Svíþjóð (Sweden)

Sweden — Svíþjóð — is the ancient eastern kingdom of the Norse world, the seat of the Yngling kings and the deepest root of the royal line. It is here, at the great temple of Uppsala, that the gods themselves (in Snorri's euhemerised history) ruled as kings, and from here that the god-descended Yngling dynasty ran its long, strange course of sacrificial deaths before being driven west into Norway. In the saga age Sweden is the great neighbour to the east — a kingdom the Norwegian kings marry into, war with, and flee through on the road to Russia and Byzantium. It belongs to the oldest and most pagan layer of the corpus: the land of Uppsala's blood-sacrifices, of the sacred-king answerable with his life for the harvest, of the dynasty that began with Odin. The eastern kingdom from which both the royal blood and the old religion flowed.