union of states.  The realm had come into existence through the cunning and violence of the king of the Sviar, who made way with the kings of the respective lands, making their communities pay homage to him.  No change in the interior affairs of the different lands was thereby effected; they lost their outward political independence, but remained mutually on terms of perfect equality.  They were united only through the king, who was the only center for the government of the union.  No province had constitutionally more importance than the rest, no supremacy by one over the other existed.  On this historic basis the Swedish realm was built, and rested firmly until the commencement of the Middle Ages.  In the Old Swedish state-organism the various parts thus possessed a high degree of individualized and pulsating life; the empire as a whole was also powerful, although the royal dignity was its only institution.  The king was the outward tie which bound the provinces together; besides him there was no power of state which embraced the whole realm.  The affairs of state were decided upon by the king alone, as regard to war, or he had to gather the opinion of the Thing in each province, as any imperial representation did not exist and was entirely unknown, both in the modern sense and in the form of one provincial, or sectional, assembly deciding for all the others.  In society there existed no classes.  It was a democracy of free men, the slaves and free men enjoying no rights.  The first centuries of the Middle Ages were one continued process of regeneration, the Swedish people being carried into the European circle of cultural development and made a communicant of Christianity.  With the commencement of the thirteenth century, Sweden comes out of this process as a medieval state, in aspect entirely different to her past.  The democratic equality among free men has turned into an aristocracy, with aristocratic institutions, the hereditary kingdom into an elective kingdom, while the provincial particularism and independence have given way to the constitution of a centralized, monopolistic state.  No changes could be more fundamental.

The old provincial laws of Sweden are a great and important inheritance which this period has accumulated from heathen times.  The laws were written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they bear every evidence of high antiquity.  Many strophes are found in them of the same meter as those on the tombstones of the Viking Age and those in which the songs of the Edda are chiefly written.  In other instances the texts consist of alliterative prose, which proves its earlier metrical form.  The expressions have, in places, remained heathen, although used by Christians, who are ignorant of their true meaning, as, for instance, in the following formula of an oath, in the West Gothic law:  Sva se mer gud hull (So help me the gods).  In lieu of a missing literature of sagas and poetry, these provincial laws give a