It took me a while, as an American, to realize how new Iceland was--to me a thousand years of recorded history seemed pretty old, but then I remembered that compared to the rest of Europe, that's not old at all--and that more, being a new country seems to be part of the local identity (even aside from being an again-independent country being very recent indeed).

And the geology ... yeah, the newness of the physical land is mind-boggling, by any standards.

One of the more striking moments our last trip was standing at the site where Njal's farmhouse burned down a thousand years ago, and seeing out to the island of Surtsey, which isn't much older than I am.