Eesti ja kujutlus Eestist Skandinaavia saagades

Abstract

Descriptions of sagas have been widely used in studies on prehistoric and early medieval periods but mostly as descriptive sources. The following article will discuss Scandinavian sagas, written mostly during the 13th and the 14th centuries, and will attempt to analyse how the Scandinavians and especially Icelandic saga-writers have understood the eastern Baltic region, namely Estonia, Latvia and the area known as Austrvegr. The latter is a relatively ambiguous term and has been used only in texts describing the eastern Baltic in regard to the context. The article distinguishes between the two different levels of attitude towards the inhabitants of the area under discussion. The first attitude that was widespread and shared mostly by ordinary people describes the Eastern Baltic as a balanced area with common culture. Several paragraphs contain references to the Scandinavian names given to the Estonians, or information about the etymology of toponyms. But there was also another level, which shows the eastern Baltic region as different, strange and hostile. According to these descriptions Austrvegr was inhabited by giants and other evil creatures, against whome men had to fight. It is also distinctive that most of these stories appear in the later, the so-called Knight sagas. This may be explained by the fact that the sagas were scribed by Christian monks in the monasteries of Iceland. The written stories were old and passed down orally, thus representing the first, i.e. the common level of attitude. The second attitude was probably represented by monks, who regarded the eastern Baltic as a heathen region, and not a part of the Christian world. According to the Old Norse worldview, which was probably still followed, among others, also by the monks, evil beings inhabited a region somewhere east and north of the World of Men. So the eastern Baltic proved very appropriate as a supposed dwelling place. And it was also much easier to integrate these artificial stories into later sagas, which were actually European tales of chivalry, originally not associated with the world of the sagas.