Categorizing Otherness in the Kings’ Sagas

The purpose of this study is to find out how the image of 'otherness' in the kings' sagas reflects the mental worldview of the Norse-Icelandic cultural sphere at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The main investigation also tries to answer how the Norse-Icelandic cultural sphere defined its group boundary/boundaries and group identity. The Norse-Icelandic cultural sphere denotes in this study people sharing the same cultural, linguistic and historical background in the area covering approximately present-day Norway, Iceland, the Faroes and the Shetland and Orkney Islands, but the concept is to be understood as abstract and not confined to geography. As a starting point for defining ‘otherness’ such terms as analogue and digital difference introduced by the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen are applied, but it turns out that Eriksen's theory cannot be applied as such. The category of extreme 'otherness' (digital difference) is not a closed, exclusive category, but in spite of the big differences between the groups, there were also contacts. The study shows that even modern concepts concerning group identity and group formation can be applied to medieval sources.