The oldest books written in the vernacular are the Provincial Laws from the thirteenth century. In them we find the separation of the Danish language from the Old Norse in rapid progress, and the process of separation is at this period already so far advanced that it must be presumed to have begun at a much earlier date: There appear three popular dialects, those of Scania, Zealand, and Jutland. The vocabulary is still the same as in the Old Norse, but the old inflectional endings have for the most part disappeared, and the vowels have undergone various changes. In the centuries immediately following, shortly before the Reformation, there was developed on the basis of the Zealand dialect a uniform Danish literary language, in which the old stamp was gradually lost. The language became by degrees softer, the multitude of inflectional and derivative endings, which are so fully developed in the Old Norse, were so far as practicable abandoned, and the vocabulary of the language began to admit German elements. In reference to grammar the language occupied during the great spiritual activity of the Reformation period, which produced a vast Danish literature, essentially the position it does at the present time.
The old Danish laws are of no less importance to philology than they are to the history of culture. They are partly secular, partly ecclesiastical, and so far as the form in which they exist is concerned, there is no essential difference between them as regards the time of their origin, for they all belong to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and none of the manuscripts are older than 1250. But in reality the secular laws can be traced far back into antiquity, while the ecclesiastical are a product of the institutions introduced together with Christianity. Of the oldest codes which were framed for a special purpose, as for instance Knud the Great's "Vederlagsret" and Palnatoke's laws for the Jomsviking fraternity, only a few fragments have been preserved, while Saxo and Svend Aagesen give us a few extracts from them translated, of course, into Latin. The secular laws are based on legal
