The History of the Settlement of Iceland

The settlement of Iceland came late: it was one of the last large habitable places in Europe to be occupied. Its first permanent settlers arrived from Norway and the Norse colonies of the British Isles in the late 9th century, traditionally in 874, and within about 60 years most of the usable land had been claimed. Icelanders wrote that story down themselves, and archaeologists have since tested it against volcanic ash, excavated halls and DNA.

This guide sets out when Iceland was discovered and settled, who arrived first and where they came from, drawing on the medieval records and on David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea (Allen Lane, 2019), which inspired the original version of this article. You can follow the story on the ground on our Iceland cultural and wilderness small group tour, a 17-day circuit of the island from Reykjavík.

When was Iceland settled?

Iceland was settled from about 870, and the traditional date for its first permanent settler, Ingólfr Arnarson, is 874. The earliest Icelandic history, Íslendingabók (the Book of Icelanders), written by the priest Ari Þorgilsson in about 1122–33, dates the start of settlement to 870, the year the English king Edmund was killed by Vikings. The later Landnámabók (the Book of Settlements) gives 874 for Ingólfr’s arrival. Ari wrote that the land was fully settled within 60 years, which brings the Age of Settlement (landnámsöld) to a close around 930, the year the Althing first met.

A layer of volcanic ash, the Landnám (“land-taking”) tephra, fell across much of Iceland in an eruption that Greenland ice cores date to about 871, give or take two years. Beneath it there is almost no sign of people; just above it, turf walls and hearths appear. In central Reykjavík, a turf wall built shortly before that ash fell can be seen in the Settlement Exhibition.

Íslendingabók, the Book of Icelanders, was written by Ari Þorgilsson in the 1120s or early 1130s. The medieval manuscript is lost; the text survives in 17th-century paper copies like this one.

Key dates:

• About 325 BCE: Pytheas describes “Thule”.
• About 795: Irish clerics summer on Thule (Dicuil).
• 860s: Naddoddr, Garðarr and Flóki reach Iceland.
• 870: settlement begins, according to Íslendingabók.
• 874: Ingólfr Arnarson settles at Reykjavík, according to Landnámabók.
• 930: the first Althing; the Age of Settlement ends.
• About 985: Icelanders settle Greenland.
• 999 or 1000: the Althing adopts Christianity.
• 1056: Iceland’s first bishop.
• 1262–64: Iceland accepts Norwegian rule.

Before people: a young volcanic island

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge crosses Iceland from the Reykjanes peninsula to the north-east, between the North American and Eurasian plates. Thingvellir sits on the rift.

In geological terms Iceland is young. Its oldest rocks, in the Westfjords and the East Fjords, are about 16 million years old, laid down in the Miocene by eruptions on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the 16,000-kilometre undersea mountain chain where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart. Iceland, built up by a hotspot beneath the island, is the largest place where the ridge rises above the sea. The plates separate by about 2 centimetres a year, and the island is still growing: Surtsey rose from the sea off the south coast in 1963. Our article on Iceland’s lunar landscapes and geology goes further into the volcanoes and lava fields.

For the first settlers this meant hot springs, rising steam and thin volcanic soils. Ari wrote that the land was then wooded between mountain and shore; those low birch woods were largely cleared in the centuries that followed.

Glacier ice and volcanic mountains in the Vatnajökull region of south-east Iceland.

Thule: did ancient writers know of Iceland?

Thule (“Tile”) on Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina of 1539, drawn as an island of its own and surrounded by sea monsters.

The first possible reference to Iceland comes from the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia, who sailed north around 325 BCE and described his voyage in a now lost work, On the Ocean. He wrote of an island called Thule, near a frozen sea. In AD 77 Pliny the Elder repeated in his Natural History that Thule lay six days’ sail north of Britain, and the Greek geographer Strabo quoted, with some scepticism, Pytheas’s description of the far north:

Here neither earth, water, nor air exist separately, but a sort of concretion of all these, resembling a sea-lung in which the earth, the sea, and all things were suspended, thus forming, as it were, a link to unite the whole together (Roseman, 125).

Later writers such as Orosius (early 5th century) and the Irish monk Dicuil placed Thule north and west of Ireland, beyond what are thought to be the Faroes, and by the Middle Ages the name was routinely given to Iceland. Whether Pytheas himself reached Iceland is still argued.

Were there people in Iceland before the Vikings?

Probably a few Irish monks, but no one who stayed. Writing in 825, Dicuil reported that some 30 years earlier clerics had spent February to August on Thule, where at midsummer it never grew dark. Ari’s Íslendingabók adds that when the Norse arrived there were Christians on the island whom they called papar; the papar left because they would not live among heathens, leaving behind Irish books, bells and croziers. No Irish artefacts have yet been found to confirm it.

Archaeology does suggest that Norse seafarers knew Iceland before 874. At Hafnir on the Reykjanes peninsula, radiocarbon dates indicate that a cabin was abandoned sometime between about 770 and 880. At Stöð in Stöðvarfjörður, in the East Fjords, the archaeologist Bjarni Einarsson has excavated a longhouse he dates to about 800 and interprets as a seasonal camp rather than a permanent farm. These dates are debated, but they suggest summer voyages before anyone settled for good.

Who discovered Iceland, and when?

Norse seafarers discovered Iceland in the 860s, a decade or so before the first settlers, though Irish monks had probably reached it earlier. Landnámabók credits three voyagers.

The first Norse voyages as Landnámabók tells them: Naddoddr to the East Fjords, Garðarr around the island to winter at Húsavík, and Flóki to Vatnsfjörður in the Westfjords (map labels in German).

Naddoddr, a Norwegian Viking living in the Faroes, was blown off course sailing there from Norway and reached the East Fjords near present-day Reyðarfjörður. He climbed a mountain to look for smoke, saw no sign of people, and as his crew put to sea again, snow fell. He called the land Snæland, Snowland, and sailed on.

Garðarr Svavarsson, a Swede who owned land on the Danish island of Zealand, came next. One version says his mother, a seer, sent him; another that a storm in the Pentland Firth drove him north. Garðarr sailed right round the land, proving it an island, and wintered on Skjálfandi bay in the north, where the house he built gave Húsavík (“house bay”) its name. He called the island Garðarshólmi after himself. One of his crew, Náttfari, stayed behind with a slave and a bondswoman and is sometimes called Iceland’s first resident.

Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson, “Raven-Flóki”, was the first to sail to Iceland meaning to settle. Leaving western Norway around 868, he sailed by way of Shetland, where his daughter drowned, and the Faroes, with three ravens to find the way; the third led him to land. He wintered at Vatnsfjörður in the Westfjords, but his men fished all summer instead of making hay, and the livestock died. From a mountain above his camp he saw a fjord full of drift ice and named the country Ísland, Iceland, a name that stuck. Flóki went home disappointed but later returned to settle; Flókalundur in Vatnsfjörður is named after him.

Ingólfr Arnarson and the founding of Reykjavík

Ingólfr Arnarson has his high-seat pillar raised on the shore at Reykjavík, in Peter Raadsig’s painting of 1850.

Ingólfr Arnarson and his foster-brother Hjörleifr Hróðmarsson left Norway after a blood feud. A first voyage convinced them the land was good; Ingólfr then went home to gather supplies and volunteers, while Hjörleifr raided Ireland for treasure and slaves. In 874, by tradition, the two sailed for Iceland together. As land came into sight, Ingólfr threw his carved high-seat pillars overboard and vowed to settle wherever the gods brought them ashore.

Ingólfr wintered at Ingólfshöfði on the south-east coast. Hjörleifr settled at Hjörleifshöfði, east of Vík, where his Irish slaves killed him and fled to islands offshore. Ingólfr hunted them down, and the islands have been called Vestmannaeyjar, islands of the “Westmen” (the Irish), ever since. Two of Ingólfr’s slaves, Vífill and Karli, took three years to find the pillars, washed up in a bay in the south-west. Ingólfr settled there and named the place Reykjavík, “Smoke Cove”, most likely for the steam rising from nearby hot springs. It is now Iceland’s capital: see our guide to Reykjavík.

Where did Iceland’s first settlers come from?

Most came from western Norway, but a large share, especially of the women and the enslaved, came from Ireland and Scotland, many of them by way of the Norse settlements in the British Isles. Landnámabók names more than 400 settlers with their households, and modern estimates of the population by 930 commonly range from about 10,000 to 20,000. Saga tradition says many chieftains left Norway to escape King Harald Fairhair; historians see the settlement as part of the wider Viking-age movement across the North Atlantic. A few came from Denmark and Sweden.

A study of the genomes of 27 early Icelanders, published in 2018, found that the settlers were on average about 57 per cent Norse and 43 per cent Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) in ancestry, compared with about 70 per cent Norse in Icelanders today. Earlier studies of living Icelanders found about three-quarters of the male line to be Scandinavian, while about 62 per cent of the female line traces back to Scotland and Ireland.

Norsemen landing in Iceland, as imagined by the Norwegian painter Oscar Wergeland in 1877.

From settlement to Commonwealth: the Althing and the conversion

By about 930 the settlers shared a common law and assembly. Power rested with some 40 chieftains, the goðar, each with a following of farmers in his goðorð, or chieftaincy. In 930 the Althing first met at Thingvellir, a plain on the rift valley north-east of Reykjavík, where each summer the goðar made laws and settled disputes, and the lawspeaker recited the law from the Law Rock. The story of that assembly, often called the world’s oldest parliament, is told in our article on the Althing, Iceland’s founding assembly.

The rift wall at Thingvellir, with the path beneath it and the plain where the Althing met from 930.

Most early Icelanders worshipped the Norse gods, among them Odin, Thor, Freyr and Freyja, though some settlers from Ireland and Scotland were Christian. Under pressure from King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway, by 999 or 1000 the Althing was close to splitting in two. The lawspeaker, Thorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, himself a pagan, was asked to decide. He ruled that Iceland would be Christian, but that pagans could still worship in private. A later tale, probably 19th-century, has him throwing his idols into Goðafoss, the “Waterfall of the Gods”. In 1056 Ísleifr Gissurarson was consecrated the first Icelandic bishop by the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen.

Icelanders traded wool, falcons, horses and later fish for timber, soapstone, wax and metals, carried in the knarr, a Norse merchant ship that could take live animals. Settlers kept moving west, too: Erik the Red led a fleet from Iceland to Greenland in about 985, and his son Leif reached North America around 1000.

This article uses Iceland’s medieval histories and sagas as sources for dates and events; for how the sagas themselves were written and passed down as literature, including the Vinland voyages, see our companion piece, Icelandic Sagas and the North Atlantic: Reading the Settlement Landscape.

The Commonwealth lasted a little over three centuries. In the 13th-century Sturlung Age a few great families fought for control, and the saga writer Snorri Sturluson was killed at Reykholt in 1241; our article on Snorri Sturluson and Reykholt tells that story. In 1262–64 the chieftains swore allegiance to the king of Norway. Iceland passed with Norway to the Danish crown in 1380, became a sovereign kingdom in 1918 and a republic on 17 June 1944. With 394,324 people in January 2026, it is still Europe’s most sparsely populated country.

Where can you see Iceland’s settlement history today?

Start in Reykjavík, at the Settlement Exhibition and the National Museum of Iceland; beyond the capital, Thingvellir and a string of farm and folk museums carry the story around the island.

• The Settlement Exhibition, Aðalstræti 16, Reykjavík: the Reykjavík City Museum shows a 10th-century longhouse, lived in from about 930 to 1000, where it was excavated, beside the turf wall older than the Landnám tephra.
• The National Museum of Iceland, Suðurgata 41: its permanent exhibition, Making of a Nation, runs from the settlement to the present day.
• Thingvellir National Park: the Althing’s site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, about 40 kilometres from Reykjavík.
• Reykholt, in Borgarfjörður: Snorri Sturluson’s home, with the stone-lined pool, Snorralaug, that tradition links to him.
• Around the island: Húsavík, Vatnsfjörður and Hjörleifshöfði (beside the Ring Road east of Vík) put the founding stories on the map, and the turf farmhouse at Glaumbær, in Skagafjörður, shows how Icelanders lived in turf houses until well into the 20th century; it was inhabited until 1947.

Opening hours vary, so check before you go. Keflavík International Airport is about 50 kilometres from Reykjavík; there are no direct flights from Australia. The Reykjavík museums are a short, level walk apart; the Thingvellir paths are gravel with some slopes. If you are planning a circuit of the island, our Iceland ring road itinerary shows how these places fit together.

Seeing Iceland’s settlement history on our Iceland tour

Our Iceland cultural and wilderness small group tour follows this story. On Day 2 in Reykjavík we visit the National Museum of Iceland. Day 3 takes us to Thingvellir, former site of the Althing, and to Reykholt for a lecture on Snorri Sturluson, the Middle Ages and the struggle for independence. Day 5 ends at Flókalundur, named after Flóki; Day 8 includes the farmhouse museum at Glaumbaer, and on Day 10 we take a whale-watching boat from Húsavík, where Garðarr built his house. On Day 12 we stop in Stöðvarfjörður, the fjord of the Stöð excavation, to see Petra Sveinsdóttir’s stone collection, and Day 14 brings the folk museum at Skógar. The tour is Level 2 – Moderate, with an Odyssey Program Leader and local guides.

Further reading

Articles about Iceland published by Odyssey Traveller

• Icelandic Sagas and the North Atlantic: Reading the Settlement Landscape
• Snorri Sturluson and Reykholt: Sagas, History and Icelandic Independence
• Questions About Iceland
• Visiting Iceland for Mature Travellers
• Lunar Landscapes and Geology in Iceland

For all the articles Odyssey Traveller has published for mature travellers, click through on this link.

External articles to assist you on your visit to Iceland

Visit Iceland: The national tourism website

Travel + Leisure: How to travel to Iceland

Ice, Fire and Feuds: On the Trail of Iceland’s Sagas

Lonely Planet: Top things to do in Reykjavík