Ahmad Ibn Fadlan’s Travel Journals
Everyone knows that Vikings left Scandinavia to plunder, and then to settle, northern England, Scotland and Greenland, right? But few people are aware of the so-called ‘Eastern Vikings’, otherwise known as the ‘Volga Vikings’. These were Norsemen who left modern-day Denmark and Norway and traveled east, forming trade links with modern-day Ukraine. It was here they came into contact with Muslim traders, and it’s thanks to Ahmad Ibn Fadlan that we have so much information about this fascinating meeting of cultures. His writings were part diary, part travelogue and they continued to be pored over by historians to this day.
Almost nothing is known about Ibn Fadlan, including his early life. What is known is that he was a legal expert and spent at least some of his career in the service of the Abbasid Caliphate. In the year 921, he was sent from Baghdad to work for Almis, the first Muslim ruler of what was then Volga Bulgaria. While the main focus of his job was to teach Islamic law, Ibn Fadlan was also instrumental in establishing caravan trade routes towards Uzbekistan and the Caspian Sea. His travels, and his work as an ambassador for the Caliphate meant that he came into contact with a wide range of people, from traders and salesmen to rulers and peasants. He recorded his observations in his diary.
Above all, Ibn Fadlan’s diaries are notable for the entries related to what he called the ‘Rus’. These were the Volga Vikings who had established a vibrant Volga trade route. In his diary, he described the Norsemen as “the perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy”, adding that they were perhaps vain, even disgusting, in habits such as combing their hair every day. Ibn Fadlan contrasted the Rus with eastern traders, concluding that the latter were far more sophisticated and cultured in almost every way. Nevertheless, he studied the Rus with great curiosity, and his first-hand account of a Viking ship funeral – and, notably, a funeral that involved human sacrifice – remains hugely important to scholars of the period. His also wrote in his diaries accounts of Viking revelry, with the drinking and womanizing a huge shock to a pious man of letters such as himself.
For centuries, Ibn Fadlan’s diary lay unread and unappreciated. It was only in 1923 that a scholar found the manuscript lying in the Quds Museum of Iran and immediately recognised its historical significance. The original manuscript was painstakingly translated and has now been widely published.