This is 83 of our ongoing series about Viking Age Iceland. For centuries, this island country, unique in Medieval Europe, operated with no king, no great lords, no foreign policy, and no defense forces but which developed legal and judicial systems to limit the violence of bloodfeud and protect the rights of freemen. Far out in the North Atlantic, Iceland was where the famous sagas developed. To explore Iceland’s place in the medieval world, we present selections from Jesse Byock’s Viking Age Iceland that investigate the history, archaeology, culture, systems of feud, and sagas of this magical place.
In principle, the legal goði-thingman bond was created by a voluntary public contract which did not depend upon a geographical base. A key factor that has received scant attention in previous studies is that this relationship provided little sense of either permanency or protection to either leader or follower. For an ambitious individual, at least in the early centuries, becoming a goði was not entry into a formally defined class. To become a goði, a farmer – that is a bóndi – did not undergo formal investiture; there was no oath of office, no swearing before a deity. The goði was answerable only to minimal guidelines set by law and to the pressure of public opinion.
Possession of all or part of a goðorð (the political office of chieftaincy) granted a leader little formal authority over his followers. Although it would be naive to assume that all social systems function according to their laws, in the instance of early Iceland, it appears that a chieftain, in accordance with Grágás, had little power to command a thingman to act against his will. Instead, a chieftain’s power rested, to a large degree, on the consent of his followers. Thingmen, for their part, could formally demand very little of their goði beyond requiring that he carry out the few duties prescribed in the laws. These responsibilities included holding thing meetings and setting prices on imported goods. Such duties assured the availability of arenas for settlement of disputes and helped to prevent friction among the farmers. In fulfilling these obligations the goðar had little latitude, for in most instances they were accountable to their followers and to other chieftains.
— Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland
