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IT BEGAN, AS so many things do, with a question that refused to let go. I had read, years ago, that a significant proportion of Iceland’s earliest settlers were not Norse but Gaelic — people from Ireland and the western Isles of Scotland.
The statistic was arresting: up to 60 per cent of the founding women and a quarter of the founding men had Gaelic ancestry.
But what struck me even more forcefully was what wasn’t being said. If these people were Irish, where had their language, their stories and their worldview gone?
This wasn’t just a genetic footnote — it was a cultural mystery. My book, Ireland in Iceland: Gaelic Remnants in a Nordic Land, is the result of following that thread across fjords, lava fields and linguistic fossils. It’s a journey through DNA and myth, through sagas and stone-carved clues, seeking echoes of a Gaelic presence in one of Europe’s most stark and storied landscapes. It’s also a meditation on what it means to lose — and possibly to recover — a forgotten kinship.
What I found in Iceland wasn’t a clean narrative or a simple answer. It was something stranger and more compelling: a scattered mosaic of signs, coincidences, place names and legends, all pointing toward a cultural interweaving far deeper than our current histories acknowledge.
Take the place names. Írafell — the Irish mountain. Patreksfjörður — named for a Gaelic bishop. Kjaransvík — Ciarán’s Bay.
These are not poetic inventions or latter-day tributes. They are ancient indicators, whispering of the people who lived, prayed and died in these landscapes long before the Norse sagas were ever set to parchment.
The literary connections are equally compelling. Iceland, like Ireland, was unique in medieval Europe for having recorded its oral traditions in writing. The sagas, with their complex characters and layered storytelling, have long been considered a purely Norse legacy.
But there are tantalising overlaps with Irish tales — especially in figures like Óláfr Pái from Laxdæla Saga, whose Irish mother turns out to be the daughter of a Gaelic king. His story, with its motifs of fosterage, identity and noble lineage, closely mirrors Irish epics like the Echtra Mac nEchach.
Could it be that Icelandic saga culture, which defines so much of its national identity, owes part of its form and imagination to Irish storytelling traditions? It’s a hypothesis not easily proven, but increasingly difficult to dismiss.
And then there are the monks — the papar — who appear in Icelandic sources as the island’s earliest visitors. Long before the Viking ships arrived, these Christian hermits were said to have established outposts across Iceland’s unpeopled coasts and islands.
Archaeological research has begun to corroborate this folklore. Carvings found in man-made caves in the southwest, eerily similar to early medieval sculpture in Ireland and Scotland, suggest a spiritual presence older than Norse settlement.
To me, these monks represent something profound. They weren’t raiders or settlers, but seekers. Their motivations were not to conquer, but to commune. They remind us that migration isn’t always about domination; sometimes it’s about devotion.
Throughout my research, I found myself returning to a simple question: if all this evidence exists — in names, bones, myths, and markers — why is the Irish legacy in Iceland so little known, or even acknowledged?
Part of the answer may lie in the complex layers of colonial influence. Iceland was under Norwegian and later Danish rule for centuries, during which its Norse heritage was emphasised, and its Gaelic roots allowed to fade. In Ireland, too, we have our own reasons for forgetting — perhaps because the narrative of being raided and victimised was more palatable than reckoning with the possibility that we were also voyagers, colonists and carriers of culture.
But memory is a strange thing. It clings in corners and resurfaces in curious ways. I would sit in cafés in Akureyri or Reykjavik, scanning faces for traces of Ireland: the reddish tint in the hair, the set of the jaw, the glint of irony in the eye. Of course, these are fictions — stories the mind tells itself. And yet, stories have their own kind of truth.
There are other resonances that feel too uncanny to ignore. The way both cultures speak of fairies, of hidden people, of sacred stones and shape-shifters. The way each tells stories not just to remember but to protect — the land, the spirit world, the threads that connect things.
In writing Ireland in Iceland, I wasn’t trying to prove anything definitively. This isn’t a historical monograph; it’s an act of cultural listening. A way of asking: what might still be there, if we knew how to look?
As someone who has spent much of my life exploring the echoes of Ireland’s past — whether in the Irish language, in old place names, or in our vanishing oral traditions — this journey felt like a natural extension. My previous books, like Thirty-Two Words for Field and Listen to the Land Speak, are rooted in the belief that language and land carry ancestral memory. Iceland offered a new lens through which to test that belief — and to extend it.
What I came to realise is that this isn’t just a book about history. It’s about belonging. About the hidden links between cultures. About how stories — especially the ones that lie dormant — can reawaken connections we never knew we’d lost.
We in Ireland like to speak of diaspora — of the people we’ve sent across the seas. But what if some of them went not unwillingly, but with a vision? What if, on a windswept island near the Arctic Circle, they planted not just crops and homes, but cosmologies?
And what if some part of that still lives on — not in textbooks or timelines, but in the air, the names, the bones of the land?
Manchán Magan is a writer, broadcaster and documentary-maker. His best-selling books include Thirty-Two Words For Field and Listen to the Land Speak. www.manchan.com and social media, Insta/Twitter/Tiktok/Facebook @manchanmagan Ireland in Iceland: Gaelic Remnants in a Nordic Land is published by Mayo Books and illustrated by Aodh Ó Riagáin. For more, visit manchansbooks.com.
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