Interesting Facts About Iceland
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- Most Icelanders do not have a family name (such as Johnson, Smith, etc). So children have a given name and then father’s-name-son or father’s-name-daughter. Thus:
- Jon has a son named Thor Jonsson and a daughter named Hafdis Jonsdottir.
- Thor Jonsson has a son named Bjarni Thorsson and a daughter named Frida Thorsdottir.
- And so forth.
- Icelandic women don’t take the husband’s name when they marry, chiefly because the husband doesn’t have a family name to take.
- Because they don’t have surnames, Icelanders are listed in the telephone directory alphabetically by first name.
- Because they don’t have surnames, it is not appropriate to call an Icelander by Mr. or Ms. Almost all Icelanders use the first name with everyone, including the president of Iceland.
- The English word geyser comes from Icelandic (perhaps the only Icelandic word imported into English). Geysir is the name of a famous geyser in Iceland (which, sadly, no longer erupts).
- The Icelanders speak the Icelandic language, which is used only in Iceland and among Icelandic expatriates chiefly in Scandinavia and North America. Icelandic is very similar to old Norwegian of about 1,000 years ago.
- There are only about 270,000 Icelanders in the country. About half of them live in the capital Reykjavik and its suburbs.
- Iceland is the world’s oldest democracy. Its parliament (Althingi) was founded about 1,000 years ago.
- Iceland has vast amounts of water because it rains so much. Icelandic water is so clean and pure that it is piped into the city and to the kitchen taps in the home without any treatment (no chlorination needed).
- Urban Icelandic homes do not need a water heater or a furnace for heating. Steam and hot water are piped into the city from natural geysers and hot springs for use in homes and buildings.
- Because of its bountiful water supply and many rivers, Iceland has vast reserves of hydroelectric power. Electricity is so inexpensive that aluminum ore (bauxite) is shipped in to the country, made into aluminum, and the aluminum ingots are shipped out again. (Smelting aluminum requires vast amounts of electricity.)
- The weather in Iceland is not as cold as you might think. (Winter is a heck of a lot colder in Minnesota than it is in Iceland!) The climate is relatively mild because of the influence of the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf Stream. Average winter daytime temperature in Reykjavik is 31 degrees F. (1 degrees C.)
- Iceland is very green, because there is so much water and the climate is mild. (There are not many trees however.) People like to say that Iceland should be named Greenland and Greenland should be named Iceland. I used to tell my Icelandic friends that they should change the name of their country from Iceland to Waterland.
- Iceland lies just south of the Arctic Circle. Winter nights and summer days are long. On December 21 in the capital, the sun rises at 11:30 a.m. and sets at 3:30 p.m. On June 21 the sun sets about midnight and rises at 3:00 a.m. It never gets darker than twilight at night during the late spring and early summer.
- During a recent survey, Icelanders ranked the highest of all European countries in expressing general satisfaction with their lives.
- Icelanders rank near the top of world nations in the per capita rate of connection to the Internet.
- Iceland has no army, navy, or air force. It does have a Coast Guard.
Posted in: Iceland Jokes
May 11th, 2008 at 7:32 am #Margrét
Okay, I’ll have to nitpick (Iceland pride…).
The president is actually about the only person in the country who you’re supposed to call mister or sir.
Fjord is another word transported from Icelandic (or old Norse) to English.
I believe Geysir has been made to erupt a few times in recent years.
There are about 300.000 Icelanders around now.
Also, even though we rank so high on general life-satisfaction lists, suicidal rates usually go up during the wintertime when we barely see sunlight.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:45 pm #Elliot
Actually, many English words come directly from Old Norse, the ancestor to Icelandic. The vikings controlled virtually all of northeastern England before the Norman invasion of 1066, which brought French into the English language. In fact, the pronouns “they” and “them” correspond almost directly to the Old Norse (and Icelandic) equivalents — something fairly remarkable, as far as language borrowings go, since languages very rarely borrow something as fundamental as pronouns.
Also, the reason for the odd naming job of Iceland and Greenland lies in the fact that Greenland was named so to entice early settlers (in this case, the Old Norse peoples) to colonize the island.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:08 pm #Xetheare
What’s their immigration policy?
May 13th, 2008 at 10:49 pm #Helen
What’s their immigration policy?
Ha, I was actually thinking that. Sounds like a great place to live.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:26 pm #Adam
As it turns out, rumor has it that Greenland and Iceland were named as such to keep people away from the awesomeness that is Iceland and send them to the desolation of Greenland instead.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:41 pm #Mikkel
As far as I’ve heard, Denmark ranked highest of all countries in expressing general satisfaction with their lives.
Also, Greece had democracy more than 2000 years ago. Actually some Eurasian countries had democracy before Greece.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:11 am #Connie
Wow! This list really makes me want to check this place out.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:52 pm #sandswipe
Greece had democracy first, but Iceland has gone a thousand years in a row without being conquered by a dictatorship, papacy, or oppressive foreign nation of any sort. When’s the last time Greece managed half that?
They didn’t invent it, but they managed to do it the longest without being even a little bit slaughtered. Really, that’s just as big of an accomplishment.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:22 pm #Jeff
Is it still true that Icelandic women seriously outnumber the men?
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:52 pm #Mallory
The story I heard was that the discoverers of Iceland wanted to prevent it from being invaded/colonised by other groups, and so named it ‘Iceland’ to make it appear undesirable. The bad reputation seems to have stuck… hasn’t Iceland never been invaded since settled by the Norse?
October 13th, 2008 at 3:27 pm #Graham
Iceland’s name has nothing to do with ice. It is the English rendering of the Icelanders name for their country, Ísland, which means island.
October 30th, 2008 at 11:28 am #sissi
graham that’s not true
I’m a native Icelandic speaker and I can tell you that the Icelandic word for island is eyja
Ís does mean ice and land means country
October 30th, 2008 at 4:02 pm #Fridrik
Berserk and Saga are also taken from icelandic (meaning …. well .. berserk XD and a long story)
And Graham .. you’re wrong >.> *is icelandic and knows*
Ísland means iceland .. so .. has nothing to do with that
I know Greenland was named that partially cause the guy who found it happened to be at a really green part of greenland in the summer.
But i dunno about why it’s named Iceland .. probably to keep people away >.> cause we want to beh aloneh!