Iceland historical timeline

Origins

Iceland was empty until Norse settlers began arriving around 874, bringing with them Gaelic slaves and wives from Ireland and Scotland whose descendants make up a substantial share of the modern gene pool. In 930 the settlers established the Althing at Þingvellir, an open-air assembly that makes Iceland’s the oldest parliament still in existence. Around the year 1000 the assembly voted to adopt Christianity rather than fight about it, and in the thirteenth century Icelanders wrote down the sagas, which remain the fullest prose literature to survive from medieval northern Europe.

Turning points

Feuding chieftains ended self-rule: Iceland submitted to the Norwegian crown in 1262 and passed with Norway to Denmark. Six centuries of foreign rule and poverty followed, punctuated by catastrophe — the Laki eruption of 1783 killed a fifth of the population through famine and cooled summers across Europe. Home rule came in 1904, sovereignty in 1918, and full independence was declared on 17 June 1944 while Denmark itself was under German occupation. Britain and then the United States occupied the island during the war, building the airfields and roads that dragged it into the twentieth century. The Cod Wars with Britain, fought over fishing limits between the 1950s and 1970s, were won. The banking collapse of 2008 was, relative to the size of the economy, among the largest in history.

Influential people

Snorri Sturluson, chieftain and historian, wrote down most of what the world knows about Norse mythology. Jón Sigurðsson led the nineteenth-century independence movement and appears on the banknotes. Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. In 1980 Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became the world’s first democratically elected female head of state, and Björk has since done more than any tourist board to fix an idea of the country abroad.

Cultural evolution

The language changed so little that modern Icelanders read the thirteenth-century sagas without translation, and new words are still coined from Old Norse roots rather than borrowed. Most people carry patronymics rather than surnames, so the telephone directory is alphabetised by first name. Books remain central: the jólabókaflóð, the flood of new titles published before Christmas, is a national habit rather than a marketing term.

Present-day significance

A country of under four hundred thousand people receives several times that number of visitors a year, a transformation that dates from about 2010 and reshaped the economy. Almost all heating and electricity come from geothermal and hydro sources. Since 2021 the Reykjanes peninsula has been volcanically active again after eight centuries of quiet, and the town of Grindavík has been evacuated — a reminder that the island is still being built.