Learning about places and people: Representations of travelling connections and communication situation in the Sagas of Icelanders

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the meaning of sagas in a European context by analyzing certain cultural-historical patterns as revealed in the interaction between sagas and those societies that such texts formed a part of and showed interest for. The first step is the identification of textual references involving characteristic perceptions that people in the North had about the world around them, with a special emphasis on the Nordic-Baltic region. In the further analysis of the actual meaning of such statements, the aim is to discuss the possibilities for studying sagas as history in the light of early cross-cultural contacts. Hence, textual information will be interpreted with regard to its historical and cultural environment. Naturally, there is a need to take two different perspectives into consideration while attempting to reconstruct a certain context around saga events: firstly the actual period of saga-writing, and, secondly, the time of the events that sagas are describing/referring to. Current paper wishes to contribute to the many-sided study of sagas by bringing up the particular issue of early forms of cross-cultural contacts on the basis of written inheritance from the Middle Ages.