[snip]
> An alternative trade route to the North Sea is by ship through
> Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean. The danes and norse often chose
> this route in the viking age (and probably hundreds of years
> before.) The swedes more often went east, up russian rivers. Even
> norse and danes chose such eastborne routes from time to time.
>
[snip]
> Morten
I tend to be suspicious about the (19th century?) claim of the
preferred routes of Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes. It smells too much
of an academic collusion within Scandinavia to reserve archaeological
territories for oneself exclusively, so as not to start academic wars
about the various modern-ambition tainted interpretations. The claim
might of course be true in a statistical sense, but if the primary
purpose of those travels was trade (or loot, which in this context is
the same thing) they had to exchange stuff coming from east or west,
so they had to be at least aware of the "other" route.
As to which came first, the Russian river route or the Atlantic Coast
route, I vote for the former, since it was the safest. Crossing the
Bay of Biscay is not something you do without a very good reason.
Take an example I am familiar with: Trade from the North Sea to the
Baltic was, until the coming of large Hanse "kogge's", done overland
in Schleswig at Haithabu. The "ummelandsfart" (around Northern
Jutland) was considered too risky. If this was the economics of it
given late Viking age technology, there must have been even greater
emphasis on river travel before.
Also, but now I'm getting very speculative, some have
connected "Dane" with *dan- "river" (as in Don, Dniepr, Dniestr).
This would then be a river people doing trade through Russia. Saxo
Grammaticus mentions conflicts between Danes and Ruthenians.
Ruthenians in this context are Ukrainians.
Torsten