The Vikings' world – which places do they name?

ÞæiR foru drængila fiarri at gulli ok austarla ærni gafu, dou sunnarla a Særklandi.

They travelled valiantly far for gold and in the east gave food to the eagle. They died in the south, in Serkland – the Muslim lands around the Caspian Sea.

A mother, Tóla, had those lines carved on a stone at Gripsholm in Södermanland (Sö 179). The stone was raised for her son Haraldr, brother of Ingvarr. Not far away, at Lundby, two brothers raised a stone for a third, Skarði: For austr heðan með Ingvari, a Særklandi liggR sunR ØyvindaR – from here he travelled east with Ingvarr; in Serkland lies Eyvindr's son (Sö 131). Ingvarr's expedition to the east around 1040 is remembered on 23 Swedish runestones. It is the largest memory of a single journey that the runestones hold.

A couple of hundred years later someone in Iceland sat down to write about the same man. In Yngvars saga víðförla, the saga of Ingvarr the Far-Travelled, he is no longer a son or a brother who did not come home. He is a saga hero who fights dragons and giants in the east.

We wanted to know whether that is a coincidence, or whether it says something about how the world of the Viking Age was remembered. So we counted.

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Two ways of remembering a world

The runestones and the sagas are the two great voices from the Norse Viking Age. They speak in different ways. A runestone was carved by people who knew the dead man, often within a few years of his death. A saga was written much later, in Iceland, by people telling of ancestors they had never met. One is a memorial, the other a story.

We went through four kinds of text: the runestones in the Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base, carved in the eleventh century; the sagas of Icelanders, 42 sagas about Iceland's first generations, written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the kings' sagas in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, written around 1230; and the legendary sagas, 36 sagas about the time before Iceland was settled, written down in Iceland in the same period as the sagas of Icelanders. The verse in the sagas we counted separately.

In the texts we looked for places outside Scandinavia. Every hit was read in context, for Old Norse is full of traps: serkr is a shirt, rúm a bed, frakka a spear and vindr a wind. Each place counts once per stone or saga, so that a long saga naming England fifty times weighs no more than a short one naming it once.

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The stones: a road that ran east

The most common place on the runestones is no place at all. It is a direction: austr, in the east. Whoever read the stone needed no more. Everyone knew where the road went.

When the stones name a country, two names stand almost side by side: England on 28 stones, where men took gæld, payment from the English kings, and Greece on 27 – the Byzantine Empire and its capital Miklagarðr. Then comes Garðaríki, the realms along the Russian rivers, and furthest away Serkland, where Ingvarr's men died. But the weight lies in the east. 66 % of the places lie there, and 74 of the 90 stones that name a place in the east stand in the Mälaren region.

That says something about who travelled and who stayed. The stones were raised by mothers like Tóla, by brothers like Spjóti and Halfdan, by wives and sons. They were raised for those who did not come home. The runestones are not travel accounts but memories of a road that was real, and that many did not come back from.

There is also something Swedish about it. The Danish and Norwegian runestones almost never name a place outside Scandinavia. Before the year 1000, 25 of 239 Swedish stones do, but none of 68 Danish and Norwegian ones.

The sagas of Icelanders: the sea to the west

In Iceland another story was told. The sagas of Icelanders are about the first generations on the island, about farms and feuds, about honour and about journeys. But the journeys go west.

Um sumarið eftir fór Björn vestur til Englands og fékk þar góða virðing, says Bjarnar saga: The following summer Björn travelled west to England and won great honour there. He stayed two winters with Knútr the Mighty. Others go to Ireland, to Orkney, to Scotland, and furthest of all to Greenland. The North Atlantic – Orkney, the Faroes, Greenland – is named in 25 of 42 sagas of Icelanders. That is not so strange. Many of the Icelanders' forebears came to the island by way of the British Isles, and their trade and kinship ran that way.

The east is there too, but almost only as a single city: Miklagarðr, where Icelanders took service in the emperor's Varangian guard. It is named in 8 sagas of Icelanders. When Bolli Bollason in Laxdæla saga comes home from there, the saga lets the scene take its time. Bolli var svo mikill skartsmaður er hann kom út úr för þessi að hann vildi engi klæði bera nema skarlatsklæði og pellsklæði og öll vopn hafði hann gullbúin – Bolli was so splendid when he came home from that journey that he would wear no clothes but scarlet and silk, and all his weapons were set with gold. In the sagas of Icelanders Miklagarðr is a place one comes home from, with riches and stories. Serkland is named in not a single one.

The legendary sagas: east again

The surprise is the legendary sagas. They were written by the same people, on the same island, at the same time as the sagas of Icelanders. But they tell of the ancient past, of kings and heroes before the settlement – and they look east.

heldu þeir í Austrveg ok kómu undir Bjarmaland ok lögðu undir einn eyðiskóg, says Bósa saga: They held east and came to Bjarmaland and put in by a deserted forest. In the forest stands a temple. Þar er göfgat goð þat, er Jómali heitir. Þar er gull mikit ok gersemar. – There the god called Jómali is worshipped. There is much gold and treasure. Bjarmaland by the White Sea appears in 6 legendary sagas but in only 3 sagas of Icelanders. Garðaríki and Miklagarðr are the kingdoms where heroes go to win a bride or a realm.

The difference between the two kinds of saga is 29 percentage points: 58 % east in the legendary sagas against 29 % in the sagas of Icelanders. It probably lies between 15 and 44 points. A difference this clear would arise by chance in fewer than one case in a thousand. We decided how the test would be done before we ran it, and the difference remains however we count – without the longest sagas, without Yngvars saga and without the general directions: between 26 and 35 percentage points. And the world of the legendary sagas resembles that of the runestones more than that of the sagas of Icelanders.

Our hypothesis: the eastern route became the ancient past

That the legendary sagas often take place in Eastern Europe is known in research (Jackson 2019). What we add is the measurement: how large the difference is from the sagas written at the same time, and that the world of the legendary sagas resembles that of the runestones.

Our hypothesis is that in Iceland the eastern route had become the ancient past. In the eleventh century it was a real road. Mothers and brothers in the Mälaren region knew where their sons and brothers had gone, and where they lay. But the Icelanders' own history began in the west, and when they wrote about their ancestors in the thirteenth century they wrote about Orkney, Ireland and England. The east became the place of what had happened long ago, of heroes and kings in a time before their own. There stood Jómali's temple and the gold of Bjarmaland. Ingvarr, whose journey Tóla and the other mothers remembered on their stones, became the hero of a legendary saga.

The hypothesis can be put more sharply:

In Icelandic memory the ancient past lay in the east and their own history in the west. The eastern route became legend once it was no longer anyone's road.

What we cannot settle yet

We also tested two other explanations, and both gave too few hits for a firm answer.

Time. If the western gaze of the sagas is only because they were written two hundred years after the Viking Age, the skaldic verse – composed by contemporary poets and quoted in the sagas – should look more to the east than the prose around it. In Heimskringla it does not: 38 % east in the verse against 39 % in the prose of the same sagas. But the verse rarely names places, only 21 times, and the uncertainty is too large to say whether time matters.

Place. With time held constant the Swedish runestones name the wider world about 4 times as often as the Danish and Norwegian ones, which would happen by chance in fewer than one case in a thousand. But whether the Danish and Norwegian stones look another way we cannot say: only eight of them name a place at all.

What our findings tell us

The runestones and the sagas describe the same world, but they remember it in different ways. In the eleventh century the wider world was, for many families in the Mälaren region, a road to the east, towards Miklagarðr, Garðaríki and Serkland. It came to be written on the stones because someone had not come home. The stones are memories of real people and real journeys, and they show that the eastern route was part of life – and of grief – in what is now Sweden, in a way it was not in Denmark and Norway.

Two hundred years later, in Iceland, the same world had been divided. The Icelanders' own history, that of the ancestors who settled the land, lay in the west: Orkney, Ireland, England, Greenland. To the east lay another time. There they placed what had happened before their own history, in stories of heroes, kings, dragons and gold. That the same writers on the same island turned their gaze two ways depending on which time they were writing about is the finding that stands firmest in our analysis. It means that the point of the compass in a saga tells not only where something happened, but also when the storyteller imagined it happening.

That says something about how memory works. What was once a road one's neighbours travelled became, when no one travelled it any longer, a place for legend. Ingvarr is the clearest example: on the stones a son and a brother who did not come home, in the saga a hero. What we do not yet know is whether time alone explains the difference, or whether it also mattered that the sagas were written in Iceland and not in Sweden. The verse and the Danish and Norwegian stones are too few to settle it. But the pattern itself stands: the sources look different ways, and they do so in a way that can be measured.

How the hypothesis can be tested further

1. The contemporary sagas. The sagas about thirteenth-century Iceland, such as Sturlunga saga, were written at the same time but about their own time. If the hypothesis holds they look west and south – to Norway, England and the pilgrim road to Rome – and not east.
2. The age of the legendary sagas. If the oldest legendary sagas look further east than the youngest, the eastern route faded within the genre too.
3. The whole of skaldic poetry. A clean edition of all surviving skaldic verse would give ten times as many verse hits, and then time could be tested properly.

Read with a compass

Next time you read a saga, notice which way the ship is steering. If it goes west, towards Orkney or Ireland, you are probably among the ancestors. If it goes east, towards Garðaríki or Bjarmaland, you are in the ancient past. And if you stand before a runestone in the Mälaren region that says austr, you stand before the memory of someone who really went.

Caveats

• That a place is named does not mean that anyone travelled there. The sagas are literature, not travel accounts.
• The runestones mainly remember those who died abroad. Those who came home seldom got a stone.
• The verse has been separated from the prose by machine, and a few short prose lines may have come along.
• The text of the legendary sagas is Guðni Jónsson's and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson's edition of 1943–44. We have used it for counting and quote only short passages.
• The places are grouped into east, west and south by what lies closest to hand. The Baltic lands, Bjarmaland and Finland count as east, France as west.

Sources

• Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base (Rundata), Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. Open Database License.
• The sagas of Icelanders: Icelandic Saga Database, sagadb.org (Sveinbjörn Þórðarson). Public domain.
• Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ed. N. Linder and H. A. Haggson, 1869–72, via heimskringla.no.
• Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Reykjavík 1943–44, via heimskringla.no.
• Jackson, T. N. 2019. Eastern Europe in Icelandic Sagas. Boston: Academic Studies Press.
• Photo: Wikimedia Commons, with photographer and licence in the caption. The map: Vitki, on OpenStreetMap's base map (© OpenStreetMap contributors). The count: Vitki (the analysis plan and the code are open on GitHub).