Iceland: Read before you go

Iceland Book Recommendations | Njal's Saga | To Make Much of Time

UPDATED: 1/16/2023

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Iceland and Scandinavian countries make up the most literate countries in the world, so it is a bit ironic that this is one trip that I probably least prepared for from a reading list perspective.

The travel guides we used for the trip were Lonely Planet: Iceland and Lonely Planet: Iceland's Ring Road Road Trips , which was very useful for both planning and as reference on the trip.

Iceland is known for their Sagas, stories that are medieval historical prose, written in likely the 13th and 14th centuries covering events in the 10th and 11th centuries and may have originated through oral storytelling. Dustin read Njal's Saga some years before going, and there are several other main ones as well as dozens more that are perhaps less known.

I found a website that offers a number of them available to read online for free here (in English). While in Iceland, we visited a museum called The Settlement Center that had an entire installation dedicated to Egill’s Saga. Read more about our visit to the museum here.

The one non-fiction book I read on the flight over and completed during the trip was Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland by Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson.

This book provided an overview of the Icelandic society with topics as varied as the way in which people lived in isolation more so than in cities, the reason for and rise of high literacy rates, the challenges and hardships of the turf houses, which you can read more about on our blog here, and, as the title suggests, the way with words that seems to be baked into the DNA of Icelanders. The book covered how recently in history the population lived in tough conditions, and it provided a good backdrop for viewing the country, although the story it painted was a bit bleak at times.

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