Rus' people

• 1. Introduction

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  In the year 922, a Muslim diplomat named Ahmad ibn Fadlan stood on the banks of a river he called the Itil and watched a group of merchants arrive. He recorded what he saw. They were tall as date palms, blond and ruddy, each man carrying an axe, a sword, and a knife at all times. He called these people the Rus. The Rus were a people of early medieval Eastern Europe, and the scholarly consensus holds they were originally Norsemen who came mainly from present-day Sweden. They settled and ruled along the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Sea from roughly the 8th to the 11th centuries. From two small settlements on a single river, their name would spread across a continent and outlast them by centuries. Who were the men who arrived sword in hand at the birth of a child? How did a word for rowers in a Swedish fleet become the name of nations? And why, in a Ukrainian cemetery, do the bones of the dead still cluster with Icelanders?

• 2. The Name From The Oars

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  Rusʹ is generally considered a borrowing from the Finnic word Ruotsi, which means Sweden. Because Ruotsi and its cognates appear in all Finnic languages, scholars assume the term entered the Finnic lexicon before those languages diverged, before or at the very start of the Viking Age. The trail leads back to the sea, and to the act of rowing. Two theories compete, and they are not mutually exclusive. One derives the name from Old East Norse rōþer, a term for rowing and for the fleet levy. The other traces it through Rōþin, an older name for the Swedish coastal region of Roslagen. That region name carries its own clue. Roslagen is built from the same root plus the plural of the neuter noun lag, meaning the teams, a reference to the teams of rowers in the Swedish kings' fleet levy. The modern Swedish word for the people of Roslagen, rospiggar, descends from a form meaning inhabitants of Rōþin. Old Norse preserves the same root in words like róþsmenn and róþskarlar, both meaning rowers. Modern scholarship now leans toward the rowing-word origin over the Roslagen one. At the time, Roslagen was sparsely populated and lacked the demographic strength to stand out beside the adjacent Swedish heartland of the Mälaren Valley. Word compounds such as róþs-menn and róþs-karlar are considered the most likely source. The root even survives carved in stone. On the Piraeus Lion, a marble statue originally standing in Athens, the scholar Erik Brate read the form roþ(r)slanti, an inscription most likely carved by Swedish mercenaries serving in the Varangian Guard.

• 3. Two Towns On The Volkhov

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  Ladoga, called Aldeigja by the Norsemen, was founded in the mid-8th century and was the earliest and most significant settlement of the Rus. It grew up as a manufacturing and trading centre, serving Scandinavian hunters and dealers who came for furs gathered in the north-eastern forest zone of Eastern Europe. Rurikovo Gorodische, likely known as Holmr, was founded over a century later in the mid-9th century. These two settlements sat at opposite ends of the Volkhov, a river running 200 kilometres between Lake Ilmen in the south and Lake Ladoga in the north. The Norsemen most probably called this territory Gardar. Long after the Viking Age, that name broadened into Garðaríki, a word for the entire state. The area between the lakes was the original Rus. From here the name was carried south to the Slavs living on the middle Dnieper, in the land that became known as Ruskaja zemlja, the land of Rus. The Rus also moved eastward, into the lands of Finno-Ugric tribes in the Volga-Oka region. In the early period, a Norse presence is visible almost only at Staraya Ladoga, with Norse objects rare elsewhere and mostly found as single finds. That rarity held through the 9th century. Then, in the next century, the picture changed completely. At many places, and in relatively large quantities, archaeologists find the remains of a thriving Scandinavian culture. For a short time, some parts of Eastern Europe belonged to the Norse world as fully as Danish and Norwegian lands did in the West. From the Ladoga area, the centre of the Rus, envoys travelled all the way to Constantinople in 838.

• 4. Sword In Hand

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  The Persian traveller Ibn Rustah described a people who lived on an island so large it took three days to walk around, covered in thick forest and most unhealthy. They had no fields. They harried the Slavs, reaching them by ship, carrying them off as slaves to sell, and living on what they took from Slavic lands. Ibn Rustah recorded a stark custom. When a son was born, the father would approach the newborn, sword in hand, throw the weapon down, and say that he would leave the child no property, only what he could win with that blade. This was a raiding and trading diaspora. The Arabic sources, of which there are over thirty relevant passages in roughly contemporaneous works, portray the Rus as raiders, traders, and mercenaries serving the Volga Bulghars or the Khazars, rather than as state-builders. The word itself was slippery. When Al-Yaqūbi recorded Rūs attacking Seville in 844, he almost certainly meant Vikings based in Frankia. Other writers placed the Rus differently still. The Mujmal al-Tawarikh called the Khazars and Rus brothers, and later writers including Muhammad al-Idrisi, Al-Qazwini, and Ibn Khaldun identified the Rus as a sub-group of the Turks. The Byzantines, who called them the Rhos, saw them as a distinct people from the Slavs. Pseudo-Simeon and Theophanes Continuatus referred to them as dromitai, a word tied to the Greek for a run, suggesting how swiftly they moved along the waterways. In his treatise De Administrando Imperio, the emperor Constantine VII described the Rhos buying cattle, horses, and sheep from the Pechenegs, because none of these animals could be found in Rhosia.

• 5. Kings, Brides, And Warbands

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  Vladimir the Great fled to Sweden in 976, escaping his brother Yaropolk, and there, in a kingdom ruled by Erik the Victorious, he gathered the invasion force he used to conquer Kievan Rus. Marriage and warfare bound the two worlds together tightly. The Swedish king Anund Jakob wanted to help Yaroslav the Wise, grand prince of Kiev, in his campaigns against the Pechenegs. Ingvar the Far-Travelled, a Swedish Viking bent on conquering Georgia, assisted Yaroslav with 3000 men in the war against the Pechenegs before continuing on to Georgia. Yaroslav married the Swedish king's daughter, Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden, who became the Russian saint Anna. Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian king and a commander of the Varangian Guard, married Elisiv of Kiev. Several thousand Swedish Vikings died defending Kievan Rus against the Pechenegs, and Vikings made up the bulk of the bodyguards of early Kievan Rus rulers. The runestones the Varangians raised in Sweden record these journeys and even the fates of individual warriors. The Turinge runestone immortalises a dead commander with a poem, naming brothers who were the best of men in the land and abroad in the retinue. It says he fell in battle in the east, in Garðar, commander of the retinue, the best of landholders. The Veda runestone reveals another consequence of eastern riches. Wealth acquired in Eastern Europe led to a new legal practice of buying clan land. The Swedish chieftain Jarlabanke used his clan's acquired wealth to raise a monument to himself while still alive, boasting that he owned the whole hundred.

• 6. A Realm Of Cities

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  Garðaríki, the realm of cities, was one of several names Scandinavian sources gave to the eastern lands, alongside Austr, the East, and Svíþjóð hin mikla, Great Sweden. That last name appears in the 12th-century geographical work Leiðarvísir ok Borgaskipan by the Icelandic abbot Nicolaus, who died in 1161, and in the Ynglinga saga by Snorri Sturluson. Its use indicates that Icelanders considered Kievan Rus to have been founded by the Swedes. The sagas themselves arrived late. When they were put to text in the 13th century, the Norse colonisation of Eastern Europe was already a distant past, and little of historical value can be drawn from the oldest legendary traditions, where Garðaríki appears as a kingdom inhabited even by the dwarves Dvalin and Durin. Yet the names preserved in the sagas carry real evidence. They record Old Norse forms for important settlements, including Hólmgarðr for Novgorod and Kønugarðr for Kiev. Fjodor Uspenskij argues that the element garðr in these names, which usually means farmstead in Old Norse, shows the influence of Old East Slavic gorodǔ, meaning city. He further argues that the Rus were competent in Old East Slavic, borrowing some fifteen words such as torg, for marketplace, from tǔrgǔ. The runestones offer the most contemporary witness. The earliest telling of eastward voyages is the Kälvesten runestone from the 9th century in Östergötland, though it does not say where the expedition went. The fashion for raising runestones began with Harald Bluetooth's Jelling stones in the late 10th century and produced thousands of stones across Sweden in the 11th century. Earlier memorials had used runes on wooden poles set in the ground, a perishable tradition described by Ibn Fadlan, which explains why so few survive.

• 7. Brothers Across The Sea

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  The Primary Chronicle tells an origin myth. The tributaries of the Varangians drove them back beyond the sea, refused them further tribute, and set out to govern themselves. But there was no law among them, and tribe rose against tribe in discord and war. So they resolved to seek a prince who would rule and judge them according to the Law. They went overseas to the Varangian Russes, a people named just as others were called Swedes, Normans, English, or Gotlanders. The tribes told them their land was great and rich but had no order in it, and invited them to come and reign. Three brothers came with their kinsfolk. The oldest, Rurik, settled in Novgorod; the second, Sineus, at Beloozero; and the third, Truvor, in Izborsk. From Rurik's entourage the chronicle names two Swedish merchants, Askold and Dir, called boyars for their noble class. Their names, Haskuldr and Dyri, are Swedish, and the chronicle says they did not belong to Rurik's family but only to his retinue. Later they conquered Kiev and created the state of Kievan Rusʹ. The chronicle, compiled in Kiev at the start of the 13th century and reflecting the politics of the time of Mstislav I, also preserves the texts of Rus-Byzantine treaties from 911, 945, and 971. These treaties open a window onto the names of the Rus. Of the fourteen Rus signatories to the treaty in 907, every one bore a Norse name. By the treaty of 945, some signatories had Slavic names, while the vast majority remained Norse. The first Western European source to mention the Rus, the Annals of St. Bertin, records that in 839 a delegation reached the court of Emperor Louis the Pious at Ingelheim. Men in it called themselves Rhos. When Louis investigated, he learned they were Swedes, and fearing they were spies, he detained them until reassurances came from Byzantium.

• 8. Becoming Slavic

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  By around 950 the Rus elite became bilingual, yet Old East Slavic cannot be shown to have become their native language until the end of the 11th century. The names tell the story of a slow dissolution. In the Rus-Byzantine treaty of 944 or 945 there are 76 names. Twelve belong to the ruling family, and only three of those are Slavic: Svjatoslav, Volodislav, and Predslava. The rest of the family carried Norse names, among them Olga from Helga and Akun from Hákon. Even Olga's representative bore the Finnish name Iskusevi. In the 980s the chronicle reports that Vladimir the Great had twelve sons and one daughter, and only one child, a son named Gleb from Guðleifr, had a Norse name. The rest bore Slavic compound names mostly ending in -slav, meaning fame. After that generation the dynasty kept only five Norse male names and one female name, with Oleg, Igor, and Gleb the most popular. Gleb was murdered in 1015 and canonised. Foreign sources prove the adaptation finished late. Byzantine writers of the later 10th century still preserve the nasal sound in Ingvarr, and a Hebrew document renders Helgi as HLGW, keeping the initial H. A manuscript from as late as 1073 still shows a vowel between the G and the l in Gleb, meaning the name was still pronounced with an initial Gu. From this the scholar Melnikova concludes that the Slavicisation of the Rus elite would have been complete only after the second half of the 11th century. Religion drove the change as much as language. Vladimir, a pagan who worshipped Perun and Veles, likely Slavic versions of the Norse gods Thor and Freyr, converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church in 988. Melnikova argues that the disappearance of Norse funeral traditions around the year 1000 is better explained by Christian burial rites than by ethnic assimilation. The lack of Norse burials shows not that the Rus had become Slavic, but that they had turned Orthodox Christian.

  Birch-bark letter number 526, written in the 1080s, refers to a man named Asgut from a village near Lake Seliger, on the road between Novgorod and the central parts of Kievan Rus. These letters from Novgorod, dating from around the year 1000, hold hundreds of names, mostly Slavic or Christian. Melnikova counts seven with Old Norse names, while Sitzman identifies as many as eighteen. The countryside held the old traditions longer than the towns. A letter from the second half of the 14th century mentions Vigar', a man named Sten of Mikula, a Jakun, and the widow of a second Jakun. The most intriguing letter mentions a place called Gugmor-navolok, perhaps from the name Guðmarr, near a portage on the route to Lake Onega. A Guðmarr may once have settled there, with the family naming traditions preserved for centuries afterward, even though his descendants had adopted the local material culture. The runic script itself survived in remote corners. At Zvenigorod in the south-west, a weaver's spindle-whorl bears the inscription representing the Norse female name Sigrið, found in a layer dated to between 1115 and 1130. It carries the g rune from the Elder Futhark, an archaic form, alongside crosses and f runes. Only those who had once followed Norse paganism and then converted to Christianity would grasp the meaning of both signs together. At a fort called Maskovichi on the Western Dvina river route, near the Latvian border, around 110 bone fragments carry graffiti of warriors and weapons. Of these inscriptions some 30 are clearly Cyrillic and 48 are runic, some written in mirror-runes from right to left, made by people who still knew or remembered the runes. The Norse left their mark on the land in lasting ways. Settlers gave their names to places across north-western Russia, so that a man named Einarr survives in Inarevo and Kynríkr in Kondrikovo. The Norse word for hero, vitjaz', derived from Viking, entered Old East Slavic, alongside everyday loanwords like the word for a box and the word for herring. And the genetic trail runs deepest of all. At the cemetery of Ostriv along the Ros' River, 67 graves dated from the early 11th century yielded DNA that clusters with present-day Icelandic and East Baltic populations, on the edge of the variability of published Swedish Vikings and close to medieval individuals from Estonia.