In 1117, the Alþingi decided that all the laws should be written down and this was accomplished at Hafliði Másson’s farm over that winter and published the following year. This could represent the way in which the law was interpreted differently by different scribes or by different citizens.Īccording to the Grágás, one third of the Icelandic laws were recited by the Law Speaker at the Icelandic national parliament, the Alþingi, each year over a three-year period. Sometimes the Konungsbók and Staðarhólsbók present different information, sometimes complementary information, and sometimes contradictory information. Because the Grágás laws originally existed in two different forms, each has a unique written account of the law. The ornate detail and appearance of the volumes suggests that they were created for a wealthy, literate man, though scholars cannot be certain. Instead, the Grágás was derived from two smaller, fragmentary volumes known as the Konungsbók (Copenhagen, Royal Library, GKS 1157 fol), apparently written around 1260, and Staðarhólsbók (Reykjavík, Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, AM 334 fol), apparently written in 1280. The Grágás does not contain a unified body of law, as arguably one never existed in the Icelandic Commonwealth.
The existing Icelandic Commonwealth laws that now exist as the Grágás never actually existed in one complete volume during medieval times.
According to Ari Thorgilsson, the earliest Icelandic laws were modeled on those from the Norwegian west-coast law-province, Gulathing.
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