Yggdrasil · Humankind

Þorgeirr: One Law for a Divided Community

A pagan lawspeaker settles Iceland’s religious quarrel and the whole island accepts Christianity.

Myth and literature

The story

Later historical account: a Christian historian, writing more than a century after the events, tells how an Icelandic assembly chose one religion.

In Ari Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók, Christians and heathens at the Alþingi, the yearly assembly at Þingvellir, each declared themselves under separate laws and left the Law-Rock. The Christians asked the lawspeaker Þorgeirr, still a heathen, to speak the law that would go with their faith. Later, back at his booth, he lay down, spread his cloak over himself and said nothing for a day and a night. The next morning he called the people to the Law-Rock and argued that a land without one law would be laid waste by feuds. Both sides agreed to follow his ruling: everyone was to be Christian and be baptised, with some old customs left alone for a few years.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: a deadlock at the assembly, a heathen lawspeaker asked to rule, his day and night under a cloak, a speech, and agreement to one law with temporary concessions. According to Grønlie, his speech is the only direct speech in Ari’s whole book, and its theme is keeping the peace.

What is not recorded: what Þorgeirr was doing under the cloak. Grønlie’s note lists the views: preparing his speech (Björn M. Ólsen), listening to an inner voice (Sigurður Nordal), or a shamanistic communing with guardian spirits (Jan de Vries, Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson). Grønlie herself suggests it may only show the concentration such a speech needed. The cloak therefore does not prove a pagan divination ritual, and Ari does not say it was one. The concessions are usually read as short-term practical measures rather than lasting tolerance.

Historical evidence

The evidence

The only full account is chapter 7 of Íslendingabók, written between 1122 and 1133 according to Siân Grønlie’s introduction (the dating rests on the bishops named in the prologue). Ari gives the conversion as 1000, but Grønlie’s notes report Ólafía Einarsdóttir’s argument that his calendar puts it in 999, so editors write 999/1000. Ari names his informant: his foster-father Teitr, who had it from eyewitnesses. The book survives in two paper copies made in the 17th century by Jón Erlendsson, from a medieval manuscript of about 1200. Ari says the old laws stood for exposing children and eating horse-flesh, and that sacrifice in secret was allowed, punishable only if witnesses were produced; he adds that these provisions were abolished a few years later.