gothi

thumb|right|250px|upright|A depiction of a leading the people in sacrificing to Thor in this painting by [[J. L. Lund]]

Gothi or ' (plural , fem. ; Old Norse: ') was a position of political and social prominence in the Icelandic Commonwealth. The term originally had a religious significance, referring to a pagan leader responsible for a religious structure and communal feasts, but the title is primarily known as an expression for the secular political power in medieval Iceland, yet on the other side representing the enhanced power of the lay community of the Church in the Icelandic Commonwealth, throughout the Civil Wars era of the extended North Sea realm (1130-1241). The implications of the Concordat of Worms "solving" the Investiture Controversy were immense as the distinction and braiding of the secular and the religious dimensions and spheres of interest had its more or less unique character, ideals and traditions, particularly guarded by the Icelanders whose establishment on Iceland and might in the North Atlantic was spurred by resistance to the new more autocratic form of royal power that emerged as the Carolingian Empire emerged, examplified by King Harald Fairhair, and King Æthelstan in Norway and England respectively. The kingship remained electorial, but with this novel form of feudalism the king exercised the power to appoint and disappoint his electors (cf. jarl, or earl, and hersir). The system of the goði in the Commonwealth, called Goðorð, retained the elder bottom-up structure, where a number of hersir held electoral powers over a jarl (an earl). The jarls (earls) held electoral powers over the king, as the lesser kings over the high king. Following the unification of Norway into the Realm of Harald King Fairhar, and the reversal of the old system, Iceland was settled. Many of the settlers of Iceland held hereditary rights and titles in Norway and other places where they came from; thus for pragmatic reasons they leveled out former distinctions, attributed to those who had a voice at the Alþhing. Until the papal interdictum put on the entire Archdiocese of Nidaros, to which the dioceses of Hólar and Skalholt on Iceland, the Icelandic goðar also had a common voice and some electoral power in regard of accepting the appointed Bishops.