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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Travelers in a strange land often embellish, and historical sources need to be interpreted with a grain of salt.

For instance, consider Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who made a trip to Rus:

[The Rus] are the filthiest of all God’s creatures... Meanwhile, the female slave who was to be killed [after her master had passed] came and went, entering one yurt after another. One by one the owner of the yurt had intercourse with her and said, “Tell your master that I have done this out of love for you.” ...Six men entered the yurt. They all had intercourse with the female slave and then laid her beside her master. Two held her feet, two her hands. The crone called the Angel of Death placed a rope around her neck with the ends crossing one another and handed it to two of the men to pull on. She advanced with a large, broad-bladed dagger and began to thrust it in between her ribs, here and there, while the two men strangled her with the rope until she died.

Are the Slavs just that barbaric? Or is someone, on observing an alien culture he perceives as inferior, embellishing a story for the sake of his readers? It's hard to say. And perhaps it's literally true in every detail, but that itself doesn't speak to how widespread it was or whether the typical Rusian(?) would consider this praiseworthy or detestable.

Maybe the ancient Slavs really were that barbaric, but I was under the impression that ibn Fadlan visited the Viking Rus, not Slav Russians. Or maybe it was some mix of both.

I might be getting confused by Michael Crichton's novel here.

You're right- this got covered at some length in the latest Dan Carlin pod. It is up for debate whether these were Slavicised Germanics, just Vikings doing Viking things, or nonsense.

He suggested that the 'filth' part (which is in contrast with other accounts of the Vikings in their homelands) is a function of 'Men away from home on a slaving trip without their wives letting standards slip' rather than an inherent feature of their culture. There was an anecdote about washing their faces in the same dirty water too.

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