In Depth

History

Iceland is now a peaceful, democratic welfare state full of clear-skinned, well-educated people who mostly speak three languages and have no army to speak of.

It was not always this way.

Frozen with glaciers, bubbling with volcanoes, with lousy soil and a mostly uninhabitable interior, Iceland was turned down for settlement by Irish monks, Swedish explorers and an attempted Norwegian settler before Ingólfur Arnason made Reykjavík his home in 874.

Arnason was the vanguard of a wave of settlement escaping from political strife in ninth-century Norway, and by the early 900s, the island was dotted with small farms.

By the mid-tenth century, Iceland was looking almost civilized. Admittedly, these were a tough people; the Sagas of the Icelanders, a close chronicle of early settlement, details shocking acts of violence and vengeance. But they had a code of laws, and in 930 set up their parliament, the Alðing, in a field on Ingólfur's estate conveniently overlooked by a ridge that functioned as a podium. The Icelanders renamed the area Aðingvellir ("Parliament Fields"), and it's now a national park.

The creation of the Alðing marked the beginning of 200 years of peace in Iceland. Every year, for two weeks, the whole population would get together, seal marriages, make business deals, appeal to the nation's highest court, listen to the "law-speaker" recite the entirety of the nation's legal code, and await the decisions of the 48 chiefs and 96 advisers who ran the country. The country became Christian in 999 or 1000, and churches and schools were founded.

This is considered the golden age of ancient Iceland, when the Sagas were written. These long narrative poems -- still read by most Icelanders -- are chronicles of early settlers' lives, loves, explorations and conquests, liberally enhanced with fiction. The discovery of Newfoundland by Leif Ericsson is in the sagas. There's even a saga that, some claim, shows Icelandic explorers were the first Europeans in New York harbor.

By the 1200s, feuding between politicians had developed into open war, and the country degenerated into civil chaos. Sensing an opening, the Norwegian King Hákon Hákonarson took over in 1262.

The next few hundred years were pretty dark; Iceland was run by wealthy Norsemen, taxes were high, and three volcanic eruptions during the 14th century killed many Icelanders.

Denmark took Iceland over in the 1500s when the Scandinavian countries joined into a union, but Danish rule was no more pleasant than the Norwegians'. A forced Reformation in 1550 led to the execution of Iceland's last Catholic bishop and his two sons and Swedish and Danish interests were given exclusive trading rights to Iceland, causing extortion and famine. Various volcanoes erupted, the worst of which was 1783 eruption whose poisonous gasses killed enough pasture to starve three-quarters of the island's cattle and a fifth of the human population. Iceland was not a pleasant place to live.

If 1783 was a nadir of Icelandic history, since then things have improved greatly. Denmark granted free trade in 1855, self-rule came in 1874, and finally the Act of Union in 1918 made Iceland a free state within Denmark, much like Greenland is now. Unlike in Ireland, freedom came peacefully to Iceland, a result of growing liberalism in Scandinavia. When Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, the Icelanders took control of their own destiny. For four years, Iceland functioned as an independent state under the protection of the Allies. On June 17, 1944, the Republic of Iceland was formally established.

The twentieth century has been a peaceful time for Iceland. Volcanoes continue to erupt, with the most recent life-threatening blast being in 1973 in the Westman Islands. But modern technology helps the Icelanders survive the wildness of their land. Iceland's few international conflicts have included low-level battles with Britain over fishing rights, ended in 1976 with an agreement, and general irritation over the massive American military base at Keflavik, which many Icelanders would like to get rid of (but they don't hold it against American travelers).

People, Language and Culture

Iceland is one of the world's most homogenous nations, with nearly all residents directly descended from the original Norse settlers. Many people can trace their entire family trees back to the Sagas. The gene pool is so pure, in fact, that the Icelanders have sold their genetic data to a local company, which is using it to track the hereditary roots of disease.

Most Icelanders don't have family names in the American sense. Instead, they have patronymics: the name Bjork Gudmundsdottir merely means Bjork's father was named Gudmund. It is illegal to take a family name, or to adopt a non-Icelandic name, and the phone book is sorted by first name. In a nation of 270,000 where most people are related anyway, this doesn't cause as much confusion as you may think it would.

The Icelandic language is close to Old Norse, with a complicated grammar and two letters that aren't found in the Roman alphabet (but were quite common in Old English): þ (called "thorn" by Old English scholars, it's pronounced "th" as in "wrath") and ð (called "eth," it's pronounced like "th" in "that.") It's almost impossible to get a grasp of Icelandic quickly, unless you know other Scandinavian languages, so it's a good thing almost all Icelanders speak English (and Danish, and often German, and sometimes Swedish, French or Spanish).

But Icelanders are fiercely protective of their language and defensive against incursions from English; they're into multilingualism, not Anglicisation. The most well-read nation in the world, they put out a volume of newspapers and books that's breathtaking for a country of 290,000.

Of those 290,000, more than half live in the Reykjavík metro area, and more migrate in from the countryside annually. Metro Reykjavík is the only place in Iceland that outsiders would call a city: the next-largest settlement, Akureyri up north, has a population of 15,000.

As a Scandinavian country, Iceland is mostly secular (though technically Protestant), and socially and sexually very liberal. There's no stigma to being a single mother here, and more than half of firstborn children are born to unmarried parents. But don't mistaken "liberal" for "friendly." Icelanders can come off to visitors as shy, reserved or even cold, and it takes quite a lot to breach that barrier.