This year marks the 750th anniversary of Norway’s first nationwide law under King Magnus Lagabøte. In connection with this, the Norwegian National Archives is making all Norse fragments of national law manuscripts available in the Digital Archive.
The work of digitizing the fragments will be completed during the year, and we place great emphasis on making the material more accessible to researchers and historians.
An important source for research
The Swedish National Archives’ collection of medieval fragments consists of parts of law manuscripts and other manuscripts, i.e. handwritten books, from the Middle Ages. These have come to the Swedish National Archives because they have been reused as bindings. In the 16th and 17th centuries, they were cut up and used to bind account books.
The collection contains fragments of around 40 manuscripts from Magnus Lagabødt’s national law, as well as fragments of older regional laws.
First archivist at the Swedish National Archives, Jo Rune Ugulen Kristiansen explains that the fragments are important sources from a historical period for which there are few primary sources. «They bear witness to the existence of many books and manuscripts that, for various reasons, have not survived to the present day.
The law fragments often contain interesting ways of reading the legal texts, and also show that the National Act existed in many more manuscripts than we have today.
– «This material is in demand in research environments such as language history, legal history, music history and church history,» Kristiansen explains. «In addition to the text itself and its content, we also study the materials used – the dyes, ink and parchment.
Digitization and accessibility in the Digital Archive
In connection with the national law anniversary, we are photographing all Norse fragments of national law manuscripts. We strive to ensure that the quality of the photographs is so good that in most cases the user does not need to see the physical document.
In addition to photographing one fragment at a time, we photograph several fragments assembled into larger units, as they probably belonged together before they were cut into smaller pieces. The assembly into larger units is based on Thorsten Eken’s book «Gammalnorske membranfragment i Riksarkivet».
In addition, we emphasize that the information associated with the fragments is good, so that it should be easier to find them in the Digital Archive.
Here you can see the fragments that have already been published in the Digital Archive.
