Word: thingvellir
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Driving through rain east of Reykjavík to look at Thingvellir, site of the first Icelandic parliament (established 930), the oldest such assembly in the world. I'm not feeling so young myself, the imagination blank except for memories of a book called Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and memories of the Icelandic sagas, populated by heroes with unpronounceable names who made elegant speeches and went at one another with axes. More recent memories: news analyses assuring the public that Reagan and Gorbachev definitely are and definitely are not going to accomplish anything substantive at this presummit summit. Most...
...structure stands at Thingvellir anymore. The place where the ancient Icelandic chieftains met is a field by a lake fed by a stream fed by a waterfall that rolls over black rocks with the sound of enthusiastic applause. In summer, tourists pitch tents out here in hordes. This morning finds a single tourist: there was no car on the road but mine. (Is history my scoop...
...weeks relations between Iceland's 170,000 citizens and the U.S. garrison at the great NATO base at Keflavik Airport had been growing steadily touchier. On the Fourth of July a group of U.S. airmen went on a drinking spree at Thingvellir, a pastoral spot sacred to all Icelanders as the first meeting place (in A.D. 930) of the Althing, the oldest continuous Parliament in the world. Last month a U.S. officer's wife was arrested on the suspicion of drunken driving. She phoned the airbase and almost immediately the Icelandic police were surrounded by U.S. troops...
Iceland's thousand-year-old Althing (Parliament) last week carried out the mandate of Icelanders (TIME, May 15). Every bell in the island pealed as Althing members assembled in the open air on Thingvellir (Parliament Plains), passed a law declaring Iceland an independent republic, voted to make Lawyer Sveinn Bjornsson the first president. Since U.S. troops landed in Iceland in 1941 he had served as Regent for Denmark's King Christian X, whose objections to an independent republic were overruled by the Althing...
Iceland, whose Parliament began meeting on the sounding, desolate plains of Thingvellir (pronounced Thing-vod-lef) in 930 A.D., found itself overrun by British and U.S. soldiers, all with a healthy taste for blondes. Prices had risen 70% in less than a year and a half. Fishermen-fishing is Iceland's chief industry-netted almost as many mines as fish. The State liquor monopoly was being wrecked by bootlegging. Premier Hermann Jónasson's Cabinet had fallen twice in less than a month. The 1,011-year-old Parliament (the Althing) had rejected price-control plans...