The Vikings had no capitals, but they had places of power: sites where law was spoken, sacrifice made and the ancestors remembered. Two Swedish places show this impressively.
The Vikings knew no capitals in our sense, no government palaces, no bureaucracies. And yet their society was by no means lawless. It had places of power: assembly sites where law was spoken, disputes settled, alliances made, sacrifice offered and the ancestors remembered. These thing-places were the heart of public life – here, under the open sky, order arose not through a ruler but through the assembled free men themselves.
„With law shall the land be built." — Old Norse legal proverb (Njáls saga: „með lögum skal land byggja")
This famous saying, which appears in several Norse law-texts and in Njáls saga, sums up this culture’s self-understanding: not arbitrary will but lög, the law, held the community together. Two Swedish sites still show impressively today what such places looked like.
In Uppland lies Arkils tingstad, „Arkil’s thing-site". Raised stones and a stone bench mark the assembly place where a powerful family, the Skålhamra clan, held its thing. It is one of the few places where such an assembly site is still recognisable as a built structure in the terrain – not merely inferred, but visible.
The remarkable thing: two associated runestones bear a rare, artful memorial poem of some 200 runes – one of the longer poetic inscriptions in Sweden. So this place joined three things in one: the law-giving of the thing, the fame and grief for a dead man, and the self-display of a powerful family. A thing-site was never mere administration but always also a stage for honour and remembrance.
Anundshög in Västmanland is grander still: a whole ritual landscape. Here rises the largest burial mound in Sweden, surrounded by several stone ships – ship-shaped stone settings marking graves –, a long row of upright stones and a runestone. Over many centuries burial, feast, sacrifice and law-giving came together at this place; here lay the thing-site of Badelunda.
Whoever entered such a place did not do so in a neutral space. The huge mounds and stone ships made the presence of the ancestors physically palpable. Law was spoken in the face of the dead, whose land one tilled and whose order one continued. That gave the thing’s decisions a weight no bureaucracy could ever have lent.
Of course much stays open. That Anundshög was a thing- and cult-site is well supported by its layout, its stone row and its position; but who really lies buried in the great mound – the legendary king Anund? – remains unknown. The assignment of individual stones to particular people is also partly reconstruction. Such honest question-marks are part of it.
For us these assembly places are one of the finest sides of the Norse world. They show a society that took its order into its own hands, that joined law and memory, ancestors and everyday life inseparably – and that poured all of it into lasting signs of stone. Runestones, stone ships, memorial poems: it is the same wish that lies in an engraving too – to hold fast something important, so that it remains.
The Thing · Runes · Burial · Picture Stones.
Arkils tingstad (U 225–226), Anundshög (Vs 13), Rundata. Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Image credit (title): Anundshög (ship setting), photo Achird, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons).