Download PDF | (New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture) Sverrir Jakobsson - The Varangians_ In God’s Holy Fire-Palgrave Macmillan (2020).
218 Pages
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth to the ffteenth centuries, presenting fresh approaches to key aspects of Byzantine civilization and new studies of unexplored topics to a broad academic audience. The series is a venue for both methodologically innovative work and ground-breaking studies on new topics, seeking to engage medievalists beyond the narrow confnes of Byzantine studies. The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various aspects of Byzantine culture or society, with a particular focus on books that foster the interdisciplinarity and methodological sophistication of Byzantine studies.
The series editors are interested in works that combine textual and material sources, that make exemplary use of advanced methods for the analysis of those sources, and that bring theoretical practices of other felds, such as gender theory, subaltern studies, religious studies theory, anthropology, etc. to the study of Byzantine culture and society.
Preface
Writing books is only one of many ways a scholar has to communicate with an audience, and not necessarily the most effcient one. Having composed a few articles on the Varangians, I nevertheless felt a need for a larger canvas on which to paint an image of the Varangians which differs so markedly from those usually found in general surveys and textbooks. As it happens, one of my frst publications as a scholar happened to be on a similar topic. It was called: “A Research Survey on Scholarly Works Concerning the Varangians and their Relations with the Byzantine Empire 838–1204”. This was published in June 1994 in a brief volume made by the MA students at the Centre for Medieval Studies at Leeds to celebrate the twenty-ffth anniversary of the centre. Another twenty-fve years were to pass before I had fnished the frst draft of the present book in October 2019. During the writing of my doctoral thesis, on the topic “The World View of Medieval Icelanders 1100–1400”, the Varangians made an unexpected reappearance.
I was looking for examples of Icelandic attitudes towards the Great Schism and, to my surprise, I discovered that Medieval Icelanders had little awareness of its existence. I published a brief article on the topic in an Icelandic journal which was read by another Icelander, the philosopher Jóhann Páll Árnason. He found this conclusion suffciently interesting to report it to Jonathan Shepard, one of the greatest authorities on the Medieval Roman/Byzantine Empire. On his urging, I sent a more densely argued article on the topic to the Czech journal Byzantinoslavica in 2008. Since then, I have been involved again with the Varangians, as a sideline from my writings on the political history of Medieval Iceland. At that time, more than a decade or so ago, I would never have conceived of a book on the topic of the Varangians. I felt that this would be an almost unsurmountable task, as my ideas about the Varangians were a far remove from the ideas then dominant in almost every book or article on the topic, very much shaped by the work done by Sigfús Blöndal and Adolf Stender-Petersen in the early twentieth century.
However, in the last decade or so, other scholars have been increasingly challenging those premises, and I feel that it is now possible to write about the Varangians without painstaking explanations of why the image of them delineated by me is so different from that of Blöndal. As can be inferred from the preceding paragraph, I am indebted to many scholars of the present generation who have been challenging established orthodoxies in the most recent years. I was also fortunate enough to be a part of a research group devoted to revitalizing studies of the relations between Scandinavia and the Medieval Roman Empire, the results of which can be seen in the monograph Byzantium and the Viking World (from 2016) and other works. If no man is an island, this is especially true about scholars, and most of the ideas which form the premise of this work are the results of minds other than my own, doing work which I have beneftted from. The bulk of this book has been written in two research sabbaticals I had from my employer, the University of Iceland, in 2017 and 2019.
A month’s research leave in Copenhagen was invaluable in reacquainting myself with the voluminous secondary literature on this subject, as well as editions of primary sources not available in the University Library in Reykjavík. In addition, it was an unforgettable experience for my family. This present volume is a part of a research project called Legends of the Eastern Vikings which has been generously funded by the Icelandic Research Fund and is still ongoing. The text and ideas in this book have been moulded by discussions with many of my colleagues and I have received much assistance in committing them into words. I can only mention the most important contributions.
The manuscript has been read by my fellow scholars at the University of Iceland, Þórir Jónsson Hraundal, Daria Segal, and Ármann Jakobsson, Csete Katona from the Central European University in Budapest, and Roland Scheel from the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen. My research assistants Meghan Anne Korten, Þorsteinn Ö. Vilhjálmsson, Cassandra Ruiz, Þuríður Ósk Sigurbjörnsdóttir and Arnór Gunnar Gunnarsson have contributed a great deal to my efforts. Finally, I would like to thank my editors at Palgrave, Oliver Dyer, Emily Russell and Joseph Johnson, for encouraging me to write this book in the frst place and for pressing me to hand it in for publication instead of getting lost in the many fascinating detours of this history. Lastly, my inspiration for this work and all others of mine comes from my wife, Æsa Guðrún Bjarnadóttir, and our three children, Jakobína Lóa, Stína Signý and Janus Bjarni. They have provided a welcome distraction from my work and are also the reason why I get up in the morning and manage to do any work at all.
Reykjavík, Iceland Sverrir Jakobsson
A Note on Spelling and Translation
For a work which is based on sources in numerous languages and alphabets, there are many decisions to be made on how to spell things, which things to translate and/or transliterate, and which not to translate and/or transliterate. Although I have doubtless been inconsistent on many occasions, the general principles are as follow: Arabic names have been Romanized, mostly without the use of diacritical marks. For Greek names I use the system used by the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, for East Slavonic names I use the Library of Congress system and for Old Norse names I use a normalized medieval spelling. Titles of medieval works in Greek and Old Slavonic are mostly translated into English or Latin (in such cases as that is customary), whereas I have left Latin and Old Norse titles untranslated, except for a few instances when I felt a translation was called for. Original quotes have been translated, but in the case of Old Norse poetry, I have kept the original along with the (very literal) translation. This was done in order to give my readers some sense of the rhythm of the poems.
Introduction
The Varangians were an elusive group of people. For a period of three or four centuries they existed and then they were gone, seemingly without a trace. They became a part of the memory of people in various European countries and cultures, a memory that progressively was shaped by the rules and requirements of its own metanarrative. The Varangians did not leave behind any modern institutions and very little material remains can be traced back to them. Their survival was due to their place in a narrative, which can be called the Varangian legend. The Vikings who ventured East have usually been called Varangians, to differentiate them from their compatriots in the West. This term, however, appears relatively late, and the frst Vikings in the East were known as the Rus, a term from which the country name Russia and the ethnonym Russians later evolved.
The story of the Varangians has often been traced back to the year 839, although no such term as Varangian had existed at that time. However, another group, called the Rus, is mentioned in written sources from that year on, and the Rus are generally accepted as predecessors of the Varangians, for reasons which will soon be made clear. Both groups are an integral part of the history of Nordic people in the East. The grand narratives about the Varangians had different versions within different cultures. One of them is the Russian/Ukrainian concerning the foundation of the earliest Rus state but the one which is the main topic of this work is the early medieval evolution of a group of people known as the Rus, its eleventh-century transmutation into the Varangians and the development of the Old Norse tradition of the Varangian warriors in the service of the Roman emperor. This story has been told before but in a very different form and for a very different purpose than in the present volume. The seminal work on the subject is Væringjasaga by Sigfús Blöndal, published posthumously in 1954 and later translated into English by Benedikt Benedikz as The Varangians of Byzantium.
The purpose of Sigfús Blöndal was twofold, to introduce to his Icelandic readers the rich history of the Medieval Roman Empire and to establish the facts concerning people either known as Varangians in Old Norse sources or reported as having visited the Medieval Roman Empire, generally known as Byzantium in modern scholarly discourse. He was thus preoccupied with establishing which sagas can be trusted as sources and which of them cannot, but he was also prepared to give more credence to saga evidence than scholars of later times would do. Currently, 66 years after the publication of this work and 70 years after the death of Sigfús Blöndal, his work is still the standard work on the Varangians for an English-speaking audience. This refects a certain stagnation in the feld of Varangian studies. In the time of Sigfús Blöndal, the focus of scholarship on the Varangians was on the period between 800 and 1200 and the purpose was to examine the facts concerning the origin of the Rus and The Varangians, within a hallowed Rankean paradigm of history “as it actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). The result of this important and ground-breaking research has been the establishment of a grand narrative which is formed like a mosaic or a quilt, as many heterogeneous pieces are placed together to form a greater whole. In the course of the twentieth century this picture was enriched and supplemented by archaeological research, which has yielded impressive results, yet without any substantial challenges to its main premises.
Numismatic studies on the vast quantities of silver coins related to viking trade unearthed in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia has also made important contributions. Some advances towards a reassessment of this narrative have been made through a more thorough analysis of a large corpus on Arabic sources on the eastfaring Scandinavians (for instance by Þórir Jónsson Hraundal), which had previously either been more or less neglected, or trimmed to ft the narrative governed by the more extensively studied Latin, Greek and Slavonic sources. In later years, however, there is a certain shift in research on the Varangians with more focus on how to interpret the sources available to us, rather than to squeeze minute factual nuggets out of the material which might have been missed by earlier generations of scholars. As it turns out, these sources have their own peculiarities and a cultural setting particular to them. If the historiography of the Eastern Vikings was for a long time characterized by emphasis on establishing the murky facts of Rus and Varangian activity in the East, the level of interest has begun to move towards different subjects of research, such as the interaction of different cultures, the formation of identities, and the development of a particular grand narrative concerning the Rus and the Varangians.
Among examples of a more recent trend in Varangian historiography only few can be singled out, such as the collected volume Byzantium and the Viking World, appearing in 2016, and, especially, the German doctoral thesis Skandinavien und Byzanz by Roland Scheel. The present volume aims to take note of this shift in studies on the Varangians. Its main purpose is to re-examine medieval sources on the Eastern Vikings and to highlight the ongoing “debate” (to use a term made popular in this context by Jan and Aleida Assmann) on the Rus and the Varangians in the medieval period. The aim is to compare and contrast sources emanating from different cultures, such as Byzantium, the Abbasid Caliphate and its successor states, the early kingdoms of the Rus and the high medieval Scandinavian kingdoms, and analyse what signifcance these sources attached to the Rus and the Varangians in different contexts.
These sources will be analysed with regard to the cultural and political context in which they were written and the purpose behind the narrative, always with particular attention to the sections connected to the Rus and the Varangians in these accounts. An important part of this debate on the Rus and the Varangians was the fashioning of identities and how different cultures defne themselves in comparison and contrast with the other. This comparison fuels the main research questions of this work, encompassed in the overarching theme on the formation of medieval identities. A key element to address is the traditional emphasis on narrative history as a historical method which “consist in the investigation of the documents in order to determine what is the true or most plausible story that can be told about the events of which they are evidence”.1 The interest in the documents themselves is limited to the information which can be gathered from them concerning the events they relate which are to the interest of a particular narrative. However, these pieces of information which have been ftted into the grand narrative of Rus and Varangian history have often been removed from their context within narratives devoted only coincidentally to the Rus and the Varangians.
It is time to re-examine this context and focus on the sources for the history of the Eastern Vikings. An important element of Rus and Varangian history is the portrayal of Rus and Varangians in Old Icelandic narrative sources, which have been neglected in later years. In Sigfús Blöndal’s grand oeuvre on the Varangians, twelfth and thirteenth century Old Norse narratives in which they appear were assessed according to their value as sources for actual events, with some lauded as reliable but many others dismissed as legendary. Their relative devaluation as sources for the history of events has resulted in their disappearance from the grand narrative history of the Eastern Vikings, although with some important exceptions. A new research paradigm is needed to re-integrate the study of these texts into the mainstream of research on the Eastern Vikings, and there is a need of a new emphasis on the continued debate on the “Scandinavian experience” in Byzantium and the Eastern World and the role which the Varangians played within the cultural memory of Medieval Iceland and Norway.
The historiography on the Eastern Vikings has been multiform and varied but the main thrust of it has been a focus on actual historical events and how these might or might not be refected accurately in the sources. In contrast, very little emphasis has been placed on the narrators of the medieval accounts of the Rus and the Varangians, the context in which these writings took place and the motive behind these narratives. An analysis of medieval sources has to take into account the cultural and political context in which they were written and the purpose behind their narrative, with particular attention to the sections connected to the Rus and the Varangians in these accounts. An important part of this debate on the Rus and the Varangians was the fashioning of identities, and how different cultures defned themselves. The main research questions of this volume stem from this contrast and belong to an overarching discussion of the formation of medieval identities. Employing a theory of cultural memory defned by Jan Assmann, memory (the contemporized past), culture, and the group (society) will be discussed in connection to each other. According to Assmann, the concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specifc to each society in each epoch, whose cultivation serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image.
Upon such collective knowledge of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity. The content of such knowledge varies from culture to culture as well as from epoch to epoch but what is common is that through its cultural heritage a society becomes visible to itself and to others. Which past becomes evident in that heritage and which values emerge in its identifcatory appropriation tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society.2 Here the intention is to examine the representations of the Rus and Varangians from this angle, as this group was important for the construction of the identity of both Russians and Scandinavians. An important paradigm of cultural memory is “the concretion of identity” or how a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity.
The objective manifestations of cultural memory are defned through a kind of identifcatory determination in a positive (“We are this”) or in a negative (“That’s our opposite”) sense. Through such a concretion of identity the constitution of horizons evolves, as the supply of knowledge in the cultural memory is characterized by sharp distinctions made between those who belong and those who do not, that is, between what appertains to oneself and what is foreign. This knowledge is not controlled by epistemological curiosity but rather by a need for identity. The concretion of the identity of the Varangians through their manifestation in the cultural memory in different societies as parts of the Self or the Other will be an important hypothesis. For the Romans and the Arabs, the Rus and the Varangians were the Other but they gradually became parts of a common environment and common experience. For Russians and Scandinavians, they were, on the contrary, a part of Us, but a part that belonged in a distant and legendary past. A second important characteristic of cultural memory is its capacity to reconstruct. No memory can preserve the past. What remains is only that which society in each era can reconstruct within its contemporary frame of reference.
Cultural memory relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation, sometimes by appropriation, sometimes by criticism, sometimes by preservation or by transformation. Cultural memory exists in two modes: frst in the mode of potentiality of the archive whose accumulated texts, images, and rules of conduct act as a total horizon, and second in the mode of actuality, whereby each contemporary context puts the objectivized meaning into its own perspective, giving it its own relevance. An examination of the debate about the Rus and the Varangians will bring to light the potential modes as well as the actual modes of the knowledge about their history in different cultures. Formation and organization of the shared knowledge about the Eastern Vikings are also important characteristics of the debate. The objectifcation or crystallization of communicated meaning and collectively shared knowledge is a prerequisite of its transmission in the culturally institutionalized heritage of a society. This was achieved through emphasis on very few important parts of the Rus/Varangian experience, which could be different within different cultures.
The organization of this knowledge includes the institutional buttressing of communication, for example, through formulization of the communicative situation in ceremony and the specialization of the bearers of cultural memory. Cultural memory always depends on a specialized practice, a kind of cultivation. In this context, the role of the narrators will be examined as well as the nature of the works in which information about the Rus/Varangian experience was preserved.
The relation to a normative self-image of the group engenders a clear system of values and differentiations in importance which structure the cultural supply of knowledge and the symbols. The binding character of the knowledge preserved in cultural memory has two aspects: the formative one in its educative, civilizing, and humanizing functions and the normative one in its function of providing rules of conduct. Cultural memory is also refexive in that it refects the self-image of the group through a preoccupation with its own social system. The debate on the Rus and the Varangians was also a debate on values and rules of conduct.
The aim here is to compare various voices in this debate, from writers who used the Rus as a negative, but also partly admirable, Other,—such as Patriarch Photios in the ninth century and Ibn Fadlan in the tenth century,—to the Icelandic Sagas, in which Varangian knights have become models of religious and chivalric conduct. Throughout this development, the debate on the Rus/ Varangian revolved around the prevailing norms and values in the societies within which this debate took place and it also refected their system of differentiation. Any narrative on the Varangians has to take the Rus into account.
The story of the Varangians begins with the appearance of the Rus in the ninth century and it was only in the eleventh century that the Rus metamorphosed into the Varangians. Like the Varangians, the Rus were not a culturally homogenous group but a combination of many ethnicities which could have varied identities. Another note on terminology concerns the Medieval Roman Empire, which is commonly known as the Byzantine Empire in Western historical literature. Following Anthony Kaldellis (in Romanland and other works) I cannot but reject this anachronistic term as the Byzantine Empire was in no way a separate entity from the earlier Roman Empire. The Roman Empire did not evolve into a Byzantine Empire; it simply continued its existence. Hence, there was no Byzantine emperor, as the offce of the Roman emperor never transmuted into anything else than it had been before.
This is acknowledged by most historians and experts in the feld, but the weight of tradition continues to compel scholars to use the term Byzantine for what is actually the Roman Empire. As this will never change unless we scholars rebel against this practice I use the terms Roman Empire and Roman emperor throughout this book. Even if this might confuse some readers, I hope that this note will clarify the issue, as I have no wish to further the myths of earlier generation of Western European supremacists. To sum it up, the history of the Varangians is to a large degree involved with the narrators of Varangian history, the creators of that image of the Varangians which became embedded in the cultural memory of medieval Europeans and that of later generations. They are the reason why the Varangians are still the subject of scholarly and popular excitement. They are the chief subjects of this book on the medieval debate about the Varangians.
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