W.A.Craigie and the lack of Gaelic names in Landnáma

In the article ‘Gaelic words and names in the Icelandic Sagas‘ from

1897 W.A. Craigie states: ‘The result is that of the three or four

thousand names given in Landnáma there are not two percent of

Gaelic ones. All this makes it very improbable that any extensive

knowledge of Irish affairs should have been handed down to the

Icelanders of Ari’s time, and what we do get, we may accept with all

thankfulness.’ This short essay re-evaluates Craigie’s statement from

a point of view based on latest research.

In his almost 120 years old article, W.A. Craigie claims that at the time the

Landnámabók was written, it is very improbable that Icelanders could have had an

extensive knowledge of „Irish affairs‟. He proves his claim with the argument that not

even two percent of the names in Landnámabók are of Gaelic origin (Craigie 1897a).

However, since the writing of Craigie‟s article, a lot of new research on Icelandic-Irish

relations has opened up totally new perspectives. Therefore, today scholars look at

the material Landnáma provides very differently, which I will explain in the following

essay. I will also present some reasons why Craigie might have arrived at his

conclusion even though it is possible to interpret the material very differently.

Upon assessing this statement, it is first of all important to acknowledge the historic

facts behind it as far as possible: Contrary to earlier thought, it has been shown

through the DNA analyses by Agnar Helgason et al. in recent decades that a

considerable amount of the first Icelandic settlers were of Gaelic origin (Helgason et

al. 2001, 731-735). This view is also supported by an analysis of Landnámabók by

Jón Steffensen in the 1970es where he shows that while the majority of male,

landowning settlers was probably indeed of Norse origin, it can by no means have

been to such an extent as previous analyses of the text suggested. In contrast to

previous scholars, he interpreted any doubtful mentions in favour of a Gaelic origin

and not of a Norse origin. He also calculated percentages of Gaelic wives and slaves

in – who often received new, Norse names by their masters – and arrived at the

conclusion that up to 40% of the first Icelandic settlers were of Gaelic origin

(Sigurðsson 2000, 27-29). Now when holding these results against the statement by

Craigie, one must ask a few questions from it: Is it really likely that Icelanders forgot

W.A. Craigie and the lack of Gaelic names in Landnáma Andrea Blendl, UHI

2

about their extensive Gaelic roots within such a short timespan? And - seeing that the

information Landnáma gives does not seem to reflect an accurate picture of the

ethnic mixture of early Icelandic settlers – why was the settlement portrayed in such a

Norse-centric way?

When judging an author‟s statement, it is always important to know the context in

which he was writing. Craigie was influenced by the predominant opinion of his

contemporaries that „the Celts are invariably an influenced rather than an influential

people‟ (Wawn 2000, 369). This means that Craigie might not have been willing to

interpret the material from Landnáma in any way which showed a considerable,

lasting Gaelic influence on Icelandic society.

In addition, it is also worth noting that while Craigie did know some Gaelic, his

specialism was in Old Norse-Icelandic, Danish and English (Aitken 2004). Therefore,

it is thinkable that he might have missed Gaelic traces in his lexical research, simply

due to being unable to identify Gaelic roots and attributing them to Norse names

instead.

In his essay „The Gaels in Iceland‟, also from 1897, Craigie even is extremely

dismissive of the idea of a strong Gaelic influence in the early settlement of Iceland:

“It is the fashion of the day to trace Celtic influence in every quarter where

there is the faintest probability of the claim being allowed. To establish the

possible presence of Celtic blood in the race, or in the individual, is apparently

regarded as settling the question, though it has yet to be shown why the Celtic

element should persist and prevail over other, stronger characteristics.”

(Craigie 1897b, 247).

In this statement three things become obvious: Firstly, Craigie seems to believe in

the inferiority of the “Celtic blood”. Secondly, Craigie is strongly against any claim of

Gaelic influence in Iceland, and thirdly, he has his mind firmly set on the idea that,

with the Gaels being an inferior race, their influence would not persist since other

characteristics, being Norse, must be stronger and basically suffocate the Gaelic

heritage. It is quite obvious that any scholar expressing such strong ideas will not

approach an original source objectively and with an open mind. Therefore, Craigie

has his conclusions, namely that Landnáma reflects a loss of knowledge about the

Icelanders‟ Gaelic ancestry, already predetermined when studying the material. This


3

makes it possible that he read the text with a certain selectivity and discovered only

what he had his mind already set on.

Craigie seems to identify as the only reason for the lack of Gaelic names in

Landnáma the fact that Icelanders must have largely forgotten about their, anyways

minuscule, Gaelic ancestry about 200 years after the settlement age. However, when

looking at the writing process and textual history of Landnáma, there might be

another option: Actually, it seems possible that the Gaelic elements present during

the settlement age were deliberately left out by the compilers of Landnámabók. This

idea becomes even more likely when looking at the introduction to Landnámabók in

the medieval Thórdarbók manuscript:

“People often say that writing about the settlements is irrelevant learning, but

we think we can better meet the criticism of foreigners when they accuse us of

being descended from slaves or scoundrels, if we know for certain the truth

about our ancestry.” (Landnámabók 2006, 7).

It is quite obvious that a writer who states such an intention would not mind leaving

out some Gaelic ancestry in order to prove his point, even in case he was well aware

of the respective Gaelic roots.

Amongst scholars, the current consensus is that Landnámabók was written in order

to prove that the Icelandic families who held power in 12th century Iceland had indeed

rightful claims to their land (Roesdahl 1998, 266-7), and obviously such claims could

not have arisen had their ancestors come not as noble, freedom-loving Vikings from

Norway but rather as Gaelic slaves or farmhands, maybe not even quite voluntarily.

Therefore, in my opinion, it is absolutely conceivable that even though at the time of

writing, Icelanders knew about their Gaelic roots, they doctored their genealogies to

be more “Norse”. One fact that proves how much doctoring was at bay in the

manuscript are the considerable discrepancies between the different version of the

text, which reflect changes in Icelandic society and claims to land during the 12th and

13th centuries (Rafnsson 2008, 121-122). This shows that Landnáma was never

regarded as a static work but could be amended and altered depending on the

agenda of whoever was copying a manuscript. If this was possible with later versions,

certainly it was just as possible to fit the original genealogies to the author‟s agenda.


4

When looking at Landnámabók and its textual history, a comparison with

Íslendingabók can be helpful, as the two texts cover similar periods and processes

and Ari the Learned, author of the latter, is even named as a co-author of the original

Landnámabók in the manuscript Hauksbók from the 13th century (Landnámabók

2006, 3-6). When he compiled Íslendingabók, Ari relied on information from

witnesses of the settlement era, which had been transmitted orally for two centuries.

Such oral transmission of genealogies is known from cultures all over the world and

was prevalent in early Medieval Europe, for example also in Ireland. The problem

with these non-literate genealogies is that they are somewhat fluid and are often

adapted to new circumstances. Even in cases where a written form exists, ongoing

oral transmission may persist and the two versions might develop significant

differences over the generations (Thornton 1998, 85-6). In the case of Landnáma,

where none of the original manuscripts is preserved, this means that later editors

compiling the manuscripts which have been preserved might have had access to oral

versions of the genealogies as well – and these versions might have contained

significant differences to the original Landnámabók. However, this fact leaves room

for the hypothesis that at the time of Ari the Learned, there might have been more

knowledge about the „Irish Affairs‟ contained in the original Landnámabók than the

manuscripts which have survived until today would suggest.

Generally when discussing Landnámabók, one must always remember that the text

does not portray the first settlers exactly in the way they were remembered but

instead “in a manner very typical of oral cultures describes the first settlers in every

firth and every valley as the present occupants wanted them remembered, and in the

way that best suited their purposes, at the time.” (Sigurðsson 2000, XVII – emphasis

added). So while Craigie in his statement apparently looks at the material from

Landnáma as a true account of what people at Ari‟s time knew about their ancestry, it

is also possible to think of it more as an account of what people during that period

wanted as their ancestry, maybe because they felt it would help their land claims or

their political standing in society. So indeed, Landnáma tells more about Icelandic

feeling towards Gaelic roots in the 12th century than one might consider at the first

reading: Consciously deciding to not reveal a Gaelic ancestor to the writer of a

genealogy makes a very strong statement about the preference of Norse roots at the

time – however, it does not prove that the informants of the scribes were not still well

aware of their true ancestry.


5

Another important point when thinking about the prevalence of Norse names in

Landnámabók is the exact location where it was compiled. When looking at Icelandic

place names of Gaelic origins, it seems likely that Gaelic settlement in Iceland was

not evenly spread over the entire country. Clusters of place names with potential

Gaelic roots are found on Reykjanes and more generally in the West of the country

(Friðriksson 2007, 20-21). This makes it likely that in areas with a higher density of

Gaelic ancestry more awareness of these roots would have survived. However, Ari

grew up in Haukadalur in Suðurland (Íslendingabók 2006, X-XI) – which lies at a

considerable distance from the potential centre of Gaelic settlement. In addition, in

Íslendingabók, he traces his own ancestry back to Norwegian royalty (Íslendingabók

2006, XI). This means that indeed, Ari might not have been aware of the extensive

Gaelic roots of some of his contemporaries, even though this knowledge might well

have survived in other regions of Iceland.

The comparison with Íslendingabók also brings another important point to attention:

As Ari states himself, during the writing process his original manuscript was edited

and altered after he showed it to the Icelandic bishops (Íslendingabók 2006, 3).

Among scholars it is thought likely that during the editing process genealogies

concerning foreign ancestry of Icelanders were edited out in order to make it more

Icelandic (Íslendingabók 2006, XII). It therefore seems probable that Landnámabók

was also edited by a superior, for example a bishop, before the manuscript was first

copied and spread. As during the 12th and 13th centuries the Icelandic bishops were

subject to the archbishops of Trondheim and there was a constant power struggle

between the Icelandic church and the Norwegian kings until Iceland finally fell to the

Kings of Norway in 1252 (Orfield 2002, 82), it is likely that the manuscript would have

been edited in a way to convey Icelanders‟ equality with the highest Norwegian

nobility. Any trace of non-Norse roots might have impeded this equality and any claim

of “home rule”. Therefore, the edited version of Landnámabók would have to be

considered more in the light of a political statement, not as a document which reflects

the exact extent of knowledge about the settlement era that had been preserved in

12th century Iceland.

On a more historiographical level, one must take into account that in the statement by

Craigie, two agendas or biases are at play: The one of the original author of

Landnáma and the one of Craigie. However, it is a classical problem in historiography


6

to disentangle biases in original sources if the author is unknown – making it only

possible to present various hypotheses. As Jenkins puts it:

“And this is that no matter how verifiable, how widely acceptable or checkable,

history remains inevitably a personal construct, a manifestation of the

historian‟s perspective as a „narrator‟. Unlike direct memory (itself suspect)

history relies on someone else‟s eyes and voice; we see through an interpreter

who stands between past events and our readings of them.” (Jenkins 2008,

14).

Obviously, when assessing Craigie‟s prespective on Landnáma, one is facing this

dilemma two-fold: First, there is the perspective of a 12th century historian writing

down the text as its narrator two centuries after the events, then there is the

interpretation of Craigie in the late 19th century – both adding their personal bias to it.

Gender also plays a major role in the interpretation of Landnámabók and might even

be another reason for Craigie‟s statement: As Helgason‟s research has shown,

female first generation settlers had a higher percentage of Gaelic roots than males

(Helgason et al. 2001, Helgason et al. 2000). This again means that in a source

dealing with male-dominated aspects like land-ownership and inheritance of land

claims, the roots of the few females mentioned in the text are likely to not be

regarded as important – thus falsifying the picture by emphasizing the roots of the

male settlers. Since a female line with Gaelic roots would not have served as proof

for land claims, this bit of the genealogy might as well be omitted.

One aspect, which has not yet been researched in-depth at all, is the option of

bilingualism of early Icelandic settlers. However, it seems thinkable that with Norse

fathers and Gaelic mothers the second settler generation might have been fluent in

both Gaelic and Norse. It is a well-known feature of modern bilingual societies that

people often use two names, one in each language, and exclusively employ the

names depending on the linguistic context. In cases where one language is a

minority language, often the name in this language serves as a marker of identity

only within this specific community, while in wider contexts and for communication

with speakers of the majority language, exclusively the name in the majority language

is used (Aceto 2002, 577-608). Now if this example is transferred to early Medieval

Iceland, there is the option that, with Landnáma being written in Norse and Gaelic


7

certainly being more of a minority language in the 12th century if any speakers were

remaining, even bilingual people would have used their Norse names – which by no

means signifies a loss of awareness of their other, Gaelic roots. Obviously, with no

single original source written in Gaelic preserved from Iceland, this hypothesis can

never be proved, but the comparison with other bilingual communities makes it

appear at least possible.

Generally, one must ask the question if a quantitative approach, like the one Craigie

seems to favour, is the right means of analysis for Landnáma. Upon taking a more

qualitative approach and evaluating the prominence of people mentioned in the

material, it becomes obvious that some settlers with Gaelic connections do indeed

play important and large roles in the text, for example in the stories about Ari Másson

from Breiðafjörður. In the legends about him, Gaelic myths about an unknown land in

the West might be the base for his reaching the “Land of the White Men” (Sigurðsson

2000, XII). This again makes it seem even less likely that at the time of writing, their

Gaelic link had been largely forgotten about. Thus, it is possible that Craigie arrived

at his verdict partly also due to his use of a method that was not perfectly suitable for

the kind of evaluation he was undertaking.

On the whole, it appears that there is a variety of possible reasons for the low

number of Gaelic names in the material Landnáma provides, some more likely, some

less likely. Probably the true cause lies in an amalgamation of various reasons,

relating to politics, regionalism, language and gender. In fact, in my opinion the idea

that “Irish affairs” had been largely forgotten at the time of Ari is one of the less

probable reasons. Nevertheless, it cannot be fully ruled out with 100% certainty.

In conclusion, when looking at evidence from very different periods and gathered

through various disciplines, it becomes obvious that, while for Craigie at the time he

was conducting his studies Landnáma might indeed only have permitted the idea that

the knowledge about their Gaelic roots would have been lost to Icelanders some

centuries after the settlement, more than a century later there are new perspectives

on the material, thanks to modern scientific methods, which were not available to

Craigie. Therefore, from a 1897 point of view, his statement is perfectly

understandable and certainly he made a point that seemed valid at the time of

writing. Nevertheless, in 2015, Landnámabók needs to be interpreted with all the new

knowledge gathered over the past decades in mind. To me, the low number of Gaelic


8

names in Landnáma is by no means an indication that at Ari‟s time, Icelanders had all

but forgotten their Gaelic roots. In fact, there are various other hypotheses which can

explain sufficiently the apparent lack of Gaelic names in the text.

I have shown that is important to note the probable intentions behind the writing of

Landnámabók in order to fully appreciate the material we are given. It seems likely

that the authors of the text never meant to give accurate genealogies for the

settlement period but rather tried to support political movements and land claims – a

point which Craigie seems not to consider in his analysis.

In one point, however, I absolutely agree with Craigie: We may accept with all

thankfulness what information we are given in the written sources – even if not all of it

should be taken as fact.

[2945 words]


9

Primary sources:

Íslendingabók/Krístni saga. The Book of Icelanders/The Story of the Conversion

(2006). Translated by S.GRØNLIE. London: Viking Society for Northern Research.

Landnámabók. The Book of Settlements. Revised English translation ( 2006).

Translated by H. PÁLSSON and P. EDWARDS. Winnpeg: University of Manitoba

Press.

Secondary sources:

ACETO, M. (2002) Ethnic personal names and multiple identities in Anglophone

Carribbean speech communities in Latin America. Language in Society. 31(04). pp.

577-608.

AITKEN, A.J. (2004) Craigie, Sir William Alexander (1867–1957), rev. Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [online:

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32614, accessed 19 April 2015].

CRAIGIE, W.A. (1897a) Gaelic Words and Names in the Icelandic Sagas, Zeitschrift

für celtische Philologie 1. pp. 439-454.

CRAIGIE, W.A. (1897b) The Gaels in Iceland, Procedings of the Society of

Antiquaries of Scotland. 3 ser. VII. pp. 247-264.

FRIĐRIKSSON, Þ. (2007) Keltnesk örnefni á Reykjanesi og víðar, Faxi 67(1). [online:

http://mitt.is/faxi/Faxi%20mars%202007.pdf, accessed 21 April 2015]. pp. 20-21.

HELGASON, A. et al. (2000) Estimating Scandinavian and Gaelic Ancestry in the

Male Settlers of Iceland. American Journal of Human Genetics 67(3). pp. 697–717.

HELGASON, A. et al. (2001) mtDNA and the Islands of the North Atlantic: Estimating

the Proportions of Norse and Gaelic Ancestry. American Journal of Human Genetics.

68(3). pp. 723-737.

JENKINS, K. (2008) Re-thinking History. Revised Edition. Abingdon: Routledge

Classics.


10

ORFIELD, L.B. (2002) The Growth of Scandinavian Law. London: Oxford University

Press.

RAFNSSON, S. (2008) Die Inseln im Atlantik, in P. SAWYER (ed.) Die Wikinger:

Geschichte und Kultur eines Seefahrervolkes. Hamburg: Nikol Verlag. pp. 120-143.

ROESDAHL, E. (1998) The Vikings. 2nd Revised Edition. London: Penguin Books.

SIGURĐSSON, G. (2000) Gaelic Influence in Iceland: Historical and Literary

Contacts. 2nd Edition. Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press.

THORNTON, D. (1998) Orality, literacy and genealogy in early medieval Ireland and

Wales, in H.PRYCE (ed.). Literacy in Medieval Celtic Societies. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. pp. 83-98.

WAWN, A. (2000) The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19th-

Century Britain. Cambridge: Boydell&Brewer.

W.A.Craigie and the lack of Gaelic names in Landnáma

Documents

Transcript of W.A.Craigie and the lack of Gaelic names in Landnáma