The settlement of Iceland, at the end of the ninth century, has been vigorously discussed for decades by archaeologists and historians, place-name scholars, literary scholars, and theologians. Recently, the settlement has increasingly been examined from the perspective of environmental history, especially by archaeologists who have demonstrated how the settlement impacted the contemporary nature-culture dynamics. The literary sources describing the settlement have been used in various ways: sometimes as sources that have facilitated the finding and interpretation of archaeological material, and other times, they have been seen as irrelevant for understanding the actual historical settlement and have instead been regarded as evidence of sociopolitical issues during the thirteenth century when the texts were written. The main aim of this article is to add to this range of existing interpretations and to propose a new reading of the literary descriptions of the settlement of Iceland, based on the manuscripts where such stories...
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