The Vikings had no central state power. Law and politics arose at the assembly of free people – the Thing.
How does a society order its life together when it has no officials, no written law books and often not even a king? The Norsemen’s answer was the Thing.
The Thing was the regular assembly of the free men of a region. Here disputes were settled, verdicts passed, contracts concluded and important decisions made. Whoever had a matter to raise put it before the community – the public itself was the authority.
Since the laws were not written down, there was the law-speaker (lögsögumaðr): a man who knew the law by heart and recited it aloud at the assembly. Law was thus something that lived in the memory of the community.
The most famous of these assemblies is the Icelandic Althing, which according to tradition first met around 930 on the plain of Þingvellir. It is regarded as one of the oldest still-existing parliaments in the world. Here we see how seriously the Vikings took the law – even without a state in the modern sense.
“Where you know wrong, call it wrong, and grant your foes no peace.”Hávamál 127, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)