Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Qupperneq 298

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Grethe Jacobsen
population of the British Isles during the invasions.11 In a recent article,
he calculated that at least 13.5 percent of the population was of Celtic
origin and argued that the percentage might have been as high as 40.12
Those of Celtic origin were primarily of slave status, although some
prominent leaders, Helgi enn magri for example, were of mixed origin.
Steffensen did not deal with the question of the gender of the people of
Celtic origin. We propose that they were primarily captured Celtic
women who were kept as mistresses or concubines of free men of Norse
descent in Iceland. They mothered several children and were then “for-
gotten” or discreetly omitted from the family genealogies. The reason for
such a phenomenon could be explained by a shortage of Norse women of
free status, either because they chose to remain in Norway whose laws
gave them the right to live independently, or because the hazards of child-
birth and life in a rough, unsettled land took a heavy toli on them.13
Our source is the Sturla version of the Landndmabok. The first Land-
nåmabok, which was compiled during the twelfth century, listed the Ice-
landic settlers, their families and their landndm (land take). Now lost, this
and other early versions were incorporated into later, extant versions, of
which the earliest is the Sturla version, compiled 1275-80 by Sturla
PorSarson (1214-84) who added some saga material and the complete
genealogies of the Sturla elan. He omitted the sentence, cited above,
which explained the background for the compilation of the Land-
ndmabok.14
The historicity and the usefulness to the historian of this source have
been mueh debated in view of the acknowledged bias in the compila-
tion.15 As is the case with most medieval demographic and statistical
11 Steffensen, “The Physical Anthropology,” p. 95 (note 7).
12 Jon Steffensen, “Tolfræøilegt mat å HffræSilegu gildi fråsagna Landnåmu af ætt og
hjoøemi landnemanna,” Saga, 9 (1971) pp. 21-39.
I3For a discussion of this see Grethe Jacobsen, “The Position of Women during the Viking
Period,” (M.A. Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1978), chap. 4. The topic was
also treated in a paper given at the Fourteenth International Congress of Medieval Stud-
ies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May 1979, entitled “Pregnancy and Childbirth in Scandin-
avia during the Middle Ages.” [Later published as “Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Me-
dieval North: A Typology of Sources and a Preliminary Study,” Scandinavian Journal of
History, 9:2 (1984) pp. 91-111],
14 Jakob Benediktsson, “Formåli,” in his edition of the Landndmabok pp. L-CLIV (note 9).
15 Kulturhistorisk Leksikon, s.v. “Landnåmabok”; Jakob Benediktsson, “Landnåmabok.
Some remarks on its value as a historical source,” Saga-Book, 17 (1969) pp. 275-92;
Sveinbjom Rafnsson, Studier i Landnåmabok. Kritiska bidrag till den islandska fristats-
tidens historia, Bibliotheca historica Lundensis, 31 (Lund, 1974).