ABSTRACT

This chapter has two overlapping questions, stimulated by Bolli's journey. It uses two of the major sub-genres of medieval Icelandic literature, the 'Sagas of Icelanders' and the 'Kings' Sagas', written from the early thirteenth- through to the fifteenth century. When Bolli's great adventure was turned into saga in the mid-thirteenth century, Icelanders had in reality long since stopped travelling in any numbers to what they called Miklagaror, the 'great city' of Constantinople. The chapter explores more on historical genres partly because of space, but also because for all their romantic trappings they did retain memories of Byzantium as a real place, even if it was a semi-fictionalised reality. Repeated pulses of exchange between the eastern Roman Empire and Scandinavia over the best part of seven hundred years must have created a very physical and immediate experience of Byzantium, complementary to stories. Byzantium was a central location of the fantastic and the magical in the medieval Icelandic imagination.