Iceland's history: a thousand years of law without a state

Who claimed an empty island in sixty years

Iceland's settlement is a recorded event rather than a prehistory. Íslendingabók, written by Ari Þorgilsson between 1122 and 1133, and Landnámabók, compiled in the following century, name more than 3,500 people and 1,500 farm and place names arranged geographically around the coast. Both date the first permanent settlement to the years around 870, when a Norwegian chieftain called Ingólfur Arnarson and his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir built a homestead at a steaming inlet he named Reykjavík, Smoke Cove.

Archaeology confirms the timing and complicates the account. An eruption dated by ice cores to about 871 left a tephra layer beneath the earliest farms, and dwellings dug in Reykjavík between 1971 and 1973 lie below it. Both medieval books also record Gaelic monks, the papar, already living on the island and leaving as the Norse arrived, and no artefact confirming them has been dug up.

The founders were more mixed than the written sources let on. Studies of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes place 62% of Icelandic matrilineal ancestry in Scotland and Ireland and 75% of patrilineal ancestry in Scandinavia, and archaeogenetic work puts mean Norse ancestry among the settlers themselves at 56% against 70% in the population today. Slavery accounts for the gap: most of the arrivals from Ireland and Scotland came as thralls and left fewer descendants than their owners. Ari wrote that the country was fully settled within sixty years, meaning every piece of usable land had been claimed by 930.

How a parliament governed without an executive

In 930 the chieftains convened an assembly on a rift plain about 45 kilometres east of Reykjavík, and the Althing has the strongest claim of any body in the world to be the oldest legislature still in existence. Its legislative organ was the Lögrétta, the thirty-nine goðar with their advisors and the Lawspeaker, who was elected once every three years and recited the law aloud from the Law Rock, because in the tenth century the law existed only in memory. The country came for two weeks each June and camped in búðir, booths of turf and stone. Fragments of about fifty of them survive at Þingvellir, and the floor of the valley has subsided three or four metres since the assembly first met there.

The judicial machinery grew elaborate. The country was divided into four quarters around 965, each with a court of thirty-six judges nominated by its goðar, and a Fifth Court was added in 1005 to decide on a simple majority, because a minority of six in a quarter court could deadlock a case into dismissal. What no part of the design contained was anyone to carry out a verdict. Once a court had found against a party, enforcement fell to the injured man or his kin. The penalties were compensation, three years of exile, or full outlawry, which stripped a man of every property right and let anyone kill him without consequence. A plaintiff too weak to enforce his own judgment could sell the claim to a chieftain, which kept the friendless from being robbed with impunity and made the office worth buying. Britannica states the missing piece plainly: no one was vested with executive power over the country as a whole.

Historians disagree about the results. Magnus Magnusson called the courts an uneasy substitute for vengeance; Birgir Solvason judged Icelandic society more peaceful than an England and a Norway that spent the years from about 800 to 1200 in continuous killing. The system reached nobody below the head of a farming household, and slavery was legal from settlement until the early twelfth century.

Why the conversion was settled by arbitration

Missionaries sent by the Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason had converted enough prominent men by the late tenth century that civil war between the two religions looked likely, and the Eldgjá eruption of around 961, which lifted sulphurous cloud as far as northern China, had already been read by some as a judgment. In 999 or 1000 the Althing handed the whole question to one chieftain, Thorgeir Ljosvetningagodi, and accepted his award: the country would convert as a body, and pagans could go on worshipping in private. The first bishop was consecrated in 1056 and a second see followed at Hólar in 1106. The tithe that came with the church was the first tax ever levied in Iceland, and it made the church the second institution in the country after the assembly.

How the law came to be written down

Codification began in 1117 and 1118, and the written law of the Commonwealth survives as Grágás, the Gray Goose Laws. Writing then spread to everything else. Icelanders worked in their own language on vellum while the rest of Europe wrote in Latin, and the same habit produced the two books of settlement, the annals, the kings' sagas, the sagas of Icelanders set mostly between 930 and 1030, and Sturlunga saga, a contemporary account of the collapse described below.

What the settlers did to the soil

The island they claimed was wooded. Estimates of the cover at settlement in the ninth century range from about 25% to about 40%, almost all of it birch, and the figure today is between 1 and 2%. Grazing did the rest. Iceland's volcanic soils are light and easily moved by wind and water, and stripping the birch off them set an erosion running that has never stopped. The Soil Conservation Service of Iceland, a state agency founded in 1907, reports that an erosion survey spanning 25 to 30 years found 39% of the country subject to considerable or extensive soil erosion, and that 45% of land ecosystems are in bad condition.

Then the climate turned against a country that had spent its margin. The Little Ice Age set in around 1300 with shorter growing seasons and colder winters. Barley, the one cereal the settlers had grown, was given up altogether, and grain and timber both had to be imported and paid for. Dried cod filled the gap, because church fast days in Europe created a market for it, and homespun woollen cloth was the other export. A servitude called the vistarband bound labourers to a landowner a year at a time. The shortage of land had already pushed about five hundred Icelanders under Erik the Red out to Greenland from 986, where the colony peaked at perhaps 5,000 people and was extinct before 1500.

Why the chieftains gave the country away

Around 1190 the number of chieftaincies began to fall and power gathered in fewer hands. By about 1220 the country was a loose federation of ten to twelve regional powers, and roughly ten goðar from five families held almost all of the thirty-nine chieftaincies the Commonwealth had begun with. The tithe enriched whichever chieftain owned the church that collected it, and a growing population pressing on a shrinking resource base made commoners more dependent on their patrons.

The forty years that followed are the Age of the Sturlungs, named for Sturla Þórðarson and his sons Sighvatr and Snorri. Snorri Sturluson became a vassal of Haakon IV of Norway in 1220 and his nephew Sturla Sighvatsson did the same in 1235, which turned an internal feud into a lever the crown could pull. The king consolidated between 1240 and 1260, and in 1262 the chieftains swore fealty to him under the Gamli sáttmáli, the Old Covenant, largely in the hope that he would bring peace. All had sworn by 1264.

What arrived with the king was the executive branch. New codes drawn up on his initiative and accepted by the Althing replaced the old law, Járnsíða in 1271 and Jónsbók in 1281, and the end of the Commonwealth is dated either to the Old Covenant or to Jónsbók. The Lögrétta shrank to thirty-six members nominated by royal sheriffs, the Lawspeaker was replaced by two Law Men, and the assembly turned into an appeal court whose rulings could themselves be appealed to the king. Over time it stopped making law at all.

How Denmark ruled a country it could not feed

The crown then changed hands twice without consulting anyone in Iceland. The Norwegian male royal line ended in 1380 and the country passed to the Danish monarchy, and the Kalmar Union of 1397 put all three Nordic kingdoms under one king with Denmark dominant. Denmark had no use for Icelandic fish and homespun, which opened a lasting trade deficit. English fleets filled the space in the fifteenth century, so completely that Icelandic trade accounted for more than a tenth of the port of Hull's business, and German traders took over in the sixteenth.

Lutheranism was imposed from Copenhagen and resisted here after the rest of the realm had given in. The bishop of Skálholt was deported in 1541; Jón Arason, bishop of Hólar, held out for nine more years and was beheaded with two of his sons in 1550, which Icelandic historians traditionally take as the end of the country's Middle Ages. In 1602 a royal decree handed every branch of Iceland's foreign trade to Danish merchants who paid the crown a rent for it, and the monopoly stood until 1787, after which only subjects of the Danish crown could trade with the island until 1855. Absolutism was acknowledged in Iceland in 1662, and with it the Althing surrendered the right to initiate legislation or consent to it.

Then the disasters came in series. Plague reached the island in 1402 to 1404 and again in 1494 to 1495, killing between half and three fifths of the population the first time and between a third and a half the second. Barbary corsairs raided in the summer of 1627 and carried nearly three hundred people into slavery in North Africa. Smallpox in 1707 and 1708 killed a quarter to a third of everyone alive. The Laki fissure erupted in 1783 and put out 12.5 cubic kilometres of lava; floods, ash and fumes killed about 9,000 people directly and 80% of the livestock, and the famine that followed, the Móðuharðindin or Mist Hardships, starved a quarter of the population, or a fifth on Britannica's reckoning, one of 37 famine years recorded between 1500 and 1804. Through all of it the landowners who dominated local office kept labourers in domestic service and restricted permanent households at the fishing stations, which prevented fishing from becoming an industry of its own. A royal decree of 6 June 1800 abolished the Althing outright and put a High Court of three men in Reykjavík in its place.

How the Althing was argued back into existence

Loyalty to the arrangement outlasted the hardship. When the Danish adventurer Jørgen Jørgensen seized power for two months in 1809 and declared the country independent, he got no Icelandic support, and when Norway was detached from the Danish monarchy under the Treaty of Kiel in 1814 there was no comparable push here. What changed the argument was a generation of Danish-educated intellectuals, the Fjölnismenn, and a lawyer named Jón Sigurðsson, who lived in Copenhagen and sat for Ísafjörður in the West Fjords.

A royal decree of 8 March 1843 re-established the Althing as a consultative body. It was elected in 1844 and met in Reykjavík on 1 July 1845 with twenty-six members, twenty of them elected and six appointed by the king, chosen by men of substantial means aged at least twenty-five, which came to about 5% of the population. A national convention called in place of the 1851 session, at which a majority of delegates wanted legislative and fiscal powers, was dissolved before it could debate them.

Iceland received its first constitution in 1874, on the thousandth anniversary of the settlement, and a Danish king came to Þingvellir for the celebration, the first ever to visit. It gave the Althing legislative power over domestic affairs while the crown kept a veto and split the assembly into two houses. Home rule followed on 1 February 1904, with a single minister who needed a majority in the Althing and lost office to a no-confidence vote in 1909. Women received a restricted vote in 1915 and an equal one in 1920, and the first woman took a seat in 1922. None of it stopped the departures: as the climate worsened through the nineteenth century about 15,000 people left a country of 70,000 for the New World, most for the region around Gimli in Manitoba that came to be called New Iceland.

The Act of Union of 1 December 1918 recognised Iceland as a fully sovereign state in personal union with the Danish king, for a term of twenty-five years, and left foreign affairs and defence to Denmark. The Supreme Court was founded in 1920. The Althingi's own history marks that pair of dates as the point at which judicial, executive and legislative powers had all passed into Icelandic hands.

What the republic did with the powers it recovered

Germany occupied Denmark on 9 April 1940 and cut the union in half. The next day the Althing took foreign affairs and coastal surveillance into its own hands and elected a provisional governor, and on 17 June 1941 it elected a regent to stand in for the king. British forces sailed into Reykjavík harbour on 10 May 1940 in Operation Fork; the government protested a flagrant violation of its neutrality and then asked Icelanders to treat the troops as guests. The British peaked at 25,000 men and were replaced from July 1941 by up to 40,000 Americans, more than every adult Icelandic man in a country of about 120,000, under an agreement in which the United States recognised Iceland's absolute independence. Approximately 159 Icelanders are confirmed killed in the war, most of them at sea.

The Act of Union expired on 31 December 1943. Icelanders voted over four days from 20 May 1944, with 97% in favour of ending the union and 95% for the new constitution, and the republic was founded at a session of the Althing held at Þingvellir on 17 June 1944, on the plain where the assembly had first met. Article 2 of the constitution adopted that day assigns legislative power to the Althing and the president jointly, executive power to the president and the other authorities named in law, and judicial power to judges: the three branches the Commonwealth never had, set out in one sentence.

Entry into the wider world was fast and contested. Iceland took Marshall aid at US$209 a head against US$109 for the Netherlands, and put it into trawlers, fish processing and a fertiliser plant. It was a charter member of NATO on 30 March 1949, joining amid a riot and with a reservation that it would never take part in offensive action, and it remains the member with the smallest population and the only one with no standing army. A defence agreement of 5 May 1951 brought American forces back to Keflavík, where they stayed until September 2006. Four Cod Wars against the United Kingdom, in 1952 to 1956, 1958 to 1961, 1972 to 1973 and 1975 to 1976, pushed the fishery limit from 3 nautical miles to 200, and Iceland won each round partly by threatening to leave NATO and close the base. In 1980 it elected the world's first female head of state chosen in a direct popular vote, and in 1994 it joined the European Economic Area.

Why the banks grew larger than the country

Deregulation from 2001 let three privately owned banks borrow abroad on a scale no economy of that size had attempted, and gross national income rose 32% between 2002 and 2007. By the end of the second quarter of 2008 the three held assets of 14.437 trillion krónur, more than eleven times national output. All three defaulted in the first week of October 2008, in the largest banking collapse any country has suffered relative to the size of its economy. Emergency legislation of 6 October 2008 put the supervisor in charge of them and made domestic deposits priority claims. Output fell 10% in real terms between the third quarter of 2007 and the third quarter of 2010, and net emigration of 5,000 people in 2009 was the heaviest since 1887.

The response ran through the courts, which is the oldest instinct in Icelandic politics. An Office of the Special Prosecutor was created by act of the Althing on 10 December 2008, and four bankers were sentenced by the Supreme Court on 12 February 2015 to between four and five and a half years over a single share deal. The Landsdómur, a court for ministerial misconduct written into the constitution of 1905, convened for the first time in its history and in 2012 convicted a former prime minister on one of four counts, for failing to hold cabinet meetings on important state matters, and imposed no punishment. In the Icesave dispute of 2008 to 2013, over more than half a million foreign depositors, the EFTA Court found that Iceland had no obligation to repay the British and Dutch minimum deposit guarantees.

The last thing to come home was the writing. Árni Magnússon, an Icelander who lived from 1663 to 1730 and taught at the University of Copenhagen, spent his life collecting Icelandic vellum and willed the collection to that university. Denmark agreed in May 1965 to transfer roughly half the Arnamagnæan collection, 1,666 items plus every Icelandic charter, along with 141 manuscripts from the Royal Library, and Danish opposition took the question to the Danish Supreme Court, which settled it on 19 March 1971. The Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda and Flateyjarbók were landed at Reykjavík on 21 April 1971 to a crowd on the quay, and the last two manuscripts arrived in June 1997, twenty-six years after the first. A country that had law before it had a government got the record of that law back last of all.