Ötüken Yış Bahsine İlave: Varenglerin Yolundaki Rusya Dağları

Abstract

A Byzantine source from the X century (De Administrando Imperio), by telling about how the Nordic Varengs used to come to Black Sea, mentiones some mountains in Western Russia, which is only a flat plain with rare heightnesses that cannot be classified as mountain. The mentioned region seems to be the Valdai hills around the western Russian city Smolensk, from where stems the great rivers Volga, Dnieper, Western Dvina and Lovat’. Here is a phylological question: Early Slavs called both forest and mountain as gora, as done by many other nations, and as it is the case with the Early Turkic place name Otuken Yish. The second word originally means forest, but in the Otuken case it is simply land, while in majority of cases it defines mountains. The word gora means mountain in all Slavic languages, and forest in Bulgarian. There should be some roots, where these two usages come together. This is reflected in the language of Early Medieval Eastern Slavs.