Thingvellir

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The rift valley in southwest Iceland where the Althing, the island's ancient parliament, was held and which is now a national park and World Heritage site
2. A historic plain in Iceland, famed as the meeting place of the early Icelandic legislative assembly and celebrated today for its dramatic geology
3. The Icelandic valley where the old national assembly once convened, now a protected landscape of cliffs and fissures listed by UNESCO

Etymology: Þingvellir is the name of a plain in southwest Iceland, and its name is a compound of two Old Norse words: "þing", meaning an assembly, and "vellir", the plural of "völlr", meaning a field. The "þing" element is the same one found in the modern Icelandic parliament, the Alþingi, and in place names across Scandinavia, where assemblies were held outdoors on open ground. The site was Iceland's main assembly ground from the early Viking Age, when the Alþingi met there each summer to settle disputes and pass laws. The gathering was held in a natural amphitheatre formed by the rift valley, where a speaker could be heard across the crowd. Assemblies at this place continued for centuries, and the site is still central to Icelandic national identity. Because the land sits on the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, the rift and its cliffs were formed by the slow spreading of the plates, not by human activity.