Scandinavia had a similar situation to the one found for example in early Anglo-Saxon
England and early Ireland, with small kingdoms, lordships and short-lived larger
kingdoms. However, since we lack written sources in Scandinavia, we have no names
for the possible lords, petty kings, kings and ‘high kings’. Therefore, the mention by
Jordanes of a king Roþulf for the people called ranii (hence in Ranríki) becomes very
important (‘ranii, over whom Roduulf was king not many years ago’). It hence seems a
possible hypothesis that pre-Viking Age Scandinavia had a similar structure to Anglo-
Saxon England, and to the Old Irish tuath system, with small kingdoms or at least
polities under the control of a king, dróttinn, jarl or some other leader.
A toponymic analysis of these small länder, together with what we may reconstruct
from later written sources, indicates that what seems to have kept these communities
together was a common judicial custom. Attempts have been made to reconstruct focal
sites in these länder (often called þing, þingbrekka, þingløt, þingberg, þingmót, þingvall/vo ̨llr,
þjóðstefna, þjóðarmál, þjódarlyng, vall/vo ̨llr/vellir, liung/lyng, løt, haugr, fylkishaugr, lo ̨gberg),
hence mounds, hillocks or plain fields, suitable for assembling, places where people met
for legal discussions and settlements (Brink 2003 a, b, 2004 ). It is perfectly clear that
these legal communities were not working within an egalitarian peasant society, which
was the belief in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but were instead a
hierarchical society, with kings, chieftains, free peasants, probably (semi-free) tenants
and copy holders, and, at the bottom, slaves. The question is hence, who controlled the
þing assembly? Was it a king or a chieftain, or was the ‘public’ important? What was the
role of the Lawspeaker and how was he picked out in the community – was he a chieftain
that ‘took’ the position, or was he elected to the office (if so, however, certainly from the
upper stratum in society)? Most probably someone ‘controlled’, maybe even ‘owned’,
the þing assembly. But with practically no written sources, we have to make probable
models from the few written sources we have, from toponymy and landscape analyses,
from retrospective analyses of the Old Icelandic literature and from early medieval
documents, and from comparing with the Frankish, Anglo-Saxon and Irish cultures.
The important knowledge we gain is that the Viking Age society, or rather societies,
were legal societies, for which the borrowing of the word lo ̨g into the English language
(law, OE lagu < Pr.-Nordic *lagu-) during this period is one obvious piece of evidence.
THE PROVINCIAL LAWS IN SCANDINAVIAThe earliest written laws in Scandinavia emanate from the high and late Middle Ages
(roughly eleventh to fourteenth century). They are to be seen as offsprings of the same
tradition as the Continental Germanic laws (leges barbarorum), such as the laws of the
Franks (i.e. Lex Salica), the Lombards, the Bavarians, the Anglo-Saxons etc., which,
however, started to be written down much earlier than in Scandinavia. The Continental
laws were all – in principle – written down in Latin, whereas the laws of the Anglo-
Saxon kings and the Scandinavian provinces strangely enough are in the vernacular.
The Scandinavian laws are not contemporary texts from the Viking Age. Therefore a
big issue in the discussion of these early provincial laws of Scandinavia has been to
decide to what extent they reflect earlier (thus Viking Age) legal customs, or whether
they exclusively reflect medieval legal ideology, mainly based on Roman and Canon law.
Hence, were these laws orally transmitted legal traditions and customs, which were then
written down, or medieval codifications and legislation by political agents in the Middle
–– Stefan Brink––