Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps, Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: Looking across the Baltic Sea and over Linguistic Fences
- Section 1 Mental Maps
- 1 The Northern Part of the Ocean in the Eyes of Ancient Geographers
- 2 Austmarr on the Mental Map of Medieval Scandinavians
- 3 The Connection Between Geographical Space and Collective Memory in Jómsvíkinga saga
- Section 2 Mobility
- 4 Rune Carvers Traversing Austmarr?
- 5 Polish Noble Families and Noblemen of Scandinavian Origin in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Case of the Awdańcy Family: By Which Route did they come to Poland and why?
- 6 A Medieval Trade in Female Slaves from the North along the Volga
- Section 3 Language
- 7 Ahti on the Nydam Strap-ring: On the Possibility of Finnic Elements in Runic Inscriptions
- 8 Low German and Finnish Revisited
- Section 4 Myth and Religion Formation
- 9 Mythic Logic and Meta-discursive Practices in the Scandinavian and Baltic Regions
- 10 The Artificial Bride on Both Sides of the Gulf of Finland: The Golden Maiden in Finno-Karelian and Estonian Folk Poetry
- 11 Local Sámi Bear Ceremonialism in a Circum-Baltic Perspective
- 12 Mythologies in Transformation: Symbolic Transfer, Hybridisation, and Creolisation in the Circum-Baltic Arena (Illustrated Through the Changing Roles of *Tīwaz, *Ilma, and Óðinn, the Fishing Adventure of the Thunder God, and a Finno-Karelian Creolisation of North Germanic Religion)
- Contributors
- Indices
2 - Austmarr on the Mental Map of Medieval Scandinavians
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps, Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: Looking across the Baltic Sea and over Linguistic Fences
- Section 1 Mental Maps
- 1 The Northern Part of the Ocean in the Eyes of Ancient Geographers
- 2 Austmarr on the Mental Map of Medieval Scandinavians
- 3 The Connection Between Geographical Space and Collective Memory in Jómsvíkinga saga
- Section 2 Mobility
- 4 Rune Carvers Traversing Austmarr?
- 5 Polish Noble Families and Noblemen of Scandinavian Origin in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Case of the Awdańcy Family: By Which Route did they come to Poland and why?
- 6 A Medieval Trade in Female Slaves from the North along the Volga
- Section 3 Language
- 7 Ahti on the Nydam Strap-ring: On the Possibility of Finnic Elements in Runic Inscriptions
- 8 Low German and Finnish Revisited
- Section 4 Myth and Religion Formation
- 9 Mythic Logic and Meta-discursive Practices in the Scandinavian and Baltic Regions
- 10 The Artificial Bride on Both Sides of the Gulf of Finland: The Golden Maiden in Finno-Karelian and Estonian Folk Poetry
- 11 Local Sámi Bear Ceremonialism in a Circum-Baltic Perspective
- 12 Mythologies in Transformation: Symbolic Transfer, Hybridisation, and Creolisation in the Circum-Baltic Arena (Illustrated Through the Changing Roles of *Tīwaz, *Ilma, and Óðinn, the Fishing Adventure of the Thunder God, and a Finno-Karelian Creolisation of North Germanic Religion)
- Contributors
- Indices
Summary
Abstract
Austmarr, according to the sagas, belonged to the Austrhálfa (‘the Eastern quarter’) of the oecumene of medieval Scandinavians. The article deals with the ‘mental map’ of medieval Scandinavians as it is reflected in Old Norse-Icelandic texts, primarily sagas. It shows that the early Scandinavians imagined the inhabited world (or the world visited by them) as consisting of four segments, in accordance with the four routes, corresponding to the four cardinal directions, North, South, East and West. The quadripartite division of the oecumene has found its reflection, among other things, in a number of place-names with cardinal points as their main component.
Keywords: Austmarr (‘the Eastern Sea’), the Baltic Sea, Old Norse-Icelandic literature, skaldic poetry, Ϸjóðólfr ór Hvini, Ynglingatal, Old Norse spatial ideas, four-partial world picture, Austrhálfa (‘the Eastern quarter [of the world]’), mental map of medieval Scandinavians
Introduction
The key notion uniting a group of scholars into the Austmarr network (see http://www.austmarr.org/) – Austmarr – is in fact a hapax legomenon since it occurs only once in the written record of the Old Norse-Icelandic literature. Nevertheless, it is easy to decipher: posing no problems in translation, the hydronym is traditionally understood as a designation of the Baltic Sea. Old Norse-Icelandic literature has reached us in a large number of works, are runic inscriptions of the tenth and eleventh centuries, skaldic verses composed in the ninth to eleventh centuries but preserved in the sagas written down in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, the sagas of several sub-genres (the Icelandic Family Sagas, Íslendingasögur, describing life in Iceland after the settlement of the island; the kings’ sagas, konungasögur, writing the history of Norway; the fornaldarsögur, sagas of ancient times, etc.), Norwegian chronicles and Icelandic historical works of the twelfth century; and many more (see McTurk 2005). Thematically these texts are connected with Norse mythology and history, but they also contain some information significant for a historian of Eastern Europe, and particularly interesting in this respect are the toponymic data (see Jackson 2003). The Baltic Sea in all these sources (with the exception of a Latin chronicle Historia Norwegie where it bears the name of mare Balticum) is attested as the Eastern Sea (Austmarr, Eystrasalt).
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- Information
- Contacts and Networks in the Baltic Sea RegionAustmarr as a Northern Mare Nostrum, ca. 500–1500 AD, pp. 49 - 66Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019