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Rus' people

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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 Rus'ian 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 Kyiv and created Kievan Rus'. The territory they conquered was named after them (see Ruthenia) 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 knut (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.
  • An old word for bear, cognate with arctos and ursus.
  • A term for water as in Rusalka.
  • 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 the the cultural level of the Varangians could not have warranted an invitation from the 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).


References

  • Pavel M. Dolukhanov. The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe from the Initial Settlement to the Kievan Rus. New York: Longman, 1996.
  • Omeljan Pritsak. The Origin of Rus'. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
  • Norman Davies. Europe: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • The Annals of Saint-Bertin, transl. Janet L. Nelson, Ninth-Century Histories 1 (Manchester and New York, 1991).

Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah, by James E. Montgomery, with full translation of Ibn Fadlan

An overview of the controversy

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