Sorry for interrupting the hitchhiking story, but I have to spew some history. Putin claims that he wants to conquer/something Kyiv since it’s the “mother of Russia”. In that case, I was in the grandmother
Sorry for interrupting the hitchhiking story, but I have to spew some history. Putin claims that he wants to conquer/something Kyiv since it’s the “mother of Russia”. In that case, I was in the grandmother yesterday, in Roslagen.
Roslagen is the coastal area northeast of Stockholm. Scandinavia was during (and before) the Viking age divided into “teams” of warriors, leidangs, like a conscription kind of thing. Along the coast, these had ships, such as in Roslagen, the “team of rowers”. “Vikings” were either these teams who went abroad, or random warriors who felt that Scandinavia was too well armed for what there was to plunder. (Of course there’s not much to plunder in a frozen forest anyway.)
Small teams that begun this were probably such warrior teams, while in the end, the fleets were whole leidangs who left Scandinavia as these were nationalized into kingdoms.
Scandinavians in the West ended up conquering or colonizing England, Ireland, Northern France, Iceland and Greenland, or were killed in America. Scandinavians in the East went to the Finnish, Baltic and Slavic lands. In Finnish, Sweden is called “Ruotsi” and in Estonian it’s called “Rootsi”. They conquered Kyiv, and started an empire there called “Land of the Rus”. It was an empire based on Finns, Slavs and Balts, with rulers from Roslagen in Sweden. See the discussion here.
They quickly learned Slavic though, and the kids got Slavic names, which is indicative of the rulers being not too many, and being mostly male, marrying local women, learning their languages, and being too lazy to teach the kids their own language, as it often the case with bad fathers.
Kyiv was anyway already built, and we don’t know by whom, but probably by Slavs, and it served as a trading post between Scandinavia and the Eastern Roman Empire (aka Byzantine Empire).
Kyivan Rus became the cultural origin of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Russia was formed by an eastern Rus duchy called Vladimir-Suzdal, which later called themselves Muscovy, and then called themselves “Russia” after conquering all other Rus parts, areas ruled by the originally viking Rurik dystany.
So if Kyiv is Russia’s mother, then name-wise the grandmother is Roslagen. A small part of Sweden, that I visited yesterday to have dinner with my family. We ate draniki with smetana and pickled cucumber with vodka. Everything produced west of Putin’s control.