the river Jordan

The river Jordan is the farthest and holiest point the whole corpus ever reaches — the river Sigurd the Crusader rode to with King Baldwin of Jerusalem. Here, where John had baptised, the Norwegian king swam across the sacred water and, on the far bank, twisted a knot of willows and left it for his stay-at-home brother Eystein to untie — the cheerful gesture of a man who has gone where his brother never will. That a king from a North so lately heathen should stand at the Jordan is the conversion arc of the corpus brought to its very source. The Jordan is the saga's image of the sacred limit — the holy river at the edge of the Norse imagination, touched by one far-faring king, the southernmost reach of a world that began on a bare Atlantic island.