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In one sense, Iceland began as a Christian land. The earliest history of the volcanic island, Ari Thorgilsson's Islendingabók records, "There were Christian men here, whom the Norsemen call 'papa' (priest); and they later went away, since they did not want to be here with the heathen men, and they left behind Irish books and bells and crooks, from which one might judge they were Irishmen."

But when the Irish monks left, Iceland was left to Norwegian settlers with their own religious customs—some Christian, some pagan. The clash between beliefs was not unlike that in the rest of the Viking world at the time, but its resolution is one of the most unexpected conversion stories in the world.

Iceland, called the ultima Thule in ancient geography, first came to the attention of Norwegian Vikings intent on settlement in the year 870. There were already Christians among the early settlers, people such as Audh the Deep-Minded, who wished to be buried beneath the water line, to be able to touch the same living water as Jerusalem.

Then there were some, such as Helgi the Lean, who believed in Christ but prayed to Thor when out on the sea. And there were those, like Hall and Thori Godhlaus, who claimed to have no religion, "trusting in their own might."

The Book of the Settlements (Landnamabok) would have us believe that Christianity, such as it was, died out after the first few generations, but we find Christians in Iceland throughout the era. We know that Irish missionaries came to convert the heathen, and Ari even mentions three "Armenian" bishops, Petrus, Abraham, and Stephanus.

The Vikings were, however, a rough lot and not easy to convert. Though their reputation for hostility to Christianity has been exaggerated, they were much given to lampoons and sneering verse. When a German Christian, Friedrich, came to Iceland with Thorvald the Far-Traveled in the 980s, two men made a poem accusing him and Thorvald of ergi (sexual perversion):

The Bishop [Friedrich] has borne nine children;
Thorvald was the father of all of them.

Thorvald slew the lampooners, so Friedrich and Thorvald had to leave Iceland. In spite of this, the Christian party was getting ever stronger on the island.

Meanwhile, Olaf Trygvesson had become King of Norway. Immediately upon taking the crown, he began forcibly Christianizing his kingdom (see "Be Christian or Die," p. 13). In 997 he sent his friend and court chaplain Thangbrand to Iceland to convert the island. According to another Icelandic chronicler, Thangbrand was "a passionate, ungovernable man, and a great manslayer; but he was a good scholar and a clever man."

He seems at first to have been quite successful, baptizing among others Hall of Sida, Hjalti Skeggjason, Gizur the White, "and many other distinguished men" who play key roles in Icelandic sagas and histories.

Nevertheless, Thangbrand shared the fate of his predecessor, Friedrich. "When he had been here one winter or two," writes Ari, "then he went away, and he had killed here two men or three, those who had lampooned him."

But it wasn't just the pagans who loved the ribald lampoons. Thangbrand's convert Hjalti, not the coolest of heads, pronounced his own ergi-verses in front of the Icelandic governmental assembly:

I don't want to blaspheme the gods,
But Freya seems to me a bitch.

Freya was the Venus of the pagan pantheon, and this very successful verse, containing an untranslatable pun (geyja means "to blaspheme", but also "to bark"), caused Hjalti to be banished from Iceland for three years.

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