Ibn Fadlan: The Real 13th Warrior

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Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman. In the year 922, a man called Ibn Fadlan travelled from Baghdad and into what is now Russia. His journey took him along the Volga River. And while he was traveling, he wrote down a rather extraordinary account, what ended up as a kind of ethnographic description of the people he encountered along the way. We've actually come across this account in a rather gruesome description of a russell.

possibly a Viking funeral before in another episode of Gone Medieval, the one on human sacrifice with Marianna Mouhan. And you might also be familiar with Ibn Fedlan's account from films like The Thirteenth Warrior. But there's an awful lot more to Ibn Fedlan than that. And also, there's an interesting story of how his account has reached us here in the 21st century. A story involving the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union and even Nazi-occupied Norway.

So to get the full story on Ibn Fedlan, I've invited someone who specialises in Arab sources like this and what they can tell us about North Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Very warm welcome today to Tanisha Appam, who is a PhD student at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

So today's guest is somebody who's specialising in these Arab sources and what they can tell us about North Western Europe in the Middle Ages as well. And she's working on a PhD on this subject now at the University of Autos. Very well. Welcome to Gone Medieval to Tanisha Upham. Thank you very much for having me, Kat.

So brilliant to have you here. And I'm so excited because I know that you've been looking not just into these sources and into even Fadlan, but also a lot about how these medieval sources were actually perceived and translated and some really quite intriguing parts. of that but I would just start just for our listeners some of them may not be that familiar with Ibn Fudlan can you just tell me a bit about that

account, a bit of a summary. What is it all about? What did he write? And also, why did he write it? Okay, so Ahmad ibn Fadlan. Isn't somebody who we know an awful lot about, aside from this one source, and his name's bandied round an awful lot in Viking studies, in medieval studies, in various fields. But he was... effectively, as far as we can tell, an envoy or a messenger of sorts. He was sent by the Caliph, by the head of the Abbasid Caliphate, by the Islamic Empire.

To the north, he was sent from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars who lived on the Volga River in what's now Russia. And he'd been sent because the caliph had received a letter from the king of the Volga Bulgars saying that he'd recently converted to Islam and he wanted some spiritual support. He wanted to check that...

He was doing everything OK. He wanted help in that area. And he also wanted some money so that he could build a fortress to defend himself against his neighbours. And despite the long distance, it was decided that it was worth... sending an envoy it was worth sending a party and so Ibn Fadlan was dispatched as part of this party our only record of the trip to the north was a very long trip it was a very difficult trip comes from Ibn Fadlan himself

So we don't have a clear picture of exactly what his role was. We just have his personal reflections of what he saw and what he did on the journey north. And this has formed... a really, really crucial eyewitness account of a number of different cultures, of a number of Turkic cultures along the way, of the Volga-Bulgars themselves, but most excitingly for a lot of modern scholars, also the Rus'. who had come and traded with the Volga Bulgars whilst Ebonfordland was staying with them.

So Ibn Fadlan, we don't know initially what his role was supposed to be, but there were a lot of problems with the journey and a lot of the people he'd been sent to the north with... got scared of what was going to happen. They'd reached one of the towns along the way and heard stories about the north.

we think. And so they decided to turn around and go back to Baghdad. And what that meant was that Ibn Fadlan had more responsibilities, more pressures. And so he was having to do a lot of the religious advisory work as well as the political. coordination and the reading of diplomatic letters and so on but despite having all of these extra roles put on his shoulders

He also took it upon himself to write this account, this report. And that's what we have today, the Risala of Ibn Fadlan. It's an ethnographic report, basically what he did on his travels. And he's got these set ideas of different things.

that he wants to observe about each of the cultures he visits. So he writes about burial rites, he writes about how they're ruled, various ideas about their habits and customs. And so he's taking on this double duty in a way of... writing an incredibly detailed and incredibly valuable eyewitness source, whilst also undergoing what must have been quite a stressful diplomatic journey as it was.

Yeah because he really does get into quite a lot of difficult situations doesn't he on the way which is quite interesting reading. Yeah, yeah. He really doesn't have much luck in the grand scheme of things because he's sent to the north slightly ahead of the money that's been promised to the king of the Volga Bulgars in order to build a fortress.

And it's not as though the king of the Volga Bulgars doesn't have enough money to build his own fortress, but he seems to think that there's a certain prestige in saying that the caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate, this really, really... important imperial figure has paid for his fortress so he really wants the money that's come from the Abbasid Caliphate and that's really important to him but this money never shows up.

And that's a real, real problem. And Ibn Fadlan is held personally responsible for this and is told that until the money arrives, he's effectively... an extended guest of the Volga Bulgars and so he's compelled to travel around with them. Until such time, we imagine, as the money arrives, but we don't actually have the full account of Ibn Fadlan's journey. So we don't know quite what happened, whether the money made it, whether he was able to talk his way out of this in some other way.

or even whether he made it all the way back to Baghdad. The remainder of his journey is a complete mystery. I want to get back to that a little bit later and what happens afterwards with this account, but...

So for many of us, those of our listeners who are not specialists in the subjects and are reading and writing about it on a daily basis, but they might still have... come across this in more sort of popular culture. So this sort of story and these travels actually feature in various films and popular dramas, don't they? Yes, they do. And that's a bit of a double-edged sword, really, because it really improves...

recognition of Ibn Fadlan in particular and of these connections between the Islamic world and the Rus. But, I mean, I often, when I tell people what I'm working on... have people quoting from films in response. What sort of films exactly has this featured in then, for example? So the most famous representation of Ibn Fadlan has to be the film The 13th Warrior. starring Antonio Banderas. And that itself was an adaptation of a novella by Michael Crichton called Eaters of the Dead.

That has a really interesting history. It brings up a lot of issues for us as historians working with the material. But effectively, Crichton wrote the novella on a dare. A friend of his had said that it was impossible to make the old English poem Beowulf interesting. And so Crichton came up in response with this bizarre novella that brings together... the account of an Arab emissary from the 10th century.

with Beowulf. So you have this bizarre notion of Ibn Fudlan making his way north and then becoming the mythical 13th warrior in a band of warriors who sets out to defeat a monster in the style of some of the monsters that we find in Beowulf. And it's this bizarre mishmash of material, but the very beginning of the novella is effectively just the Risala as we have it in its original form.

but it got made into a film. And whilst it was absolutely panned by critics, it's enjoyed a certain type of popularity. So I often have people, you know, when they hear the name Ibn Fadlan, they say, oh, lo, there do I see my father? And they start quoting from elements of the film. funerary sacrifice which is a very bizarre situation to be in with it and it's not the only adaptation of Ibn Fadlan interestingly we see a 30 episode long

televisation of the Risala, which was filmed by Syria's national television network in 2007. It aired an hour a night during Ramadan in that year. And this was a program called Roof of the World. And it's fascinating in what it does with the material. But the idea was that it was proof of the fact that the world's always been incredibly interconnected, that there's always been... intercultural interactions and that was in direct response to a media controversy in Denmark in 2005 where a

publication called Ulan's Post and published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. And there was obviously outcry about this. There were boycotts, but the Syrian state television's response. in 2007 was to create this entire program, this entire historical drama indicating that these connections have always existed, that...

It wasn't the case during the Middle Ages that we're just looking at conflict and borders and opposition. We see this very clearly. Ibn Fadlan is a really golden example of... this kind of cultural give and take. You see him, for example, with the Rus discussing their respective burial customs. Ibn Fadlan observes a Rus funeral and at the end of it, he has a conversation with one of the Rus men where they talk about...

how their customs differ and what it means in terms of their religion and so it's really interesting to see this that they're not just saying oh well they're not like us so we don't want to hear it they're thinking about how and why it is and discussing it And having these open conversations. Because that's what we really think we've just come to now in the 21st century. But actually, the fact that this is happening a thousand years ago is quite staggering, isn't it? Yeah. Such a good example.

But let's go back to what you said early on. So that's really fascinating that we don't actually know that much about Ibn Fadhan. We don't know the end of this journey. So actually the outcome of it all is a little bit uncertain. And can we still kind of trust what he's saying, do you think? That's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about in the course of my research.

I'm inclined to say that effectively we can trust Ibn Fadlan. There are certain caveats to this. There's often a risk that people take his account and scholars and because they think that it... matches up quite nicely with other types of evidence, with archaeological evidence, with other written sources, and so on. And they think, oh, well, this is fairly solid material. We can trust this. They then say, oh, well, Ibn Fadlan wrote a complete...

unbiased account that's not the case there's no such thing as unbiased every situation he's walking into he's taking his own ideas his own preconceptions just like we do today with every new environment that we walk into and so there's no such thing as unbiased and

We see this in Ibn Fedlant. We see his own reactions. He gets upset about certain things. He watches the Rus go through their bathing ritual and he watches as each Rus man... has the same basin of water passed around and he blows his nose into it, he washes from it, and then that same filthy water is used for the next man. There are areas like this where he just can't contain the fact that he's utterly disgusted by what he's seeing. But at the same time...

It reads as a real account. I don't see any reason not to believe that this is a real account, that this is his real reactions. And in a way, that's possibly even more valuable because Ibn Fadlan was travelling out of a geographical area.

out of a political body where there was a really rich geographical tradition. We've got countless other sources which discuss these areas of the world from an Arab geographical perspective. So we've got effectively the history books. We've got... things that are written down neutrally as ah the roosts are like this and this is what happens here and

The Bulgars are like this. And we've got these formulaic ideas. But what Ibn Fidlam brings to the table is that he's an eyewitness. He's reacting personally. And I think we really need to lean into the value of what it means to... have these personal reactions. This isn't just a bland, unbothered historical or geographical account. This is what he did.

Yeah, and it's giving that sort of personal element and his sort of cultural background. But I think the other thing that you've pointed out, I know, in the research that you've done into this as well, is actually how it's got to us.

because there's a thousand year gap there and there's lots of translations, there's lots of other filters in it as well. And you already said that we don't quite know how the journey ends, but obviously he must have gotten back somehow because this account survived. But what was the actual... earliest that we know that somebody used this? Was it sort of known about straight away or did it take many hundred years? So that's complicated and a lot of this involves theories and ideas that...

we're probably never going to be able to prove either way. So it's been theorised that Ibn Fadlan made it back as far... at least as Bukhara, the city of Bukhara. And the emir of Bukhara at the time was a man named al-Jayani. He came from a family of political figures. There's a theory that Ibn Fadlan made it back at least as far as Bukhara, which was a city that he had visited on his outward journey. And when he was travelling northwards, he...

stayed with and spent time with the emir of this city who was named al-Jayani. Now, al-Jayani's work doesn't survive, but his name is given to one of the key geographical traditions in terms of... Arab geographical accounts works written in Arabic in Persian and even later in Ottoman Turkish.

And there are elements of Ibn Fadlan's account that appear to filter really quietly into these sources from quite an early date. So some historians have theorised that perhaps Ibn Fadlan made it as far back. as al-Jayani and kind of gave him

A quick summary over the dinner table of what he'd seen, who he'd met. And some of those ideas went straight into the work of others because Aljani was communicating, he was writing to other people and saying, oh, well, I know a guy who's just been to the north and he says this.

But beyond this theory, there's no proof of anything. We can assume that he made it back as far as somewhere in the Islamic world because we have the accounting manuscripts. But that's as far as we can go. And we actually have a complete... absence of material between 922, which is the latest part of the journey that we have information about.

and the 13th century. And it's in the 1200s that we start seeing material about Ibn Fadlan begin to surface. And this is where it gets a little bit complicated because we have Ibn Fadlan... being preserved in separate ways and for a long time in the early modern period we only knew of one

primary way in which Ibn Fadlan had been preserved. And that was in quotations by other geographers. And there's a few of these, a few geographers who quote Ibn Fadlan or draw on material that we can clearly say comes from his work. But... The main one is a geographer working in the early 1200s named Yakut. Yakut wrote a dictionary of countries, which was quite a large work, quite thorough, and it kind of went through all of the countries.

that he could think of, that he knew of, that he wanted to write about, in alphabetical order. And under some of these countries, the ones that Ibn Fadlan visited, he quotes from the Risala, from the travel account of Ibn Fadlan. And that's quite helpful because it meant that we had an identification for...

what this text was, who it was that was talking, because Yaku is quite diligent about explaining where he gets his geographical material from. So he'll say, oh, well, I read this in the Risala of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, and he was sent to the king of... the Volga Bulgars by the Abbasid Caliph, al-Muqtadi, and he did this, this, this, this, and this on his journey. And now I'm going to tell you this bit about...

For example, the giant of Gog and Magog that he encountered, because I think that it's so... so unbelievable that it's worth reading but you know I can't guarantee it's true you know only God knows if this is true but I'm just quoting exactly what I saw in the written material and that's useful for us as well because

Yarkoot tells us that he saw a number of different manuscript copies of Ibn Fadlan's Rasala. And if these still exist, we have no idea where they are. They've certainly not been identified. But it's really important because he suggests that the work was popular, that it circulated well. And he's our only proof of this. But these are the earliest... beginnings of the movement of Ibn Fidlan's text, as it were.

Yes, that's quite useful because he knows then, presumably if we take this at face value, that it was circulating quite widely. But how about it coming to Europe and to North Western Europe? When did that happen? When did we get hold of the translation up here? So this is where Yaku comes into play as well. And this is why I've started only by discussing Yaku in terms of the medieval transmission of this material, because this also plays into the early modern story.

During the early modern period, obviously, there were an awful lot of colonial efforts, a lot of colonial meddlings in the Middle East and across various parts of the globe. The focus of a lot of these colonial efforts from a scholarly perspective in the Middle East was on the acquisition.

of manuscripts and this was done in an awful lot of ways most of them not above board there was a lot of buying up of manuscripts wherever they were available but there was also theft there were instances of people who had custody of these manuscripts being tricked out of them in various ways the idea was that these manuscripts somehow oddly needed rescuing and therefore needed to be brought back to Europe which is obviously an awful way of putting it And...

These attempts at manuscript collection were incredibly misguided. There's no reason that anybody needs 17,000 manuscripts in their collection, for instance. Yet you've got all of these colonial travellers who are setting out and they're particularly looking for treasure. They're treasure hunters.

us really so what they want is they want the rarest manuscripts they want the most exciting discoveries that are going to make them famous and unearth some hidden knowledge and it's as part of one of these colonial expeditions that Various manuscripts made it back to Europe. And we first encounter Ibn Fadlan in a European setting in Denmark, actually. partial copy of Jarkoot's work was bought by a Danish expedition in the late 1700s and made its way back to Copenhagen.

And in 1814, a Danish Orientalist by the name of Jens Lassen Rasmussen, he published a lengthy article, a lengthy piece of work on Arabic and Persian accounts of... trade with and knowledge of the Rus and Scandinavians and in amongst these various accounts that he'd translated many of which he'd just found in the archives in the library at Copenhagen was

Ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus as quoted by Yakut. So this is the first time that we're seeing Ibn Fadlan identified as a traveller who might have knowledge of these areas. Okay, so that's the kind of first point it gets to Northwestern Europe. And then, I mean, after that, that's actually quite an intriguing story as well, isn't it? Because it's not just one sort of translation that's just kept after that, but actually several people translate it, don't they? And there's several versions.

What happens next? Yes, actually. So it's a bit of a domino effect. And I essentially see this as the start of Ibn Fadlan's translational woes, because we've lost so much in the translation of this text in various ways.

translated it into Danish and it gained attention people wanted to know more so it was translated into English it was translated into Swedish the english translation was then translated into french and so you've got an awful remove from the texts in question when it's been through that many layers of translation but there was this interest and then a german orientalist about a decade later named christian fran

He was working in St. Petersburg and he found other copies of Yarkoot's manuscripts across Europe and he found fuller copies. He found copies that... contained more of the entries of countries so he looked at people other than the Rus and so it was possible to then build a picture and say ah yes well we've got this account on the Rus but we've also got Ibn Fadlan quoted in other parts of his account as well.

And so the picture of Ibn Fadlan started to broaden and we're seeing more translations, we're seeing more work on him, but he still exists. only in quotation form. And so by the early 1900s, the Orientalist scholars are basically just saying, well, you know, as it exists at the moment, we've reached the end of the line with the scholarship. There is nothing more that we can do because we've identified

all the passages in Yakut that deal with Ibn Fadlan. We know of him from a couple of other sources, but we're not getting any closer to the 10th century when we're looking at this material. And we don't have the full account. Something's got to change or we can't move on any further.

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So when we get into the 20th century, and especially into the 1920s, there's quite a few rather intriguing stories, aren't there, relating to the manuscript and to these translations. What happens in the 20s? An awful lot happens in the 20s. It's really the sort of thing that plays out far more like a Hollywood movie than like actual events.

But we start with what's seen as a manuscript discovery. Now, I think we should take words like manuscript discovery with a very large pinch of salt because this manuscript had been sitting... in the archives on the shelves of this library for decades. People had seen catalogues, they'd seen the name of the manuscript and dismissed it, gone past it, not dealt with it.

But there was a library at the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, Iran. And this library had done quite well for itself in terms of... keeping its manuscripts to itself. It wasn't hemorrhaging manuscripts like a lot of institutions were to the imperialist scholars. And this was a real bone of contention because being a shrine...

You were only allowed access if you were Muslim. And so we have one Russian Orientalist in... around about 1918, 1919, who reacts really angrily and says some really, really quite unpleasant things about the people who were in charge of maintaining the library. maintaining its books because he'd been able to get hold of a catalogue but they wouldn't let him in and oh how dare they not let him in but this changes in 1923 and this is where we have one of our most colourful figures in the

early modern historiography of Ibn Fadlan. Now, Ahmet Ziki Validi, later Ahmet Ziki Validi Togan, on the basis of Turkish surname rules and laws, Ziki Validi was He was a scholar from Bashkiria in Russia, so from an autonomous minority region in Russia. He was a Muslim, he was an Orientalist scholar, but he was also a politician.

It was obviously in Russia, this was an incredibly dangerous and incredibly busy and incredibly active time to be a politician. He, following the Bolshevik revolution, Zeki Validi became the leader of the Basharevcom of the local governing committee of Bashkiria for a time. met with and interacted with figures like Lenin and Trotsky, but he quite quickly fell afoul of the Bolshevik regime because their ideas about

independence and autonomy for minority communities under Bolshevik rule. And his ideas didn't quite match up. And so within a few years of Bolshevik rule, he finds himself on the run. And it's in this context that he makes it to Mashhad. It's a very dramatic context. And it's a context that...

We also receive a lot of this material direct from Zeki Validi himself. And that's something we have to bear in mind because scholars of the early Soviet period have said that he has been deliberately misleading in his representations of how things went.

because he certainly wanted to be seen as a hero in the way that things were going. So we have, for example, a very wild account of his flight from a Bolshevik military force with... a group of his comrades and there was a fellow orientalist scholar in amongst this group who were fleeing from gunfire.

And they sheltered in a cemetery and were hiding behind the headstones. And everybody was shooting back at the Bolsheviks, except for Ziki Validi, who'd pulled out his notebook and was making really furious notes. And everybody thought, well, you know, we're under fire. This doesn't look good.

he must be writing his will or something important like that. But when he didn't stop writing, somebody called over to him, you know, anytime you feel like helping. And he said, no, no, no, you go ahead. The inscriptions on this headstone are really interesting. So he's this sort of man, he's a multitasker. And what that means is when he arrives in Mashhad, he's tailed by secret service agents from the British, from Russia, from Turkey, and...

At some point he's questioned, you know, somebody pulls him aside and says, well, what precisely are you doing in Mashhad? Because we know you as a political figure and we're incredibly worried about what you're going to stir up here. And he says, oh, I'm here for research. I'm here to see manuscripts. And they think, oh, that's a likely story and really do not believe him. But in the course of a five-week stay in Mashhad, he has identified this manuscript. He's spent a lot of time.

reading in the library he was given special political permission to have access to some of these manuscripts and that's when he identifies what we know as ms 5229 and that is a manuscript containing three travel accounts and geographical work. And one of those travel accounts is Ibn Fadlan.

This is the absolute pinnacle of what people had been hoping for, really, in terms of Ibn Fadlan. It's still a 13th century manuscript, so it still doesn't bring us chronologically any closer to the time in question. But this is, for the first time, the Risala of Ibn Fadlan, as it presumably was originally laid out. It's still not the full text. It still cuts off midway through. We still don't know if Ibn Fadlan made it home.

But this text was a real game changer in a lot of ways because suddenly we're not relying on quotations. We've got a far larger amount of text and that's a really exciting development. A lot of people see it as an exciting development, but in the immediate aftermath, Ziki Validi doesn't have a camera on him, so he's having to, he says, scribble down at night, day and night, he's having to make a handwritten copy of this manuscript. He claims that...

The library had offered to sell him the manuscript until he'd said, no, no, no, this is really important. You mustn't sell it. And he then gets very bitter because after that, he's not able to see it again. It's really hard for him to get access. Hey, what's up? It's Mario Lopez. Back to school is an exciting time, but it can also be overwhelming and kids may feel isolated. A vulnerability that human traffickers can exploit.

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Okay, so we've got then this amazing copy of the manuscript, but it's being copied, written down. But then obviously it enters the wider world. And what was the sort of reception to that? What happens to that afterwards?

So there's a lot of initial excitement from scholars about this, but it's one thing to have the manuscript copy in Arabic and it's another thing to... produce it in a way that means that people have access, especially when you consider that discussing people like the Rus, we generally don't have an expectation that people understand the Arabic.

There's very little language overlap, which is an issue in itself in a lot of ways. But Ziki Validi, one of his first thoughts was, oh, well, you know, this is going to need translating. And he first thought, well, maybe I should translate it into Russian. But... In amongst all of this, he's still politically active. He's a pan-Turkic nationalist, so there are a lot of political issues here. He's bouncing back and forth between...

Austria and Germany and then back to Turkey, various places throughout the rest of his life. But he starts trying to make a translation and this is very hard given that all he has is his handwritten notes. And it takes over a decade for him to get hold of a photocopy. And in the meantime, which is something that he's very bitter about, Russia or the Soviet Union has also gotten hold of a photocopy. The idea of Russia...

Getting hold of a copy of this manuscript is quite concerning for Ziki Validi. He talks about a conversation that he's had with a fellow Orientalist scholar in Berlin, where this scholar has pulled him aside and said, well, you know, these four texts...

found in this manuscript. Don't let them fall into the hands of the Russians because this has happened with previous manuscripts and they've disappeared because they say bad things about the Russians. And so you have this real conspiracy theory type. thing going on where he's got a real concern about Russia getting hold of it.

And he keeps trying to get information. He keeps writing to Orientalist colleagues in Russia and saying, well, can you let me know if there's going to be a translation into Russian? Because I'm working on mine in Russian, but I'll put it into a different language if need be. What's going on? And then the Iranian government makes a gift of a photocopy to the Soviet Union as a diplomatic present. And so there's effectively a translation race underway.

Ziki Validi settles on German for his translation, but there's still a lot of issues. There's a lot of back and forth of, oh, maybe so-and-so is going to publish it, maybe somebody else. We don't know. But in the meanwhile, a man named Andrei Kovalevsky. in the Soviet Union is working on a Russian translation. And...

Eventually, Zeki Validi also gets a photocopy via a friend of a friend. And so he's able to work with that. But the situation for him is becoming a little bit more problematic because Zeki Validi is... by this stage in the 1930s when he's really focusing on making his translation. He's at the University of Bonn in Germany.

And the political situation is beginning to turn. It's becoming less viable for a lot of the members of the Oriental Studies Department to still be there. And so they're starting to leave. And he leaves, but a colleague of his at the university has said, oh, well, I'll help you get it published. We can get this sorted. His situation then becomes untenable too because his wife and children helped to clean up glass from broken shop.

windows after Kristallnacht and the German translation ultimately comes out. Right as Germany is declaring war, effectively, it is right on the eve of World War II. I believe it's September 1939 that this German edition comes out. So it's right to the wire in terms of...

what's going on politically. And unfortunately for Zeki Validi, who has spent all this time being desperate to be the first one to get this out because he was the one to point out what was in the manuscript, Kovalevsky in the Soviet Union actually got there first. Although I don't think it's really that much of a victory for Kovalevsky because his name wasn't on the first edition in Russian of Ibn Fudlan because by the time it was published Kovalevsky had been sent to the Gulag. Ah, okay. Now...

That also is not the only political relevance that this document has. So obviously we've got this Soviet Union interest, but as you were saying, the Second World War is just breaking out. Another translation gets tied into the... Nazis as well doesn't it a Norwegian translation I believe yes yes that's right and this is one of those things where when you start to look at the early modern history everything just grows legs and starts running

And it gets very complicated. But in occupied Norway during the Second World War, so obviously Norway was occupied by the Nazis, things are still going on at the university, work's still continuing. And an institute is formed, the Institute for the Translation of Medieval Letters. And this institute has been backed, it's been funded by the...

Nationalsamling, so the Norwegian government in support of the Nazi party. And a few translation projects are pursued via this, but the one that's important for our purposes is a translation by Harris Birkeland of... about 50 or so Arabic sources into Norwegian. And this is the first really large-scale dedicated translation of these specific accounts that just deal with the Rus or just deal with Scandinavia.

They'd been collected in 1896 by a Norwegian Orientalist, but they'd been kept in Arabic at the time. So this is, for a lot of them, it's their first movement over into a European language. And this translation came out in 1954. So people often overlook it. They think, oh, well, that's fine. You know, post-war Norway, everything must be all right. But actually Birkeland had been warned about accepting money for this translation project.

at the time and was then censured afterwards he was you know he was told well you know this was a really poor decision even if you weren't a nazi this is really not appropriate behavior at the time and this doesn't necessarily say anything for

how the sources were translated, but I think it's often really important to think about why these sources were translated or why it was that certain areas were of interest or were getting money or who was behind them. We're looking at... a situation where two of the big names dealing with Ibn Fadlan in the 20th century, Zeki Walidi and Kowalewski, both ended up in some pretty serious prison environments at some stage, Kowalewski and the Gulag.

Zeki Validi, during the Second World War, was sentenced to hard labour in Turkey for his pan-Turkic nationalist political movements. And... When you're looking at it that way, it's very hard to just think of the history and the afterlife of these texts as sitting on a dusty shelf in a library with no real drama behind it. Ibn Fadlan, these other texts, they've always been weaponised, they've always been used in different ways.

and that is really quite staggering I think one thing you just mentioned then I wanted to just pick up on so We talk about Ibn Fadlan a lot and you can see why, because it's such a rich source and it's got this history and it's got so much very important content in it. But there's actually quite a lot of other accounts as well, aren't there? I think we won't have time to go into them all.

not the only one is he? He really isn't by any stretch of the imagination and I do sometimes think that it's a shame that we give Ibn Fadlan so much airtime when there are so many others who are barely ever talked about. So the translation project I mentioned, more than 50 sources that have a concerted amount of information about the Rus, about Scandinavia, about surrounding areas.

And there's an awful lot to be done with these sources. There's an awful lot of really fascinating information. But they're, for the most part...

pretty much exclusively not eyewitness accounts. And so they don't carry the same sense of drama that Ibn Fadlan's account does. And I think that's really captured people's imaginations, both in the scholarship and in popular culture. We see that with... 13th warrior with these adaptations of the material in our own time but yeah there's so much more out there there's so much more to be done and

Partly, I think it's because people want what they see as the original material, the earliest material. And so everybody goes flocking to Ibn Fadlan saying, well, this is what happened in 921 and 922 ID, when in actual... fact all we have is what they said in the 1200s about what happened in 921 and 922 AD. So even then we're not necessarily getting that closer to the source material because people forget to think about the manuscripts.

and how this material was being moved and used and translated. So I think that's a really good illustration, isn't it, of how... thinking that we're being objective about studying the Rus or studying the Viking Age or studying early medieval period. Actually, we're really not. We've got so many filters that we have to work through, which I think what sort of work you're doing is really key to understanding that. And so what sort of topics...

are you looking at now then what sort of your research where's that taking you in terms of the content of these writings it's it's taking me in a huge number of directions you know every week there's a new side project it's a nightmare I've spent a lot of time recently looking at issues with translation. So when we translate texts like Ibn Fadlan's Risala, you know, what we choose to do about certain words and...

It's often the case that words that generally mean slave boy or slave girl are translated in ways that... kind of make us overlook the reality of these situations and really change the tone of the account. And so there are issues with that.

I've also been doing a lot of research recently on children in this material. So we see, for example, bits of information in a lot of the geographical texts that talk about The idea that only girls inherited in Ruth's society because boys, when they were born, were given a sword and told, well, your father... gained all of his wealth via his sword. So you're going to do the same. You're getting no inheritance. And you get all of these really interesting ideas coming through.

There's also all of the manuscripts. I'm doing a lot of work at the moment with one of the Yakut manuscripts because it's been ignored for quite a while. And I think there's so much that we can get out of this. And it's a bit of a blind spot, really, for Viking studies, I think, because I talked about translations of translations. That's still how it is in a lot of cases today.

that people rely on translations of translations in scholarly works. And it causes us real issues when people only look at the small segment of the text that's relevant to them. And I think that often we can really benefit from taking a step back and considering the text as a whole, really thinking about the context. It's an unusual case, the Arabic and Persian source material, in most cases in Viking studies.

you'd expect at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language that you're quoting when you're writing academic work. You know, if you were working with a Latin source, you'd assume that the historian knows Latin. If you're working with an old Norse source, you'd assume the same. But when it's the Arabic material...

There's this real disconnect at the moment. And I know that some educational institutions are working to close that gap. And there are obviously dedicated Arabists who do work on this material as it relates to the Rus and to the surrounding areas. It's really given us this gap in the scholarship, as it were. And so there's a lot of different rabbit holes to go down relating to that.

That sounds like a very familiar concept to me in my own research as well. But no, it's clearly there's so much to get out of this and I can't wait to see where you're coming. And I actually think I might also have to go back and rewatch The 13th Warrior just for a bit of sort of research purpose.

Tanisha, thank you so much. That was a really fascinating insight into the ongoing sort of life of Ibn Fadlan after his initial journey. Thank you so much for joining us on Gone Medieval today. Well, thank you very much for having me.

That was Tanisha Appam talking about Ibn Fadlan. Now, if you're enjoying this podcast and you're looking for more essential medieval content, please subscribe to our new newsletter medieval monday just have a look wherever you're getting this podcast from there's a link in the show notes there to tell you exactly how you can do that Thank you so much for listening. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit and I'm back again next Tuesday.

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