Jórsalir (Jerusalem)

Jórsalir — Jerusalem — is the farthest and holiest reach of the entire corpus, the goal of the one Norse king who led a crusade in person. When Sigurd the Crusader rode up to the holy city, King Baldwin received him with high honour and rode out with him to the river Jordan, where Sigurd swam across and tied a knot of willows on the far bank for his stay-at-home brother to undo. Baldwin gave him a splinter of the True Cross, sworn over by king and patriarch — the spiritual treasure that made Sigurd 'Jórsalafari', the Jerusalem-farer, forever. That a king from a North so lately heathen should stand at the place of the Crucifixion and carry home a piece of the Cross is the conversion arc of the whole corpus brought, quite literally, to its source. The edge of the Norse map, touching the centre of the Christian world.