Esthonia

Esthonia — the Baltic coast east across the sea — is where the child Olaf Tryggvason was sold into slavery, and where, years later, his uncle ransomed him from a market. When his mother Astrid fled with him toward her brother's safe court in Russia, their ship was taken here by Estonian vikings, and the three-year-old future king was carried off into bondage; only later did his uncle Sigurd, travelling on the king's tax-business, chance to recognise the handsome foreign boy in the marketplace and buy his freedom. Esthonia is the saga's image of the first dark turn of the road east — the Baltic shore where a royal child became a thrall, the place that swallowed Olaf into slavery and then, by a chance recognition, gave him back to the path that led to a throne.