The Varangian Guard 

The PhD gives him the power to phase into any scenery which could be deemed suitable for a cowboy. A mysterious and learned outlaw he is.

I like how the spirit Dr. Crawford manifests before us at the sacred waterfall to impart his ancient wisdom.

In Sweden it is still called Väringagardet. And we still use the word Grekland for Greece. The etymology of surnames and place names is always interesting. Thank you!

I am simply leaving a comment, though I doubt anyone needs to communicate further how thankful we are; nonetheless, thank you. Just wanted to become part of the statistic that finds its way to Google/RU-vid to remind them how well-loved these videos are.

The thing with the "palace plunderings" is in Heimskringla. Chapter 16 of Haralds saga sigurðarsonar in the Finlay/Faulkes translation ("It is the law there that every time a king of the Greeks dies, then the Væringjar shall hold a palace plundering. They shall then go through all the king’s palaces where his treasuries are, and everyone shall then be free to keep whatever he gets his hands on.")

You've unknowingly summoned the Eastern Rome fan club, great video by the way.

7:15 I note that the hairstyle described here is remarkably similar to the oseledets' worn by Ukrainian cossacks, which consists of a closely shaven head with a single long lock of hair (although this seems to have mostly been central to the head, either on the top or front, rather than off to the left)

The Norse Varangians should be seen as part of a spectrum. Later Varangians (after the Norman conquest of England) gradually become more and more Anglo-Saxon until the Byzantines called the Varangians "the English race." And, of course, the Byzantines inherited the concept from before the splitting of the Roman Empire; the Varangians weren't any different from the Cohors Germanorum which Romans had of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Julius Caesar himself had a Germanic bodyguard unit. After they were dissolved (because they had been loyal to Nero) they were reformed almost exactly the same under the name Equites Singulares Augusti, and because they were mostly from the Batavi and other Rhine valley Germanic peoples, they were colloquially called Batavians.

I crossed my fingers when I saw the title of this video. I wasn’t disappointed, @15:32 it came from Laxdæla Saga, mentioning of Bolli Bollason one of my ancestors (27th. gen.) As the story goes, Bolli was first from here to enter the Varangian Guard and, after a few years, he returned to Iceland full of riches: “He had on the clothes of fur which the Garth-king had given him, he had over all a scarlet cape; and he had Footbiter girt on him, the hilt of which was dight with gold, and the grip woven with gold; he had a gilded helmet on his head and a red shield on his flank, with a knight painted on it in gold. "Wherever he went, women paid heed to nothing but gazing at Bolli and his grandeur." Those were the days!

Great video! As Ukrainian, I can only make this correction: So, the difference between Ukrainian and Russian pronunciation of "варяги" is not an emphasis (its on second syllable in both) but in pronunciation of "г" and "и": "г" in Ukrainian it is basicaly like voiced english /h/, and in Russian it is /g/; "и" in Ukrainian is the same as Russian "ы" - /ı/, but in Russian "и" is the same as Ukrainian "і", which is close to English "i" in words like "is" or "ink"

Great video! I actually live close to a village in Sweden with traces from the varingar, namely Väring!

Greets from Kyiv 🇺🇦 (or Konugard for Varangians), ancient capital of Rus (or Gardariki for Varangians). "Rus" (or "Ruth") is a Slavic name for Varangians. Slavs borrowed that name from Finnic tribes who called Vikings as "Routsi" (litterally translated as "rowing a boat"). BTW, there is still Askoldova mogyla (Askold's grave) - an ancient place on the hills of Kyiv where Askold (one of thr first Varangian rulers of Kyiv) was buried after Hoelg (Olg or Oleg in Slavic adoption) from Rurikid dynasty came from Novgorod and killed him (according to Nestor's Chronicles). Slavs in modern-day Ukraine (as well as in Russia and Belarus) adopted a lot of Varangian names which are still preserved: Oleg (from Hoelg or Helgi), Olga (from Helga), Igor (from Ingvar) etc. As well as Rusyny (Ruthens or Ruthenians) is an old name of all Ukrainians which was used almost till 20th cenrury and is still used as selfname in different parts of Ukraine. One more interesting fact is that Varangian settlement in Shestovitsa village near Chernigiv city in Ukraine is the largest one ever found in Eastern and Central Europe (as well as Gnezdovo settlement near Smolensk). BTW, the Coat of Arms of modern Ukraine ("falling golden falcon") was the coat of arms of Rurikid dynasty (this is also an old coat of arms of Ladoga - first capital of Rurik (or Roerik). That coat of arms was used on the Rus coins of X century by Volodimer (Voldemar) the Great - great prince of Kyiv and Rus from Rurikid dynasty (he was the son of Sviatoslav (Sventisleiff) the Conqueror and the grandson of legendary Great Kyiv princess Olga (Helga)).

Interesting stuff. And very fitting that you have found such a scandinavian looking spot to film this in!

Dr. Crawford getting the most out of his old faculty ID !

I was sure you where in a wood here in Norway filming this, so similar nature

Rus derived from the area Roslagen which is a part of Sweden and still called that. The Finn’s calls the Swedes Ruotsi etc.. The main amount of the rune stones that mentions the Varangians are located in Sweden in the aforesaid area, with that said, the Kevian Rus and the Varangian guard where of mainly Swedish decent.

thank you for the consistently fantastic free content

Woohoo I’ve waited for this for so long! Thank you Dr. Crawford 🥳

I was having a stressful day, but then I put on your videos and felt my mood immediately improve. Thanks for sharing all your knowledge, and for taking us to beautiful places every week.

What a beautiful background and calming waterfall in the background! your voice, nature and humor always keep me coming back

Great video! I, personally, would definitely enjoy more videos of the historical type. Torf-Einar and his ruling descendants on the Orkneys would be terrific.

Great stuff, I also would love that you make videos of this tangent subjects relating norse history.

Thank you for still teaching ❤

I really like the background! The sound of the running water in the background is great 😌

Haha, fun to slide by with your old academic logins.

Thanks so much for sharing! Much love to you.

Great video, it's very interesting to learn of connected areas of knowledge to the old Norse language :) Hope the travelling is going well :)

Fascinating topic, beautiful setting!

12:45 I think that legend about tradition called "polútasvarf" - looting the Emperor's palace - is mentioned and described by Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla in saga about Harald Hardrádi. From what I read from some historians it seems to be myth or misunderstanding of some sort and most likely did not take place at least not legally.

That location you are at is rather breathtaking!

Thank you for taking reasoned action on your desire to contribute to humanity, and to the future. The future may not know your name, but there will be some who know that someone like you existed. An individual like yourself with higher intelligence and ability isn't necessarily rare, but for certain, is not common!

Top quality content and comment section!

@Jackson Crawford The U112 Runestone is amazing! It's carved on two sides of a massive "flyttblock" i.e. huge rock transported by melting ice. I am 191cm tall and it dwarfs me completely. I show it to everyone that visits me as I live nearby, its quite different compared to most other runstones.

Beautiful little spot.

Maybe the Varangians looted the emperor's palace after he died then simply said "what? He said we could, honest!"

I loved seeing you in the photos of Finnish Brutality. I hope while buying things a @Varusteleka you bought one their fabulous @terava knives. One is riding my hip at this moment. Great steel

What an excellent location for the video.

I have a small library of books on old Norse as well as the history of the North. I've learned more from watching your videos...and am trying to learn younger futhark as well! 🙂

Awesome!

Well, I really have to pee now

There was a monk named Verengarius in Umberto Eco's novel 'Name of the rose'

That lovely background looks sooo Scandinavian :) Possibly Sweden or Norway...

Thanks for this one! Really interesting. I just finished Don Hollway's The Last Viking and it seems like Hardrada was also rescued from imprisonment by a beautiful (and possibly noble) lady.

What a beautiful scene. Lucky.

I didn't know Byzantine Empire was called Grekland in old norse. It is the modern Swedish name for Greece. :D

Please do another video on this subject.

dang, thanks for the info. but now you need to do the Jomsvikings

There's also Nordic Runes carved into the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul/Big City! Maybe they got carved on one of those palace plunderings? :P

I’d be curious about more videos on the Varangian Guards.

Anybody have any more info on this particular Varangian? I while back I was going through a line on online genealogy and bumped into an interesting name - Inger Varyagi Martinakios of the Varangian Guard. Apparently married into the Martinakios family, daughter of some Byzantine emperor. Anyone ever heard of this or have any more info on it?

14:24 "...He was in Grekland" Me, a Swede, for whom Greece is still "Grekland" and being momentarily very confused xP

I would love to see a video discussion with Lars Brownsworth.

Thanks!

It is strange how our history has been forgotten. Or wre written. Thanks for explaining. I learned old norse in school and know the streangth of norse men, very good war ship and superior steal was some reasons to their sucsess.

During the discussion of the Ed church path runestone (U 112), there is a runic font used that is very pretty. What font is that?

15:36 there's something very satisfying about calling Constantinople "Bigtown"

Väringi - Sväringi - "svär" (svära en ed) is to "make an oath" (Swedish) and I guess the english "Swear" is from the same root?

You got the word "warlock" backwards. It's from "waerlocca" and translates as "oathbreaker".

I worked with lots of Danish bodyguards throughout the world, they still got it.

This may have been the first time for me when the background was so beautiful l was actually a little too distracted to focus on what you were saying.

This was so frustrating to John in the background. He wanted to scratch his nose, almost sneezed but had to stay still. Watch closely at the bottom of the waterfall. John, you know, John Rambo in camouflage.

The Irish used Norse mercenaries as well. They were called Galloglass which means foreign henchmen.

Thanks for all the work you do despite being an unpaid professor at this point.

I learned about the Varangian Guard when I studied the fourth crusade. Fun time of history when Latins fought Greeks, barbarians were in the military and Islam and Christianity were motivating people. It's like being in an airport.

How do you say, "that scurrying squirrel cracks me up everytime" in old norse? 🙃

Not bringing any kind of scholarly stuff in to play here, but have you heard the turisas album called the varangian way? While feeling like im the tenth or fifth to mention this.

Could the later military term Hussar be similar to the norse term huscarl?

I had no idea that Harald Hardrada had been to Byzantium. What a career!

Always so informative Dr. Crawford! Is there a translation for the Heimskringla you would recommend, or is that something you have in the works?

As a member of the Orthodox clergy, thanks for this, interesting.

Your "russian" version was perfect Latvian :D But yeah, in russian its a bit different

for those who're into modern Slavic languages: the word варяг retains a colloquial usage in Russian, meaning someone who is somehow "foreign" to the team they're working in. You can think of it as an extra worker from outsiide the organisiation that you call for a specific project, or an extra player that you invite for a game, or in some contexts it's an appointeed leader from somewhere else! e.g. a couple years ago, the Ministry of Education replaced the entire leadership of the university where I used to study with "Varangians" i.e. administrators and professors who had had no previous connections whatsoever to this univesity

Great, just in the last part of Grettis saga, after they lived in Norway, and wanted to leave, about Þorsteinn drómundur og Spes: "Þorsteinn og þau Spes skiptu í sundur sínum hlut fjárins og gáfu sumt til kirkna fyrir sál sinni en sumt höfðu þau með sér. Réðust þau nú til Rómferðar og báðu margir vel fyrir þeim. ...... Nú lét Þorsteinn lagða verða peninga til steinsmíðar báðum þeim og þvílíks annars sem þau þurftu og þau máttu eigi missa til viðurlífis. Og að lyktaðri þessari smíð og á viðurkvæmilegum tíma og öllum hlutum tilbúnum skildu þau sína stundlega samvist að sjálfráði sínu að þau mættu því heldur njótandi verða heilagrar samvistu annars heims. Settist þá í sinn stein hvort þeirra og lifðu svo langan tíma sem guð vildi skipa (...they lived happily ever after...) og entu svo sína ævi. Hafa það flestir menn sagt að Þorsteinn drómundur og hans kona Spes þykja verið hafa hinir mestu gæfumenn úr því sem ráða var. En ekki hafa börn hans né afkvæmi til Íslands komið svo að saga sé frá ger."

Interesting to hear the tale of Torsten being bailed out by a beautiful woman who returns to Scandinavia with him... this is very much like the plot of the very old English/Scottish ballad 'Lord Bateman', which has been connected to Gilbert Beket, the father of Thomas Beckett, though the evidence for this is pretty flimsy. I wonder if there could be a Norse connection in the ballad's ancestry.

Interesting connection between the Norse, Rus, and Bysantine! Even today we have the remants of the connections in the languages, the Rus being the red ones, which might have been more like brown-red ones (in their clothing). The Finns in between, still call brown "ruskea", though not an Indo-European language, but sometimes a good source of old loan-words. In Swedish we have the word "beväring" which today means somebody who makes compulsivary military training in the army (Sweden, Finland). The root is here Germanic (wehren, bevara, värn, often as värn- in compound words and placenames) and has to do with protecting and defense and warning. And the root can well be very old Indo-European, as both Germanic and Slavic words can be age-old. So I'm inclined to think it is not about an ethnic group called Varangi, but about which kind of relationship there is between the one who rules and pays, and the one who does the bidding and fights, against some payment of sorts. So in a way a translation of "soldier" who fights because he gets a "sold" (from Latin) - a payment for the service as a soldier. But in the minds of contemporaries the word could have had a dubble meaning. (Like we in the Nordic countries think "cowboy" and American are almost synonymous.) If you want to feel the frissons of adventure today, google the Finnish project "Rus" - a flat-keeled boat made as an exact copy of a Viking-age boat, which was rowed and sailed by a group of men both to today's Scotland and Paris, and to the Baltic sea shores in the east.

Your crusade for blár being blue rather than black, reminds me of my crusade telling people Latin rutilus is not red but flaxen color. This word is often used to refer to the hair color of barbarian people and it is QUITE significant to make this distinction. As assuming they were all red haired would indicate there has been some sort of massive genetic shift from red hair to blond hair in the past 1500 years or so, whereas the reality is that rutilus is the Latin word to indicate blond hair.

In Bulgarian language WYARA/VYARA means Faith. WEREN/VEREN means Faithful.

@7:30 Didn't Norman nobles use a similar hairstyle in the 11th century?

Could you please write in a comment the title/author of the book? Thanks so much ?

"Bosse" or something similar but with an umlaut means black or dark. Not the color but like evil, foreboding, gloomy, cursed things like that. English examples would be "black magic" or "a dark day" So, since this is not describing the literal color of something but instead more of a feeling, mood, tone, state of being kind of color.... aaaaaand "blue" is both a color and a negative state of being and often is interchangeable with "dark" or "black" so your are probably some kind of correct in regards to translating black as blue. Right?

Береги (Beregi) means protect, the veregians was the bodyguards of the emperor.

Erm Prof. Crawford, you forgot to add Cowbabe to your on-screen CV

I've always said and heard it with a soft g.

are we sure there was "a princehood of kyiv" or a "knezdom of kiev" it differs in this last 5 years profoundly, i'm just asking.

7:15 I wonder if this is describing a khahol style haircut

That background looks so swedish

Colorado. Used to be great but now.... It's overrun.

Hope us Irish kept out of itThanks mate that was good

I would like your opinion.the rurikid family d.n.a project plainly shows that the rurikids were finno ugric on from thier male lineage.being a prince of the rus don't u think the rus themselves could be finno ugric. Scandinavianized for sure and from what is now Sweden but this in my mind changes history a little bit

Also when viking call Roman/Byzantines Greek means they are under Frankish perception of the world!

The Rus are far more fascinating to me than mercenaries from a warrior culture. They sat at the junction between European war captives taken as slaves and the silver mines of what we now consider the middle east. With so many silver coins inscribed with middle eastern text found in Viking hordes I really feel their influence has been understated, perhaps largely due to Russian intellectual establishments rejecting and censuring any suggestion they were related to "Savage Vikings" until the 1900s.

😂

Now you need to talk about the medieval New England formed by English Varangians according to a French source and an Icelandic source!

Why we use language gimnastics when we have genetics?

You mentioned the city of Byzantium. While this is its ancient name, in 330 AD, the Roman's conquered the city and changed its name to Constantinople. In 400, the Byzantines retook the city, but did not change the name, so it remained Constantinople until 1453 when it was conquered by Mehmet II of the Ottoman empire, which he renamed the city to Instanbul. So technically, during the middle ages when the Vikings were there, it would have been called Constantinople, but under Byzantine rule at the time. Many do call it Byzantium since was under Byzantine rule, but officially, it's name was Constantinople.

I'm sure the English varangians, perhaps with the Danes who also served in Constantinople, built a colony in the Crimea. The sea around there was called the Varangian Sea for a while. Centuries later, a British visitor to the Crimea thought that the Crimeans still spoke a few words of Gothic, so ignorant was he of the local history. English and Danish culture became entwined to a degree at least in England under Cnut, and it is only the Norman Conquest that seems to have severed a strengthening Anglo-Scandinavian connection with the destruction of the house of Godwin.

The Varangian Guard are who finally defeated Sviatoslav I of Kievan Russ... Sviatoslav I is said to have been a viking noble and one of the first known cossacks, shedding light on the connection between slavs and vikings. Nobody could beat Sviatoslav I in battle, as he had conquered most of the area around Kiev at the time, and was undefeated until someone decided to hire the Varangian guard (who were trained in Svitatoslav's own tactics) who eventually killed him. The Varangian guard were the best fighters/armies known in the world at the time. His skull was made into a cup by one of the local warlords near Odessa. It's said that the Scandinavians came from the Kievan Russ people... also Ukranian/Russian speakers can understand Sanskrit perfectly.... these people are all the Scythians (Scotti) and the Biblical Tribe of Dan! ... ScanDINavia DANmark LonDON DANube SweDAN ... Even the words Donald and Don... Language tells a lot. All the Tribe of Dan.... Scythians... offspring of Hercules. Scotland means Scythia Land etymologically. German is a created language by Lutherans and there are many German words in Russian/Ukrainian and Sanskrit... German/Ukrainian-Russian-Slavic/Sanskrit are all related strongly somehow. Also thousands of Algonquin (American Indian) words are identical to Old Norse words.

Glad to see you have dropped the conspicuous lack of dr in your name. Less pretentious to include dr than to exclude it.

Why do we think of Vikings as only Sweden, Denmark Finland area warriors when in reality Viking mean SEA WARRIOR and Goplan slavic tribes living in today Pomerania - Poland teritory had one of the biggest SLAVIC VIKING town and successfully war against Scandinavian vikings in many wars . Also many slavic noble woman become wifes of north viking kings . I think its time to discuss the topic of VIKING as not only Scandinavian phenomenal but simply BALTIC Sea reality of the period !