Pre-Print Papers of the 18th International Saga Conference: Sagas and the Circum-Baltic Arena. Helsinki and Tallinn, 7th-14th August 2022

Sagas provide the richest early written sources not just for Scandinavian cultures but also for their interactions with other groups in this part of the world. In the spirit of these contacts and mobility, we will bring the 18th International Saga Conference to the eastern side of the Baltic Sea to be hosted in two countries, Finland and Estonia, with movement between them.

Scandinavians’ activity in this multicultural part of the world provides the uniting theme of the conference: Sagas and the Circum-Baltic Arena. The vast majority of saga literature concentrates attention on the North Atlantic and western parts of Scandinavia, while the written sources rapidly thin out to the east, with few or no written sources for many cultures on the Baltic Sea until much later. This creates questions for understanding accounts in sagas, but also for what sorts of insights may be gained from relating sagas with evidence from other disciplines, such as archaeology, linguistics and folklore studies. We are therefore promoting interdisciplinarity through four thematic strands concerned with bridging data across different disciplines and methodologies for gaining perspectives on the past.