The Irish-Sea Province, encompassing complex sea routes between Ireland, Britain, Wales, the Isle of Man, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Shetlands, Iceland, Norway, Galicia, and the Baltic, is an area rich in literary, linguistic, historical, and material cultural traditions. Throughout the Middle Ages, traders, raiders, missionaries, settlers, slaves, kings, and soldiers interacted and engaged with each other, crisscrossing the North Atlantic and the Irish Sea. Norse-Gaelic Contacts in a Viking World focuses on Norway and the Isle of Man as the lynchpins in that intercultural and multilingual region, postulating a "Norwegian Insular Viking zone" that was active beyond the period of the Viking Age into a "Long Thirteenth Century." The four authors, each expert in their respective fields of history, archaeology, philology, and linguistics, craft an intriguing examination of Norse and Gaelic contacts through in-depth analyses of four textual witnesses from that period.
The scope of the work is extensive, including Norway and its sphere of influence--Iceland, Scotland, the Scottish Isles, the Isle of Man, Wales, and Ireland--and situating the discussion of selected texts within the later medieval context in which the manuscripts survive. The four authors set up primary and secondary timelines for the periods under consideration. Their "Long Thirteenth Century" begins with the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 and ends with the Hauksbók recension of the Icelandic Landnámabók c. 1306-1308, in addition to an extended Viking Age from c. 870-930, the period of the primary settlement of Iceland, and c. 1158-1164, marking King Gofraid mac Amlaíb of Man's exile to Norway. Guided by their own rigorous scholarship, the authors build upon an impressive body of research, arguing for the persistence of a "Norse-Gaelic interface" (3) into the late-Viking Age and beyond.
In their brief Preface, the authors outline the joint contribution of each in the analysis and in writing of this work, as well as their gratitude to a variety of respected colleagues in the field. Thus, Chapter 1 acts as an introduction to their methodology, terminology, textual sources, geographical and historical contexts, and major personages, as well as discussions of texts that do not figure into the other chapters. It is an interesting miscellany which includes discussions of ecclesiastical sources, literacy, and linguistic exchanges in addition to setting out their scholarly approach. However, they assert the uniqueness of their endeavor and the freshness of their approach a bit too strenuously. The authors situate themselves within the existing scholarship by pointing out that while "perceived parallels between certain texts across the Norse-Gaelic divide have often been highlighted, this research has frequently been lacking specifics, and comparisons have often been drawn between material of very different date" (13). They also contend that medieval texts are "set alongside modern folk tales with insufficient attention paid to the methodological difficulties this involves" (13). Instead, they argue that where similarities do exist, "the possibility that these may reflect human universals needs to be entertained; furthermore, common inherited tradition may potentially lie behind them in some cases" (13). They also suggest that classical influence, independently transmitted in both Norse and Gaelic spheres, explains intertextual motifs. To that end, Norse-Gaelic Contacts seeks to recreate the context in which textual transfers might have occurred within the Norwegian Insular Viking zone from the Viking Age into the Long Thirteenth Century.
The primary textual witnesses for this analysis are the Icelandic Landnámabók and Njáls saga, the section titled the "Wonders of Ireland" in the Norwegian Konungs skuggajá (The King's Mirror), and the Early Modern Irish praise poem about Raghnall, king of Man, Baile Suthach Síth Emhna. Because a large part of their argument regarding the significance of Norwegian relations with the Isle of Man relies on removing or diminishing the place of Ireland from the route of textual transmission to Iceland after the Viking Age, they generally refer to texts written in medieval Irish simply as "Gaelic." In Chapter 1, they provide examples of "sporadic direct contact" (21) between Iceland and Ireland from the mid-tenth to the thirteenth century, including passages from Íslendingabók, the Icelandic law-code Grágás, Gísls þattr Illugasonar, Eyrbyggja saga, and Laxdæla saga, among others. They further argue that these surviving textual references are largely incorrect, thus proving that names and stories from the "Gaelic world" ended up in Icelandic sources almost entirely via oral tradition from the settlement period or through written texts transmitted indirectly via Norway (21). They further contend that Icelanders are invisible in Irish sources because the term gaill (plural form of gall), which means "foreign" or "Viking," was applied generally to people from the North (23).
The following chapters are dedicated to specific bodies of textual sources and thus provide extremely useful segments of text and translation, though they are formatted differently in each. Chapter 2 deals with the "Wonders of Ireland" in Konungs skuggajá broken down into eighteen distinctive motifs, with three additional items. In their analysis, the authors engage with the Tara motif and provide a comparative table of the relationship between Konungs skuggajá, De mirabilibus Hiberniae, Do Ingantaib Érenn, and the Topographia Hibernica of Gerald of Wales, situating the Norwegian text within the chronological and political context of the Irish and Latin works. Ultimately, within this chapter the authors argue that the context of the "Wonders of Ireland" reveals "the usefulness of Gaelic material for expounding Norwegian royal ideology in the thirteenth century" (44), which is the overriding argument of the whole work.
Chapter 3 investigates the poem Baile Suthach Síth Emhna (The Otherworld of Eamhain is a Fertile Settlement), the earliest surviving example of which is in the fifteenth century Book of Fermoy, a bit outside the Long Thirteenth Century scope of the authors' original design, but which potentially dates to the reign of King Hákon IV Hákonarson of Norway (1217-1263). This chapter centers on the royal influence wielded by Hákon in this eulogy to Raghnall, king of Man, who reigned from the end of the twelfth century to the first quarter of the thirteenth. Here, the authors shift to analyzing the Isle of Man as the "epicenter of a broad interconnected world" (125). Because the earliest surviving texts in Manx date from the early seventeenth century, medieval textual witnesses from the Isle of Man are largely written in Middle Irish, Old Norse, and Latin with some rare Ogham inscriptions on Manx runestones that are carved in Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Danish runes. So, this chapter focuses on the Irish Baile Suthach and provides a discussion of the literary context for this example of Classical Irish bardic poetry, including the ways in which the poem situates Raghnall as King of Tara and ruler of Eamhain. The chapter concludes with a historical exposition on the ideal versus the reality of Raghnall's reign and his political influence in reference to Norway, which "appears to have embarked on Viking raiding to extend its power" (194-5) up to and after 1208. Ultimately, they seem to hint that Raghnall, or perhaps Hákon, commissioned this praise poem as a political manifesto that "highlights the extent to which men of learning and their elite patrons operated in a sophisticated, multilingual world" (195).
The narratives of the Battle of Clontarf (1014), in which the Irish king Brian Boru (Brian Bórama) is killed after defeating a Viking invasion force led by Jarl Sigurðr of Orkney (who also falls), form the nexus of Chapter 4. Here the authors contend that these extant Icelandic narratives employed a singular source, written in the Norwegian Insular Viking zone around 1100 by a Norse speaker writing in the Isle of Man, that was brought to Iceland in the thirteenth century as part of King Hákon's expansionist ambitions. To that end, the authors consider Njáls saga, which includes the longest and most complex version of the battle, as well as the poem Darraðarljóð--an extraordinary prophetic vision of the Norns weaving a tapestry from the entrails of dead men on a loom made from their bones--as well as the brief passages in Orkneyinga saga and Þorsteins saga Síðu-Hallssonar. To these narratives, the authors add an extensive discussion of *Brjáns saga, the hypothetical source for these variations on the Clontarf episode, for which there is no direct evidence. Donnchadh Ó Corráin made a compelling case in 1998, amended in 2009, for a possible *Brjáns saga as an Irish text written in Dublin c. 1100 by a cleric literate in Irish and transmitted directly to Iceland via the extensive trading routes and cultural contact between the two, outlined in works like Mary Valante's The Vikings in Ireland: Settlement, Trade, and Urbanization (Four Courts, 2008), not cited in this book. In this chapter, the authors of Norse-Gaelic Contacts walk through Ó Corráin's arguments, accepting a great number of his assertions but then rejecting others based on their theories regarding the spelling of Irish names, connections of the character Broðir to the Isle of Man, inaccuracies within the narrative, and a number of what they term indisputable facts (248) about a hypothetical text. While they do briefly touch on the possibilities of literary license in what is ostensibly a work of literature, they discount those in favor of assertions of authorial ignorance, incompetence, and clumsiness. This denies the authorial agency in adapting these texts. There are also brief references to the Irish Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallibh (c. 1100), which few scholars know as well as Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, that warrant further expansion. Ultimately, the authors point to the attractive aspects of a Manx-Hebridean composition and transmission for this episode in the surviving Icelandic accounts.
Chapter 5 turns to the Norwegian and Icelandic interest in the Gaelic west embodied by the Gaelic ancestry, especially descent from Kjarvalr Írakonungr ("king of the Irish"), in Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, for which the authors provide a detailed stemma of manuscript transmission. Here they provide a thorough analysis of the Irish names that appear in these texts, situating them within the thirteenth-century context of Norwegian colonial expansion in Iceland. The authors wrap up their discussions with a clear, concise summary of their arguments in the Conclusion, restating their overall aims and evidence, but conceding, however, as they do throughout the work, that many of these assertions are speculative.
Overall, Norse-Gaelic Contacts in a Viking World has much to offer scholars interested in detailed textual and linguistic analysis of Irish and Norse texts. There is a comprehensive bibliography for ease of reference, and the inclusion of text and translations for the sources is quite useful. There are sources, however, that they do not acknowledge, and they should--like Valante's Vikings in Ireland. Ultimately, this book is most effective in its portrait of a complex and sophisticated multilingual world in which ideas, motifs, and narratives moved as freely and as extensively as the people.