Question 2: What do Norse place names tell us about Viking and Norse occupation in the Outer Hebrides? And can you give us some examples?
The Viking and Norse (the old Scandinavian old Norse language) place names, that are so common in the Western Isles, have been used by archaeologists and place name specialists and historians as one of the types of evidence in their arguments and debates about the relationship between the incoming Scandinavian populations in the 9th century and the pre-existing Late Iron Age populations in the islands. And there are people who would argue, largely on the basis of the place names, that the incoming Scandinavians wiped out the entire existing population.
They would argue this, on the grounds that particularly in the northern part of the Hebrides, up in Lewis and Harris, the largest proportion of settlement place names is actually in the Scandinavian languages rather than in the pre-existing language of either Pictish or Gaelic.
Now, there’s a slightly circular argument involved in this because some of the academics who would be arguing this are saying that the fact that we have no surviving Pictish place names in the islands demonstrates that the pre-existing population was entirely wiped out but the assumption that underpins that is that the pre-existing population was actually speaking Pictish. Whereas, as we know from the material culture, we can’t say one way or another and there isn’t actually any evidence that Pictish was spoken here. So that’s the kind of circular argument: it says that we know these people were speaking Pictish, no Pictish survives therefore the people were killed but that argument doesn’t stand up if perhaps Gaelic, or a form of Gaelic, was being spoken here prior to the arrival of the Scandinavian population.
However, what we can do with the place names is look at their distribution in the landscape and South Uist is particularly interesting to look at in this case because South Uist actually has slightly fewer settlement place names in old Norse than for example Lewis or Harris. So we have a pattern there perhaps of replacement of the old Norse names with Gaelic names towards the end of the Norse period in the 12th or maybe the 13th century; or a possibility that what we’re seeing is the maybe both Gaelic and Norse were spoken by the population throughout this period, that it was a bilingual society, which is entirely possible given the links down between Ireland and the outer Hebrides in this period.
So I think the place names are not clear cut by any means. There’s evidence, for example, for the survival of some of the largest main island names from the pre-Norse period. That includes the name of the Island of Lewis which is clearly a non-Norse, a pre-Norse, name adapted into Old Norse by the incoming Scandinavians. We also get some very interesting hints about the earlier society from the place names. For example, we have a lot of Pappa-based place names: Pabbay, Pable, places like that throughout the western Isles and Pappa is the word that the incoming Scandinavian population used for Christian priests. It seems to be a word that they used before they themselves converted to Christianity. So it looks as if these pappa place names probably belonged to the very beginning of our Viking period: the 9th and 10th centuries and that they are place names that are given by the incoming Scandinavians to settlements and islands where perhaps monastic communities were living and that suggests an awareness of, perhaps even a survival of, these earlier Christian communities into the Viking period and the Norse period.
In the past, some academics have argued that the fact that many Gaelic names are associated with feature of the landscape, descriptive features of the landscape, particularly features out on the moor and inland – that might be related to the fact that the Gaelic speaking population was an underclass and that in fact these are names which were given by and used by what was effectively a slave population of Gaelic speaking people. And the reason that the main settlements at some of the largest settlements have Scandinavian names, like for example Shawbost, Kirkibost, Bosta, Mangersta, names like this, that this might perhaps be a reflection of the fact that the Scandinavian speaking population, the Norse speaking population, were higher status.
However, it’s not that simple because there are all other sorts of possibilities. For example, it is likely that Old Norse was the language of law and administration and taxation, given that the islands were, in the Scandinavian period, part of Norway. Therefore, it may be that Norse place names were used in law. It could also be that because Norse names seem to have been given to the biggest settlements or the names that survive are associated with the major settlements, it may be that we have actually lost place names that are associated with relatively minor settlements. And this is an important point, that what we see now is what’s left after nearly 800 years of English and Gaelic speaking community, as opposed to what was there during the period of the Scandinavian occupation.
The other thing is that names go through, in a bilingual population, periods where they are translated from one language to another, where they’re adapted sometimes from one language to another so that they make sense in a new language or in both languages. You may also have situations where you have two parallel names for a settlement, for example, Norse and Gaelic in our case. And perhaps the Gaelic name survived as Gaelic became the dominant language after the 13th century, after the islands became part of Scotland again.
So I don’t think that place name evidence is really clear cut one way or another.
File Ref: D:\ERD Management\120518_EDU_Material_Development_Standards_PRxx_ag_1.docx
Web: http://www.uhi.ac.uk/learning-and-teaching +
Content:: Page 2 of 2