An Icelandic Tale
DNA is a wondrous thing. It tells you things you know, some you don’t, some you would be better off not knowing and even some you would never otherwise have expected. And Icelandic DNA is one of this last group. Because of little additional immigration until very recent times most Icelanders have their family origins amongst the those who first settled the country now some eleven hundred years ago and here comes the rub. Of the male DNA 75% is derived from Scandinavian sources but that does not mean necessarily Scandinavia itself. They could have come via somewhere else but themselves have had forebears from the Nordic countries. But when the female side of that same population is examined less than 38% is Scandinavian. In rough terms it means that for every man of Nordic origin there was only one woman or put another way in an Icelandic village of twenty houses a millennium ago of the families it contained fifteen of the male householders, literally husbands, were Norse, so five were not and of the women in those same houses eight were Norse and twelve not.
Now it might have been that the five non-Norse men were living with non-Norse women but it still meant that seven of the Norse men had imported brides so no more than 40% of the children would have been purely Nordic. And it might have less still. If the non-Nordic men had all married Nordic women that figure falls to 15%, which is fine if the best possible inter-racial relations are desired but not so good if celebration of “Vikingness”, were there such a word, was the aim. In fact you might be almost just well be celebrating Bardic poetry, playing the pipes and, ruling out the much later hockey, running around a field trying to hit with sticks a small ball into or more likely over a small goal for, from the same DNA sampling, the non-Snandinavian origins, female and male alike, are just as clear. They are Scotland and Ireland. They are Celtic. And therein hangs a tale of a remarkable woman and an emigration, some might call it a flight, of literally epic or at least “sagaic” proportions.
The story, at least for our purposes, begins somewhere around the beginning of the 9th Century AD as the tribal areas of western, coastal Scandinavia began to coalesce into the bulk of the country we now know as Norway. The unification was done through marriage and force and as with all changes there would be winners and losers but with the process of separating the one from the other taking two hundred years, in roughly two periods of one hundred years each.
In fact the history of the first period is surprisingly well, if far from precisely documented in the sagas. And at its the crux was a rolling, south-westward and westward extension of control by leaders of war-bands and tribal chiefs, who progressively morphed into kings, who by the end 9th century were themselves subsumed into a single king, Harald Fairhair, who is said to have reigned from roughly 870 AD to 930 AD. More precisely he is thought to have come to the full throne in about 872 AD and died in about 933 AD, to have been born in Eastern Norway, passed away aged perhaps in his early eighties in Rogaland, in Western Norway with modern Stavanger at its centre and to have been buried in Rogaland’s north close to Haugesund.
The event that consolidated Harald Fairhair’s supremacy was the Battle of Hafrsfjord close to Stavanger in about 870 AD, some say 868 AD, some 872 AD itself, with those defeated being Eirik of Hordaland, whom was killed, and Kjotve the Rich of Agder, who fled and whose son also perished. Hordaland is the kingdom based around Bergen and just to the north of Rogaland, and Agder the kingdom based around Kristiansand immediately to its south and south-east. It meant that Harald thereafter had control of all of western Norway’s then habitable area and was able to put pressure on any existing and potential opposition, some of whom like Kjotve chose exile, perhaps following others, an earlier wave still from Norway but further east around Oslofjord and caused by similar consolidation at the beginning of the 9th Century, so in Harald’s father’s, grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s generations.
With boat-building advances making possible sea-crossing rather than simply coastal-hopping, these earlier pioneers had probably already begun the settlement, if marginally, of what are now the British Isles. It had began in the far north with Shetland, with good winds a day’s sail from Norway’s south-western tip. Archaeology now indicates that Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland Isles, had Norse living on it as early as the middle of the 7th Century. Perhaps by 700 AD they were already on Orkney and, contrary to perceived wisdoms, there is no evidence of violent invasion. That may be because there was no-one able to record it or simply because the numbers of new arrivals was initially low and there was space. On both archipelagos the incomers were able to fit between the indigenous inhabitants, of whom there were probably but not necessarily some, if few. It seems they were there certainly until the 3rd Century, perhaps to the 5th, but who knows what the known climate cooling of the latter period finally did to populations.
And it was probably from Orkney that further settlement of Britain, specifically northern Scotland and the Western Isles, the Southern Isles in Norse, and more importantly that of much more attractive Ireland took place, be it by those in the first wave pushing or pushed onwards or by West Norwegians themselves. Raids began on Ireland in 795 AD, noticeably before those on Scots Iona and two summers after the first recorded raid of all in the British Isles on Lindisfarne in 793 AD. There was a landing in 787 AD by Dorchester that had resulted in the killing by probably Norse of a local official but it seems more accident than attack. But when the raids proper came they could only have taken place from the north, i.e. from Shetland and Orkney, which in the case of Ireland would presumably have meant passage through the calmer waters of The Minch, with the Western Isles to starboard not port. And what there was on the Isles seems to have been much the same as would have been found on the Northern Isles, harsh conditions and some but few native inhabitants and in the same way that settlement would have taken place in the far north it would have been repeated on parts of the Hebrides the first half of the 9th Century, in small numbers, with, if anything, more space still, and centred, it is suggested, on Barra.
Permanent settlement in Ireland began in about 837 AD, which in terms suggests at least Hebridean summer bases being set up at sometime in the previous forty years, quite possibly as early as 800 AD, if the dates of the sackings of Iona in 795 AD, allowing time for restoration again in 802 AD and once more in 806 AD are to be believed. The foundation of what we now know as Dublin, said to by some to have been by force but equally possibly by filling a space in deeper water below the Gaelic Irish settlement at Atha Cliath at the first ford up-river, “atha” meaning ford, must have followed soon enough. A Norse stronghold was built there on the Black Pool but it was taken by the Irish at some point between 845 and 849 AD, the then Norse leader, Thorgest, having previously been defeated, captured and killed. However, a second Norse group returned and in 853 AD succeeded in recapturing what had been with three brothers, Olaf, in Dublin itself, Ivar on the Shannon in the west and Asi, Amlaib, Imar and Auisle, sharing leadership.
Norse control of Dublin would continue until 902 AD, when it was once more taken by the Irish and critically would not be reimposed until 914 AD. However, in the meantime two things had happened. The first was that Harald Fairhair sought to extend his control beyond Norway’s shores, explicitly to those who had fled his reaches and repercussions. The second was the birth of a child.
With regard to the first event in about 875 AD a Fairhair acolyte was tasked tasked with taking control of the Shetlands and Orkneys on his behalf. The given reason was raids mounted back from the islands to Norway by ex-opponents, feasible from both archipelagos. But he may have tried to extend his reach further, to the Hebrides and even Ireland and, whilst this may well have been true, based on Hebridean, perhaps Manx and Hebridean involvement, the real reason may actually have been financial, the desire to tax not just two but three, four even five Norse and other ex-patriot populations. The acolyte was Ragnvald, Earl of More, More being the region to the immediate north of Rogaland. Resistance seems to have been minimal. Indeed from the Hebrides in particular there seems to have been an attitude of waiting for the annoyance to go away. Moreover, the region did not impress in spite of specifically the Northern Isles being granted to Ragnvald as reward. He remained in Norway but instead gave them to his brother, Sigurd, who duly arrived.
With regard to the second event, the child, a girl, she was born probably in the 830s and quite possibly though not necessarily in Norway. Her father was Ketil Flatnose, a minor chief also from More og Romsdal, so Norse, her mother from Ringerike by Oslo, so Viking but not necessarily Norse, a distinction I look at elsewhere, and she herself was married off at some point around 850 AD to Olaf of Dublin not from Norway itself but via the Hebrides, where her father seems to have moved and become the local leader with two versions of the how and why.
The first might best be seen initially as an extension of Sigurd’s installation in the Northern Isles. In the quelling of raiders from the Shetlands and Orkneys and the placement of Sigurd there the process of inclusion of the Hebrides, perhaps of the Isle of Man and even beyond might have been assumed. But once Fairhair’s enforcers had withdrawn previous practices seem to have resumed and Ketil is perhaps best seen as a second but more minor Ragnvald, sent to reimpose control. He seems, however, to “have gone somewhat native”. He did not send tribute back to Harald, perhaps because in a region where Norse settlement must have been sparse and marginal there was not much to send, but as a result, in complete contrast to Ragnvald, Ketil’s lands at home were forfeited and his sons exiled.
The second and frankly the more chronologically likely is Flatnose was of an earlier generation, more likely two, was already installed somewhere in Nordic Scotland, had married his daughter off for strategic reasons to Dublin and, given girls were married off young, shortly after it foundation and was dealing with the Fairhair intervention as best he could with the aim of minimising its impact. Either way the situation was therefore that soon after 875 AD both the Northern and Isles were notionally under Norse control but with the former remaining loyal to the motherland, the latter not, and Norse settlement in Ireland finally stable even expansive but also largely independent of Norway.
However, it is not to say that there was was not continuing interaction between the Northern and Western Isles. Sigurd would control the former for about twenty years, a period that would see the expansion of some of that same jurisdiction perhaps not into the latter but certainly across the Pentland Firth onto the Scottish mainland and considerable extension across the northern moors and hill southwards, the military credit for much of which is given to a certain Thorstein the Red, the son of Olaf of Dublin and his Norwegian cum Hebridean wife, Unn. In other words said Thorstein was the son of the aforesaid girl-child, who would later become known as Aud-the-Deep-Minded, and therefore the grandson of Hebridean Ketil.
Olaf of Dublin, who was known to have raided into Scotland on several occasions disappears in or about 871 AD. One version says that he returned to Vestfold, in modern Norway but by Oslo, to help his father militarily in a dispute. That, however, seems to suggest that again he was not Norse but Viking and leaves the question of why his wife and son, still probably only a very young man as he was one of six children with five sisters with no indication of order by age, did not go with him. The alternative is, as reported, that he died in battle in Scotland against the Picts at much the same time. In fact it matters not but, as Ivar, brother-in-law and uncle respectively replaced their husband and father, it did result in Aud and Thorstein returning to North Scotland, perhaps the Hebrides in particular, where Aud clearly was and remained in what was normally a man’s world a figure of some significance.
Now it may have been that Aud and Thorstein’s departure from Ireland was not immediate and was actually defensive. An Oistin was nominally king of Dublin from 873 AD for two years, dying at age twenty-four or twenty-five and he is said to have been Thorstein’s elder brother. At the time, probably that of the Fairhair intervention, given the supposed date of his mother’s birth, Thorstein himself may perhaps have been little more than sixteen years old, perhaps less and his situation perilous. His uncle, Auisle, is said in 867 AD to have been killed by his brothers, Thorstein’s father, Olaf, and Ivar. Then Olaf was gone in 871 AD and Ivar himself is thought to have died fighting in Scotland in 873/4 AD, which makes the inheriting of Dublin by Oistin about then feasible, as would be conflict with Barid, son of Ivar, Oistin's death as reported in 875 AD and then Barid’s replacement of him.
Such events would certainly provide a reason, under the possible threat of death of either or both at the hand of Barid, for the departure of Thorstein and his mother from Dublin to refuge in the Hebrides and, as Thorstein matured, his emergence, based on status, as an important figure in northern Scotland, especially militarily. Much of the extension of Sigurd’s control from the Orkney’s onto the mainland can easily to be put down to campaign successes attributable as much to Thorstein as to him. Control was gained probably by Sigurd himself from the north over large tracts of land seemingly westwards via Durness to Cape Wrath, southward to the Dornoch Firth, south to today’s Glen Oykel, west-southwest to Laxford and south-west to Coigach and, again probably, from the south by Thorstein in Argyll and Bute, Mull and Jura, northern Skye, the Great Glen and Wester Ross. The evidence is in part based on place-names, Durness, Laxford itself, Ullapool, Reiff amongst others and in part also on the communication network by horse posited by Dr. Barbara Crawford as having been set up across the whole region. There there are two particular place-names that she noticed are replicated. They are variants of Rosehall and Langwell, the former have nothing to do with roses or halls and the latter with water-wells. In fact the “wells” in the latter names are an incorrect anglisation of “vollr”, the Norse for field so “langwell” is “long field”, or typically a place where horse feed would be grown and “rosehall” is “rossal”, “rostall” or “ristol”, otherwise “hross-stall”, with “hross” being one of three words for horse, the others being “hestr” and “marr”, mare, and “stal” being stall or stable, in other words a place where horses were kept. And together they, Rosehalls and Langwells seem to form from in the north-east in Caithness to in the south-west in Wester Ross and Isle Ristol, only an island in very recent times and then hardly so, a network of equine relay points allowing rather than sailing around what could be a dangerous coast land travel on horseback in stages of fifteen to twenty-five miles per day depending on terrain. And just as Isle Ristol would have been the point to transfer from horse to boat to cross to Lewis so the outlying Russel and Rassal by Kishorn would be the launching-point for Skye and more Russels and Rassals beyond. In fact the staging posts perhaps can be seen not just as strategic links between Sigurd's and Thorstein's territories but also as the southern and western markers of the borders of mainland Norse Scotland with Glen Oykel and Dornoch as its Sigurd control south-western border and southern capital capital, the addition of the Black Isle and part of the Moray Firth as Norse implantations, and my Coigach peninsula and Kishorn as interchanges between Thorstein-conquered mainland and the family-controlled Nordic Isles.
That is until Thorstein’s death in about 888 AD so perhaps only in his thirties, even early thirties, and in curious circumstances as there were with regard to subsequent death in about 892 AD of Sigurd, at twice his age. Sigurd seems with others to have crossed the River Oykel to take on Mel Brigte, the Pictish leader of the territory south of it. And they were successful. Mael Brigte was killed and as was the way then his head cut-off. But as Sigurd returned to Norse territory with the head tied to his saddle the Pict’s prominent teeth scratched causing blood-poisoning, from which Sigurd died and was buried the howe that still bears his name on the north, so the Norse, side of the Dornoch Firth. As for Thorstein he is said to have been betrayed and killed by, as reported in the Irish annals, “his own people” with no elaboration as to whether they were literally Hebrideans, Norse or other Nordic. However, there seems little motive for the Hebrideans to have done the deed, which leaves two possibilities.
The first is that Sigurd or those close to an ageing Sigurd and with an eye on a future without him saw Thorstein as a rival for control of all North Scotland and had him assassinated. Yet for Sigurd himself any gain would also prove to be literally short-lived. Without Thorstein to do his fighting he had to do it himself, with fatal consequences.
The second is that in distant Dublin the ruling descendants of his Uncle Ivar thought that with a reputation enhanced by Scottish success Thorstein might think of reviving claims to his father’s previous Irish dominions and so they arranged the same. It may even have been a bit of a joint-effort. However, whatever the truth it was the reaction of his mother, and a relatively rapid reaction at that, which remains both the most decisive, perhaps fearful for her wider family, and intriguing, with on the one hand no return to Ireland and on the other clear wariness of Orkney.
Aud-the-Deep-Minded ordered the construction of small number, one, perhaps two, of sea-going ships. Where they were built is unknown but they would have required a good supply of high-quality timber so on what we see there today the Hebrides seem unlikely. But the building on her orders also was to be kept secret, from whom is not stated but the Earl of Orkney the number-one candidate., which also suggests it could not take place on the East coast of the mainland, where, whilst Norse were already embedded, probably already exploiting timber resources, wood supply in fact being suggested as one of the principle drivers of Norse expansion south with neither the Northern Isles or Caithness blessed with abundance, The Earl also had reach. That leaves the West Coast within but away from the tentacles of the Langwell/Rossal trails to Coigach and Kishorn certainly so north of present-day Lochinver, in the Loch Brooms, by Gairloch or in Torridon.
And that would certainly fit in with what Aud was to do next. In the new boat(s) she sailed to Caithness there marrying off Groa, one of Thorstein’s daughters and her grand-daughters, to the Mormaer. It was an interesting political move as he was not Norse but the Pictish leader. Indeed it was more one of defiance, the creation of an Hiberno-Norse dynastic rival to the purely Norse one just across the water. Only a generation later would the two families seem to be integrated, even reconciled, with the marriage of Groa’s daughter to the Orkney Earl four down the chronological chain. Moreover, Aud did not then return to the Hebrides but instead set out northwards to the already Nordic-occupied Faeroes, where another of Thorstein’s daughters was married off, and again did not retrace but continued on.
There were then only two places she could then go. The first was back to Norway, which seems to be more retreat than return, or to a certainly known and largely empty Iceland. That is not to say that it was completely uninhabited. It had probably been settled as much as perhaps three hundred years earlier by a small number of Irish, Christian clergy seeking contemplative solitude, the Church reaching Ireland from 431 AD. And much more recently there had been Nordic exploration and some additional settlement including some of Aud’s siblings, who had already perhaps decided on flight rather than fight, And this is critical because knowledge of what Iceland offered must have reached her ears both via the family and through religious contacts, not least because unlike her sisters and still the majority of her people she had long renounced Paganism and converted to Irish Christianity.
The emigration of Aud, her followers and their slaves is said to have taken place at some point in the last decade of the 8th Century. Quite when is not known, although there is a preferred window. On his death Sigurd had been succeeded by his son, Guthorm, who lasted just a year, seems to have had no issue, at which point the leadership reverted to the man in original receipt of the Orcadian land-grant, Rognvald. He sent Hallad, one of his legitimate sons to fill the vacancy, but he after perhaps two years decided it was not for him and returned to Norway. Somewhat at a loss Rognvald then seems in about 895 AD to have had little choice but then to send an illegitimate son, Einar, in his stead, who quickly seems to have made his mark. At the same time in Dublin there was strife. The Ivar dynasty continued to rule but with much chopping and changing and under some pressure, possibly external. It seemed from about the time of Thorstein’s death Dublin had become not a place to return to and Scotland’s Norse mainland and Northern Isles with the arrival of Einar with his Rognvald and therefore Finehair affiliations equally unsympathetic, especially for those who were Nordic but not Norse or only Norse in part. Moreover, as a Christian in a still pagan world and a woman in a man’s one without the protection of a powerful father, thought to have died about 880 AD and her once powerful son deceased, the pressures on Aud must have been great and immediate. Why else would a by-now sixty-odd-year old woman decide to up sticks and go out into what was largely unknown, having allied herself maritally to Caithness’s Pictish, countervailing power to probably Einar, arriving mid-decade, and, should it all have gone wrong and she had to retreat south once more, similarly by marriage seemingly putting in place a Faeroese second backstop. In fact the Faeroes were the ideal backstop. They too had been first settled by Irish monks but again probably only for a short period before, perhaps 825 AD, the islands became pre-Iceland a place of refuge for earlier Nordic and Norse.
Thus, in the genetic make-up of the population of the Faeroes the difference in origin of male and female DNA is, if anything, greater still than Iceland. The male is more Norse and the female more Celtic, which suggests either that there were amongst the islands’ early settlers fewer females coming from Scandinavia and also not the same proportion of male Celts from Scotland and/or Ireland, were they slaves, bondsmen or freemen, or alternatively the arrivals were already mixed-race Hiberno-Norse, or more accurately Celto-Norse, aka Gall-Gael.
Indeed the odds seem to be on the latter not least because the person said to have been the first non-religious Faeroe Islander, Grimr Kamban, bore a name that is precisely both, the first name Norse and the second Celtic. *Cam(b)” is even in modern Gaelic the word for “crooked” or “bent” in the physical sense. Campbell, Caimbeul” is “crooked mouth”. Cameron, “Camshron” “bent-nose”. Moreover, his arrival date on the islands, said to be 825 AD, might also be indicative. There had already been some Nordic activity in the region and Norse activity in England and particularly in Scotland and Ireland is known to have begun in the last years of the 8th Century. If, as likely was the case, children were a product that initial mixed-race generation would in 825 AD have just been reaching maturity, might have found themselves potentially not wanted by either Norse or Gael socially and therefore been on the look for somewhere away from both to make a home. The inhabited Hebrides might have been a possibility, Shetland almost certainly Norse and impossible, and Orkney quite probably already taken and also pure or near-pure Norse, making the wild but hardly inhabited Faeroes a best option.
And this thesis is not contradicted by what is known or surmised about the further, early settlement history of the Faeroes. It took place from the 870s AD, is said to have been by Norse fleeing from the advances of Harold and that may have been so but it would seem that few would have come directly. And the reason is again the preponderance of Celtic female DNA. Crudely put, even if no previous racial mixing were assumed, if Faeroese Celt married Faeroese Celt only two of the remaining nine in ten Faroese Norse men had Norse wives. The other seven had Celtic wives and, as it seems unlikely the women would have already been on the islands in expectation, they must have been “acquired” en route. In fact it suggests the possibility that a maximum of only two in ten, a fifth of the initial Faeroese arrived directly from Scandinavia, whether fleeing Fairhair or not, although there is evidence they did come from Hordaland, Sogn and Rogaland suggesting flight, and the rest, Nordic, mixed-race or mixed-marriage couples came, perhaps also fled, from Scotland and Ireland. And they came, if the example of Iceland is to followed, over no more than the century from Grimr Kamban.
Al of which now takes us neatly to those, who became Iceland’s first permanent settlers as opposed to perhaps more transient men of religion. Shortly after Grimr Kamban settled there a Norwegian from Agder, so again not strictly Norse, sailing to the Faeroes drifted off course and landed in Eastern Iceland before retracing his steps. Then in the early 860’s a Gardar Savarsson and crew were blown off course, it is said, in the Pentland Firth. They would have been neither the first or the last but the storm is reported to have carried his boot north to land on the south-east and then the west coast of the island. Whether the report is entirely precise is slightly questionable. He may well have been further westward when the storm struck, not least because he was said to be sailing from Zealand, so east of Jutland, to the Hebrides. Indeed Cape Wrath seems more likely, the Faeroes already by-passed and Iceland the next, in fact the only landfall. And the reason for the journey to the Hebrides is also interesting. His wife was from there, may also have been Norse but more likely Gael or even Gall-Gael, was presumably living on the islands still, with him returning from a trip to the “Old Country” to his home in the “colonies”.
In fact Savarsson also did not remain in Iceland, at least not long-term. Having touched land in the south-east of the island he sailed west and north, before building himself a house at Husavik to be able to overwinter, the next summer continued east-wards following much of the coast and in doing so showing that the new land was an island before, somewhat belatedly, heading homeward. Goodness knows what his wife was thinking. However, one of his men, a Nattfari, remained with two slaves, a man and a woman, from where is unknown, the three seemingly becoming the country’s first permanent residents. However, once back at home Savarsson clearly told of his adventures because in 868 AD, so within the decade, a Hrafna-Floki Vilgarson took himself, his family, others and cattle from Western Norway, so Norse, to Shetland, then the Faeroes and finally to Western Iceland. But again he did not stay, at least initially. He went back to Norway before later returning, settling this time not where he first landed at Vatnsflordur but further south at Flokadalur and living out the rest of his life on the island, to which he is said to have first given the name Island, Iceland in English.
Meanwhile or rather at about the same time Hrollaug, one of the legitimate sons of the same Rognvald, who had been granted the Earldom of Orkney, another of whom but by a different mother is said effectively to have founded Normandy, also took himself to the new land. There he is said to have moved around a bit but finally settled, to have remained loyal to Harald Fairhair but curiously never went back to Norway.
And then in 874 there was Ingolfr Arnarson. He was born in Norway on Sunnfjord north of Bergen, so another Norse, from where, because of a blood feud it is said, he set sail for Iceland with his Norse wife and step-brother and notably slaves, specifically Irish slaves. Indeed legend has it that his step-brother was because of ill-treatment killed by those self-same slaves, who fled to the Vestmann Islands, Westman being Norse for Irish, whilst Ingolfr himself with his family, having over-wintered in the North-west and returned to Norway, finally permanently settled in West Iceland in and around what we today call Reykjavik. And it was his son, Torstein, who in about 930 AD would be a founder of Iceland’s parliament.
It then seems, that Ingolfr Arnarson return was the precursor of what can only be described as a rush, if not a too numerous one, with, before all useable land had been claimed, perhaps 1,500 settlements and farms and some 3,500 new arrivals over little more than sixty years. It was one, of which Aud the Deep-Minded’s arrival a generation later was only a part, if an important one. It is thought that her party perhaps consisted by then of a single boat, on which were twenty, perhaps twenty-three, men with allegiance to her and to which have to be added slaves. However, Aud had not come without some fore-knowledge. According to the Laxdale Saga two of her brothers, Bjorn and Helgi, and a sister, Thorunn, with part-Irish, so Hiberno-Norse, brother-in-law, another Helgi, whose sister is said to have been Aud’s son, Thorstein’s, wife, had already left Norway directly for Iceland and were already settled in much the same area as Aud was said literally to have struck land and also in the north. Her brother, Helgi, had settled on the headland in between Hvallfjord and Kollafjord, north of Reykjavik. Bjorn on the south side of Breidafjordur in West Iceland and mixed-race brother-in-law, Helgi, some distance away on the north coast at what he, as a Christian, an Irish Christian, who was known, nevertheless, to invoke Odin and Thor, called Kristnes, Christ’s Headland.
And it was this at least notional Christianity that also seems to have played a prominent part in Aud’s impact on her new home. Not just she but presumably her Celtic slaves and the Gaelic and other Gall-Gael womenfolk, probably Christian all, arrived en block and just a little over a century before the new land began the process to official conversion. Moreover, on settlement after an over-winter and after she marries off another of her mixed-race, possibly Christian grand-daughters, Thorstein’s daughters to one of the most senior of the men, Dala-Koll, who had come with her from Scotland, granting him land in lower Laxardal, she seems to have begun the process of changing the status of a good number of her slaves to freed-men. It was a social position between what they had been and free-born. She also granted them land again on Breidafjordur but north of Reykjavik, an area not unlike the Hebrides, with she then said to have laid claim to territory at Hvammur inland at the head of the same inlet. And, presumably, with Celtic freed-men went at least some Celtic women with the comparatively rapid, Christian conversion of the new land perhaps an indication of the strength of the continuing, albeit underlying Celtic influence and therefore by definition predominately female influence, in Icelandic culture to this day. In the Icelandic language there are obvious words of Gaelic origin and even in contemporary Icelandic law there are traces of Irish Brahon Law, particularly with regard to women’s rights.
And the process of marrying off the remaining grand-children continued. Thorstein had had six surviving daughters, four of whom had come to Iceland and seem to have remained. Dala-Koll would die relatively early and Thorgerd, his wife, leave for Norway, there to remarry, but at some point return. It meant that one grandchild remained, a grandson, Olaf Feilan, “feilan” itself meaning, note in Irish, “little wolf”, who, it is said to have married Alfis with the soubriquet “of Barra”, which seems to point to her having Nordic, Celtic or mixed connections to the Hebridean island. Moreover, the wedding date is perhaps the best indication of that of Aud’s death with the date of 920 AD suggested elsewhere perhaps a little late.
She was to draw her last breath during the three days of celebration following the, presumably Christian, nuptials. Furthermore, if Olaf was Thorstein’s last child, then it is likely he would have been born somewhere around his father’s death, about 888 AD. In addition he would probably have married in his early 20s, which results in an earlier date of 910-915 AD, by which time Aud would have been able to marry off a grandchild every couple of years and been about eighty on her passing.
And just one more small aside that further emphasises just how Celtic Iceland’s people are. On Olaf Feilan’s death in about 940 AD his nephew, Hoskuld Dala-Kollson, so his elder sister’s boy, named his newly-born, illegitimate son after him. The boy would grow up to be a major landowner and political figure in Iceland despite the fact that his mother, Melkorka, had been not just a concubine but Irish.