A man from Reric

"The Slavs on the Dnieper" painting by by Nicholas Roerich. From "The Beginning of Russia. Slavs" series. 1905. Tempera on cardboard. 67 x 89 cm. Painting is depicting local villagers paying tribute to the Rus. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. 

Reric or Rerik was one of the Viking Age Slavic trading ports on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, located near Wismar in the present-day German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Reric was built around 700 by Slavs of the Obodrite tribe. 

At the turn of the 9th century, Obodrites were allied with Charlemagne in their wars against the Danes and another Slavic tribe Wiltzi. In 808 AD Rerik was destroyed by the Viking king Gudfred during his campaign in South Baltic...

The "Annales regni Francorum" report that ‘Godfrid destroyed the Slavic emporium of Reric...and taking the merchants from there, he weighed anchor and brought them to the portus of [Hedeby] along with his whole army.’

Hedeby is first mentioned in the Frankish chronicles of Einhard (804). But it is the sacking of the major Slavic trading centre Rerik In 808 by the Danish king Godfred and moving of the merchants from there to Hedeby that helped Hedeby to develop into a major trading centre.

If we know that South Baltic Slavic "Vikings" had large trading vessels which Norse Vikings lacked, moving Slavic merchants from Rerik to Hedebi by Godfrey makes a lot of sense. Danes got the merchants who knew the trading routes and who knew how to build merchant ships...

I talked about these large Slavic merchant ships my post "Ladia". These ships were so good for transporting large amount of goods along the Russian rivers and lakes that they were still used in the far north in the 19th century. These were captured sailing on the River Emajõgi in Estonia... 

What is very interesting is that One of the names used by chroniclers for Obodrites was Reregi... Also we have a tribe called Wagri, Wagiri, or Wagrians, who were part of the Obodrite confederation...

And then we have Rurik (830 – 879AD), the leader of the Varangians...Varangians who in the first half of the 9the century controlled trading routes between Baltic, Caspian and Black Sea...

According to Russian chronicles, Rurik was born 20 years after Danish king Godfrey, in 808, destroyed Rerik, major Slavic merchant port and moved Slavic merchants from Rerik to Hedebi...

It is widely believed that Rurik was "in some way" ethnically Scandinavian. The only similarly named figure described in the Carolingian Annales Fuldenses and Annales Bertiniani was Rorik of Dorestad (810–880AD), a Danish king from the royal Scylding house of Haithabu (Hedeby)...

Rorik of Dorestad was a member of one of two competing families reported in the Frankish chroniclers as having ruled the nascent Danish kingdom at Hedeby...

Rorik received lands in Friesland from Emperor Louis I. but he wanted more and and so reportedly he plundered Dorestad in 850, attacked Hedeby in 857, and looted Bremen in 859. The Emperor was enraged and stripped him of all his possessions in 860...

After that, Rorik disappears from the Western sources for a considerable period of time, while only two years later, in 862, the Russian chronicle's Rurik arrives in the eastern Baltic, builds the fortress of Ladoga, and later moves to Novgorod...

In 882 Frankish chronicles mention Rorik of Dorestad as dead (without a date of death specified). The Russian chronicle places the death of Rurik of Novgorod at 879, a three year gap prior than the Frankish chronicles...

According to Western sources, the ruler of Friesland (Rorik of Dorestad) was converted to Christianity by the Franks. This may have parallels with the Christianization of the Rus, as reported by Patriarch Photius in 867...

Now this is very very interesting indeed...

Was Rurik a personal name? Or was Rurik "a man from Rerik"? Or was Rurik "Rereg" an Obodrite?

Even if Rurik from Hedeby was Dane by origin, what are the chances that he had, under his command, experienced merchant sailors originally from Rerik, when he established control over the eastern trading routes?

Slavic merchants from Rerik probably already used these eastern trading routes, previous to the destruction of Rerik and the move of the Slavic merchants from Rerik to Hedeby...

Slavic (speaking) merchants would have had much better chance surviving trading trips through Eastern Slavic lands than Germanic (speaking) merchants...They would have been seen as "one of us" or "cousins" by the local Slavic tribes...

These previously established trading connections could then have been used by the mixed Danish (Norse) - Slavic enterprising groups as the starting point for military and political takeover of the territories along the eastern trading route...

9th of January 2025

Today I came across this image showing the closeness of Early Slavs to today's populations. 

In Europe, N haplogroup is found in Fins, Balts and Slavs...

Rurikids had N haplogroup...

Bodzia cemetery

"Archaeologists remain mystified and spellbound by a 10th – 11th century AD cemetery discovered near the village of Bodzia in central Poland..."

Bodzia is a small village located in the Kuiavia region of central Poland, a few kilometres away from the river Vistula...

The first phase of the cemetery comprises four rows of chamber graves, all oriented on a N–S axis. The dead themselves were buried in wooden rectangular boxes reinforced by iron fittings. The inner parts of these boxes were decorated with fabric...

The abundant and rich grave goods, consisting of weapons, high-quality jewellery, ornaments, coins, amulets and many other finds, indicates that this was an elite cemetery. 

Weapons were found in the men's graves, i.e. swords of Viking type, langsax (one-edged sword), pickaxe, as well as finds associated with trade. These were members of the elite — warriors and their family members settled in the Polish territory...

One of the wooden coffins contained remains of a woman aged between 30–35 with a fatal wound to the back of her head. The remains of padlock and an iron chain found next to the coffin, indicate that the coffin had been closed with the chain (to prevent the woman from escaping?)

One of the peculiarities of the Bodzia cemetery consists of rectangular wooden constructions (perhaps fences or houses of the dead) preserved in the excavated area... 

But the main reason why this site is so baffling is the origin of the people buried in this cemetery together. The site demonstrates burial rituals and artefacts of Polish, Kievan Rus, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian and Khazar origin...

"A unique medieval cemetery from the 10th/11th century with chamber-like graves from Bodzia (Central Poland). Preliminary result of the multidisciplinary research" by Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka we read that "The strontium isotope analysis of the bodies found in burials, only one individual, a male, falls into the local range and was likely born locally in the Bodzia area. The remaining individuals, a mix of males and females, fall significantly below the local range for Bodzia and with in a range from approx. 0.709 to 0.711. These values are within the range of values known from southern Scandinavia or the Kiev region of the Ukraine or parts of northern Poland"

For instance this exclusively Slavic Kaptorga (amulet container) made of silver with the image of an eagle from chamber grave E72...

Bronze belt end from the grave of a young warrior from Kievan Rus, with a decoration on both sides: in the form of a Grand prince of Kiev Sviatopolk bident and an interlaced ornament...

What were all these people doing there together?

The nature of multiculturality at the site, and proximity to the Vistula River trade route, indicates that it was perhaps a foreign trade settlement connecting the Baltic to the Byzantine Empire. An ornate bronze balance found in one of the graves supports this explanation...

But another explanation is more likely. In "A unique medieval cemetery from the 10th/11th century with chamber-like graves from Bodzia (Central Poland). Preliminary result of the multidisciplinary research" by Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka we read that "The cemetery at Bodzia was established near the contemporary fortified settlement of Włocławek, locatedon the western bank of the Vistula, near a ford of strategic importance for the Piast state. The ford linked Mazovia (the eastern province of the Piast monarchy) with the areas on the western side of the Vistula. It was also at the juncture of two trans-regional trade routes: the Vistula route which joined the Baltic Sea littoral with the Danube river drainage basin (i.e. the territory of Bohemia and Moravia)and the Bug-Narew route which linked the lands of the Vistula drainage basin (and hence Piast Poland) with the Novgorod-Kievan Rus. This specific location gave Włocławek its status as one of the main fortified settlements of Boleslav the Brave’s (992-1025) state, mentioned in the 12th century chronicle of Gallus Anonymus (I.8). Together with Gniezno, Poznań and Giecz, other fortified settlements located incentral Greater Poland, Włocławek provided Boleslav the Brave, the first crowned Piast (1025), with a place for elite armed forces, which ensured his political supremacy in the region and the state."

To me the most amazing thing about this site is the amazement and bafflement of the archaeologists and the historians...This cemetery dates from around the time of the of the Cnut the Great 

According to Medieval chroniclers Thietmar of Merseburg and Adam of Bremen, Cnut was the son of a Polish princess called Świętosława, who was the daughter of the Polish king Mieszko I and sister of Polish king Bolesław I. 

This has been linked to Cnut's use of Polish troops in England and Cnut's sister's Anglicized Slavic name Santslaue...

This is also the time when large heavy duty trading ships of Slavic design start being built and used by the Norse. 

I wrote about this in my post "Ladia".

So if we know that at the time when this cemetery was built, Poles and Danes were fighting together under a Danish-Slavic kings, why is it surprising that we find Viking warriors buried in the middle of Poland?

Ladia

Amazing photo. This is not a scene from a film about Vikings. This are barges on the River Emajõgi, 19th century. Emajõgi is a river in Estonia which flows from Lake Võrtsjärv through Tartu County into Lake Peipus

Ladja was an early medieval Slavic heavy cargo ship developed in South Baltic. Norse Vikings acquired the technological knowledge to build these large vessels when Harald Bluetooth made the alliance with the Baltic Slavs, which is why we find the word in Old Norse.

Before mixing with Slavs, Norse viking ships were small, narrow and fast. Ideal for small raiding parties. Only after, when they started building wide and large "ladja" ships, were they able to cary armies including cavalry. And only then were the vikings able to transport enough troops and equipment to Britain to launch the major invasion, which culminated during Canute (Cnut the Great).

This is based on archaeological data. Source for Slavic influence on Viking ship building (and the other way round) is "A comparative analysis of early medieval shipwrecks from the southern shores of the Baltic sea" by George Indruszewski, used to work in Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde, Denmark, now at Roskilde University....

Log cabin

When someone says log cabin, people immediately think of Scandinavia, because everyone knows that log cabins were invented by Scandinavians and that Scandinavians are the best at making them. But what if I told you that log cabins were a late cultural import into Scandinavia from the Slavic lands south and east of the Baltic sea?

The origin of these types of buildings can be traced to Pomeranian culture of the the late bronze age and early iron age, which developed from Lusatian culture. One of the best examples of the Pomeranian wooden architecture is the fortified town of Biskupin. Biskupin was an Iron Age fortified settlement in north-central (Wielkopolska) Poland (Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship). When first discovered it was thought to be early evidence of Slavic settlement but archaeologists later confirmed it belonged to the Biskupin group of the Lusatian culture.

There are two settlement periods at Biskupin, which was located in the middle of a lake but is now situated on a peninsula, that follow each other without hiatus. Both settlements were laid out on a rectangular grid with eleven streets that are three meters wide. The older settlement from early Iron Age was established on a slightly wet island of over 2 hectares and consisted of ca. 100 oak and pine log-houses that are of similar layout and measure ca. 8 x 10 m each.They consisted of two chambers and an open entrance-area.These houses were designed to accommodate 10 to 12 persons. An open hearth was located in the centre of the biggest room. There are no larger houses that could indicate social stratification. Because of the damp, boggy ground the streets were covered with wooden planks. This is the reconstruction of one of the log cabins from Biskupin that can be seen in the Biskupin open air museum.

The settlement was surrounded by a tall wooden wall, or palisade, set on a rampart made up of both wood and earth. The rampart was constructed of oak trunks that form boxes filled with earth. The rampart is more than 450 m long and accompanied by a wooden breakwater in the lake. 6000–8000 m³ of wood have been used in the construction of the rampart.

The settlement at Biskupin belongs to the Hallstatt C and D periods (early Iron Age, 800-650 BC and 650-475 BC). However, dendrochronological analysis provided more accurate dating. It proved that oak wood used in the construction of the settlement was cut down between 747-722 B.C. Over half of the wood used was cut during the winter of 738/737 B.C.

What is very interesting is that the tradition of building dwellings and fortifications from logs was during the early Iron age found only in Pomeranian culture south of Baltic sea and not in Jutland or in Scandinavia.

The tradition of building log cabins was continued by the Central European Celts. This is a reconstruction of a Celtic house in Havranok, Slovakia.

The Havránok hill fort was an important religious, economic, and political center of the Púchov culture (300 BCE - 180 CE), in which the dominant Celtic tribe of Cotini mingled with the older people of the Lusatian (Pomeranian) culture.

In the early medieval period we find that the tradition of building dwellings and fortifications from logs was still exclusively found among Slavs living in the same area of the old Pomeranian Culture, south of Baltic sea, and further east, but not in Jutland and not in Scandinavia. As a matter of fact, the similarity between the Iron age Pomeranian log dwellings and fortifications, and Medieaval Slavic Pomeranian log dwellings and fortifications is so striking, that when Biskupin was originally discovered, it was presumed that it was a Medieval Slavic fort. Only carbon dating showed that Biskupin was in fact 1000 years older.

Here is an example of a typical Medieval Slavic fort: Chotěbuz - Podobora:

Slavs built both square semi-subterranean (sunk in) dwellings with heating devices in a corner and ground dwellings. They also used both log only and log frame with wattle doub construction technique.

Here are the reconstructions of completely sunken and semi sunken Medieval Slavic hut from Slovakia based on the actual discovered huts remains dated to the 6th - 7th century AD:

And this is what these types of houses looked like inside. Please note a built stone oven in the corner:

And here is a reconstruction of a Medieval Slavic surface log cabin, based on archaeological finds from Staré Město ("Old Town"), a town in the Zlín Region of the Czech Republic, again dated to the 6th - 7th century AD.

The same building technique using logs was unknown in Scandinavia until the 11th century, the time of the closest cooperation and intermixing between the Norse and the Slavs. This all indicates that log cabins and fortifications are a Slavic cultural import into Scandinavia.

When looking at the introduction of the joint timber houses in the Germanic areas of the Baltic, we have to look at the Jutland and other Danish areas of the southern Scandinavia separately from the Northern areas of Scandinavia. These two areas were politically and culturally separate and were linked to different Slavic tribal group. The Danes were politically and culturally linked with the Western Slavs (Polabians, Obodrites, Serbs, Poles) and the Norse and Swedes were politically and culturally linked with the Eastern Slavs (Rus). There is no wander then that in these two areas of Scandinavia we find two different types of the joint timber construction techniques.

In the Danish controlled areas, the earliest constructions of lying and crossing logs were found in the fortification rampart of Danevirke in southern Jutland, built in the 8th and 9th centuries. A similar technique has been found in a few houses in Haithabu (Hedeby) near Danevirke in the 9th century and in a well in Kaupang in Norway in the beginning of the 9th century. The type of wood used was oak which was cut lengthwise to get appropriate dimensions. The logs had a rectangular section, and the joints had both an upper and a lower notch that were rectangular. In Wollin and Gdansk (Poland), there were also joint timber houses made of oak wood, mostly built of round logs, but occasionally also of rectangular ones. The woodworking skills needed to build these houses were so advanced that they must have been developed somewhere else and then brought to Jutland. This points to the technological import from the South Baltic Western Slavic territories (today Germany and Poland) where joint timber houses were also constructed from oak wood for millenniums. The same types of rectangular oak profiled log houses were also built by Serbs in the Balkans and are still built today.

Here is an example of the advanced joint timber houses from Serbia. You can see that the oak logs were longitudinally split into beams (thick planks) which are then joined together using deep rectangular joins.

This is another house from Serbia which shows even more complicated rectangular log construction technique. This technique combines the wooden frame made out of thick square profile oak logs and thinner horizontal wooden beams (thick planks). The wooden beams with external joins are inserted into the internal joins on the vertical holding beams.

In the Norse and Swedish controlled areas, the earliest joint timber houses were found in Trondheim, Sigtuna and Olso. They all seem to be built around 1000 AD. Before that time all houses built in these areas of Scandinavia were framework buildings with wattle and daub. The woodworking skills needed to build these houses were also very advanced and again the only explanation for a sudden appearance of such advanced woodworking technology is that it must have been developed somewhere else and then brought to Scandinavia. One of the explanations is that this house building technology was perhaps developed in the Scandinavian countryside before the first towns were built. But we did not find any trace of houses built in this way anywhere in the countryside before they appeared in the above mentioned towns. I would say that this is more likely a sign that people who had long experience of using this technique came and settled in the area and built a town there. And people who did have such know-how at that time were Slavs of the old Russian kingdom. The joint timber houses from Staraya Ladoga, and Novgorod, which were built using the same material (pine logs) and the same design and technology (round joints on one or both sides) were built at least as early as the 8th century AD. As I said already East Slavs south and east of the Baltic sea were building these types of houses, from various types of wood since at least the 6th century AD. Norse had extensive political, economic and cultural contacts with the East Slavs in the old Russia for at least two centuries before the first joint timber houses (log cabins) appeared in Scandinavia. It is quite possible that some of the Slavs from the Old Russia settled in Scandinavia and it is them who brought their traditional home building technology with them.

In the work entitled: "About the Introduction of Joint Timber Building in Scandinavia", Karin Rosberg from Uppsala university argues this is exactly what happened.

In the intro to the paper Karin says that the issue of the introduction of joint timber building is old in both Norway and Sweden. Former Swedish researchers, such as Boëthius, Erixon, and Lundberg, have been very uncertain about this, and Lundberg believed it was introduced as early as during the Vendel Period, i. e. 550-800 AD. A few decades later, Hauglid in Norway assumed, with some caution, that it was introduced by king Harald Hårdråde in the middle of the 11th century.

She then proceeds to explain where and when the earliest joint timber houses and other structures were built, after which she describes similarities and differences between the Slavic and Scandinavian joint timber techniques for building houses. Finally this is what the author of this work thinks about the reason why the Scandinavians adopted joint timber building so late (1000 AD), even though they were for centuries in contact with Slavs who built the joint timber houses and fortifications?

"As I said before, joint timber building has very good heat qualities, which is needed in the Scandinavian climate. Accordingly, one would expect the Scandinavians to be quick to adopt a solid building technique which would also save much work with wood cutting for heating. And they did so at last, and the heat qualities were certainly an essential reason for joint timber building dominating in Scandinavia for about 900 years. But they did not adopt it until such a long time had passed as 200 years. Why? I suggest the reason for the delay was cultural. The Scandinavians readily adopted foreign dress fashion and consumer goods, but not so readily foreign housing. They probably had much of their identity in the houses, especially in their dwellings. The house shows who is the owner, and for the Vikings an old family was important. So a traditional Viking long house could be associated with an old and impressing family. In addition, for the Vikings their house was a sacred place and had a religious dimension. Such things made the housing more conservative than other cultural features. There are theories, expressed by Rapoport, about socio-cultural factors having a considerable impact on house form, and about house form having a considerable degree of constancy due to culturally linked aspects. These theories point in the same direction as my suggestion. Towards the end of the 10th century, the cultural difference between the Scandinavian and Slavic peoples decreased. (My comment: This happened due to a long period of political cooperation and cultural and physical mixing (intermarrying) between the Scandinavians and the Slavs. This eventually lead to the large Slavic settlement in Scandinavia and equally large Scandinavian settlement in the Slavic countries). Eventually they both—or at least parts of them—converted to Christianity. All this probably made the Scandinavians more ready to adopt the Slavic joint timber house building tradition. "

But once the Scandinavians did start making log cabins, they made them their own, to the point when today everyone thinks that joint timber log cabins are a native Scandinavian tradition. So much so that today even Slavs believe that they borrowed the technology for building their own joint timber log cabins from Scandinavians. Funny how things like this happen.

The below picture shows a typical joint timber log cabin from Scandinavia (Stockholm). Please note that it uses the same horizontal beam joining constriction technique like the first hose from Serbia that I showed above.

If anyone has any additional info on the development of the joint timber log cabins please let me know.