It is often said that the oldest council in the nordic countries did not have a constitution and therefore could not be a genuine democracy. The spoken word or the shown action on the thing site constituted a stable base for validity, as customs and traditions were the source of the outcomes of legal procedings,  political disputes or negotiations of penances.

But the basic principles and laws of thing governance were possibly structural, i.e. based on analogy and correspondences.

The Danish word ”ting” has several significanses: a gathering for making decisions in public affairs, the thing site or the attendants there.

And translated into Quechua as it is spoken today, e.g. ”Tinkuy”means: to meet, get together, or reunion and assembly, and ”Tinkuna”: meeting point or ”Tinkunapata”: meeting place {1}. 

How did they look, the Danish thing sites? A thing site, often placed on a hill in open land, was built of four stones, on which were placed beams or planks ( four thing sticks). There was perhaps a major stone in the middle of the square or a cornerstone functioning as the middle of the site.  Minor thing sites or town conventions were constructed as a circle of stones surrounding a major boulder.

The central power thing governance was built on the foundation of four landscapes in unification. 

The figure exists in nature, and such a constitution could possibly be expressed in mathematical terms, and given a semantic interpretation {2}. 

Put more formally, in an analog representation, the figure shows a distinction between a presence (A) and its absence (-A) and an intermediate, legitimate line between them as well as an all surrounding, illegitimate frame {3}.

In structural thought a division in 2 may be a special excample of a division in 3, for example in Quechua: Hatun (big) is the opposite of Huch´uy (little), and if the categorical duality is weakend by an intermediary category, eg. Tinkuy (used as an adjective to mean ”of middle-size,” ”between big and little”) {4}, the set of 3 categories could evoke a semiotic box {5} of 4 categories as the opposite of confluency, tinkuy, is separation or Pallca (divided in two) {6}. And although the closure of the set of 4 categories is paradoxical, the set is structurally stable.

There are perhaps some Danish examples of the structure in the marking of four churches in the shires (Herreder) with farthings or in a shire with 4 cornerstones, as a willage was built with 4 corner-farmsteads {7}. An example of the set of semiotic categories mentions  a Broadstone,  Narrowstone, Animalstone and Lucie´s stone, where the three first mentioned are described as belonging  together {8}, and then later all four are mentioned together {9}, or another example speaks of two Debt stones, a Pond stone and a Pile of stones {10}. 

And You could possibly say that the landscapes Northern Jutland, Southern Jutland, Zealand and Scanialand {11} were intertwined as categories. 

Perhaps the word landscape is younger than the Viking Age, as the word shire (herred) is perhaps older. But while often off the mark, the viking must have had a firm base.

In the Andes the local group or ”The Ayllu is the socionatural collective of humans, other-than-humans, animals and plants inherently connected to each other in such a way that nobody within it escapes that relation” {12}.

Among norse people, such a conjunction of relations and locality were perhaps circumstantial. 

A Danish king was foremost a guardian of the land as the leader of the ”leding” (the defence fleet), and was in peace time of less importence to the great men and the house holders. For the kingdom, what mattered the most, was that the king was designated by the central power thing and thereafter celebrated as chosen king at every one of the four landscape things. 

Every free person bearing weapons, perhaps both men and women, had a right of acces to the thing sites for those territories of which his or her own home territory was a part. That would be 4 or 5 thing sites as the Danes went trudging, riding or sailing to things in every territorial strata. 

There were possibly no enclosing borders  – localized groups of people, although forming topogeographically distinct places, were merging together moving up through the territorial strata or becoming separated, moving down, as it is found in Ayllu´s manifistations in the Andes {13}.

As there was no delegation of competence of power down to smaller things or no representation up to bigger things, the competence of a thing was originative or stemming from itself {14}.

At the sites of sacrificial acts (Blót) there were built piles of stones (Hørger), probably nearby the thing sites, and these sanctuaries could be the foundation of residency and movement, or pilgrimage, as were the hierarchies of Other-than-humans in the Andes {15}.  

It seems that for a Danish viking, the collective, of which he was a part, were flexible and depended on the need: e.g. to choose a new king, or situate a disputed fence or settle a conflict within the family. 

Through the centuries, the importence of the things dwindled as the state accumulated more power. At the central power thing no one was summoned after the beginning of the second half of the 12th century. The landscape things were decommissioned in the beginning of the 19th century, and traces of the home territory things or town conventions disappeared at the end of that century. And the shire things were repealed at the beginning of the 20th century.

Keld Anker Olsen 2024

Notes:

1) Jaime Salazar, personal communication

2) Thom: ”The unfolding of a double cusp can have four minima, and so corresponds to interactions  involving the conflict of four regimes. Some of these    interactions can be localized in the neighborhood of the parabolic umbilic, and can be given a linguistic interpretation”, p. 91

3) Wilden p. 183

4) Allen pp. 177-8 

5) Greimas and Rastier p. 88

6) Holguin: p. 186

7) Gravlund p. 84

8) ibid 91

9) ibid 97

10) ibid 97

11) The landscape constituted by of Scania, Halland, Blekinge and Bornholm together

12) de la Cadena P. 44

13) Allen pp. 85, 88

14) See Meyer 1949

15) Allen p. 85

Literature

Allen, Catherine J. (2002) {1988}: The Hold Life Has. Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community. Second Edition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.

De la Cadena, Marisol (2015): Earth Beings. Ecologies of practice across andean worlds. Durham and London, Duke University Press.

Gravlund, Thorkild  (1926): Herredsbogen, Sjælland. København: Forlaget af H. Aschehoug & CO.

Greimas, A.J and F. Rastier (1968): The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints. Yale French Studies No. 41, Game, Play, Literature. Yale University Press, pp. 86-105.

Holguín, Diego Goncález  (2007) {1608}: Vocabvlario de la Lengva General de todo el Perv llamada Lengua Qquichua, o del Inca. Digitalizado por Runasimipi Qespisqa Software (http://www.runasimipi.org) para publicación en el internet.

Meyer, Poul (1949): Danske Bylag. En fremstilling af det danske landsbystyre paa baggrund af retshistoriske studier over jordfællesskabets hovedproblemer. Kjøbenhavn: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busk.

Thom, René (1975) {1972}: Structural Stability and Morphogenesis. An Outline of a General Theory of Models, translation from the French edition, as updated by the auther, Fowler, David. Reading. Massachusetts, The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company.

Wilden, Anthony (1972): System and Structure. Essays in Communication and Exchange. London: Tavistock Publications.