Yngvar the Far-Traveller and the Regnal Years of Yaroslav the Wise

Regnal years were a widely spread way of dating in archaic societies. In the present paper, a hypothesis is put forward that the date of the death of Yngvar the Far-Traveller in Yngvars saga viðfǫrla as well as in Icelandic annals (1041) derived from a knowledge that Yngvar’s expedition had taken place in the 26th year of the reign of Yaroslav the Wise in Rus. It is said in the saga that Yngvar was 25 years old when he died, and that his father Eimundr helped Yaroslav to ensure his power, then returned to Sweden, married, and Yngvar was born. As Elena Melnikova has shown, Yngvar’s expedition is likely to have been identical to the Rus raid against Byzantium in 1043. In Rus annals, the raid is dated either to 1043 (the date corroborated by Byzantine sources) or to 1041. As I tried to show elsewhere, the annalistic entry should have been originally dated to the 26th year of the reign of Yaroslav. Chroniclers, who converted this regnal date into annus Mundi, regarded different years as the first year of Yaroslav: 1016 or 1018. It is argued in the present paper that Yngvar’s age in the saga, the absolute date of Yngvar’s death (1041) as well as the distance between the death of St Olav (1030) and that of Yngvar (11 years) all derive from those 26 years.