The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  3 Pliny (the Elder) tells us in his Historia Naturalis (written about A.D. 77) that a much earlier historian, Timaeus, whose work is no longer extant, made reference to an island called Mictis, “lying inward in the sea; [i.e., to seaward] six days from Britain where tin is found, and to which Britons cross in boats of osier covered with stitched hides.” Whether Mictis and Tilli are one and the same may be argued, but this reference establishes the fact that natives of Britain were capable of making oceanic voyages six days long, in skin-covered boats.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ALBANS AND CELTS

  1 Modern historians have generally assumed the alb root to be of Latin origin. However, Vittorio Bertoldi, in Problems of Etymology, Zeitschrift fur Romanische Philologie, vol. 56, 1936, pp. 179–88, demonstrates that alb is pre-Indo-European. It probably entered Latin as a loan word with a connotation of “white” acquired by association with snow-capped mountains. “Alban” and “Albania” are Latinized forms of Alb and Alba.

  2 Dr. Ian Grimble has admirably summed up this catastrophic but seldom-told episode in European history in Highland Man (Inverness, Scotland: Highlands and Islands Development Board, 1980). The following quotation is from p. 47.

  “At the time when the Celtic invaders swept through Europe, it was inhabited by non–Indo-European peoples who were defeated, enslaved, or pushed into inaccessible regions. Amongst these were the Ligurians, who became concentrated in the Ligurian Alps and in Corsica, where Seneca remarked in A.D. 41 that they still spoke their Ligurian tongue. Others were the Basques, who speak their own non–Indo-European tongue in the Pyrénées to this day. In Caesar’s time they occupied a significant part of Gaul with their own laws and customs, despite the double menace of the Celts and the Romans. But by then a great number of these dark, aboriginal inhabitants had lost their language and traditions; those who had not were the ones who had settled in remote places.

  Today, so long do genetic characteristics persist, there is still a marked similarity between the blood groups of the Ligurian lands, the Basque country, Wales, Ireland, and the Scottish Highlands, which cannot be explained as accidental.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  ARMORICA

  1 The Gaelic-speaking Celts known as the Scotti then lived in northeastern Ireland. They did not cross over into the part of north Britain that now bears their name until the third or fourth century A.D.

  2 Bede was not the only early historian to view the Picts as immigrant invaders from the Continent. Nennius, an eighth-century Welsh chronicler, believed they came from overseas to “the islands called Orcades then laid waste many regions in the north and [in Nennius’s time] occupied about one third of Britain.” Gildas, a sixth-century ecclesiastic, also believed they came from overseas and “settled in the most remote part of Britain and with the Scots seized the whole land as far south as the wall [Hadrian’s Wall].”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WAR IN THE NORTH

  1 It is by no means certain that the Armoricans were, in fact, welcomed to northern Alba as refugees. Possibly they were refused sanctuary, and so came ashore as invaders. Whichever it was, the consequences and outcome remained essentially the same.

  2 Broch is a Norse word, bestowed on the towers by Viking raiders in the eighth century. It, too, means “fort.”

  3 Some historians have suggested these forts were deliberately fired by their builders in order to produce a vitrified effect, but there is no convincing evidence to support this theory.

  4 Another excellent example of an interdependent complex is on the Orkney island of Rousay, where three brochs stand within five hundred yards of one another. Such propinquity has puzzled historians, as the official guide book makes clear: “This concentration is, indeed, a quite extraordinary and, as yet, inexplicable phenomenon.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PICTLANDIA

  1 We do not know how the Picts gained nominal preeminence amongst their fellow Armoricans. It may be that, having suffered least at Caesar’s hands, they emerged in exile as the strongest surviving tribe. Whatever the reasons, Picts and Pictland became names that would endure in the north through nearly eight centuries.

  2 History has long believed that no Roman invasion of Ireland was ever attempted. However, the recent discovery of a Roman military camp in eastern Ireland demonstrates that the legions must have at least made a beachhead there.

  3 Roman naval auxiliaries carried siege weapons for use on land, including ballistae and catapults, either of which would have been able to destroy or reduce a broch.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FETLAR

  1 Plutarch (c. A.D. 75) tells us of a Greek by the name of Demitrius who was employed in Britain by the Romans in the first century A.D. and who reported having heard from the natives of a large island a long way west of Britain, which bore a name that sounded to the Greek like Cronus. This island seems to have been Greenland. It is, at any rate, certain that the waters between Iceland and Greenland were known to geographers of the early Christian era as the Cronian Sea. Cf. Westviking, pp. 5–6.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ALBA REBORN

  1 Chroniclers of those times were well aware that Scotland was inhabited by two peoples. They distinguished between the two by calling them the Northern and the Southern Picts. “Pict” had by then become a generic name. The Northern Picts were, in fact, Albans.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SONS OF DEATH

  1 F.T. Wainwright, The Northern Isles (Edinburgh: Th. Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1962).

  2 John Marsden, The Fury of the Northmen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FURY OF THE NORTHMEN

  1 A.W. Brøgger, Ancient Emigrants (Oxford, 1929).

  2 Originally it was the “Peti” and the “Papae” who inhabited these islands. The first of these people, I mean the Peti, were scarcely taller than pygmies.

  Peti is a corruption of Picti, the Latinized generic name by which Norse scribes referred to all the non-Irish inhabitants of Scotland. Papae may refer specifically to Christian priests, but more probably also carried a generic meaning: Christians as opposed to heathens. It is to be noted that the Historia does not state that the Picti were pygmies; the intended connotation is that they were physically inferior to the Norse.

  . . . they busied themselves to an amazing degree with the building and fitting out of their towns. There were then no towns, or even villages, in the twin archipelagos. There were, however, over a hundred brochs in various states of repair to which people could rally in times of duress. Archaeology has revealed that Gurness (one of eight brochs on the shores of Eynhallow Sound in Orkney) was extensively repaired during the seventh century. New external walls and ditches were added, and houses were built close under its protective walls.

  But at midday, thoroughly drained of their strength, they lay low in their little underground houses under the pressure of their fears.

  The standard contempt of victors for vanquished is evident here, but we are nevertheless given a poignant glimpse of a people harassed, exhausted, and so in fear of their lives that they felt obliged to hide in their thick-walled, semi-subterranean dwellings during daylight hours.

  As to where these people [the Picti] came from to that region we have no idea. Now as for the Papae, they have got their name on account of white garments in which they dress themselves, like clergy. It’s because of this that in the Teutonic language all clergy are called “papae.”

  Scholars generally interpret papa (plural papae), as found in Norse Latin sources, in the narrowest sense as meaning “Father,” or priest. It probably had a much broader meaning, as in “papist,” a follower of the religion headed by the Pope. This may seem like a trivial point but it has important overtones. Using only the narrow interpretation, many historians have been led to conclude that the papae of the Norse Atlantic sagas were priestly hermits, few in number, and widely scattered in the wilderness. The alternative explanation, that papae referred to s
izeable communities of men, women, and children who were members or followers of the Church of Rome, can then be conveniently disregarded. We shall see the importance of the interpretation when we deal with the pre-Norse settlement of Iceland.

  The Historia further notes that the people known as papae wore white clothing similar to, but not necessarily identical with, that worn by Christian clergy. This also becomes a matter of importance when we come to consider the identity of the inhabitants of Hvitramannaland (Whiteman’s Land), which is also called Albania by Norse scribes.

  . . . But in the days of Harold the Hairy—I mean the King of Norway, of course—some pirates kin to the very powerful pirate Rognvald advanced with a large fleet across the Solundic Sea. They threw these people out of their long-standing habitations and utterly destroyed them; they made the islands subject to themselves.

  As used by scribal clerics of the time, “pirates” was a synonym for Vikings. Whatever interpretive uncertainties there may be in the body of the Historia text, there can be none about the fate which overtook the Northern Islanders.

  3 Archibald R. Lewis, The Northern Seas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).

  4 Many historians have identified the Lochlannach with the Vikings. This is almost certainly incorrect. The name is Gaelic, meaning Men of Loch Lann (variants: Lainn, Loinn, Linnhe, Lyn, Lorne, Larne).

  Originally the Lochlannach were Celtic sea raiders from Ireland’s Loch Larne coast. They first appear in history in connection with a raid on Ulster in the first century B.C. They were one of the Dalriad tribes that raided, then invaded, western Scotland, there to establish themselves in the contiguous fiords of Loch Linnhe and Loch Loin. From this well-situated base they raided north and south as opportunity arose. According to the Annals of Innisfallen: “The Hebrides and Ulster were plundered by the Lochlann” as late as the year 798.

  Although the Lochlannach probably collaborated with the Norse, as many of the Scotti seem to have done, they themselves were sea rovers and pirates of unassailably Irish Celtic ancestry.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TILLI

  1 As late as the 1880s, congregations of fin whales numbering above a thousand individuals were still being encountered in these waters. This was just before Norwegians began exterminating them with the steam whaler and the harpoon canon. In 1884 a Captain Milne, commanding a transatlantic Cunarder, sailed through such an assemblage southeast of Iceland. He likened it to “a space of about half-a-county filled with railroad engines, all puffing steam as if their lives depended on it.”

  2 Cf. Farley Mowat, Sea of Slaughter (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984), Chapter 6, White Ghost.

  3 Grey whales were exterminated in the western Atlantic during the nineteenth century.

  4 Cf. Sea of Slaughter, Part V, Chapter 15, Sea Tuskers.

  5 All-round foundations may not have been needed when a vessel was required to provide only short-term shelter. Sites in northwestern Greenland and Labrador suggest that ships were sometimes overturned, then propped up on one side only to provide what was in effect a lean-to type shelter. In places where suitable stones for support were not available, the ships could have been propped up on one side with wooden supports. Greenland and Alaskan umiaks often carried shaped pieces of wood intended for just this purpose. I have myself sheltered through very bad weather, including a blizzard, under a freight canoe that had been propped up on one side. We kept the wind and snow out by means of a curtain wall of caribou skins pegged along the high side.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SANCTUARY

  1 Conventional wisdom has it that the Irish were the first British Islanders (if not the first Europeans) to explore the western reaches of the North Atlantic. Irish claims loom large because most of the few surviving accounts of pre-Norse activity in the Western Ocean are preserved in ancient Irish documents called “immrama.” Written in Latin by clerics, the immrama purport to record the adventures (and misadventures) of sixth- and seventh-century Irish priests engaged on religious quests.

  Anything the Albans may have possessed comparable to the immrama has long since vanished. So, indeed, has their language, taking with it an entire folk history. Unless, of course, fragments of that history have been preserved through absorption into the folk tales of other people. There is a good case to be made that the immrama do, in fact, include references to non-Irish western voyages that latter-day clerical scribes attributed to Irish mariner-saints.

  2 As we have already seen (Chapter 12, note 2), papar was probably a generic Norse term meaning followers of White Christ in general.

  3 The fact that Iceland was well known to continental Europeans for centuries before the Norse claim to have discovered it seems firmly established by the following:

  c. 330 B.C. Pytheas voyaged to Thule.

  3 B.C.–A.D. 65 Seneca wrote: “The time shall come . . . when Thyle shall not be the last of the lands.”

  A.D. 23–79 Pliny referred to the island as Tylen.

  84 Agricola’s fleet rounded northern Britain and reported seeing Thule.

  100–168 Ptolemaic maps, probably from the first century, showed Thule in approximately its correct geographical position.

  363 The naval expedition of Theodosius attacked Picts in Thule.

  c. 500 The (probably mythical) voyages of Arthur and Malgo to Thule at least recognized the existence of such a place.

  500–600 The Gothic historian Jordanes located Thule far to the west of Europe.

  c. 550 Brendan visited the Faeroes and Iceland.

  600–700 Bishop Isidore of Seville described Thule as the most remote of islands and placed it northwest of Britain.

  c. 620 A European-type homestead was built on the Westman Islands.

  730–733 Bede wrote of Thule.

  700–800 Selenius mentioned Thule in his Book of Marvels.

  770–790 Dicuil recorded the visit of monks to Thule. Bishop Patrick of the Hebrides referred to Iceland as Thule.

  865 The first recorded visit of the Norse to Iceland.

  4 Margrét Hermanns-Audardóttir, Islands Tidiga Bosattning (Umea, Sweden: Umea Universitet, 1989).

  It should be noted that, although the validity of Dr. Hermanns-Audardóttir’s findings on Heimaey have not been seriously questioned outside of Iceland, the primacy of Norse claims to the discovery and settlement of that island are still generally defended by most historians there.

  5 The exploration of such distant regions need not have taken as long as we might choose to think. During the summers of 992 and 993 Erik Rauda cruised the whole west coast of Greenland north at least to Melville Bay, as well as apparently crossing Davis Strait to explore part of the coast of Baffin Island. Cf. my reconstruction of his travels in Westviking and in Chapter 25 of the present book.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ARCTIC ELDORADO

  1 As we shall see, there were no indigenous people in Greenland when the Albans arrived there.

  2 Cf. endnote 4, Chapter 16, Tunit.

  3 Peter Schledermann has described his Arctic archaeological work in two books: a scientific report, Crossroads to Greenland, 1990, and Voices in Stone, 1966, a popular and personal account. Both are published in the Komatik Press Series by the Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TUNIT

  1 Although “Inuit” is currently the preferred name in the eastern Canadian Arctic, western Arctic, Alaskan, and Siberian peoples of the same ancestry use the name “Eskimo.”

  “Tunit” is found in several variants, including “Tornait” and “Torneq.” It comes to us through the Inuit and one of the meanings given to it by the Inuit is “unworldly one,” as in alien being.

  2 For a full account of the Tunit and their ancestors, I recommend Robert McGhee, Ancient People of the Arctic (UBC Press:Vancouver, 1996).

  3 H.B. Collins in Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, vol. 7, pp. 75–123.

  4 Heather Pringle, “
New Respect for Metal’s Role in Ancient Arctic Cultures,” in Science, vol. 277, 8 August, 1997, touches on this problem. “Only recently have [archaeologists] come to realize how widely dispersed and relatively abundant metal objects were in the ancient arctic,” writes Pringle. She goes on to point out that new techniques for identifying rust stains and other metallic oxides have led to the conclusion that “metal objects were common in sites hundreds of kilometres from the few northern sources of [natural] copper and iron, implying the existence of elaborate trade networks. . . . Researchers have been slow to recognize this brisk commerce in metal . . . largely because metal objects were so precious that they were rarely left behind for archaeologists to find.”

  She quotes University of Arkansas anthropologist Allen McCartney: “Metal is a material you can keep using until it is dust practically. So it’s hard to find [in Arctic sites] because if it was big enough for someone to have seen it, they walked off with it.”