The Basic Unit of the Icelandic Commonwealth

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.