Manchán Magan: più profondo ti immergi nella cultura islandese, più l’Irlanda trovi

Excerpts:

>The tour guide mentioned that researchers had found traces of lead residue in the woman’s teeth which revealed that she been born in Ireland or Scotland and brought to Iceland as a young girl. It struck me as interesting that her native language must have been Irish, or at least the version of Middle Irish that was spoken in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man at the time. The guide went on to say that DNA evidence revealed that the young warrior’s father was Norse and his mother was Irish, and so, he too was probably bilingual, speaking Old Norse and Middle Irish.

>That was the moment it dawned on me that one of the first languages ever spoken on this barren, unoccupied land was Irish. It’s likely that various seafaring wanderers had made brief visits to the island before them, but Irish and Old Norse were the languages that the rocks, waterfalls, fjords, lava fields and stunted trees first got to hear for any continuous period.

>Really, the deeper you dive into Icelandic culture the more of Ireland you find, which all gives rise to one central question: if we in Ireland have distant cousins living just below the Arctic Circle, shouldn’t we spend some time getting to know them? And if a significant proportion of the make-up and mindset of Icelandic people arises from Ireland, might not they be curious about it? As the motherland, mother tongue and mother culture, do we have a certain duty to reach out to our more northern kinsfolk? To remind them from whence they came.

There’s only nine letters off between Iceland and Ireland, so it figures we share a lot in common.

If memory serves, Norse raiders brought captured Irish women to Iceland as slaves and concubines, establishing settlements with them. While Irish men were also taken as slaves, they had little lasting influence on the Icelandic population, which is largely Norse in paternal lineage and Irish in maternal lineage.

Iceland has a complex history, including of Irish settlement, slavery, and monastic activity. For the sake of their national identity and a national story to bind them together, they just wrote the Irish influence out decades ago. At least according to a friend who lives there.