Ten Things About Iceland

Gullfoss

It's a country where you can safely drink out of any stream. It has about 500 earthquakes per week. All the sheep are free range. It was #4 on the 2018 Happiness Index.

We went to Iceland on a Road Scholar hiking tour of southern Iceland for a week this summer (2018.) I was not expecting it to be so different, so intriguing. I was wondering what it would be like to be so far north.

Here’s some of what I came away with.

One of our guides, Ásdís Birgisdóttir 

1.  Who Lives in Iceland? There are only 350,000 residents of Iceland, almost all of them living in or near the capital, Reykjavik. (The least populated US state, Wyoming has 573,000 people.)

There are 4.5 million visitors each year. Tourism is Iceland’s number one industry.

The entire country is smaller than the US state of Kentucky.

2.  Geothermal heat The North American tectonic plate and the Eurasian tectonic plate meet, or actually, almost meet underneath Iceland. The two tectonic plates are drifting apart, causing a rift where magma from the center of our earth flows closer to the surface of the earth.

Icelanders realized that access to the extreme heat of the magma could be a resource. In the 1930s, they constructed an elementary school which used heat from magma to warm the building. They installed a backup heat source, a coal burning furnace, in the building. This elementary school is still in use today, and is still heated from the geothermal system. The coal burning furnace has never been turned on.

Today, Iceland uses geothermal energy to heat 85% of houses, as well as some city streets. Geothermal heat also is used to create electricity.

One of the mineral springs at the Geysir area

3. Settlement: Iceland remained uninhabited long after Western Europe had been settled. There were no indigenous inhabitants of Iceland before the Viking explorers and their slaves arrived.  The Vikings came from Norway, and Ingólfur Arnarson built the first settlement, in 873 AD, where Reykjavik exists today.

Of the early female settlers, DNA tests support that 63% of the early female settlers were Celtic. They did not come from Norway, but the British Isles.

In 930 AD, twenty five chieftains developed a parliament (Alþingi) and a set of laws by which to govern Iceland. It was the first of that sort of government in the world.The most sacred place to Icelanders is the area where the first assembly took place in a rift valley that marks the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates.

This photo is on display in a restored sod house in Skogar.

4.  Hidden People? Belief in elves? OK, I Googled this after our guide, Helgi, brought up the topic. Only ten percent of Icelanders believe in elves or hidden people. However, a higher number of Icelanders will not rule out their existence.

When Iceland was controlled by Norway, the official religion was Catholicism. When the Danes took over Iceland after 1523, the Catholic bishop was beheaded (the Christian way to resolve differences.) The official religion is now Lutheranism, however, you wouldn’t know that from speaking with the young Icelandic people. Our “Free Walking Tour of Reyjkavik” guide, a twenty two year old woman, seemed not to know what the inside of a church looks like.

5. Survival of the Fittest!  Our guides were well versed in the litany of volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Eighteen volcanic systems have erupted and continue to erupt since settlement. Each eruption has had a physical and economic impact on the inhabitants and/or has changed the landscape of the island as well as the region as well as the world. Skaftáreldar (fires of Skaftá) in 1783-84, Hekla (1970, 1980-1981), Eyjafjallajökull (2010), and Katla (2011) were commonly mentioned as we peered through the bus window at vast expanses of infertile landscape, still recovering from the latest eruption, or at endless fields of lava covered with moss which is slowly creating soil after older eruptions. As our guide Helgi put it, volcanoes, famine, plague and foreign occupation of Iceland informed the phrase describing Icelanders that I heard several times: “Survival of the fittest!”

6. Sheep. Sheep in Iceland are all free range. We saw sheep in the most remote places. We saw small white dots on a patch of grass up the steep mountainsides, a group of three sheep out in the middle of a sparely vegetated lava field, and a mother and two babies walking on the bridge of our highway. Our guide Asdis even demonstrated how to sweep the sheep off the road by crouching in their path and spreading her arms wide, trying to convince them to vacate the bridge.

Asdis said that Icelanders know how sheep will behave and know to slow down and drive around them, but the tourists do not share this finesse and sheep kills by tourists along the roadways have increased.

7. Iceland is expensive.  Icelandic sweaters, made in Iceland with Icelandic wool are at least $250 US. I didn’t buy one. One of the women in our group found a used one at a Red Cross thrift store. It was in good shape, had a zipper and a hood, had the traditional Icelandic pattern, and she bought it for $100.

Dining out was expensive, often 5090 KR for each of us, which translated to more than $50 US each.

8. Icelandic language: The Icelandic language seemed both charming and difficult to me. Icelandic has two letters in its alphabet not found in the English alphabet. Also, it is a tonal language, so that a word that is spelled one way can mean several things, depending on how it is spoken. Our guide Helgi, told us that his name meant "holiness". It also means “weekend.” Asdis said there are 34 words for “cat,” as in my cat, your car, his cat, her cat, our cat…Here's how to pronounce

Þingvellir.

9. Big Brother or your brother? The entire population of Iceland has had its DNA collected, and anyone can access this database. So, say you meet a cute person in a bar, things are going very well, and you wanted to know if you were related (this is more relevant to heterosexuals), you could look the two of you up in the national DNA database and in a few seconds, find out if you are related. It turns out our two guides, Asdis and Helgi, were related through a common ancestor seven generations ago. I thought this was an amazing amount of information to access while poking around on your cell phone driving down the highway with a bus full of tourists.

10. Iceland is quirky but safe. Every locale has a well trained and well equipped volunteer Civil Patrol to rescue people from the stupid things that people (read: tourists) do. Participating in the Civil Patrol is a matter of civic pride. How are they funded? How do they get money for the snow jeeps, bad weather clothing, rescue equipment and the training? Why of course, they sell fireworks! From the day after Christmas to the day after New Years, Reyjkavik is apparently crazy with fireworks (I assume the Civil Patrol is standing by.)

In Iceland, we saw Atlantic Puffins, an North Atlantic Right Whale, Icelandic horses, random steam vents, historic cairns, and some preserved sod houses.  We saw boiling mud pots and lots of waterfalls. (There are more than 10,000 waterfalls in Iceland. The surveyors gave up after counting the first 10,000.) We heard about their lesbian Prime Minister, who is the second lesbian Prime Minister of Iceland. We saw lots of graffiti and lots of murals on the sides of buildings in Reykjavik. We learned that they form last names by appending their father’s (or mother’s) first name with “…son” or “…dottir,” so a daughter and a son in a family will have different last names. We heard about their system of immigration, where guest workers come from Europe to service the tourists and manufacturing, since there are not enough Icelanders to staff all the hotels and restaurants. 

Phew, I could go on. I liked the few residents whom we met. Our guides and our six foot tall Nordic female bus driver were great, and I’d recommend the experience to you.