Into the Ocean: Vikings, Irish, and Environmental Change in Iceland and the North by Kristján Ahronson (review)

This is an extremely impressive monograph, which deals with a number of methodological and substantive questions. At its core is the diachronic problem of the settlement of the Atlantic islands in the first millennium ce; in particular, the problem of determining the extent of Irish contact with Iceland prior to the Norse settlement (landnám) in around 870 ce. This problem is approached by way of Kristján Ahronson’s own field studies of cave-sites and stone sculpture, which have turned up new data of the first importance. At all points, however, the attempt is made to reflect upon both the wider environmental context – an approach which Ahronson shares with much recent work on medieval settlement in the North Atlantic – and the wider intellectual framework in which these data are received. This latter critique, which Ahronson develops in an original way, ranges between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, reflecting on the development of the modern disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, and history out of premodern antiquarian thought. This may seem a rather eclectic admixture, but it is generally successful in creating the space for a critical reflection on data, sourced from a number of disciplines, which have often been subject to fairly narrow interpretation.

Chapter 1 uses the early work of Sir Daniel Wilson and Eugène Beauvois as starting points for reflection upon the intellectual roots of investigation of early settlement in North America and the North Atlantic. Two chapters (Chapters 2 and 6) reflect on epistemologies of interdisciplinary researches and environmental studies respectively. Other chapters develop Ahronson’s previous studies of place-names with the Old Norse pap- element (Chapter 3) and cross-forms common to the Hebrides and Iceland (Chapter 7). The most important and original content in this volume is contained in Chapters 4 and 5. Here, Ahronson sets out in detail his strategy and results from a campaign at Kverkarhellir and Seljalandshellir, two man-made caves near the very southern tip of Iceland, which overlook the suggestively named Vestmanneyjar (‘islands of the Irishmen’).

The work at Kverkarhellir develops earlier approaches of Holt and Gudmundsson to the cave-site Kolholtshellir, where they attempted to relate spoil from the construction of the cave to the widespread volcanic ash (tephra) deposit of 871 ce. This tephra horizon, made up of ash from the eruption of Vatnaöldur, is generally known, on account of its coincidence with the first Norse settlement, as the ‘landnám tephra’. At Kverkarhellir, Ahronson is successful in setting out a relative chronology of spoil and tephra-layering that indicates the cave was constructed prior to the Norse landnám. The implications of this are considerable.

The evidence from contemporary literary sources does no more than suggest that the Irish visited Iceland in the late 700s. Icelandic sources, dating from the mid-1100s, suggest actual Irish settlement prior to the Norse landnám, but the evidence is at a long remove from events, and the Irish in these sources play a role that suggests a limited memory of events has been imposed upon by a later Christian historiography. Ahronson’s work offers the potential to expand upon these literary data using an environmental narrative. His work at Kverkarhellir – potentially a ‘smoking gun’ in establishing a pre-Norse chronology – is placed in the context of the wider investigations of the environmental history of the Eyjafjallahreppur landscape by Andrew Dugmore and others. There is more to do here – we cannot, for example, assume that a pre-Norse presence necessarily means ‘Irish’ – but the research potential is well mapped out by Ahronson.

The explicit focus on using the data from Scotland to add value to the evidence from Iceland leaves the Faroe Islands with rather less attention than they might warrant. Here, recent studies by Fisher and Scott (sculpture) as...