Geirmund Hjørson, called ''Heljarskinn'', was a leading
Iceland
Iceland is a Nordic countries, Nordic island country between the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe. It is culturally and politically linked with Europe and is the regi ...
er of the late ninth century. He was the son of a
Norwegian merchant and a
Samoyed woman. His nickname, an apparent reference to his complexion, means "
Hel skin", which indicates either dark or "black" skin or perhaps skin "pale as death".
The sources for Geirmund's life are the ''
Landnámabók
(, "Book of Settlements"), often shortened to , is a medieval Icelandic written work which describes in considerable detail the settlement () of Iceland by the Norse in the 9th and 10th centuries CE.
is divided into five parts and ov ...
'' and the ', the first
saga
Sagas are prose stories and histories, composed in Iceland and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Scandinavia.
The most famous saga-genre is the (sagas concerning Icelanders), which feature Viking voyages, migration to Iceland, and feuds between ...
in the ''
Sturlunga saga
''Sturlunga saga'' (often called simply ''Sturlunga'') is a collection of Icelandic Norse saga, sagas by various authors from the 12th and 13th centuries; it was assembled in about 1300, in Old Norse. It mostly deals with the story of the Sturlun ...
'' collection. According to these, he was the son of a
Norwegian petty king and made a fortune as a
Viking
Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden),
who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.Roesdahl, pp. 9â ...
. On Iceland, he held four large estates and travelled with a bodyguard of eighty men. His lifestyle was supported by the wealth from his raids and could not be sustained off of his estates alone.
Notes
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9th-century Norwegian nobility
9th-century Icelandic people
9th-century Vikings