Journeys to Rome and Jerusalem in Old Norse-Icelandic Sagas

Abstract

Many Scandinavian characters in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas travel south to the distant cities of Rome and Jerusalem. This paper examines the literary uses sagas make of accounts of travel to Rome and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and compares their functions and significances in the saga-mindset. The context of this paper is my larger study over the last five years, which have focused on accounts of “far-travel” in saga-literature, that is, by Norse saga-characters to lands recognisably outside the area of familiarity. Of the three main destinations of southern far-travel in sagaliterature, Rome, Jerusalem and Byzantium, the latter two, being self-evidently conceptually “distant” from the north, were covered at length in a previous thesis on the subject. Rome, however, is also at least at the southern edge, if not actually beyond the border, of cultural familiarity, and this paper thus treats Rome as a destination for far-travel as the others that were analysed in the thesis, examining what characterises journeys there. Jerusalem and the Holy Land will feature in this paper to a more limited extent, as travel to Rome and Jerusalem is in saga-literature characteristically taken for the same purposes – pilgrimage and absolution – and accounts of travel to the two places exhibit some of the same characteristics. The two sites are not equal, however, and some of the conclusions of this paper will draw out the differences between Rome and Jerusalem as far-travel destinations.