Goðafoss — The Waterfall of the Gods and What Was Thrown In

Goðafoss Waterfall, Barðardalur, North Iceland

In the year 1000, the lawspeaker Þorgeir Þorkelsson returned from the Althing having decided Iceland would adopt Christianity. He threw his statues of the Norse gods into the waterfall at Ljósavatn. The waterfall has been called Goðafoss — Waterfall of the Gods — ever since. The gods are still there.

In the summer of the year 1000 CE — the exact date is debated but the year is accepted by historians — the Althing faced a constitutional crisis that threatened to divide Iceland permanently. The Christian and pagan factions each held their own positions in the assembly ground and each declared the other's laws invalid. The risk of civil war was real. The assembly called on its lawspeaker — Þorgeir Þorkelsson of Ljósavatn — to adjudicate. Þorgeir was a pagan. He spent a day and a night under a cloak, not sleeping, not eating, not speaking. When he emerged, he announced that Iceland would be one people under one law, and that law would be Christian. Pagans could continue their practices in private but not in public. Returning to his farm at Ljósavatn, Þorgeir took his statues of the Norse gods — representations of Odin, Thor, Freyr, the figures to whom he had prayed for a life — and threw them into the waterfall at the edge of his land. The waterfall became Goðafoss. The Waterfall of the Gods. The tradition in the district has never agreed on what this act meant. Was it a clean break — a man who made a decision and enacted it completely? Or was it a burial — the gods placed in water, which in the Norse tradition was a sacred medium of preservation, not destruction? The statues are still in the Goðafoss pool. They have been there for a thousand years. The water that passes over them runs north to the sea. Visitors who stand at the falls in winter, when the spray freezes on the surrounding rocks and the sound is enormous, report the same quality that other loud waterfalls do not produce: the sense that something under the water is listening. The gods, if they are there, have been patient.