His grandfather’s grandfather had the land.
The odalborn man inherits land from his grandfather’s grandfather. The son of an odalman who claims odal as odal by inheritance counts four or five forefathers who had the land before him.
In Gulathing law c. 266 is a description of the mode of settling a claim as to land. It describes the sitting of the open-air court, from which both bauggildsmen and nefgildsmen and relations by marriage of the claimant are excluded as ineligible, the calling of witnesses all to be odalborn men of the same fylki as that in which the land lies, and so on. The validity of the claim is made to rest according to this statement upon the ability to count up five forefathers who have possessed that land, while the sixth possessed it both by ownership and by odal.
Þeir scolo telia til langfeðra sinna .v. er átt hava, en sá hinn sétti er bæðe átte at eign oc at óðrle.
(266.) They [the men who claim odal] shall count five of their forefathers who have owned [the land] and the sixth having it both in ownership and odal.
The odalmen were of full kindred on the land.
If, then, at the time of the laws we look at the class of landowners who were prominent as odalmen or haulds—typical men with wergelds originally of 100 cows—they were not only men of full kindred whose full pedigree of freedom went back the necessary nine generations, but their grandfather’s grandfather must have possessed the land. The sixth generation of owners were the first to hold land both in ownership and odal.
The steps in the rank of Norse aristocracy were marked, therefore, as in the case of the more dependent class, by the number of the generations of ancestors through whom they could claim their landed rights.
The odal land was held by a family and subject to family divisions.
Nor in the case of the odalborn man any more than in the case of the leysing must we look upon the odalman or hauld merely as a detached individual landowner owning his own separate estate like a modern country squire. Such a conception would be far indeed from the truth. It must be remembered that holdings in odal were subject to rules of division. Moreover, indications appear in the laws that the division was not merely one between the heirs of a single holder, but something more like what took place between the group of kinsmen in the case of the Cymric gwely and ‘tir gueliauc.’ How otherwise can this clause be read?