Iceland

 Iceland is the second biggest island in Europe, smaller than Great Britain (home to England, Wales, and Scotland) but bigger than Ireland.  It still speaks something very close to Old Norse, the medieval language of Scandinavia, though of course they have had to come up with new words for things like TVs and trucks, and it is very proud of its Viking heritage.

 One continuity with the Icelanders' Norse past is they do not have last names in our sense.  Eirik Olafsson is son of Olaf.  His son will be surnamed Eiriksson.  The phone book (I expect there wasn't an Old Norse word for phone book) lists people alphabetically by first name.

Europeans have been in Iceland on and off since the ninth and probably the eighth century, some of the first being Celtic hermits, whose desire to get away from it all certainly took them far from human settlements.  Its traditional foundation date however is 874, when settlers from Norway established a permanent colony in what is now the capital of Reykjavik.  The early settlers were mostly Norwegian, bringing with them Celtic slaves they had captured in the islands north of Scotland.

By the tenth century there were enough settlers that they needed a form of governance, and they established the Althing, what might be called a parliament, a system of democratic government.  (As you probably guessed, the word means "all thing," or the thing/process/get-together for everybody.)  Iceland proudly calls its parliament the world's oldest, though the country's current status as an independent republic (now with a President) dates only to the last days of World War II, and for many of the years in between it was under one of the Scandinavian kings (Norway, Sweden, or Denmark).  The Althing is now the legislature for the country.

One of the most important decisions of the medieval Althing, around the year 1000, was to vote to adopt Christianity for the country.  They had been pagan until then, but they'd been visited by missionaries and decided this Christianity stuff made sense.  The Norse gods we now associate with early medieval Scandinavia are now known from stories written in Iceland, but only several centuries after they had all become Christian.

Besides the eddas, the stories of legendary gods, the Icelanders wrote sagas, more or less historical accounts of early settlers.  Many of the stories are about people deciding to kill their relatives.  One might wonder why a community of peaceful sheep farmers and fishermen would be interested in blood-thirsty tales of revenge, but a lot of the sagas seem intended as cautionary tales and examples of how to defuse violence before it gets out of hand, an activity in which women played a major role.

Sheep farming and fishing were indeed the principal activities of these Viking descendants.  Fishing included going after walruses and narwhals in the icy Arctic seas, coming home with ivory equivalents (tusks that could be substituted for elephant tusks), which made excellent trade goods.

One problem with sheep farming is that sheep eat baby trees before they can become established.  Iceland had had plenty of forests when Europeans arrived, but once they were cut down for ships or building, they did not replenish themselves, as new seeds would have had to travel over the ocean.  This had happened back at the end of the Ice Age, but there hadn't been sheep in Iceland then.

(Fun fact:  The word for mutton in Icelandic is the same as the word for meat.  Beef is cow-mutton.  Pork is pig-mutton.  Meat, just as a word, means meat from the sheep unless otherwise specified, because meat from the sheep was what you were going to get.)

A lot of Iceland is also volcanic, not suited for either sheep or forest.  Its volcanoes periodically erupt, releasing clouds that can foul air traffic.  The volcanoes do  fuel hot springs that help keep Reykjavik warmer than you'd expect for its latitude.  Indeed, modern Iceland's power comes almost entirely from hot springs and waterfalls.  Iceland's population is low, less than that of Vermont though it's substantially bigger, less than 10% that of Ireland, an island nearly as big.

It used to be that the cheapest way for Americans to fly to Europe was through Iceland, to Luxembourg.  One would get off the plane in Iceland while it refueled, and the gift shop was right there.  I have a most excellent sweater made of Icelandic wool that I bought there.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

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.