In The Book of Icelanders, the first work on the history of Iceland from the 1120s, its author Ari orgilsson writes about the period around 870 AD, during which he says the first Scandinavian settlers arrived in Iceland:
“At that time, Iceland was covered with forest from the mountains to the coast. At that time there were Christian people here, which the northerners call ‘Papar’. But they eventually left because they didn’t want to live here with heathen people. They left Irish books, bells, and crosiers to show they were Irish” (my translation).
Another Icelandic history, the Book of Conquests (the first surviving version of which dates from the 13th century), echoes Ari’s testimony and also refers to “English books,” which state that there was contact between Iceland and Ireland at the time. It is unclear which books are meant by this.
However, it is known that the Irish monk Dicuil wrote a geographical work entitled De mensura orbis terrae around 825. In this, he mentions an island called Thule, which is a six-day voyage from the north of Britain. This island has always been uninhabited. However, Dicuil also reports that 30 years ago he met some clergymen who stayed on Thule from February 1st to August 1st. They told him that at the time of the summer solstice, it was still so bright at night that you could even pluck lice out of your clothes.
If, as it seems, Iceland is meant by this, there would indeed have been visits by people there before the Scandinavians began to settle. So far, however, no solid evidence of human presence in Iceland before about 871 AD has ever been found. In research, it is therefore mostly assumed that, if they actually existed, these Irish hermits visited Iceland only occasionally and sporadically, and that they had little or no influence on the course of Scandinavian settlement. However, in his recent book Into the Ocean, Kristján Ahronson, a lecturer in archaeology at Bangor University in Wales, presents various types of evidence that people from the British Isles were in Iceland long before the arrival of the Scandinavians.
For example, there are some place names in Southeast Iceland that contain Ari’s ‘Papar’ as an element, such as Papafjörur or the island of Papey. The age of these place names is uncertain, and some researchers suspect that they are only later; they may even have been minted as late as the 12th century and therefore cannot indicate an actual Irish presence in Iceland. Ahronson, on the other hand, thinks it most likely that they date back to the time of the arrival of the first Scandinavians in Iceland and their encounter with ‘Papar’ there.
Central to Ahronson’s argument are about 200 man-made caves, mostly found in southern Iceland, whose exact date of origin and earliest use are largely unknown. Ahronson has studied two of these artificial caves, Kverkarhellir and Seljalandshellar. In the case of Kverkarhellir, he managed to find rock remains from the area in front of the cave, which he interprets as spoil from inside the cave and thus from the time it was formed. No man-made objects or dateable organic material were found in the examined area. But in Iceland, it is often possible to date finds very precisely using layers of volcanic ash since these can be assigned to individual volcanic eruptions. For example, the famous ‘land-taking tephra’ (which is present almost all over Iceland) can be traced back to an eruption in 871 (plus or minus 2 years). No traces of human presence have ever been found below this layer. According to Ahronson, however, some of the material he identifies as cave debris lay so far below the land settlement that it must have been deposited there around AD 800 or even earlier.
Ahronson gains further evidence through a new approach, which he calls “tephra contouring”. The contours of the volcanic ash layers are recorded three-dimensionally, so that conclusions can be drawn about the nature of the surfaces on which the ash fell. Ahronson assumes in his study that without human influence, the landscape near Kverkarhellir would have been overgrown with birch trees. The layer of ash created by the volcanic eruption around 871 should therefore have holes where the tree trunks were. But while another layer of ash, dated 920, contained two circular holes that Ahronson traces back to tree trunks, no such holes were found in the layer from 871. Ahronson concludes from this that at that time there were open grassy areas without any tree cover instead of forests; the forest had apparently been cleared by humans beforehand.
Finally, Ahronson devotes another sub-study to the numerous crosses carved into the walls of said artificial caves, Seljalandshellar and Kverkarhellir, at an unknown date. By comparing the 24 largest of these crosses with similar specimens from the British Isles, he concludes that the carvings found in Icelandic caves show the closest correspondence to early mediaeval crosses found primarily in western Scotland. Therefore, they provided further evidence of connections between Iceland and the British Isles in the 7th and 8th centuries.
Ahronson’s methods are undoubtedly innovative, and the evidence he presents is extremely compelling. If the early dating of the formation of Kverkarhellir can be confirmed, this would indeed provide evidence of human presence well before the beginning of the Norse settlement in Iceland. However, without human artefacts or organic material (e.g., bones from farm animals) being found, it remains uncertain for the time being whether the rock remains documented by Ahronson are actually rubble deposited by people during the construction of the cave. The method of “tephra contouring” also seems promising, but its reliability would have to be confirmed by many other studies before it could be used to draw reasonably certain conclusions about the earliest settlement of Iceland. Ahronson’s own study was based on a single test area of less than 9 square metres, clearly too small to be able to make reliable statements about possible human-caused deforestation of an entire region before 871. The comparison of stone crosses provides interesting clues as to the possible time when the caves were formed, but in this case there can be no question of a reliable date. The book thus provides very interesting new evidence, but by no means proof of human presence in Iceland before settlement began around 871.
Sometimes, it would also be desirable if Ahronson dealt more critically with mediaeval written sources. For example, he repeatedly cites Adam von Bremen’s Hamburg Church History from around 1075 as evidence of the early use of artificial caves in Iceland (pp. 103 and 149). It says that the Icelanders clothed themselves in skins and lived happily ever after in abject poverty in underground caves together with their livestock. Apart from the fact that Adam’s statement clearly refers to the 11th century, not the 9th, 8th, or even 7th, it clearly serves to idealise the Christianity of the Icelanders in Adam’s presence and its expressiveness in relation to their actual living conditions towards zero.
All in all, after reading Ahronson’s book, despite its extremely interesting results, many questions remain unanswered. Assuming that the 200 or so artificial caves in Iceland were actually created by (permanent or temporary) immigrants from the British Isles, how much labour and time would have been invested in them? Wouldn’t this mean that a large number of people would have had to be present in Iceland for an extended period of time—not, as Dicuil suggested, just a few clergymen for just six months? But how could it be explained that with so many people present, no artefacts, graves, or at least bones of livestock that could be clearly traced back to them have yet been found? And if the forests had actually been cleared extensively before 871, why can’t this be proven by pollen analyses (in contrast to clearing from the 870s)? So there seems to be some potential for further research here, and Into the Ocean provides exciting suggestions for this.
