History of Iceland: Timeline From Settlement to Today

In little more than a thousand years, a handful of Norse farms grew into one of the world's oldest parliamentary democracies. Few nations have packed so much hardship and so many milestones into so short a span.

Iceland’s past is not centered on royal courts, fortified cities, or ancient monuments. Most communities developed along the habitable coast, leaving historical sites scattered among working towns, farms, and travel routes rather than gathered in a single preserved center.

Iceland’s history began with Norse settlement around 874 AD. The Alþingi, the national parliament, was founded in 930, followed by centuries of Norwegian and then Danish rule, until the republic was declared in 1944. Iceland's human history spans approximately 1,150 years, young compared with most of Europe.

Iceland formed from volcanic activity along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the boundary where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart. A plume of magma beneath the ridge fed eruptions over millions of years. These slowly built the island up out of the ocean, and its oldest rocks, in the Westfjords, date back around 16 million years. You can see the rift at ground level today at Silfra fissure in Þingvellir, where the gap between the plates is filled with meltwater.

Ice did the rest of the shaping. Successive ice ages carved out the fjords and valleys you see today, while the volcanic engine never switched off. That’s why eruptions shape this entire story, deciding where people could farm and, at times, how well they lived.

Iceland was settled around 874 AD, when the Norse chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson built the first permanent farm at what is now Reykjavík. He was not the first to find the island, though, and the early arrivals are some of the most colorful figures in the whole story.

A Norseman named Nadd-Oddur (Naddoddur) was blown off course at sea in the 860s and landed on an unknown shore. It was Iceland. He named it Snæland, or Snow Land, after the snow on the mountains, then sailed on. Garðar Svavarsson, a Swedish Viking, came next and sailed all the way around it, proving it was an island. He wintered at Húsavík in the north and modestly renamed it Garðarshólmi, or Garðar's Isle. One of his crew, Náttfari, stayed behind, arguably the first Norseman to live in Iceland. 

Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson, remembered as Raven Flóki, was the first to sail out with the goal of settling. Lacking charts, he released three ravens to find land. One flew back the way he had come, one circled and returned to the ship, and the third flew on toward Iceland and never came back. His first attempt went badly, because a harsh winter killed his livestock. From a mountaintop he saw a fjord choked with drift ice, which led him to give the island the cold name it still carries: Ísland, Iceland. He sailed home to Norway.

Ingólfur Arnarson is counted as the first permanent settler. He sailed around 874 with his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir and his household, including enslaved workers. As land came into view, he threw his high-seat pillars, the carved wooden posts that framed a chieftain's seat of honor, into the sea and vowed to settle wherever they washed ashore. They came aground on a steaming bay he named Reykjavík, or "Smoky Bay." Centuries later, in 2000, the ruins of a longhouse from this era were uncovered at Aðalstræti in the city center.

Many settlers left Norway to escape King Harald Fairhair, who was forcibly uniting the country under one crown. Others came from Norse colonies in the British Isles. The land filled up fast. Settlers had claimed nearly all of it within about 60 years. By the year 1000, perhaps 60,000 people lived here.

Much of what we know about the settlers comes from two medieval books. The Landnámabók, or Book of Settlements, is the detailed one. It names more than 3,000 people and 1,400 settlements, recording where each settler claimed land and listing their descendants. The Íslendingabók, the Book of Icelanders, is shorter and tells the bigger story: settlement, the founding of the Alþingi, and conversion to Christianity. The priest Ari Þorgilsson, called Ari the Wise, wrote it around 1130, and this text gives us the earliest dating of the settlement. 

No originals survive. Only later copies are now kept at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík, which holds Iceland's medieval manuscripts. Icelanders can still read these texts today, because the language has changed very little in a thousand years, unlike the rest of Scandinavia.

Irish monks known as the Papar are thought to have lived here as hermits before the Norse arrived. Both books mention them. They left behind crosses, bells, and books before they departed.

In 930, Iceland's chieftains founded the Alþingi at Þingvellir, the "parliament plains," creating one of the world's oldest parliaments and beginning the period known as the Icelandic Commonwealth. The country had no king. Power lay with local chieftains called goðar. Each summer, free men gathered to hear a law-speaker recite the law aloud from the Lögberg, the Law Rock.

The Commonwealth lasted from 930 to 1262, and the Alþingi kept meeting at Þingvellir until 1798.

Woodland is thought to have covered a quarter to nearly 40 percent of the country when the settlers arrived, mostly low birch. Almost all of it was gone within a couple of centuries, cleared for grazing and cut for fuel and timber. Today, forests cover only about 2 percent of Iceland. Wood was scarce, so Icelanders built with the earth instead. They raised the iconic turf houses, whose thick sod walls kept out the cold for the next thousand years.

Out of this small, isolated society came one of medieval Europe's great literatures. From the 1120s onward, Icelanders began writing down the works the country is still famous for: the family sagas, the Landnámabók, and the histories. The towering figure was Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), a chieftain and twice law-speaker. He wrote the Prose Edda, our single richest source on Norse mythology, and Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway. You can still read the feuds of this era in works such as Njáls saga and Egils saga.

Iceland adopted Christianity around the year 1000 through a legal compromise at the Alþingi, not through war. The Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason pushed hard for conversion, cutting off trade and holding Icelanders hostage. At home, Christians and pagans were drifting toward open conflict. To avoid civil war, both sides agreed to let one man decide for everyone.

That man was the law-speaker Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, a pagan priest trusted to be fair. He ruled that all Icelanders would be baptized as Christians. To keep the peace, though, some old customs were allowed to continue for a time, including eating horse meat and the exposure of unwanted infants. It was a uniquely Icelandic solution: a national religion changed by a committee decision rather than a battle.

The waterfall Goðafoss in North Iceland, the "waterfall of the gods," is tied to this moment. The story goes that Þorgeir threw his pagan idols into the falls on his way home, a symbolic end to the old religion. It's a beloved legend, not confirmed history.

Iceland lost its independence in the 13th century after a period of clan warfare known as the Sturlung Age, approximately 1220 to 1262. Wealth and chieftaincies concentrated in fewer hands, and the most powerful families turned on one another. The peace the Commonwealth had mostly kept for three centuries collapsed into raids, burnings, and revenge killings. 

It was a brutal time, and it claimed Iceland’s greatest writer. Snorri Sturluson was killed in his home at Reykholt in 1241 by agents of the Norwegian king. Sensing an opening, King Hákon of Norway pressed Iceland's exhausted leaders to accept his rule. Iceland pledged loyalty to the crown through the Old Covenant of 1262 to 1264, the Gamli sáttmáli. In 1281, a new royal law code, Jónsbók, replaced the old Commonwealth laws.

Nature piled on. Hekla, the volcano medieval Europeans came to call the "Gateway to Hell," erupted repeatedly during these centuries. The eruptions smothered farmland in ash and deepened the hardship of a colder, harder age.

Iceland passed from Norwegian to Danish control in the late 14th century and stayed tied to Denmark for almost 600 years. Norway and its territories joined the Kalmar Union in 1397, which brought Denmark, Norway, and Sweden under a single monarch. Iceland came along with it. As Danish power grew, the island was governed increasingly from Copenhagen, eventually under an absolute monarchy from 1662.

The Black Death reached Iceland between 1402 and 1404 and is thought to have killed between a third and a half of the population. A second wave in the 1490s was nearly as deadly.

The Reformation was forced on Iceland in 1550. The Danish crown moved to seize Church property and impose Lutheranism. The last Catholic bishop, Jón Arason of Hólar, resisted with arms and gathered followers, but he was captured and beheaded along with his two sons. Lutheranism has been the state religion ever since.

From 1602 to 1787, a Danish trade monopoly allowed only licensed Danish merchants to trade with Iceland. It held the country in poverty for nearly two centuries. The one lasting good to come of it was an act of defiance. The magistrate Skúli Magnússon established wool workshops, known as the Innréttingar, in the 1750s to develop a local industry. Those workshops became the seed of the modern capital, which is why Skúli is remembered as the father of Reykjavík.

In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs from the North African ports of Algiers and Salé raided Grindavík, the East Fjords, and Vestmannaeyjar (the Westman Islands), in a series of attacks Icelanders still call the Tyrkjarán. About 50 people were killed, and close to 400 were captured and sold into slavery in North Africa.

The Westman Islands were hit hardest. On Heimaey, the raiders seized 242 people and killed dozens, while others hid in sea caves and cliffs as the pirates combed the island. The most famous captive, Guðríður Símonardóttir, nicknamed Tyrkja-Gudda, spent years enslaved in Algiers before she was ransomed and came home. She later married the poet Hallgrímur Pétursson. The great bells of Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, the church named for him, carry the names of Hallgrímur, Guðríður, and their daughter Steinunn.

Iceland's witch trials took an unusual turn. Unlike in almost every other European country, nearly all the accused were men. Between about 1625 and 1685, approximately 120 to 130 cases came to trial, and about 22 people were executed, usually by burning.

The 18th century was the cruelest in Iceland's history, a relentless cycle of disease and eruption. A smallpox epidemic in 1707 and 1708 killed about a quarter of the population. A string of eruptions from Hekla, Katla, and Öræfajökull then battered farmland through the decades that followed.

The Laki eruption was the worst of them. The fissure erupted in 1783 and 1784, pouring out vast amounts of lava and a poisonous haze that killed most of the country's livestock. The famine that followed is remembered as the Móðuharðindin (the "Mist Hardships"). The famine killed about a fifth of all Icelanders, and the haze spread over Europe, darkening skies as far away as Asia. It remains one of the deadliest volcanic events in recorded human history.

Hardship kept driving people away. The explosive Askja volcano eruption of 1875 poisoned grazing land in the east, and emigration that was already building turned into a flood. More than 14,000 Icelanders left for North America between 1870 and 1914. Known as the Vestur-Íslendingar, the Icelanders of the West, many founded a colony called New Iceland on the shores of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, centered on the town of Gimli.

Iceland became a fully independent republic on June 17, 1944, the final step in a movement that had been building since the 1830s. Its leading figure was Jón Sigurðsson, a scholar and politician who pressed Denmark for greater self-rule throughout the 19th century and became the symbol of the national cause.

Progress came in clear stages. The Alþingi, Iceland's parliament, was restored in 1843 and met again in Reykjavík in 1845, though at first it could only advise the Danish king. The 1874 constitution, granted on the 1,000th anniversary of settlement, gave it real power to make laws in Iceland. In 1904, Iceland gained control of its domestic affairs, with an Icelandic minister in Reykjavík overseeing them. The Act of Union of 1 December 1918 went further, making Iceland a sovereign state, tied to Denmark only by a shared monarch. Icelanders voted overwhelmingly to cut even that last tie while Denmark was occupied during World War II. They declared the republic at Þingvellir on June 17, 1944, the birthday of Jón Sigurðsson, with Sveinn Björnsson as the first president.

Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, and Britain moved at once to keep Iceland out of Nazi hands. British forces landed on May 10, 1940, over the formal protest of a neutral Iceland. In 1941, the United States took over the island's defense, basing thousands of troops at Keflavík and building infrastructure, including the airport still used today.

Iceland straddled the shipping lanes between North America and Europe, which made it strategically vital. The war also transformed the economy and sealed independence. Denmark couldn’t govern, so Iceland managed its own affairs and took the final step to a republic in 1944.

Since becoming a republic, Iceland has repeatedly punched above its weight. It joined NATO as a founding member in 1949. Breaking with Iceland's tradition of neutrality, the decision was so divisive it triggered a riot at Austurvöllur, the square in front of parliament, where police used tear gas for the first time in the country's history. A US military base operated at Keflavík from 1951 until 2006.

The Cod Wars were three confrontations with the United Kingdom from 1958 to 1976 over fishing rights. Iceland pushed its exclusive zone out step by step, reaching 200 nautical miles (about 370 km). Its small patrol boats famously used net-cutters to slice the trawl gear of British vessels. The navy-less nation won every round, even threatening to leave NATO before Britain finally backed down.

On October 24, 1975, about 90 percent of the nation's women refused to work for a day, a protest widely credited with pushing through an equal-pay law the next year. Five years later, in 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was elected president. She was the world's first democratically elected female head of state and served until 1996.

In 1986, Reykjavík hosted the summit between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at Höfði, a small white house by the sea. The meeting is seen as a key step toward the 1987 treaty that began cutting nuclear arsenals.

The beer ban was finally lifted on March 1, 1989, still marked casually as Bjórdagurinn, or Beer Day. In 2009, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became Iceland's prime minister, the world's first openly gay head of government. And in 2018, the national football team reached the FIFA World Cup, the smallest nation ever to qualify.

The 21st century has been dramatic. The 2008 banking collapse, known as Hrunið (the Crash), wiped out the country's three big banks. It triggered the Pots and Pans Revolution, the Búsáhaldabyltingin, when protesters banged kitchenware outside the Alþingi until they forced the government out.

In 2010, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull grounded European air travel for days. By a strange twist, it helped launch the tourism boom that followed.

Fire has shaped the island all along, and the Westman Islands know it best. On January 23, 1973, a fissure tore open beside the town on Heimaey without warning. 

The fishing fleet happened to be in harbor that night, so islanders ferried most of the island's 5,300 residents to the mainland within hours. No one died in the evacuation, and the eruption's only fatality came weeks later, from volcanic gas. Lava buried about 400 buildings and threatened to seal off the harbor, until crews pumped millions of tons of seawater onto the flow to halt it. One excavated house is now the heart of the Eldheimar museum.

The eruptions have not stopped. Since 2021, after some 800 years of quiet, they’ve returned to the Reykjanes Peninsula near Reykjavík. The fishing town of Grindavík was evacuated in late 2023, a reminder that in Iceland, history and geology are never really finished.

The best way to understand Iceland's history is to stand in it, and many of the key sites are within easy reach of Reykjavík. Several fall along the Golden Circle route, while others are a short flight or ferry away.

Þingvellir carries the whole arc in one place: the Alþingi founded in 930, the conversion argued out around the year 1000, and the republic declared in 1944, all inside the same rift valley. Most Golden Circle departures stop there, which makes it the easiest first step into the history of Iceland.

Our guides fold the sagas, the eruptions, and the independence story into the drive itself, so the timeline above stops being a list and becomes a place you've stood in. Browse our Golden Circle tours to build a day around Þingvellir, or ask our Private Travel Desk about a history-focused private route.

Iceland was settled around 874 AD, when the Norse chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson built the first permanent farm at present-day Reykjavík. Irish monks, the Papar, may have lived there earlier but left as the Norse arrived.

Ingólfur Arnarson is traditionally named as Iceland's first permanent settler, around 874 AD. Earlier explorers, including Hrafna-Flóki, who gave the island its name, had visited but didn’t stay.

Iceland's human history is about 1,150 years old, dating to the settlement around 874 AD. As an independent republic, it’s much younger, founded on June 17, 1944.

The Alþingi was founded in 930 at Þingvellir, making it one of the world's oldest parliaments. It met there until 1798, and the parliament still governs Iceland today.

Iceland became a fully independent republic on June 17, 1944. It had gained sovereignty under the 1918 Act of Union but stayed tied to Denmark through a shared king until then.

June 17 is Iceland's National Day, marking the founding of the republic in 1944. The date honors Jón Sigurðsson, the leader of the independence movement, who was born on that day.

Volcanic eruptions repeatedly reshaped Iceland, none more than Laki in 1783 to 1784, whose gases and famine killed about a fifth of the population. Later eruptions at Heimaey in 1973 and Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, and the ongoing Reykjanes eruptions since 2021, show the process is still ongoing.

The Cod Wars were three confrontations between Iceland and the United Kingdom from 1958 to 1976 over fishing rights. Iceland extended its limits to 200 nautical miles and prevailed, despite having no navy.

Almost all of the approximately 22 people executed in Iceland's 17th-century witch trials were men, unlike the rest of Europe. Icelandic magic was tied to runes and staves, skills associated mainly with men.