Valdimarr (Vladimir)

Valdemar — Vladimir, king of Garðaríki at Kyiv and Novgorod — is the great eastern lord at whose court the boy Olaf Tryggvason is raised. In whose service Olaf's uncle Sigurd travels and collects the king's taxes, and to whose realm the ransomed boy is brought to grow up far from the enemies hunting him in Norway. Valdemar's court is the eastern haven of the Austrvegr, the river-road realm where a Norwegian king's son finds shelter and a place until he is grown and ready to claim his own throne. Valdemar is the saga's image of the powerful, hospitable king of the Rus — the lord of the great river-strongholds whose court fosters an exiled Norse prince, one of the chain of eastern rulers (with Yaroslav after him) through whom the kings of Norway are sheltered and raised on the long road east. The king in whose hall a future Christianiser of the North came of age.