of Ibn Fadlan require further study. Too much has been made of the text’s status as
an ‘official’ chancellery report of the embassy, which is just wishful thinking. Among
the several astonishing accounts of the various peoples through whom the embassy
travelled, the passage on the Rus, and especially its weird account of a horrific cultic
marriage and magnificently pyrotechnical ship burial, has been especially prized but it
has not, despite repeated attempts, been satisfactorily explained. It may represent a
‘snapshot’ of the Viking Rus at a stage of the ethnogenesis which would lead to their
emergence as the Rus’ who created Russia, though most recently several resolutely
Vikingist readings of these Rus have been offered. Curious texts often lead curious lives:
the fictional ‘completion’ of Ibn Fadlan imagined by Michael Crichton as Eaters of the
Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan, Relating his Experiences with the Northmen in ad 922
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1976 ), has been translated back into Arabic as a fortuitous
discovery of the rest of the account, though Crichton’s whimsy went undetected by
the translator.
Bibliography: Facsimile of the Meshed MS: F. Sezgin, A. Jukhush, F. Neubauer and
M. Amawi, Majmu fi al-Jughrafiya, Frankfurt: Publications of the Institute for the
History of Arabic-Islamic Science, 1987 ; Arabic text: Risalat Ibn Fadlan, S. al-
Dahhan (ed.), Damascus: Matbuat al-Majma al-Ilmi al-Arabi bi-Dimashq, 1959 ;
English translations: J.E. McKeithen, ‘The Risalah of Ibn Fadlan: an annotated
trans. with introduction’ (unpublished PhD diss.), Indiana University 1979 ; Rich-
ard Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia. A Tenth Century Traveller from Baghdad to the
Volga River, Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2005 ; J.E. Montgomery, Ibn Fadlan and the
Caliphal Mission through Inner Asia to the North. Voyaging the Volga (http://wonka-
.hampshire.edu/abbasid studies/html/abbasids/culture/works.html); J.E. Mont-
gomery, ‘Ibn Fadlan’, in J. Speake (ed.), Literature of Travel and Exploration. An
Encyclopedia, London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003 , vol. 2 : 578 – 80 ; ‘Ibn Fadlan and the
Rusiyyah’, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 3 ( 2000 ): 1 – 25 (www.uib.no/jais);
‘Pyrrhic scepticism and the conquest of disorder: prolegomenon to the study of Ibn
Fadlan’, in M. Maroth (ed.), Problems in Arabic Literature, Piliscsaba: The Avicenna
Institute of Middle East Studies, 2004 : 43 – 89 ; ‘Travelling autopsies: Ibn Fadlan
and the Bulghar’, in Middle Eastern Literatures, 7. 1 ( January 2004 ): 4 – 32 ; T. Taylor,
The Buried Soul. How Humans Invented Death, London and New York: The Fourth
Estate, 2002 ; W. Duczko, Viking Rus. Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern
Europe, Leiden: Brill, 2004.[b] According to the Primary Chronicle (or the Chronicle of Nestor), the Rus are said to live
in that part of the world where the descendants of Japheth, son of Noah, are to be found.
An earlier version of this genealogy is also found in the Chronology Compiled on the Basis
of Verification and Assent, a world history completed in 937 – 8 by the Melkite patriarch of
Alexandria Said ibn al-Bitriq (Eutychius) (d. 940 ), who notes, in his account of
the construction of the tower of Babel, that among the sons of Yafith ( Japheth) are the
inhabitants of the north: they include the Turk, the Pechenegs, Gog and Magog, the
Khazar, the Alan, the Rum, the Rus, Daylam, the Bulghar, the Saqaliba and the Ifranja
(Franks).
–– J.E. Montgomery––