Resting on the edge of the Arctic
Circle and sitting atop one of the
world's most volcanically active
hotspots,
Iceland is nowadays
thought of for its striking mix of
magisterial glaciers, bubbling hot
springs and rugged fjords, where
activities such as hiking under the
Midnight Sun are complemented by
healthy doses of history and
literature. It's unfortunate, then,
that one of the country's earliest
visitors, the Viking Flóki Vilgerðarson,
saw fit to choose a name for it that
emphasized just one of these
qualities, though perhaps he can be
forgiven in part: having sailed here
with hopes of starting a new life in
this then uninhabited island, a long
hard winter in around 870 AD killed
off all his cattle. Hoping to spy
out a more promising site for his
farm he climbed a high mountain in
the northwest of the country, only
to be faced with a fjord full of
drift ice. Bitterly disappointed, he
named the place
Ísland
(literally "ice land") and
promptly sailed home for the
positively balmy climes of Norway.
A few years later, however,
Iceland was successfully settled
and, despite the subsequent
enthusiastic felling of trees for
fuel and timber, visitors to the
country today will see it in pretty
much the same state as it was over a
thousand years ago, with the coastal
fringe , for example, dotted
with sheep farms, a few score
fishing villages and tiny hamlets -
often no more than a collection of
homesteads nestling around a wooden
church. An Icelandic town, let alone
a city, is still a rarity and until
the twentieth century the entire
nation numbered no more than 60,000.
The country remains the most
sparsely populated in Europe, with a
population of just 272,000 - over
half of whom live down in the
southwestern corner around the
surprisingly cosmopolitan capital, Reykjavík.
Akureyri , up on the north
coast, is the only other
decent-sized population centre
outside the Greater Reykjavík area.
But if the coast is thinly
populated, Iceland's Interior
remains totally uninhabited and
unmarked by humanity: a starkly
beautiful wilderness of ice fields,
infertile lava and ash deserts,
windswept upland plateaux and the
frigid vastness of Vatnajökull,
Europe's largest glacier. Even in
downtown Reykjavík, crisp,
snow-capped peaks and fjords hover
in the background, evidence of the
forces that created the country. And
Iceland's location on the
Mid-Atlantic ridge also gives it one
of the most volcanically active
landscapes on Earth, peppered with
everything from naturally occurring
hot springs, scaldingly hot bubbling
mud pools and noisy steam vents to a
string of unpredictably violent
volcanoes, which have regularly
devastated huge parts of the
country. It's something that
Icelanders have learned to live
with: in June 1998, when Reykjavík
was rocked by a major earthquake,
the ballet dancers at the National
Opera performed right through it
without missing a step.
Historically, the Icelanders
have a mix of Nordic and Celtic
blood, a heritage often held
responsible for their
characteristically laconic approach
to life - taps in hotels often drip,
buses don't depart to the stroke of
the driver's watch, and everybody,
including the President and the
Prime Minister, is known by their
first name. The battle for survival
against the elements over the
centuries has also made them a
highly self-reliant nation, whose
dependence on the sea and fishing
for their economy is virtually total
- hence their refusal to allow
foreign trawlers to fish off Iceland
during the diplomatically tense
1970s, sparking off three "Cod
Wars", principally with
Britain. However, their isolated
location in the North Atlantic also
means that their island is
frequently forgotten about -
Icelanders will tell you that
they've given up counting how many
times they've been left off maps of
Europe - something that deeply
offends their strong sense of
national pride. For all their
self-confidence though, they can
seem an initially reserved people -
until Friday and Saturday nights
roll around, when the bjór
starts to flow, and turns even the
most monosyllabic fisherman into a
lucid talkshow host, right down to
reciting from memory entire chunks
of medieval sagas about the early
settlers.
