Was the Althing a success if Iceland lost independence?

The short answer

• An empty island within reach of the ships. Iceland lies about 970 kilometres west of Norway but only about 450 from the Faroe Islands, which Norse settlers had already reached, so the ship technology of Chapter 2 made the crossing practical. Irish hermits may have visited before the Norse, but no settled population existed, so newcomers could claim land without conquest. That emptiness made Iceland the first true Norse colony, a society built from scratch on land that no other people held.
• Land hunger and politics in Norway. Later Icelandic writers explained the migration as flight from the tyranny of Harald Fairhair, who united much of Norway in the late ninth century. Historians treat that story with caution, because it flattered the settlers’ descendants, but scarce farmland and the growing power of kings do seem to have pushed ambitious families outward. Iceland offered the chance to be a chieftain answerable to no one, and the earliest settlers claimed vast estates that they later divided among followers and kin.
• Captives from the Gaelic west. Norse raiding in Ireland and Scotland produced captives, and the settlers took many of them to Iceland as slaves to clear land, herd animals and weave cloth. The genomes show how large this element was. Without forced labour from the Gaelic world, the rapid clearing of a whole island within about sixty years would have been much slower, so violence abroad was built into the foundations of the new society.
• The need for law without a king. Settlers who had left Norway partly to escape royal power still needed a way to settle quarrels over land, livestock and killings, which otherwise led to blood feuds that could destroy families. The answer was to borrow the Norwegian tradition of regional assemblies, called things, and to create one assembly for the whole island. The Althing grew out of this practical need for order among equals, and it was designed so that no single chieftain could dominate it.

What it changed

A springboard further west. Iceland became the base for the next voyages. Erik the Red, outlawed from Norway and then from Iceland for killings, sailed west in the early 980s and returned with plans for a new colony. Chapter 4 follows the fleet that left Iceland for Greenland in 985 or 986. Each new colony was founded by people who had lost out in the last one, so the frontier kept moving west.

A durable legal culture. The Althing sat almost every summer until 1798 and was revived in the nineteenth century, and Icelanders call it one of the oldest parliaments in the world. The tradition of law recited and later written in the Grágás law codes gave Iceland a sense of identity that outlasted its independence, which ended when the chieftains accepted the Norwegian crown in 1262–64.

An environment slowly degraded. The loss of woodland meant that Icelanders soon lacked timber for houses and ships and relied on driftwood and imports. Erosion reduced the grazing land just as the climate cooled after 1300. Iceland survived, unlike Norse Greenland, but it became poorer and more dependent on trade with Norway, and that slow pressure on a farming society frames the colder centuries of Chapter 5.