Language, Society and Identity in Early Iceland Stephen Pax Leonard (2012)

Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Review essay

[Publications of the Philological Society, 45] London: Wiley-Blackwell. Pp. 198 ISBN 978-1-118-29496-3

Reviewed by Kendra Willson

1 Introduction

The Icelandic language is famous for its morphological and lexical conservatism and for the dramatic success of puristic efforts in modern times. Iceland is also noted for the intensity and continuity of its written tradition starting in the twelfth century CE. The first written records, from the 12th century A.D., postdate by only a few hundred years what has been thought – notwithstanding a few potentially older archaeological finds – to be essentially the first human settlement of the island, by settlers from Norway (many coming via the British Isles) in the 9th century A.D. A similarly striking but less discussed feature of Icelandic is the nearly complete lack of dialectal variation observable in the modern language or in the 900-year written record, although Icelandic’s closest living relatives, Norwegian and Faroese (the latter reflecting another insular settlement from a similar time period), show substantial variation. Stephen Pax Leonard sets out to explain the unity of the Icelandic language, as an instance of ‘the problem of accounting for linguistic homogeneity ... in a tabula rasa situation’ (52). He mentions a partial analogue in the much later New Zealand English (71) (cf. e.g. Trudgill, Gordon, Lewis and MacLagan, 2000), which shows little dialectal variation, although New Zealand had more continuous immigration and social stratification than early Iceland and an indigenous Maori population.

Affiliation

University of Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

SOLS VOL 8.2 2014 315–326 doi : 10.1558/sols.v8i2.315

The second goal of Leonard’s study is to reconstruct the role of language in the establishment of social and political structures and the emergence of an Icelandic linguistic identity. In this context, he addresses a few speciﬁc areas, such as Icelandic social and legal structures and associated vocabulary (91–115), the terms dönsk tunga ‘Danish tongue’ and norræna ‘Norse’ as language labels (121–124), pronoun use in legal texts (128–136) and spatial reference (136–143). Leonard has published separate articles on some of these topics. He takes care to distinguish this early Icelandic linguistic identity from a ‘national’ identity in the modern sense, emphasizing that ‘any notion of statehood at the time is likely to have been based on the single person of the monarch’ (102). Although Iceland’s famous kinglessness until the union with Norway in 1262 suggests a different type of identity formation, the degree to which this can be viewed as ‘national’ is a discussion which Leonard carefully sidesteps. The conservatism of the Icelandic language and the long written tradition, with an emphasis on the medieval heritage, are central to Icelandic national identity in modern times (as summarized by Leonard on p. 11). He says ‘the dialectal homogeneity of Icelandic became subsequently an identity factor in itself’ (32) without specifying when this occurred. The work is in implicit dialogue with the modern discourse of linguistic purism and identity in Iceland. Leonard strives to avoid anachronism by focusing on the early period, but the relationship with the modern situation is also interesting. It is refreshing to see the subject treated by a non-Icelander with respect for Icelandic culture but some distance from the ideology.

2 Reasons for Icelandic homogeneity

According to Leonard (88), a decisive factor in the unity of Icelandic is the settlement pattern of isolated farmsteads, unlike the villages which emerged in Norway and the Faroes (cf. also Helgi Guðmundsson, 1977:319). In addition to ecological circumstances, formation of towns was deterred by the anti-vagrancy law vistarband (‘obligation for annual farm employment’) which originated during the commonwealth period (930–1262 A.D.) and lasted into the nineteenth century (Einar Laxness, 1995:vol. 3, 130–132); it required those who did not own sufficient property to qualify as independent farmers to affiliate themselves with larger farms as tenant farmers or seasonal workers. (The first towns were officially founded after the repeal of the trade monopoly in 1786–7.) In the absence of villages, children’s linguistic socialization is largely in the hands of older adults, which has a conservative effect, and there is no local peer group to mold young people’s linguistic usage.

REVIEW ESSAY: WILLSON 317

Leonard suggests that ‘it is difficult to find plausible contexts for the movement of large numbers of adolescents…around Iceland’ (76). There was a practice of fostering (cf. Hastrup, 1985:98–99, which Leonard does not discuss specifically) but it is not clear what fraction of children were fostered. The fostering contract lasted until the child reached the age of sixteen; in most instances the relocation probably occurred long before adolescence (Hastrup, 1985:98, gives age four as a hypothetical example). Some adolescents and young adults did circulate among farms as farmhands hired for seasonal employment (vist), though the number of such workers at any given farm would of course have been small. (In the nineteenth century, hired farmhands comprised 25% of the population [Gísli Gunnarsson, 2002]; I am not aware of statistics for the earliest period.) Another Icelandic institution which Leonard does discuss (100–101) is the hreppr, a local district which functioned as a unit for poor relief (paupers would be redistributed to other households). This institution seems to have evolved early in the commonwealth period (Einar Laxness, 1995: vol. 1, 208) and persisted into modern times. This would have circulated people among households, although locally. Leonard says (77) that marriage matches were local (contra Sandøy, 1994:41) and hence could make only limited contributions to dialect mixing. Archer (2009) has examined the geographical distances between the households involved in marriage matches mentioned in sagas and found that they tend to be regional but not maximally local. However, it is not clear how representative these data are of the situation as a whole. Leonard suggests (76) also that since the legal age of majority in early Iceland was twelve, teenagers would not display the linguistic behaviors associated with adolescent identity formation in modern cultures. This is an interesting claim but could use substantiation from studies of present-day traditional societies. Leonard argues that dialect mixing must have occurred prior to the settlement, as the pattern of isolated farmsteads would not have been conducive to dialect leveling, but more to maintaining an existing situation of low diversity. He points out the apparent uniformity of the language stages represented in early Norse runic inscriptions, despite the high degree of orthographic variation. Runologists have tended to view differences in written forms as reflecting different orthographic solutions or diachronic stages; ‘the possibility of regional differences [in runic Norse] is hardly admitted’ (59). However, this may reflect the assumptions made by runologists in the face of a sparse corpus as much as the linguistic reality. Apart from this interesting point, the section on runic sources (58–62) feels somewhat oblique to the thesis of the book, as the author concludes (62) that runic evidence is basically irrelevant to his project. There are a couple of runic inscriptions from Iceland older than the 1200 date Leonard gives for the earliest

318 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES

(58), including recent ﬁnds that postdate Leonard’s research (Þórgunnur Snædal, 2011). Earlier scholars (Leonard [77] cites Kuhn, 1935:29–30; see also Helgi Guðmundsson, 1977:321) have also claimed that the alþing assembly, which brought together a few percent of the total population every summer, had a standardizing effect on the language. Leonard (77) is skeptical, as this two-week summit would probably not have engendered sustained contacts of types that would have inﬂuenced language development. However, the special importance of laws as verbal artifacts in Iceland’s kingless state may have contributed to conservatism, as the laws became, along with skaldic poetry, ‘a solid, immovable and largely immutable “lump of language” in the middle of Icelandic’ (84) well before they were committed to writing. The importance of written culture from early on and the comparatively high literacy rate in Iceland from an early date are also commonly cited as contributing factors to the conservatism and uniformity of the Icelandic language (cf. Helgi Guðmundsson, 1977:322–323). Leonard does not emphasize this as much, as he is interested in reconstructing factors shaping language practice in the period before writing became widespread in the twelfth century, although, as with most research on early Iceland, he bases his inferences largely on texts recorded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

3 Use of sources

Leonard’s use of the Old Icelandic written sources shows a solid grounding in Norse philology and history and consideration of the texts’ cultural contexts. His readings of the laws seem particularly skillful and insightful. I agree with his assessment that the early Icelandic laws are mainly ‘concerned with maintaining social stability’ (102) rather than with ‘democratic justice’ (102) and like his thoughts (102–103) about the function of the búakviðr ‘panel of neighbors’, a type of jury, in forming community. In addition to the ‘lump of language’ (84) notion mentioned above, an interesting point of linguistic relevance is that the law ‘made linguistic identity a legal issue’ (133) by specifying that a person who had not learned dönzk tunga [the ‘Danish tongue,’ i.e., Old Norse language] in early childhood could not be appointed to a jury until he had lived in Iceland for three years. This might reﬂect an estimate of the amount of time needed for an adult to master a second language and become integrated into society or established as a likely permanent resident. Three-year residence is also the threshold for paying tithes in Iceland. However, the number three and the period of three years occur elsewhere in Old Icelandic law, in standard ﬁnes of three marks of silver and the

REVIEW ESSAY: WILLSON 319 three-year preparation time and mandatory absence in the lesser outlawry (fjörbaugsgarðr), and three and nine recur in mythical contexts. In interpreting other Old Icelandic texts, Leonard faces the challenge of summarizing very concisely a huge scholarly literature. Occasionally this leads to slightly misleading phrasings. He calls the Eddic meter fornyrðislag ‘a tightening of the Germanic alliterative long line’; ‘version’ might be more cautious. He claims (66) that skaldic poetry, ‘a very esoteric and apparently prestigious style of speech was therefore accessible to individuals from any part of society’ (66), and ‘available to all speakers’ (70) but also discusses (82–85) the formal rules and norms of the genre. Although the possibility of learning to interpret and compose skaldic verse may have been widely available, not everyone in early Icelandic society would have possessed this skill. This is seen clearly in Gísla saga Súrssonar, in which Gísli utters a verse at a public gaming event in which he confesses to a murder (1943:58), but no one seems to heed it except his sister Þórdís, who memorizes the verse on one hearing, and later ‘gengr heim ok hefir ráðit vísuna’ (1943:59) [goes home and has figured out the verse]; several months later, prompted by her husband, she explains its meaning to him and only then do repercussions begin. The skalds to whom verses are attributed are overwhelmingly male and belong to the landholding class. In Leonard’s brief introduction to the saga literature (21–23), it is not always clear which statements refer to all genres of sagas and which refer specifically to the Icelandic family sagas. The nicely put characterization, ‘The sagas portray the mechanisms of personal and social relationships in the context of a society that is struggling for survival’ (23) applies most obviously to the latter. (These genres are, however, largely modern categories.) The characterization of sagas as ‘written texts intended for oral performance’ (86) underplays the complex and fluid dynamic between written and oral that underlies them. Leonard characterizes Njáls saga as possibly containing ‘a parody of legal language’ (23); while Njála is distinctive in its attitude toward legal tricks (Sterling, 2009), caution should be exercised in characterizing medieval texts as parodic (see Willson, 2009). More obviously or purely humorous presentations of legal loopholes are seen, for example, in Víga-Glúms saga. Leonard claims (112) that ‘Icelanders found it also important to trace their ancestors back to “legendary history”’ prior to the settlement and that ‘The characters of the fornöld were not the complex and ambiguous figures of “history”, but emblematic figures expressing simple primary values of heroic endeavor’ (113). This seems a slightly anachronistic characterization. Genealogical roots in the ‘old country’ were valued and ancient times were conceived of as significantly different from the writers’ present, but all were viewed as history.

320 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES

In interpreting the Book of Settlements (Landnámabók), Leonard occasionally seems to fall into the trap of assuming that the people who are mentioned are representative of those who came, although he also acknowledges ‘that the founders mentioned in Landnámabók represent only a small proportion of the total settlement population’ (63). Hence ‘according to Landnámabók, out of the ﬁrst 415 settlers, only 11 were women’ (72) is taken to suggest a marked gender imbalance during the earliest settlement times and ‘There are very few accounts of settlers travelling in groups larger than four’ (89) suggests that the settlers came in very small groups. However, the record is heavily biased toward male Scandinavian heads of households. The argument ex silentio is also very pertinent to the question of non-Scandinavian languages that might have been represented among the early settlers. Leonard notes that 16% of the 48 women and less than 5% of the 220 men whose origin is stated in Landnámabók ‘have genealogical ties to the British Isles’ (63); this is a far smaller fraction than suggested by the genetic evidence (see below), although the gender imbalance is similar.

4 Possibility of other language contacts

To my mind the book’s greatest weakness is its dismissal of the possibility of linguistic influence from languages other than Norse dialects, particularly Celtic. Leonard insists that ‘Linguistic norms in early Iceland came into being in a context of dialect contact and not language contact’ (30). While Icelandic certainly continues the early Norse language spoken in Scandinavia, the claim that there were no other languages significantly present in Iceland in the early period does not seem fully substantiated. The issue of a Celtic presence, although it recurs several times throughout the text, is treated somewhat dismissively. Recent genetic studies (Agnar Helgason, 2000a, 2000b, cited by Leonard, p. 62) suggest that over half the women settlers were of British background, while 90% of the men were from Scandinavia. Leonard states that ‘the most likely scenario is that the female settlers with Celtic origins were Norse speakers by the time of the Settlement’ (67). This is not really supported, and Leonard does not discuss how such language shift in the British Isles might have contributed to dialect leveling or left a lasting legacy. The dearth of Celtic loan words in Icelandic, apart from proper names, has traditionally been taken as evidence for a lack of influence, but the possibility of contact influences in other areas of the grammar has not to my knowledge been reexamined in the light of modern contact linguistics. (The issue of influences between Norse and Celtic in literary form, e.g. prose sagas and poetic rhythms, has been discussed extensively. Leonard [67] cites Gísli Sigurðsson [1988:25], a reference missing from his bibliography. Other cultural influences, e.g. in visual arts, are

REVIEW ESSAY: WILLSON 321 undeniable.) One book-length study of Celtic influence on Iceland, by Helgi Guðmundsson (1997), is largely devoted to explaining away its subject matter, as Gísli Sigurðsson (1999:109) notes. The existence of Celtic place names in Iceland (Hermann Pálsson, 1996:49–97 passim), would suggest an actual presence of the language, as most Icelandic place names (typical for an exploratory settlement phase) are semantically transparent formations in the language of the settlers. The patterns of Celtic place names in Iceland should be analyzed using the insights of recent developments in toponymy as a key to settlement patterns (e.g. Aikio, 2007; Udolph, 1994). The only reference Leonard (67) gives for Common Gaelic influence on English is Baugh (1959), an outdated textbook. More recent discussions (such as the contributions to Filppula and Klemola, 2009) might help provide models for identifying contact influences between Celtic and Norse. In interpreting the passage from Laxdæla saga in which Melkorka tells her son Ólafr she has ‘kennt þér írsku at mæla, svá at þik mun þat eigi skipta, hvar þik berr at Írlandi’ (1934:51) [taught you to speak Irish, so that it will not matter to you, where in Ireland you find yourself], Leonard (120) cites O’Rahilly (1988:248) that ‘it is not correct to speak of Irish dialects’ in the tenth century; although Middle Irish texts are quite uniform, there was undoubtedly variation in the spoken language. Norse influence on Old English has been a particularly active area of modern contact linguistics (particularly since Thomason and Kaufmann, 1988). Influence of Old English on Norse is recognized especially in church vocabulary and writing practices, where it appears to be common to the Norse area rather than specific to Iceland (Leonard [60] cites Hreinn Benediktsson [1965:22–35] on writing). Despite the many voyages to England mentioned in Old Norse sources, I have never seen discussion of Anglo-Saxon speakers in Iceland. Leonard mentions indications that learned Icelanders at least knew Old English (81). He states that ‘whilst Norse and English may have been mutually intelligible they were unam- biguously different languages’ (126); it is not entirely clear what definition of ‘language’ is being invoked here. The degree of mutual intelligibility between Old Norse and Old English, which at that point may have had ca. 1000 years of divergence, might have approximated the ‘semi-communication’ (term due to Haugen, 1966) as modeled e.g. by Braunmüller (2012) in the context of Old/Middle Scandinavian and Middle Low German. It is my personal suspicion that the portrayal of mutual comprehensibility in Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu is streamlined for literary effect and convenience. The saga states (quoted by Leonard on 126) ‘Ein var þá tunga á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmörku. En þá skiptusk tungur í Englandi, er Vilhjálmr bastarðr vann England; gekk þaðan af í Englandi valska, er hann var þaðan ættaðr’ (1938:70) [At that time there was a single tongue in England as in Norway and Denmark. But then languages changed

322 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES in England, when William the Bastard (Conqueror) won England; from then on French was used in England, as he was descended from there] and depicts an Icelandic poet impressing King Æthelred with skaldic verses. The possibility of other contacts, such as a Sámi or Finnic influence, is not discussed. Sámi (called Finnar) are a pervasive presence in Old Norse texts. Despite Hermann Pálsson (1997) and a recent boom in work on influences between Sámi and Scandinavian, including loan words (Hyllested, 2008) and speculation on morphological influences (e.g. Kusmenko, 2004), as far as I know no one has looked for a Sámi linguistic presence in Iceland. Olsen and Bergsland’s (1943) proposal that a twelfth-century runic inscription from Iceland might contain a Sámi word was emphatically rejected by the runological community (see Willson, 2012). Another argument ex silentio is the dearth of references to other languages or their speakers in the early Icelandic texts. However, as Leonard notes (118), there are surprisingly few references to linguistic differences or communication diffi- culties in Norse sources, even in relation to groups that are known to have spoken quite different languages, so the dearth of references to different languages within Iceland does not necessarily mean that other languages were not spoken there, as he suggests in the case of Gaelic (119–121). As Leonard notes, the Grágás clause, mentioned above, about people who did not learn the dönsk tunga in early childhood ‘suggests that the scribe had some sort of group of speakers in mind’ (133). Sterling (2008) analyzes the representations of ethnic others in sagas of Icelanders as part of a strategy for delimiting Icelandic identity, excising many foreign elements while ennobling others. The impression of homogeneity given by the sagas may not directly reflect the reality of early Iceland.

5 Icelandic language history

Leonard stresses in his introduction that ‘my intention is not to describe language change (neither phonological, syntactic or otherwise) in Norse or Old Icelandic’ (2). As with the discussions of Old Icelandic literature, it is evident from the book that Leonard controls this history, but the telescopic treatment subordinate to other concerns sometimes leads to unclear or misleading formulations. The emergent stops /rl/ > /tl/, /rn/ > /(r)tn/, /ll/ > /tl/, /nn/ > /tn/ (67) are probably a bit later than the thirteenth-century date that Leonard (68) gives to them, citing Sandøy (1994:45, cf. Sandøy 2001:130); Björn K. Þórólfsson (1925:32) notes that /ll/ > /tl/ is reﬂected in orthography starting in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries (Leonard here uses the Icelandic convention of for /t/). The pun in Eyrbyggja saga cited on p. 68 need not be conclusive, as puns can rely on distorted pronunciations. In his discussion of preaspiration (68-69), Leonard mentions (69)

REVIEW ESSAY: WILLSON 323 the hypothesis that it might be due to Gaelic influence but not the proposed connection to Sámi (Riessler 2004) or the view that it is a late and independent innovation in Icelandic, part of the Icelandic consonant shift (cf. Steblin- Kamenskij, 1974; Goblirsch, 2001), despite the remnant distribution observed by Gunnar Ólafur Hansson (2001). The passing reference (72) to ‘the pronunciation of hv and not kv’ might be less clear to a reader unfamiliar with Icelandic dialectal variation than, say, ‘the pronunciation of orthographic as /xv/ rather than /kv/’. Leonard states (87) that ‘Icelandic’s morphology is almost entirely intact and and syntax of the modern language does not differ greatly from that of the language of the Vikings’. ‘Intact’ seems a somewhat evaluative term. Although there is large overlap between grammatical word order constructions in Old and in Modern Icelandic, the language shows tendencies toward increasingly fixed word order and related typological changes that are typical for European languages moving into the modern period. In the discussion (73) which contrasts the acceptance of the sixteenth-century quantity shift and unrounding of /y/ with the successful twentieth-century campaign against flámæli (‘slack speech’, also called málvilla ‘language error’, a lowering of high lax vowels /I/ /Y/ to merge with mid- lax vowels /ε/ /œ/) it could be emphasized that the phonological changes that were resisted by the purists were in general younger and had not been adopted by all speakers.

6 Conclusion

This ambitious project is grounded in a thorough knowledge of early Icelandic written culture and institutions as well as a background in (historical) socio- linguistics. The book is clearly and concisely written and its scope is carefully delimited (1–2). Essential background is provided in a way that should help orient readers not familiar with Iceland to the ensuing discussions without boring the Icelandicist reader. 146 pages of text are supported by a 37-page bibliography (147–183). There is also a concise index (184–188). All in all, Leonard’s is an exemplary illustration of how linguistics and other aspects of cultural history can inform each other insightfully. The study should be accessible and interesting both to readers interested in questions of language and identity formation in ‘new societies’ in general and to those interested in early Icelandic society. I look forward to seeing further work in this vein and hope that Leonard will continue to develop his insightful readings of early Icelandic law. I also hope that the relevance of contacts with other languages, especially Celtic and Sámi, for the Icelandic linguistic landscape will be reexamined with systematic methods and fresh eyes.

324 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES

References Agnar Helgason (2000a) mtDNA and the origin of the Icelanders: Deciphering signals of recent population history. American Journal of Human Genetics 66: 999–1016. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/302816. Agnar Helgason (2000b) Estimating Scandinavian and Gaelic ancestry in the male settlers of Iceland. American Journal of Human Genetics 67: 697–717. Doi: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1086/303046. Aikio, A. (2007) The study of Saami substrate toponyms in Finland. In R. L. Pitkänen and J. Saarikivi (eds) The borrowing of place-names in the Uralic languages 159–197. Onomastica Uralica, 4. Debrecen/Helsinki: [s.n.]. Archer, E. (2009) ‘It is generally thought that you are rather too poor’: Saga Iceland, a marriage proposal, rejection and the reasons why. Paper presented at the 13th International Saga Conference, Uppsala, 11 August 2009. Baugh, A. C. (1959) A History of the English language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Björn K. Þórólfsson (1925) Um íslenskar orðmyndir á 14. og 15. öld og breytingar þeirra úr fornmálinu. Reykjavík: Fjelagsprentsmiðjan. Braunmüller, K. (2012) Semi-communication and beyond: Some results of the Hamburg Hanseatic Project (1990–1995). In E. H. Jahr and L. Elmevik (eds) Contact between Low German and Scandinavian in the Late Middle Ages. 25 years of research 95–111. Uppsala: Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur. Einar Laxness (1995) Íslandssaga. Reykjavík: Vaka-Helgafell. Filppula, M. and Klemola, J. (eds) (2009) Re-evaluating the Celtic hypothesis. Special issue, English Language and Linguistics 13(2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gísla saga Súrssonar (1943) In Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson (eds) Vestfirðinga sögur. Íslenzk fornrit, 6. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag. Gísli Gunnarsson (2002) Hvað var vistarbandið? Vísindavefurinn 13.5.2002. Retrieved 20 January 2013 from http://visindavefur.is/?id=2377. Gísli Sigurðsson (1999) [review of] Helgi Guðmundsson. Um haf innan. Vestrænir menn og íslensk menning á miðöldum. Álvísmál 9: 109–111. Goblirsch, Kurt (2001) The Icelandic consonant shift in its Germanic context. Arkiv för nordisk filologi 116: 117–133. Gunnar Ólafur Hansson (2001) Remains of a submerged continent: Preaspiration in the languages of Northwest Europe. In L. Brinton (ed.) Historical linguistics 1999 157– 173. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (1938) In S. Nordal and G. Jónsson (eds) Borgfirðinga sögur. Íslenzk fornrit, 3. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag. Hastrup, K. (1985) Culture and history in medieval Iceland: An anthropological analysis of structure and change. Oxford: Clarendon. Haugen, E. (1966) Semicommunication: The language gap in Scandinavia. Sociological Inquiry 36(2): 280–297. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1966.tb00630.x.

REVIEW ESSAY: WILLSON 325

Helgi Guðmundsson (1977) Um ytri aðstæður íslenzkrar málþróunar. In E. G. Pétursson and J. Kristjánsson (eds) Sjötíu ritgerðir helgaðar Jakobi Benediktssyni 20. júlí 1977 314–325. Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar. Helgi Guðmundsson (1997) Um haf innan. Vestrænir menn og íslensk menning á miðöldum. Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan. Hermann Pálsson (1996) Keltar á Íslandi. Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan. Hermann Pálsson (1997) Úr landnorðri. Samar og ystu rætur íslenskrar menningar. Studia Islandica, 54. Reykjavík: Bókmenntafræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands. Hreinn Benediktsson (1965) Early Icelandic script as illustrated in vernacular texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Reykjavík: Manuscript Institute of Iceland. Hyllested, A. (2008) Saami loanwords in Old Norse. North-Western European language evolution 54 and 55: 131–146. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/nowele.54-55.04hyl. Kuhn, H. (1935) Die sprachliche Einheit Islands. Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 11: 29– 39. Kusmenko, J. (2004) The Sámi and the Scandinavians: Aspects of 2000 years of contact. Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac. Laxdæla saga (1934) Einar Ól. Sveinsson (ed.) Íslenzk fornrit, 5. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenska Bókmenntafélag. Olsen, M. and Bergsland, K. (1943) Lappisk i en islandsk runeinskrift. Avhandlinger utg. av det Norske Videnskapsakademi i Oslo, II kl. 1943 Nr. 3. Oslo: I kommisjon hos Jacob Dybwad. O’Rahilly, T. F. (1988) Irish dialects past and present, with chapters on Scottish and Manx. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Riessler, M. (2004). On the origin of preaspiration in North Germanic. In K. Jones-Bley, M. E. Huld, A. Della Volpe and M. R. Dexter (eds) Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Los Angeles, November 7-8, 2003 168–185. (= Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series, 49. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.) Sandøy, H. (1994) Utan kontakt og endring? In U.-B. Kotsinas and J. Helander (eds) Dialektkontakt, språkkontakt och språkförändring i Norden: föredrag från ett forskarsymposium 38–52. Stockholm: Meddelanden från Institutionen för nordiska språk vid Stockholms universitet. Sandøy, H. (2001) Færøysk i vestnordisk språkhistorie. In K. Braunmüller and J. Lon Jacobsen (eds) Moderne lingvistiske teorier og færøsk 125–154. Oslo: Novus. Sigurðsson, G. (1988) Gaelic inﬂuence in Iceland: historical and literary contacts: a survey of research. Reykjavík: Menningarsjóður. Steblin-Kamenskij, M. I. (1974) The Scandinavian consonant shift. Arkiv för nordisk ﬁlologi 89: 1–29. Sterling, N. (2008) The other inside: Icelandic identity and foreigners in the Íslendingasögur. Doctoral dissertation. Berkeley: University of California. Sterling, N. (2009) Disposable outsiders and narrative liability in Njáls Saga. Enarratio 16: 79–88.

326 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES

Thomason, S. G. and Kaufman, T. (1988) Language contact, Creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Trudgill, P., Gordon, E., Lewis, G. and MacLagan, M. (2000) Determinism in new dialect formation and the genesis of New Zealand English. Journal of Linguistics 36: 299– 318. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022226700008161. Udolph, J. (1994) Namenkundliche Studien zum Germanenproblem. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110884180. Willson, K. (2009) Parody and genre in sagas of Icelanders. In A. Ney, H. Williams and F. C. Ljungqvist (eds) Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Preprint Papers of The 14th International Saga Conference Uppsala, 9th – 15th August 2009 1039–1046. Papers from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, 14. Gävle: Gävle University Press. http://www.saga.nordiska.uu.se/preprint/ Willson, K. (2012) A putative Sámi charm on a 12th c. Icelandic spade: runic reception, magic and contacts. In C. Hasselblatt and A. van der Hoeven (eds) Finno-Ugric Folklore, Myth and Cultural Identity. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Finno-Ugric Languages, University of Groningen, June 7-9, 2011 267– 281. Studia Fenno-Ugrica Groningana, 7. Maastricht: Shaker. Þórgunnur Snædal (2011) Rúnum ristir gripir frá Alþingisreitnum og Urriðakoti. Árbók hins íslenska fornritafélags 167–185.