IN THIS CHAPTER I intend to demonstrate that the early Scandinavians (as well as all Germans and— more broadly— Indo-Europeans) imagined the oecumene as divided into four parts, and that Eastern Europe belonged, in their minds, to the eastern quarter of the world.

In the Latin medieval cosmography of Europe, the traditional division of the oecumene was tripartite. In those cases when a Scandinavian author grounded a “learned” introduction to his work on this tradition, the world was divided into thirds, as for instance in Snorri Sturluson's Ynglinga saga (see below, p. 62). However, in describing certain geographical situations and sailings, in orienting in space, there came to the fore a natural and traditional for the early Scandinavians four-part division of the inhabited world (Jackson, Podossinov 1997). These ideas, as the Old Norse source material demonstrates (cf. Jackson 1994a, 1998), are as follows. The world consists of four quarters, according to the four cardinal directions. The set of lands in each segment of this mental map is invariable. The western quarter includes all the Atlantic lands, such as England, the Orkney and Shetland Islands, France, Spain, and even Africa. The eastern lands are the Baltic lands and the territories far beyond the Baltic Sea, such as Old Rus’ and Byzantium. The southern lands are Denmark and Saxony, Flanders and Rome. The northern quarter is formed by Norway itself, but also by Finnmark and, sometimes, by Bjarmaland. The latter is described as a territory lying on the borderline of the easterly and northerly segments, since it was thought to belong to the easterly quarter, but one could get there only by travelling northwards. Movement from one segment into another is defined not according to the compass points but according to the accepted naming of these segments, which means that spatial orientation is described in terms of a goal. Thus, when somebody goes from Sweden to Denmark he is said to go either suðr (to the south) (Hkr 1941, 349), because Denmark belongs to the “southern segment,” or to go austan (from the east) (Hkr 1951, 92), because Sweden belongs to the “eastern segment.”