Blameless Bodies

: Compensation, crime and corporeality in Viking-Age society.

Resumen

This thesis will focus on approaches to personal injury compensation in early medieval Scandinavia. I will apply Foucauldian body theory, as well as comparative legal theory to three Old Norse legal texts in order to explore how the body was defined, protected and regulated.
Viking-Age customary legal orders (the approaches to dispute, misdemeanour and antisocial actions practiced in early medieval Scandinavia) concerning personal injury are not an example of criminal law nor a civil law, but a kind of corporeal regulation. This category does not exist in modern English law, nor the legal systems of contemporary western Europe, since it is contingent on the socio-cultural context of Viking-Age society. Bodies, likewise are products of, and productive in creating, their socio-cultural environment and this puts the compensated Viking body (the beneficiary of a personal injury case, or “victim”) at two degrees of separation from us as investigators in the modern Western tradition. The Viking-Age body exists within its own body world (“the totality of bodily experiences, practices and representations in a specific place and time”,
Robb & Harris 2013: 3), where it is regulated by Viking-Age customary legal orders which, similarly, occupy their own judicial world. One of the key problems which this investigation seeks to address, therefore, is the translation of Old Norse personal injury regulations into legalisms.

Fecha de lectura	30 abr 2026
Idioma original	English
Institución de lectura	University of the Highlands and Islands
Supervisor	Alexandra Sanmark (Supervisor) & Shane McLeod (Supervisor)