Did the Finns Help the Swedes Go East?

The tribes that populated what is now Finland and Estonia have traditionally seen to be in the receiving end of Viking raids, most notably in Egils’ Saga where the titular hero slaughters a whole Estonian farmstead instead of letting them suffer the indignity of being robbed in their sleep. New research suggests that the Finno-Ugric tribes may ialso have played a key role in allowing the Vikings to navigate the waterways that led to the Black Sea, having familiarised themselves with the territory at a far earlier date. Archaeological evidence also suggests that influences from the east may have played a greater role in the culture of the Mälaren area. The iconic thick leather belts with metal buckles may even have come to present day Sweden from nomadic tribes to the east via present day Finland. A new Finnish documentary highlights this and the second part is shown on Icelandic State Broadcasting tonight:

https://www.ruv.is/sjonvarp/spila/eystrasaltsfinnarnir/26872/808ls1

(In Finnish and Swedish with Icelandic subtitles)

A Sami in modern day Finland

News from Norway

An archaeology student at the University of Trömsö found a previously unknown Viking era trading post in Sandtorg in northern Norway between the towns of Harstad and Narvik. Dating from the 9th century, it is the oldest trading centre in the north of Norway and shows that international trade was conducted from here earlier than thought. Among the artefacts discovered are Arabic coins and an Asian belt strap decoration. Those who know the Sagas will recall that this is the general area Egill Skallagrímsson’s immediate ancestors emigrated from to Iceland.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeology-student-finds-viking-trading-post-norway-180975391/?fbclid=IwAR3bpTj2dx5CeWAcXGi5rnpxL7CO1znAHbT5874OWaqhm98vTx0-lhh8s3I

The NRK national radio series Museum, about Nordic history and archaeology, is finally available as a podcast. In an episode from 2005, hosts  Øyvind Arntsen and Jan Henrik Ihlebæk travel to Starya Ladoga, the old Aldeiguborg, to find out about the beginnings of the Rus. Among the conclusions are that once Rúrík went east, he left Swedish history and entered that of Russia, in much the same way that prince Carl left Danish history and entered Norwegian when he became King Haakon VII of Norway. If Kyiv is he mother of Russian cities, then Aldeiguborg is the grandmother. In Norwegian with some Russian:

https://radio.nrk.no/podkast/museum/l_4665aac8-cd9c-4aee-a5aa-c8cd9cbaeee1

 Norwegian lion meets Russian bear

Swedish Proto-Vikings on Icelandic TV

De första svenskarna, or The First Swedes, is a two-part series by archaeologist Jonathan Lindström. The series debuted on Swedish television in February and the first episode was showed on Icelandic television last week. Using modern DNA technology from the University of Uppsala, Lindström aims to show that Sweden was first settled by dark-skinned, blue-eyed people from coming the south at the end of the last Ice Age 11.000 years ago. Almost simultaneously, a pale skinned group entered from the north via Russia, emanating from modern day Turkey. These hunted elk and had superior stone age weapons and tools and soon interbred with the former group. The second episode, to be aired tomorrow (July 21st) deals with proto-Viking raids from long before the beginning of the Viking Age.

The link to Icelandic National Broadcasting is here: https://www.ruv.is/sjonvarp/spila/fyrstu-sviarnir/29633/8qj8oh

The link to Swedish National Broadcasting:  https://www.svt.se/special/mot-de-forsta-svenskarna/

Celebrations in Kyiv Rus Park

Despite restrictions, Kyivans celebrated the holiday of Ivan Kupala on July 12th. The holiday is analogous to St John’s Day, known in Scandinavia as Midsommar, Sankthans or Johannus. Ivan is a Slavisation of John and the word kupala probably comes from the proto-slavic “kump,” which means gathering. In the Nordic and Baltic countries, it is celebrated on June 24th but for countries that use the orthodox liturgical calendar such as Ukraine, Russia and Belarus (and even Poland which does not), it is celebrated on July 6-7. or the weekend after, which explains the late date this year.

The occasion is connected with fertility. Young women are supposed to make flower wreaths and float them on the water. If they float, love will come, but if it sinks, it will not. Alternately, men may attempt to capture the wreaths to catch the attention of the woman in question. The celebration is also connected with water and children play pranks, mostly involving pouring water on people.

The main celebrations in Kyiv this year were held at the at Pyrohiv Outdoor Museum of Folk Architecture and at the Kyivan Rus Park. The latter is situated 35 kilometers south of the city and attempts to recreate the ancient town of Kyiv as it stood in the 10th century on a 1 to 1 scale. Only a small part has yet been completed, but it is open to the public on weekends in the summer, with events taking place in full Rus regalia.

“Ukraine is not a 26-year-old country; it is a great state with a history longer than a millennium. It has always been admired and its enemies have always feared it,” says park director Nataliia Koval in the Kyiv Post.

Park founder and “Knyaz of Ancient Kiev” Vladimir Vladimirovich Yanchenko says on its website: “Ancient Kiev became the center of gravity in the process of creation of states of Eastern Europe … Lately, this Rus’ galaxy gave birth to such countries as Ukraine, Russia, Belorussia. So, if we want to strengthen and develop our country – Ukraine, it is necessary to save and protect this gravity of the Kievan Detinets.”

Ukrainian history is still a work in progress and like the Park itself, a stout edifice is being built upon much that remains conjecture. What we know about the Kievan Rus is gleamed from incomplete and sometime contradictory sources, and much is open to debate, whereas the process of nation-building tends to prefer clearer narratives. Nevertheless, leading specialists such as Petro Tolochko of the NASU Institute of Archaeology of Ukraine have been consulted for the recreation. Not everything here may look exactly as it did a thousand years ago, but there is no faulting the ambition.

For more information, see: https://parkkyivrus.com/en/

The Wise Woman

Ready to read your fortune: The Wise Woman

What’s in a Name? The K-Word in Modern Ukraine

You say Kiev, I say Kyiv. Let’s call the whole thing off. No, the Kiev/Kyiv debate is not the lost verse to a Cole Porter song but rather a very loaded political question in Ukraine these days. Following the Leninopad and the demolition of the 2000 or so Lenin statues remaining during the 2014 Euromaidan revolution (bar two in Chornobyl deemed too radioactive), various cities and towns in Ukraine have undergone a change in spelling to better reflect the Ukrainian language rather than Russian. Odessa has become Odesa, Kharkov switched to Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk is now simply Dnipro. The separatists in the Donbass have gone in the other direction, labelling Donetsk with the older name Stalino on ceremonial days. For most of the rest of the country, Kiev has become Kyiv. No more Chicken Kiev. And no more Kievan Rus.

For the Medievalist or Icelander, this should be a matter of scant concern. One can simply go with the ancient moniker Kænugarður, as it is known in the old Norse. Benoît Humbert, is his PhD thesis at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, seems to firmly establish what to the Icelander may seem self-evident, that the name comes from Kæna for ship and garður for town (garden in modern Icelandic), hence ship town.

The Russian Scandinavianist Tatjana N. Jackson says in her article “The North of Eastern Europe in Early Nordic Texts: the Study of Place-Names” that “Kænugarður” was rarely used in the oldest Norse texts from 12th and 13th Century texts compared to Hólmgarður, og Novgorod, no doubt reflecting the direction of Nordic penetration from north to south.

The Ukrainian name is in fact older. Down by the banks of the river Dniepr (or Dnipro) as it passes through K-town is a statue of four people in a boat. At the bow is a woman stretching her arms out, somewhat resembling Kate Winslet doing the same in the film Titanic. Behind her stand three stern-looking men, two carrying spears, the last one a bow. The woman is Lybid and her brothers are Shchek, Khoryv and Kyi. According to tradition they settled in these parts in 482. The three hills were named after each of the brother but the town eventually became known as the namesake of the eldest.

The ship faces downstream from whence they came, which also explains why the right bank of the river as seen on a map is called the left bank by locals and vice versa, which was to become of importance later when all of left bank Ukraine (the right side on the map) was dominated by the Russian Empire and the right bank by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a division that reverberates to this day. But it is accounts of people sailing down the Dniepr during the Rus era that our modest website hopes to illuminate.

“The Boat,” as it is sometimes called, has become an emblem of the city, reproduced on countless postcards and was unveiled on the 1500th anniversary of settlement in 1982. One could argue that in some ways this resembles Iceland more than other Nordic countries. Whereas the Norwegians, Swedes and Danes trace their roots deep into the post-ice age past, the Icelanders traditionally claim a definite starting point in 874 as mentioned in the Sagas. In downtown Reykjavíok there is a statue of the first settler Ingólfur Arnarsson dating back to 1924 and portrays the “Father of Iceland” at the helm of a dragon-ship.

Yet whereas Iceland was most probably uninhabited when the Norse first came there, what is now present-day Ukraine most decidedly was not. But more on that later. For now, let us merely establish, out of respect for Kyi and the gang, that we will pander to Ukrainian sensibilities by settling for Kyiv and even Kyivan Rus rather than Kiev. Not everyone writing on this site will do so. And that is fine too.

Valur Gunnarsson