What’s a thing? As anyone knows, it’s anything. Literally. It’s an all-purpose word that can mean an object, an affair, a situation, a mild obsession or phobia (she’s really got a thing about spiders), or, with a capital T, a certain large, lumpy, orange member of the Fantastic Four. But here’s the thing: before it was a catch-all term, a thing—from the Old Norse þing, was a sort of democratic assembly held throughout the Viking lands of Northern Europe. Viking things were an early experiment with a representative system, allowing disputes to be settled through nonviolent mediation rather than by the bloody conflict that we tend to associate with the Vikings. The egalitarian, socialist principles of modern Sweden may be traced to the concept of the Viking thing. And while the modern concept of representative democracy has its roots in ancient Greece and the Iroquois confederacy, it also owes something to medieval Scandinavia.
So, the next time you’re going to “a thing,” think of the Vikings who first made a thing an official thing. Just don’t picture the assembled Norsemen with horned helmets… that’s an invention of the nineteenth century imagination. For the real Vikings, sporting horns just wasn’t a thing.
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