Noregr (Norway)

Norway is the old country — the spine that runs through the whole corpus. It is the seat of the kings whose saga is Heimskringla, from Harald Fairhair who first welded it into one realm to the civil wars that close the chronicle; and it is the place the settlers fled. When Harald claimed the free farmers' inherited lands as the crown's, the proud men who would not kneel sailed west to Iceland — so that the family sagas exist because of what Norway became. It is a country of deep fjords and a long, harbour-strung coast, of the great temple-seat at Lade and the holy city of Nidaros, of viking kings who reached east to Byzantium and south to Jerusalem. Almost every Icelander's story begins with an ancestor leaving Norway, and almost every king's story is about holding it. The homeland the corpus is forever sailing away from and looking back toward.