Next week on our Viking Lives podcast, Richard and I will be telling the story of Iceland's conversion to Christianity in the year 1000 AD. This moment in the country's history is described in a number of medieval works, including several of the sagas and Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders) by Ari the Wise, an historical account that dates from 1130. As scholar Siân Grønlie has observed in her introduction to Ari's book, the conversion as we find it in Íslendingabók seems to witness a "resilient secularism" in how the change was approached and understood.
In the 990s, King Ólafur Tryggvason of Norway had been pressuring Iceland to convert. The king sent missionaries to Iceland and took Icelanders living in Norway into hostage and threatened to kill them if the country didn't adopt the new faith.
The question of whether to do so was taken up at the national parliament at Þingvellir. As the debate proceeded, and it began to look like there would be a battle on the assembly grounds, the news arrived that a volcanic eruption has started. The heathens proclaimed that the gods were showing their anger. Snorri goði, a chieftain from Helgafell on the Snæfellsnes peninsula (where there is, indeed, quite a lot of lava), pointed at the older lava fields near the parliament and asked, 'Then, at what were the gods angry when they created this?'
He asked the question as a way of supporting his case for Christianisation and neutralising the heathen's point, but it is one that also suggests a degree of scepticism about the role of divine figures in the lives of humans more generally. He seemed to have a level-headed view of change.
When the two sides of the debate couldn't agree on whether Iceland would become Christian or remain true to the old gods, the assembly asked the Law Speaker, Þorgeirr Ljósvetningagoði Þorkelsson, to make the decision on the country's behalf. Þorgeirr was himself a heathen, but after deliberating underneath his cloak for a day and a night, he announced that Iceland would, from then on, be a Christian country. The parliament accepted his decision, one that was about religion and at the same time about how Iceland responded to the changes in the wider world. It might join in the changes occurring elsewhere, it might not, but it would make decisions that expressed faith in its own systems and institutions: the parliament, a single unified legal code, and the office of the Law Speaker.
And also, perhaps sensibly, what the king of a more powerful neighbour though they should do.
A thousand years have passed since Iceland adopted Christianity, and as in other countries the role of the church has changed. Iceland was of course initially a Catholic country, but with the Reformation a Lutheran one, and it has a Constitution that guarantees religious freedom for all. Two hundred and sixty-odd years after King Óláfur got his way, Iceland became a Norwegian colony, later a Danish one, and in the twentieth century was able to reclaim full independence. The country sits rather apart and also over the North Atlantic ridge, and will always be pushed this way and that.
Over the past few weeks, I haven't heard much mention of the sagas or of Ari the Wise during the country's debate over whether to initiate talks with the European Union about future membership. Tying EU membership to the stories we find in medieval sagas would be a stretch, I know, even for a saga scholar. But from where I followed the debate as the No vote took the day, from far-away Australia, I noted some familiar-sounding predictions of social eruptions, fissures, and ruptures. I wondered if perhaps a little bit of Snorri goði was in order, his wry scepticism that has always struck me as being very Icelandic in its way.
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| Þingvellir National Park, Iceland (pic: Kári Gíslason) |
