I heard about this book when two people at the book swap recommended it. Alas, it wasn’t one of the books that was being swapped so instead of getting and reading it immediately, I ended up putting it on my TBR list until I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

How Iceland Changed the World is an informal account of Iceland’s history, beginning from the time of its settlement in AD874 to the modern day, with a focus on how Iceland impacted the world. The book talks about the Icelandic voyages and how they discovered America; how Iceland became a land of readers and thus preserved Norse mythology (hint: to do this, you need to have a system without a central government but with clansmen that compete for influence through stories and foreign support); how Iceland triggered a climate crisis; How Iceland was involved in WWII and the formation of Israel, and much more.

This book definitely achieves what it sets out to do, which is to show that Iceland has played an integral part in Western history. Although a tiny nation, Iceland and its volcanoes have managed to affect even the climate, possibly giving this nation an outsized impact.

In general, the tone of this book is light and breezy, with Bjarnason making a few jokes here and there. The British History Podcast came to mind when I was reading was this – both are trying to tell an accurate story, but the way they tell it isn’t staid. This made the book very accessible for people like me, who had no knowledge of Icelandic history prior to reading it.

That said, there is one minor flaw in the book. Each chapter covers both a period in Icelandic history and a certain topic. I did wonder, while reading this, how much history was left out with such a narrow focus. I also had the sense of jumping around, even though the book progresses linearly through time. The chapters seem to be almost independent of each other, given the different topics.

Overall, this was a fun book! I really enjoyed learning more about Iceland and the nuggets of information woven into the text. It also reminded me that I wanted to read the Norse version of The Nibelungenlied, which I really should be doing soon!

Featured Image: Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash