The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2001, Page 40

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 56 #3
Book Reviews
LAWS OF
EARLY ICELAND
Gragas II
Translated and
edited by ^
ANDREW DENNIS
PETER FOOTE
RICHARD PERKINS
Laws of Early Iceland:
Gragas II
translated by Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote and
Richard Perkins
University of Manitoba Press, 2000, Winnipeg
$74.95
Reviewed by DeLloyd J. Guth
In 1980 these three scholars translated
and published Gragas I, which selected
parts of the Codex Regius, the original
manuscript now located in the Old Royal
Collection, Copenhagen, and known to
Icelanders as Konungsbok. The collecting
of these laws began about 1117, their writ-
ing down in the Codex Regius was about
1260, and it was put into Icelandic print by
Vilhjalmur Finsen (3 vols., 1852-1883). The
first English volume (1980) gave us sections
of the Gragas that are crucial to under-
standing Iceland’s medieval institutions
and criminal law procedures: how the
Assembly operated, the duties of the
Lawspeaker and Law Council, the wergild
(man-price) system and the law of homi-
cide. There is also the Christian Laws
Section, which dates from about 1122, fol-
lowing on the mandatory baptism of all
Icelanders in 999/1000.
Now Gragas II gives us the rest of
Codex Regius, with the remaining focus on
civil matters and procedures: rules of inher-
itance, kinship, betrothal and marriage,
possessory rights in land and chattels, con-
tracts, titles, defamation (“mocking” or
unsolicited “love poetry”), and even “bites
from a dog” (p. 201). Medieval Icelanders
certainly loved the rule of law. But did they
live the rule of law? We can never know, if
it is law enforcement evidence that we
require: the medieval equivalencies of
police and judicial records. These do not
survive, even if the institutions producing
such records ever then existed.
But if we read carefully the legal cul-
ture in the Gragas, alongside of the magnif-
icent medieval sagas, we encounter a
uniquely sophisticated jurisprudential
world. Its characteristics match any mod-
ern model for a fully participatory legal
system, operating eight centuries ago on an
isolated North Atlantic island: it expressed
substantive law within the “if ..., then ...”
logical dialectic, starting from a condition-
al or suppositional statement (i.e., if one
does this, then the law will do that); for its
authority, it did not rely on some moral
imperative (i.e., do right and do not do
wrong) or some transcendant source (i.e.,
the gods and goddesses so command!), and
thus each law’s authority rested on the
community’s positivist command; it con-