The larger Viðey Map is the only map in the Icelandic corpus that shows Iceland, and, as such, is a unique instance of Icelandic self-portraiture. The name ‘Island’ (‘Iceland’) is one of the map's few medieval place-names. The opening chapters of the Icelandic Landnámabók (Book of Settlements), a history of the Icelandic settlement written in the twelfth century, describe the succession of names by which Iceland was known to Norse seafarers in the early decades of the ninth century. It attributes Iceland's discovery to Naddoðr, a Norwegian Viking who sights Iceland on his way to the Faroe Islands. On his return to Norway in the autumn, he sees Iceland’s mountains white with snow, and so names it Snæland (‘Snowland’). The next Scandinavian to reach Icelandic shores, however, named it a second time. Garðarr Svavarsson, we are told, dwelt for a short time in the north of the island, which he named Garðarshólmi (‘Garðarr's Island’). Iceland’s third discoverer, Hrafna-Flóki (‘Raven-Flóki’), sought Iceland with the assistance of three ravens, which, like the Biblical Noah, he let fly in search of land. Flóki made land at Vatnsfjörður in the northwest, and on seeing the fjord to the north frozen over, called the island Ísland (‘Iceland’).

Such is the history of the name Iceland presented by the anonymous compilers of Landnámabók. The name's earliest written attestation, however, appears at Canterbury in England in c. 1050. The name's earliest witness is the English Cotton Map (London, British Library, MS. Cotton Tiberius B.V., f. 56v, c. 1050), which also has the distinction of being the earliest map to show the island. The Cotton Map (depicted on this book’s cover) was drawn sometime between the two conquests of England – the first Danish, the second Norman – that took place in the eleventh century. When the Danish prince Cnut, ‘the Great’, ascended the English throne in 1016, the Danish throne in 1018, and the Norwegian throne in 1028, England became part of an expansive maritime realm. The unusual detail with which the map-maker depicts North Atlantic coastlines may, as Michelle P. Brown suggests, draw upon Anglo-Scandinavian awareness of these regions, and the wider mercantile and ecclesiastical networks of which they were a part.