Iceland

• 1. Introduction

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  Iceland sits on a rift where two of the planet's great tectonic plates, the Eurasian and the North American, are slowly pulling apart. It is one of the only places on Earth where that drift can be watched above sea level. The land itself is geologically young, between 16 and 18 million years old, built by rifting and volcanism along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Geysir, the spring that gave the English language the word geyser, sits here. So does Strokkur, which still erupts every 8 to 10 minutes. This is a Nordic island country between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic, the region's westernmost and most sparsely populated. How does a place this raw and isolated, with roughly 395,000 residents, come to rank among the wealthiest and most peaceful nations on Earth? Who were the people who first chose to live on a volcanic plateau of sand and lava? And why does a country at the edge of the Arctic Circle have no army at all? The answers run from a despondent Norseman naming an ice cap to a summit that helped end the Cold War.

• 2. Naming The Snowland

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  Naddodd, by the account of the Landnámabók, was the first Norseman to reach the island, in the ninth century, and he arrived by accident, lost while sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands. He called the place Snæland, meaning Snowland. The Swedish explorer Garðar Svavarsson came next, circled the whole island, and named it Garðarshólmur, Garðar's Isle, after himself. The present name came from Flóki Vilgerðarson, the first Norseman to sail there on purpose. According to the Sagas of Icelanders, Flóki climbed a mountain after a brutal winter in present-day Vatnsfjörður, looked out at an ice cap, and chose the name Iceland out of his despair. A popular notion holds that settlers picked the chilly name to scare off rivals. That idea is most likely a myth.

• 3. Settlement And Commonwealth

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  Náttfari, one of Garðar Svavarsson's men, stayed behind one summer with two slaves and became, with them, the first documented permanent resident of the island. He settled in what is now called Náttfaravík. The Norwegian-Norse chieftain Ingólfr Arnarson built his homestead in present-day Reykjavík in 874, and many emigrants followed him, mostly Scandinavians along with their thralls, a great number of whom were Irish or Scottish. By 930 nearly all the arable land was claimed, and the Althing was created to regulate the new Icelandic Commonwealth. Genetic and blood-type studies later confirmed the literary record. The majority of male settlers were of Nordic origin, while the majority of the women were of Gaelic origin. Before any of them arrived, monks called the Papar may have lived there, possibly part of a Hiberno-Scottish mission. Carbon dating of a cabin's ruins in Hafnir places its abandonment between 770 and 880. The early settlement years fell within the Medieval Warm Period, when about 25 percent of Iceland was forested, compared to roughly 1 percent today. Around the year 999 or 1000, Christianity was adopted by consensus, though Norse paganism lingered for some years among parts of the population.

• 4. Centuries Of Catastrophe

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  The Age of the Sturlungs, running roughly from 1220 to 1264, tore the Commonwealth apart through violent feuds among chieftains, chiefly the Sturlung family. It ended with the Old Covenant of 1262 to 1264, which placed Iceland under Norwegian rule. The Black Death arrived in 1402 to 1404 and returned in 1494 to 1495. The first outbreak is estimated to have killed 50 to 60 percent of the population, the second between 30 and 50 percent. In the summer of 1627, Barbary Pirates carried out the Turkish Abductions, taking hundreds of residents into slavery in North Africa and killing dozens, the only invasion in Icelandic history to cause casualties. The smallpox epidemic of 1707 to 1708 is thought to have killed a quarter to a third of the population. Then in 1783 the Laki volcano erupted. In the years that followed, known as the Mist Hardships, over half of all livestock in the country died, and roughly a quarter of the population starved to death. Laki's dust clouds and haze hung over much of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia for months. The first census, taken in 1703, had recorded 50,358 people, and after Laki the population fell to about 40,000.

• 5. The Long Road To A Republic

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  Jón Sigurðsson took the lead of an Icelandic independence movement that formed in the 1850s, drawing on a nationalism nurtured by the Fjölnismenn and other Danish-educated intellectuals. In 1874 Denmark granted Iceland a constitution and limited home rule, expanded in 1904, when Hannes Hafstein became the first Minister for Iceland in the Danish cabinet. That same year of 1874, the clergyman and poet Matthías Jochumsson wrote the words of Lofsöngur, the national anthem, with music by Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson. The Danish-Icelandic Act of Union, signed on the 1st of December 1918 and valid for 25 years, made Iceland a fully sovereign state in personal union with Denmark. When German forces occupied Denmark on the 9th of April 1940, the Althing replaced the king with a regent and took control of its own defence and foreign affairs. A month later, British forces launched Operation Fork, invading and occupying the country in violation of its neutrality. In 1941 the friendly Icelandic government invited the then-neutral United States to take over its defence. Beginning on the 20th of May 1944, Icelanders voted in a four-day plebiscite. The result was 97 percent to end the union and 95 percent in favor of a republican constitution. Iceland became a republic on the 17th of June 1944, with Sveinn Björnsson as its first president.

• 6. A Land That Tears Itself Apart

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  Hekla, Eldgjá, Herðubreið, and Eldfell are among the volcanoes that make this one of the most geologically active places on Earth. The island has hundreds of volcanoes and about 30 active volcanic systems, sitting atop the Iceland hotspot where the Eurasian and North American plates drift apart. Surtsey, one of the youngest islands in the world, rose from the ocean in eruptions between the 8th of November 1963 and the 5th of June 1968, and only scientists studying new life are allowed to set foot there. The harnessing of this energy transformed daily life. Most residents have access to inexpensive hot water, heating, and electricity drawn from geothermal power and from rivers and waterfalls. The land also keeps unusual weather records. The highest air temperature ever recorded was 30.5 degrees Celsius on the 22nd of June 1939 at Teigarhorn, and the lowest was minus 38 degrees on the 22nd of January 1918 at Grímsstaðir and Möðrudalur. The warm North Atlantic Current keeps the coasts ice-free through winter, with the last ice incursion on the north coast back in 1969.

• 7. An Island Of Few Creatures

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  The Arctic fox was the only native land mammal when humans arrived, having crossed the frozen sea at the end of the ice age. No native reptiles or amphibians live on the island, and bats reach it only rarely, blown in by winds without the ability to breed. Polar bears occasionally drift over from Greenland on icebergs, and in June 2008 two arrived in the same month, though no Icelandic population exists. The land that greeted the first settlers was far greener than today. Ari the Wise, writing in the Íslendingabók in the late 12th century, described Iceland as forested from mountain to sea shore, with around 30 percent of the land under trees. Centuries of cutting for firewood and timber, the chill of the Little Ice Age, and overgrazing by imported sheep stripped away critical topsoil. Three-quarters of the country's 100,000 square kilometres is now affected by soil erosion. The most common native tree, the northern birch, survives in only a few small stands in isolated reserves. Reforestation has increased the forest cover sixfold since the 1990s. The tallest tree in Iceland, a sitka spruce planted in 1949 at Kirkjubæjarklaustur, measured 25.2 metres in 2013.

• 8. Wealth, Peace, And A Country Without An Army

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  Iceland has no standing army, only a lightly armed coast guard, and it is the only NATO member without one, as well as the alliance's smallest by population. The 2024 Global Peace Index named it the most peaceful country in the world, citing its lack of armed forces, low crime, and stability. For most of its history this was a poor nation that relied on subsistence fishing and farming. The shift came with the industrialization of fishing and Marshall Plan aid, through which Icelanders received the most help per capita of any European country, at 209 US dollars, with the Netherlands a distant second at 109. Fishing once supplied 90 percent of exports in the 1960s, a share that fell to 20 percent by 2020 as the economy diversified into finance, biotechnology, tourism, aluminium, and ferrosilicon. That openness carried risk. Before the crash of 2008, the combined debt of the three largest banks, Glitnir, Landsbanki, and Kaupthing, exceeded roughly six times the nation's gross domestic product. The collapse triggered the greatest migration from Iceland since 1887, with a net emigration of 5,000 people in 2009. The country recovered and leaned into tourism, drawing around 1.1 million visitors a year, more than three times its own population. It was here, at a Reykjavík summit in 1986, that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev took significant steps toward nuclear disarmament, and a few years later Iceland became the first country to recognize the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.