We have said that the Icelanders had never waged war against any other people. But they have had to struggle against foreign rulers, and against hardships caused by the nature of their country. After the Reformation, the intervention of the Crown greatly increased, and, at the same time, its revenues from the country. A Crown monopoly of all trade was imposed (in 1602). Nature joined forces with mismanagement by the authorities; on the seas surrounding the island pack-ice frequently became a menace to shipping, and there also occurred unusually long and vicious series of volcanic eruptions. These culminated in the late eighteenth century (1783), when the world's most extensive lava fields of historical times were formed, and the mist from the eruption was carried all over Europe and far into the continent of Asia. Directly or indirectly as a consequence of this eruption, the greater part of the live-stock, and a fifth of the human population of the country perished.
Still the people continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (baðstofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, while a member of the household read, or sang, about far-away knights and heroes, and the banquets they gave in splendid halls. In their imagination people thus tended to make their environment seem larger, and better, than life, as did Hrolfur with his fishing-boat in the story When I was on the Frigate.
III
About 1800, things began to improve. The monopoly of trade, which had been relaxed in 1787, was finally abolished in 1854. In the year 1874 Iceland got self-government in its internal affairs, and in 1904 its first minister of state with residence in the country. It became a sovereign kingdom in union with Denmark in 1918, and an independent republic in 1944.
The climate of the country has improved during the last hundred and fifty years, though there were a number of severe years in the eighteen eighties. It was at this time that emigration to the North- American Continent reached a peak, especially to Canada, where one of the settlements came to be called New Iceland—the title given to the last story in this book. Many of these emigrants suffered great hardships, and, as the story tells, several of them became disillusioned with the land of promise. Their descendants, however, have on the whole done well in the New World.
Until recently, the Icelanders were almost entirely a nation of farmers, and the majority of the stories in this collection contain sketches of country life. A certain amount of perseverance and even obstinacy was needed for a farmer's life on an island skirting the Arctic Circle (The Old Hay). Only about a quarter of the country is fit for human habitation, mainly the districts along the coast. The uplands, for the most part made up of mountains, glaciers, sand- deserts, and lava, are often awe-inspiring in their grandeur.
Nevertheless it would be wrong to exaggerate the severity of the land. In many places the soil is fertile, as is often the case in volcanic countries, and—thanks to the Gulf Stream, which flows up to the shores of the island—the climate is a good deal more temperate than one might suppose (the average annual temperatures in Reykjavík are 4-5° Centigrade).
Besides, the surrounding sea makes up for the barrenness of the country by having some of the richest fishing banks in the world. Hence, in addition to being farmers, the Icelanders have always been fishermen who brought means of sustenance from the sea—usually in primitive open boats like those described in When I was on the Frigate and Father and Son. In the late nineteenth century decked vessels came into use besides the open boats, succeeded by steam trawlers at the beginning of the present century. For the last few decades, the Icelanders have been employing a modern fishing fleet, and, at the time of writing, fishery products constitute more than ninety per cent of the country's exports.
With the growth of the fisheries and commerce there began to spring up towards the end of the nineteenth century a number of trading villages in different parts of the country. Reykjavík, the only municipality of fairly long standing and by far the biggest one, had at the turn of the present century a population of only between six and seven thousand—now about eleven times that number. We catch glimpses of these small trading stations at the beginning of the twentieth century in A Dry Spell and Father and Son.
Nowadays, four fifths of the population live in villages and townships—where some light industry has sprung up—and, in Reykjavík alone, more than two fifths of the population are concentrated.