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1960s and 1970s, scholars seriously began to doubt this general picture of
the commonwealth. Although little had been published which presented a
new view on this issue, I followed the trend of the time faithfully in 1972,
when I published an article on the relationship between goðar and the
farmers and criticized the idea of seeing the choice of goðorð as an election
of a kind.11 In the first volume of Saga Íslands (The History of Iceland) two
years later, Jakob Benediktsson wrote about the establishment of the com­
monwealth. He mentions, of course, the right of farmers to change their
allegiance to a goði, but he does not mention any similarity to the modern
franchise. on the contrary, he stresses the fact that farmers inevitably had
to live in the neighbourhood of the goði they belonged to in order to enjoy
his protection and to be able to support him in providing protection for
other members of the goðorð.12
I have not yet mentioned the historian Björn Þorsteinsson, although he
had written two books about the Icelandic commonwealth before 1970.13
this is because he never expressed himself very clearly about those charac­
teristics of the political system that I have been discussing. But in his third
book on the subject, Íslensk miðaldasaga (History of Medieval Iceland),
which was published in 1978, he turned strongly against the view of the
commonwealth as a democracy which had dominated in the first half of the
20th century. His chapter about goðar now carries the title “Forréttindastétt”
(A Privileged Class). He does not even mention the farmers’ free choice of
goði, but states that farmers seem to have been able to live without belong­
ing to any goðorð, whatever the evidence for that may be. On the other
hand, Björn mentions the right of goðar to refuse to accept a farmer into
their goðorð and states, correctly, that there are examples of goðar who
ousted farmers from their neighbourhood if they did not like them.14
The emphasis on opposition to the Norwegian king among common­
wealth-era Icelanders has also diminished since the mid-20th century. In
the first volume of Saga Íslands in 1974, Sigurður Líndal, a professor of law
and a historian, wrote a chapter about Iceland and the neighbouring world.
11 Gunnar karlsson, “Goðar og bændur,” Saga 10 (1972): 27–34.
12 jakob Benediktsson, “Landnám og upphaf allsherjarríkis,” Saga Íslands I, ed. by Sigurður
Líndal (Reykjavík: Bókmenntafélag, 1974), 173–174.
13 Björn Þorsteinsson, Íslenzka þjóðveldið (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 1953). – Björn Þor steins­
son, Ný Íslandssaga. Þjóðveldisöld (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 1966).
14 Björn Þorsteinsson, Íslensk miðaldasaga (Reykjavík: Sögufélag, 1978), 52–53.
WAS ICeLAnD tHe GALAPAGoS . . . ?