Northwest Europe: 02*ICELAND

This island state lies between Greenland to the northwest across the Denmark Strait (300 km) and the Faroe Islands to the southeast across the North Atlantic (640 km).

Iceland was formed from a hotspot along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that runs north to south right across the island. There are about a hundred and thirty volcanoes on Iceland, about thirty of which are still active. Only the coastal areas have been used for settlement and agriculture because the rest is a wasteland of lava flows, ice and ash.

It remained uninhabited for a long time after the rest of western Europe had been settled. Pytheas of Massalia (c.380-c.305 BC) claimed that Thule, variously identified as Iceland, Norway, Shetland or Orkney, lay six days to the north of Britain. Roman currency has been found on the island, but it was probably left by the Vikings.

In his Thirty Questions on the Book of Kings (731) the English Benedictine monk the Venerable Bede (673-735) notes that the inhabitants of Thule (Iceland?) were able to see the Sun both by night and by day for a brief period in summer.

There is archaeological evidence of a monastic settlement at Kverkarhellir cave in southern Iceland. Simple crosses carved on its walls bear a striking resemblance to similar crosses found in Ireland and the western coast of Britain. A deposit of waste suggesting an earlier construction is dated to 800.

A cabin in Hafnir in southwest Iceland, abandoned between 770 and 880, is thought to have been inhabited part of the year but who built it cannot be determined.

Landnámabók (‘Book of Settlements’, twelfth century), a medieval Icelandic document detailing the settlement of Iceland by the Norse in the ninth and tenth centuries, claims that the island was discovered by a Norse Viking Naddoddr who named the country: Snæland (‘Land of Snow’). It was later known as Iceland following the settlement of another Norseman, Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson (9th century).

In his Íslendingabók (‘Book of the Icelanders’) the priest Ari Thorgilsson (1067-1148) claims the first settler was Ingólfur Arnarson, who founded Reykjavík in 874, and early settlers said that the forests reached ‘from the coast to the mountains’.

 Settled between 870 and 930 by Norse Vikings and Irish and Scottish Celts, Iceland was ruled by a central parliament or Althing, the oldest legislature in the world to still exist.