Vikings in Russia: Yngvar’s Saga and Eymund’s Saga

Translated and Introduced by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. The two Icelandic sagas in this volume open a small window on the hazy world of Scandinavian Vikings in eleventh-century Russia. The brief glimpses they give us of an obscure corner of European history are intriguing, not so much because of the light they throw on the lives of Yngvar Eymundsson and Eymund Hringsson as for the elusive quality of narrative. Although these sagas appear to contain references to actual events, they include so many purely fictive elements that it is not always possible to separate facts from the products of the authors' fertile imagination; the two elements that went into the making of the sagas, historical fact and creative story-writing, are sometimes barely perceptibly, sometimes extravagantly, fused together. "Yngvar's Saga" was probably written about the beginning of the thirteenth century. It is a translation into Icelandic of a now lost Latin work, which we may call *Vita Yngvari (an asterisk indicates a lost original), by the Benedictine monk Odd Snorrason the Learned who belonged to the monastery of Thingeyrar in the second half of the twelfth century. "Eymund's Saga" is evidently much younger than YS which served as one its sources. We can see no reason why it could not have been written even as early as the latter part of the thirteenth century.