Possibly the most famous speech act in all of Icelandic literature is the law speaker Þorgeirr Þorkelsson's proclamation that Iceland will convert from the heathen religion of its ancestors to the new religion of Christianity. After spending a mysterious day and night lying under a cloak, Þorgeirr emerges to proclaim that Christianity will be the new religion of the land. In Ari Þorgilsson's Íslendingabók, the earliest account of the Icelandic conversion, Þorgeirr says:

What may be most interesting about this speech is that it is not, in fact, the speech act that converts Iceland to Christianity. Despite any assumptions about what this remarkable speech means or implies, no conversion has yet taken place, nor is it certain at this moment that there ever will be a conversion. Ari is quite clear on the matter, for immediately following Þorgeirr's speech, the narrative continues (emphasis added):

Here, only after Þorgeirr's famous speech, does Ari give an account of the speech act that converted Iceland to Christianity, but while these brief lines describe the speech act, they do not present the speech itself in direct discourse.