It started when Viking chieftains sailed wooden boats to this far-off outpost rather than yield their authority to Norwegian King Harald the Fairhaired. Who would sail to this unforgiving wilderness in the year 874 without a willingness to take risks and a tough determination to preserve their independence from Harald's despotic rule? The 50-some chieftains each claimed their own land, and later gathered yearly to make laws in Europe's first parliament, the Althing.

The fruits of their voyage make Iceland unique today in being a small island nation between the United States and Europe—the mid-Atlantic ridge runs through it with a visible gap between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. There are only 320,000 people living there, and the landmass is just the size of Virginia.

Most of the population shares the thousand-year-old Viking and Celtic background. The country is homogeneous except for a small percentage of immigrants from elsewhere, with no separation between the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the state. Icelanders speak excellent English, but there remains a need to speak Icelandic to be fully integrated into the society. Although it's a founding member of NATO, its isolated location and protection by Britain and the United States going back to World War II has afforded it the luxury of doing without an army.

Along those lines, the interest in crime fiction there is high, perhaps because the actual rate of crime is so low. The murder rate of 1 per 100,000 people is the lowest recorded in the world. We saw only one police car on the road, one security guard at the American Embassy, and two guys chatting at the railing of a coast guard ship in the harbor. "Iceland is one of the few countries in the world with no military," Erlingur Erlingsson confirmed.

At the Laundromat Café, which includes a cozy café and play center as well as washers and dryers, a mother noted that people left their strollers unattended outside with no concern. The country founded by fiercely-independent Vikings is now so family-friendly that fathers as well as mothers are given generous parental leave for a total of nine months, with 80 percent of their salaries. The front page of a local newspaper featured a picture of a wedding ring that had been found in a field after a carrot sprouted through it. Reykjavik Airport features a cheerful children's play area. Family-friendliness is one reason for the high birth rate compared to other European countries.

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Iceland is rebounding more recently from the spectacularly burst bubble of financial speculation in 2008. Afterwards the banks could not repay depositors, many of them lured by the promise of unrealistically high returns. Egg-throwing, pot-banging protestors staged the "kitchen-utensil revolution" to force the parliament to move to a center-left coalition. The three banks were not bailed out but were taken over by the government as they failed. Now, as it is paying off depositors, the country is held up as a model by the International Monetary Fund as well as economist Paul Krugman in The New York Times.

"The impact of the economic crisis on happiness in Iceland showed almost no decrease in happiness measures from 2007 to 2012," Dora Gudmundsdottir, Head of the Division of Determinants of Health in Iceland, told me by phone, referring to a report she presented last month. Despite less trust in social and government institutions, "the impact on people's own wellbeing seems to be minimal."