Icelanders enjoy nature on a camping trip possible only during the warmer months. (RAFN HAFNJORD / ICELANDIC TOURIST BOARD)

These are the sagas, written about the most influential families. The time was also fertile for poets, who created a style known as the Eddas. The literary tradition continues today with great writers like Halldor Laxness. One reason that literature became so popular throughout the country is that the golden age of the sagas and Eddas was followed by hard times for the people of Iceland. The commonwealth collapsed in 1264 and with it the economy, halting the flourishing of new culture. Instead, people looked back with pride at what had already been accomplished and so embarked upon a campaign of copying and recopying the works of the golden age. Because of the proliferation of scripts, rich and poor alike were able to own copies and learn to read from them. This preserved both the language and the literary tradition throughout the Dark Ages, a time when people tended to live on single-family farms, which could be miles apart.
       
       An old democracy
       
A striking thing about Icelanders is their lack of class distinctions. Certainly, some people have more money than others, but with the small population, huge margins are easily kept in check. Because there are no grandiose homes and even the government and religious buildings are quite modest, Icelanders call all buildings "houses." Still, almost everyone can afford things that Americans would consider luxuries, such as a summer residence and the ability to stable a horse in the suburbs. Even prestige is distributed fairly, with waitressing seen as a profession. Amazingly, throughout centuries of living on isolated farms, separated by distance and at times by impassable weather, no regional dialects have emerged. After all, this is the home of the oldest parliament in the world, the Althing.