Quote Originally Posted by Labrat
Did they? I though Iceland was uninhabited until the Vikings colonized it.
It's pretty common academic belief that the Vikings already knew about Iceland before they "found" it, by way of the Irish. The reason for this foreknowledge is that Irish monks had a tradition of traveling into solitude, and one of their most popular destinations was Thule/Iceland. The Vikings in the British Isles found out about this, and eventually made the trip themselves. Obviously, being hermits, the Irish monk population on Iceland by the time of the Viking settlement was so low and sparse as to be unmentionable, but the point was that Iceland was known to exist long before the Vikings ever settled there.

Cheers.