The use of the word ‘translation’ in the title of this book brings to the fore the ambiguity inherent in the word itself. It is this intrinsic tension in the understanding of what constitutes a translation that underlies the analysis of the works discussed. These works form a corpus of literature, both in Norse and in English, that are often disregarded precisely because they are translations, when, in effect, medieval literature as such can be viewed as fundamentally translational in nature. Authors in the Middle Ages borrowed, reshaped and combined narrative content, ideas and rhetorical forms from various different sources, both native and foreign, to create their own works, scarcely distinguishing between what was borrowed and what was new. It is the distinction between medieval and modern conceptions of ‘translation’ that creates a disjunction in our perception of literary creativity in the Middle Ages. To acknowledge the cultural value of pre-modern translations as evidence of the various reading communities' narrative predilections and of the fundamental mobility of texts is to recognise medieval perceptions of text as fluid and mobile. It similarly reveals the lack of such rigid distinctions between native and foreign within medieval reading communities, where many different linguistic registers and textual traditions often co-existed, as in the case of England.