ABSTRACT

Ireland has always had something of an international flavor to it. From its earliest days as an inhabited island, Ireland (named after the goddess Éiriú) saw frequent commerce with the island of Britain and the European mainland. The “sea roads” between Ireland and the Mediterranean have always been well traveled; travelers’ accounts have long taken note of Spanish ships in Galway Bay. Sea roads to the north were commonly traveled as well. Some of the first inhabitants of Iceland, to the northwest of Ireland, were Irish monks called papars (“fathers”), practicing what they called “white martyrdom.” Between the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. the monks climbed into small boats called currachs and allowed themselves to be carried away from Ireland with no oars to guide their journey, trusting in God to take them to a new place. Enough of these monks survived to establish a foothold in Iceland, Scotland, and elsewhere, to which others came (Crawford 2002). The names of some of Iceland’s oldest-named natural features (such as á, pronounced “aw,” “river”) bear an uncanny similarity to certain Irish words (abhainn, pronounced “awin,” “river”). The Irish monks are said to have left Iceland when the Norse arrived in the ninth century C.E. (Harding and Bindloss 2004: 20), but their peripatetic ways were by that time legendary.