Russia most likely owes its name to Swedish rowers
The Rus', who gave their name to Russia and Belarus, were most likely Norsemen from what is now Sweden. From the 8th to the 11th centuries they settled and ruled along the rivers linking the Baltic to the Black Sea, and their name probably comes from an Old Norse word for rowing.
Their first centres lay at the two ends of the Volkhov, the river that joins Lake Ilmen to Lake Ladoga: Ladoga, known to the Norsemen as Aldeigja and dating from the 750s, and Rurikovo Gorodische, probably their Holmr, established about a century later. Envoys from the Ladoga area reached Constantinople in 838, and the Primary Chronicle first records Varangians taking tribute from Slavic and Finnic tribes in 859. From the north, the Rus' name spread to the middle Dnieper.
The word most likely passed through Finnic, where Ruotsi still means Sweden. Scholars trace it to a Norse root connected with rowing and the fleet levy, the duty to crew the king's ships; compounds such as róþsmenn and róþskarlar both meant rowers. An alternative link to Roslagen, a Swedish coastal region named for its rowing teams, is compatible but less favoured, because that area was then too thinly populated to stand out. The Greek form Rōs comes from the same source.
Kievan Rus' was known in Norse as Garðaríki. Over time the Norse rulers and local Finnic peoples merged into the East Slavic population and shared a language; the elite still knew Old Norse until full assimilation in the second half of the 11th century, and traces of Norse culture lingered in the rural north into the 14th and early 15th centuries. As the ruling class became Slavic, the word Varangian took over as the name for Scandinavians travelling the river routes.
Because the Rus' sit at the root of state formation in Eastern Europe and matter to the national histories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, the Norse origin has been challenged by so-called anti-Normanist theories, but these are held by only a small group of scholars. Runestones in Sweden, several recording journeys to lands such as Greece and Italy, remain important evidence.
Source: Rus' people
