Landownership

• Main Author: Hastrup, Kirsten
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 1990
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198277286.003.0005; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52477511/isbn-9780198277286-book-part-5.pdf

Abstract GIVEN the central position of farming in Iceland, access to land was of primary social concern, .and land the vital resource of both the economic and the cosmological order. In this chapter I shall deal with landownership, and th’e social categories which were a corollary to the distribution of land. From the earliest settlements rights in land were central to social thinking. It was when the land was albyggt (‘fully settled’) that Icelandic law was drawn up according to the twelfth-century fslend-ingabok ((islb.) ch. 3). Among other things the law regulated rights in land. The laws were written down in 1II7—18, a few decades before Landndmabok, ‘the book of settlements’.