I had never intended to become an archaeologist. Archaeology is not the first profession that comes to mind for a child growing up, as I did, in Australia. However, history has always captivated me, its seeds perhaps planted on long ago Saturday afternoons when, with no other occupation, I would leaf through three huge scrapbooks that a great-great-uncle had put together in the 1880s. They transported me back to a different world, to a time that was somewhat obscure, yet somehow familiar, a sepia past of horse carriages, gas lamps, dark interiors with overly elaborate furnishings, bearded gentlemen in frock coats and top hats, women in black lace dresses with high collars, elaborate head gear, silk flowers, ribbons, and black jet jewellery, and children who might easily have stepped out of a Tenniel illustration from Alice through the Looking Glass. If the present sometimes seemed dull, the past appeared to be full of interest. And it may be that a curiosity about the Middle Ages began to evolve back then as well. A favourite children's book was Nicholas and the Wool-Pack by the English author, Cynthia Harnett, a tale about rural life in late medieval England. And I wonder if a fascination in medieval knights might have had its source in a famed national hero, an armour-bearing bushranger who, in his final showdown with the police, dressed himself and his gang members in medieval-looking suits of armour fashioned from plough mould boards. But certainly none of this would have led me down the path I have taken, were it not for the move my family made when I was sixteen, all the way across the world to a place where the past mingled with the present, a land of Biblical scenery, studded with walled cities, battlefields, and fortresses, where one could pick up an Iron Age stone tool in a field, speak and be understood in an ancient language, shop in a medieval bazaar, carry in one's pocket coins impressed with the same designs found on coins minted two millennia back.

Hattin

Among the photographs of family members that I have on my desk is one of two half-brothers of my paternal grandmother. Their names were Louis and Douglas Solomon. The photograph was taken in October 1915 in the Strand Studio, London.

At the time, the brothers were in England recuperating from injuries sustained in the Gallipoli debacle. In the photograph the two boys appear young, fresh-faced, but pensive and somewhat subdued; rather different, I would imagine, from how they might have appeared in a photograph taken a year earlier, before they had experienced the horrors of war. Louis served in the 2nd Field Ambulance and was wounded on August 22, 1915. He may have participated in the Battle of Hill 60 that had been launched the day before. It was the last major assault of the Gallipoli Campaign. On the day he was wounded, the attack had been reinforced by the Australian 18th Battalion, which consisted of newly arrived troops that were inexperienced and ill-equipped. Attacking at dawn and using only bayonets, they suffered 383 casualties. After his recuperation Louis remained in service. He subsequently served in France where he was injured again on March 23, 1918. Douglas was a reinforcement in the 10th Battalion. He is recorded as having fallen ill, probably with dysentery or typhoid fever, both of which were rife among members of the battalion, and on July 13, 1915 he suffered a back injury. But his early discharge in 1916, at which time he is recorded as suffering from “shell-shock and loss of power of limbs,” is rather more telling. Shellshock was a new “disease” in 1915, increasingly recognized but hardly understood. The term first appears in February that same year in an article by Charles Myers the consulting psychiatrist of the British Expeditionary Force published in The Lancet. Soldiers suffering from it were often returned to the battlefield, and on occasion were put on trial and even executed, for cowardice or desertion. The horrific physical outcome of this misunderstood malady, suggested by the words “loss of power of limbs” can be observed in films of inflicted soldiers taken at the time.

Guy de Lusignan

Guy de Lusignan is perhaps the ultimate anti-hero of the crusader period. A Poitevin nobleman who became king of Jerusalem, he played what many regard as the principal role in the decline and eventual fall of the kingdom. Guy's story is an ill-fated one, but with a not entirely unfortunate ending. Some leaders suffer devastating defeats but are eventually able to recover their reputation. When Churchill was held responsible for the failure at Gallipoli in 1915, he was demoted from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty. He spent the remainder of the war years on the Western Front, where he commanded an infantry battalion, and after the war he began a long and slow recovery of his reputation until his complete rehabilitation as the leader of Britain in the Second World War. For Guy, even had he been as astute and well-regarded as Churchill, which he certainly was not, the shadow of the defeat at Hattin was so heavy and his role in it so indisputable, that his reputation, such as it was, was forever tainted. So much so that we tend to forget that after that defeat, he played a significant part in the recovery of the kingdom, enabling it to survive for another century. No less significant was the fact that he went on to establish a dynasty on the island of Cyprus that would carry his name and enable a crusader presence to survive in the Latin East for two centuries after the fall of Acre.

Guy faced criticism well before the Battle of Hattin. William of Tyre refers to him as “an obscure man, wholly incapable and indiscreet.” In stating this, the chronicler was ostensibly repeating the opinion of Guy's opponents, but clearly he was also expressing his own view. The very last words in the archbishop of Tyre's chronicle record Guy's repudiation by Baldwin IV after increasing acts of disobedience. These led the king to try to annul Guy's marriage to his sister Sibylla, and finally to place the regency of the kingdom and guardianship of his joint ruler, the child Baldwin V, in the hands of Guy's rival, Raymond III of Tripoli.

This book has two underlying themes: the Crusader period, which is the bit of history and archaeology I have chosen to spend a career studying, and the notion of repetition in history. The first theme is fairly straightforward—the Crusader period is a phase of history, easily defined. The second is more complex, for it is a human perception, not so much a fact as a feeling, and consequently enigmatic, and perhaps dubious, but certainly fascinating.

Does history indeed repeat itself? Mark Twain is said to have suggested an alternative: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Whether the attribution is correct (it has never been substantiated), this certainly Twain-like statement contains, as does any decent witticism, a subtle truth. For what is a rhyme? Not a repetition of the same word with the same meaning, but rather the following of one word by another that merely sounds the same. In a similar manner, what appears to be the repetition of a historical event is generally not that at all. Human history is old enough for there to be very little that is entirely new. If we take the earliest known use of stone tools by hominins at the end of the Pleistocene period, that is around 3.3 million years ago, to be the beginning of human history, we can appreciate that it would be remarkable indeed if a precursor could not be found for virtually any historical occurrence.

It seems that we are quick to grasp at the idea of repetition, perhaps because what is new is unknown, and what is unknown is frightening. When it landed upon us early in 2020, the covid–19 pandemic was immediately compared to the fourteenth-century Black Plague, and the Spanish Flu of 1918–1920. The comparison was perhaps a mildly comforting one, for although those pandemics decimated populations in many parts of the world, humanity made it through. And there was reassurance in the fact that with modern medical knowledge and technology we are today so much better equipped to face such disasters. There is comfort in comparison. And so, we say, “history has repeated itself,” and hold up examples like the attacks on Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And let's not get bogged down by the many details that challenge these comparisons.

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.