‘In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’. This important insight of Benedict Anderson has usually been embraced in studies of modern nations, but it applies equally well to other forms of communities, such as premodern ones (see also Wojtek Jezierski's introduction). Such communities are imagined in being limited, sovereign, and communal. Whereas the concept of sovereignty is a post-medieval one, it directs attention to the theme of order, which, as with the principle of communal interests, is as relevant to a medieval as to a modern setting. The limits of communities point to the problem of border and the decisive presence of the other from which a community needs to separate itself.

In this chapter, I shall discuss the role of the Baltic in the late medieval Icelandic manuscript AM 343a 4to, which was written at the large estate Möðruvellir fram in Eyjafjörður in northern Iceland around 1450. The Baltic, as a border zone to an imagined Nordic community, plays a surprisingly large role in this manuscript. After having placed the manuscript in its literary and historical setting, I shall explore how the scribe tried to construct a Nordic community vis-à-vis others. The Baltic Rim is particularly interesting in this respect, since it was a place that belonged to the centre and simultaneously had close contact with the periphery. I shall argue that the need to draw firm boundaries reflected a vulnerable centre which was dependent on the periphery in a variety of ways. The imagined Nordic community of AM 343a 4to could be socially defined as an elite community, with an edge towards peasants as well as kings. In the final section, I will relate this textual community at Möðruvellir fram to the historical context in which the manuscript was written in order to elucidate how Icelandic nobles in the mid-fifteenth century viewed the Baltic as part of a Nordic community.

The Literary and Historical Context

AM 343a 4to is the largest manuscript produced in Iceland in the late Middle Ages. It contains fifteen sagas: nine fornaldarsögur, five fornsögur suðrlanda, and one ævintýri (moral fable).