For those interested in the history behind the people, places and
names found in the various recension of the so-called Heiðreks Saga,
please see the Wikipedia articles on Lake Ladoga and Staraya Ladoga.
At Ladoga was the largest medeaval trading town in eastern europe,
which was settled by the Norse (from about the 8th century), Finnish
and Slavic. The Norse name Aldeigjuborg is from the Finnish, which
in turn is from Old Norse alda (wave, here inland sea). Here are
still to be found the burial mounds of Rorik, the town's first
Nordic king, and his successors. The Norse, probably mostly Svíar,
but also Gautar, Gotar, Danir and menn from the kingdoms in Norway,
were called Rus. This is where the name Russia originally came from,
and this is where the term was likely born. The eastern Finnar,
called Bjarmar, came from the neighboring Bjarmaland). The so-called
R-recension of the so-called Heiðreks Saga preserves their name in
the personal name Bjarmarr, a supposed earl of Aldeigjuborg, who
marrries his daughter to Angantýr. This would explain why Bjarmarr
occurs instead of Bjartmarr, which is an anological formation.
Hreiðgotaland is also also found here, lying approximately west from
Ladoga to the Baltic Sea. This would explain the connection of
Heiðrekr, the Gothic king, to the area, as not only the Norse, Finns
and Slavs were busy settling the area, but also the descendents of
earlier Goths living in the area would have been there to mingle
with the new settlers in Eastern Europe's emerging commercial
senter, which became the first so-called Varangian capital under
Nordic kings. Later, the descendants of Rorik and the other Norse
settlers, who had become a majority, would travel south to found
Kiev, and later into the service of the Greek Kings as elite
warriors. This place, Lake Ladoga, and it's capital, Staraya Ladoga,
is where myth meets history, throwing light on, amongst many things,
the Norse-Gothic connection. See also Guta Saga, which refers to
events in the area and the migration of the Gotlandic Gutar (Go.
*Gutans) south from Gutland. Aldeigjuborg was a multi-ethnic
settlement of Norse, Slavs and Finns, which was eventually ceaded to
the Swedish king through the marriage of his daughter to the Russian
(Slavic) king, and it grew to have a large Norse majority at its
peak as a capital. I suspect that the Old Norse, as in West Norse,
use of the terms Gotar, Gotþjóð, Hreiðgotaland, etc. have their
roots amoungst the West Norse (Norwegian) settlers, merchants, and
warriors that either lived or traded in Aldeigjuborg, and also the
surrounding areas, during their pre-Christian period. Here the old
battles of the Goths and the Huns would have been living in oral
tradition, likely even on the lips of the ancient Goths' descendants
in the area. The only extant version of Völsunga Saga also mentions
the dreki (dragon/serpent) killed by Sigurðr as the dreki which the
Varangians (Væringjar in the Saga) called Fáfnir. This suggests that
Aldeigjuborg may also have been the portal through which other
continental Germanic heroic traditions influenced the West Norse.
That it left it's mark seems obvious enough.