ll others to protect the boy or young man,
was held responsible for his death; either he should not have given the
boy in bail or he should have kept the contract. If we had no other
trace of gentile law among the Germans, this one passage would be
sufficient proof of its existence.

But there is another passage in the Old Norse song of the "Dawn of the
Gods" and the "End of the World," the Voeluspa, which is still stronger
evidence, because it is 800 years younger. In this "Vision of the
Seeress," in which Bang and Bugge have now demonstrated the existence of
Christian elements, also, the description of the time of general
degeneration and corruption inaugurating the great catastrophe contains
this passage:

Broedbr munu berjask ok at boenum verdask
Munu systrungar sifjum spilla.

"Brothers will wage war against one another and become each other's
murderers, and sisters' children will break the bonds of blood."
Systrungr means the son of the mother's sister, and an abnegation of the
blood kinship from that side surpasses in the eyes of the poet even the
crime of fratricide. There is a deliberate climax in that systrungar,
emphasizing the maternal kinship. If the term syskina-boern, brother's
and sister's children, or syskina-synir, brother's and sister's sons,
had been used, there would have been a weakening of the effect, instead
of a climax. That shows that even at the time of the Vikings, when the
Voeluspa was composed, the recollection of maternal law was not yet
blotted out.

Among the Germans with whom Tacitus was familiar maternal law had
already given way to paternal lineage. The children were the next heirs
of the father; in the absence of children, the brothers and uncles on
both sides were next in line. The admission of the mother's brother to
the inheritance is a relic of maternal law and proves that paternal law
had only recently been introduced by the Germans. Traces of maternal law
were preserved until late in the middle ages. It seems that even at this
late date people still felt certain misgivings about the reliability of
fatherhood, especially among serfs. For when a feudal lord demanded the
return of a fugitive serf from a city, it was first required, for
instance in Augsburg, Basel and Kaiserslautern, that the fact of his
serfdom should be established by the oaths of six of his next blood
relations, all of whom had to belong to his mother's kin. (Maurer,
Staedteverfassung, I, page