Древняя Русь и Скандинавия: Избранные труды

The content of all birch-bark letters but No. 249 (Sten\ the «man of Mikula», could be either a resident or a migrant from Sweden or Swedish Finland) points to the fact that the bearers of Old Norse names were residents fully incorporated in the local social and economic life. They are mentioned among persons with Slavic names, they pay taxes in firs, become debtors of Novgorodians, receive money, they deliver homemade products together with the Slavs and the Finns. According to the topography of later birch-bark letters, persons with Old Norse names lived in villages dispersed in the northeastern periphery of the Novgorod land. In the eleventh century the area was occasionally visited by Novgorod tribute collectors, but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it became the territory of Novgorod colonization. As the Varangians constituted a large part of the administrative machinery in early Rus’, they could easily penetrate into this region and sometimes settle there. The usage of specific family names still in the fourteenth century attests to the conservation of some cultural traditions among the distant descendants of those Varangians.

The birch-bark letters provide the latest date of Old Norse cultural relics. Nothing more than personal names survived up till that time. The latest remains of the runic script belong to the twelfth century. But for the birch-bark letter from Smolensk written by a Scandinavian, there are no objects with runic inscriptions from that time found in Old Russian towns. In the remote areas of Rus’ the runic script seems not to be utterly forgotten however and two finds prove it.

The first find was made in Zvenigorod in the southwestern part of Rus’. It was a slate spindle-whorl with an inscription sigriþ on its flattened top, and two crosses and two runes f on its side[874]. The layer in which the spindle-whorl was found is dated to 1115–1130, the time when the settlement started to grow into a town. No other objects of Scandinavian origin were excavated there except for two other spindle-whorls with rune-like inscriptions dating approximately to the same time. One more spindle-whorl with a rune-like inscription was found on an Old Russian fortified site Plesnesk several kilometers from Zvenigorod[875]. It was a strategically important point on the borders of the Old Russian state and it is in Plesnesk where several warrior burials of the late tenth century were unearthed. These burials are believed to belong to warriors of a rather high standing of a Kievan grand prince and some of them could be Scandinavians by origin.

It is tempting to suppose, that the spindle-whorls were inscribed by the descendants of the Varangians who had settled in the region in the late tenth century to defend western borders of the Russian state. The archaic features of the sigriþ inscription with rune g of the older futhark could be the result of copying the inscription for several generations. In this case the name Sigriðr must be a constantly occurring name in one of the families. The combination of crosses and f-runes seems however to speak against this surmise. It could not be meaningless for the carver as well as for the owner of the spindle-whorl. Both the cross and f-rune had rather similar symbolic values, although in different religious systems. It was possible to combine both only for a Christian convert who had earlier been an adherent of Old Norse paganism. One also needed an understanding of symbols’ significance, which presupposes survival of old cultural traditions. It is feasible that this group of the descendants of the late tenth-century Varangians living in a remote area of Ancient Rus’ and having no contacts with their homeland managed to preserve family names, remembrances of the runic script in an archaic form, ancestor’s beliefs, and probably a little of their mother tongue as the usage of runes suggests.