The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1982, Blaðsíða 15

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
13
Truly, the romance has vanished. Vanished,
forever, are ‘the pride, pomp and circum-
stance of glorious war. ’
The Vikings were always given what we
would call today a bad press. As H. G.
Wells says: “Most of our information
about these wars and invasions of the
Pagan Vikings is derived from Christian
sources, and so we have abundant infor-
mation of the massacres and atrocities of
their raids; and very little about the
cruelties inflicted upon their pagan breth-
ren, the Saxons, at the hands of Charle-
magne.”
The Vikings who setded in Iceland raised
Scandinavian civilization to the highest
level. My authority for this statement is not
open to question. “We have already found
that it was in Iceland,” says Arnold J.
Toynbee, in his A Study of History, “and
not in Norway, Sweden or Denmark, that
the abortive Scandinavian civilization
achieved its greatest triumphs both in
literature and politics.”
The Vikings in Iceland established a
National Parliament, or Althing, in 930,
thus laying down the foundation of our
age’s first democracy. Several times, I
have heard Hon. J. T. Thorson, refer, very
proudly, to the Althing, as the Grand-
mother of Parliaments. It was in the field
long before the Parliament at Westminster
which is known as the Mother of Parlia-
ments.
The Althing met once a year on the plain
of Thingvellir, about thirty miles from
Reykjavik. It had both legislative and
judicial powers. “Here the people gathered
to hear the laws proclaimed,” says Johannes
Brondsted, in his fascinating book The
Vikings, “to lodge their suits, to worship
their gods, to display their skills and to buy
and sell.”
The Althing was presided over by a law
speaker. The first law speaker was a man
named Ulfljot. He had been sent to Norway
to learn the law and to prepare a law code.
His code has not survived as it was never
copied down on vellum. As an old Ice-
landic lawbook comments: “The Law-
speaker is required to tell everyone who
asks him what the article of law is, both
here and at his home, but he is not required
to give anyone further advice on lawsuits.”
The early laws of Iceland were not effi-
cient. The ultimate vindication of all law is
force. Icelandic law had no power to
enforce its decrees, no means of employing
compulsory process. It had influence to
persuage rather than power to command.
As Jhering, a great legal scholar, has said
— “a legal rule without coercion is a fire
that does not bum, a light that does not
shine.” Powerful litigants in Iceland, when
the decree of the Althing went against
them, sometimes carried an appeal to the
sword. The blood-feud, whose aim was
personal redress and not punishment, ran
rampant, because the law did not have
behind it the compulsion of force.
The Vikings were pagans who wor-
shipped heathen gods whom they had
created very much in their own image.
They were pagans but not barbarians. They
lived an active life of the mind and the
spark of wonderment burned brightly in
them.
Let us not be frightened by the word
‘pagan’ — a word which has been over-
loaded by emotional overtones over the
centuries. If the contribution of the pagans
to civilization were to be blotted from the
record, how much poorer would this sorry
world be! In the chapter which he con-
tributed to ‘Iceland’s Thousand Years’
(published in 1945), Dr. Philip M. Peturs-
son spoke some fair words for them. “Ice-
landers were still pagan,” he said, “when
they recognized the rights of men to free-
dom of thought and expression, and acted
on that principle. Therefore, even in pagan
times, their outlook and practice were very
similar to what we have regarded as the
prerogatives chiefly of Christians.”