60 GUIDE TO ICELAND. as, or appointed, priests had great power. The priest could call upon a ninth part of his ‘ plngmen’—the men residing within the jurisdiction of his ping—to follow him to the Aljung; and when there they were bound to hack him in his suits and quarrels, while it was his duty to stand by them, and see them righted in theirs. The leading of bands of armed followers to the Alju'ng led, as may well be supposed, to constant fights at ])mgvellir, there being no supreme authority to hold the chiefs in check. The Sagas abound in instances where a suitor, dissatisfied with, or unable to obtain a decision at the Alju'ng courts, attacked with his armed followers his opponent and his men, in the immediate vicinity of the Court of Laws. As party feeling usually ran high, it was not an un- common occurrence for most of those present to embrace the cause of one or the other of the disputants, and then a most sanguinary battle would take place, in which sometimes as many as a thousand men would be engaged. One such conflict took place over the death of the hero of the Njal Saga, an outline of which will be given further on. As a rule, however, the more powerful chiefs combined to see matters settled according to the law of the land. If a case was lost through some flaw in the procedure—not an uncommon thing, by-the-bye, for never were men more expert in law quirks, or more formal in their legal proceedings, than the old Icelanders—it was frequently submitted to the arbitration of the combined chiefs. In order to induce hostile parties to submit their case to arbitration, these chiefs promised their armed assistance to him who was willing to do so. The history of the Icelanders from the establishment of the Aljung down to the commencement of the eleventh century records but one event of any great importance, that is, the discovery of Greenland, which subsequently led to that of America. About the year 980, a man named Gunnbjom discovered Jan Mayen ; and some years later Eirlkr Rau^i (Eric the Red) went in quest of this island, but sighting Greenland he sailed there instead, and founded a settlement. The Icelanders sailing southward to explore the coast of Greenland discovered America in a.d. 981-1000, and in the year 1477 Columbus visited Iceland, and doubtless heard of the land lying to the westward, hence his voyage in search of it, and its rg-discovery by him. In the year 997 the first Christian missionary landed in Iceland, at Oautav'ik in the Berufjor^r (Bear-fjord). His name was Thang- brand, and he was a son of Willibald, a count of Saxony. He was sent by the Norwegian king O'lafr Tryggvasson, who at that time

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