ReadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2025

Eastern Europe in Icelandic Sagas

Tatjana N Jackson author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Arc Humanities Press

Published:15th Mar '19

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Eastern Europe in Icelandic Sagas cover

Based on the material of the Old Norse Icelandic sources written down in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, this book demonstrates how medieval Scandinavians imagined Eastern Europe. It reconstructs the system of medieval Scandinavian perception of space in general, and the eastern part of the oecumene in particular. It also examines the unique information of these sources, of which the Russian chronicles were unaware: namely, the saga and skaldic poetry data concerning the visits of the four Norwegian kings to Old Rus in the late-tenth and mid-eleventh centuries.

The Quellenwert of the Icelandic sagas has long aroused controversy among scholars, especially between historians and those specializing in philology or literature.[...] Fortunately for historians, Tatjana Jackson [...] endorses the more balanced position of T. M. Andersson, Gísli Sigurðsson and others concerning the interplay between the spoken and the written word, whereby writers of sagas drew upon both components. And she approaches the Old Norse Kings’ Sagas in light of Aron Gurevich’s dictum: it is “not a question of whether to use the sagas ..., but of how.”

-- Jonathan Shepard * Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas / jgo.e-reviews 70, nos. 1-2 (2022): 222-2

ISBN: 9781641890267

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

224 pages

New edition