Moberg 2003: 31).

Figure 3.1 The initial settlement pattern on the Faroe Islands (Arge et al. 2005: 605).

3.3. ADAPTATION OF MEANS