To further assist in this effort, until 10 years ago, deCODE even had guaranteed access to every Icelander's health records, thanks to a decision taken by the Icelandic Parliament. Then in , a woman sued to keep her deceased father's medical records from going into the deCODE database, citing a right to privacy.
Now the company has to approach individuals for their consent. Almost all of them have done so, and shrug when I ask them if they had concerns about privacy. One man in his mids is emotional as he replies to me and his soup-spoon trembles as he talks. He meets my gaze. What is it to do with privacy? Image source, Alamy. Image source, Alda Sigmundsdottir.
Icelanders at a glance. Image source, Getty Images. Image source, Science Photo Library. I blame it on the punk background. We were so I guess a bad word for it would be 'holistic'. You know, this idea that you make your own poster and you glue it up and you carry your equipment. And even though it's a long time since I put a poster on the wall, I have to tell you, I have that background, and I'm still working with the same people I've been working with since I was I have a feeling for the whole picture.
At the Oscars five years ago she wore a dress, a costume really, designed by Marjan Pejoski in the shape of a swan, and left eggs all down the red carpet. She wasn't rebelling; she just liked the dress. They actually thought that I was trying to look like Jennifer Aniston but got it wrong.
I think Europeans can stomach things like that more easily. I think Michael Jackson should settle in Switzerland or something. He'd be fine. The Iceland she left behind was so parochial, she says, that when a foreigner walked down the street people stopped and pointed.
This was before the country's tourist boom and there were only a few hotels there then. There were strawberries, things I'd never seen. In she had a high-profile fallout with the director Lars Von Trier, during the shooting of the film Dancer in the Dark, in which she appeared and for which she also wrote the music. According to co-stars, she called Von Trier "a tyrant" and a "coward" and resented his autocratic style.
And she has had the odd Naomi Campbell-style scrap with the paparazzi. Is she controlling? Some historians believe that the first inhabitants of Iceland were nomadic people groups that traveled to the island after Viking explorers discovered it.
Others speculate that perhaps small groups of Scottish travelers fled to the island, seeking to escape Viking raids in the Middle Ages. Many historians consider the first settler to be the Norwegian, Ingolfur Arnarson, who arrived on the island with his wife in A. Their settlement was limited in scope due to a lack of resources so development was stalled. Some of these servants and slaves were from Asian countries.
Many people wonder about the facial features of the Vikings. Native, indigenous peoples of the Arctic are known as Inuit peoples. Inuit people are mostly associated with Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. They may have been some of the first explorers and inhabitants of some of the northernmost regions in the world, including Iceland.
One study traced their ancestry to Siberia in North Asia:. A genetic study published in Science in August examined a large number of remains from the Dorset culture, Birnirk culture and the Thule people.
Genetic continuity was observed between the Inuit, Thule and Birnirk, who overwhelmingly carried the maternal haplogroup A2a and were genetically very different from the Dorset. The evidence suggested that the Inuit descend from the Birnirk of Siberia, who through the Thule culture expanded into northern Canada and Greenland, where they genetically and culturally completely replaced the indigenous Dorset people some time after AD.
There is a small number of Inuit people in Iceland today. Though the people themselves have lasted for generations on the island, their history is less clear. Many different cultures make up the population of Iceland. And, just like with any group of people, there are some similarities among them.
There are groups of people in Iceland that have moved from Asia in modern times and now call it home. While in the case of the Americas, there were millions of people in multiple civilisations, in Iceland, there were but a few individuals. It is believed that all of these monks left with the arrival of the Norse, but the truth remains unknown; it is possible some stayed, or were enslaved, and thus would have had some influence on the beginnings of the Icelandic nation.
The first Norseman to set foot on this island, however, was a man called Naddodd , who was lost en route from Norway to the Faroe Islands in the early s. He noted that the land was vast, but after ascending a mountain and seeing no smoke rising from anywhere, determined that it was uninhabited and left. Photo from Wikimedia, Creative Commons, by Furfur.
Although not recognised officially as the first Icelanders in medieval literature, they were the first to create a permanent home here around AD, four years before the Settlement Era truly began. Those who came were largely clans who did not wish to bend the knee to the first Christian King of Norway, Harald Fairhair.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Icelandic stock, therefore, descended from Norwegians alone in this time. Unfortunately, however, as with most things in history, the true story is a lot darker. En route to Iceland, the Norse would, in classic Viking style, pillage and plunder Irish settlements, and take slaves from them; most of these slaves were women who would go on to mother the first generation of trueborn Icelanders.
Evidence of the Irish influence on the early years in Iceland can be found across the country, particularly in the naming of locations. From to AD, more and more people and clans were arriving in Iceland, with a demographic of almost entirely Norwegian men and Irish women.
By AD, there were thirty-nine clans across thirteen district assemblies. This would mark the end of the Settlement Era. While tedious tomes to leaf through, their importance is undeniable; without them, we would be blind to the history of Icelanders, and the early days of where they came from as a people.
The demographics of Iceland changed little in the Commonwealth Era, other than an influx of Christian missionaries, largely from Norway but to an extent from the rest of Europe, who got the country to abandon the Old Norse faith in the year AD.
There is one heavily debated potential influence on the Icelandic gene pool which perhaps occurred during this time, however. The small gene pool of Icelanders has an anomaly, where it appears some people have a DNA sequence that otherwise is only found in Native American populations.
How this came about is unknown, but as this was the era in which Erik the Red settled in Greenland and his son Leif the Lucky settled in Newfoundland, it is very possible that a First American was brought back to Iceland as a wife or slave. There are no written accounts of this, however, so it is a contentious point.
Almost all foreign contact and trade outside of Greenland and America at this time was with Norway, with whom Icelanders did their best to foster a good relationship. This caused a civil war within Iceland, and supporters of the Kingdom eventually won out.
By , the island nation fell under the rule of the Norwegian Crown and for the next seven-hundred years, Iceland would be under the control of foreign powers, and though this next era would mark their hardest times, it also was a time when new influences would begin to creep into the roots of the Icelandic people. The Colonial Era began with a mini Ice Age , so with crops dying and fertile land becoming barren, it is no wonder that only a handful of people chose to move to Iceland in this time.
Christian missionaries, largely from Germany, Norway and the Celtic world, continued to pass through, however, and had a small influence on the demographics. The largest change occurred when, at the death of the last man in the Norwegian Royal Line, Norway joined the Kalmar Union with Sweden and Denmark, the latter nation being the one with the most power. While the Norwegians had been distant rulers that had brought some level of prosperity through their purchase of Icelandic fish and wool, the Danish wanted greater consolidation of influence, without the need for these products.
As such, Iceland became oppressed, impoverished and with an ever-decreasing influence over its own affairs. Even then, however, they were few and far between. Technological advancements as the years went by brought about different influences to Iceland, however. The relationship between Icelanders and these foreigners is little known, but records show that they would stop at Icelandic ports and trade with the locals.
It was a largely peaceful, mutually beneficial arrangement, with the huge exception of the Basque Whalers who were notoriously massacred in the Westfjords in the s. Undoubtedly, there was some mixing between the sailors and whalers and the Icelandic women, but due to the shame associated with such an affair, such incidents are little recorded.
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