Ásaland (Asia)

Ásaland — Asia, east of the Don — is Snorri's homeland of the Æsir, the land of the great city Asgard from which Odin led the gods north into Scandinavia. In the Ynglinga Saga's daring rationalisation, it is not the mythic Asgard of the heavens but a real eastern country, the original home of a gifted migrant people whose leader Odin was so wise and victorious that later generations worshipped him as a god. From Ásaland the whole royal world descends. It is the corpus's image of the deep origin — the far eastern homeland of the gods-made-ancestors, the source from which Odin's people, and so the kings of the North, are imagined to have come, the headwater behind the headwaters.