Rus' Erotic

The Rus' were a historical people of the 8th to 11th centuries, Norse in origin and mostly Swedish, who traded along and then ruled the river roads between the Baltic and the Black Sea, and who dissolved within a few generations into the Slavic population they governed, leaving their name to Kievan Rus' and through it to Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Ruthenians. What made them a people was not a homeland but a trade. They rowed and portaged shallow boats up the Neva and the Volkhov, across the watersheds, and down the Dnieper and the Volga, carrying furs, wax, honey and slaves south and hauling Arab silver north. The word itself probably comes from an Old Norse term for rowing crews, passed through Finnish Ruotsi, still the Finnish name for Sweden. Frankish annalists in 839 met envoys calling themselves Rhos and decided they were Swedes. In Constantinople such men served as mercenaries under the name Varangians.

Their towns were the fortified trading posts of Ladoga, Novgorod, Gnezdovo near Smolensk and Kiev, where the Rurikid princes made themselves rulers of the Slavic tribes who paid them tribute. The witnesses on the peace treaties with Constantinople in 911 and 944 carry Norse names, Karl, Ingjald, Farulf, Vermund, and a Byzantine emperor writing a generation later recorded the names of the Dnieper rapids twice, once in Rus' and once in Slavonic, the Rus' versions being plain Old Norse. But the shift was fast. Prince Igor's son was Sviatoslav, a Slavic name, and by the time Vladimir accepted baptism from Byzantium in 988 the ruling class spoke Old East Slavic, with Norse surviving mainly in names and loanwords. Religion followed the same route: Norse gods first, then a Slavic pantheon under Perun, on whom the Rus' swore their treaty oaths by laying down weapons and rings, then Orthodox Christianity, which is why Rus' came to mean an Orthodox land rather than a Viking one.

The best eyewitness is the Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan, who met Rus' merchants on the Volga in 922 and wrote down what he saw: men tattooed in dark green from the neck down, each carrying an axe, a sword and a knife, women wearing a brooch box at the breast with a knife hung from it and a neck ring for every ten thousand dirhams their husbands owned. He watched a chieftain burned in his ship with a slave girl killed to accompany him, a rite the graves at Gnezdovo and Ladoga confirm in outline. Within two centuries that world was gone, absorbed into the princely families, the church and the cities it had built, and the people who carried the name were no longer Norse at all.