Population Changes in Iceland

Abstract

T HE settlement of Iceland was in many ways a remarkable achievement. During the period A.D. 870-930 many thousands of people left their homesteads in Scandinavia and the British Isles and sailed in open boats to a country far out in a stormy sea. Until then the expansion of the Nordic peoples had been mainly toward countries richer and climatically more favored than their homelands; the Drang nach Siiden of the Germans, for example, may have had its origin in the climatic deterioration about 500 B.C. But this new expansion was to a country climatically less favored than the homelands, and the fact is reflected in the many old Icelandic place names beginning with kaldr, cold, names such as Kaldidalur, Kaldakinn, and Kaldbakur, indicative of the disappointment of settlers from warmer countries. To find a counterpart of this large-scale expansion toward the subpolar areas, including also the settlement of Greenland, we must turn to our own century. The settlement of Iceland is unique in being a settlement of the largest habitable area on the globe where no primitive people had ever lived and where white settlers never came across any natives. The Icelanders had thus no possibility of learning anything from natives who had adapted themselves to their environment.