The Vikings reach Iceland

The story

An island of ice and fire

Iceland is a volcanic island in the North Atlantic, just below the Arctic Circle. It has glaciers, geysers, hot springs, volcanoes that erupt now and then, long winter nights and long summer days. Before the Vikings it was almost uninhabited. Perhaps there were a few Irish monks there, called “papar”, looking for lonely places to pray; only uncertain traces of them remain.

According to the “Landnámabók”, the “Book of Settlements”, put into writing in Iceland between the 12th and 13th centuries, the first Norwegians to see the island were sailors blown off course by storms, such as Naddoddr and Garðar. Another explorer, Flóki, spent the winter there, lost his livestock and, seeing a fjord full of ice, called it “Ísland”, “land of ice”. The name has stuck, even though the south of the island is very green.

Ingólfr and the smoking peninsula

The first settler to stay for good was, according to tradition, a Norwegian chief named Ingólfr Arnarson. The story says that, as he approached the coast, he threw two wooden pillars from his house into the sea and swore to settle wherever the current carried them ashore. After a few years he found them in a bay surrounded by steam rising from the ground. He called it Reykjavík, “smoky bay”, and settled there, around the year 874. Today Reykjavík is the capital of Iceland. That steam was hot water from geothermal springs.

After him hundreds of families arrived. Many, according to the sagas, were fleeing from Norway because King Harald Fairhair (Harald Hårfagre) was imposing taxes and taking power away from the local chiefs. Others came from the British Isles and Ireland, bringing slaves and Celtic wives with them. Studies of the DNA of modern Icelanders show that most of the men descend from Scandinavians and most of the women from women of the British Isles. In less than sixty years the island was occupied: the period of settlement is called the “landnám”.

A country without a king

The Icelanders did not want to be ruled by a king. They organised themselves in an original way. The local chiefs, the “goðar”, did not rule over a territory but over a group of followers, who could change chief. In 930 they met for the first time in a general assembly, the Alþingi, in the open air, at Þingvellir, on a plain with a rock wall. It was a parliament: laws were made, cases were judged, quarrels were settled. The “lawspeaker”, a man chosen for three years, had to remember by heart and recite a third of the laws every year, because they were not written down.

In the year 1000 the assembly decided that Iceland would become Christian. The judge Þorgeir, who was still a pagan, withdrew for a day and a night under a blanket and then announced that there had to be one law and one faith. Anyone who wished could go on honouring the old gods in private.

Life on the island was hard. Houses were built with turf and blocks of lava, because there were no large trees; sheep and goats grazed on the meadows; cod was fished and dried for the winter. In time the settlers cut down many birch woods, and the soil, with no trees, was eroded by the wind.

Sagas and language

The Icelanders loved to tell stories. Between the 12th and the 14th centuries they wrote many “sagas”, long prose tales about the settlers' families, about feuds and revenge, about sea voyages. A writer and chief, Snorri Sturluson, also collected the myths of the old Norse gods, such as Odin and Thor. Thanks to these texts we know a great deal about the world of the Vikings.

The Icelandic language has changed much less than other European languages: an Icelander today can read texts more than eight hundred years old with relative ease. In 1262, after decades of internal struggles, Iceland agreed to submit to the king of Norway; it became independent again only in 1944.