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By Root 2008 0

especially Norwegians, English, and Germans, joined by French and Dutch. In the early 1900s Iceland at last began to develop a fleet of its own and underwent an explosion of industrial-scale fishing. By 1950, more than 90% of Iceland’s total exports were marine products, dwarfing the importance of the formerly dominant agricultural sector. Already in 1923, Iceland’s urban population overtook its rural population in numbers. Iceland is now the most urbanized Scandinavian country, with half its population in the capital of Reykjavík alone. The flow of population from rural to urban areas continues today, as Iceland’s farmers abandon their farms or convert them to summer houses and move to the towns to find jobs, Coca-Cola, and global culture.

Today, thanks to its abundance of fish, geothermal power, and hydroelectric power from all its rivers, and relieved of the necessity to scrape up timber for making ships (now constructed of metal), Europe’s former poorest country has become one of the world’s richest countries on a per-capita basis, a great success story to balance the stories of societal collapse in Chapters 2-5. Iceland’s Nobel Price-winning novelist Halldór Laxness put into the mouth of the heroine of his novel Salka Valka the immortal sentence that only an Icelander could utter: “When all is said and done, life is first and foremost salt fish.” But fish stocks pose difficult management problems, just as do forests and soil. Icelanders are working hard now to repair past damage to their forests and soils, and to prevent similar damage to their fisheries.

With this tour of Iceland history in mind, let’s see where Iceland stands with respect to the other five Norse North Atlantic colonies. I had mentioned that the differing fates of those colonies depended especially on differences in four factors: sailing distance from Europe, resistance offered by pre-Viking inhabitants, suitability for agriculture, and environmental fragility. In Iceland’s case two of those factors were favorable, and the other two caused trouble. Good news for Iceland’s settlers was that the island had no (or virtually no) prior inhabitants, and that its distance from Europe (much less than that of Greenland or Vinland, though greater than that of the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Faeroes) was close enough to permit bulk trade even in medieval ships. Unlike the Greenlanders, the Icelanders remained in ship contact with Norway and/or Britain every year, could receive bulk imports of essentials (especially timber, iron, and eventually pottery), and could send out bulk exports. In particular, the export of dried fish proved decisive in saving Iceland economically after 1300 but was impractical for the more remote Greenland colony, whose shipping lanes to Europe were often blocked by sea ice.

On the negative side, Iceland’s northerly location gave it the second most unfavorable potential for food production, after Greenland. Barley agriculture, marginal even in the mild early years of settlement, was abandoned when the climate became cooler in the late Middle Ages. Even pastoralism based on sheep and cows was marginal on poorer farms in poorer years. Nevertheless, in most years sheep thrived sufficiently well in Iceland that wool export dominated the economy for several centuries after settlement. Iceland’s biggest problem was environmental fragility: by far the most fragile soils among the Norse colonies, and the second most fragile vegetation after Greenland.

What about Icelandic history from the perpective of the five factors that provide the framework for this book: self-inflicted environmental damage, climate change, hostilities with other societies, friendly trading relations with other societies, and cultural attitudes? Four of these factors play a role in Icelandic history; only the factor of hostile outsiders was minor, except for a period of pirate raids. Iceland illustrates clearly the interaction among the other four factors. Icelanders had the misfortune to inherit an especially difficult set of environmental problems, which became exacerbated