CHAPTER TWO

LAW AND SOCIETY

Polities and legal customs in Viking Scandinavia

Stefan Brink

EARLY POLITIES AND PREHISTORIC PROVINCES

D

uring the Viking Age Scandinavia was finally moving towards the establishment
of territorialised and unified kingdoms or states. Although we have no written
records for this, we must assume that there were several kingdoms or polities before the
establishment of Denmark, Norway and Sweden as major kingdoms. We know of several
people (gens) in Scandinavia, mentioned by classical authors at the beginning of the first
millennium, and by Jordanes in his history of the Goths, Getica, from around ad 500.
Many of these can be identified and geographically located, for example: theustes, which
should be the people living in the small province of Tjust; finnaithi, the people living
in Finnveden; and ostrogothae, the Östgötar – all in southern Sweden; raumariciae, the
people living in Romerike; grannii, the people living in Grenland; and ranii, the people
living in Ranríki – all to be found in (medieval) Norway.
The provinces of Scandinavia, today called landskap, in prehistoric times called land,
are certainly prehistoric, no doubt existent in and probably older than the Viking Age.
We have for example the name Jämtland mentioned on the runestone on Frösön as
eotalont (J RS 1928 : 66 ), and Hadeland in Norway mentioned in the inscription on the
Dynna runestone (N 68 ) as haþalanti, both runestones dated to the eleventh century.
As is mentioned elsewhere in this book, Denmark and Norway began to emerge
as major kingdoms in the tenth century (see Roesdahl, ch. 48 , and Krag, ch. 47 , below).
However, state formation was a process covering several centuries. Many researchers
believe today that several smaller polities, land, in Denmark were united into a kingdom
already in the eighth century (e.g. Olsen 1999 : 23 – 37 ; Näsman 1999 , 2000 ). For
Norway, control of the smaller polities or land – especially along the coast – was an
obvious struggle in the early tenth century, when the polities along the ‘North Way’,
obviously the coastal route, were united under the control of a king, hence the
emergence of the name Norway. Sweden, however, remained a very confederate kingdom
during all of the Middle Ages, consisting of different provinces (Sw land sg., länder pl.)
(see Lindkvist, ch. 49 , below).
The interesting question, extremely difficult to answer due to the lack of written
sources, is what was the societal base for these smaller polities or land? It is probable that