In the recent news articles about volcanoes in Iceland, they never refer to the volcano by name. Seems odd.
Perhaps it’s because the last volcano to erupt, and spewed so much into the atmosphere that it disrupted air traffic, was unpronounceable: Eyjafjallajökull.
They were likely all named 1000 years ago in Old Norse, of which Icelandic is the closest to amongst the Norse languages.
And aren’t NPR articles essentially what they read for news reports? I don’t think they’d want to touch this one.
Or is there one big volcano called “Iceland”?
My understanding is that for Icelanders that name is easy to pronounce. 
But for the rest of the world? 
If they want volcanoes with names easy for them to pronounce, they should just get their own volcanoes.
Pronounced “Kull”. 
Katla did erupt not long after the “E” volcano.
I’m guessing that there were one or two early stories that didn’t name the volcano, and then all the other stories you were seeing just got their information from those original one or two.
Which is actually pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove.
Just as an aside, Iceland is an amazing place.
People don’t have surnames. Just patronyms…and gender-specific ones at that.
There’s only about 500,000 people in the whole country.
The whole island is a geological Wonderland: volcanoes, glaciers, waterfalls, hot springs .
They have letters in their alphabet that were dropped from English 1000 years ago
Well, my understanding is that they do, but they’re different from how surnames work in most other Western languages. In Icelandic, your surname is a direct reference to your father (or sometimes your mother), rather than being a family name. Edit: I see you added similar information after I composed my post.
As Wikipedia describes it:
There’s an xkcd for that
I remember a show about Icelandic volcanos, probably PBS’ “NOVA”, where that “E” volcano had its name spliced in, probably voiced by someone who pronounced it correctly, and they took it from there.
Things like that remind me of the Chelyabinsk incident, when initial news reports showed people running away from broken glass and the like, and I could picture Russian speakers laughing and telling each other, “Whoa, the censors at that channel don’t know what those people said!” and by the time NOVA did a program on it, the clips were heavily bleeped.
If it helps, “jökull” just means “ice field” or “glacier”. Lots of ice-capped mountains in Iceland end in that.
Other than that it’s just a five syllable word, which is above average, but not excessively so.
If we English was agglutinative and we called it “Themissisippiriver” that would be a mouth-full, too for anyone who didn’t know how to break it down.
It would also ruin counting time for various games:
One themissisippiriver.
Two themissisippiriver.
Three themissisippiriver.
The quarterback would have waaay too much time in the pocket before you could rush him.
Have fun:
Back to the OP: maybe the point is that this isn’t a volcano like Etna or Vesuvius or a single named point erupting, this is a series of fissures - the earth just opening up in unpredictable directions across a wide area.
No.
For one thing, this peninsular area near the capital has basaltic magma, and it forms shield volcanoes
This is due to the fault there widening and its mantle magma coming up, same as a hotspot like Hawaii.
Elsewhere in Iceland the magma forms granite and strata volcanoes,. which are related to slip strike and subduction faults. There’s the intersection of three faults in the area , so you can have the 4 zones , one zone each for the plate pairings, and the middle zone where its less well defined.