Sagas of Iceland · Part 13 · The end of an age · B2–C1
The Conversion of Iceland
Part 13 of the Sagas of Iceland: the year 1000, when Iceland was about to split into two nations, one Christian and one pagan. Both sides asked one man, the pagan lawspeaker Thorgeir, to decide. He lay silent under his cloak for a day and a night, and then he made a decision for the whole country. Concession (although, even though, despite, while), the language of persuasion and compromise, and conditionals for consequences, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, a story that is almost certainly true, told by Iceland’s first historian. In the summer of the year 1000, the Althing was about to break apart. Half the chieftains were Christian, half were pagan, and each side was going to make its own laws. Iceland was about to become two countries.
A pagan priest, Philo, who lay down under his cloak and didn’t speak for a day and a night. When he got up, he made one of the strangest compromises in history. Tonight’s grammar is the grammar of agreeing to disagree.
The Althing at Thingvellir, the summer of 999 or 1000
Our main source is The Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók), written around 1125 by Ari the Learned, a priest who carefully named the people who told him the story; one of them had heard it from a man who was there. So historians take it seriously, though they also note that Ari was a Christian writing a hundred years later.
Around 995–1000, the Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason, a fierce Christian, sent missionaries to Iceland and held the sons of Icelandic chieftains as hostages in Norway. At the Althing of 1000, the Christian and pagan groups each declared that they would not live under the same laws as the other. The country was about to split. The Christian leader, Hall of Sída, asked the pagan lawspeaker, Thorgeir of Ljósavatn, to decide for everyone, and both sides promised to accept his decision.
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