Chapter 76 Parliament｜Alting

No matter what you see in Reykjavik, you always think of Thing Wedley.The increasingly haunting saga is a reminder that the most important stories in Icelandic history are closely related there.Therefore, although Reykjavik is the capital, any description of it is just an introduction.Now that I understand that the saga is the soul of Iceland, Thingvellir is the resting place of that soul. Thingvelli is often referred to as the Old House of Parliament.Or the old site of Althing (Althing), which is the parliament.When I first heard the name, I thought that there should be an old house on the site of the former parliament. If the old house collapsed, there should be remnants of the foundation.After reading Sakya, I gradually realized that the situation was different, but it was not clear exactly how.Finally got here today and was amazed.

There are no old houses, no foundations, and no semi-natural stone seats like the Greek Olympic Stadium, but an open valley among the mountains.On one side of the valley, there is a seven or eight kilometers long jagged cliff made of lava, about 30 meters high, forming an imposing natural barrier.To the south of the valley is the largest lake in Iceland, called Parliament Lake. We entered along the cliff, and there was a steep passage. Today, the road is full of ice and snow, and it is very difficult to walk. Moreover, the biting cold wind is cut by the cliff and becomes sharper, making it almost impossible to stand or breathe.

However, this is the former site of the parliament. The Icelandic parliament meets in this field every year. From the tenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, it lasted for more than 800 years.This is the earliest parliament in the world, three hundred years earlier than the British Parliament.Therefore, this strange valley that makes us tremble is a small bright spot in the history of human civilization. Thirty-six local chiefs participated in the parliament, each with some followers, and ordinary people could also come to listen.The meeting was held in June, when the weather was already warm, and meeting here would not suffer as we do today.

The Counselor of the Icelandic Embassy in China, Mr. Ragnar Baldsson, who accompanied us, pointed and said that the hill in front of the cliff is the meeting place. The position of the elders, while the ordinary people who observe can sit on the slope of the hill. At that time, Iceland had no royal family, royal power, and no permanent government agencies. It mainly relied on such a parliament to adjudicate and arbitrate various incidents every year, based on unwritten customary laws.Because it is unwritten, there are some experts who are proficient in various rules among the people participating in the meeting, and the law is on their hearts.

In this way, the annual conference connects the whole of Iceland. This kind of connection is not by kingship but by law. It has been practiced between the valleys and cliffs for so many years, which is really spectacular. The two companions who were traveling with me asked: In an era without loudspeaker equipment, the issues discussed in such an environment must not be detailed, and they are probably all life-threatening events, right? I said yes.I have read the sakya, know what things are discussed, and I go further and tell my partner why these things are.The reason is that the parties basically all have a little pirate background, either near or far.

A group of pirates and their families from northern Europe settled down here, but they felt more and more necessary to establish their own arbitration mechanism to judge honor and disgrace, so they gradually got close to the law and became the group that relied on the authority of law the most. This historical process is already meaningful, and what is more profound is that they have to settle their bloody feelings before and after the law, and gradually cleanse and improve their personality and soul. This is exactly why Sakya can't let me put it down.Ms. Shi Qin'e, an outstanding Nordic literature research expert in our country, said that the characters represented by Sakya are all pirates or became prosperous after becoming pirates, so their concepts are all Viking-style.The saga is an epic of pirates reborn.

As far as I know, the Vikings arrived in Iceland with the guidance of two crows in the early ninth century, and about 20,000 people have arrived one hundred years later. Most of them are already peaceful settlers, but the people who control them Such a society is of course full of strange stories. In terms of age, this is equivalent to Guan Hanqing and Wang Shifu in Chinese history who are chanting the story of Zhao Kuangyin to Empress Li.However, the Chinese society at that time had matured to the point of exhaustion, and it was difficult to find vigorous blood, primitive melancholy, and open-minded boldness on the whole.China has accumulated too many established concepts, while Iceland is still creating one by one at the cost of its life, enjoying the self-consciousness of a giant only in the initial stage.These giants are still willing to stand in the mountains, Thingvelli's lava is a rough platform to receive these heroes.

People like to focus on its advanced significance, that is, to affirm that it has experimented with parliamentary politics in the universe ahead of time, but I, on the contrary, focus more on its lagging significance, that is, a few thousand years behind it shows how early human beings learned to commit individual behavior to Give social justice. It is actually not easy for human beings to enter civilization from ignorance and barbarism, because most of the thousands of reasons for individual behavior do not conform to social justice, but social justice is the premise of civilization. Many good people originally rose up in pursuit of justice, but in the end they brought greater injustice to others.Such examples abound, so there are so many stories of grievances and feuds between the East and the West that both ignore the rules and look forward to the rules.This is a great spiritual hurdle that is very difficult and must be passed by human beings.Only by passing this spiritual danger can we embark on the road of civilization and move towards today.

Mental danger is of course invisible, and it is difficult to imagine because of the age, but Thing Wedley makes us see it. Back then, the heroes in Iceland were not afraid of bleeding to death, but they were afraid of the jagged rocks here.Ordinary thieves have long been swept away by time, but they stayed because they had a minimum standard of honor and spiritual grade, but it was these standards and grades that allowed them to stay that needed to be judged, so those stalwart bodies, The cloudy eyes are facing here from afar, guessing and expecting year after month. There is no temple of gods here, except for the wind in the valley, the voice of the wise, and the shouts of the people.Judging from Sakya’s account, it was the voice of the wise men that played a decisive role, rather than the shouts of the people. It seemed that the people at that time came to listen to the judgment of the wise men.