For lack of sources the historians were, until quite recently, led to the belief that the change was due to one tribe in gaining the ascendency over another, the political supremacy changing from one part of the country to another. The epoch was called “The Struggle between Swedes and Goths,” “The Struggle about the election of kings between Swedes and Goths.” Now it is generally admitted that the struggle was between principles, not between tribes. The circumstances sometimes were such that one section or province opposed others, but these divisions never were identical or at all depended upon racial or tribal conditions. It was a struggle between heathendom and Christianity, democracy and aristocracy, provincial particularism and centralized state unity.
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 metre 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 text consists of alliterative prose, which proves its earlier metrical form. The expressions have, in places, remained heathen, although used by Christians, who were 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). The laws show a good many individual traits and differences, but these are not of such a serious character as to give evidence of having been formulated by tribes of different origin. A remarkable exception is formed by the laws of matrimony and inheritance for the inhabitants of Værend and Bleking, who, it will be remembered, are the descendants of the Herulian immigration in historic times. In lieu of a missing literature of sagas and poetry, these provincial laws give a good insight into the character, morals, customs and culture of the heathen and early Christian times of Sweden. From the point of philology they are also of great value, besides forming the solid basis of later Swedish law. How the laws could pass from one generation to another, without any codification, depends upon the facts that they were recited from memory by the justice (_lagman_ or _domare_), and that this dignity generally was inherited, for centuries being carried by the descendants of one and the same family.