A Title Christianity Kept and Emptied

Iceland's formal conversion to Christianity, traditionally dated to the year 1000 CE and reached by decision at the national assembly, the Althing, did not immediately dissolve the godar's political authority, only its pagan cultic function. The men who had held godord as pagan chieftain-priests generally kept their secular legal and political standing under the new religion, and the office's Icelandic institutional framework, the network of local godord whose holders sat at the Althing, persisted as the backbone of Icelandic self-governance for centuries afterward, now emptied of its original sacrificial and temple-keeping duties but retaining its name and its judicial weight.

The title's survival past the religion that originally defined it is one of the clearer illustrations of how thoroughly religious and political authority had been fused in the office to begin with; removing the religious content left a still-functioning secular institution behind, in contrast to purely cultic Norse religious roles that had no equivalent afterlife once Christianity displaced the sacrifices and temple rites that had given them their reason to exist. Later Norwegian and Icelandic law codes drafted after conversion still used forms of the title in a purely secular sense, a linguistic residue of how completely the office's religious and civic functions had once been fused.