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).