The Varangians: In God’s Holy Fire

218 Pages·2020·3.287 MB·English

by  Sverrir Jakobsson

NEW APPROACHES TO
BYZANTINE HISTORY AND CULTURE
The Varangians
In God’s Holy Fire
Sverrir Jakobsson
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture
Series Editors
Florin Curta
University of Florida
FL, USA
Leonora Neville
University of Wisconsin Madison
WI, USA
Shaun Tougher
Cardiff University
Cardiff, UK
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality
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The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various
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Sverrir Jakobsson
The Varangians
In God’s Holy Fire
Sverrir Jakobsson
University of Iceland
Reykjavík, Iceland
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture
ISBN 978-3-030-53796-8 ISBN 978-3-030-53797-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53797-5
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E
pigraph
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928)
To my daughter Stína Signý, the adornment of her parents
p
rEfacE
Writing books is only one of many ways a scholar has to communicate with
an audience, and not necessarily the most efficient one. Having composed
a few articles on the Varangians, I nevertheless felt a need for a larger can-
vas on which to paint an image of the Varangians which differs so mark-
edly from those usually found in general surveys and textbooks.
As it happens, one of my first 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-fifth anniversary of the centre. Another twenty-five years were
to pass before I had finished the first 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 unex-
pected 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 sufficiently
interesting to report it to Jonathan Shepard, one of the greatest authori-
ties 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
ix
x PREFACE
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 con-
ceived 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 estab-
lished 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 rela-
tions 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
benefitted 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,
PREFACE xi
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 first 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