Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 78

GRIPLA78
first and foremost I am thinking about the formal ruling system as it is
set out in the law-code Grágás, described in Ari’s Book of the Icelanders and
referred to in the sagas. At the bottom of this system were the local chief­
tains, goðar, somewhere around 40 in number, all roughly and formally
equal in power. The term goði seems to derive from goð/guð: “god”, and in
the sagas one can see that their authors took it for granted that the goðar
served as priests of some kind in pagan times. All farmers’ households
belonged to the domain of a goði, a goðorð as it was called, but were legally
free to change allegiance from one goði to another. the goðar in turn were
free to expel farmers from their goðorð. the goðar were supposed to hold a
spring assembly each year, three goðar together. Then there was the central
alþing, the general assembly at Þingvellir, where the goðar sat in the lögrétta
or law council, decreed what was the right law on specific issues, and
passed new laws. Furthermore, at the alþing there were five separate courts
of justice, nominated by the goðar: Four were quarter courts, fjórðungs­
dómar, each of them dealing with cases from one of the quarters of the
country, and the fifth court, the fimmtardómr, was a kind of appeal court
which dealt with cases that had not been settled in a satisfactory way in the
quarter courts.
Alongside this system of formal courts there was a complicated infor­
mal system for settling disputes by arbitration and reconciliation. Space
here does not allow me to take this into consideration; I must concentrate
on the formal system of government, and even within that I can only deal
with a few important points.
Many scholars have had their doubts about the real existence and func­
tionality of this system. But I would like to state categorically that I do not
see any strong reason to doubt that it existed and worked roughly in the
way it is described in the law-code. The lawbook Grágás is not a single
piece of text: it is a huge collection of legal provisions which have been
organized in different ways in different books. It is difficult to imagine
that this collection could have emerged in any other way than in the form
of actual law.1 In many cases, episodes related in the sagas confirm the evi­
dence of the law. In some cases, the sagas seem to contradict individual
prescriptions of laws, and some scholars have made much of such cases,
1 Gunnar karlsson, Goðamenning. Staða og áhrif goðorðsmanna í þjóðveldi Íslendinga (Reykja­
vík: Heimskringla, 2004), 28–59.