A man takes three ravens to sea, lets them fly and follows the third. He winters in a fjord in north-western Iceland, loses his livestock, sees drift ice in spring and calls the land "Ísland". That is the story of the Landnámabók, the "Book of Settlements", in manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries, well over four hundred years after the events. Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson is the figure on whom the name of Iceland hangs, and at the same time one of the least tangible people of the settlement age. This article lays the versions side by side, separates narrative from evidence and says, where it has to: this cannot be shown clearly at present.
Flóki Vilgerðarson, called Hrafna-Flóki, "Raven-Flóki", is in Icelandic tradition the third Norseman to sail to Iceland and the one who gave the island its present name. The epithet itself is in the Landnámabók: in the fourth chapter of the Sturlubók the text speaks of the land "that Hrafna-Flóki had found". Everything we know about him goes back to this family of texts. There is no inscription, no grave find, no coin and no contemporary chronicle that names him.
The Landnámabók describes him as a "great viking" (víkingr) who sets out to look for the land the Swede Garðarr had found. On his family the text I could read names only his daughter Geirhildr, who dies on Shetland. Who his parents were and where the name Vilgerðarson comes from is not stated there; I leave speculation aside. On his origin the text says he set out from a place called Flókavarði, on the border between Hörðaland and Rogaland, that is in western Norway. Whether he lived there is not stated.
Recent accounts date his voyage to the year 868. No such number stands in the manuscripts. It is a modern back-calculation from the saga chronology and appears in reference works and travel guides as fact. A nature-reserve notice on Vatnsfjörður is more careful: if the account is true, Flóki lay there between about 860 and 870. No more than a rough frame can be got out of it.
A word on the technical terms that follow. Landnámabók means "Book of Settlements" and records who settled where in Iceland. Landnám is the taking of land, landnámsmaðr the man who does it. The Sturlubók, Hauksbók and Melabók are the three medieval versions described below. A saga is a story told in prose which may rest on oral tradition but is literary in form.
The main source is the Landnámabók, and it survives in several versions. Sturla Þórðarson wrote the Sturlubók probably between 1275 and 1280; it survives in a 17th-century copy. The Hauksbók arose in the early 14th century and goes back to Haukr Erlendsson, who died in 1334; it draws on the Sturlubók and on the lost version of Styrmir Kárason, the Styrmisbók. The Melabók dates from around 1300, but only two leaves of it survive. Later composite versions of the 17th century, the Skarðsárbók and Þórðarbók, follow. The core of the work is placed in the late 11th or early 12th century; the oldest version is lost. How faithfully the surviving texts reproduce that core is uncertain.
What matters for Flóki: the versions do not tell the same story. The Sturlubók, which I could partly consult in an online edition in modernised spelling, has the ravens, the winter in Vatnsfjörður and the naming in a short second chapter. According to a scholarly article that I know only through a summary, the Hauksbók offers more: a sacrifice before departure in Rogaland, a stop in the Faroes where a daughter is married, and place names such as Hafnarfjörðr, Hvaleyri and Bríanslækr. The wintering place after the winter in the north-west differs too: the Sturlubók names Borgarfjörðr, the Hauksbók Hafnarfjörðr. The Melabók can contribute little to this section because only fragments of it remain.
The second great text, the Íslendingabók, the "Book of the Icelanders", is by the scholar Ari Þorgilsson (1067/68 to 1148) and is dated to the years around 1122 to 1133. Ari is brief and sober and counts as the most reliable source for early Icelandic history. He dates the settlement to Norwegians in the time of King Harald Fairhair and names Ingólfr as the first. As far as I know he reports nothing of Flóki, Naddoddr and Garðarr; I could not consult the text itself, so this is second-hand and needs checking. A recent article reads the silence as Ari deliberately passing over the Flóki story as a separate tradition because Flóki did not fit his picture of the Norwegian settler. That is an interpretation, not a finding.
Adam of Bremen, who wrote his Hamburg church history around 1075, also describes Iceland in his description of the northern islands (Book IV, chapter 36). According to a summary of the Danish-English edition by Lund and Wallace, he explains the name by the ice that makes the sea solid, and mentions neither Flóki nor ravens. That is noteworthy because Adam knows a reason for the name that gets along without the Flóki story. It proves nothing against Flóki.
Older than all these texts is a sentence by the Irish scholar Dicuil, who reported in 825 in De mensura orbis terrae on clerics on an island called Thule. Whether Iceland is meant cannot be read clearly from the text. For Flóki Dicuil brings nothing.
Archaeologically and scientifically it looks like this: an ash layer, the so-called Landnám tephra, is now dated to about 877, with an uncertainty of one year. Traces of settlement accumulate only after it. A find that could be tied to Flóki's winter is not known.
In the Sturlubók Flóki joins a short chain of discoverers. First the text names a viking Naddoddr, who, on the way from Norway to the Faroes, is driven west and finds a large land. His men climb a high mountain in the East Fjords and see no smoke, no sign of people. As they leave, snow falls on the mountains, and they call the land Snæland, "Snow-land". Then comes the Swede Garðarr Svavarsson, who looks for the land on purpose, sails around it and so establishes that it is an island. He winters at Húsavík on Skjálfandi and builds a house there. In spring his man Náttfari, with a slave and a maid, is driven off to sea and stays behind; a stretch of land is later named after him. Garðarr goes home, praises the land, and it is called Garðarshólmr, "Garðarr's Islet".
Flóki is the third in this row, and he has a mission: he wants to find Garðarshólmr. This blurs a common claim. Sometimes it is said that Flóki was the first to winter in Iceland. According to the Sturlubók that was Garðarr.
Ingólfr Arnarson forms the end of the chain, and the Sturlubók ties him expressly to Flóki: Ingólfr and his foster-brother ready a large ship and look for the land that Hrafna-Flóki had found and which was now called Ísland. How Ingólfr's settlement is interpreted and why the sources call him the "most famous of all settlers" is in the article on Ingólfr Arnarson. For Flóki what matters is this: the Landnámabók narrative presupposes that the name Ísland was fixed before Ingólfr. That is a narrative connection, not a document.
What follows is the narrative, not the secure sequence. I rely on the Sturlubók and mark what only the Hauksbók brings. Where I know a turn of phrase only through a summary of the text, that is said.
Departure. Flóki puts out from Flókavarði, on the border of Hörðaland and Rogaland. In the Hauksbók a sacrifice comes first: he makes a great offering before putting to sea. What exactly was sacrificed I take only from a synopsis, and the wording needs checking. A scholarly article also calls the ravens in this version sacrificial birds; whether the text says so is to be checked.
Shetland. First the voyage goes to Hjaltland, the Shetland Islands. Flóki anchors in a bay the text calls Flókavogr, "Flóki's Bay". There his daughter Geirhildr is lost in a water, the Geirhildarvatn. On Shetland it is said today that the loch at Girlsta is meant; the echo of Girlsta and Geirhildarstaðir makes the reading attractive, but it is a local tradition and not secure. Orkney does not appear in the section I could read.
Faroes. The Hauksbók adds a stop in the Faroes, where Flóki marries off a daughter. In the Sturlubók, as I read it, the Faroese station is missing. Several modern accounts name it anyway without saying which version.
Companions. On board are a farmer named Þórólfr, a man named Herjólfr and a Faxi, described as a man from the Southern Isles (Suðreyjar, the Hebrides). All three later play a part in the question of how good the land is.
The ravens. The Sturlubók has the sentence: Flóki had three ravens with him at sea. The first, when released, flew back over the stern. The second rose into the air and returned to the ship. The third flew forward over the bow, in the direction in which they found the land. The text says no more on the method: neither how far from land the ravens were released nor when the third one set off. For this the Hauksbók gives an explanation which a scholarly article reproduces thus: the men of the north then had no leiðarsteinn, literally a "guide stone", and so Flóki depended on the birds. What a leiðarsteinn was is disputed among scholars; more in the article Sunstone and navigation.
Landfall and Faxaóss. Following the third raven, they reach land. As they sail west past Reykjanes, a large bay opens and Snæfellsnes comes into view. Faxi says this must be a large land they have found: there are big rivers here. The bay has been called Faxaóss since. Modern texts mostly write Faxaflói, "Faxa Bay"; the Sturlubók has, as far as I see, Faxaóss.
Vatnsfjörður. Then they cross Breiðafjörður to the west and land in Vatnsfjörður by Barðaströnd. The fjord, it says, was full of fish, and the men forgot to make hay over their fishing. In winter the cattle died. The spring was rather cold.
The name. Flóki climbs a high mountain, looks north and sees a fjord full of ice. Therefore they called the land Ísland, "as it has been called since". Which mountain it was, the text I read does not say. Recent accounts give now Lónfell, now Nónfell, another names Hornatær. The names vary from account to account. That may suggest that the spot was sought in the landscape only later.
The prevented return. They meant to leave in summer but were not ready in time. A summary of the Sturlubók passage reports that their boat tore loose near Reykjanes and drifted to Herjólfr, who landed at a place later called Herjólfshöfn. The sentence is unclear in the summary, and I could not check it against the wording. What the text version does fix is that Flóki spent the second winter in Borgarfjörðr, where they met Herjólfr again; the summer after, they sailed back to Norway. A web summary of the voyage, on the other hand, lets "several years" pass before the men got home. That does not fit two winters.
Verdict on the land. In Norway people ask about the land. Flóki speaks ill of it. Herjólfr names good and bad. Þórólfr says that butter drips from every blade of grass in the land, and is called Þórólfr smjör, "Butter-Þórólfr", ever after.
Later settlement. Here the chapter ends, as far as I have read it. Several modern pages write that Flóki later returned to Iceland, settled there and died there. The Sturlubók passage I could consult does not say so, and I could not find the place the claim comes from. This cannot be shown clearly at present. What is secure is only the narrative intent: from the man who talks the land down and the man who praises it comes the tension to which Ingólfr answers.
The raven motif. The scene recalls the Flood story in the first book of Moses (Genesis 8), in which Noah lets a raven and several times a dove fly to learn whether the water has fallen. The Icelandic historian Gunnar Karlsson has pointed to this parallel; he does not regard it as proof that the story is invented. The British historian Raymond Ian Page calls the similarity probably no coincidence and the story in this form suspect. Paul Edwards and Hermann Pálsson saw a direct borrowing in 1972. Other scholars trace the motif to older sacrificial customs and oral narrative patterns. The difference: Noah has two kinds of bird, Flóki three ravens with three different behaviours, and the third one's behaviour shows a direction, whereas Noah's dove shows the end of the flood. If there is a borrowing, then, it is a free one, not a literal one.
A further hypothesis, which I name expressly only as a hypothesis: land-seeking birds are known from older sources elsewhere too. Pliny the Elder writes in the Naturalis historia (Book 6) of seamen of the island of Taprobane who carried birds and released them to find land. I have not looked the passage up and know it only from the scholarly discussion. Whether there was a path from such Mediterranean traditions to an Icelandic scribe I do not know. Equally, the practice may have arisen independently several times.
The raven epithet. That the epithet "Raven-Flóki" stands in the Sturlubók speaks for a firm oral tradition. It can just as well have grown out of the story: the story explains the name, the name explains the story. Anyone who reads the ravens as Odin's birds Hugin and Munin, as often happens online, goes beyond the text: the Landnámabók presents the ravens as signposts without linking them to Odin. On the raven in the North as a whole see The raven in the Norse world.
The reason for the name. Name and occasion fit together strikingly: the land is called "Ice-land" because the founder saw ice. The other names in the chapter also explain places through small stories: Faxaóss through Faxi, Herjólfshöfn through Herjólfr, Þórólfr smjör through the butter remark. Such name narratives are a well-known pattern of medieval topography; a scholarly article therefore calls the Flóki passage an aetiological legend, that is, one that wants to explain how something got its name. That does not prove Flóki is invented. But it means that the derivation of the name is itself more literature than evidence. Adam of Bremen knows the reason "ice" without Flóki.
The dying herd. Raymond Ian Page points out that the loss of livestock through a missing hay supply recurs in accounts of early Norse exploration and is therefore to be read with caution. It may be true, or a narrative pattern: whoever does not prepare, fails.
The dating. The number 868 is not a manuscript statement. It arises from the saga order: Garðarr around 860, then Flóki, then Ingólfr in 870 or 874 according to the written sources, and the ash layer of 877 as a scientific marker. That is a relative chronology, translated into absolute numbers that need not be right. The numbers 870 (Ari) and 874 (Landnámabók) are themselves back-calculations of the 12th and 13th centuries.
The variants. That the versions differ on the Faroese station, the sacrifice, the wintering place and place names is no surprise: according to the article mentioned, the Hauksbók aimed to be more encyclopaedic than the Sturlubók, which drew on oral family tradition and lost works. For the reader it means: where the versions diverge there is no reason to hold one the "right" one. A ranking of the versions by reliability I cannot give.
Why Ingólfr? The article mentioned suggests that Flóki's connection to people with Irish names, in Þórólfr's line and in the place name Bríanslækr, did not fit the ideal of the Norwegian settler and that Ingólfr was therefore moved to the centre. That, too, is an interpretation.
About Flóki's ship the text I read says nothing: no ship type, no crew size, no length of voyage. Attested is only what the narrative names: a departure in western Norway, stops on the Shetland Islands (and in the Hauksbók in the Faroes), ravens as signposts, a landing on the south-western side of Iceland, then a crossing of Breiðafjörður. That Norse sailors in the North Atlantic paid attention to latitude, sun and coastal marks is treated in the article How the Vikings navigated; for Flóki himself it supplies no evidence. The raven method is the only aid named in this story, and the Hauksbók sentence about the missing leiðarsteinn makes it a substitute for something one did not have. Which device or procedure the word means stays open. On the ship question see Longships; whether Flóki used a longship or a cargo sailer cannot be said.
At Vatnsfjörður the Flókatóftir, the "Flóki ruins", are shown above the bay near Brjánslækur. For a long time they were taken for Flóki's winter quarters. A notice by the Icelandic environment agency on the nature reserve describes neither excavations nor finds; the site lies outside the reserve. "Flóki's house" is thus a local tradition, not an excavation result. The same holds for the Geirhildarvatn on Shetland. The place names Faxaóss and Herjólfshöfn are transmitted in the Landnámabók; whether they arose in the settlement age cannot be decided. Excavation evidence of the first settlement points to Reykjavík; see Ingólfr Arnarson.
There is no Rhineland link. Flóki belongs to the world of the North Atlantic; what the Vikings did on the Rhine is under Vikings in Aachen.
The man who talks the land down became, in many popular accounts, the discoverer who named it "out of rage". That is a sharpening: the text says only that the land was called Ísland because of the ice-filled fjord. That is retelling, not evidence.
In the television series Vikings a character bears the name Floki, played by Gustaf Skarsgård. According to a reference page he is "loosely" modelled on the historical Flóki; in the fifth season he reaches Iceland and believes he has found Asgard. This has little to do with the Landnámabók: the series character is a boatbuilder, not a discoverer with ravens. For a classification of the series see the fact check on Vikings.
For the question of how the North Atlantic chapter continues, Erik the Red, Leif Eriksson and Vinland are the next stations.
Flóki hafði hrafna þrjá með sér í haf, og er hann lét lausan hinn fyrsta, fló sá aftur um stafn; annar fló í loft upp og aftur til skips; hinn þriðji fló fram um stafn í þá átt, sem þeir fundu landið.
"Flóki had three ravens with him at sea, and when he let the first go, it flew back over the stern; the second flew up into the air and back to the ship; the third flew forward over the bow in the direction in which they found the land."Landnámabók (Sturlubók), chapter 2, Old Icelandic text in modernised spelling from the Snerpa online edition; wording read through a retrieval tool that processed the page and reproduced these sentences verbatim; comparison with a critical edition outstanding; English version my own translation
Open is whether there was a historical Flóki or whether a figure combines names, motifs and routes of his predecessors. Open is what the Hauksbók says in its wording on sacrifice, Faroes and wintering place, and how exactly the Sturlubók passage on the return is to be read. Open are the mountain, the length of the stay and a later settlement. An excavation result at the Flókatóftir or a contemporary text naming him would clarify much. Neither exists so far.
Who was Hrafna-Flóki? According to the Landnámabók a west-Norwegian viking who, around the time of the settlement, looked for the land discovered by Garðarr, spent a winter in Vatnsfjörður and gave the island the name Ísland. Outside the Landnámabók he is not attested.
Why is he called Raven-Flóki? He took three ravens to sea and let them fly. The third flew ahead, towards land. The epithet stands in the Sturlubók in the fourth chapter.
When did Flóki sail to Iceland? The sources give no year. The often-cited 868 is a modern back-calculation; a nature-reserve notice carefully names the period between about 860 and 870.
Did he discover Iceland? According to the Landnámabók Naddoddr and Garðarr were there before him; Garðarr also wintered first. Older is only the rumour of Thule in Dicuil, whose interpretation remains uncertain.
Is there a link to Aachen or the Rhineland? No, the Flóki story takes place in the North Atlantic.
Related articles: Ingólfr Arnarson, The Icelanders, Sagas of Icelanders, Vikings in the North Atlantic, The raven in the Norse world, How the Vikings navigated, Sunstone and navigation, Jarlshof and the Shetlanders, Vikings on the islands, Erik the Red, Leif Eriksson, Vinland, Longships, Adam of Bremen, Norse kings and Vikings: fact check.
Ingólfr Arnarson · The Icelanders · Erik the Red · Leif Erikson · Vinland.
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