My ancestors were Vikings. My Swedish maternal grandfather was born in a tiny village on the shores of Götland - a biggish island that sits in the middle of the Baltic between Sweden and Lithuania.
After the Vikings were done with their pillaging, plundering and unruly behaviour, most settled in Iceland, and Grandfather Johan told us of ancestors from those days.
On the strength of my Viking blood and these stirring stories, I'd majored in Old Icelandic, or Old Norse, at university.
I learned, along with the Old Norse sagas, that it was the Viking, Ingolfur Arnason, who first built his farmstead in AD874 and named it Reykjavik - "Smoky Bay"- after the steam rising from geothermal springs.
So here I am, half a century later, sailing over the Arctic Circle. There is no sunrise, no sunset, for several days - just a pewter-grey, heavy sea, a leaden sky, and a pale yellow sun which streaks the sky with watery yellow and pale pink.
Imagine an island that sits between two tectonic plates. One plate reaches all the way west to the Rockies. The other stretches east all the way to the Himalayas.
Welcome to Iceland - one of the most inhospitable landscapes on Earth, but one of its most dramatic and memorable.
We land at Akureyri (aku-rey-ri) on the north side of the island just 100km from the Arctic Circle, originally settled by the Vikings in the 9th century.
Only 16 000 people live here, most making their living in the fisheries, or from sheep or cattle. A chilly wind is blowing, but the sun is sparkling off the grey sea and glints off the snow-capped mountains ringing the little town with its brightly painted houses and small picture-book churches.
Between the patches of snow on the hillsides there are masses of wild blue lupins, but hardly a tree in sight. Although Iceland today plants more trees than any other nation in the world, over the centuries humans, the bleak weather, sheep and volcanic ash have put paid to most of them.
During the long, hard winter, the animals are kept inside, but now it is summer (10C and a high wind chill factor); so the island's million and a half sheep are being herded up in to the mountains, to be brought back down again in autumn.
Wildlife? Well, if you count the four to five million puffins that live around the coast, or the millions of seabirds, migrants, waders and ducks that come to summer here (Lake Myvatn has 17 types of ducks - more than anywhere else in the world), then you could say that there's quite a lot of wildlife.
If you don't count our feathered friends, all you have left are the Arctic foxes and the occasional polar bear that drifts in from Greenland on an ice floe (only to be shot on arrival).
Salmon fishing is among the best in the world, but be prepared to fork out R2 500 for your licence.
Outside Akureyri is Godafoss, "the Waterfall of the Gods", an impressive sheet of water tumbling into narrow gorges.
Here, in the year 1000 AD, Thorgeir, the Law-Speaker of the Icelandic parliament, threw his carvings of the Old Norse gods - Wodin, Thor, Freya - and publicly declared that from now on Iceland would be a Christian nation.
A few kilometres further I come to a lava landscape and geo-thermal field filled with the constant action of sulphur pits, boiling mud pools, steam vents, boiling springs and fumeroles. My guide tells me 90 percent of the houses are heated by hot water from the ground.
She still makes fresh bread every day - mixes her dough and pops it into a hole in the hot earth of her garden. Bingo - the next morning a freshly baked loaf.
My next port of call is in the north-east, where just 9 600 people live in an area of 9 520km2, making the West Fjords Iceland's least populated area.
Isafjordur was once an important trading post. Now it's predominantly a fishing centre. I meet a fisherman, dressed in sea-stained leather, who tells us about the old days and then invites us to schnapps and nibbles of raw shark. (If you think sushi is bad, stay away from raw shark.)
In the middle of the tiny town (3 500 people) we visit some of Iceland's best-preserved buildings, dating from the 18th century.
The magnificent Rift Valley - the boundary between the tectonic continental plates - is where, under an almost 40m cliff, Europe's oldest law-making assembly, the "Althing", met from AD930.
Not far from the city centre of Reykjavik is the majestic Gullfoss Waterfall, and an area with more bubbling pools, clouds of steam and a geyser that spouts an 18m column of water every eight minutes.
Reykjavik is an attractive town, home to more than half of the country's 300 000 population and the centre of Iceland's economy, which is largely based on fishing and aluminium.
What it lacks in good weather it makes up for in theatres, cinemas, art galleries, museums and libraries. It's a hotbed of contemporary culture with a vibey night life.
It's a fine summer day - now 14C - and the girls are out in their skinny tops and shorts.
Icelanders see no sun from mid-November until mid-January; so the girls have almost translucent complexions. Tall, with fair hair and blue eyes, they show their Viking origins.
