Who discovered Iceland?

Part of my family lives in Iceland, this fascinating island high in the north. The quaintness of the landscape immediately makes you think of times gone by (although in my opinion the Icelanders are tremendously progressive, culture-loving and connected. No wonder, perhaps, since the whole island has just about as many inhabitants as Graz and the long darkness in winter offers plenty of time for reading, making music and thinking).
Jokingly, my nephews are called Vikings by us, because after all, everyone knows that the Vikings were in Iceland. Around 874, the Viking Gardar Svavarsson is said to have discovered the island (and modestly named it Gardarsholm). But also the Viking Flóki Vilgerðarson is said to have discovered the island with the help of three ravens - and named it Iceland. (although Iceland was actually green and Greenland was full of ice ...)
Around 1220 Snorri Sturluson wrote the famous Snorra-Edda in Old Icelandic for the Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson. The Edda was actually a textbook for skalds (poets) and told ancient legends, stories and songs in prose form. (Who would have thought that a schoolbook would become one of our most important mythological sources?). Through the Edda, much about the Norse gods has been preserved for us, just as the monks in Ireland and Wales, with their writing of ancient legends, have handed down to us much knowledge about the Celtic world of gods.
And now that we have brought the Celts into the picture, this brings us to the goal of this blog post.
The conviction that Iceland was discovered by the Vikings is wavering. A bit like that we know today that someone (yes, the Vikings) traveled to America before Columbus.
New research suggests that Iceland was settled by Celts before the Vikings. Isn't that a wonderful connection of these two popular novel eras?
Þorvald Friðriksson writes in his scientific book "Keltar" that not only does DNA analysis prove that Icelanders are much more descendants from the Celts than from the Vikings, but also proves that Irish monks lived in Iceland long before 874. Exciting here also that he can prove that 60% of the first immigrants were women. This contradicts the image that one has of such voyages of discovery, that only men go on expeditions. No, there were monks and women. Material for exciting stories ...
Many names in Icelandic, especially for mountains and valleys, fish and birds, are clearly of Celtic origin. And the two most dangerous volcanoes in Iceland are called Hekla and Katla. Hekla means "the terrible one" in Celtic, and Katla means "she who destroys."
In our minds, the Celts may have been warriors, metalworkers and traders, but they did not go down in history as the great seafarers, unlike the Vikings. Which may be because one of our main written sources about the Celts is Julius Caesar, and he didn't even get beyond the south coast of England - far away from the North Atlantic and Iceland ... And the Celts Friðriksson talks about are not the mainland Celts of Caesar's time, but the "remnant Celts" of the "Celtic fringe" (Ireland, Wales, Brittany), who were still Celtic after the turn of time.
Nevertheless. Exciting.
This is one of those incidents where you realize how little we really know about the past and how great it is that today we have such techniques as DNA analysis, X-ray, C14 determination etc at our disposal. More poetic may be the legends of an Edda or a Mabinogion, but also the hard facts of science can create the most incredible stories in the mind.
Who knows, maybe one day I will write a novel with a Viking author that tells about the arrival of the Vikings in Celtic Iceland ...