Jon R. Hjalmarsson

This was really great to take with us on a road trip around Iceland, and read the stories out loud as we went by the places! Each chapter has a travel-guide section followed by the actual story, and both sections were great and did a much better job of giving me a feel for the real places than our more conventional travel guides did.

Be warned though that a lot of the stories are word-for-word the same as what's on the tourist information signs. So you may not be getting entirely new information.

Not a lot of material available in English. Hjalmarsson provides a useful, if somewhat old-fashioned (nationalistic) overview of Iceland's past. Reasonably comprehensive in terms of addressing not just political, but social and cultural developments as well.

Middle Ages pp. 5-76 only. Read while i Iceland in 2010. Northwestern graduate.