1 Social Structures and Identity in Early Iceland Stephen Pax Leonard Introduction The objective of this article is to determine what and how the social structures of early Iceland contributed to the identity of the settlers. 1 By social structures, I mean the articulation of a ‘set of clearly definable social institutions which were considered to constitute the basic framework of the society concerned’ (Leach, 1982: 32). The reason for focusing on social structures is that the Icelanders must have become fully self- conscious as an Icelandic community through the establishment of these. Whilst the notion of identity can be understood and discussed at many different levels, it is social identity (the identity of the settlers as a group) that is of most concern in this article. Social identity is an individual-based perception of what defines the ‘us’ associated with any internalised group membership. This can be distinguished from the notion of personal identity which refers to self-knowledge that derives from the individual’s unique attributes. Personal and group identity should not be considered completely independent of one another: one’s individual identity can often only be defined at the level of the group. These identities would have been created most obviously on the basis of the household/farmstead, but also group identities would have 1 I define early Iceland as the Settlement Period plus the Commonwealth Period, i.e. from the Settlement in the ninth century until c. 1264. There is no intention of describing Icelandic social structures here. Descriptions are available elsewhere, cf. Jón Jóhannesson (1974); Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (1999); Gunnar Karlsson (2000); Byock (2001).