Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.1998, Page 151

Reviews
some of the more venerable Icelandic
scholars as well as some of the more
promising of the younger generation,
in both humanities and natural sci-
ences, lending their voices to asserting
a well known and accepted picture of
the landnám. There is, as a result, very
little original thought in this volume,
and next to nothing which had not
appeared elsewhere by the same
authors. That said, many of the articles
are very useful summaries, sometimes
of a lifetime's worth of work on
important aspects of landnám studies.
Ólafur Halldórsson’s opening article
on linguistic and cultural evidence for
the landnám is a very clear and useful
synthesis of well known evidence as is
Jakob Benediktsson’s short and suc-
cinct summary of his widely published
work on the Book of Icelanders and
Book of Settlements as sources for the
landnám. This is followed by an over-
view of archaeological evidence for the
landnám by Guðmundur Ólafsson who
is the only one of the authors to raise
the issue of Margrét Hermanns-Auð-
ardóttir’s work. Guðmundur’s article is
firmly in a long tradition of sum-
maries on landnám archaeology started
by Kristján Eldjárn, and is a useful up-
date on Þór Magnússon’s contribution
from 1987 ('Vitnisburður fornminja.’
Islensk þjóðmenning I: 47-59)- In her
article the editor, Guðrún Ása Gríms-
dóttir, covers similar ground as Jakob
Benediktsson regarding the Book of
Settlements but goes further and sug-
gests that there is evidence indicating
that the Northwestern part of the
country (Vestfirðir) was settled later
than the eastern part (Austfirðir) and
moreover that the tales regarding the
landnám of Vestfirðir show signs of
being influenced more by political and
economic conditions in the 13th cen-
tury than unbiased local traditions.
Her argument is convincing and ap-
peals as a sensible version of Svein-
björn Rafnsson’s more uncompromis-
ing ideas on the conspiratory nature of
the Book of Settlements (Studier i
Landnámabók, Lund 1974). Historian
Gunnar Karlsson deals in his article
with attitudes to the landnám and re-
curring image problems of the Ice-
landers in relation to their origins.
Unlike Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, Gunnar
Karlsson sees the Book of Settlements
primarily as an effort to create a
positive image for the politically
developing Icelanders and he goes on
to discuss the ideas behind and
interest in the existence of Irish monks
in Iceland prior to the landnám pur-
sued diligently by a number of non-
academic scholars in Iceland in this
century and the last. These two articles
are the only ones from the humanities
contribution in the volume where
original ideas are presented but neither
is based on extensive research and both
deal with ideas and late-medieval
sources for the landnám rather than
the landnám itself.
One of the reasons behind the resili-
ence of ideas of an Irish element in the
landnám is the fact that Icelanders are
much closer to the Irish and the Scots
than Norwegians in the ABO system
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