Where the Law Rock Lies

Abstract

Where the Law Rock Lies Eric O. Scott Nobody knows where the Law Rock was—not for sure. A flagpole and a bandstand sit atop a grassy hill near the black stone ridge that marks the edge of Þingvellir National Park; they represent the best guess anyone has as to where the Law Rock might have been. One thousand years ago, it was the most important place in Iceland—it was the center of the Alþing, the oldest parliament in Europe. At the Law Rock, the Lawspeaker—Iceland's only elected official, at that time—recited one‐third of the laws each summer, a task performed without the aid of writing. Then, the most prominent men in the country, the goðar, would debate the laws, making new ones when circumstances dictated. The Alþing formed the center of Icelandic society: there, the Icelanders affirmed their customs, tried court cases, brokered marriage proposals, traded goods, and started bloody feuds. They did this all from memory—memory, which radiated out from the Law Rock, memory, by which they created their nation. But nobody remembers where the Law Rock was. We see the things we've forgotten, and we try to put them back together again. I first saw Þingvellir on my seventh day in Iceland. I was taking a summer course in the Icelandic language and spent three weeks in the country to practice the tongue. That was my official reason, anyway. I had a darker purpose. I came to Iceland for the same reason Muslims are drawn to Mecca, or Christians to the Way of St. James: because my soul called out for pilgrimage, a journey to a Heathen holy land. This pilgrimage had been a long time coming. My parents are Pagans—the priest and priestess of a Wiccan coven in the Midwest—and so I have been a Pagan my entire life. This makes me a statistical anomaly; almost all Pagans converted to their new religions, including my parents and most members of my coven. A friend once told me she thought of second‐generation Pagans as unicorns: legendary creatures, probably fictional. My fascination with Iceland took root when I was young: I suspect it went back to something my father said. Iceland was the last place to convert to Christianity and the first place Paganism came back. The truth is more complicated than that, but the idea—the romance of a place where the old gods were so much closer to hand—stayed with me, gnawed at my attention. It grew into a conscious desire in my 20s, as I began to explore Ásatrú. By the time I applied to the summer course, the desire had grown ravenous. I spent hours every night staring at pictures of the Northern Lights dancing above frozen waterfalls. My first glimpse of Þingvellir came at the end of a long day of hiking. I had been traveling around the southwest of Iceland on a tour bus filled with other students, some from my program and others from Canada and the Nordic countries. We had already visited other historical places that day: Egill Skallagrimsson's farm at Borg, Snorri Sturlusson's home at Reykholt. Our bus arrived at our final stop, a tourist center, where we huddled together against a sudden shower of cold summer rain. Once the rain let up, we walked to an overlook and saw it stretch out before us: a rolling plain with a river running through it on its way to Þingvallavatn, the largest lake in Iceland. The gray sky made the grass's green all the more vivid. Mist settled over the lake, occluding the islands that lay at its center. A few white buildings sat down in the center of the fields: a church and the old house of parliament, which had long since relocated to Reykjavík. We walked down from the overlook on a wooden path that stood between two walls of black rock. These cliffs, I have been told, marked the continental divide: We stood with one foot on North America and the other on Eurasia. The path let us out onto asphalt near the bandstand and flagpole which might have...