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Paper short abstract

This paper will use a southern gothic lens to review the evidence for Norse settlement in the Western Isles of Scotland. The presence and absence of tropes in local namescapes are used to look behind sanitised narratives, to expose forgotten societal trauma and centre the fate of suppressed groups.

Paper long abstract

Not all narratives are born as free-flowing prose. In the Western Isles of Scotland, where written accounts and folk narratives are a surprisingly recent phenomenon, the story of pre-modern settlement draws on remnants of oral tradition. While the local names of places are important here, their ability to serve as allegories or problematise societal phenomena is often overlooked. Individual names can help biographise a place and its historical significance for the local community. When reviewed together as namescapes, what emerges is the story of the communities themselves and their formative experiences.

Read in context, the Hebridean namescapes have decidedly gothic features. Covering relatively isolated rural environments, they have a maudlin quality. While ruggedly beautiful, the scars of economic decline and abandonment abound. Lurking within this setting are memories of an older and potentially more traumatic story: the colonisation of the area by Viking-Age Scandinavians. By the later Middle Ages, however, associated Old-Norse place-names were reduced to devices in Romantic dinnseanchas (place-lore). More recently, the juxtaposition of Gaelic and Norse place-names was seen as proof of a vaguely-defined ‘hybrid’ society, without much comment on its evolution. Subsequent efforts to make Viking studies more accessible have presented Norse settlement in increasingly equitable terms.

This paper will use a southern gothic lens to question sanitised colonial narratives. It reviews the presence and absence of tropes in the place-name record in the context of deeply prejudiced and violent times, to explore the scope for forgotten historical trauma and witness the fate of suppressed groups.