Iceland, Land of Ice.

Iceland is a beautiful country; I cannot fathom why Vikings settled upon it.
  It is hugely beautiful.  It contains stunning glaciers, waterfalls, mountains, fjords, black-sand beaches, geothermal features and other natural wonders.  It is also windswept, frigid, dismally dark in the winter and eerily light at midnight in the summer.  It is devoid of trees and other resources an Iron-age culture might consider useful; local cuisine developed around fermented fish, whale meat and puffin.  It sits 600 miles from mainland Norway.  In short it is a wondrous frozen rock in the Middle of Nowhere, North Atlantic.
 Oh, and it's made of volcanoes that tend to blanket parts of the island with molten rock and huge clouds of ash every so often.  The kind of ash that blows wildly across "lava fields" (think frozen desert) stripping the paint off of cars, blinding sheep and sending them stumbling off cliffs to their deaths, blacking out the sun, moon and stars and grounding air traffic across Europe.  You know, just the kind of place you would want to raise a family, a herd of sheep, and the occasional pillaging party.

  Anyways, it's a wonderfully modern nation nowadays and I had a lot of fun visiting.  Check out my pictures and if you're ever in Reykyavik, I recommend you try the hot dogs.