Rus' (people)
The ethnic origins of the
Rus' people are highly controversial in
Eastern Europe. Whereas most Western historians tend to give credence to the Normanist theory, many
Slavic scholars are strongly opposed and work to find other origins.
Culture and heritage is what is ultimately at stake in this controversy. The question is whether East Slavic civilisation owes an element of its cultural origin to the
Scandinavian rulers of the
9th to
11th centuries, as suggested by the Normanist theory, or whether that heritage can excusively attributed to the
Slavs, as held by the Slavicists.
The question is emotionally charged. In the
1700s, one
imperial Russian historian presenting the Normanist theory in
St. Petersburg was forced to curtail his lecture by shouts from the audience and forced to cease his work on the issue. His work was destroyed (Source: Davies).
The Normanist theory
This theory is called the Normanist theory, as it suggests that Kievan Rus' may have been named after its Scandinavian overlords just as Normandy.
Rus was, according to the Russian Primary Chronicle, a group of Varangians living on the other side of the Baltic sea, in Scandinavia. The Varangians were first expelled, then invited to rule the warring Slavic and Fennic tribes of Novgorod:
- The four tribes who had been forced to pay tribute to the Varangians - Chuds, Slavs, Merians, and Krivichians drove the Varangians back beyond the sea, refused to pay them further tribute, and set out to govern themselves. But there was no law among them, and tribe rose against tribe. Discord thus ensued among them, and they began to war one against the other. They said to themselves, "Let us seek a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to custom. Thus they went overseas to the Varangians, to the Rus. These particular Varangians were known as Rus, just as some are called Swedes, and others Normans and Angles, and still others Gotlanders, for they were thus named. The Chuds, the Slavs, the Krivichians and the Ves then said to the Rus, "Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come reign as princes, rule over us". Three brothers, with their kinfolk, were selected. They brought with them all the Rus and migrated (The Primary Chronicle).
Later, the
Primary Chronicle tells us, they conquered
Kiev and created
Kievan Rus'. The territory they conquered was named after them (see
Etymology of Rus and derivatives) as were, eventually, the local people (
cf.
Normans).
The Normanist theory is also based on
Ibn Fadlan who uses the name
Rusiyyah for a group of people who are usually interpreted as
Vikings near
Astrakhan, and on
Ibn Rustah who visited
Novgorod and described how the
Rus' exploited the
Slavs.
- As for the Rus, they live on an island ...that takes three days to walk round and is covered with thick undergrowth and forests; it is most unhealthy....They harry the Slavs, using ships to reach them; they carry them off as slaves and...sell them. They have no fields but simply live on what they get from the Slav's lands....When a son is born, the father will go up to the newborn baby, sword in hand; throwing it down, he says, "I shall not leave you with any property: You have only what you can provide with this weapon." (Ibn Rustah, according to the National Geographic, March 1985)
It is also due to the annals of Saint Bertan which relate that Emperor
Louis II' court in
Ingelheim,
839 (the same year as the first appearance of
Varangians in
Constantinople), was visited by a delegation from the
Byzantine emperor. In this delegation there were two men who called themselves
Rhos (
Rhos vocari dicebant). Louis enquired about their origins and learnt that they were
Swedes. Fearing that they were spies for their brothers, the
Danes, he incarcerated them.
This theory claims that the name
Rus, like the Finnish name for
Sweden, is derived from an
Old Norse term for "the men who row" (
rods-) as rowing was the main method of navigating the Russian rivers, and that it is linked to the Swedish province of
Roslagen (Rus-law) or
Roden, from which most
Varangians came. The name
Rus would then have the same origin as the
Finnish and
Estonian names for Sweden:
Ruotsi and
Rootsi.
In contemporary Scandinavian sources Eastern Europe was called
Greater Sweden or
Sweden the Cold beside the name
Gardarike (the land of cities). A similar way of naming an area of colonies has been used for southern
Italy, Magna Graeca (Greater Greece).
It has been suggested that the Vikings had some enduring influence in Rus, as testified by loan words, such as
yabeda "complaining person" (from
aembetsman "official"),
gospodin "lord" (from
husbondi "master") and
knout (from
knutpiska a kind of whip with
knots). Moreover certain Nordic names also became popularized, such as Oleg (Helgi), Olga (Helga) and Igor (Ingvar).
The Slavicist theory
Scholarship from Eastern Europe has criticised this theory. For example Dolukhanov has written about how problematic he feels the Normanist theory to be.
Some non-Normanist origins for the origins of
Rus have been postulated:
- From one of two rivers in the Ukraine (near Kyiv and Pereyaslav), Ros and Rusna. \n*An old word for bear, cognate with arctos and ursus.\n*A term for water as in Rusalka (mermaid) and rosa (dew).\n*The Iranian tribe of the Roxolani (from Persian rokhs'' ‘light’).
According to Montgomery, the Rus' were
Swedes in
839, but in the
11th century they were
Slavs. The Scandinavians were completely absorbed and, unlike their brethren in
England and in
Normandy, they left no cultural heritage whatsoever, in Eastern Europe.
This almost complete absence of cultural traces (besides the name
Rus,
place names, loan words, some personal names, and probably the veche-system of Novgorod, see
ting) is highly remarkable, and the Slavicists therefore call the
Vikings "
cultural chameleons", who came, ruled and then disappeared, leaving little cultural trace in Eastern Europe. This seems to suggest that these Rus' were a group of people, less than a people in the nation sense of the word; less than an ethnos.
The fact that
Vikings apparently used a different name for the area, as discussed above, is presented as an argument against the Normanist theory.
This conclusion leads Slavicists to refute the
Primary Chronicle, which claims that the Swedish Rus' were "invited". They claim that the cultural level of the
Varangians could not have warranted an invitation from the allegedly culturally superior
Slavs.
Another theory
Other scholars note the presence of a Western European trading company (Scandinavian?, French?) near the mouth of the
Don River of a name very similar to the words Rus' and
Ruthenia. This trading outpost seems to have been present in the
800s and perhaps earlier (see the Normanist theory).
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References
- Pavel M. Dolukhanov. The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe from the Initial Settlement to the Kievan Rus. New York: Longman, 1996.\n* Omeljan Pritsak. The Origin of Rus'. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.\n* Norman Davies. Europe: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.\n* The Annals of Saint-Bertin, transl. Janet L. Nelson, Ninth-Century Histories 1 (Manchester and New York, 1991).
Related articles
External link
Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah, by James E. Montgomery, with full translation of Ibn Fadlan
An overview of the controversy
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