Rev.:] The Making of the Eastern Vikings: Rus’ and Varangians in the Middle Ages / Ed. by Sverrir Jakobsson, Thorir Jonsson Hraundal, and Daria Segal. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023. (Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces, vol. 12). 236 p.

Abstract

The volume is edited by Prof. Sverrir Jakobsson, Dr Thorir Jónsson Hraundal and a PhD can-didate Daria Segal from the University of Reykjavík. The list of the participants is quite di-verse (from renowned scholars to recent university graduates) and, as a result, the quality of the papers is immensely varied. The intended aim of the collection is to contribute to what the editors believe is a “much-needed paradigm shift in the study of the eastern Vikings, with a renewed focus on their multiple and hybrid identities”. The editors argue that histo-riography on the “eastern Vikings”, as they label them, is vast but invariably focused on ac-tual historical events, while their goal is to concentrate on the narrators of the medieval ac-counts of the Rus’ and the Varangians, the literary contexts, and the aetiology of these nar-ratives, thus situating the debate on the Rus’ and the Varangians in a new context. The book consists of an introduction, eleven chapters, a list of references, and a terminology index where the term Rus’ is missing, either by oversight or because of the challenges of defining it unambiguously. Of the eleven chapters, eight are source studies, while three are written in a slightly different vein and are primarily orientated towards historiography. The papers, as they appear in the book, are devoted to: 1) a gender reading of tenth-century Islamic geo-graphical sources about the Rus’ (T. M. Upham); 2) the Varangians in medieval Arabic sources of the ninth to eleventh centuries (Thorir Jónsson Hraundal); 3) the initial stage (ninth cen-tury) of relations between Byzantium and the Rus’ (M. White); 4) the Western images of Scandinavians and the Rus’ in the period between 800 and 1250 (R. Fenster); 5) criticism of John Lind’s concept of “Varangian Christianity” as practised by Scandinavians along the way “from the Varangians to the Greeks” (I. Garipzanov); 6) the Varangians in the chronicle writ-ing of medieval Rus’ (D. Segal); 7) the treasures of Haraldr Sigurðarson, the king of Norway from 1046 to 1066, acquired by him in Rus’ and Byzantium (F. Androshchuk); 8) the Norwe-gian missionary king of the late tenth century Óláfr Tryggvason and the role in the baptism of Rus’ ascribed to him by sagas (K. J. Richter); 9) saga narratives on the visits of the Scandi-navians to Constantinople which predate the sources by several centuries (Sverrir Jakob-sson); 10) a re-evaluation of the 1954 work of Sigfús Blöndal on the Varangian guard in Con-stantinople and its 1978 English translation and reworking (R. Scheel); 11) Kievan Rus’ in Ukrainian historiography (Valur Gunnarsson). The volume produces an entirely mosaic impression and is not always logically organised from the point of view of chronology. Nevertheless, the collection is interesting for the issues raised in it and its unconventional approaches and interpretations. However, many of these papers demonstrate an insufficient acquaintance of the authors with the Russophone scholarly literature, without which it is impossible to investigate the chosen topic comprehensively.