A history of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones

Author:Gwyn Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Vikings, Scandinavia -- Civilization
ISBN: 0192151665
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

bushy brows, blue eyes, and was snub-nosed; he shaved his beard but wore a long and bushy moustache. His head was shaven except for a lock of hair on one side as a sign of the nobility of his clan. His neck was thick, his shoulders broad, and his whole stature pretty fine. He seemed gloomy and savage. On one of his ears hung a golden ear-ring adorned with two pearls and a ruby set between them. His white garments were not distinguishable from those of his men except for cleanness. 1

A year or so later he was dead, and his three sons fought savagely among themselves to enlarge the third share of Kievan power he had appointed for each of them. Yaropolk slew Oleg, then perished in his turn, and it was the third son Vladimir who with the help of an army recruited, we are told, in Sweden succeeded to all the lands of the Rus. This Vladimir, as resourceful as he was ambitious, was born to do more than survive; he interfered victoriously in the affairs of various Slavonic tribes, made his presence felt in the north among the Ests and their neighbours, beat the Poles once and the Bulgars twice, and chastised the insolent Petchenegs. Then in 988 he accepted the Christianity of the Greek Church, and employed his enormous energy in building churches and christianizing his many- religioned subjects, no small number of them by immersion in the waters of the Dnieper. Like other Scandinavian princes (and his bonds with the North seem stronger than his father’s and grandfather’s), he had come to recognize the political and economic advantages of belonging to a monotheistic religion. He is not over- reliably reported to have taken an appraising glance at Islam, Judaism, and Rome, before settling on the faith of Byzantium. As part of the complicated and farsighted manoeuvre by which he brought Novgorod and Kiev into the community of Christian peoples he helped the emperor Basil II Bulgaroctonos put down a rebellion by Bardas Phocas, and was rewarded with the emperor’s sister in marriage—an honour she tried hard to avoid, partly no

1 G. Vernadsky, The Origins of Russia , p. 277 (Leo Diaconus, Historic Libri decern , ed. Haase, pp. 156-7). There is another translation in Holger Arbman, The Vikings (trans. Alan Binns), pp. 103-4. Professor Arbman continues: ‘The description has many features (the hair lock, osolodets^ in particular) of the Cossack hetman of the sixteenth century, and suggests how quickly the Rus were becoming Slavonic. Svyatoslav is not a Scandinavian name, and it is probable that he was in part of Slavonic descent.’ In an earlier reference to Svyatoslav’s birth Professor Arbman suspects that something has been lost of the Kievan family tree (p. 102).

doubt because of the eight hundred concubines and slavegirls he maintained in various Rus towns. Another far-reaching decision of his was to make the language of his new church Slavonic, not Greek or Scandinavian. This last, we assume, had long since ceased to be a possibility.

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