scandinavian thing history

What is known of the legal proceedings of Iceland during the Viking era is probably true in a general sense of the government of all the Nordic peoples. Laws derived from the decisions of the Thing - an assembly of landowning free men. Each district, of which there might be as many as a hundred in a given county, had its own assembly, and the judgments of the Thing were passed on orally from one generation to the next. Great regional assemblies, at which men from many districts came together - usually in the summer - considered such larger questions as the election of kings, the declaration of war, the religious conversion of the people. The first truly national Thing was called in Iceland in 930 - and this Thing would meet annually almost without interruption until 1798. The great and chronic weakness of the Thing everywhere that it existed was its inability to implement its decisions. Legislative and judicial in character, it lacked executive power, and often its decisions - especially where individual complaints were involved - were ultimately settled by duel or some other violent means. 
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