It Is Strange That We Are Talking About “Truce” After King Harald’s Death

The grief following King Harald’s death resembles, in Hans Jacob Orning’s telling, the national mourning that filled the Norse gods’ world after Balder died. That is why the historian finds it strange that public discussion now centers on “borgfred,” or a political truce after a monarch’s death.

For roughly the past century, politicians have used borgfred to describe an agreement to suspend political conflict during a national crisis. German politicians adopted that meaning after the outbreak of the First World War, when they agreed to set aside their disputes because Germany had entered the war.

The medieval meaning was more concrete. Borgfred referred to the peace that applied inside a castle, where feuds were forbidden. The term was especially associated with the Holy Roman Empire, where nobles had the right to wage feuds against one another.

The concept never carried much weight in medieval Norway. The country lacked effective castles until late in the Middle Ages. King Sverre tried to build fortifications in the largest Norwegian towns in the late 12th century, but they were small and easy to capture or destroy. European-style castles appeared only after Håkon V Magnusson began an extensive building program around 1300. Even Akershus mainly had symbolic importance and saw little military fighting. Borgfred therefore never became an important Norwegian legal or political term, and it appears in no Norwegian laws.

Orning argues that the underlying medieval logic still helps explain the idea. Peace required a particular authority to maintain it, while that same authority could break it by going to war. Medieval societies did not assume a single state monopoly on violence. Laws regulated violence rather than banning it outright. Norwegian law recognized special zones of peace, known as “grid,” around churches, assemblies, homes and, more unexpectedly, beer houses. The kingdom was not one uniform zone of peace, but a collection of areas where protection varied.