Problém pravdy ve staroseverských zákonících

In spite of being carefully studied since early Modern Times, Old Norse lawbooks still present the historians of law with many difficult questions. One of them is the concept of Truth. The noun “truth” (sannendi, sannindi) occurs rather scarcely in the older provincial laws (in contrast to the later royal country laws). More often we meet the corresponding adjective sannr, whose literary meaning was “true”, but the legal meaning mostly “convicted”, and the verb sanna, whose literary meaning was “to make true”, while the legal meaning reached from “confirm a witness or oath” to “to prove someone’s guilt”. Both confirming and convicting or proving were realised by means of witness or oath presented to the court either by the parties themselves or by their witnesses and oath-helpers. Especially in the last mentioned case, knowledge of the circumstances of the committed act was not presupposed on the side of the witness or oath-helper, in spite of the fact that his or her oath or witness statement constituted the ”truth” of the claim. Thus we are forced to ask, in which way the witnesses and oaths could be taken as “truth” and how and why the whole system worked. Many answers were given to this question in the course of scholarship with most of them being possible to classify in three categories. The formal explanations tend to operate with the presupposition that the concept of truth was based on the concept of the correctness of performed legal act, i.e. the witness or oath that was formally correct, was considered to be true, without questioning its material content. But such an interpretation is hardly convincing since we know very well from Old Norse narrative sources (e.g. Icelandic Family sagas) that Old Norsemen were well aware of the difference between formal correctness and material truth. The same objection holds true for the magic-religious explanations which operate with an idea that lying witnesses or oath-helpers were objected to a revenge of gods or magical powers observing the truthfulness of witnesses and oaths. However the sources of Old Norse religion do not deliver much evidence of such deities, not to mention that such a concept could hardly correspond to the fact, that the witnesses and oath-helpers were not obliged to know the real state of the facts and thus, when witnessing or swearing something that was not in accordance to it, they could not be considered “guilty” in the religious sense (even when they of course were considered guilty in the legal sense). Lastly, there exist socio-moral explanations, stating that a person witnessing or swearing an oath put his personal honour at stake and thus the effect of his witnessing or swearing falsely would ruin his (or her) social position. Again, the narrative sources do not give much support to this idea. The present article does not try to disregard the above mentioned theories but claims that they are not able to fully explain the high esteem and legal functioning of the Old Norse witness and oath. In the author’s opinion, the only possible way to understand these phenomena in the Old Norse legal system is based on the concept of the “power of spoken word” which is only secondarily connected to religious, magical, formal or social concepts. It rather points to the fact that, for Old Norsemen, the criterion of the truth did not depend on the relationship between the spoken word and reality but rather the speaker’s decisiveness to stand behind his own words. In the view of the author, this explanation can be amply demonstrated by taking a closer look at the conflict between the institution of spoken oath and the institution of written testimony that can be observed e.g. in the extant charters from the Scandinavian Middle Ages. The written testimony (introduced to Scandinavia by the church) was, for a long time, hardly able to compete with the native concept of collective oath or testimony, because it contained no personal involvement. At the end of the article, some modern concepts of truth are mentioned (e.g. Jürgen Habermas’ or William James’), that stand closer to the Old Norse than the traditional European one.