Frostaþing

The Frostathing is the great assembly of the Throndhjem districts — the northern law-court where Hakon the Good made his open, doomed appeal for Christianity. Before a vast gathering, the Christian king stood and entreated the bonders, great and small, to be baptised and believe in the one God — and they refused him flatly, angrily, saying he was asking to take from them the faith of their fathers and the sacrifices their whole life depended on, and would sooner drive him out than give up the old gods. The Frostathing is the saga's image of the assembly that will not be ruled in matters of the soul — the northern law-court where the loved king, at the height of his authority, asked his people to change their gods and was told no, the place where conversion-by-persuasion met its wall.