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| Coming into Iceland |
The
Republic of Iceland is a sparsely settled
(about 9 people per square mile) island that just touches the Arctic Circle and
it was one of the places I always wanted to visit. If you put Hawaii and
Yellowstone in a sack, shook them up and dumped them out, you’d have the
countryside of Iceland (without the palm trees). There are volcanoes, black
beaches, geysers and other geothermal features. Differing from these two places
are the glaciers that formed valleys and that persist over 5,000 square miles
of the island’s interior. Because of all
of the geothermal energy almost all of the energy used is from this renewable
resource; it also allows production gardening in greenhouses. Within these
greenhouses are enough banana trees to make Iceland the largest supplier of
bananas to Europe. However, since its founding in 874 by Ingólfr Arnarson, most
of the economy was based on fishing and agriculture; now one of the biggest
money-makers is tourism, even though this is an expensive place to visit. Islandic
culture has its roots in Scandinavian and Germanic heritage, which isn’t
surprising since most Icelanders are descendants from these groups. What’s
interesting is how people are named: usually a person’s last name signifies the
first name of the father or in some cases the mother. This is a hereditary
tradition that is distinctly different from that of Europe. If a man is named
John Smith and has a son named George and a daughter named Mary, their last
names will not be Smith. They will be George Johnson for the boy and Mary Johndaughter
for the girl. It works in the same manner if the children are given the
mother’s name. So Sally Jones’s children would be George Sallyson and Mary
Sallydaughter. Iceland became a sovereign country under the Crown of Denmark,
the Kingdom of Iceland on December 1, 1918; in 1944 Iceland became a republic
with a president as the head of government. Chilly and windy, all three towns
we visited in Iceland reminded us a great deal of Tasmania and of Scotland.
