History

In geological terms, Iceland is a young island. It started to form about 20 million years ago from a series of volcanic eruptions on the Mid-Atlantic ridge. The Icelandic hotspot is likely partly responsible for the island's continued existence.

The earlist human Island discover's and setttler's is open to debate. Some say that the land called Thule by the Greek explorer merchant Pytheas, aound 300 B.C., was actually Iceland although. There is stronger evidence that Irish monks in the eighth century after St Brenden's travels having already colonized the Faroes, were visiting Iceland regularly, seeking solitude during the summer months. The first geography document that describes the Northern seas was written by an Irish monk, named Dicuil, early in the 9th century. The book was called De mensura orbis terrae. However, over the next century Iceland was only visited by the new invaders, the Vikings . The Vikings were Scandinavian adventurers, armed with the fastest ships of the time and because of politics and a land shortage at home went to seek their fortune overseas through establishing many settlements war and piracy. And According to tradition, the Vikings came across Iceland by accident when a mid-ninth-century Swedish man named Naddoddur lost his way to the Faroes and landed on the eastern coast of what he called Snæland , or Snowland. However, he didn't stay long. But his reports of this new country were followed up by the Swede Garðar Svavarsson , who circumnavigated Iceland around 860, wintering at modern-day Húsavík in the northeast, where two of his slaves escaped and may have settled. At about the same time, Flóki Vilgerðarson left his home in Norway intending to colonize Snæland. But a hard winter in the northwest killed all his livestock; climbing a mountain he saw a fjord on the other side choked with ice and, frustrated, he renamed the country Ísland , Iceland, and returned to Norway.

According to Iceland's ancient historical record, the Islendingabok, the first major settlement came in 874. Led by a Norwegian called Ingolfur Arnarson, the settlement was built near what he called Reykjavik (Is: Smoky Bay), taking the name from the steam from the area's thermal springs. The site was selected using a ritual of the day; Arnarson's high seat pillars, a symbol of authority and part of a chieftan's paraphernalia, was tossed into the sea as they approached land. Tradition required that the settlement be built where the Gods chose to bring the pillars ashore.

As the first settlers arrived, they set up a parliamentary system of government in order to avoid the political difficulties in Scandinavia at the time. As many of these settlers rejected the monarchies which were at the core of conflicts of the time, it was believed that this new parliament, known as the Althing, would provide a more rational means of resolving disputes between individual settlers. It had never been tried before in their own known and even now their current parliament can be directly traced to this initial experiment. Over the centuries Norway and Denmark eventually came to rule over Iceland as part of their kingdoms, beginning in 1262 when Icelanders, under pressure from Norway's king Hakon Hakonarson, signed a confederal agreement in order to resolve their own internal conflicts. The Kalmar Union of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden at the end of the 14th Century (essentially the first Scandinavian Union) brought Iceland under Danish control, a situation that lasted until 1944, while Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany.

Although WWII fighting never came to Iceland itself, it was to trigger the end of foreign rule. When Germany invaded Denmark in 1940 the Alþing decided that, as the king could no longer govern, the Act of Union should be dissolved and Iceland should declare its full independence from Denmark. So the government proclaimed independence from Denmark on June 17, 1944, with Björnsson elected as the first president of the Icelandic Republic.

The five decades that followed Icelandic independence saw Iceland come under the NATO defense umbrella, with the reservation that it would never take part in offensive action against another nation, and a military base was constructed at Keflavik.
Between ca. 1100 AD and 1300 AD, the Icelandic Sagas were written. They have a special niche in the world's literature They were written in the Icelandic language, at a time when almost everybody else in the world was writing in Latin.

There has been a lot of discussion on whether the Icelandic Sagas are true history, or pure fiction. This discussion is really academic as the Icelandic Sagas are true in the sense that they are great literature, and all great literature
is true in the sense that it lifts the reader to another plane.