Aistear na nGael

BOTH: Welcome to Reykjavik!

Did the monks actually carve out the caves themselves?

You can view your chromosomes as mosaics

of the chromosomes of your ancestors.

The texts that were written during the

12th and 13th century remember the past in the 9th century

as dominated first by Irish monks

- as they call them, "Papa" - that came to Iceland.

So the Icelandic texts remember Irish monks here about 870,

in scattered settlements, not very many of them, and they are said to

have left behind religious artefacts - bells and crosses and so on.

But surely the references are so clear that they cannot be

explained unless there is a historical reality behind them.

So what you're talking about here is stories about the

history of Iceland.

How true to history do you think the sagas are?

That is, erm, a fundamental problem we have.

When you have texts that are clearly literary and artistic,

written in the 13th century, trying to tell you

and convince you as a reader that they are describing conversations,

characters and events that took place in the 9th and 10th and 11th century.

But when we start analysing them,

we see that the whole historical framework is correct.

They time the settlement in the late 9th century,

and they know that they were pagan turning to Christianity.

They know that they were coming from Norway and the British Isles,

and that they got organised in a society in Iceland,

in a very systematic fashion,

laying out chieftains' farms and assembly sites,

and they continued on to Greenland in the late 10th century.

All this we can confirm with archaeology and other evidence.

Until we had archaeological proof in the 1960s that the Norsemen

were in Newfoundland,

with a base camp that was used for exploring the lands

further south, we couldn't confirm that this was historically accurate,

but now with the archaeology and the sagas,

we see that the archaeology in Newfoundland tells us

exactly the same story as the sagas do, but, of course, without names.

And without events,

that's what the storytelling adds on to the archaeological information.

This is a very isolated and bleak area

for Irish monks to settle down.

Well, when you think about the fact there would once have been

a wall there, it wouldn't have been quite as bleak then

as it is now, it would have been a warm and very sheltered place.

As for the location, you're at a very accessible point here.

You have the Westman Islands just over there,

you have this wide coastal plain that's quite fertile,

it would have been easy to find from the sea,

it would have been a secure place cut into the hillside.

Did the monks actually carve out the caves themselves?

Well, that's what we believe.

If you look over at the wall here you can see the tool marks

that somebody's used to carve this cave, and also the shape of it

reflects the fact that it is shaped out to be a dwelling.

I'm looking at all these crosses,

did they makes these crosses, carve them out?

Well, we can't be sure that all of them are early.

That one over there is a particularly spectacular example,

you can see that the terminal's very visible.

Yeah.

The difficulty with a cross carved on a wall is that you

can't date a carving, so you're going on artistic style.

And what is impressive is that these do correspond to a family,

as I say, of crosses found on the Faroe Islands

and in the north of Scotland.

We associate them particularly with the early Christian settlement,

that period when the Irish were moving into the Hebrides,

up to Iona,

and then steadily expanding out along the islands into the Atlantic.

And these monks were actually Irish?

That seems to be the likely explanation.

They come from a movement that is traceable

up through the Hebrides,

starting with people like St Columba around about the 6th century,

and then we see the progress of that Irish monastic expansion,

if you like, up into the Outer Hebrides,

the northern islands of Britain,

the Faroe Islands, and now to here, in, what, about the 800s.

How do you know that this cave in Seljaland

and all the other caves in the area predate the earliest Norse settlers?

We don't know for certain.

On the one hand we have circumstantial evidence like the

crosses on the wall, but as we've already said,

these are not precisely dateable.

But there's other types of dating evidence as well,

as methods in archaeology improve.

And there's a cave around the corner we can look at which

actually has one example of that sort of evidence.

I'll take you there.

Jonathan, you were saying that this cave is potentially

more important than the other caves.

This one gives us some opportunities to start looking at dating evidence.

And dating these sites is the crucial step we have to take

now to establish whether or not these really are sites of the Irish.

Here at this one, because of an excavation,

we had the opportunity to date it more precisely.

How do you do that?

Successive volcanic events, you know,

the eruptions of the volcanoes,

outpourings from them, these put deposits on the landscape,

which occur as stratified events

to which everything else can be related.

And in this case, particularly for this site,

is a thing we call the "Landnam tephra".

A tephra is a layer of volcanic material which can be dated,

but we can bring these down to quite precise dates, and the Landnam tephra,

as it's called, is a volcanic event that dates around about 870AD,

and that 870, 871 - plus or minus two -

horizon is one which relates very loosely to the

arrival of the Norse settlers here, who came in about that time,

that's the historic dating.

And whether or not that historic dating is exactly right,

where we find the so-called Landnam tephra,

we always find the Norse on this side, and not on that side.

We find them later than that volcanic event.

Now, here, a few years ago, Kristjan Ahronson, from Bangor University

in Wales, carried out an excavation not in the cave,

but just here outside.

And in that excavation he found the material that had been taken

when the cave was dug and dumped out here.

And the relationship of that material to the Landnam tephra

is such that he feels the material from the cave is older

and not more recent than that, so in other words,

it's older than the Norse settlement.

But if that is correct, this cave is built before the Norse horizon,

so it must be built by people who have arrived earlier than

that Norse settlement event.

Now, it could be we've got the dating of the

Norse settlement wrong and there were other Norse people here

earlier than 870,

but when you consider what we know about the fact that the Irish

were here at some point before that,

and we look at the other evidence with the caves

and the carved crosses and so on,

and the fact that the Norse settlers themselves tell us

the Irish were here first, to me,

it all adds up to a likelihood that the caves, which are traditionally

associated with the Irish, could well have been built by the Irish.

It's quite a plausible relationship.

-EXHIBIT VIDEO:

-Inside was one large room where the whole family lived.

Children didn't have bedrooms, for example. They slept on benches

either side of the fire, right beside their parents.

From their camp, the Vikings traded silver and slaves...

Slave woman, the most well-known, Melkorka, princess from Ireland,

that comes here, speaks Irish, teaches her son - secretly -

the Irish language and he later manages to go back to Ireland

and meet his family there.

She was sold on the slave market as a deaf and dumb woman,

so she wouldn't speak a word.

And on her own,

when she was spending time with the son she gave birth to with her

Icelandic master, she would speak fluent Irish and teach him that.

That was part of her cover.

And then it all came out, her royal background and so on,

which she had not revealed.

There are many characters of a lower social status that are farming,

are wives or even slaves that have Gaelic-sounding names,

and she would be the most prominent character.

Also in the more adventurous sagas about Viking Age heroes,

we also have many ideas from Irish literature

transplanted into a Norse context.

So it's both the notion of characters being defined as Irish,

or Hebridean - many are said to come from the Hebrides -

having different religions, different customs.

Most of them were Irish-Christian at the time.

And they would bring that Christianity with them to Iceland.

SCREAMING AND BATTLE CRIES

Imagine you're down here and you have two chromosomes -

one from your father and one from your mother.

And what I've done is I've coloured

the chromosomes of your grandparents here, in different colours,

to show you what happens to them as time passes.

So what happened here is that your father's chromosomes

are a mosaic of his parents' chromosomes.

And then your chromosomes are a mosaic of your parents' chromosomes,

which were already a mosaic of their parents' chromosomes.

Now if we extrapolate or extend that back many generations,

then what happens is you can view your chromosomes as having

many, many different colours and lots of small fragments.

And each of those fragments is from a particular ancestor,

say, 1,000 years ago.

So we can identify those fragments,

and then we compare them to the fragments of other people,

and we're trying to find matches,

trying to find how much you match to other people.

And that tells us how related you are to those other people.

Agnar, I'm going to be a little bit selfish here,

so, who am I most related to?

OK, we can go straight to your results.

They do require a little bit of explanation.

What I'm showing you here is essentially how related

you are to several different populations.

Several different groups of people in Europe.

Now, I have ordered the population labels here by how

closely related they are to you, or how closely related you are to them.

And it may be no surprise for you to see that the greatest kinship

is to people from Ireland. You probably already knew that.

No surprise.

And then the second most close relationship is to

people from Scotland, but you are significantly more related to

-people from Ireland than you are to people from Scotland.

-Right.

The third closest relationship is to people from England,

and it does tend to be the case that you tend to be most related

to people who live closest to you.

So geography is a key factor in the structure of kinship

and your relationships to other people.

But maybe the interesting and fun thing to see from your results

-is that, in fourth place, we have Iceland.

-You're joking?

And then after that we have Denmark and Norway - Scandinavia.

So, the history of Iceland is that

we believe there is evidence to suggest that it wasn't only

Norwegians and Scandinavians that settled in Iceland,

the Vikings who came to Iceland, they dropped by in the British Isles

and in Ireland, and took with them people from Ireland, to Iceland.

It happens that you are more closely related to people from Iceland

than you are to people from Denmark and Norway.

Now, that tells us

that your genealogical relationship to Icelandic people being

greater than that to Scandinavian populations, that is

due to common ancestors that Icelanders have with Irish people

that are part of the people who moved to

Iceland during the settlement period.

-So essentially, you have ancestors that you share with me.

-Yeah.

And those ancestors are the families who were split,

where some people came to Iceland and some people remained in Ireland.

And you have chromosome fragments that you have inherited from

those ancestors, and I and other Icelanders have

chromosome fragments that they have inherited those ancestors in common.

So this is telling us something not only about your history,

but about the history of your population,

about the Irish population and the Icelandic population,

and the fact that there is this special genealogical relationship

between Icelanders and Irish.

So what about the rest of my friends,

what is the bigger picture with all ten of us?

In many ways, the results for your friends are similar to yours.

There are some of the ten who actually

have Iceland in third place.

That is, they're more closely related to Icelanders than

they are to the English population.

And there are others that have, like you, Iceland in the fourth position.

But in general, we see the same picture,

and for me the most interesting part of the results is this

closer relationship to Iceland than to other Scandinavian populations.

And that's indicating these common ancestors that Icelanders

have with the people of Ireland.

And we see that result coming up again and again for

all the people from Ireland, so that's the general picture.

Were you expecting this result?

I was expecting something like this,

I wasn't expecting it to be that clear, to be honest,

but I was kind of hoping,

because our previous research had indicated that there was this

special connection between Ireland and Scotland and Iceland.

And it's nice to see it borne out, and it's nice to see

we can pick it up even from looking at one individual, like yourself.

You carry in you the history of your whole population.