Fír Flathemon in the Russian Primary Chronicle? The Legend of the Summoning of the Varangians and the Prefatory Matter to Audacht Morainn
Dmitry Nikolaev
Moscow State University
Abstract
The legend of the summoning of the Varangians as presented in different versions of the Russian Primary Chronicle (also known as Povest' Vremennykh Let) provided a matter for hot debates among the students of Russian history: to some of them it seemed to present a proof that Eastern Slavic peoples found themselves unable to establish a reliable state to settle their disputes. The idea of an orderly government had to be imported from Scandinavia with the rulers themselves. This discussion, however, seemed to come to an end in the 1990s when a new approach to the analysis of this section of the RPC was introduced. Russian scholars Ye. Mel'nikova and V. Petrukhin proposed to treat the Varangian-summoning legend not as a historical source, but as a literary tale (analogical to the opening parts of Res gestae saxonicae by Widukind of Corvey or Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson) the main purpose of which was to explain the aetiology of the Russian statehood. In the end Mel'nikova and Petrukhin suggest, nevertheless, that this tale could have had a genuine historical core—the treaty (r'ad) established between Varangian rulers and their Slavic subjects regulating their mutual rights and duties. However, not mentioned in their paper is the closest parallel to the RPC-legend, the Irish tale of the killing of noble lineages of Ireland and their subsequent return to the island, as it is set forth in the late-Old-Irish historical poem Sóerchlanda Érenn uile. This poem which, accompanied by a prose setting, serves in some manuscripts as introductory matter to Audacht Morainn shows the effects of the lack of fír flathemon on peoples not having a proper ruler. The striking resemblance between this tale and the Varangian legend in the RPC gives us an opportunity to reconsider the motif structure and the ideological purport of the latter: the establishment of r'ad may probably be seen not as an account of a historical fact ornamented with some wandering motifs but as a wandering (or inherited) motif itself, and the main purpose of this tale could have been not to provide an aetiology for the Russian statehood, but to show the importance of having a ruler possesing ‘rightness’ (pravda).