The Godord

The godord was not a piece of land or a fixed territorial jurisdiction in the way a medieval European bishopric or parish was. It was a bundle of authority and following, religious leadership of local sacrifice at a hof, and standing to bring and represent legal cases at regional assemblies and the national Althing, attached to whoever held the title of godi or gydja over a group of farmers who had formally declared their allegiance. Sources describing Iceland's early legal and social structure make clear that a godord could be inherited within a family across generations, but it could equally be bought and sold outright, held jointly by more than one person, or divided, arrangements that would be unusual for a purely religious or purely political office in most other traditions but made sense given how thoroughly the two functions were fused in this one.

Because a follower's attachment to a particular godi was in principle a matter of personal choice rather than fixed residence, a farmer dissatisfied with his godi's conduct of sacrifices or representation in legal disputes could, at least formally, transfer his allegiance to a different godord holder, giving the system a competitive element among religious-political leaders that more centralized priesthoods elsewhere in the ancient world generally lacked.

When Iceland formalized its legal and political system in the tenth century CE, establishing the Althing as a national assembly and organizing the island into quarters with regional assemblies of their own, the godord functioned as the basic building block of the entire structure. Holders of godord were the men, and in principle women in the office's religious dimension, entitled to sit as the legally recognized leadership at these assemblies, so that Iceland's early government was, in effect, an assembly of chieftain-priests rather than a monarchy or a body of officials separated from religious authority.

The godord survived Iceland's formal conversion to Christianity around the year 1000 CE largely intact as a secular legal and political institution, its holders keeping their assembly standing and local authority even after the pagan sacrificial duties that had originally justified calling the office religious fell away, a continuity that makes the godord one of the clearer surviving windows onto how completely religious and civic authority had been fused in pre-Christian Norse Iceland, and how much of that fused structure could persist even once its religious content was removed.