Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Blaðsíða 297
The Celtic Element in the Icelandic Population
287
“can answer better foreign men when they charge us with descending
from slaves or bandits, if we know for certain our ancestors.”9 This
statement is copied from a now lost version from the early thirteenth
century and indicates that the general consensus of foreigners then was
that the Icelanders were not of pure Norse origin. As will be shown sub-
sequently, the tendentious compilation of the ancestors of the Ice-
landers may inadvertently reveal through its omissions that there was
some truth to the charge and furthermore suggest who the slave an-
cestors were.
Scholars intent upon explaining the Celtic element in the Icelandic
population have pointed to references in the sources of slaves from Ire-
land. The settlers of Iceland brought with them slaves from Norway and
the British Isles. One example is found at the beginning of the Laxdæla
saga in the description of the settlement of Unnr in djupuSga, one of the
founding mothers of Iceland and Hgskuldr’s great-grandmother, who
brought with her several slaves from the British Isles. Iceland was, in
this respect, no different from the other Scandinavian countries, all of
which had large slave populations well into the twelfth century. There
would have been no basis for accusing the Icelanders of being descend-
ants of slaves unless the Icelandic slave population had intermarried
with the free, Norse population to a much larger extent than was the
case in the other Nordic countries.
This explanation has not, however, been suggested by scholars who
have dealt with the origin of the Celtic element in the Icelandic popula-
tion. B arthi Gudmundsson suggested that the Icelandic settlers were not
of a Norwegian or West Norse descent, but an East Norse people, des-
cendants of the Heruli, described in the sixth century by the Greek his-
torian, Prokopius. According to Gudmundsson’s thesis, the Heruli im-
migrated to Sweden and Denmark in the sixth and seventh centuries
and finally settled in Iceland in the late ninth and early tenth centuries.10
Steffensen rejected the East-West Norse argument and explained the
Celtic element as stemming from a mingling of the Vikings and the
9 “En vér pykjumsk heldr svara kunna utlendum mynnum, pa er pc ir bregSa oss pvf, at vér
séim komnir af prælum e5a illmennum, ef vér vitum vist vårar kynferSir sannar,”
Islendingabok, Landnåmabok, Jakob Benediktsson gaf ut, fslenzk fomrit, I (Reykjavik,
1968) p. 336, n. 1.
10 Barthi Gudmundsson, The Origin of the Icelanders (Lincoln, NB, 1967) pp. 121, 141,
165.