Heill Llama!

> Fascinating stuff! This is area spoken of in Old Icelandic sources

generally as 'austrvegr' "east-way". There's a curious, and possibly
early, saga which deals entirely with late Viking Age adventures in
the East: Yngvars saga víðförla; the expedition it purports to tell
of did take place, and is commemorated in tens of surviving
runestones in Sweden, although the story has been turned into a
folktale and then adapted further into a Christian morality tale
only remotely connected with historical events. A number of runic
inscriptions have come to light in the region, including one
particularly intriguing 'helmingr' (half-stanza) of skaldic verse
from Staraya (=Old) Ladoga.

http://www.arild-hauge.com/ru-e-rusland.htm
http://www.arild-hauge.com/ru-n-rusland.htm

Arild's pages are a net-treasure ;-) One of the problems with the so-
called Fornaldarsögur in general, in my opinion, is that they were
nearly all written too late to accurately reproduce the heroic
spirit of the time they seek to describe. The heros were originally
not Christian knights, crusaders, men of the mideaval court, etc..
One wishes that they had been written earlier, even earliest. I do
like the oral-tradition wording of the R-redaction Heiðreks, which I
think is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, FA Saga extant in
some form, but comparing it to the U- and H-redactions really shows
not just a huge shift in style, but a whole new paradigm of thought.
This new paradigm, unfortunately in my opinion, reigns widely in the
other extant FA sagas.

> I wonder if there's a clearer photograph of this anywhere online.

It is hard to read, and given the lack of consensus of the reading,
some better pictures would be nice.

> Besides Old Norse runes from the eastern routes (and the one much

earlier possible East Germanic inscription on the Kovel spearhead),
one of the Rus centres, Novgorod, is famous for its Slavic birch-bark
letters, discovered in recent decades, and dating from the 11th to
the 15th century. These offer an important glimpse of an East Slavic
vernacular, distinct from the South Slavic based Church Slavonic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect

Interesting stuff.

> Imagine if a similar trove of Gothic writings turned up! Not likely

perhaps, but you never know. It's only relatively recently that the
Novgorod birch-bark letters have been found. The other potential
point of contact between Norse travellers and Goths would have been
the Crimean peninsula (the Byzantine 'theme' of Gothia), at the
southern end of the Dniepr trade-route, where we have evidence for
the survival of the language into early modern times.

A find of Gothic writings would turn the whole of Germania on its
head. I do so hope, and ardently pray, that this happens. Give us
the native Gothic oral inherited verse, laws, stories, a history of
Goths in the native vernacular, a sensus with names, etc.!!

> And speaking of the Varangians, I came across this article a while

ago about English refugees who became mercenaries in the Varangian
Guard following the Norman Conquest of 1066.

http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/articles/pappas1.htm

I had heard about this before, but was unaware what, if any,
scholarship had gone into this queston. But it doesn't surprise me
in the slightest. We know almost nothing about our past, and anyone
who says otherwise is a liar ;-) I imagine that the English and
Norse mingled for generations out there in Byzantium, fighting and
drinking and dying side by side. Not that we would know much about
that. One thing we do know is that Haraldr harðráði was one of them,
and one wonders to what extent internal troubles, political or
other, in England might have lead some of the English guardsmen to
suggest he try his odds on the English throne, even before 1066,
when he did? I'll bet that Haraldr spoke English, even if brokenly.
Then whole Norse settlement of England seems to show that learning
English was a given for Norse settlers, most of whom seem to have
been of the merchant, farming or fishing classes. Whatever may have
been the case, Haraldr was a warrior and lived by a warrior's code.
Popular or unpopular, I think it highly unlikely that the English
tongue would have changed much, if at all, had he been taken as
king. For the first, the Norse were a minority, most of whom already
spoke English as it was. For the second, the Norse were of the same
stock, and that avoided ethnic tensions. For the third, Norse and
English were very similar at that time, as opposed to the French of
William, which became the administrative and legal language at the
cost of English. For the fourth, Haraldr loved poetry, and even was
a poet himself, which probably means that would have had open ears
for traditional verse, including English of course, and that could
mean that a lot of king ¯lfred's noble work in promoting English as
a literary language, most of which is lost to the damnation of all
Germanic scholarship and Anglophiles, like myself, might have
survived to the present day, with English, in a more conservative
form, as the only administrative, legal, ecclesiastical, literary
and common tongue of the land down to modern times. Now, alternative
histry is not my bag, but I can't help speculating on something so
big as a failed Norman conquest ;-)

Konrad

> Llama Nom
>