Skálholt

Skálholt stands beside the river Hvítá in the south of Iceland, a bishop's seat founded in 1056 that was, for eight centuries, one of the two cultural and political centres of the island. Its cathedral, school, smithy and farms, and a monastery while Catholicism lasted, made a sizable gathering of buildings, and Adam of Bremen called it Iceland's largest city around 1075. The diocese belonged to the province of Nidaros from 1153.

The Reformation ended Catholic Iceland here. In 1550 the last Catholic bishop, Jón Arason of Hólar, was executed at Skálholt with his two sons, and the relics of Saint Thorlac were scattered over the cathedral grounds; the partial seizure of the see's estates damaged the Icelandic system of poor relief. The school remained the island's religious and educational centre after Lutheranism came in 1551. In 1570 its teacher Sigurd Stefánsson drew a map from the Norse sagas that placed Vinland at about 51 degrees north, and Bishop Thorlacius made the surviving copy in 1690. In the seventeenth century Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson, who named the Edda in 1643, gathered old manuscripts for the Danish king, among them the Flateyjarbók, which went to Copenhagen in 1656. Skálholt remained a see until 1785.