Verba Volant, Scripta Manent? Aspects of Early Scandinavian Oral Society

We all have our problems. President Charles de Gaulle of France said, probably with a huge sigh, ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’. Another French sovereign, however, in quite another time, Charlemagne of Francia, had his ruling problems: in Italy, c. 806, faithful men claimed not to be bound by the additions made to Lex Salica by Charlemagne in 803, because they declared that they had not heard the ruler announce them personally. Thus the Italians at that time did not feel forced to accept a written decree: the orally declared word was given supremacy (Nelson 1990: 267; cf. Clanchy 1993: 186 and 262-3). This problem – not de Gaulle’s, but Charlemagne’s – becomes acute for everyone working with early Scandinavian society and culture: when does the transition from a predominantly oral society to one based primarily on literacy take place? And is it possible to reconstruct early Scandinavian oral culture in some way? What I am particularly aiming at in this chapter is to try to understand how decrees, communal rules and official proclamations were transmitted and remembered in a society with no written documents or records. Hence what I would like to explore here is whether we can find any reminiscences of this oral tradition in our oldest written records, runic inscriptions and provincial laws, and thus to investigate the ‘communal language’ of pre-historic Scandinavian society.