But the bold Irish monks extended their voyages farther north. Dicuil has also to tell us how they found Iceland, which he calls Thule, and lived there. After having mentioned what Pliny, Solinus, Isidore (Hispalensis) and Priscianus say about Thule (Thyle), he continues [7, 2, 6]:
“It is now thirty years since certain priests, who had been on that island from the 1st of February to the 1st of August, told that not only at the time of the summer solstice, but also during the days before and after, the setting sun at evening conceals itself as it were behind a little mound, so that it does not grow dark even for the shortest space of time, but whatsoever work a man will do, even picking the lice out of his shirt (pediculos de camisia extrahere), he may do it just as though the sun were there, and if they had been upon the high mountains of the island perhaps the sun would never be concealed by them [i.e., the mountains]. In the middle of this very short time it is midnight in the middle of the earth, and on the other hand I suppose in the same way that at the winter solstice and for a few days on either side of it the dawn is seen for a very short time in Thule, when it is midday in the middle of the earth. Consequently I believe that they lie and are in error who wrote that there was a stiffened (concretum) sea around it [i.e., Thyle], and likewise those who said that there was continuous day without night from the vernal equinox till the autumnal equinox, and conversely continuous night from the autumnal equinox till the vernal, since those who sailed thither reached it in the natural time for great cold, and while they were there always had day and night alternately except at the time of the summer solstice; but a day’s sail northward from it they found the frozen (congelatum) sea.”
This description, written half a century before the Norwegians, according to common belief, came to Iceland, shows that the country was known to the Irish, at any rate before the close of the eighth century (thirty years before Dicuil wrote in 825), and how much earlier we cannot say. With the first-hand information he had received from people who had been there, Dicuil may have blended ideas which he had obtained from his literary studies. The sun hiding at night behind a little mound reminds us of the older ideas that it went behind a mountain in the north (cf. Cosmas Indicopleustes and the Ravenna geographer); but of course it may also be due to local observation. The idea that the frozen sea (“congelatum mare”) had been found a day’s sail north of this island is precisely the same as in the Latin and Greek authors, where, according to Pytheas, the stiffened sea (“concretum mare”) or the sluggish sea (“pigrum”) lay one day’s sail beyond Thule (cf. [p. 65]). But this does not exclude the possibility of the Irish having come upon drift-ice north of Iceland; on the contrary, this is very probable.
Dicuil’s statement of the Irish discovery of Iceland is confirmed by the Icelandic sagas. Are Frode (about 1130) relates that at the time the Norwegian settlers first came to Iceland,
“there were Christians here whom the Norwegians called ‘papar’ [priests]; but they afterwards went away, because they would not be here together with heathens, and they left behind them Irish books, bells and croziers, from which it could be concluded that they were Irishmen.” In the Landnámabók, which gives the same statement from Are, it is added that “they were found east in Papey and in Papyli. It is also mentioned in English books that at that time there was sailing between the countries” [i.e., between Iceland and Britain].
In many other passages in the sagas we hear of them,[158] and the Norwegian author Tjodrik Monk (about 1180) has a similar statement. Many places in south Iceland, such as “Papafjörðr” with “Papos,” and the island of “Papey,” still bear names derived from these first inhabitants. A former name was “Pappyli,” which is now no longer used. But besides these place-names there are many others in Iceland which are either Celtic or must be connected with the Celts. Thus, among the first that are mentioned in the Landnámabók are “Minþakseyrr” and “Vestmanna-eyjar.” “Minþak” is an Irish word for a dough of meal and butter, and Westmen were the Irish. It is true that in the Landnámabók [cf. F. Jónsson, 1900, pp. 7, 132, 265] these names are placed in connection with the Irish thralls whom Hjorleif, the associate of Ingolf, had brought with him, and who killed him; but, as the more particular circumstances of the tale show, it is probable that it is the place-names that are original, and that have given rise to the tale of the thralls, and not the reverse. A. Bugge [1905, pp. 359 ff.] gives a whole list of Icelandic place-names of Celtic origin, mostly derived from personal names;[159] he endeavours to explain them as due to Celtic influence, through Irish land-takers; but the most natural explanation is certainly here as with the Faroes, that there was a primitive Celtic population in Iceland, and not merely a few Irish monks, when the Norwegians arrived; and that from these Celts the Icelanders are in part descended, while they took their language from the ruling class, the Norwegians, who also became superior in numbers. Future anthropological investigations of the modern Icelanders may be able to throw light on these questions. The original Celtic population may have been small and dispersed, but may nevertheless have made it easier for the Norwegians to settle there, as they did not come to a perfectly uncultivated country, and to subdue men takes less time than to subdue Nature. As to how, and how early, the Celts first came to Iceland, we know in the meantime nothing.
Einhard, ninth century
Hrabanus Maurus
Rimbertus
Einhard (beginning of the ninth century), the biographer of Charlemagne, speaks of the Baltic as a bay eastwards from the western ocean of unknown length and nowhere broader than 100,000 paces (about ninety miles), and mentions the peoples of those parts: “‘Dani’ and ‘Sueones,’ whom we call ‘Nordmanni,’” live on the northern shore and on all the islands, while Slavs and Esthonians and other peoples dwell on the southern shore. The well-known German scholar, Hrabanus Maurus (circa 776-856), Archbishop of Mayence (847-856), bases his encyclopædic work, “De Universo” (completed in 847), in twenty-two books, chiefly upon Isidore, from whom he makes large extracts, and has little to say about the North. Rimbertus (end of the ninth century), on the other hand, in his biography of Ansgarius, gives much information about Scandinavia and its people, while the nearly contemporary Bavarian geographer (“geographus Bawarus”) describes the Slavonic peoples.