When the Norwegian King Magnus Håkansson Lagabøter ("Law-Mender") of Norway in 1274 issued a law book valid for his entire kingdom, he was only the third European medieval ruler to do so, after Emperor Frederick II in 1231 (the Liber augustalis for Sicily) and King Alphonso X in the 1260s (the Siete partidas for Castile). Another potential model for the Norwegian legislation was the canon law book Decretals (or Liber extra) that Pope Gregory IX issued in 1234, which unlike the other two potential models can be proven to have been known in Norway in the thirteenth century. With King Magnus's law book, Norwegian law was modernized in accordance with developments within European legal thought, for instance introducing some aspects of the Romano-canonical procedure, centralizing more of judicial power in judges appointed by the king, and embracing the idea of equity (reason) as a source of law that judges might have recourse to alongside a strict reading of the law.
In preparation for the 750th anniversary of the Landslov, Norway is preparing a sequence of popular and scholarly events and publications (in both traditional and modern media). The volumes under review make up an early outcome of these preparations: a new, scholarly edition of the Landslov itself. The National Library of Norway has also published much of its contents on their website, at https://www.nb.no/forskning/lagabote/ressurser/. This includes the entire edition, the massive critical apparatus, and much subsidiary material, some of which was not included in the printed edition, which was published by the National Archives of Norway.
A new edition was needed for several reasons. Rudolf Keyser and P.A. Munch (uncle of the artist Edvard M.) published the previous edition in 1848 within the multi-volume collection Norges gamle love, containing all the medieval laws of Norway and Iceland. The old edition is easily available on the internet, but challenges most modern readers with its fraktur typeface (https://www.nb.no/items/URN:NBN:no-nb_digibok_2015012808049). Even more problematically, Gustav Storm established already in 1879 that Keyser and Munch had chosen the wrong manuscript for their base text. They based their edition on a manuscript at the Arnamagnaean Institute in Copenhagen, AM 60 4:o, while a manuscript in the Royal Library of Stockholm, Holm. Perg. 34 4:o, provides an older and better text. Also, they did not reproduce in the edition all variants from the no less than 41 complete manuscripts and some fragments that they had collated. Their edition came a little too early to draw on some early manuscript fragments discovered later in the nineteenth century as binding materials in the Norwegian National Archives. In addition, their printed edition contains rather too many misprints. The new edition rectifies these problems and is thus already for this reason very welcome.
Weighing in at 1009 printed pages distributed over two volumes, the new edition certainly answers to the most stringent scholarly demands that could be put forth. The text reproduces that of Holm. Perg. 34 4:o, which was transcribed from photographs, but it also includes short sections from other manuscripts, notably including King Håkon Håkonsson's statutes (rettarböter) apparently from 1260, which normally accompany the Landslov in the manuscripts, but which happen not to be included in the Stockholm volume. The apparatus reports completely all variant readings in forty-three complete manuscripts and in fragments (usually short) from at least fifty further manuscripts. This adds up to tens of thousands of variant readings reported in numbered footnotes, a truly herculean task. As might be expected, the critical apparatus not seldom overwhelms the actual text of the law book, especially since the publisher decided to begin each note on a new line, leaving much white space at the bottom right of each page. At places with much variation in the tradition, the effect may be disorienting at first, as when the first line of the section devoted to tenancy of land ("Landsleigubǫlkr"), appearing at the top of page 600, is provided with five pages of critical notes in a smaller font, before the actual text begins again on the sixth page with five lines of text and 38 footnotes (606). When the text is (appropriately) non-normalized and about every two or three words is provided with a sometimes four-digit footnote references, the result is not an edition for those faint of heart.
Those with sufficient philological hardiness to face this edition will, however, find a treasure trove that delights and intrigues. It is rare that editions of texts surviving in more than a dozen or so manuscripts, let alone forty-three, are published with complete critical apparatus, so this is a publication to be grateful for. It invites detailed and rich textual work that takes the entire manuscript transmission into account. The tradition of the Landslov surely merits closer scrutiny than it has so far received. One might, for example, note that several individual chapters seem to have had a peripatetic existence within the law book, sometimes being left out, sometimes appearing in one place, sometimes in another. One example is the text that all editors including the present ones have printed as chapter 4 in the section devoted to procedural law, the Þingfararbǫlkr. The first half of the chapter specifies that legal cases should be judged according to evidence and witnesses, then it provides some detail about the use of witnesses. This passage is missing at this point in some ten manuscripts (being added in the margin in one of them, and after what usually is the second half of chapter 4 in another). In several of these manuscripts, the passage is instead found early in the much later section devoted to commercial law (Kaupabǫlkr), something that is not signaled in the old edition of the procedural section, illustrating its short-comings. Five manuscripts contain the passage in both contexts. I am unclear about exactly what this textual disturbance might mean, but surely this is a matter that deserves to be looked into in greater depth than has so far been done. It is striking that the passage concerns details of procedural law which at the time was much discussed in the law schools of Europe.
This and other chapters with disturbed transmission must be capable of telling us interesting things about the development of law in Norway around the middle of the thirteenth century, especially when they, as the chapter discussed above, concern what was at the time "modern" or "new" law. The new edition allows and inspires close study of such cases.
Considering the enormous amount of information on offer in the edition, it is not surprising that the editors have not themselves taken all the information directly from the manuscripts. They have partially worked with Keyser's and Munch's handwritten transcriptions and collations from the 1840s, which today reside in the Norwegian National Library and have been made available digitally on the internet (nb.no). The editors have carefully compared selections from these old notes with the manuscripts and have found them to be remarkably reliable (unlike the apparatus in the 1848 printed edition), which has allowed the editors to complete their work at relative speed.
Those who are simply looking for a reliable Old Norwegian text of the Landslov, without worrying too much about variants from dozens of manuscripts, might be less well served by this edition, which does not easily lend itself to leisurely reading straight through. The website associated with the project (see above) provides a version of the text without the apparatus. A normalized text synthesizing the readings in the most important manuscripts is under work by Magnus Rindal, who was one of the editors of the large edition. That edition is also being translated into modern Norwegian (nynorsk) and into English. I hope the translations will be published on paper, on pages facing the normalized Old Norwegian text, which would create eminently useful hand editions, sufficient for most needs. Legal historians would certainly consider such editions a god-send, as would many others. An edition of King Magnus's Town Law (Byloven) is also under work. The king promulgated this law book in 1276, soon after finishing the Landslov. As far as I am aware, there are no plans for new editions of the other law books produced in Norway under King Magnus. The law for the king's court or hird, the Hirdskrå was published twenty years ago. [1] More problematic is that the project will, apparently, not include the Church laws issued by King Magnus and his father King Håkon, which at the time lead to great controversies when the Archbishop of Trondheim Jon Raude strongly opposed them and instead produced his own Church law. One of the two editors of the volumes under review, Bjørg Dale Spørck, produced good editions of three of the Church laws of the two kings for her dissertation of 2006, which however was printed in a small pressrun and is not readily available outside of Norway. The most widely spread royal church law ("Nyere Gulatings kristenrett I") as well as Archbishop Jon's eminently interesting Church law, which reflects the up to date canon law of his time, has not been edited since Keyser and Munch in 1848. All these expressions of the ius particulare of medieval canon law are of great interest to international research in that field and they ought to be published with translations into English. They are available in reliable modern Norwegian (bokmål) translations by Spørck. [2]
The national law book of King Magnus is divided into nine sections of differing length, dealing with the main aspects of law, roughly: court procedure, Norway's constitution, defense, protection of persons, inheritance, property, tenancies, commerce, and theft. In this, it is similar to most secular law books from the thirteenth century, while books inspired by Roman and canon law tend to be hierarchically organized in books and titles. Church matters, such as marriage law, are left out, although the second section is labelled "Christianity section" (Kristinsdómsbǫlkr), but most of its contents is more in the vein of constitutional law. Only the first two chapters are specifically about ecclesiastical concerns: that everyone in Norway must believe in a specific Christian creed (ch. 1) and that the king and the bishops have separate spheres of responsibility (ch. 2). The long chapter 5 outlines in detail how the Norwegian Crown should be inherited at the king's death, regulations that would get a workout in the next three vacancies on the Norwegian throne: an oldest son should inherit first (as at Magnus's death in 1280); brother in the third place (as in 1299); and a daughter's son only in the eighth place (1319). Among the other sections, the one devoted to tenancies is long (65 chapters) and complex. This section illuminates the imperfect organization of the law book, characteristic of many a medieval book. A reader might wonder why rules about salmon, herring, and whale fisheries, about bear hunts and river ferries are included in this section, nominally devoted to the leasing of real estate. As the examples demonstrate, medievalists beyond legal historians have much to work with in the law book.
The editors and the publishers should be applauded for their fine work in making an important medieval law book available in a first-rate edition. It is an exciting time when we may look forward to continued publications and events devoted to one of the most important law books of the thirteenth century. To order this work see https://www.arkivverket.no/om-oss/vare-publikasjoner/arkivverkets-bokhandel/kilder-fra-tiden-for-1537/kong-magnus-hakonsson-lagabotes-landslov.
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Notes:
1. Hirdskråen: Hirdloven til Norges konge og hans handgångne menn etter AM 322 fol., ed. Steinar Imsen (Oslo: Riksarkivet, 2000).
2. Bjørg Dale Spørck, Nyere norske kristenretter (ca. 1260-1273) (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2009).