Scandia debate: Translation, Interpretation, and the Politics of Ibn Faḍlān. A Reply to Maksym Kyrychenko (Scandia debatt 2025:1)

Abstract

A response to a debate piece by Makysm Kyrychenko (Scandia 2025:91:1) on historiographical interpretations of the Rūs of Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān’s tenth-century Arabic travel account as Slavic Severians, this essay engages with the historiography of Ibn Faḍlān between 1814 and 1956 in order to offer nuance to these Severian readings. Acknowledging that the Rūs as they appear in Ibn Faḍlān’s eyewitness account have long been open to interpretation, I focus in the first instance on who Ibn Faḍlān understands them to be. Tracing the development of European scholarship on Ibn Faḍlān against political priorities and the various resonances of the concept of “Rūs”, I outline some of the key factors affecting the source as it moved through translations in various languages. As a text which is primarily accessed in translation, the historiography of Ibn Faḍlān has been flattened and oversimplified; by returning to the first manuscripts used to facilitate his study in both Denmark and Russia, I work to establish a more detailed understanding of how the text was used, received, and transmitted. To this I also add further detail on the 1923 identification of the Mashhad identification, drawing attention to the political ramifications of the Russian and German translations of Ibn Faḍlān which were both published in 1939.

From here, and this expanded historiographical groundwork, I reflect briefly on some of the arguments presented for the Severian identity of Ibn Faḍlān’s Rūs. While these arguments have long since been abandoned – and with good reason – it is instructive to consider how the journey from text and manuscript to accessible translation influenced some of these interpretations. It is also helpful, moreover, to emphasise just how important it is to consider both textual and manuscript contexts and the Arabic language itself in discussion of these interpretations. This is, I argue, a critical step advancing understandings of Ibn Faḍlān, regardless of how his Rūs are interpreted.