"Life, Despite It All"
It wasn't the End of the World after all...
by Joel Bowman
“I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state
of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!”
~ Jules Verne, "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864)
Reykholt, Iceland - "When wandering Norse settlers landed on these frigid polar shores sometime in the second half of the 9th century, located on an active rift between tectonic plates and brimming with sulphuric geysers and volcanic eruptions, they must have thought they’d at least have the place to themself.
Imagine their surprise, then, when they encountered their first papar, a mysterious sect of Gaelic monks who had taken up eremitic residence on the frostbitten island, in what appears to have been an early and, until then, successful attempt at Medieval social distancing.
Whether despite, or because of, the land’s remoteness and extreme conditions, the Norsemen must have fancied the place; they spent the next few centuries cultivating the land here and transporting Gaelic serfs, known as “thralls,” to help them with the heavy lifting of early settlement. (Hence the idiom, to be in thrall, or under the control, of something or someone.)
According to the Landnámabók, the Icelandic “book of settlements,” it was a sturdy Norseman by the name of Ingólfr Arnarson who fist built his homestead here in 874, giving name to Reykjavík, the western province that would become the island’s capital.
Ingólfr Arnarson, the first settler of Iceland and newly arrived in Reykjavík,
directs his thralls to erect pillars for the island’s first permanent homestead.
Painting by Johan Peter Raadsig, 1806 - 1882.
On the Brink: What must life have been like, we wonder, for these intrepid frontiersmen? How did they survive in such extreme conditions, all without planes… petroleum… penicillin, etc. Turns out, many didn’t. Between early settlement and the mid-19th Century, the hard-scrapple population, numbering between just 40,000-60,000, was beset by bitterly cold winters, carpeted with poisonous ash fall from volcanic eruptions and, despite its remoteness, cut low by ravenous diseases and bubonic plagues.
When the Black Death visited the island at the beginning of the 15th Century, it wiped out between 50-60% of the population (church records suggest as little as 20% of the clergy survived…) It returned again toward the end of the century, presumably to finish the job. Then came the smallpox outbreaks, which killed a third of the population at the outset of the 18th Century… plus measles, influenza and livestock plagues. There were also frequent crop failures, and the resulting bouts of starvation. All told, Iceland experienced 37 famine years between 1500 and 1804… one every eight years.
And yet somehow, someway, by hook or by crook… the people pressed on, eking out what meagre living they could, braving the merciless conditions, and each other, to soldier on through the seasons and the centuries.
From 930 through to this very moment, the island has been governed as an independent commonwealth, albeit one that has found itself under the control of Norway, Sweden and Denmark over the years. Its governing body, the Althing, remains the oldest surviving parliament in the world.
The economy, a mixed market capitalist system with private enterprise and free trade and at its core, thrives. As of last year, Iceland boasted the eighth-highest Gross Domestic Product per capita in the world (US$78,837). Today, 390,000 Icelanders enjoy a level of comfort and wealth Arnarson and his early arrivals could not have imagined.
They harness vast quantities of geothermal energy from the ground… grow fresh crops in glasshouses pumped full of carbon dioxide (a.k.a. plant food)… and charge wide-eyed tourists like your editor US$26 a bowl for gourmet, farm-to-table tomato soup, which they gladly and gratefully pay. (It did have king prawns and cognac, to be fair…) Staring down unimaginably tough odds, the best in mankind survives another day. In Man vs Nature, we’ve all but tamed even our severest surroundings."
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