A nice picture of ponies from Iceland, where they used to have a Lawspeaker.

Had an interesting dream last night. I dreamed I was driving on a superhighway, approaching a wide bridge or overpass. There had been some kind of accident or disaster, and the entire wall on the right-hand side—what do you call it, a balustrade—had fallen off. So if you drove in the right-hand lane and swerved a little, you ran the risk of running off the edge and plunging to your death.

In the dream, I was terrified of getting on that bridge. Although there were three lanes to the left, where you could feel reasonably safe in driving, I was convinced that once I got on the bridge I’d somehow be forced into the right-hand lane, and go off the edge.

Not sure what it meant. I can relate it to my personality, though. The way I tend to run away from things I’ve identified as dangerous, even when that danger is fairly remote.

Which relates not at all to the subject of this post.

One of the things I learned from Prof. Torgrim Titlestad’s Viking Norway concerned law and literacy. It surprised and intrigued me. Here’s how it works.

When we think of the history of law in society, it’s generally presented as a moment of unalloyed improvement when the laws are written down. Codified. Makes sense, doesn’t it? When the law is oral, there can be disagreements about the exact wording, and the rulers or potentates are able to exercise pressure to get things their own way. Once they’re written down, they’re set, and everyone is equal before them.

But that’s not entirely true, especially in the absence of universal literacy.

In the Viking Age, there was a man called the Lawspeaker, whose job it was to memorize the law in its entirety. Each year at the Thing (assembly) he would recite one-third of the law, so that the whole thing would get recited over three years.

What this meant was that the law was part of personal experience for the people. Those who heard the law, remembered it, at least in broad terms. They were able to function and do business with a working understanding of how the law functioned.

When the law got written down, that changed. I’m sure the lawspeakers kept reciting the law for a while, but the written law placed legal power more and more in the hands of the literate, which meant churchmen and government clerks (often the same people). When a common man needed legal advice, he had to go to one of these professionals. The age of the lawyer had begun.

This continued until the common people became literate, although by then the language of the law had reached such levels of refinement that it had become a foreign tongue, and was again out of reach.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. The human instinct is not to share power.

But it also illustrates a basic fact about the American system. It’s based on universal literacy. Without universal literacy, the power goes back entirely to the ruling class.