Gripla - 2020, Page 223

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Egðir from Hafrsfjord had to be satisfied with less fertile land than Ingolfr
and his men who had arrived earlier; a fellow named Ǫnundr tréfótr, for
example, whose participation in the battle of Hafrsfjord is mentioned in
Landnámabók,67 settled on a farm with the telling name of Kaldbakr ‘cold
back’.
Recent DNA-studies of the Icelandic population have shown a consid-
erable genetic element from the British Isles, and particularly so in the ma-
ternal lineage (mitochondrial DNA): as much as 62 percent of the maternal
lines of today’s Icelanders can be traced back to Gaelic women, whereas
between 75 and 80 percent of the male lines lead back to Scandinavia.68
The simplest explanation of this is that a considerable contingent of the
men who settled Iceland had lived in the British Isles for some time, that
they had intermarried with Gaelic women, and had children by them. This
explanation may be backed up to a certain extent by Landnámabók and
the sagas, where it is a topos that Irish kings’ daughters were brought to
Iceland and eventually married to Icelandic chieftains. Such intermarriages
were probably not as common among the settlers that came somewhat later
from Agder, who most likely were of Norse origin in both male and female
lines. Even this may have contributed to distinguish them within the early
Icelandic population.
of the stanza in question (st. 13 in the editions, e.g., skP I, 107–08). A dating of Eiríkr
blóðøx’s birth to about 895–900 and the battle of Hafrsfjord to ca. 900 seems on the whole
to give the most likely chronology.
67 Íslendingabók. Landnámabók, ed. Jakob Benediktsson, 198.
68 Agnar Helgason et al., “Estimating Scandinavian and Gaelic Ancestry in the Male Settlers
of Iceland”, American journal of Human Genetics 67 (2000): 714; idem, “mtDNA and
the Islands of the North Atlantic: Estimating the Proportions of Norse and Gaelic
Ancestry”, American journal of Human Genetics 68 (2001): 731. A recent study of skeletons
from the settlement period indicates a somewhat larger Gaelic element in the male lines
(Y-chromosome) in a sample of 24 pre-Christian and 1 early-Christian individual, which
shows a median of 57 percent Old Norse origin (S. Sunna Ebenesersdóttir et al., “Ancient
genomes from Iceland reveal the making of a human population”, science 360 (2018):
1028–32). This is, as the authors call attention to, best explained by assuming that the men
of Gaelic ethnicity came to Iceland as slaves and had inferior opportunities for successful
reproduction than men of Norse origin. This must have been the case both short and long
term, since their inferior socio-economic status would in most instances be inherited by the
next generations.