Slavery was part of the foundation on which Iceland was built.

When settlers departed from Norway,

many of them picked up slaves from Ireland and the British Isles while en route. DNA analysis has
discovered that up to 50% of female settlers and 20% of male settlers came from Ireland and the UK.

We see very little names of women in early histories of Iceland. Some scholars posit that this is in
part due to a lot of early female settlers having been Irish slaves whose ancestry has been
suppressed.

We see an extreme degree of objectification of female slaves in the sagas. In the saga of the people
of Laxadal, a character purchases a slave woman (Melkorka) for a significant markup because she
cannot sleep, rapes her, and dresses her up in finery. She is later revealed to be an Irish princess, and
gets on poorly with his wife and they fight.
The idea that their ancestor was an Irish princess rather than just some enslaved person would have
been a very attractive fantasy for many Icelanders in the 13th Century, when the sagas of Icelanders
were written. This is pure fantasy – Melkorka is said to be clearly of a more dignified sort than most
slaves, she suits fine clothes and somehow owns gold treasures, and this is used to justify her better
treatment at the hands of her slavers.

In another saga, the wife of a king swaps her ugly and swarthy children with the child of a slave
woman at birth. Her deception comes undone when, after a few years, the slave woman’s child
masquerading as the prince is meek and timid while the kings children masquerading as slave
children and brave and fine young men. A poet immediately figures this out, tells the queen to swap
them back, and the king is rather baffled.
Ordinary slaves, within literature, are pretty consistently depicted as ugly, lazy, and stupid.

Three classes described in Rígsþula. Lords, farmers, and thralls. Thralls are the lowest and least
attractive. It’s not a legal state capable of change, but a rank of person which is static.
Some thrall names from Rígsþula:

Not nice! Also a lot of these features are just sort of what happen to your body after a lifetime of
backbreaking labour.
The society described in Rígsþula is clearly not Iceland, where slavery did not persist for very long,
and seems to have died out by the late 12th Century. Rígsþula also mentions lords, which Iceland
didn’t have. It’s probably Norwegian. That said, life for the lowest stratum of society might not have
been that much better, even if they weren’t slaves.

Literary enslavement and actual enslavement were by no means the same thing.

Literary enslavement and actual enslavement were by no means the same thing.
Literary enslavement and actual enslavement were by no means the same thing.

Thanks to be elite bias in writing and the difficulty of identifying enslaved persons in archaeology,
enslavement remains an under researched element of Old Norse life.

However! There is a bit of archaeological evidence.

Slave collars found at trading ports around Scandinavia and the Viking diaspora (maybe, could also
have been used for livestock):

There are some double burials in Iceland that have been interpreted as the killing of an enslaved
person to accompany their master or mistress into the afterlife. See the Oseberg Ship Burial, in which
two women were buried together.

Slavery has also been evidenced by certain spaces and buildings uncovered in the archaeological
record. We have discovered semi-subterranean buildings (pit houses) with enclosed fires used for
weaving, which we think may have doubled as sleeping places for slaves.

In Helgakviða Hundingsbana we get a glimpse of the afterlife that the Norse envisioned for their
slaves. Hunding (a slave) is forced to wait hand and foot on Helgakviða, the man who killed him, even
in death.
Basic assumptions about who or what something is in Old Norse literature cannot always be taken
for granted. Humans are not always people, and objects are sometimes something slightly more. For
example, weapons often have names and biographies. Alternatively, humans are sometimes just
animate objects. See much of what happens in Egil’s Saga ch.7, in which Egil and his father kill people
who the other likes and essentially no thought is given to it. They become proxies and objects to be
exploited by father and son in their feud against each other. They’re just valued objects.