Chapter 21 Imagining the Holy Land in the Old Norse World

Abstract

In Old Norse literature as elsewhere in the literature of medieval Europe, many images of Jerusalem and the Holy Land are to be found, not mutually exclusive, but rather adding to a range of functions and meanings. In an Icelandic twelfth-century itinerary, we encounter the pious pilgrim, admiring the blood of Christ on the ground where the cross had stood. From twelfth-century Orkney, by contrast, we have runic and poetic evidence of boastful Viking crusaders, belittling the cowards who stayed at home and viewing the concept of the Holy Land through the lens of the world of the sagas. In thirteenth-century Iceland, we find a peculiar version of the Holy Land in a local setting, fully integrated into Icelandic saga style. As late converts on the fringe of the known world, the Nordic peoples were removed in time and space from the events and sites that mattered most to salvation. In the Orcadian and Icelandic material, we see a creative negotiation of both the spatial and temporal distance. This chapter focuses on the attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land found in some Old Norse sources, as well as the strategies used for making them, as it were, domestic.