Old Norwegians Saga

An Old Norwegian Saga relating Scandinavians with Persians.

According to Ynglinga Saga, many hundreds of years after the Aesir had settled among the Vanir, Norse nobles continued to remember their venerable eastern ancestry, which was traceable to Godheim and the Great Swithiod. These lands were legendary and still held an aura of mystique and wonderment for later Norsemen, many centuries after they had migrated westward.

"To Saeming Earl Hakon the Great reckoned back his pedigree. This Swithiod they called Mannheim (literally: The home of men), but the Great Swithiod (Greater Scythia) they called Godheim; and of Godheim great wonders and novelties were related".255

It would appear that the descendants of Odin and the initial wave of immigrants lost contact with Godheim (literally “the home of the gods”) in the ancestral motherland, and after having lived a long time in Europe set out in search of it, having previously sworn that they would succeed in this mission. It was in Turkland (ie; Central Asia) that the Norseman Swegde chanced upon the very people he had been searching for. Having rediscovered Godheim and the Great Svithiod he apparently established lasting contact with the inhabitants of the region.
"Swegde took the kingdom after his father, and he made a solemn vow to seek Godheim and Odin. He went with twelve men through the world, and came to Turkland, and the Great Svithiod, where he found many of his connections".256

Earl Hakon the Great was not the only high-born one to look eastward. In the Old Norse tale Gylfaginning,257 the Swedish king Gylfi is said to have undertaken an arduous journey to Asgard (an Icelandic folk remembrance of the Persian regional governmental centre of Asagarta {sandwiched between Parthia and Medea}), where he met in consultation with the wizard-gods, who, the Christian Snorri tells us, “deceived him” with their tales of the world’s origins and its coming end. There the king learned many other things that proved to be the basis for Norse pagan beliefs. As you have already seen, the epic of Ragnarok was probably one such teaching. Here Snorri’s pen appears to have faithfully recorded Gylfi’s unforgettable adventure, preserving for us profound Norse remembrances of the divine wizards of Asia Minor.
Additional relevant details are found noted in a 13th Century Icelandic tract, which allow us to specifically identify the wizards as Magi, for it was said that - “Magon reigned over parts of the Great Svithiod, but Madia over Kylfingaland, which we call Gardariki (Rus’)”.258 This account intimates that the Svithiod was ruled by a Magus, with the best part of the Medes, the original tribe of the Magi, serving as temporal lords over ancient Russia, having left Iran at some point in ages past.