Volume 49, Number 9 · May 23, 2002
Living on the Moon
By Jared Diamond
Viking Age Iceland
by Jesse L. Byock
Penguin, 448 pp., $15.00 (paper)
The History of Iceland
by Gunnar Karlsson
University of Minnesota Press, 418 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection
with a preface by Jane Smiley and an introduction by Robert Kellogg
Penguin, 782 pp., $20.00 (paper)
To Americans visiting Europe, Iceland recommends itself as a beautiful, friendly, safe tourist destination, whose international airport near Reykjavik is at just the right location to interrupt transatlantic flights for a few days, and whose international airline (Icelandair) is as low-priced as it is reliable. But there is much more to Iceland than meets the eye. Modern Icelanders are the direct descendants of marauding Norwegian settlers (disproportionately men) and their Celtic wives, slaves, and followers. Those origins, long suspected on the basis of historical accounts, were proved within the last year by genetic studies comparing Icelanders' paternal and maternal genes. Upon their occupation of the previously uninhabited Icelandic landscape, those settlers established a society like none other on Earth. They arrived with an anti-big-government attitude and found that attitude reinforced by necessity born of extreme poverty. For both of those reasons they privatized government beyond Ronald Reagan's wildest dreams, and thereby collapsed in a civil war that cost them their independence for the next seven hundred years.
Review, 2419 words
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