Iceland

The Icelandic conversion is the one case in northern Europe where the change of religion was settled as a point of law by an assembly that could have gone either way. Around the year 1000 the Althing at Thingvellir faced a split between a Christian party with royal backing from Norway and a heathen majority. Rather than fight, both sides agreed to be bound by the ruling of a single arbitrator, and they chose Thorgeir Ljosvetningagodi, a heathen priest. He is described as lying under his cloak for a day and a night before giving his judgment: all should be baptised and hold one law, while private sacrifice, the eating of horseflesh and the exposure of infants would be tolerated for a time. Islendingabok, written more than a century later by Ari Thorgilsson, is the source.

That settlement had a consequence nobody planned. Because the old religion was not defeated in a war and its practitioners were not treated as a conquered enemy, Icelandic Christian scribes had no compelling reason to destroy the material. They wrote it down instead. The Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda compiled by Snorri Sturluson in the thirteenth century and the family and legendary sagas are the reason a coherent account of Norse mythology exists at all, and every reconstruction of Germanic religion elsewhere in Europe leans on Icelandic manuscripts written by Christians two hundred years after the conversion.

The Lutheran Church of Iceland is established and named in the constitution, and is funded by a parish charge collected with income tax and allocated to whichever registered body a taxpayer belongs to. Membership has fallen well below the Nordic norm and the number of registered religious and life stance organisations has grown.

Asatruarfelagid was founded in Reykjavik in 1972 by a small group that included the farmer and poet Sveinbjorn Beinteinsson, and it was granted state recognition as a registered religious organisation the following year. That made Iceland the first modern state to give a heathen body the same legal standing as a church, with the right to conduct legally valid marriages and to receive the parish charge on behalf of its members. Sveinbjorn served as allsherjargodi, the presiding office, until his death, and he was widely known outside the organisation for his rimur chanting, a living Icelandic verse form he used for the old poetry.

The organisation has grown from a few dozen members to several thousand, which in a population the size of Iceland makes it one of the larger non Lutheran bodies in the country. Its public positions have been consistently liberal. It has conducted same sex marriages since they became legal in Iceland, and its leadership has been outspoken against the use of Norse symbols by the far right, which is a recurring problem for heathen groups internationally and one Asatruarfelagid has addressed directly rather than quietly.

A purpose built temple at Oskjuhlid in Reykjavik has been under construction since 2015 and has run many years past its intended completion. It would be the first structure of its kind built in Iceland in roughly a thousand years.

Two cautions are worth stating plainly. The organisation does not claim an unbroken line from the pre Christian period, and describes its practice as a modern one drawing on preserved sources. And the separate Icelandic tradition concerning huldufolk, the hidden people, is not part of it, whatever the tourist literature suggests.