Árbók Hins íslenzka fornleifafélags - 2014, Page 119

ÁRBÓK FORNLEIFAFÉLAGSINS118
Summary
Church-related place names in Skagafjörður
The Skagafjordur Heritage Museum has for the past eight years conducted a
research project named The Skagafjörður Church Project. The aim of the project
is to survey and locate the earliest Christian cemeteries and churches in the
Skagafjörður region. The article examines if and how placenames can be used to
throw light on and aid in the location of early churches and cemeteries.
The number of place names pointing to early churches/cemeteries decreases
exponentially with the amount of time that has passed since a church and/or
cemetery fell out of use or disappeared from the surface. No place names could
be associated with churches and cemeteries that had fallen out of use in the 11th-
12th centuries. It was also apparent that the existence of place names relates
directly to the visibility of the remains as well as whether the church had gained
a new role when decommissioned, perhaps as a storage shed or a smithy. People
seem to have used the terms church (kirkja) and chapel (bænhús) interchangeably,
unrelated to which class the church had officially belonged to. It seems that all
smaller churches were termed chapels, whether they had had burial rights or not.
Archaeological research in Skagafjörður and elsewhere indicates that most if not
all the earliest churches had burial rights at the onset of Christianity in Iceland.
The term “bænhús” could be an echo from the earliest Christian churches but
it is evident that in the 14th century the ecclesiastical definition “bænhús” only
applied to small family chapels with limited number of religious services and
without burial rights.
Place names can rarely stand alone as evidence for churches/cemeteries but
are nevertheless, in addition to other data, a valuable source for research on early
church history. They may point to the location of churches and/or cemeteries
as well as other components of the religious landscape such as roads and paths
connecting various farms and parish churches.