National Museum of Iceland

The National Museum of Iceland, established in 1863, is dedicated to preserving and showcasing the nation’s cultural and historical heritage. Located at Suðurgata 41 in Reykjavík, the museum’s permanent exhibition, ‘Making of a Nation,’ guides visitors through Icelandic history using original artifacts, multimedia displays, and reconstructed environments. Notable artifacts include the Valþjófsstaður door, a medieval church door from around 1200 AD depicting the legend of a knight and a lion. The museum also features a café and a museum shop for visitors to enjoy.

Planning your visit

The National Museum of Iceland tells a single continuous story — Making of a Nation — running from the settlement in the ninth century to the present, and it is the clearest introduction available to how a small population survived on a volcanic island at the edge of the habitable world. Around 2,000 objects and 1,000 photographs carry it: Viking-age graves and weapons, the conversion to Christianity, medieval manuscripts and church art, the centuries under Danish rule, poverty and turf houses, and the twentieth-century transformation.

The Valþjófsstaður door, carved around 1200 with a knight, a lion and a dragon in interlaced Romanesque relief, is the single finest object — a church door from the east of the country, and one of the great survivals of medieval Icelandic woodwork.

The museum is well designed and genuinely explanatory rather than simply displaying artefacts, which matters because Icelandic history is unfamiliar to most visitors and the sagas alone give a distorted picture.

It sits near the university, a walk from central Reykjavík.

Bookable options include guided tours covering the Viking era through to modern times and private tours. Doing this early in a trip improves everything seen afterwards around the country. Current availability is shown below.