Of Outlaws, Christians, Horsemeat, and Writing: Uniform Laws and Saga Iceland
Our word law is a loanword from Old Norse.1 It makes its earliest appearances in Old English manuscripts in the late tenth century. At that time the Old English word for law was, believe it or not, æ, written as a digraph called "ash." Now most readers, myself included, tend to experience...
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University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository
1991
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| Online Access: | https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/205 https://repository.law.umich.edu/context/articles/article/1204/viewcontent/89MichLRev.pdf |
| Summary: | Our word law is a loanword from Old Norse.1 It makes its earliest appearances in Old English manuscripts in the late tenth century. At that time the Old English word for law was, believe it or not, æ, written as a digraph called "ash." Now most readers, myself included, tend to experience anxiety when we confront a ligatured vowel like ae and so we untie it as a prelude to getting rid of it altogether: we turn an aesthete2 into an aesthete before finally humiliating him (or her) as an esthete, all to resolve our nervousness. King Æthelred the Unready becomes AEthelred before turning ignominiously into Ethelred. If 2 had stayed our word for law and we make the necessary allowances for what happened to the pronunciation of Old English words that had an ash in them, instead of lawyers we would simply be "ers," which indeed was how Chaucer spelled arse.3 And imagine how hard it would be to maintain the pompous tone in which we are wont to speak of THE LAW if instead we were speaking of THE E, pronounced with a short e to add even further indignity to the institution. So we have something to thank those Vikings for after all. They might have emptied England of most of its silver and carried off no small number of captives as slaves, but they left us our word for the model of order4 - law - as an exchange for the disorders they wrought. So the etymology of law gives me my warrant for the violent yoking of my title: uniform laws and saga Iceland. And the retirement of my colleague Bill Pierce gives me the occasion for yoking them. The sagas were written in Old Norse or, more precisely, in a dialect of Old Norse philologists call Old Icelandic. Old Norse lög, a plural form, had a literal sense of things that had been laid down. But the word referred to more than positive enactments - Le., laws; it also indicated the community that shared those laws, a community that was then known as "our law." 5 Hence the term outlaw6 to indicate someone who had been expelled from the community and who as an outlaw was shorn of all ... |
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