290 ICELAND: ITS HISTOEY AND INHABITANTS. 



At the Althing of A. D. 1000 a debate took phice about the intro- 

 duction of Christianity. The Christian chieftains supported the 

 envoys of King Olaf Tryggvason, of Norway, and the heathens, to 

 avoid civil war, agreed to submit it to the decision of the heathen 

 law speaker, Thorgeir, whether the Christian religion or the old 

 faith should prevail in Iceland. For three days and three nights he 

 lay quietly in his tent thinking over the two religions. On the fourth 

 day he stood forth on the law mount, or hill, and declared that they 

 were to be baptized and call themselves Christians, the temples to be 

 destroyed, but those who liked to sacrifice at home to the old gods 

 might continue to do so, and a few heathen customs were to be per- 

 mitted. The people accepted this ; only the men from north and east 

 Iceland refused to be immersed (baptized) in cold water, so the hot 

 springs at Reykir were used for the rite. 



Two bishops' sees were established, at Skaholt in 1056 and at 

 Holar in 1106, subject successively to the metropolitan sees of Bremen, 

 Lund, and Thrandheim. The bishops were elected at the Althing 

 until the archbishop of Thrandheim appointed Norwegians in 1237. 

 Tavo bishops, St. Thorlac and St. John, were by a public vote at the 

 Althing declared to be saints, after a thorough and searching inquiry 

 into the miracles they had wrought. Thus the Icelandic Church was 

 a church of the people for the people, and Rome had little power in 

 the island. Celibacy was never accepted by it. In the twelfth and 

 thirteenth centuries six Benedictine and five Augustinian cloisters 

 were founded, all centers of learning and culture. The greater part 

 of the Icelandic Sagas is supposed to have been written or at least 

 copied in them. The oldest was the Benedictine cloister at Thin- 

 geyrar, 1133; next, Thvera, 1155, also Benedictine. The Icelandic 

 monks wrote in Icelandic, not in Latin, as all their brethren on the 

 Continent did. They were intensely national and handed down with 

 scrupulous care even the records of the heathen faith. But it was 

 owing to disputes about the jurisdiction of the clergy that the King 

 and archbishop of Norway were able to set chieftain against chief- 

 tain and undermine the Icelandic commonwealth, disputes similar 

 to those which Thomas a Becket, of Canterbury, carried on with 

 Henry II half a century earlier, and which are recorded in the Ice- 

 landic Thomas Saga. 



The two centuries and a half which followed the introduction of 

 Christianity were the greatest period in the history of Iceland. A 

 great literature, especially the Sagas, came into being, while the Con- 

 tinent, with the single exception of the Provencal Troubadours, had 

 nothing better to show than monkish annalists. At the courts of 

 Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Dublin, England, and Orkney, Icelandic 

 poets were the chief or, usually, the only singers of heroic deeds. It 



