Ebook: "He Drowned in Holmr's Sea - His Cargo-ship Drifted to the Sea-bottom, Only Three Came out Alive": Records and Representations of Baltic Traffic in the Viking Age and the Early Middle Ages in Early Nordic Sources

This doctoral dissertation undertakes an integral study of references to Baltic traffic in the Viking Age and the Early Middle Ages on the basis of runic inscriptions, skaldic poetry and Icelandic sagas (sagas of Icelanders and kings' sagas). Baltic traffic is in the thesis defined according to a comprehensive approach, using the concept of the Baltic Sea drainage basin as the premise, justified both from the geographical as well as historical point of view. The thesis offers a systematic discussion of the nature of travel contacts in the Baltic region as depicted by the source material, and clarifies how the features of narrativity and historicity intermingle in the sources' representation of travel and communication. Methodologically the study follows the adapted hermeneutical approach, and aims at providing an understanding of different levels of contextuafity that are active around a given source as well as acknowledging the importance of applying multi-disciplinary research perspectives.

Exploring both the informative as well as the depictive content of the sources, the study brings to the fore the various communicative purposes that guide over the nature of the material; the advancing degree of interpretative abstraction leads from mostly brief and concrete commemorative statements of runic inscriptions to the poetical level of eulogy in skaldic poetry, and to the multi-dimensional prose narrative concerning the significant past as presented from the point of view of sagas. Through their numerous expressions of personified travels the sources at the same time demonstrate certain inter-relatedness - they find their broader culturai-historical meaning within the evolving narrative tradition of travelogue.

With runic inscriptions making up the core of the current study, special attention is given to the interplay between the textual content of a rune stone inscription and the visual layout of the text. The thesis follows the approach according to which any monumental runic text should not be reduced to a mere linear linguistic phenomenon; the study further establishes a complex way of interpreting runic monuments and their communicative significance with regard to their visual and physical dimension as well as the surrounding landscape environment.