The Viking Age is Undergoing a Revisionist Transformation
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East.
In the middle of the 9th century, in an office somewhere in the Jibl region of what is now western Iran, a man is dictating to a scribe. It is the 840s of the Common Era, though the people in this eastern province of the great Caliphate of the 'Abbsids - an Islamic superpower with its capital in Baghdad - live by the Hijri calendar. The man's name is Abu 'l-Qsim Ubayd Allh b Abd Allh Ibn Khurraddhbih, and he is the director of posts and police for this region.
In his office, he is compiling a report as part of his duties. As his job title implies, he oversees communications and security in the Jibl region, reporting to officials in Baghdad. What he provides is an intelligence service: in essence, Ibn Khurraddhbih is what we would call a station chief, like those CIA officials who manage clandestine operations abroad. The report he's working on is part of a much larger document that will one day be known as Kitb al-Maslik wa l-mamlik (the Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms'), a summary of exactly the kind of thing that governments usually want to know: who was visiting their territory, where they came from, where they were going, and why. This is what he says about a group of people known as the Rus':
For many decades, the second paragraph of this rather dense text was thought to refer to a totally different group of merchants from those described in the first, for the simple reason that scholars just didn't believe that the Rs (or the Rus', as the word is usually spelled today) really went so far east. And yet, the text is clear. The two sections run on from each other, and both refer to the same people. So why do Ibn Khurraddhbih's observations about them matter today?
We used to think of the time of the vikings, the three long centuries from around 750 to 1050 CE, as an age of expansion, when the Scandinavian peoples burst out upon an unsuspecting world with fire and sword. Over the past 40 years or so, that picture has become much more nuanced, as we see the poets, traders and settlers alongside the stereotypical raiders (who were nonetheless real) that most people imagine when they think of the vikings. However, our view of these events has recently changed. We no longer see an outward impulse of intention and process, but a much more haphazard and varied diaspora of Norse peoples, in which individuals with their own motives and missions shift across the northern world.
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