Thingvellir

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The plain is black underfoot. It is old lava, grown over with moss and dwarf birch and crowberry, and it runs flat toward a long lake until the ground simply tears: a wall of dark rock rises on the western edge, split top to bottom, and a person can walk down into the crack between two continents. This is Almannagjá, the fissure of all men, and to the east of it the ground falls away in step after step of broken stone. The whole valley is sinking and stretching at once. North America lies to the west of the gorge and Eurasia to the east, and they are pulling apart at the speed a fingernail grows. It is on this floor, between the rifts, that a people once gathered every summer to say its law aloud.

Þingvellir means “the assembly plains” — þing, the assembly, and vǫllr, the field. The Icelanders held their open-air national parliament here for the better part of nine centuries, from around the year 930 until 1798. There was no king in the country and no capital; there was only this place, where for two weeks at midsummer the whole apparatus of a commonwealth assembled out of tents and turf and then dissolved again into the empty land. The site lies about forty kilometers northeast of modern Reykjavík, at the northern end of Þingvallavatn, the largest natural lake in Iceland, near 64.26° north.

The choosing of the plains

Iceland was settled late, mostly within a single lifetime. The traditional reckoning, preserved by the priest and historian Ari Thorgilsson, puts the first Norse landtaking around 870, and within two generations the island was full — chieftains and their households spread along the coasts and up the river valleys, Norwegians for the most part, with Gaelic blood and Gaelic slaves among them. They came carrying the gods and the customs of the Norse world they had left, but they came without the thing that ordered that world at home: a king. The men who sailed to Iceland were largely those who had reason to leave kings behind. What they built instead was a commonwealth governed by law alone, and law needs a place.

By the older account, a man named Grímur Geitskör was sent to find it. The chosen ground belonged to a settler who had been outlawed for killing, so that it fell forfeit to common use — a convenient origin, and possibly a tidy one. What recommended the place was practical and exact. It lay roughly central to the inhabited quarters, reachable from every district by overland track. It had grazing for the horses and the driven cattle of thousands of men, water from the Öxará river that had been led across the plain, fuel and fish from the lake. And it had the long rock wall of Almannagjá, which threw back a human voice. A man standing at the foot of that wall could be heard by a crowd standing on the slope below. The land itself made an amphitheater. Around the year 930 the assembly of all free Icelanders — the Alþingi, the Althing — met here for the first time.

The Almannagjá rift at Þingvellir, where the North American and Eurasian plates diverge. Photograph by Wikimedia user Debivort, 2007. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Icelanders did not invent the thing at Þingvellir. The assembly was an inheritance, the Germanic and Norse institution of the free meeting where law was declared and disputes were judged, the same root that stands behind the assembly grounds of Gamla Uppsala in Sweden and the local things of the Vikings wherever they settled. What was unusual was the scale and the completeness. There was no higher authority above this one. The Althing was at once the legislature of the whole country, its supreme court, and the single occasion on which the nation existed as a nation. For one fortnight a year the plains held a temporary city — booths and law and feud and marriage-broking and the buying of foreign cloth — and the rest of the year they held nothing but sheep.

The law spoken aloud

At the heart of the assembly stood the Lögberg, the Law Rock, a vantage along the edge of the Almannagjá wall from which proclamations were made to the assembled people. Here the things of the country found their voice. Anyone with business before the nation — a man seeking a verdict, announcing a killing, declaring a marriage, summoning an adversary — came to the Law Rock to be heard. But the rock belonged first to one office, and that office is the strangest and the most beautiful thing about the place.

The Icelandic Commonwealth had no king, no standing army, no police, and, at the beginning, no books. Its single national official was the Lawspeaker, the lögsögumaður — literally the “law-speech-man,” the one who said the law. He was elected by the chieftains to serve three years at a time, and his central duty was memory. Each summer he climbed to the Law Rock and recited the law of the land from memory, by heart, before the assembled freemen. He did not recite all of it each year. He spoke one third of the whole code annually, so that across his term the entire body of law passed across the rock and into the common ear; and every year, without fail, he recited the procedural section that governed the assembly itself, lest the machine forget how to run. If a point of law was disputed and the Lawspeaker did not know it, he was bound to consult five or more of the wisest men he could find before pronouncing. The law existed because a man stood on a rock and said it. It had no other home.

“A romanticised view of the session of the Lögrétta,” the legislative council of the medieval Althing. Watercolor by W. G. Collingwood, c. 1897. Public domain.

Around the Lawspeaker the assembly resolved into its working parts. The legislative power lay with the Lögrétta, the law council: the goðar, the chieftain-priests who held the country’s local authority, seated with their advisers and the Lawspeaker, deciding new law and amending old. The judging power lay in the courts — a system of quarter courts for the four districts of the country and, from the early eleventh century, a fifth court above them to break deadlocks, manned by judges nominated by the chieftains. Justice at the Althing did not punish in the modern sense; it arbitrated. A court could outlaw a man — strip him of the law’s protection so that he might be killed without penalty, the lesser sentence for three years, the greater for life — or it could fix the compensation, the blood-price, that would end a feud before it consumed two families. The sagas, above all Njáls saga, turn on exactly this: men riding to Þingvellir with their cases and their armed followings, the law and the threat of violence balanced against each other on the same plain.

And on the plain itself stood the booths — the búðir, low rectangular foundations of stacked turf and stone over which the chieftains and their men stretched cloth roofs for the fortnight of the session. Their grass-grown outlines can still be traced across the ground. Each great man brought a following to feed and shelter; the assembly was also a fair, a marriage market, a court of gossip, the one place where a young Icelander might see the whole of the known world that mattered to him pass by in two weeks. It was a parliament that smelled of horses and woodsmoke and was rained on.

The day under the cloak

Then, in the year 1000, the plains held the decision that has fixed Þingvellir in memory above all its centuries of ordinary law.

Christianity had been entering Iceland for a generation, carried by missionaries and pressed hard from outside by Olaf Tryggvason, the Christian king of Norway, who held Icelandic hostages and choked Icelandic trade to force the conversion of the island. By the summer assembly the country had split. A body of the chieftains and their men had taken the new faith; the rest held to the old gods, to Tyr and the powers of the Norse world. The two parties came to Þingvellir armed, and there each declared itself out of the other’s law — renouncing, in effect, the single legal community that had held the country together. The thing that the plains existed to prevent was about to happen on the plains themselves. A people that had no king and no army had only one thing to lose, and it was about to lose it: the agreement to live under one law.

The account that survives is Ari Thorgilsson’s, set down in his Íslendingabók, the Book of the Icelanders, written around 1122 to 1133 — more than a century after the event, but by a careful man who named his informants and traced them back toward the generation that had been present. It is told again, with the saga’s color, in Njáls saga, and the convergence of the two accounts is most of what later readers have to work with.

By Ari’s account the Christians turned to a man named Síðu-Hallur and asked him to proclaim a law for them; and Hallur, rather than split the country in two, went instead to the Lawspeaker — Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, Thorgeir the chieftain of Ljósavatn — and bought from him the task of pronouncing the law for the whole nation, even though Thorgeir himself was still a heathen. Thorgeir took the burden. He lay down, drew his cloak over his head, and stayed there a day and a night, saying nothing, while the country waited. What passed under the cloak no source claims to know. When he rose, he called the people to the Law Rock and made them swear first to abide by whatever law he should declare. Then he declared it.

There should be one law and one faith in the land, he said, for if the law were split the peace would be split, and a country could not stand so. All Icelanders should therefore be baptized and become Christian. The old idols should come down and the open worship of the old gods should cease. But — and the compromise is as remarkable as the ruling — the old observances need not vanish overnight. A man might still sacrifice to the old gods in private, if no witness charged him; he might still eat horseflesh, and still expose unwanted infants on the hillside, both being heathen customs the new faith condemned. These exemptions were quietly withdrawn within a few years. What held was the central act: a whole people changed its religion at a single assembly, by a single ruling of a heathen lawman, and did it without a war.

It is the founding scene of the Icelanders’ image of themselves, and it deserves to be read for what it was. This was not a conversion of the heart proclaimed from the Law Rock; it was a decision of law, taken to preserve law. The thing the Icelanders would not divide was not their theology. It was Þingvellir.

After the commonwealth

The free commonwealth did not last. Through the thirteenth century the great families fed on one another in an age the sagas remember as the Sturlung era, and a country with courts but no enforcement bled toward exhaustion. Between 1262 and 1264 the chieftains, by a covenant later called the Gamli sáttmáli, the Old Covenant, submitted to the king of Norway. The Althing lost its power to make law; the king’s law replaced the law the Lawspeaker had carried in his memory, and the office itself was abolished not long after. The assembly went on meeting at Þingvellir, but now as a court and a registry under a crown, first Norwegian and then, with the union of the kingdoms, Danish.

For five more centuries the plains still drew the country each summer, and the later history written into them is darker than the saga-age. Along the Öxará, where it pours over the lip of Almannagjá in the waterfall called Öxarárfoss, lies a still green pool: Drekkingarhylur, the drowning-pool. In the harsh moral climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women condemned for adultery or for bearing and killing a child were drowned there, held under by poles. Men were beheaded and hanged and burned on the same ground. The plain that had been the seat of the nation’s law had become, for a while, the place of its executions.

The Lögberg (Law Rock) at Þingvellir, where the Lawspeaker recited the law. Photograph by Jakub Hałun, 2023. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In 1798 the Althing met at Þingvellir for the last time. Two years later a royal Danish decree abolished it altogether, and when an assembly bearing the old name was at last re-established in 1845 it sat not on the plains but in Reykjavík, a consultative body under the crown, recovering full legislative power only as Iceland won home rule in the new century. The plains fell quiet. Then, slowly, they became a symbol.

In 1930, on the thousandth anniversary of the first assembly, Iceland made Þingvellir a national park and gathered there in tens of thousands to honor the founding — a deliberate act of memory, the country returning to the one place that had ever made it one. The fuller return came on the seventeenth of June 1944, when the Republic of Iceland was proclaimed at Þingvellir and the last tie to the Danish crown was cut. The rain that day was heavy. The people stood on the slope below Almannagjá, where men had stood to hear the law since the tenth century, and heard a republic declared from the ground its parliament had been born on. In 2004 the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list — not chiefly for its geology, striking as that is, but as the seat of the Alþingi and a monument to a form of self-government almost without parallel for its age.

The Almannagjá gorge, the fissure along the western wall of the rift, down which the path to the assembly site runs. Photograph by Fabrizio Lecce, 2023. CC BY 4.0.

Two things meet at Þingvellir, and neither will quite resolve into the other. One is the slow violence of the earth: the rift that widens a little each year, the lava floor that drops in steps, the sense, walking Almannagjá, of standing in the seam where a continent is being unstitched. The other is the human invention that chose this ground precisely because the rock would carry a voice — a commonwealth with no throne, no army, and at first no writing, that held itself together for three centuries on nothing but the agreement to come back each summer and hear one man recite, from memory, what the law was. The land was tearing apart the whole time. The people, against it, kept choosing to be one. That the same plain should bear the drowning-pool and the proclamation of a republic is not a contradiction the site resolves; it is simply how long a people can use one piece of ground, and how many things that ground will be made to mean.

The horses still graze there in summer, where the booths once stood.

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