This work is concerned with time reckoning and perception in Old Norse culture. Based on an
analysis of various prose and poetic works the author reconstructs the native images of time
as well as their changes in relation to social development namely the arrival of Christianity
and feudalism to the North. The primary sources are divided into three groups. The first group
comprises works that contain traces of the original domestic understanding of time the Poetic
Edda Snorri's Edda legendary and family sagas. The second group includes different types of
texts all of which adopt foreign concepts of time that spread to Iceland especially through
various learned treatises and the influence of the Church. Lastly it is examined how foreign
time reckoning and perception affected the temporal structure of kings' and bishops' sagas
included in the third group of sources.
