Section 2 of 9
Varangians, Garðaríki and Miklagarðr. Rivers, dirhams and service to the emperor — the direction that opened before the western one.
Why less is heard about this
The western expeditions were written up by the monks who were being robbed: Lindisfarne, Paris and York have annals set down by the injured party while the event was fresh. The eastern direction left almost no such witnesses.
Here, instead of chronicles, there is archaeology and there are objects: hoards of dirhams, tree-ring dates from buildings, runestones raised for the dead, and a handful of outside views such as Ibn Fadlan’s account. The picture that results has fewer events in it and far more substance.
Field note
07
Hoard evidence and numismatics
archaeological find
Hoard finds and individual coins connect Scandinavia with eastern markets as a material network rather than a legend: mint, weight, inscriptions and findspot let us trace an object’s origin. Dirhams in northern hoards are among the clearest traces of this trade.
13 entries, 1 of them disputed
Tree-ring dates from the buildings at Staraya Ladoga reach back to the 750s — almost half a century before Lindisfarne. The Viking Age is counted from the first raid on the West simply because the West had chroniclers who wrote it down.
Greek texts call them Βάραγγοι, Slavic ones varyazi. The word most likely comes from Old Norse várar, “pledges”: men bound by a common oath — a company under contract rather than sea raiders.
The sagas give these places names of their own: Ladoga is Aldeigjuborg, Novgorod is Holmgarðr, Kyiv is Kœnugarðr, Constantinople is Miklagarðr, “the great city”. The names are everyday and practical — the way you speak of places you go to regularly.
The west has Lindisfarne, the siege of Paris and the Great Heathen Army. The east has trading posts, written treaties and paid service. This is not about the character of the men: there were no rich undefended monasteries here, but there was a river leading to the caliphate.
The argument outgrew linguistics long ago and became political, which is why taking a side here would be dishonest: both sides have arguments.
The Scandinavian derivation traces the word to Old Norse roðr, “rowing”, by way of Finnish Ruotsi — still the Finnish name for Sweden. Objections point out that the name attached itself very quickly to a Slavic state and its population, and offer Slavic and Iranian explanations instead. No solution is generally accepted.
Ibn Fadlan watched the rite on the Volga in 922: a ship dragged up onto the bank, ten days of mourning, a slave girl killed, and an old woman presiding whom he calls the Angel of Death. No Norse text describes a burial in such detail. But he did not know the language and judged what he saw by his own standards — the details reach us through a double filter.
The treaties of 907, 911 and 944 survive in the Primary Chronicle: where to house the merchants, how long to feed them, how to try a killing or a theft. The envoys in the lists are called Karl, Farlaf, Vermud, Rulav — Norse names inside a Slavic text.
The Varangian Guard was formed around 988, when Vladimir of Kyiv sent Basil II six thousand men. The service paid so well that runestones still stand in Sweden raised for men who went “to Greece” and did not come back.
The inscription is on the parapet of the upper gallery — a bored guardsman on duty, thousands of kilometres from home. Only the name can be read with confidence; the rest has worn away. A second inscription of the same kind was found nearby.
Ingvar the Far-Travelled led his expedition east around 1041 and almost none of it returned. The Ingvar stones are the largest group of runic monuments commemorating one event, and they all say the same thing: he died in the east.
Dirhams all but vanish from the hoards after the 1010s: the silver mines of Central Asia were exhausted and minting collapsed. The eastern trade did not “end” by anyone’s decision — it simply ran out of the thing it existed for.
Dirhams came along the Volga route from Bulgar and from the caliphate. Silver was weighed rather than counted: what mattered was the weight of metal, not the face value.
His account is a rare outside view: appearance, trade, customs, and the funeral of a chieftain with a ship burnt over him. Valuable testimony, but a partial one — he judged other people’s customs by his own.