Right now, somewhere in the highlands above an Icelandic valley, a farmer on horseback is whistling to a sheepdog and squinting at a ridge full of moving white dots. It’s réttir season — the annual September roundup when Iceland’s sheep, which have spent the entire summer wandering the mountains and moors completely unsupervised, get driven back down to be sorted, counted, and claimed. It’s one of the last places left in Europe where an animal this valuable is simply let loose on the land for months and trusted to come back.
That arrangement is also the entire reason chefs, butchers, and the European Union itself now treat Icelandic lamb as something genuinely exceptional. Here’s what actually makes it different, how the réttir tradition fits in, and why a small, cold, treeless island somehow produces some of the most sought-after lamb on the planet.
A Breed That Hasn’t Changed in 1,100 Years
Icelandic sheep arrived with the Vikings who settled the island between 870 and 930 AD, and the breed has been bred essentially in isolation ever since. Iceland has banned the import of live sheep for well over a century to protect the flock from disease, which means today’s Icelandic sheep are genetically almost identical to the ones that stepped off Norse longships more than a millennium ago — making it one of the oldest and purest sheep breeds still farmed anywhere in the world.
That isolation matters for flavour as much as for pedigree. Icelandic sheep are a small, hardy mountain breed, and mountain breeds have historically produced leaner, milder meat than the larger lowland breeds farmed across continental Europe. Nobody has ever tried to “improve” the Icelandic sheep with modern crossbreeding, because it’s not legally possible — so the animal on the mountain today is, for better and worse, exactly the one that has always grazed there.
Free-Range by Necessity, Not by Marketing
“Free-range” gets stretched to mean almost anything on a supermarket label, but in Iceland it’s closer to the literal truth. Each spring, lambs and ewes are released onto vast, unfenced highland commons called afréttir, where they roam freely for the entire summer, grazing on wild grasses, moss, and mountain herbs that grow nowhere near a feedlot. They’re never given grain. Iceland’s cool, wet climate has never been much good for growing it, so the breed simply evolved to fatten on pasture and its mothers’ milk instead, coming to slaughter weight off nothing but a few months of highland grazing.
The result, by most chefs’ and butchers’ accounts, is meat that’s noticeably milder and more tender than grain-finished lamb from warmer countries, with a fine grain and a subtlety that even self-described lamb skeptics tend to find approachable. Grass-fed lamb also carries meaningfully more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) than grain-fed meat, one of the few flavour claims in the stock-photo aisle of food writing that actually holds up nutritionally as well as gastronomically.
Réttir: The Roundup That Brings Them Home
All that unsupervised summer freedom has to end somewhere, and that’s where réttir comes in. Every September, before the first hard frost, farmers head into the highlands on foot and on Icelandic horses — often joined by extended family, neighbours, and anyone else willing to spend a long day walking a mountainside — to drive the scattered flocks down into large sorting pens, also called réttir. Because sheep from dozens of neighbouring farms graze the same open commons all summer, every animal has to be read by its ear tag and funnelled into the pen belonging to its actual owner, a genuinely impressive piece of logistics carried out mostly by hand.
Once the sorting is done, farmers decide which sheep to keep for wool and breeding and which to send to slaughter, and the whole event traditionally wraps up with a réttaball — a community dance, complete with folk singing and plenty of food and drink, held in the same rural halls that will host far quieter gatherings for the rest of the year. It isn’t staged for tourists, and rural Icelanders will tell you it’s one of the busiest working days of their year rather than a festival — but it’s also the moment the whole free-range system that defines Icelandic lamb quietly completes itself, right on schedule, every autumn.
Iceland’s Own Champagne Moment
In 2023, the European Union granted “Íslenskt lambakjöt” — Icelandic Lamb — a Protected Designation of Origin, the same top-tier legal status given to Champagne, Parmigiano Reggiano, and Roquefort. It was Iceland’s first PDO product of any kind. The designation legally restricts the name to meat from purebred Icelandic lambs that were born, raised, and slaughtered on the island, turning what had long been an informal reputation for quality into an internationally enforceable guarantee. Icelandic lamb has since been finding its way into new export markets, China among them, riding the same wave of interest that has made New Nordic cuisine a fixture on serious menus well beyond Scandinavia.
Fewer Sheep Than People, for the First Time Ever
For most of Iceland’s history, sheep have vastly outnumbered Icelanders — the national flock peaked at roughly 891,000 head in 1978, at a time when the human population was well under 300,000. That ratio has been quietly collapsing for decades. By 2025, Iceland’s sheep population had fallen to around 365,000, and for the first time in the country’s recorded history, humans now outnumber sheep. Sheep meat production followed the same trend, with 2024 slaughter numbers hitting their lowest point since 1954.
It’s a strange twist for an animal so central to Icelandic identity: rarer sheep, in theory, should mean an even more prized product, and Iceland’s own PDO status arrived at almost exactly the moment the flock it protects became noticeably smaller.
How to Try It
Fresh Icelandic lamb — chops, leg, or rack — shows up on menus across Reykjavík year-round, but it’s especially prominent from late summer through autumn, right around réttir itself, when the newest crop of highland-fed lambs reaches the table. For a smokier, more traditional introduction, hangikjöt — lamb smoked over birch or dried sheep dung — is the classic centrepiece of a Þorramatur feast, usually washed down with a shot of ice-cold Brennivín. If Icelandic lamb has you curious about how neighbouring Norway treats the same animal, fårikål, Norway’s national lamb-and-cabbage dish, makes a fascinating contrast — same species, entirely different culinary tradition. And for a gentler taste of Icelandic farm life to pair with it, skyr, made from the milk of the same highland-grazing animals, is about as Icelandic a side note as it gets.
Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Pexels.
