Iceland becomes first country to legalize equal pay
The legislation, which came into force on Monday, the first day of 2018, makes Iceland the first country in the world to legalise equal pay between men and women.
Iceland
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir becomes the first democratically elected female head of state
On June 29, 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, a Reykjavík theatre director and French teacher, won Iceland’s presidency with 33.6% of the vote in a four-way race. She became the first woman anywhere elected head of state by direct popular vote, opening a door that dozens of countries have since walked through.
An unknown Icelandic author preserves the Faroe Islands’ founding saga
Færeyinga Saga, written in Iceland around 1210 C.E., preserved the story of how the Faroe Islands — 18 windswept rocks in the North Atlantic — became Christian and Norwegian. No original manuscript survives, only passages copied into later works. Without this anonymous Icelandic writer, the founding drama of a whole archipelago might have vanished entirely.
Norse settlers establish Iceland in one of history’s last great island settlements
Norse seafarers landed on Iceland around 874 C.E., settling one of Europe’s last uninhabited large islands. Within roughly two generations, the available farmland was claimed, and in 930 C.E. chieftains founded the Althing — a legislative assembly still named in Iceland’s modern parliament, and among the oldest continuously operating in the world.