This is CBSI in the world.

I'm John Batchel with Eleanor Barracloff, the professor,

who is also the author of Embers of the Hands,

Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.

Eleanor is helping us understand that the Vikings,

who have this very large reputation in America because they got to North America, they got to Greenland in the news, they got to Iceland, always in the news, they got to England, yes, of course, but they also reached all the way into what is now Russia and Eastern Europe.

Eleanor, please continue. You had them at Novgorod around the middle

of the 9th century. Yeah, so pretty similar, just a couple of years before this great heathen army

lands in England. There is Rourik and his company in Novgorod in 862. This then becomes the starting point for what becomes known as

Kiev and Rus as a sort of cultural group. But the reason it becomes known as Kiev and

Rus is that a couple of decades later, their power base shifts south to Kyiv. But what's really interesting is that although you have

people of Norse descent and Norse heritage very much controlling this cultural area early on,

there are always a minority. And there are lots of other Slavic groups in particular who are very much operating within this

cultural sphere. And so what you end up with, a bit like sort of elsewhere in the North

world, in the North diaspora, you end up with a cultural melting pot where you have

Scandinavian elements, you have Slavic elements, and you have all sorts of other elements there too.

And what you find is that the Norse are, in a way, masters of cultural assimilation.

And so before too long, you see names, sort of in the rulers, for example,

that we might think of as being quite Slavic.

So we have names

like Igor and Olga, which actually sound very Slavic, but they come from Norse, you know,

their Ingvar and their Helga. But what you then find is that these people are naming their

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