Древняя Русь и Скандинавия: Избранные труды

Since then the number of Scandinavian personal names among the Rurikides’ gets restricted to four masculine names and one feminine name. The most popular among them were Oleg, Igor’, and Gleb (due to canonization of prince Gleb who was murdered in 1015). Rurik is met for the fi rst time in the mid-eleventh century and it was used later from time to time but did not enjoy wide spread. The only feminine name that remained in Old Russian anthroponymicon was Ol’ga. Three other Old Norse names known from the treaties, namely Hákon, Óleifr and Ivarr, continued to be used, now not by the Rurikides, but by Russian nobles. Drastic decrease in number of Scandinavian personal names at the end of the tenth century can indicate that assimilation processes had intensifi ed.

There is a great diff erence in the forms of names in the treaties, between those that do not occur later and those current among the Rurikides. In the treaties all the names except for Oleg, Ol’ga and Igor’ are rendered in a form as close to the original as the Old Russian phonetic system allowed. At the same time there exist certain fl uctuations in rendering vowels /ó / > o and u (Óleifr > Oleb / Uleb) and /á/, /a/ > a and o (Hákon > Akun, ]akun, Arnfastr > Arfast and Fastr > Fost, the latter two occur both in the treaty of 944). The interdentals /ð/ and /þ/ that lack in Russian are systematically refl ected as /d/ (very seldom /z/) and /t/ respectively (Þórðr > Turd, Guðleifr > Vuzlev). The initial Fr– uncommon in Old Russian is usually substituted by Pr– (Freysteinn > Prasten, but sometimes also Frasten). It seems that there was no stable tradition of spelling Old Norse names and the scribe was free in choosing this or that variant[859].

On the contrary, the princes and princesses’ names that came into permanent usage in the eleventh century have stable forms common for the whole text of the chronicle. These forms reflect changes that originated in the course of adaptation of the names in Old Russian. Thus, the initial H– in Ol(e)g and Ol(‘)ga is omitted in all cases and the combination of consonants – lg– started to be occasionally divided by a reduced vowel. Igor’ (< Ingvarr) has a denasalized group Ig– and a compressed second stem while in Gleb (< Guðleifr) it is the fi rst stem that turned to be compressed.

Though phonetically altered forms of these three names are used in the treaties of the first half of the tenth century, they could hardly appear then or even by the end of the tenth century. Foreign sources of the time of the treaties and of the late tenth century render these names in forms closer to their Old Norse variants than to those found in the Old Russian chronicle. Thus, Byzantine authors of the middle and the second half of the tenth century preserve nasalization in Yngvarr – Ἴγγοϱ[860], or Ἴγγωϱ[861] and Inger[862]. In the so-called Cambridge document written in Hebrew and telling about an attack of the Rus-people on SMKRYY (Tmutarakan’?) the name of the leader of the assailants is rendered as HLGW, i.e. Helgi with the initial H-[863]. The fact that the adaptation of the name Guðleifr was not complete even in the middle of the eleventh century is attested by a manuscript of 1073 made for prince Svjatoslav where the name Gleb is spelled with a reduced vowel between G and l, the remains of the stem Guð-[864].

As these sources reflect authentic pronunciation of the names, it is more probable that the process of adaptation of Old Norse personal names used by Russian princes came to its end not in the mid-tenth century, but only in the second half of the eleventh century. The annalist who wrote at the beginning of the twelfth century knew the already adapted forms and used them throughout his text. He must have had no knowledge of the earlier pronunciation of the names, as he was unable to identify the contemporaneous form Gleb and the mid-tenth century form Vuzlev (< Gudleifr) that he left unchanged.

Were Old Norse names perceived at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as alien to Eastern Slavic tradition? Two cases seem to suggest an answer to this question. First, it is the case of the name Vuzlev in the text of the treaty of 944. The Old Norse form was unfamiliar to the annalist and he did not correlate it with the Old Russian Gleb. One can suppose that Gleb sounded for the annalist as an original Old Russian name, contrary to Vuzlev and dozens of Old Norse and Finnish names in the preamble.