A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law 2.0
A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law (LMNL) is an innovative lexicon, which presents English equivalents of legal-cultural terms from multiple medieval Nordic languages and explains the usage of many of these words. LMNL is available as a physical volume, free PDF (CC-BY) and is freely searchable online. The mainland Scandinavian countries are (so far) represented by their provincial laws, while Iceland – for historical reasons -- is represented by its national laws. The intention of the proposed project is to supplement the LMNL with the remaining Old Swedish laws, the national laws of King Magnus Eriksson and King Kristoffer respectively, and the older town law (Bjärköarätten) and King Magnus Eriksson town law, as well as King Magnus Lagabøtes Norwegian national law and a Danish town law. With this expansion of the material the LMNL will cover the Old Swedish laws up through the end of the Middle Ages, and the Nordic national laws. The aim is to provide more comprehensive coverage of legal language in the medieval Nordic countries and enable researchers to better compare legal practices and procedures throughout medieval Scandinavia. The project builds on an existing database (LMNL) hosted free of charge by the University of Sheffield, which is currently adapting the editorial interface to simplify data entry. The additions are carried out by editors of the original lexicon project (MNLD).
Final report
A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law (LMNL) has become widely recognized as an important tool for internationalizing research on medieval Nordic laws and legal history by presenting English equivalents of legal-culturally relevant terms in the Old Nordic languages and explaining the use of many of these words. LMNL is an innovative lexicographic resource as it treats all the Nordic languages together on equal standing, which enables a clear presentation of similarities and differences between them. In the follow-up project A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law 2.0 (LMNL2.0), funded by the Swedish Riksbankens jubileumsfond, the existing lexicographic resource, which focused on provincial laws, has been supplemented with Norwegian and Swedish national laws as well as Danish and Swedish town laws. New inclusions within the LMNL now gives the work a broad coverage of c. 500 years of Nordic legal history due to portions of multiple medieval law codes, in particular the national laws being in force long after their initial adoption.
A further seven – for a total of 31 – Nordic medieval laws have been excerpted and inserted into the database. These are:
Danish
The law for trading places and towns for Skåne (SkBL) manuscript from the late 1300s
Norwegian
Magnus Lagabøte's National Law (MLL) 1274
Swedish
The law of the Östgötar (ÖgL) text ca 1290, manuscript 1350, a provincial law that for practical reasons could not be included in its entirety in the original version of LMNL.
Magnus Eriksson's National Law (MEL) 1350s
Kristoffer's National Law (KrL) 1442
Magnus Eriksson's Town Law (MESt) 1350s
The law for trading places and towns for Stockholm (BjR) manuscript from 1345
The new round of editing has resulted in approximately 1,300 new Nordic headwords, 1,500 new English equivalents to Nordic headwords, 16,000 new source references, i.e. information on the laws and codes or equivalent in which the words appear, 150 novel and 30 revised descriptive articles, which provide more detailed information about the use of words in the relevant laws and/or about the cultural-legally relevant concepts related to the words.
As expected, new entries touch on areas such as trade, shipping and administration, but also various forms of punishment, not least in the town laws, as well as words related to royal power and military defence. Examples include klædhishus 'merchandise transit hall' for a kind of customs station in MESt, ledhsaghare 'pilot' in MESt, and a new use of the word raþman 'alderman' which refers to a member of the town's governing council in SkBL, BjR and MESt, and the new (borrowed) words kak 'scaffold', about a kind of punishment in SkBL and bödhil 'executioner', which probably referred more to a jailer in KrL. Examples of new words that deal with royal power and the defence of the kingdom or city include veizlumaðr 'endowed man', which in MLL is a new word for yet another of the king's men, mur 'town wall' which in BjR and MESt refers to Stockholm's defensive wall, skiparastefna 'mariners' summons' in MLL which probably refers to the summoning of a captain and crew to a warship, and marskalker 'marshal' in MEL and KrL who may have been the king's, i.e. the realm's, highest military leader of the cavalry, who however appears as the person who inspects war horses. It is also noteworthy that among the new Nordic words there are several loanwords, mainly from German and Latin.
LMNL has, by all accounts, reached the intended target groups: researchers, teachers and students from virtually all of the Western world in a range of scholarly fields with an interest in various aspects of Nordic medieval history, legal history and language history. This is evidenced by statistics regarding traffic on the database's website, sales of physical copies of the book, printed as well as digital, as well as downloads of the freely available pdf, attention in the form of reviews in scientific journals, direct contacts to the project and references in scientific publications and student theses. Most if not all of these have been enabled largely due to the freely available database online and the Open Access pdf. LMNL has also reached a wider international audience than is typically expected for works in the field, including large parts of South America and Asia as well as parts of Africa, statistics of which are tracked on the publisher's website.
LMNL's pan-Nordic scope and presentation of a specialized terminology in English broaden the research possibilities regarding socio-legal historical aspects in Northern Europe. Recent examples of such research using LMNL are a study of emotions in medieval Netherlands (Bremmer Jr, Rolf H. "In an Overfurious Mood": Emotion in Medieval Frisian Law and Life." Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. 95–124) and investigations of newly discovered runic inscriptions (Zilmer, Kristel. "Rune finds from Finnesloftet." Maal og minne 114.1 (2022)). Moreover the LMNL continues to be used extensively for translations of legal texts such as Jóhanna Katrín Friðrikdóttir’s Magnus the Lawmender’s Laws of the Land from 2024. It also serves as a reference work for literary studies (Anderson, Kimberly. 2024. An Investigation of Advice Giving in the Íslendingasögur. PhD Diss. University of Cambridge), archaeology (e.g. Lingström, Maria. Mästerby, 1361: Battlefield Archaeological Perspectives on the Danish Invasion of Gotland. 2025. Diss. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, 2025). We anticipate even further impact of the Lexicon within these fields and beyond in the coming years. In addition, LMNL is integrated with the Old Norse lexicographic standard work Dictionary of Old Norse prose with links to the corresponding head words in the LMNL.
Since its inception, the work with LMNL has been characterized by international cooperation: the idea was hatched by a Swede and an American in connection with a project based in Scotland that gathered international expertise to translate the Nordic Medieval provincial laws into English (Medieval Nordic Laws, co-financed by The Leverhulme Trust, UK). The original LMNL project (2014–2017) was carried out by scholars from England, Norway, Sweden and the USA. The supplementation has been made by a Swede and an American in Sweden and the Netherlands, respectively. The operation of the resulting database is maintained free of charge and without time limit by The Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), University of Sheffield, England, in continuous contact with project members. The resulting dictionary, which will also be available in traditional printed paper form in this second, extended edition, as a digital e-book and as a freely available pdf for download, is produced by the publisher Open Book Publishers (OBP), Cambridge, England in close collaboration with project members.
The infrastructure in the form of the database will continue to be freely accessible through the DHI, without whose unique services and expertise this project's dissemination would not have been possible as there is no comparable expertise for co-creating, developing and long-term maintenance of digital humanities infrastructure. The data is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) primarily through upcoming APIs that allow searches and data collection from the database in addition to its public user interface. The physical dictionary is available at OBP under an open CC-BY license. All in all, this means that this reference work will continue to be publicly available and re-usable.
The facts that LMNL2.0 is an extension and further development of an existing lexicographic resource, whose approach, structure and working method were already established in connection with the original project, and that the collaboration with both the database's provider DHI and with the publishing house OBP had been established in the original project meant that the work on LMNL2.0 has not entailed any deviations from the plan or any unforeseen technical or methodological problems. On the other hand, the difference between Swedish and foreign university managements' views on working hours and honouring agreements has slowed down the publication.
A further seven – for a total of 31 – Nordic medieval laws have been excerpted and inserted into the database. These are:
Danish
The law for trading places and towns for Skåne (SkBL) manuscript from the late 1300s
Norwegian
Magnus Lagabøte's National Law (MLL) 1274
Swedish
The law of the Östgötar (ÖgL) text ca 1290, manuscript 1350, a provincial law that for practical reasons could not be included in its entirety in the original version of LMNL.
Magnus Eriksson's National Law (MEL) 1350s
Kristoffer's National Law (KrL) 1442
Magnus Eriksson's Town Law (MESt) 1350s
The law for trading places and towns for Stockholm (BjR) manuscript from 1345
The new round of editing has resulted in approximately 1,300 new Nordic headwords, 1,500 new English equivalents to Nordic headwords, 16,000 new source references, i.e. information on the laws and codes or equivalent in which the words appear, 150 novel and 30 revised descriptive articles, which provide more detailed information about the use of words in the relevant laws and/or about the cultural-legally relevant concepts related to the words.
As expected, new entries touch on areas such as trade, shipping and administration, but also various forms of punishment, not least in the town laws, as well as words related to royal power and military defence. Examples include klædhishus 'merchandise transit hall' for a kind of customs station in MESt, ledhsaghare 'pilot' in MESt, and a new use of the word raþman 'alderman' which refers to a member of the town's governing council in SkBL, BjR and MESt, and the new (borrowed) words kak 'scaffold', about a kind of punishment in SkBL and bödhil 'executioner', which probably referred more to a jailer in KrL. Examples of new words that deal with royal power and the defence of the kingdom or city include veizlumaðr 'endowed man', which in MLL is a new word for yet another of the king's men, mur 'town wall' which in BjR and MESt refers to Stockholm's defensive wall, skiparastefna 'mariners' summons' in MLL which probably refers to the summoning of a captain and crew to a warship, and marskalker 'marshal' in MEL and KrL who may have been the king's, i.e. the realm's, highest military leader of the cavalry, who however appears as the person who inspects war horses. It is also noteworthy that among the new Nordic words there are several loanwords, mainly from German and Latin.
LMNL has, by all accounts, reached the intended target groups: researchers, teachers and students from virtually all of the Western world in a range of scholarly fields with an interest in various aspects of Nordic medieval history, legal history and language history. This is evidenced by statistics regarding traffic on the database's website, sales of physical copies of the book, printed as well as digital, as well as downloads of the freely available pdf, attention in the form of reviews in scientific journals, direct contacts to the project and references in scientific publications and student theses. Most if not all of these have been enabled largely due to the freely available database online and the Open Access pdf. LMNL has also reached a wider international audience than is typically expected for works in the field, including large parts of South America and Asia as well as parts of Africa, statistics of which are tracked on the publisher's website.
LMNL's pan-Nordic scope and presentation of a specialized terminology in English broaden the research possibilities regarding socio-legal historical aspects in Northern Europe. Recent examples of such research using LMNL are a study of emotions in medieval Netherlands (Bremmer Jr, Rolf H. "In an Overfurious Mood": Emotion in Medieval Frisian Law and Life." Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. 95–124) and investigations of newly discovered runic inscriptions (Zilmer, Kristel. "Rune finds from Finnesloftet." Maal og minne 114.1 (2022)). Moreover the LMNL continues to be used extensively for translations of legal texts such as Jóhanna Katrín Friðrikdóttir’s Magnus the Lawmender’s Laws of the Land from 2024. It also serves as a reference work for literary studies (Anderson, Kimberly. 2024. An Investigation of Advice Giving in the Íslendingasögur. PhD Diss. University of Cambridge), archaeology (e.g. Lingström, Maria. Mästerby, 1361: Battlefield Archaeological Perspectives on the Danish Invasion of Gotland. 2025. Diss. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, 2025). We anticipate even further impact of the Lexicon within these fields and beyond in the coming years. In addition, LMNL is integrated with the Old Norse lexicographic standard work Dictionary of Old Norse prose with links to the corresponding head words in the LMNL.
Since its inception, the work with LMNL has been characterized by international cooperation: the idea was hatched by a Swede and an American in connection with a project based in Scotland that gathered international expertise to translate the Nordic Medieval provincial laws into English (Medieval Nordic Laws, co-financed by The Leverhulme Trust, UK). The original LMNL project (2014–2017) was carried out by scholars from England, Norway, Sweden and the USA. The supplementation has been made by a Swede and an American in Sweden and the Netherlands, respectively. The operation of the resulting database is maintained free of charge and without time limit by The Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), University of Sheffield, England, in continuous contact with project members. The resulting dictionary, which will also be available in traditional printed paper form in this second, extended edition, as a digital e-book and as a freely available pdf for download, is produced by the publisher Open Book Publishers (OBP), Cambridge, England in close collaboration with project members.
The infrastructure in the form of the database will continue to be freely accessible through the DHI, without whose unique services and expertise this project's dissemination would not have been possible as there is no comparable expertise for co-creating, developing and long-term maintenance of digital humanities infrastructure. The data is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) primarily through upcoming APIs that allow searches and data collection from the database in addition to its public user interface. The physical dictionary is available at OBP under an open CC-BY license. All in all, this means that this reference work will continue to be publicly available and re-usable.
The facts that LMNL2.0 is an extension and further development of an existing lexicographic resource, whose approach, structure and working method were already established in connection with the original project, and that the collaboration with both the database's provider DHI and with the publishing house OBP had been established in the original project meant that the work on LMNL2.0 has not entailed any deviations from the plan or any unforeseen technical or methodological problems. On the other hand, the difference between Swedish and foreign university managements' views on working hours and honouring agreements has slowed down the publication.