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During this time, Iceland remained independent, a period known as the Old Commonwealth, and Icelandic historians began to document the nation's history in books referred to as sagas of Icelanders. In the early thirteenth century, the internal conflict known as the age of the Sturlungs weakened Iceland, which eventually became subjugated to ...
Southern Iceland is hit by two earthquakes, the first 6.6 M L and the second 6.5 M L. There were no fatalities but a few people were injured and there was some considerable damage to infrastructure. 2004: 2 June: The president of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, refuses to sign a bill from the parliament for the first time in the nation's ...
Written sources consider the age of settlement in Iceland to have begun with settlement by Ingólfr Arnarson around 874, for he was the first to sail to Iceland with the purpose of settling the land. Archaeological evidence shows that extensive human settlement of the island indeed began at this time, and "that the whole country was occupied ...
The ridge marks the boundary between the Eurasian and North American Plates, and Iceland was created by rifting and accretion through volcanism along the ridge. [69] Many fjords punctuate Iceland's 4,970-km-long (3,088-mi) coastline, which is also where most settlements are situated.
This created a unique structure. [4] [dubious – discuss] The most powerful and elite leaders in Iceland were the chieftains (sing. goði, pl. goðar). The office of the goði was called the goðorð. The goðorð was not delimited by strict geographical boundaries. Thus, a free man could choose to support any of the goðar of his district.
During the Weichselian glaciation, almost all of Scandinavia was buried beneath a thick permanent sheet of ice and the Stone Age was delayed in this region.Some valleys close to the watershed were indeed ice-free around 30 000 years B.P. Coastal areas were ice-free several times between 75 000 and 30 000 years B.P. and the final expansion towards the late Weichselian maximum took place after ...
Only in western Norway (whence came the original settlers of Iceland) were the dialects kept relatively pure and free from Danish influence, so much so that in the second half of the 19th century the linguist Ivar Aasen created an authentic Norwegian idiom on the basis of them, first called landsmål "national language" and later nynorsk or ...
Because of the Kalmar Union, Iceland had been under the control of the Crown of Denmark since 1380, [4] although formally it had been a Norwegian possession until 1814. [5] In 1874, one thousand years after the first acknowledged settlement, Denmark granted Iceland home rule. The constitution, written the same year, was revised in 1903 and the ...