Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction: Sources, Aims, Conventions
- Part 1 Eastern Europe in the Old Norse Weltbild
- Chapter 1 Austrhálfa on the Mental Map of Medieval Scandinavians
- Chapter 2 Austrvegr and Other Aust-Place-Names
- Chapter 3 Austmarr, “the Eastern Sea,” the Baltic Sea
- Chapter 4 Traversing Eastern Europe
- Chapter 5 East European Rivers
- Chapter 6 Garðar/ Garðaríki as a Designation of Old Rus’
- Chapter 7 Hólmgarðr (Novgorod) and Kænugarðr (Kiev)
- Chapter 8 Aldeigja/ Aldeigjuborg (Old Ladoga)
- Chapter 9 “Hǫfuð garðar” in Hauksbók, and Some Other Old Russian Towns
- Chapter 10 Bjarmaland
- Part 2 Four Norwegian Kings in Old Rus’
- Chapter 11 Óláfr Tryggvason
- Chapter 12 Óláfr Haraldsson
- Chapter 13 Magnús Óláfsson
- Chapter 14 Haraldr Sigurðarson
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Sources, Aims, Conventions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction: Sources, Aims, Conventions
- Part 1 Eastern Europe in the Old Norse Weltbild
- Chapter 1 Austrhálfa on the Mental Map of Medieval Scandinavians
- Chapter 2 Austrvegr and Other Aust-Place-Names
- Chapter 3 Austmarr, “the Eastern Sea,” the Baltic Sea
- Chapter 4 Traversing Eastern Europe
- Chapter 5 East European Rivers
- Chapter 6 Garðar/ Garðaríki as a Designation of Old Rus’
- Chapter 7 Hólmgarðr (Novgorod) and Kænugarðr (Kiev)
- Chapter 8 Aldeigja/ Aldeigjuborg (Old Ladoga)
- Chapter 9 “Hǫfuð garðar” in Hauksbók, and Some Other Old Russian Towns
- Chapter 10 Bjarmaland
- Part 2 Four Norwegian Kings in Old Rus’
- Chapter 11 Óláfr Tryggvason
- Chapter 12 Óláfr Haraldsson
- Chapter 13 Magnús Óláfsson
- Chapter 14 Haraldr Sigurðarson
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“Writings of the twelfth century and later can, if used critically, yield important information about the Viking period.”
(Sawyer 1982, 24)“I would be inclined to argue that while a text revealing a thirteenth-century view of the past may, and probably can, tell us something about the writer's own time, it must also tell us something about that past itself.”
(Foote 1993, 141)THE TITLE EASTERN Europe in Icelandic Sagas does not mean that this book deals only with the sagas, and not Old Norse-Icelandic literature in general. Scandinavian written monuments constitute one of the largest groups within the corpus of foreign sources relating to the history of Eastern Europe, and Old Rus’ in particular. In addition to sagas, the Scandinavian materials include skaldic poetry, runic inscriptions, chronicles, homilies and saints’ lives, geographical treatises, and annals. With the exception of runic inscriptions (mostly Swedish) and a small part of fornaldarsögur (“sagas of ancient times”), these works belong to the Icelandic-Norwegian, or West Scandinavian, circle. Of the above genres, three (skaldic poetry, runic inscriptions, and sagas) do not occur in other regions and cultures; being a specific product of Scandinavian mentality, they require special attention. Icelandic skalds composed simultaneously with the events described, and their poems, according to the most widely accepted view, were transmitted orally in an unchanged form during several centuries before they were recorded. The runic inscriptions are a multitude of “authentic materialized messages from the period in question,” as Kristel Zilmer has put it (Zilmer 2005, 14), while sagas, according to her, offer “a kind of backward look at the events” from the distance of several hundred years (Zilmer 2005, 15). This is how Judith Jesch describes the earliest two types of sources:
And so, from the mid-tenth century, we have Scandinavian evidence for Viking activity in England from two groups of contemporary sources: runic inscriptions from mainland Scandinavia (but mainly Sweden), and the skaldic verse composed in honour of Scandinavian leaders and preserved in Icelandic texts, mainly the historical sagas of the kings of Norway. The same sources also provide evidence of Viking activity on the European continent and in the east [my emphasis].
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- Eastern Europe in Icelandic Sagas , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019