The Iceland Watch

By David J Whittaker and Gisli Thorsteinsson

With a population of just 329,000 (barely more than Nottingham), Iceland is the most thinly-populated country in Europe, and 80% of it is uninhabited. Despite this, in the 1100 years since humans first settled there, the Icelanders have built a remarkably resourceful, diverse and robust community – and they have never had to go to war. In fact, in 2013 the United Nations ranked Iceland the 13th most developed country in the world. Professor Gisli Thorsteinsson is Professor of Education in Reykjavik, while Dr David Whittaker is a retired academic specializing in geopolitics. The two authors have written this book to record and explain Iceland’s history and its many achievements and to introduce readers who may not be familiar with the country to the range and vitality of Icelandic thinking and achievement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mereo Books
• Release date: May 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781861514745

Book preview

David J Whittaker & Gisli Thorsteinsson

The Iceland Watch

A land that thinks outwards and forwards

Map of Iceland

Copyright ©2015 David J Whittaker and Gisli Thorsteinsson

David J Whittaker and Gisli Thorsteinsson have asserted their right under the Copyright Designs and Patents A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Published by Mereo

Mereo is an imprint of Memoirs Publishing

25 Market Place, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 2NX, England

Tel: [phone], Email: [e-mail]

www.memoirspublishing.com or www.mereobooks.com

Read all about us at www.memoirspublishing.com.

See more about book writing on our blog www.bookwriting.co.

Follow us on twitter.com/memoirs books

Or twitter.com/MereoBooks

Join us on facebook.com/MemoirsPublishing

Or facebook.com/MereoBooks

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover, other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-1-86151-474-5

Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson and his wife Dorrit Mussajef

(photograph: Gunnar Vigfússon)

Contents

FOREWORD

SMALL STATE, BIG IDEAS

ICELAND AND THE NORTHERN LANDS

ICELAND AND THE WIDENING WORLD

ICELAND AND THE ARCTIC

ICELAND AND SEA FISHING

ICELAND’S FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE AFTERMATH

ICELAND AND WELFARE

EDUCATION, LITERACY AND INNOVATION

THE STATE AND NATIONALISM

DEFENCE AND SECURITY

ICELAND AND PEACE

POSTSCRIPT

INDEX

Foreword

How do they do it? This book is really a case study in governmental and popular thinking. There are only 329,000 people in Iceland, rather more than there are in Nottingham (United Kingdom), St Louis (Missouri, United States of America) or Bonn (Germany). Their homeland is 103,000 square kilometres of lava field and difficult-to-manage central mountains. Shorelands are narrow. Yet there are many acres of striking beauty, with rivers and lakes. The folk there, in a land more temperate than its name suggests, have done magnificently over 1100 years to contrive a settlement remarkable for its day-by-day enterprise which is imaginative, resourceful, diverse, robust, outward in perspective and forward in vision and intent. Remarkable, too, is the fact that these islanders have never had to fight in a war for their survival.

Professor Gisli Thorsteinsson is Professor of Education at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik and Dr David Whittaker is a retired academic specialising in geo- politics. This is their second collaborative work. The authors have wanted to introduce readers to the range and vitality of Icelandic thought and decision. This small state has large ideas and unremitting vigour. The Iceland Watch is not an academic treatise. Rather, it has been designed to offer the general reader something perhaps unusual in scope but definitely question-provoking.

We owe a great deal to Iceland – to Professor Eirikur Bergmann, Professor Jesse Byock, Professor Gunnar Karlsson, to Davide Denti, Skuli Helgason, Professor Baldur Thorhallson, Ingibjörg Gisladottir, Dr A J K Bailes, Professor Valur Ingimundarson, and to Dr Dhana Irsara in Linköping, Sweden. They have given us vital ideas either in print or in person. Then there are the Icelanders we have met in the street, in the café, on the quayside. We are grateful for their ready assistance.

Lastly, it has once more been something of a family concern in England, technologically and with words from Dr Paul Whittaker, Birgitta and Adrian Norton. Helena Vadher, with quite indispensable industry and care, has put our ideas into typescript.

Particular thanks must go to the President of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, who has supplied photographs for use as illustrations, and to Bragi Bergson, an Icelandic historian, who most kindly agreed to inspect the entire manuscript.

Above all we are grateful to Chris Newton and Memoirs Publishing for splendidly engaging in the publication of our book.

The book is dedicated to the memory of David’s late wife, Marianne Whittaker.

Chapter 1

Small State, Big Ideas

Introducing aspects of an island, doubtless unfamiliar to many readers, is most effectively done, first, with a word about the terrain, which is unusual to say the least, then to describe the early investment of the land by Viking seamen-colonists, and then to explore the concepts of smallness and bigness as islanders and the outside world have chosen to do. We shall have to look at earlier times to do these aspects justice.

Iceland’s cabinet – a small collective decision-making body (photograph: Gunnar Vigfússon)

On meeting an Icelander, three things come to mind. Courtesy demands that they are not mentioned. This land of theirs is small, remote, and surely insignificant in the view of most ‘outsiders’. In that context, survival and challenge are positives to outpace disadvantage.

As always, bald statements set the scene. Iceland’s total population is only 329,000, making it the most thinly-populated country in Europe and 80 per cent uninhabited. The Icelanders live chiefly on the edges of a rarely easy 103,000 square kilometres (larger than Scotland by a quarter and about the extent of Cuba or Hungary). Iceland is geologically unstable, with thirty active volcanic systems, geysers and 250 sites of natural hot spring water.

Apart from the instability, the island bestrides the submarine Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which marks the boundary between the Eurasian and the North American tectonic plates. Lakes and islands cover 15 per cent of the surface area. Many fjords cut into a 3,000-mile coastline, where most settlements are located. Iceland’s central highlands are a cold and virtually uninhabitable spread of snow-topped peaks, lava fields and glacial sand. Glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. There are valleys, though, of striking beauty and verdant pasture.

Climatically, Iceland’s position makes it a transitional zone between the cold Arctic air of Greenland and water currents streaming southwards and the warmer North Atlantic Drift (Gulf Stream) heading north. Visitors characterise the days as surprisingly mild and very wet and windy. They see the island’s title as misconstrued. Average summer temperatures in Reykjavik range between 10° and 13° Celsius with occasional warmer periods. Winter chill is fairly consistent, between -3° and 0° Celsius with the Central Highlands the coldest.

Biodiversity, as Icelanders are used to it, is compatible with location and environmental consequence. There are no free-living reptiles or amphibians and the only mature mammals are Arctic fox, mink, rabbits, reindeer and the occasional polar bear in search of food crossing (somehow) from Greenland. With three-quarters of the island scantily vegetated, plant life is chiefly grass and lichens and woodland the habitat of birch, aspen and rowan. When the land was settled first 1100 years ago forests were extensive but climatic variations, severe soil erosion, timber gathering and overgrazing by sheep have grievously reduced their extent from an estimated 25 per cent to today’s 1 per cent. Replanting of trees is in hand, coping with the exigency of trees rooting in volcanic residue soil. Birds are plentiful, above all the seagoing species of puffins, guillemots, skuas and kittiwakes thronging the cliffs. In the sea life is plentiful, with many species of fish to contribute both to diet and to half the country’s exports. Commercial whaling is practised intermittently.

Reykjavik – Iceland’s hub

The capital city, the world’s northernmost, is Reykjavik, which accommodates over half the island population, with two-thirds of Icelanders living in the surrounding countryside. There are five other towns, again, in less harsh environs, housing between 30,000 and 10,000 people, with another four at 10,000 to 4,000. It could be said that figures such as these give the lie to irreducible challenge and mark up the optimism and sense of opportunity today. Previously Iceland had a people who were regularly subject to cold winter famine, ash-fall from volcanic eruptions and searing plagues. Improving living conditions have triggered a rapid increase in population since the mid-nineteenth century. Now Iceland has a markedly homogeneous population, young in age range.

As for the origins of Iceland’s early settlement and the progress over later centuries of a community with firm vestiges of what we would acknowledge to be civilisation in the making, we cannot do better than examine the work of today’s scholars. Jesse L Byock, University of California, has published many books on Iceland, its Viking age and its pristine Old Norse language. Gunnar Karlsson, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Iceland, has a wealth of publications which help us understand and appreciate how islanders with little to go on almost incredibly fashioned a proto-democracy out of a raw land. They had only their wits and a bottomless faith in what John Dewey later coined ‘living forward’. (1)

The smallness of Iceland has generally been both a restrictive and a facilitating factor. So far as we can establish, the island was first settled in the mid-ninth century AD by Norsemen thrusting expansionwards in their longboats out of West Norway, the British Isles and Ireland. Most Icelanders are descendants of Norwegian settlers and Gaelic Celts from western Scotland and Northern Ireland who were shipped as slaves (‘thralls’) into Iceland. Recent DNA analysis and scientific study of genetic and blood type data indicates that the early male settlers were 66 per cent Norse and the females were 60 per cent Celtic. Could this, perhaps, relate to the boat crews making sure that their slave haul incorporated a good number of Irish women as future mothers?

Earlier explorers would doubtless have been repelled by wide spreads of lava, yet in time an Age of Settlement was initiated by less cautious, more resolute seafarers going ashore to work out primitive coastline holdings and to supplement this by fishing, fowling and hunting whales. We know this from the detailed chronicling, two centuries later, of the Islendingabok (the Book of Icelanders) and the Landnamabok (the Book of Settlements). Auspicious daring was to be recorded, though here and there some facts may be questionable in the light of recent archaeological evidence. Nonetheless, Iceland is resplendent in early documents (some still preserved) which, together with the rich treasure of the sagas Byock reminds us, are ‘stories by a medieval people about themselves… one of the world’s great literatures and a knowledge of their social context increases our appreciation of their achievement’. (2)

A close-knit society has retained an ancient language, too, where modern Icelandic is close to its Old Norse origins and one relatively unchanged since the twelfth century. Otherwise, English and Danish are widely spoken and compulsory in schools.

A rather fascinating thought is that previous visitors to this rocky outcrop washed by the Atlantic might well have reflected on the same criteria as ourselves, namely, smallness, remoteness, and lack of any significance. In antiquity they would have referred to Iceland as Ultima Thule, a distant place located beyond the borders of the Known World. The Greek explorer Pythias, around the year 400 B.C., knew of it as ‘six days sail north of Britain and as near the frozen sea’. Half a century later Pliny the Elder spoke of a Thule ‘in which there be no nights at all about midsummer, namely when the sun passes though the sign Cancer and contrariwise no days in midwinter, and each of these times they suffer, do last six months, all day or all night’. Indeed, a familiar perspective and one long time ridiculed.

Later writers, for instance, the English Venerable Bede in 730 AD and the fourteenth century Italian Petrarch, clearly spoke of a distant land in the north seas, although, in fact, it might have been Norway or Greenland. Again, it is the Roman historian-geographers Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Procopius, who attest to a Thule remarkable in its summer and winter regimes and as a place offering scant inducement for exploration.

Before 800 AD, Irish monks and hermits, known in Iceland as ‘Papar’, visited in search of peace and solitude. For many years both Christian and pagan deities were worshipped. They found their solitude. Some drifted off course and as snow fell they named this place Snjoland (Snowland). Later, Norse seamen circumnavigated the land realising that it was an island. A small bay they named ‘Reykjavik’. Carbon dating now indicates that the monks abandoned their settlement about 870 AD, doubtless harried by marauding Norsemen.

Later times brought the foundation of an Icelandic Commonwealth, episcopal foundation, monastic establishment, a basic book of laws, a vigorous flourishing of poetry and sagas. However, Icelandic chieftains and clans were to be annexed by Norway for many years, with Norwegian kings permitting the influential melding of church and state in their colony. In time, Norway and Denmark were to fasten many years of fair absolutism over the storm-swept island.

Iceland, it seems, has always been humanistic in preference and literate in being. Transformation from Catholicism to Lutheranism around the year 1000 AD underwrote peoples’ enterprise and civilised progress, illustrated eventually by the compilation and publication of records and fiction, the opening of libraries and museums and the appearance of newspapers.

Icelandic experience and confirmed subsistence was marked in 930 with the institution of the Althingi, the world’s oldest parliament and one still in session today. Assemblies drew large crowds of chieftains, craftsmen, traders and travellers to the Lögberg (Law Rock) where sat the Lögsögumaður (the Law Speaker). The following years saw Christianity replacing pagan cults redolent of dramatic mythology. Contacts with neighbouring Norway and Greenland fortified the spirits of Icelandic stalwarts Leifur the Lucky (Leifur Eriksson) and Eric the Red (Eirikur Thorvaldsson) and took them further, to North America. On the way over, Eric settled 500 of his Icelanders among existing paleo- Esquimaux in tenth century Greenland. He contemplated establishing a Vinland colony on the eastern American shores but indigenous native hostility forestalled that scheme.

The non-Icelandic reader may well see notable accordance in the shape of Karlsson and Byock thinking. It is, however Byock from California who glimpses three constants in the evolution and continuity of Icelandic civilisation. Prime position sees a ‘headless polity’, a Commonwealth, constructing and holding to a rudimentary state apparatus with some sort of central legislature and country -wide judicial and legal systems. Secondly, on the whole, there was social and economic stability with people being highly litigious and hardly at all militaristic, relying upon maintenance of order as settlement beds down into the tenth century.

In third place there was the emergence in mid-thirteenth century or so of a new elite, the big chieftains. Predictably they would wrestle with farmers for chiefly rural control. This is a useful interpretation, with which Karlsson appears to agree. Of course, theoretical constructs come up against a number of possible questions which should not be regarded as refutation. Certainly, if the ‘polity’ was supported by Icelanders on the whole, then it was to do with the common man’s rights and expectations being confirmed at a basic level. There was no extra rank of aristocrats to interfere with that.

Then the securing and security of peaceful control. Has not the modern Iceland that we know and respect had long and unusual experience of power-broking without tactics and the violence that excludes? Perhaps these advantages were easier to bring about in a small community. Even so – it is a never-ending argument – in a small community the Big Ones (chieftains, nobles, kings) may be able to attain and exercise more easily inordinate control. A good many years ago the legal historian James Bryce, writing of medieval Iceland, saw it as ‘an almost unique instance of a community whose culture and creative power flourished independently of any favouring material conditions and indeed under conditions in the highest degree unfavourable’. Further, ‘they produced a body of law so elaborate and complex that it is hard to believe that it existed among men whose chief occupation was to kill one another’. (3)

Today’s historians raise from time to time what Karlsson terms ‘a challenging question’. Was the frequent and evident deterioration of Iceland’s landscape physically and in terms of land- use, as well as a population shrinking from time to time, a consequence of uncaring foreign rule by Danes and Norwegians? Or was the island climate suffering extra- cold spasms, leading to resulting human distress? Could it all have been the consequence of internal struggles among power cliques? And was a Golden Age just the invention of nineteenth century nationalists downplaying the fact of rather inhibiting colonisation and accentuating the virtues of an independent commonwealth – only finally gained in 1944?

No doubt Bryce would have agreed that we have to be most careful with the term ‘Viking’ in the instance of Iceland. It is understood conventionally to refer to the Old Norse incomers who were anxious to integrate and multiply as they hungered for land in an already stabilising, regulated community. As for the helmeted freebooters terrorising foreign shores and returning with booty, of course, they existed but not to the random extent that fiction prefers. Wholesale industry among archaeologists and literary experts has traced, beyond the culture and governance of Scandinavian lands, a wide, deep dependence on trade and quite sophisticated human contacts as far as the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Russia.

It is interesting these days to reflect that however opportunistic the embryonic Icelandic state was turning out to be, the seats of authority were primarily consensual. Strength of arm did not rule. The barbarian, so often judged that way, was piece by piece reaching some degree of democracy. He was frequently finely literate. So different was he from other nationalities that judging his character is complex 1,200 years later.

Byock once more points up distinctiveness. Big chieftains and their lower-rank associates were ‘more like political leaders than the warrior chiefs of many contemporary cultures’. (4) They had only limited authority and no forceful means to compel landowners to do their bidding. Any attempt to bid, as it were, for higher terms, would be subject to the discussion and decision of the assembly, the ‘Thing’, meeting regularly.

Byock and Karlsson stress that bigness in the leader relied absolutely on the loyal self- interest of a corps of legally recognised followers. It is slightly perplexing for us these days to understand Byock’s depiction of a small-scale elite as ‘priest-chieftains’. These gentlemen, for so they were, were expected to exercise hard on-the-ground political supervision within an ideological ambit. How could they have done this, one wonders, as the old heathen mythology was being replaced with Christianity? Karlsson reminds us that the introduction of Christianity and the consolidation of royal power tended to go hand in hand in Northern Europe. During the Viking Age in Iceland, Norwegian secular authority and that of the church were kept separate. Karlsson has it that ‘Christ was let in but the (Norwegian) king was not’. Could it have been that these accepted leaders were both foci of power and intent and retailers of traditional saga lore? It looks as though both Karlsson and Byock wish to stress that for Icelanders, saga content is neither a block of historical fact nor a fixed text. The saga is a manipulable instrument. Something that a teller can use? For good or bad? In this vein Byock expresses it thus:

Tradition was a living and proving heritage of quasi-factual social recollection that served the thematic core of each saga story, uniting saga-teller and audience with life in the Icelandic environment, past and present. (5)

Where medieval Icelanders composed sagas for themselves, and about themselves, their reiteration by authoritative figures can, one trusts, only have made for a composure and confidence that is political assurance in the best, lasting sense.

Apart from social and political compulsives, the first settlements did have some environmental advantages rather than overall constraints. There were no dangerous predatory animals. Livestock had free use of the pastures. Sheep replaced cattle and goats, as less destructive to grass foraging. Small-framed Scandinavian horses with thick coats coped with long, cold winters and rough ground. Careful animal husbandry went well with a settler’s shrewd concepts of a freeman’s inviolable rights to acreage, and to begin with this took precedence over prospective trading.

In time, however, lonely farmers became richer as a consequence of their brothers’ depredations in Europe. This and the availability of iron ore and, further out, plentiful fish stocks, helped lay foundations for commerce which could grow without any invasion. The outlier of medieval Iceland provides us with the growth of order almost in laboratory detail. Byock views island-wide self-reliance as the precursor of a devolutionary state which was different in developmental pace and nature from most emerging European states. The earliest occupiers of the island ‘took advantage of the safety afforded by the North Atlantic to eliminate the hierarchy of command’. Without a monarch and a panoply of aristocrats they had ‘room to move’.

Possibly it is not too far-fetched to consider modern Iceland’s egalitarianism, self-confidence and making the best of slight resources as having ancient foundations? Trust in their neighbours they needed for peaceful survival, but one has to wonder just how far resolution of conflict came about, given the personalities, fears, discrimination and hopes of the individuals who might become contestants. Limitation of force pressed the need for advocacy and arbitration and attempted restitution through the obligations of mutual service. What might have been termed ‘warfare’, so common in the rest of Europe, can hardly ever have occurred, with most quarrelling happening at individual or family level. Curbing the power of any leader, and sometimes of your neighbours, called for the tongue rather than the sword, and for imaginative persistence. (6)

At this point, one or two questions may be asked. To what extent is the nominally egalitarian society ever quite free of exclusive associations, however small, and of cabals, however informal? Do interest clusters and proprietary circling ever freeze independence and stifle would-be initiatives? One has in mind here, to be considered in a later chapter, the elite ‘Octopus’ that nearly ruined Iceland in 2008. How could that ever have happened?

Less questionable is the enterprise Icelanders have demonstrated over centuries in making a tough environment into what it is today. The mid-nineteenth century brought banking, trade regulation and the growth and systemisation of industry. Within the last 100 years this remote island has introduced electrical power, automobile transit, a submarine telegraph to Scotland, compulsory schooling, women’s voting rights, education, productivity, trade in alcohol beverages, university tutoring, a provisional light railway, an end to free-for-all whaling, the first aircraft flight, a Supreme Court holding, the Icelandic Krona, telecommunications, a National Theatre and Orchestra and membership of the United Nations (UN), the