‘They looked around them, whether they could see smoke or any sign that the land was inhabited, and they saw nothing… As they sailed from the land much snow fell upon the mountains, and therefore they called the land Snowland.’ (Wright, 1965, pp. 346–7.)
Irish Christian hermits inhabited a few cells on the island of what the Landnámabók, the Old Norse description of settlements, in the quotation calls Snowland, more familiar now as Iceland, before the pagan Norse and other Scandinavians began to colonize the coasts and further inland in the late ninth century. The new population was never evenly distributed across the island, for the mountains, glaciers, high tableland, deep fissures and heat vents, the geysers and sulphur springs, as well as the volcanoes and lava flows, made the interior largely inhospitable. Continuing volcanic activity, especially from Mount Hekla, made the most climatically favoured lands of the south and west vulnerable to periodic devastation. Nonetheless, the coasts and adjacent zones offered the population, which at its height may have exceeded 60,000, a tolerable livelihood, when supplemented by trade. Men and women exploited the limited but rich meadowlands by raising cattle and sheep. Hunters snared birds and gathered their eggs, and fishermen brought in large catches, including whales and seals.
From Iceland the intrepid sailors made contact with Greenland in the early tenth century, settlements proper being established on the coast there later in the century, even as exploration continued. There is no doubt that Norsemen visited Labrador, Newfoundland and the coast of