Settlement at 870 — Ingólfur Arnarson and Iceland's founding myth
Iceland's settlement story begins with Ingólfur Arnarson, the Norse chieftain credited as the first permanent settler in 874 CE. According to the Landnámabók (Book of Settlements), he threw his high-seat pillars overboard as he approached the coast and vowed to build his farm wherever they washed ashore — they landed in what is now Reykjavík, 'Smoky Bay,' named for the geothermal steam rising from the ground. Seltjarnarnes, the small peninsula 5km west of the settlement, was farmed within a generation. You are kiting on a coastline whose place names have not changed in 1,150 years.
The sagas and a language frozen in time
Modern Icelanders read the 13th-century Sagas of Icelanders — Njál's Saga, Egil's Saga, Laxdæla — without translation. Icelandic is the most conservative of the North Germanic languages: deliberate purism (a state-funded language committee coins native words for new concepts rather than borrowing) has kept the grammar and vocabulary close to Old Norse. Road signs, menus, and ferry timetables at Seltjarnarnes are Icelandic-only outside tourist zones. Hallgrímskirkja, the basalt-column-inspired Lutheran church on Reykjavík's skyline, is named for the 17th-century poet-priest Hallgrímur Pétursson — the country still venerates its writers above its kings.
Ásatrú — the legally recognised return of Norse paganism
In 1973 Iceland became the first country in the modern era to grant legal recognition to a reconstructionist Norse pagan religion: Ásatrúarfélagið, the Æsir Faith Fellowship. It is now the largest non-Christian religion in Iceland and conducts legally binding marriages and namings on the lava fields outside Reykjavík. The state Lutheran church remains dominant, but the cultural respect for the old gods — Þór, Óðinn, Freyja — runs through place names, personal names (the patronymic system survives: Ólafsson, Ólafsdóttir), and the persistent half-serious belief in huldufólk, the hidden people, that has rerouted road construction projects within living memory.
Pools, lights, and the post-2008 reinvention
Two daily rituals frame life in the capital region: the geothermal pool and watching the sky. Seltjarnarnes has its own community pool with hot pots fed from underground; Reykjavík's Sundhöll (1937) and Laugardalslaug are city institutions where business deals are still done in 38°C water. From September to March the aurora borealis is visible from the peninsula on clear nights with active solar weather — the same darkness that limits winter daylight to five hours is what makes the lights possible. The economy that funds all of this was rebuilt after the 2008 banking collapse on tourism and tech; pre-2008 Iceland was a fishing nation with a small financial sector, post-2008 it is a tourism nation with a small fishing sector. Faxaflói Bay, the body of water you kite on, still feeds Reykjavík's fish markets daily.