Was the Althing a success if Iceland lost independence?

The short answer

• An empty island within reach of the ships. The crossing was within reach of the ships described in Chapter 2: Iceland is about 970 kilometers west of Norway and about 450 from the already-settled Faroe Islands. Irish hermits may have visited before the Norse, but there was no settled population to conquer. Newcomers could claim land and build a colony from the ground up.
• Land hunger and politics in Norway. Later Icelandic writers explained the migration as flight from Harald Fairhair’s tyranny after he united much of Norway in the late ninth century. Historians approach that flattering account of the settlers’ ancestors cautiously. Scarce farmland and growing royal power nevertheless seem to have encouraged ambitious families to leave. In Iceland a chieftain could hold land without a king above him; early claimants took large estates and divided them among kin and followers.
• Captives from the Gaelic west. Raids in Ireland and Scotland supplied captives whom settlers took to Iceland as slaves. They cleared land, herded animals and wove cloth. Genetic evidence shows the size of the Gaelic contribution to the founding population. Without forced labor, clearing the island’s usable land in about sixty years would have been much slower. Violence in the Gaelic west helped make the new farms possible.
• The need for law without a king. Freedom from royal power left settlers with disputes over land, livestock and killings, and feuds could destroy families. Norwegian regional assemblies, called things, offered a means of resolving such quarrels. Icelanders adapted the tradition to an island-wide assembly, giving people a common procedure without placing one chieftain in command of the others.

What it changed

A springboard further west. Iceland became a base for the next westward voyages. Erik the Red had been outlawed for killings first in Norway and then in Iceland. He sailed west in the early 980s and returned with plans for a colony; in 985 or 986 a fleet left Iceland for Greenland, as Chapter 4 follows. People who had lost their place in an earlier settlement helped carry the frontier farther west.

A durable legal culture. Iceland lost independence when its chieftains accepted the Norwegian crown in 1262–64, but its legal tradition endured. Law first recited and later written in the Grágás codes remained part of Icelandic identity. The Althing met almost every summer until 1798 and was revived in the nineteenth century; Icelanders count it among the world’s oldest parliaments.

An environment slowly degraded. Fewer trees meant less timber for houses and ships, so Icelanders turned to driftwood and imports. Erosion reduced grazing land as cooling after 1300 brought further pressure. Iceland survived, unlike Norse Greenland, but grew poorer and more dependent on trade with Norway. Chapter 5 follows the colder centuries.