11 - The Church and Gaelic–Norse Contact in the Hebrides

Summary

The two chief difficulties facing historians of the Hebrides in the Viking Age remain the extent to which Scandinavian settlement displaced the previous inhabitants on the islands and their language(s); and the pace and nature of the conversion of Scandinavians to Christianity. This short contribution considers the nexus between these two problems and proposes some potential solutions.

The linguistic problem has been much reviewed and remains inconclusive (the best recent review remains Jennings and Kruse 2009; see also Crawford 1981; Barrett 2004; Jennings and Kruse 2005; Kruse 2005; Clancy 2010; Macniven 2013, 2015; Whyte 2016; 2017; see also the wider contextual review in Woolf 2007: 275–311). Our key source of evidence is toponymy: the rich harvest of place-names of Old Norse derivation throughout the Hebrides assures us that Scandinavian presence was deep, long-term and linguistically influential. However, the fact that the Hebrides emerge into the historically better-attested period of the later Middle Ages as a strongly Gaelic-speaking region poses some searching questions. Did Norse completely replace Gaelic in the Hebrides for some of the period between c. 800 and c. 1300, and if so, for how long? Or was there some continuity from the pre-Viking period? If Gaelic was completely displaced, how then did it come to dominate in the later Middle Ages?

Although often forgotten, it is crucial to note that in linguistic terms the Hebrides prior to 800 were not evidently a homogenous region (see Jennings and Kruse 2005; 2009). While Gaelic was certainly the language of the region south of Ardnamurchan (historically the kingdom of Dal Riata), and we can demonstrate Gaelic dominance in islands such as Islay and Tiree, matters are more difficult north of Ardnamurchan. The presumption, based on art-historical proxy evidence, is that this northern region prior to 800 had been predominantly Pictish-speaking. There is good reason to suspect the spread of Gaelic-speaking ruling kindreds, and churches, into this northern region across the later 7th and through the 8th century (see Fraser 2004; Jennings and Kruse 2009; Clancy forthcoming), but to what extent, if at all, this led to the northern region adopting Gaelic as a language is unknowable.