Americans celebrate the landing of the first pilgrim settlers and the taming of the West, Afrikaners revere the trekboers who conquered and occupied the wilderness of South Africa during the 18th century. Icelanders celebrate the founding of Icelandic society and the early history of their island, particularly the from 930-1030, known in Icelandic chronology as the Saga Age--the period during which the sagas of the Icelanders take place. The earliest historical writings also deal with this period.

Parts of the sagas are close to history, and parts are pure fiction. Even though the origins of Iceland lie farther back in time than those of the other new societies, the mythology of the founding is more coherent and peopled with more concrete figures than is that of any other new nation. Magnus Magnusson, the Icelandic/Scottish translator of many sagas into English, is quite correct in his assertion that "much, much more than the garbled and debased mythology of the Wild West, Iceland is the remembered and continuing land of frontiersmen."

However, there’s one major challenge that the Icelanders never had to face: a population indigenous to their new land. Here one of the central themes of new societies is missing, the interplay of settlers and natives. Iceland was in fact the largest uninhabited area settled in historical times. One basic disadvantage the settlers had was that they had no help in adjusting to their new environment.

Icelanders from the beginning have dwelled on their origins and their genealogy. The enormous number of manuscripts of the sagas that have survived from medieval times and that are known to be only a small fraction of the total confirm that copying and reading the sagas were major endeavors of the people. Scores of 18th- and 19th-century travelers to Iceland wrote about the pervasive popularity of the sagas in Iceland. Unfortunately, there were no medieval travelers who wrote about such things.

The whole of Icelandic history is miraculous. A number of barbarian gentlemen leave Norway because the government there is becoming civilized and interfering. They settle in Iceland because they want to keep what they can of the unreformed past, the old freedom. It looks like anarchy. But immediately they begin to frame a Social Contract and to make laws in the most intelligent manner: a colonial agent is sent back to the Mother Country to study law and present a report. They might have sunk into mere hard work and ignorance, contending with the difficulties of their new country. They Iceland settlers took with them the intellect of Norway; they wrote the his might have become boors without a history, without a ballad. In fact the story of the kings and the adventures of the gods.

The settlement of Iceland looks like a furious plunge of angry and intemperate chiefs, away from order into a grim and reckless land. The truth is that those rebels and their commonwealth were more self-possessed, more clearly conscious of their own aims, more critical of their own achievements, than any society on Earth since the fall of Athens.

Iceland, though the country is large, has always been like a city state in many ways. The small population, though widely scattered, wasn’t broken up, and the four quarters of Iceland took as much interest in one another's gossip as the quarters of Florence.

In the Sagas, where nothing is of much importance except individual men, and where all the chief men are known to one another, a journey from Borg to Eyjafirth is no more than going past a few houses. The distant corners of the island are near one another. There’s no sense of those impersonal forces, those nameless multitudes, that make history a different thing from biography in other lands. All history in Iceland shaped itself as biography or as drama, and there was no large crowd at the back of the stage.

The development of Icelandic independence proceeded in a way in much the same way as the American colonies, and it took about the same amount of time, a century and a half from the time of first settlement. The impression from Snorri Sturluson's History of the Kings of Norway is that King Olaf Tryggvason as late as 999-1000, when he was aggressively and cruelly campaigning to Christianize his domain, regarded himself as king of the Icelanders and the Icelanders so regarded him.

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