Gaelic Iceland?

It is known that the Icelandic people have significant amounts of Celtic ancestry. What is the latest POD we can get to have them speaking a form of Gaelic?
 
I had thought that Gaelic ancestry came from Vikings stealing women from Ireland and Scotland to bring home. If I am remembering correctly then there is little chance it will become the main tongue of the island.
Sorry.
 
When the norse first arrived in iceland, they found natives that they presumed to be Irish - that they found them is documented, but whether or not they were Irish is up in the air.

In historical references, there are indications of Pictish skin boats sailing to Iceland long before the Vikings (of unfortunately dubious nature), reference Thule and Ultima Thule.

In other historical references, of even more dubious nature, Celtic Irish fled viking raids to Iceland (which they, from not such dubious sources, did have knowledge of)


The absolute earliest point of anything reasonably indicated would be ~50-100AD.

In 0-40 AD the Romans began a system of conquest against the Pictish just across the channel from Brittainy that we, today, would refer to as Genocide. Some picts escaped across the channel, but were pushed north by local tribes until the Scotii allowed them to land and settle a buffer region between them and the tribes of the south. Later, when Rome began to push north in Britain, the tribes of the south squeezed the resettled Picts against the Scotii of the North, and some of those Picts escaped by sea - presumably to Ireland, but *any* documentation of this period is extremely scanty and entirely one sided (roman).

It isn't totally impossible, given Pytheas' descriptions in 400BC, that some of these Picts escaped to Iceland. 400 years later, they are found by the Vikings.

Since the Picts would speak a Celtic derivative or dialect, and have similar customs to the non-Christianized Irish, it is quite reasonable for the vikings to then call them 'Irish'.

Thus, the Icelanders can be speaking Celtic from sometime around 50-100AD or ~450 AD up until the vikings arrive at around 750-850AD with only a little stretching of reality.


If you want Celtic before that, then the only way would be if the iron-age celtic tribes discovered steel circa 400BC... which would certainly change a *lot* of things if they distribute it like they did bronze & iron (overrunning anything weaker than them) and might, possibly, lead to an earlier colonistic urge somewhere in Europe.
 
Top