Västgötalagen

• 1. Introduction

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  Västgötalagen is the oldest Swedish text written in Latin script, and it carries a question inside it that few medieval law codes would dare ask: what happens to an inheritance when the heir vanishes into the Byzantine Empire? That question was not hypothetical. Swedish men were leaving the provinces of Västergötland and Dalsland in such numbers to join the Varangian Guard in Constantinople that the law had to address it directly. The code used a name that reveals how far away Byzantium felt from the Swedish countryside: "Greece." The drafters of Västgötalagen were not just writing rules about mills and thieves. They were trying to hold a society together at a moment when it was pulling apart at the edges. The manuscript that survives contains lists of bishops and kings, notes on where Sweden ended and Denmark began, and a record of every lawspeaker the region had known. What kind of document was this, exactly? And how did it come to be the oldest thing written in Latin letters on Swedish soil?

• 2. A Law for Two Provinces

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  Västgötalagen governed the provinces of Västergötland and Dalsland, and also Mo härad, during the latter half of the thirteenth century. It was compiled in the early part of that same century, probably at least partly at the instigation of a man named Eskil Magnusson. The earliest complete text is dated 1281. Fragments of an older text have been dated to 1250, pushing the origins of the code back further still. Like other medieval Swedish laws, the Older Västgöta Law was divided into balkar, or books, and then into flockar, or chapters. The rubrics in the Codex Holmiensis B 59 give the titles in Old Swedish: Kirkiu bolkær covered the Church, Af mandrapi addressed manslaughter, and Gipta bolkær governed matrimony. There were chapters on wounds, on accidental wounds, on fights, on inheritance, on land, on thieves, and even a section titled Lecara rætar, meaning Jester's rights. The scope of the code was not limited to criminal matters. It reached into the texture of daily life, specifying in one heading exactly how a mill shall be built.

• 3. The Varangian Clause

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  One passage in Västgötalagen stands out for what it reveals about the world beyond Sweden's borders. Scandinavian men were enlisting in the Byzantine Varangian Guard in such numbers that the code declared no one could inherit property while staying in what it called "Greece" , the term Scandinavians of that era used for the Byzantine Empire. The intention was to stop the emigration. The drafters of the law understood that two other European courts were simultaneously drawing Scandinavians away: Kievan Rus', which recruited them from roughly 980 to 1060, and London, which maintained a Scandinavian guard unit known as the Þingalið from 1018 to 1066. The inheritance ban was a legal lever pulled against a tide of mobility. It named a distant empire and tried to make departure costly. The fact that such a rule was needed at all tells us that the pull of Constantinople was strong enough to reach into the farms and villages of Västergötland.

• 4. Laurentius and the Margins

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  Around 1325, a priest named Laurentius in Vedum added material to the oldest manuscript of Äldre Västgötalagen, the Elder Westrogothic law. What he added was not more law. He compiled notes on the border between Sweden and Denmark, lists of bishops in Skara, and lists of lawspeakers in Västergötland. He also wrote out a list of Swedish kings. That royal list begins with Olof Skötkonung and ends with Johan Sverkersson. These additions sit alongside sections on illegal appropriation and cases of non-compensable crimes, making the manuscript a layered object: part legal code, part historical record, part antiquarian notebook. Some headings that follow the main law sections in the manuscript are described as related to laws, while others reflect the interests of an antiquarian. Laurentius was doing something that medieval scribes often did. He was using the margins and blank leaves of a practical document to preserve things he thought mattered.

• 5. Two Versions, One Stemma

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  Västgötalagen exists in two versions. The first is Äldre Västgötalagen, the Elder Westrogothic law. The second is Yngre Västgötalagen, the Younger Westrogothic law. A printed edition of both was published by Carl Johan Schlyter in 1827, and that edition holds a distinction of its own: it made Västgötalagen the subject of the earliest known stemma, the branching diagram scholars use to map the relationships between manuscript copies of a text. A new edition followed in 1976. The two versions of the law represent different moments in the code's development, and their coexistence points to a tradition of revision and updating rather than a single frozen text. The 1827 edition transformed what had been a manuscript tradition, known to specialists, into a text that could circulate in print and attract the attention of linguists, historians, and legal scholars. It also fixed the code's place in the history of philology, as the first object to which the stemmatic method was applied in a published form.