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: