Gripla - 20.12.2009, Side 85

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assemblies to make decisions about their societies, like many other people,
and had done so for centuries. As far as we know, there were three þing­
districts in Norway when Iceland was discovered and settled. Judging
mainly on the basis of place­names, þings were established in most or all of
the norse viking Age colonies in the north Atlantic: the faroes, Shetland,
the orkneys, the Isle of Man, districts in Ireland, Scotland, england, the
Greenland colony.17 there is no reason to think that the Icelandic alþing
differed initially from other such assemblies.
What about the goðar then, the central figures of the Icelandic þing sys­
tem? Nowhere outside Iceland are there chieftains with this title in
Christian times. the term goði seems to occur attached to personal names
in three runic inscriptions in Denmark. It may occur in a few Swedish
place-names, although it seems difficult to determine whether the places
are named after the gods themselves or their servants, the goðar. other
instances to which attention has been drawn by scholars seem to be even
more doubtful.18 I believe that the explanation why the goði institution was
preserved in Iceland lies in the way Christianity was introduced in the
country. to put it simply, among Germanic people in pagan times there
were probably two kinds of chieftains with special relationship to the
divinities of the time, namely kings and goðar. I see no reason to believe
that the kings were less attached to religion than the goðar, and this attach­
ment can be seen in Christian times where the first local saints were kings,
such as King Olaf Haraldsson in Norway and King Knut Sveinsson in
Denmark. In most european countries, amongst them the Scandinavian
ones, conversion to Christianity was instigated by kings who decided to
switch their allegiance from pagan gods to Christ and who used the change
to consolidate the countries under their rule. In this process, the kings
eradicated the goðar so completely that we hardly find any trace of them in
written sources.
In Iceland, exactly the opposite took place. According to Ari the
Learned’s account of the conversion, the goðar decided at the alþing to
17 Michael Barnes, “tingsted. vesterhavsøyene for øvrig,” Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk
middelalder XVIII (Reykjavík: Bókaverzlun Ísafoldar, 1974), 382–387. – Gillian Fellows-
Jensen, “Tingwall, Dingwall and Thingwall,” Twenty–Eight Papers Presented to Hans Bekker­
Nielsen on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday 28 April 1993 (odense: odense university
Press, 1993), 53–63.
18 Gunnar karlsson, Goðamenning, 374–379.
WAS ICeLAnD tHe GALAPAGoS . . . ?