Iceland

 Iceland is a parliamentary democracy, established on an island with a lot of volcanoes (a source of geothermal heat and electricity), one of the world's largest islands (in Europe second only to Great Britain, being bigger than Ireland), and a member of NATO.  Sounds sort of normal and boring, right?  But it's a country shaped by its medieval past even more than most of the rest of Europe.

The first human settlers of Iceland came from Scandinavia during the ninth century.  They found good land for their sheep and governed themselves through what was called the Althing (meaning the thing that has everyone represented), now considered the world's oldest parliament, even though it didn't meet for a century or so from the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries.  It's back in business now, and Icelandic people are intensely proud of its ninth-century roots, making it 400 years older than Britain's Parliament.  In the year 1000, the Althing voted to adopt Christianity, the only example we know of where people voted to become Christian, rather than a ruler deciding to convert and converting his people.

From Iceland, explorers went to Greenland and to what is now maritime Canada, although the New World settlements were short-lived and the Greenland colony eventually died out after several centuries.  The other Scandinavian countries claimed Iceland as their own at various times, most recently Denmark, but in 1944 the Icelanders became their own independent democracy.

The main economy of Iceland, both then and now, was based on sheep raising and fishing.  Wool is used to make lovely warm sweaters, which you can buy in the convenient gift shop at the airport if you're changing planes or have a layover.  The Icelandic word usually translated as "meat" means lamb or mutton by itself, and then there's "cow-mutton" (beef), "pig-mutton" (pork), and so on.  

The big problem with raising sheep is that they keep all the plant life cropped short.  In fact, gracious English manors in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries used to keep sheep to take care of the lawns.  But after the early Icelanders cut down the local trees, to build ships or open up grazing lands, trees were gone for good, any seed that somehow arrived from the mainland being nipped off before it could grow.  (These days Iceland plants and protects trees.)

These peaceful medieval sheep-farmers wrote sagas, accounts of historical events like the adoption of Christianity or the discovery of the New World, that also included a whole lot of feuds, insults, and people killing their relatives.  Although these are sometimes seen as glorifying violence, in fact they are about not getting into those situations in the first place, and women are often portrayed as the peace-keepers.

The sagas were written in Old Norse, the ancestor of the languages now spoken in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.  In Iceland, the everyday spoken language is still very close to Old Norse.  Proud of their medieval linguistic heritage, the Icelanders have avoided adopting modern words from other languages, instead creating new words from Old Norse roots for things like television or internet.  Children learn Danish in school, which they consider a simple language, good for talking to Scandinavians who have given up on complex declensions and conjugations.

They have also continued the tradition of having surnames based on a parent's name.  So "Peterson" as a last name originally meant "son of Peter," but in Denmark-Sweden-Norway these have just become hereditary, so Torvald Peterson's kids will all have the last name Peterson, not Torvaldson or Torvaldsdottir.  Not so in Iceland!  There each person's surname is quite literally so-and-so's daughter or son.  Torvald Peterson's daughter might be Kristin Torvaldsdottir.  The phone book is arranged by first name, not last name.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval Scandinavia, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.