Ísland (Iceland)

Iceland is the heart of the corpus — the empty, kingless island at the edge of the world that a whole literature was written to fill. Settled from around 870 by chieftains fleeing Harald Fairhair's crown, it became something new: a republic with no king, governed by law and the yearly assembly at Þingvellir, where free farmers ran their own affairs and settled their quarrels by lawsuit — or, when law failed, by feud. That tension between law and blood is the engine of nearly every family saga. In the year 1000 the island voted, at the Þing, to accept Christianity without civil war — one of history's quietest conversions. A land of turf farms, glaciers, lava, and long winters, too poor and too remote for kings to bother with, where ordinary farmers became the heroes of the greatest prose of the medieval North. The kingless land of the men who would not be ruled.