Iceland

A country founded by people leaving Norway, with a parliament older than almost any other and a written record of its own beginnings. Norse settlers arrived from around 874 on an island with no prior population, and in 930 established the Althing at Thingvellir, an annual open-air assembly usually counted as the oldest surviving parliament in the world. The Icelandic sagas, written down in the thirteenth century, describe those settlements and feuds in prose of a kind Europe would not produce again for centuries. The commonwealth had law but no executive, so disputes ended in feud, and it collapsed into Norwegian and then Danish rule. Centuries of poverty followed, worsened by the Laki eruption of 1783, which killed a fifth of Icelanders and, through its sulphur haze, contributed to crop failure across Europe. Independence came in stages, completed in 1944 while Denmark was occupied. Britain and then America occupied the island in the war and the base stayed until 2006. Three Cod Wars with Britain over fishing limits were won. The banking collapse of 2008 was the largest relative to population anywhere. Iceland runs almost entirely on geothermal and hydroelectric power. The country has about 390 thousand people, the smallest population in Europe outside the microstates. Icelandic has changed so little that speakers can read medieval sagas. The country sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and is volcanically very active. There is no standing army. Patronymic naming means most Icelanders have no family surname, and the phone book is ordered by first name. The Eyjafjallajokull eruption in 2010 closed European airspace for days.

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