Law and Order

There was a good discount if you killed a slave, and totally okay to be gay.


The oldest known literature written in Swedish is the Westrogothic Law, a provincial law from the early 13th century. At a closer look it gives a few interesting twists and turns upon how people were seen upon, and how our norms and values change - faster than we think.

Being gay in the year of 1225 was totally ok. No laws what so ever against homosexual deeds. That the phenomenon was known is crystal clear if you read the laws concerning criminal defamation. It was seen as slander if a man accused a man for being taken by a man. It was obviously shameful to be the bottom, but being a top was totally ok(g)ay.

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It was way worse with crime involving property. The punishment for simple theft was most often death, and the laws of heritance were the most extensive ones. That might also explain the hard punishment for the man who pleased someone else’s wife.

The law reveals it was a brutal class society back then as well. Heavy fines if you slew a local man, but decent discounts if you instead slew a man from another province - or a German. The lowest fee and a total bargain was if you slew another man’s slave. (thrall)


(for those of you who didn’t follow above = damn expensive to kill a Californian, cheaper to kill a man from Arizona or Mexico, but only a dollar if you killed your neighbor’s gardener)

It’s spread by the Church, not historians, that it was the christening that made Vikings abolish slavery. Since this law was written centuries after God made his entrance in Scandinavia, we can see it as bullshit.

But with God and church came a lot of new norms and values.


Unfortunately for us being gay.

// T.