Iceland

From the Landnám and the world's oldest parliament to a volcanic republic that won its seas.

Iceland's history begins late and in fire. Settled by Norse and Celtic newcomers in the Viking Age, conventionally from 874, this empty north-Atlantic island filled within sixty years and in 930 founded the Althing at Þingvellir, one of the oldest parliaments in the world and the assembly of a stateless Commonwealth that governed without a king. Around the year 1000 the same assembly voted, peacefully, to accept Christianity, and in the thirteenth century Icelanders wrote the sagas and Eddas that preserved the literature of the Norse world. Civil strife in the Age of the Sturlungs ended that independence: by the Old Covenant of 1262-64 Iceland submitted to the Norwegian crown, and with Norway it passed to Denmark, enduring the imposed Reformation, a Danish trade monopoly and the catastrophe of the Laki eruption of 1783-84. A nineteenth-century awakening led by Jón Sigurðsson restored the Althing and won Home Rule in 1904 and sovereignty in 1918; on 17 June 1944, with Denmark under German occupation, Icelanders proclaimed a republic at Þingvellir. The modern republic became a founding member of NATO in 1949, fought and won the Cod Wars over its fishing seas, helped establish the 200-mile exclusive economic zone in international law, and survived a spectacular banking collapse in 2008, all upon a land split by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.