Þing goða—The Mythological Assembly Site

Abstract

Abstract The question of whether and how the legal and the religious domains may have interacted within pre-Christian Norse society has been treated in various ways by scholars from a range of different fields; still, much remains opaque regarding the links between the two in the Viking period. With this article, I hope to contribute to the study of this aspect of the Viking period by focussing on assembly and the assembly site as portrayed in the mythological eddic poems. The primary question I set out to explore is: What do the descriptions of things in mythological sources tell us about the position of the thing within the pre-Christian culture of the Viking period? I account for the various occurrences of the assembly-site motif, and examine how they are constructed. While examining these occurrences, I discuss how they can be interpreted in a larger religious context.