Iceland - People
Icelandic last names differ from most current Western family name systems by being patronymic and occasionally matronymic. This means that they reflect the immediate father or mother of the child and not the historic family lineage, Icelanders do not have last names as most of the world understands them. This also means that the telephone directory is alphabetized by first name rather than surname. As a result of each person using patronymics, a family will normally have a variety of last names: Jón Einarsson and his wife Brindís Magnúsdóttir have separate last names as do their children Ólafur Jónsson and Edda Jónsdóttir.
Most Icelanders are descendants of Norwegian settlers and Celts from the British Isles, and the population is remarkably homogeneous. The settlement of Iceland caused the first western mass migration across the Atlantic. “It was like the Oklahoma land rush,” says scholar Jesse L. Byock. Iceland's frontier society was a social experiment. For more than three hundred years, farmers notorious for feuding managed to govern themselves without benefit of barons, knights, lords, or monarch. Icelanders rejected overlordship. They created a complex rule of law, but formed no government bodies or military authorities to enforce the law or to manage conflicts. Guided by self-interest in preserving their rights as freemen and the social order in their non-hierarchical community, medieval Icelanders used consensus to resolve disputes.
According to Icelandic Government statistics, 94% of the nation's inhabitants live in urban areas (localities with populations greater than 200) and about 63% live in the Reykjavik metropolitan area. Of the Nordic languages, the Icelandic language is closest to the Old Norse language and has remained relatively unchanged since the 12th century. The Icelandic alphabet contains letters not found in modern English. For example, Þ is transliterated as "th", and ð is transliterated as "d". About 83% of the population belongs to the state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, or other Lutheran Churches. However, Iceland has complete religious freedom, and about 35 other religious congregations are present.
Most Icelandic surnames are based on patronymy, or the adoption of the father's first given name. For example, Magnus and Anna, children of a man named Petur, would hold the surname Petursson and Petursdottir, respectively. Magnus' children, in turn, would inherit the surname Magnusson or Magnusdottir, while Anna's children would claim their father's first given name as their surname. Women normally maintain their original surnames after marriage. This system of surnames is required by law, except for the descendants of those who had acquired family names before 1913. Most Icelanders, while reserved by nature, rarely call each other by their surnames, and even phone directories are based on first names. Because of its small size and relative homogeneity, Iceland holds all the characteristics of a very close-knit society.
The island's relative isolation has resulted in a population of approximately 320,000 that is almost entirely descended from a single family tree. Data about the population's genealogy has been extensively recorded since 740 AD, and sits in an accessible database called Íslendingabók or book of Icelanders. In population genomics, this is called the founder effect, in which the lack of diversity limits the number of genomic variants (differences between people), and allows usually rare variants to become common enough in the population to be more easily noticed and studied. (To avoid awkward situations like accidentally dating your cousin, Íslendingabók was recently connected to an application that quickly identifies the degree of relatedness between any two people.)
The Sagas, almost all written between 1180 and 1300 A.D., remain Iceland's best-known literary accomplishment, and they have no surviving counterpart anywhere in the Nordic world. Based on Norwegian and Icelandic histories and genealogies, the Sagas present views of Nordic life and times up to 1100 A.D. The Saga writers sought to record their heroes' great achievements and to glorify the virtues of courage, pride, and honor, focusing in the later Sagas on early Icelandic settlers. The best-known Icelandic writer of the 20th century was the 1955 Nobel Prize winner Halldor Kiljan Laxness. The literacy rate is 99.9%, and literature and poetry are legendary passions with the population. Per capita publication of books and magazines is the highest in the world.
Unlike some other classes of Icelandic saga, the family stories are not fantastical adventures or chivalrous tales. Instead, they deal with issues of land ownership, insults, accusations of witchcraft, claims on beached whales, stolen hay, feud negotiations, and other everyday matters. The thirty or so chronicles, written in the vernacular, focus mainly on people and events of the mid-tenth to early eleventh centuries, the period shortly after Iceland’s settlement. The family sagas are similar to the realistic novels of the nineteenth century. Although all the details are not necessarily true, they paint a picture of the society’s attitudes and ways of functioning.
Unlike its literature, Iceland's fine arts did not flourish until the 19th century because the population was small and scattered. Iceland's most famous painters are Asgrimur Jonsson, Jon Stefansson, and Johannes Kjarval, all of whom worked during the first half of the 20th century. The best-known modern sculptor, Asmundur Sveinsson (1893-1982), drew his inspiration from Icelandic folklore and the Sagas for many of his works. Today, Kristjan Johannsson and Gardar Thor Cortes are Iceland's most famous opera singers, while pop singer Bjork and progressive rock band Sigur Ros are well known internationally.
Emigration from Iceland began later than any other Scandinavian country, due in part to the small island nation's extreme isolation. Icelandic immigration is also difficult to track, as many Icelandic immigrants to the US were counted as citizens of Denmark, which controlled Iceland at the time. However, it is clear that in the late decades of the 19th century between 10,000 and 15,000 emigrants set out from Iceland to the US—a total that approached one-fifth of the entire Icelandic population. Early emigrants included new converts to Mormonism who joined the Danish exodus to the Utah territory, as well as a few adventurers who founded a colony in Wisconsin in the 1860s.
The US government passed the Homestead Act in 1862. This act offered settlers 160 acres of free public land in the Midwest if they lived on and cultivated it for at least five years. This law was one of the reasons why so many immigrants moved as far west and north as North Dakota in the last half of the 19th century. The immigrants who moved west came from many parts of Europe. Most of them were Norwegian and German, but they also came from such countries as Sweden, Ukraine, England, Finland, and Iceland.
The main emigration began in the 1870s, when families and groups of families began moving to the Great Lakes states, seeking to escape the famine and overcrowding that had struck Iceland just as they had other Scandinavian lands. At first, the Icelanders did not arrive in sufficient numbers to start their own communities, and so tended to attach themselves to Norwegian or Swedish farm settlements, or to go to work for established farmers. Within a few decades, though, Icelandic towns had been founded in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Icelandic schools established.
Seasonal affective disorder and subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder (S-SAD) are more common in younger individuals in Iceland and among women. The weight gained by patients during the winter does not seem to result in chronic obesity. The prevalence of SAD and S-SAD was lower in Iceland than on the East Coast of the United States, in spite of Iceland's more northern latitude. These results are unexpected since the prevalence of these disorders has been found to increase in more northern latitudes. The Icelandic population has remained remarkably isolated during the past 1000 years. It is conceivable that persons with a predisposition to SAD have been at a disadvantage and that there may have been a population selection toward increased tolerance of winter darkness.
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