It should be noted that this conclusion bases on materials coming from larger sites or towns, Gnjozdovo, Kiev, Novgorod. The evidence concerns the princely family, the warrior elite and the descendants of the Varangians of high status. There is no doubt that the social elite and town citizens adopted cultural innovations much easier and quicker than the peasantry. Therefore the processes of assimilation could develop faster in towns than in smaller, especially rural communities.
There are not so many traces of Scandinavian rural colonization in Ancient Rus’, especially in its Southern part. Therefore it is all the more surprising to find vestiges of Scandinavian cultural traditions in rural areas as late as the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. The evidence is again supplied by runic or rune-like inscriptions and by personal names.
The anthroponymicon of ca. 1000 birch-bark letters found by now in Novgorod numbers several hundred personal names. Most of them are Slavic or Christian, but seven birch-bark letters contain Old Norse names[867].
The oldest among these birch-bark letters is dated to the second half of the eleventh century (stratigraphic date is 1080ies) and mentions As gut who lived in a village near lake Seliger and owed a Novgorodian moneylender or tax collector several grivnas[868]. The context of the letter suggests that Asgut was a resident of the village. There is no way of finding out what brought Asgut (or his ancestors) to this village, but it is significant that the settlement was located on the Seliger route from Novgorod to the central part of Rus’.
Other birch-bark letters with Old Norse names were written in the second half of the fourteenth century and came to Novgorod from different parts of the Novgorod land. They name Vigar’ (<Végeirr or Vigeirr)[869], a «man of Mikula» Sten’ (<Steinn)[870], Jakun (<Hákon)[871] and a widow of another, Jakun[872]. The most interesting is the birch-bark letter No.[873] that mentions a place-name Gugmor-navolok deriving from ON Guðmarr, and two persons living nearby named Vozemut (<Guðmundr) and Vel’jut (<Véljótr). The combination of these names suggests that a certain Gudmarr once settled on the site near a portage (navolok) on the way to the lands north of lake Onega and that the tradition of using Old Norse names was preserved in the family (or in the community?) into the fourteenth century. It is highly improbable that Gudmarr was a newcomer, as there are no traces of fourteenth-century immigration in this area, as well as of earlier Scandinavian antiquities in the vicinity. It seems that the descendants of Gupmarr adopted the material culture of Slavic and Finnic neighbours, but retained their own name-giving traditions.
The content of all birch-bark letters but No. 249 (Sten\ the «man of Mikula», could be either a resident or a migrant from Sweden or Swedish Finland) points to the fact that the bearers of Old Norse names were residents fully incorporated in the local social and economic life. They are mentioned among persons with Slavic names, they pay taxes in firs, become debtors of Novgorodians, receive money, they deliver homemade products together with the Slavs and the Finns. According to the topography of later birch-bark letters, persons with Old Norse names lived in villages dispersed in the northeastern periphery of the Novgorod land. In the eleventh century the area was occasionally visited by Novgorod tribute collectors, but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it became the territory of Novgorod colonization. As the Varangians constituted a large part of the administrative machinery in early Rus’, they could easily penetrate into this region and sometimes settle there. The usage of specific family names still in the fourteenth century attests to the conservation of some cultural traditions among the distant descendants of those Varangians.
The birch-bark letters provide the latest date of Old Norse cultural relics. Nothing more than personal names survived up till that time. The latest remains of the runic script belong to the twelfth century. But for the birch-bark letter from Smolensk written by a Scandinavian, there are no objects with runic inscriptions from that time found in Old Russian towns. In the remote areas of Rus’ the runic script seems not to be utterly forgotten however and two finds prove it.
The first find was made in Zvenigorod in the southwestern part of Rus’. It was a slate spindle-whorl with an inscription sigriþ on its flattened top, and two crosses and two runes f on its side[874]. The layer in which the spindle-whorl was found is dated to 1115–1130, the time when the settlement started to grow into a town. No other objects of Scandinavian origin were excavated there except for two other spindle-whorls with rune-like inscriptions dating approximately to the same time. One more spindle-whorl with a rune-like inscription was found on an Old Russian fortified site Plesnesk several kilometers from Zvenigorod[875]. It was a strategically important point on the borders of the Old Russian state and it is in Plesnesk where several warrior burials of the late tenth century were unearthed. These burials are believed to belong to warriors of a rather high standing of a Kievan grand prince and some of them could be Scandinavians by origin.
It is tempting to suppose, that the spindle-whorls were inscribed by the descendants of the Varangians who had settled in the region in the late tenth century to defend western borders of the Russian state. The archaic features of the sigriþ inscription with rune g of the older futhark could be the result of copying the inscription for several generations. In this case the name Sigriðr must be a constantly occurring name in one of the families. The combination of crosses and f-runes seems however to speak against this surmise. It could not be meaningless for the carver as well as for the owner of the spindle-whorl. Both the cross and f-rune had rather similar symbolic values, although in different religious systems. It was possible to combine both only for a Christian convert who had earlier been an adherent of Old Norse paganism. One also needed an understanding of symbols’ significance, which presupposes survival of old cultural traditions. It is feasible that this group of the descendants of the late tenth-century Varangians living in a remote area of Ancient Rus’ and having no contacts with their homeland managed to preserve family names, remembrances of the runic script in an archaic form, ancestor’s beliefs, and probably a little of their mother tongue as the usage of runes suggests.
Another complex of rune-like inscriptions comes from a fortified site Masko-vichi on the Western Dvina route. This fort on the border with Latvian lands was located several kilometers from the mainstream but was still able to control it. The fort functioned in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and later became a petty castle[876]. About 110 fragments of bones with graffiti found on the site include pictures of warriors and weapons, and inscriptions. All letter-like graffiti are short and do not form any readable text of several words. These are rather groups of three to six letters, some of which can be interpreted as a word. About 30 inscriptions are obviously Cyrillic while 48 are supposed to be made with runes[877]. Among rune-like graffiti there are several unreadable inscriptions made with ‘mirror’ runes (amulets?), several inscriptions that can be interpreted as personal names, isolated words, and separate letters. Though the reading and the interpretation of the Maskovichi inscriptions are uncertain, there can be little doubt that they were made by persons who had some knowledge or remembrances of the runic script.
Thus in the remote areas of the Old Russian state the descendants of the Varangians who had settled there in the late tenth and eleventh centuries preserved some of their cultural traditions for several centuries while being included in the local political and economic life. The assimilation processes in rural communities seem to have developed much slower than in towns.
(Впервые опубликовано: Runica – Germanica – Medievalia / W. Heizmann und A. van Nahl (Erganzungsbande zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde / H. Beck, D. Geuenich, H. Steuer. Bd. 37.). B.; N.Y., 2003. P. 454–465)
Варяги на севере и на юге Восточной Европы: региональные особенности
Е. А. Мельникова
В современной, как и в более ранней историографической традиции за немногими исключениями[878], деятельность скандинавов в Восточной Европе IX – начала XI в. представляется обычно единообразной и неизменной: и в IX, и в X, и в первой половине XI в. они вели торговлю, служили наемниками в дружинах русских (в IX – начале X в. – скандинавских по происхождению) князей, выступали в роли их помощников и советников, ходили походами на Византию. Отмечают источники и грабительские набеги в Прибалтику и на Русь (например, на Ладогу) в VII–X вв.[879]