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Florin Curta (University of Florida). Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe. By Wladyslaw Duczko. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004 // Early Medieval Europe, 2006, 14, 3, 328-330.

Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe.
By Wladyslaw Duczko. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2004. xii
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290 pp.
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78 ill. (including maps). $184.00. ISBN 90 04 13874 9.

For more than three decades, Wladyslaw Duczko has written numerous studies that have been central to our understanding of the Viking Age in eastern Europe. In this latest work, his goal is to combine written with archaeological sources. He begins with the analysis of a passage in the Annals of St. Bertin mentioning Rus’ envoys arriving in Ingelheim in 839. The author believes that the Rus’ had been sent by Emperor Theophilus to establish contact with the Danes, whose military assistance the Byzantines needed against the Arabs. Using finds of Byzantine coins minted for Emperor Theophilus, Duczko traces the route on which the envoys returned to northern Russia. There are of course serious problems with this interpretation, such as the fact that no evidence exists for a Byzantine use of Norse military assistance before the late tenth century. Coin finds are hardly an indication of embassies and, in any case, require an explanation that takes into account the archaeological context.
Duczko finds plenty of evidence to support the idea of a much earlier Scandinavian presence in northern Russia than previously thought. Dendrochronological dates established for Staraia Ladoga show that the earliest occupation phase on that site pre-dates by almost a century the Rus’ visit to Ingelheim. Trade is the factor that explains how this initial settlement expanded. It is only after c.850 that the expansion began in earnest, a fact that Duczko links to the first Rus’ attack on Constantinople mentioned in Byzantine sources.
While containing numerous insights and presenting some fascinating details about the archaeology of the Rus’, the book is uneven, and the author’s reach often exceeds his grasp. In the introduction, Duczko cautiously warns the reader against the simplistic association of artefacts and people, which is the foundation of the culture-historical approach to archaeology. However, he believes that archaeological assemblages in Russia ‘show a practically pure breed of Norse culture’ (p. 128). Reification of ethnicity is remarkable in such statements as ‘when objects with runes are found outside the North they should always be considered as the strongest testimony of the existence in the area of a Norse milieu’ (p. 70). By the same token, Duczko explains the presence in the Rus’ lands of pelta pendants similar to those found in ninth-century assemblages in Moravia as an indication of Rus’ travelling south to obtain salt from the Moravian markets (p. 78). The chapters on assemblages in the Upper Dnieper and Volga-Oka regions is a detailed presentation of archaeological features and artefacts, but little more than that. There is almost no attempt at interpretation beyond concerns with chronology and ethnic attribution. The author is certainly right in emphasizing that, throughout the tenth century, there was more than one centre of power in the Rus’ lands, but offers no explanation for
why Kiev, and not Gnezdovo or, for that matter, Chernihiv, became the major centre of the early eleventh-century Rus’ lands. Duczko believes that when Scandianvians stopped coming from Scandinavia, the Norse in Russia turned into Rus’. If so, why then did the process already start in the 900s, when Scandinavians were still coming to the Rus’ lands?
There is an unfortunate air of sloppiness about this book. In the preface, the author acknowledges Paul Barford for having turned his English into a publishable text. To be sure, the consistent lack of definite articles or wrong use of adverbs is a most annoying indication of a poor translation into English of an original text most likely written in Polish. But not all errors can be attributed to the translator. The Annals of St. Bertin are confusingly referred to as ‘Bertinian Annals’ (p. 24) and as ‘Flandrian’ (instead of Flemish, p. 10). Errors can sometimes be really funny, as when Duczko calls the Vikings ‘gallant’ (p. 45) and has them prey on the ‘ingenuous [sic !] people by extorting tributes’ (p. 78). The use of boats for burial is clear evidence of a ‘Scandinavian pedigree of the deceased’ (p. 94). A Byzantine embassy could not have been dispatched in 839 to the court of the Ummayad caliph in Spain (p. 42), because a caliphate of Cуrdoba was proclaimed only in 929. To Duczko, Byzantium is ‘the mighty Greek Empire’ (p. 36), in which the ‘nasty persecutions of iconophiles conducted by the fanatical emperor [Theophilus] were not good at all for the internal harmony of the state’ (p. 41). The author seems to have no doubts that ‘the pragmatism of Byzantines and their ruthlessness in political matters is known’ to everyone (p. 47). The important questions with which this book deals deserve a more careful treatment.

University of Florida FLORIN CURTA