Overview

Iceland is the only European country whose history has a definite beginning. Norwegian outlaws, exiles, and adventurers began to settle this previously uninhabited land about 874. In 930 they established what is at the dawn of the twenty-first century the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world.

Background

The first visitors to Iceland may have been Romans but were probably Irish. The kayaks and umiaks of the Inuit could not have traveled as far as Iceland from Greenland or North America. Roman and early British records refer to a place called "Thule" or "Ultima Thule," which must have been Iceland. A very few Irish monks lived in Iceland in the eighth and ninth centuries, as the Irish monk Dicuil stated in 825 in Liber de mensura orbis terrae (Book of measuring the circle of the world), but they had either abandoned...