| Abstract | Paper -a:
Journeys made in saga-literature by Norse characters from their home countries in Scandinavia and Iceland to distant lands are most often motivated by pragmatism. Pragmatic motivations can take different forms, among them commercial motivations (settlement, trade, mercenary service), self-preservation (escaping feud violence or political intrigues) and 'spiritual pragmatism' (pilgrimages, Christian missions). Far-travelling for frivolous pursuits is more rare.
There are, however, some indications in the sagas of the motivation for far-travel of exploration out of curiosity – exploration more or less for its own sake. Both of the men identified by the sagas as Vínland's discoverers, Bjarni Herjólfsson and Leifr Eiríksson, are said to be criticised for lack of curiosity when they tell of their sighting of and brief visit to the new-found land (Grœnlendinga saga, Chs. 2, 3). In the opposite direction, Yngvarr the far-traveller exhibits the exploratory impulse quite explicitly when he becomes curious about the provenance of the great rivers flowing through Russia from east to west and decides to explore the length of the largest river (Yngvars saga víðförla, Ch. 5). Other, more subtle or indirect suggestions of the exploration motivation for far-travel exist.
It is difficult, however, to judge if this desire to explore uncharted lands is ever an unmixed motivation. At least, explorers who travel to distant lands often turn their attention to other, more pragmatic and profitable pursuits once there. Thus Bolli Bollason, who leaves first Iceland and later Norway eagerly professing the desire to educate himself by gaining experience in the wider world, turns immediately to mercenary service once he reaches the Byzantine empire, where he distinguishes himself in military rather than strictly educational essays (Laxdœla saga, Chs. 72-73). King Alfred's Norwegian guest Óttarr, who reports he travelled around the northern cape of the Scandinavian peninsula simply to find out what was there, devotes himself to hunting walruses and trading with the native inhabitants of the north.
This paper will identify and examine these examples of far-travel for exploration and attempt to place them in the contexts both of saga-literature and of the historical journeys they purport to describe. A crucial element of this analysis is identifying how the stories of explorations in distant lands were adapted over time, whether to familiar story-patterns in a consistent, recognisable way or to unique accounts in ways exclusive to each individual text. Such a study will of a necessity incorporate texts (sagas, verses, place-names), physical artefacts (ruins of Viking settlements, coin-hoards), and objects both textual and physical (runic inscriptions).
Paper -b:
In a few cases, the Íslendingasögur refer to cooking gear or cutlery being used as direct or indirect devices in conflicts - sometimes in a grotesque, sometimes in a cunning manner. At the same time, dining-tables are strikingly seldom mentioned explicitly. This paper aims at three aspects: It shall give a brief overview of irregular use of kitchen utensils, it shall attempt a characterization of the rare incidents with dining-tables clearly exposed, and it tries to find out why these situations require such a setting.
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