Research Description:

The Role of the Vikings in Medieval Russian State Formation

According to the twelfth-century Russian Primary Chronicle, the Slavs and a number of other tribes in the northwestern regions of modern Russia decided in 880 to invite the Viking prince Rurik from Scandinavia. Rurik and his two brothers came with their kinfolk and set themselves in three cities; Rurik in Novgorod, the other two in Beloozero and Izborsk. Kiev was occupied by two brothers, Askold and Dir, who were not kinsmen of Rurik, but belonged to his warband. The trustworthiness of this story, based as it was on the distorting medium of oral tradition, is the key issue in what came to be known as the "Normanist Controversy." It is often assumed that Russian and Soviet historians always and unanimously supported the idea that the story of the Chronicle was just a legend and that the Vikings played no role or, at least, a very small one in the rise of Kievan Rus'. By contrast, it is often believed that Western and Scandinavian scholars take the story at its face value and thus stress the vital role of Scandinavians in the formation of the medieval state in Russia. The Normanist debate equally ignored the recently published archaeological evidence from cemeteries in northern and central Russia, as well as key anthropological theories and concepts relevant to such issues as ethnicity and power. The purpose of this project is to elucidate some of these problems by means of a comparative approach. By comparing the Viking experience in the West with that from Eastern Europe, our aim is to illuminate some of the most important conclusions deriving from the analysis of burial grounds, settlements, and circular forts. The perspective used in this project is therefore interdisciplinary, for we will draw heavily from archaeological data, but also from historical sources and anthropological theories. Our goal is to take a fresh look at the existing evidence and to propose a new model for the understanding of the early medieval history of Eastern Europe, with a particular emphasis on the cultural construction of power and the rise of the medieval state.