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Guta Lag, the law of the independent island of Gotland, is one of the earliest laws of Scandinavia. The historical appendix to the law, Guta Saga, was written in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Together, Guta Lag and its accompanying Saga provide an invaluable insight into the lives of the people living on Gotland, the largest of Sweden’s Baltic islands, in 1000-1400. Guta Lag and Guta Saga: The Law and History of the Gotlanders is the first time that these two important texts have been translated into English and combined in one edition, accompanied by an extensive commentary and historical contextualisation by Christine Peel. In the Viking Age, the island of Gotland maintained its own law and administrative system. It was distinctive among Swedish provinces, retaining its own laws until 1645 while mainland provincial laws were all superseded by national law in the mid-fourteenth century. Preserved in eight manuscripts, it illustrates the everyday life and administrative system of the people of Gotland. Guta Saga tells the story of the island from its discovery by the legendary Þieluar, who removed the enchantment upon it which led to its inhabitation. Read together, the texts provide a complete picture of an island unique among Scandinavian provinces, offering a rare view of everyday people in medieval Scandinavia. This innovative and timely translation will be fascinating and essential reading for scholars of Scandinavian studies and legal history.
This book addresses the critical terminologies of place and space (and their role within medieval studies) in a considered and critical manner, presenting a scholarly introduction written by the editors alongside thematic case studies that address a wide range of visual and textual material. The chapters consider the extant visual and textual sources from the medieval period alongside contemporary scholarly discussions to examine place and space in their wider critical context, and are written by specialists in a range of disciplines including art history, archaeology, history, and literature.
That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver for transactions, but the slave trade offers another – complementary – explanation. This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places: the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the inflows of dirhams to Rus and northern Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended up on Gotland; the functioning of networks – perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century drug trade; slave-trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional networks that the Vikings brought into play. This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has been available before.
This book presents a novel framework for studying historical legalisation using quantitative methods, with 10 fully-preserved laws from medieval Sweden, written between c. 1225 and 1350, serving as a case study. By applying a systematic classification scheme to each legal provision, it is possible to investigate the major differences and similarities in structure and content between the 10 laws. This, in turn, allows for the re-assessment of many long-standing problems in Swedish and European medieval legal history that have been challenging to address with traditional methods based on text analyses. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, major changes in the proportion of legal provisions devoted to different fields of law, and to prescribed consequences, are found. The book shows how the proportions of civil law and public law expanded at the expense of criminal law. Furthermore, a clear transition from casuistic to more abstract law provisions can also be witnessed.
The Borgarthing Law and the Eidsivathing Law is dedicated to two closely linked medieval laws which were intended to cover adjacent legal provinces in eastern Norway, around and beyond the modern capital, Oslo. The core of this book consists of new translations of the two laws, based on the recent editions and translations into modern Norwegian by Eyvind Fjeld Halvorsen and Magnus Rindal. Individual rules cover subjects such as Church rites, prohibitions, property, and payments, and shed light on medieval ideas relating to matters as diverse as disability, sexual relations, witchcraft, and forbidden foods. The volume contains a general introduction by Torgeir Landro and Bertil Nilsson, in addition to a translator’s introduction by Lisa Collinson, summarizing in English some of the information on manuscripts and relevant linguistic studies outlined by Halvorsen and Rindal. The translated texts in English are also supplemented by footnotes, supplying key readings from the original, in some cases with significant variants from relevant manuscripts. With a commentary on the individual chapters after each translation, drawing on recent scholarship on medieval law, Church history, and other relevant historical fields, this book is an ideal resource for students and scholars of medieval Norwegian legal history.
It is widely accepted that the Viking Age (c. 800–1050) stimulated the development of long-distance, regional and local trade and exchange networks. The clearest archaeological evidence for these contacts is mainly in the form of silver artefacts predominantly found in hoards in Northern and Central Europe – the Baltic zone. However, beyond occasional national- or regional-level research, there have been no attempts at a historically guided comparative archaeological survey of the Baltic zone as a whole. By investigating silver hoards and the context of their deposition, Viking Silver, Hoards and Containers seeks to understand the variety of functions performed by hoards; the differences in function within regions; the hoards’ relationship with trade; and the nature and function of emporia. It also examines the extent to which the findings mesh with literary evidence and the nature of the different societies benefiting from the influx of silver in the Viking Age. Crucially, the book features a catalogue, which provides a thorough overview and update of Baltic-zone hoards. Viking Silver, Hoards and Containers is intended for use by students of, and specialists in, early medieval, Viking and Slavic history and archaeology. However, it will also be a useful teaching resource for other general courses in archaeology, anthropology and material culture, numismatics, economic history, religious studies, GIS and statistics.
Nordic slavery is an elusive phenomenon, with few similarities to the systematic exploitation of slaves in households, mines, and amphitheaters in the ancient Mediterranean or the widespread slavery at American plantations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scandinavians in the early Middle Ages lived in a society foreign to us, characterized by different and shifting social statuses. A person could be at once socially respected and unfree. It was possible to hand oneself over as a slave to someone else in exchange for protection and food. One could be sentenced temporarily to enslavement for some offense but later purchase his manumission. Young men could enter into a kind of "contract" with a king or chieftain to join his retinue, accepting his authority, patronage, and jurisdiction, while at the same time making a quick social elevation. Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the early Middle Ages and Scandinavians, as Stefan Brink illustrates in this book, became a major player in the northern slave trade. However, the Vikings were not particularly interested in taking slaves to Scandinavia; instead, their "business model" seems to have been to raid, abduct, and then sell captured people at major slave markets. Their goal was not people but silver. Using a wide variety of source materials, including archaeology, runes, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names, and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves, Thraldom provides the most thorough survey of slavery in the Viking Age.
Monografie sestává ze dvou hlavních a dvou doplňkových částí. První část přináší nejstarší lingvistické, epigrafické a archeologické informace o raných uživatelích germánských jazyků. Druhá část shrnuje historie jednotlivých jazyků od jejich kmenové minulosti zaznamenané antickými autory a zachycené v raných epigrafických památkách přes jejich literární tradice až po současnost. Přílohy zprostředkovávají hlavní modely genealogické klasifikace germánštiny mezi ostatními indoevropskými větvemi i vlastních germánských jazyků; srovnávací fonetiku a morfologii starých germánských jazyků; několik delších textů antických a středověkých autorů; přehled starogermánských písem; lexikostatistickou klasifikaci starogermánských jazyků a fríských dialektů. Bibliografie je rozdělena do dvou sekcí: (1) primární prameny; (2) (převážně) diachronní studie.