Congratulations on completing your TMS Starting Grant, Helen F. Leslie-Jacobsen!

Helen Frances Leslie-Jacobsen was born in Liverpool and holds masters degrees from both the University of Durham and the University of Iceland. She obtained her PhD at UiB and continued to work as a post doc before becoming project manager for her TMS Starting Grant in 2018. She is currently employed as an associate professor in Norse philology at UiB’s Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic studies.Leslie-Jacobsen is a specialist in Norse philology, Edda poems and Norse legal texts and got the opportunity to cultivate her passions when she became project leader for her TMS Starting Grant project Transformations of Medieval Law: Innovation and Application in Early Modern Norwegian Law in 2018.

Magnus Lagabøte’s Landslov, which she and her research team team investigated, was the first national collection of laws in Norway and was used for 400 years. The book is an important source for Norway’s legal and social history, but it is not widely available to the public and to many researchers. For example, before the project started, little was known about the translation from Old Norse into Danish in the 16th and 17th centuries, the changes made by the series of kings who later edited the law and about the Landsloven as the basis for the law collection Jónsbók in Iceland.

Leslie-Jacobsen and her research team analysed the later manuscripts and versions of the Landsloven to gain an insight into legal development from the end of the Middle Ages onwards.

Her main research questions were:

• How and to what extent do innovations and changes in the structure, content, and use of law books in early modern Norway reflect changes in Norwegian society during the Reformation and the Renaissance?

• How did legal communities in Norway and Iceland organize and apply their knowledge in the Middle Ages and early modern times?

In addition, the research team worked to identify all manuscripts containing the Landsloven and to describe all Landsloven manuscripts that were found.

In her final report, Leslie-Jacobsen writes that the project provided new knowledge about the field and the opportunity to spread the knowledge through articles, conferences, and symposia. The funding also helped recruit the research team.

One doctoral fellow, two post-docs and two researchers worked on the project together with the principal investigator. Both post-docs have obtained academic positions outside of UiB. Altogether over 20 scientific articles and book chapters were written by the project’s core team plus several book chapters from other researchers who contributed to the topic. Leslie-Jacobsen also received a high-profile Young-CAS project during the TMS project period where she investigated ballads from the Faroe Islands and their significance for Scandinavia.

The project leader was also very active in communicating the results and organized a number of international seminars and symposia, created a digital exhibition  and the podcast the Norse files which is available for the general public on major platforms such as Spotify. Leslie-Jacobsen is now planning a new podcast about Norwegian law.