River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  Eventually the slave girl was led into a burial chamber on board a ship that had been pulled from the water, and to which the chieftain had been moved from his temporary grave. It was here that the slave girl was murdered by the Angel of Death so that she could accompany the chieftain: in a harrowing account, Ibn Fadlan describes that she was held down by some of the men while others beat their shields, allegedly to drown out her screams. Finally the boat and all that it contained was set aflame. Afterwards Ibn Fadlan describes how a mound was built on top of the remains of the ship, onto which the Vikings set a wooden post inscribed with the chieftain’s name and the name of the king of the Rus’.

  Two things are important about this account. First, the description of the funeral is so close to the archaeological record of Viking burials both in Scandinavia and the rest of the Viking world that we cannot possibly deny these people’s link to those we think of as Vikings, even though they are described as Rus’. While the funeral was a cremation, it matches very closely the details of ship graves found elsewhere: the burial chamber inside the Oseberg ship, for instance, sounds remarkably similar. The animal sacrifices depicted by Ibn Fadlan are familiar too, and the entire funeral is a good match for the elaborate ritual seen at Salme and the performative elements of the Repton charnel mound. Both cremation and inhumations were common across the Viking world, sometimes taking place side-by-side. The form of burial practice varied enormously too: some dead were placed in the ground with no grave goods, others with equipment needed for the afterlife. Some are in coffins and others, like Bj.581, in elaborate chamber graves. According to Ibn Fadlan, this related to status and wealth. A poor man, he said, would be cremated, whereas a slave would be left where he died, waiting for the dogs and birds of prey to devour him. Another possible reason why it is so difficult to find slaves in the burial record.

  Second, Ibn Fadlan’s narrative is the most reliable – at least to a degree – contemporary account of human sacrifice during the Viking Age. And it’s this description that offers a possible link to the juvenile grave in Repton. Could those juveniles have been killed in a ritual enacted in a similar way? Obviously, the circumstances were very different, but there is extensive drama and an element of performance evident in Ibn Fadlan’s account that is perhaps matched at Repton. The burial by the Volga wasn’t just a practical process of dealing with a rotting corpse, but an elaborate display of rituals and storytelling, carefully choreographed in a way that made sense to those who watched it. If we are to believe Ibn Fadlan’s depiction, each element, from the preparation of the body and the creation of the chamber aboard the boat to the ritualised abuse of the slave girl, was part of a story that had meaning and clear reasons for being carried out. There was something theatrical in Repton too, in the way that the mass grave must have been created: the clean layer of red sand beneath the bones and the stacking of remains, possibly around a central burial. It is possible that a similar performance took place there, in the shadows of the crumbling ruins of the once-glorious monastery.

  8.

  BEAD: CROSSROADS

  VYPOVZYV, UKRAINE, 2018

  I’ve stepped out of the trench for some water, sitting on the parched grass underneath a makeshift shade made from a threadbare tarpaulin. The sun is scorching overhead and we haven’t seen clouds for days, digging far from the shaded pine forests that surround the open plain. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I look up towards the hill to the east, making out a person walking barefoot down the sandy path towards me. Up there is the ancient hillfort overlooking the river, with an excavation trench reaching almost ten metres down at its deepest. Home-made, rickety ladders barely support the students climbing down to the bottom where ancient postholes appear as outlines in the sand: all that remains of the fortified structure that loomed atop this hill a thousand years ago. As the figure comes closer, I see that it’s Vitaly, his right hand clenched into a fist. He has found something. I push myself off the ground and walk towards him. ‘Is this what you were looking for?’ he asks and stretches out his hand. And there it was: a small carnelian bead with smooth, flat surfaces, oblong and with facets cut along its sides, identical to that found in Repton.

  POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

  The tales of the Rus’ provide a colourful background and a convincing and compelling description of the people you would have met on these journeys. Yet questions remain as to how accurate the accounts are and over what timeframes this would have developed. What happened beyond the territories described by the Arab travellers: how far do the connections extend north, west, or further east? There is no clear agreement on how interlinked these worlds were. More than a century’s worth of academic debate – sometimes hostile – has dwelled on whether the Vikings and Rus’ really were one and the same. The separation between east and west is in part one of semantics: while, as some have said, the Rus’ were not always Vikings, many Vikings were Rus’. The vital question here is one of identity. This was a melting pot of cultures (Scandinavian, Slav, Khazar, Byzantine and more) and it is plausible that the earliest Viking presence proved a catalyst for what the Rus’ were to become. Yet this is contentious for deeply political reasons, made even more so by the oppressive hold the Soviet Union had on historians and archaeologists in this region for decades. As George Orwell famously said in his dystopian novel 1984: ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ It has been said that in early medieval Europe ‘to bear arms was to be a participant in politics’ and for these eastern regions, studying the period in the present can be deeply political too.

  Many of the controversies surrounding the Rus’ and the Vikings boil down to a single historical source: the Russian Primary Chronicle. Apart from the accounts of the Arab travellers, which are skewed towards the Volga river region and the tenth century, there are few available historical documents that give more explicit details of when and by whom this region was settled. Much of what we think we know comes from the Primary Chronicle, which was compiled sometime between the mid eleventh and the early twelfth centuries. While it contains some reliable information, most of the contents must be taken with a pinch of salt: its writers, Christian monks based in Kyiv, seem to have taken quite a few liberties with historical accuracy, and the information contained in the Chronicle has provided an origin story for what is now Russia as well as for Ukraine.

  The Chronicle is thought to have been written down by Nestor, a monk from the Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv, and is also known as the Tale of Bygone Years. The main story goes like this: in the early 860s the land of the Slavs was in turmoil. For a long time Slavonic tribes had been harassed by robbers from the north, groups of Varangians (another name often used as a synonym for the Rus’, or the Vikings, later gaining a more specific use), who forced them to pay tribute. Eventually they revolted but this led to disaster. Internecine strife meant self-rule proved to be an unsuccessful venture; the Slavs were too busy fighting among themselves. To solve this problem, a request was made to another group of northerners, the Rus’: ‘Our land is great and rich,’ the Slavs pleaded, ‘but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.’

  The call was answered by three brothers, who took with them their families and ‘all the Rus’’ to migrate. The three were Rurik, the eldest, who set himself up in Novgorod; Sineus, who settled in Beloozero on the southern bank of Lake Beloye; and Truvor, who took up residence in Izborsk, just east of the Russia–Estonia border. The land around Novgorod – the New City – became known as the land of the Rus’ (and its people as the Rus’ians). The younger two brothers lasted only two years and afterwards Rurik took charge of the whole territory. And so, according to the Chronicle, the Rus’ state was founded. In the years to follow, the nucleus of the Rus’ was to move to Kyiv.

  Two points in the story are crucial for understanding why this account became so problematic. First, that the protagonists came from the north and were most likely Swedish Vikings. Second, that the Slavonic tr
ibes are described as incapable of keeping the Varangians at bay and of ruling themselves. It’s easy to understand why such a version of events became controversial as an origin story. The debate has become a stand-off between Normanists and anti-Normanists, with the former arguing in favour of a heavy Scandinavian influence and the latter denying it almost entirely. The anti-Normanist viewpoint was particularly favoured under Soviet rule. Here the preferred narrative was that Scandinavians had no influence over early Russian politics, language or religion and the Rus’ name referred to something else altogether: suggestions included anything from the river named Ros near Kyiv to the town of Rodez in France or the island of Rügen in the Baltic, or even, more creatively, that the name derived from the ancient Iranian tribe of Roxolani. Anything but Scandinavia.

  At times the debates have been extreme, especially on the side of the Normanists, with Adolf Hitler infamously stating: ‘Unless other peoples, beginning with the Vikings, had imported some rudiments of organisation into Russian humanity, the Russians would still be living like rabbits.’ With statements like this, it’s not difficult to understand the opposition to Viking connections and the dilemma for Slavic scholars forced to choose between a view crediting a superior, foreign people with creating their entire nation or an alternative story that is at odds with the written sources. As one nineteenth-century historian put it, the question was of ‘whether or not we have created our own history’.

  For a long time there seemed to be no middle ground and arguably this is one of the key reasons why the eastern sphere has often been excluded more generally from discussions of the Viking Age. The Iron Curtain that fell across Europe after the Second World War meant researchers into the northern past were at best discouraged and at worst silenced. It has even been suggested that research showing any form of outside influence – not just Scandinavians – having a positive impact on the Slavic people was unsafe.

  A prime example of the effect of this kind of thinking is shown in another Slavonic location, where traditionally the Vikings are thought to have had little impact: Prague. In 1928 at Prague Castle, a Ukrainian archaeologist named Ivan Borkovsky excavated a grave dating to the tenth century: a time when Prague would have been an important, cosmopolitan centre. The male skeleton lay interred in a deteriorated wooden chamber and was accompanied by a familiar set of grave goods: a sword, axe, knives, a fire steel and a bucket by his feet. Many of these objects were of Scandinavian type, giving rise to one interpretation that this was the grave of a Viking, a proposal that was initially ignored. When Nazi Germany occupied Prague in 1939, the benefits of having a Viking burial at the castle were recognised: the presence of Germanic people in eastern Europe was expedient to Nazi ideology, as such a narrative could provide historical precedent for their occupation. Viking, Scandinavian and Germanic identities were quickly conflated, suggesting that the castle and by extension the whole territory were justifiably part of the Nazi birthright. Following the war, when Prague fell under the rule of the USSR, the alternative interpretation was emphasised: that this person was of Slavic origins. A team of researchers has tried to resolve the question using bioarchaeology but the results have, to date, been inconclusive: isotope analysis suggests that he wasn’t local but came from somewhere in northern Europe, possibly around the fringes of the Baltic Sea – maybe somewhere like Denmark.[1] While that makes a Viking origin very feasible, we are well aware by now that geography does not equate to identity and the new scientific methods cannot ensure political neutrality.

  This political minefield, then, serves as a backdrop for anyone trying to understand Vikings in the east. It’s unlikely that the account in the Primary Chronicle is entirely true, not least because it was written down several hundred years later, and because the story has been formulated to present one particular lineage, that of Rurik and his descendants, as the only legitimate heirs to what became known as the Kyivan state, the political entity established by the Rus’ in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. Nevertheless, many have tried to corroborate the story and to link the identity of Rurik to another known and very real Viking: Rörik, the nephew or brother of the Danish king Harald Klak, who died around 880. Rörik is mentioned in the Royal Frankish Annals and other continental sources, and the match makes sense in some ways as the two were certainly contemporary. However, there is nothing that links Rörik to Kyiv, so it’s more likely to be a coincidence.

  But what about archaeology and new evidence? In contrast to thirty years ago, the east is opening up for researchers and new lines of evidence are enabling us to find more ways to corroborate or contradict the historical texts. There are a number of archaeological sites in the upper Dnieper region, the most famous being Gnezdovo, near the city of Smolensk in western Russia, on the right-hand bank of the Dnieper. This may be the city originally called Smaleskia; at least, that is the name that appears in the Icelandic sagas. The site is rich in Scandinavian culture in both burial types and recovered artefacts. There’s a reference in the Primary Chronicle to Smolensk being captured by Oleg, the heir to Rurik, in the early 880s just before he kills Askold and Dir, two Rus’ brothers who had arrived with the first migrants and established themselves as the rulers of Kyiv.

  Here, at Gnezdovo, the importance of the rivers becomes crystal clear. Apart from the traffic south on the Dnieper, you’d have had access eastwards towards the Volga routes, as well as to the areas through Lake Ilmen and the Lovat river to the north. The burials are particularly wealthy and include chamber graves that closely parallel those at sites like Birka. The town has often been considered to be a pogost, a centre where tribute was collected and which would have been occupied by retainers of the later princes of Kyiv, the descendants of Rurik who came to rule the kingdom of the Kyivan Rus’. This may be a later attribution, but what’s for certain is that Viking Age Gnezdovo had clear and significant links to Scandinavia while at the same time being a place of power in its own right. Now ancient DNA may have demonstrated this link for the first time, as one burial there has suggested a man had ‘Danish-like’ ancestry.

  When you move further south towards the Dnieper, little is known from the written records and even accessing information from excavations can sometimes be difficult. However, in 2018, I was asked to lead a team of British students working with Ukrainian archaeologists to excavate a Rus’ site north of Kyiv. The site in question is known as Vypovzyv, and lies around seventy-five kilometres north-east of Kyiv. To get there you drive across vast plains of sunflower fields, through remote villages filled with rusty tractors; here you pay for snacks in the village shop with hryvnia, the Ukrainian currency that originates from weight-based standardised metal bars with the same name, which literally means ‘neck ring’. The monetary system in Ukraine dates back to currencies that were used more than a thousand years ago, having developed, slowly, from the wearable currency of the Rus’. The excavations were led by Ukrainian Vyacheslav Skorokhod, part of a new generation of archaeologists who were keen to engage with western researchers.

  Vypovzyv was first spotted in aerial photographs taken by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War, and the Ukrainian team had worked at the site for ten years. When you see it from the air, the location makes sense: a long, thin peninsula juts onto a floodplain where the River Desna once flowed. Today the river is about three kilometres away but its scars and rapid movements are clearly evident in the landscape: satellite photographs show swirling, wavy patches of colour, where the grass and sand reveal the indelible marks left behind by its meandering path, the patterns testament to how powerful and fast-flowing it is. A smaller stream called the Krymka now flows slowly past the raised area of land and this tributary, or one just like it, would once have passed round the back of the site, a possible escape route from the busy Desna. Downstream, the main river flows into the Dnieper at Kyiv, while in the other direction you can travel north to the city of Chernihiv and, eventually, to the river’s source near Smolensk over the border in Russia. Desna means ‘r
ight hand’ in the old East Slavic language, perhaps because of its status as the largest tributary of the Dnieper. Between early December and April, the river is usually frozen.

  At some point in the late ninth or early tenth century a hillfort sprang up on the prominent tip of the peninsula. Here the Ukrainian team found evidence of palisades and fortifications, making this a highly defended tower right on top of the hill: a place where you could easily have spotted enemies. At the same time the tower could not have been missed by anyone sailing up or down the Desna. Around the back, where the slower-flowing tributary circles the hillfort, there’s evidence of a port zone, with traces of old channels, where boats could have been pulled up out of the water, and a pier. Among the sandy deposits lay rusty iron nails from ship repairs. On the main expanse of the plain, beyond the hillfort, the team found a large number of sunken buildings that had been part of a settlement. This appears to have been inhabited by local people, at least if the artefacts are telling the truth: objects are of typical Slavic forms that would have been common on any site in the area. There is evidence of craftwork everywhere, of small-scale cottage industries springing up in order to support the burgeoning settlement. But on the hillfort, the objects are different. They are of higher status and more of them come from elsewhere: things like silver dirhams and a minute fragment of chainmail – items that only an elite would have possessed. And it was here that a tiny orange object was uncovered during the excavation: a carnelian bead perfectly matching that found in Repton.