sign in sign up
<<
Home , Kalmar Union, Viking Age

chapter three

THE SCANDINAVIAN SOCIETIES AT THE TIME OF THE PROVINCIAL LAWS

Scandinavia as model of analysis

Here, as in much other research, the word is used as a natural united concept for the Scandinavian kingdoms. The idea of the Nordic area being something unique is deeply rooted, and in the modern political debate Nordic collaboration is often juxtaposed with European cooperation. The focus on the uniqueness of the Nordic area that binds Scandinavians together has many causes—linguistic, geo- graphical, and not least historical. The Union between the three Nordic kingdoms in 1397 is the most significant example of the special Scandinavian intercon- nectedness. Furthermore, was a part of the Swedish kingdom until the Russian takeover in 1809, and the double monarchy between and was succeeded by a Swedish-Norwegian union in 1814. In the nineteenth century, the idea that Scandinavia was a united and unique area gained influence with the political movement , which had the ideological aim of uniting Scandinavia. Even though the project never materialized, it left its marks in the form of increased Nordic collaboration, which legally led to the estab- lishment of the Nordic legal collaboration in 1872. This in turn has had a profound influence on the creation of the idea of Scandinavia as a legal unit. Historians and legal historians of the nineteenth century strength- ened and developed the idea of the special status of Scandinavia. In , the Germanists attempted to find out how the social- and legal order had functioned before the Romans and, later, Christian- ity brought changes. Within legal history, the theory of the original Germanic kinship society gained influence. This construction, whose ideological basis was the national romantic pursuit of the antique past, had its foundation partly in the extant “tribal” and provincial laws and partly in two antique books relating to Germanic people: Caesar’s 34 chapter three

Commentarii de bello gallico and Tacitus’ .1 Even though it is well known that Scandinavia was a part of the Germanic civilization, the Nordic areas did not develop like the German areas, first because Christianity came much later to Scandinavia than to most German areas. The desire to demonstrate a unique Nordic culture was nurtured by the imminent nationalism that, throughout the nineteenth century, led to conflicts between Denmark and Germany. Germany’s defeat of Denmark in 1864 led not only many Danish scholars but also their Norwegian and Swedish colleagues to turn their back on the south. A shared Nordic past was recreated from a combination of Icelandic , the -poems, Saxo, and other medieval historians, with the idea of a kinship society that was nurtured by the interpretation of the provincial laws by legal historians. The most explicit expression of the idea of a single Nordic culture is probably the construction of the notion the Age2 as well as the theory that one can trace the existence of a particular Nordic identity far back in time. Many still perceive this idea to be valid because historical texts consciously or unconsciously still present research that confirms that all Nordic territories in the pre-Christian era had identical social and political structures. Since the sources are very sporadic, regional differences are very difficult to uncover, not only from the pre-Christian era but also from the . Focus on the Nordic and the more narrowly national has also meant that archaeological finds have often been interpreted in a national con- text, a tendency that has changed in the archaeological research in the most recent decades, when objects dated as far back as the and, in the current context even more interestingly, Germanic have been interpreted within a continental European con- text. There evidently are many similarities between the objects, which

1 even though the idea of a primeval kinship society can still be found in more recent works (such as, e.g., Hoff, Lov og landskab, p. 325), they are unique exceptions. Most legal historians have rejected the idea, because the foundation of the arguments conflicted with source criticism (see, e.g., Elsa Sjöholm, Sveriges medeltidslagar. Euro- peisk rättstradition i politisk omvandling ( 1988), p. 51. Furthermore, the docu- ments on which the Germanists based their studies cannot be distinguished as either “true” Germanic or Roman/Christian (Alan Murray, Germanic Kinship Structure— Studies in Law and Society in Antiquity and the (Toronto 1983), pp. 116–130). 2 For the construction of the concept, see: Anders Lundt Hansen, I begyndelsen var Ordet . . . Overgangen fra runer til romerskrift i Danmark 800–1300 ( 2001), pp. 71–84.