Þorgeirr the Lawspeaker

Þorgeirr the Lawspeaker is the heathen who made Iceland Christian. When the country stood on the edge of splitting into two faiths and two laws — Christian and heathen each ready to declare their own — both sides drew back from the brink and agreed to abide by the judgement of one man, and the man they chose was Þorgeirr, the Lawspeaker, who was himself still a heathen. He lay a whole day and a night on the ground with a cloak spread over his head, in silence, while a nation's fate hung on his thinking; the saga never says what passed in that dark. Then he rose at the law-rock and ruled that all should hold one law, and that law should be the Christian faith, with a few old customs left quietly standing. Þorgeirr is the Norse genius for law made flesh: the man who valued the unity and the peace of the commonwealth above his own gods, and changed the religion of a whole people not by battle but by a judgement everyone had sworn to keep.