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  • Kong Magnus Håkonsson Lagabøtes landslov I-II: Norrøn tekst med fullstendig variantapparat del I og II ed. by Magnus Rindal and Bjørg Dale Spørck
  • Jan Ragnar Hagland
Kong Magnus Håkonsson Lagabøtes landslov I-II: Norrøn tekst med fullstendig variantapparat del I og II. Edited by Magnus Rindal and Bjørg Dale Spørck. Arkivverket Norrøne Tekster, 9. Oslo: National Archives of Norway, 2018. Pp. 1009. 5 illustrations. NOK 350.

In 1274, King Magnus Hákonsson the Lawmender (1263–1280) passed a code of laws which covered all of Norway (hereafter referred to as landslova). Prior to this time, legislation, civil as well as ecclestiastial, had been regional. In the early Scandinavian Middle Ages, Norway had four legal districts: the Gulaþing area, the Frostaþing area, the Eiðsivaþing area, and the Borgarþing area. The lawbooks from the former two have been preserved, but only the ecclesiastical laws of the latter two have survived. In 2024, 750 years will have passed since Magnus the Lawmender's remarkable reform of the laws was carried out. It is to be expected that this will be celebrated in various ways. Since 2012, a research project led by the legal historian Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde has been running at the University of Bergen in preparation for the celebrations. The text-critical edition here reviewed is part of this important project.

A new edition of Magnus the Lawmender's code of laws is an event which deserves attention, since hitherto the edition most used by scholars dates back to 1848 (vol. II of the series Norges gamle Love indtil 1387 I-V [1846–1895]). This new edition is published in two presentable volumes as number nine in the series Norrøne Tekster–a series which already includes Den eldre Gulatingslova (The Older Gulathing Law) as number six, and De eldste østlandske kristenrettene (The Oldest East Norwegian Church Laws) as number seven. The former of these two volumes was edited by Bjørn Eithun, Magnus Rindal, and Tor Ulset (1994); the latter was edited by Eyvind Fjeld Halvorsen and Magnus Rindal (2008).

The manuscript material on which the new edition is based is well accounted for in a thorough and useful introduction to the edited law text (pp. 18–54). This also applies to the principles of text rendering and the listing of variants (pp. 13–18). A considerable number of manuscripts considered to have text-critical value is included in the variant apparatus. A total of forty-three full manuscripts are listed, in addition to fifty-four fragments. This material is dated mainly on paleographic and linguistic evidence. Only manuscript AM 309 fol. provides a date (September 4, 1325). Based on the kind of evidence just mentioned, a chronological distribution of the manuscript material used may be summed up as follows: The corpus of forty-three full manuscripts contains two that are considered to be older than ca. 1300; thirty-two are dated to the period between ca. 1300 and 1350; five to the period ca. 1350–1400; and four to the sixteenth century. There is no manuscript dated to the fifteenth century. The fragments consist of seven that are probably older than ca. 1300; a majority of forty-three has been dated to the period ca. 1300–1350. There are three dated to the period ca. 1350–1500. The youngest fragment, which is part of a manuscript that contains other law [End Page 407] manuscripts, originates in the period between ca. 1550 and 1600. This means, summa summarum, that the majority of the manuscript evidence used in the variant apparatus of the new edition is dated in the first half of the fourteenth century. As pointed out by the editors (p. 65), reliable stemmatic relationships cannot be established among all these manuscripts. This seems to be the general practise as far as Norse law manuscripts are concerned, as has been pointed to by others (e.g., Grethe Authén Blom, Historisk tidsskrift 53 [1974]).

Nevertheless, the thorough presentation of the entire manuscript evidence that we see here should be regarded as an asset to the new edition...

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