The historical narrative

The Primary Chronicle introduces the earliest known names of the Varangian rulers of Rus’ under the year 862. In particular, it states that the oldest brother, Rurik (Rjurikъ), located himself in Novgorod, and with him “there were two men who did not belong to his kin, but were boyars. They obtained permission to go to Tsar’grad [Constantinople] with their families”; in the course of their trip they arrived in Kyiv and conquered it. They remained in the town, “and after gathering together many Varangians, they established their dominion over the country of the Polyanians” (RPC: 60). Their names were Askoldъ (Аскол∂ъ/Оскол∂ъ) and Dirъ (Дupъ) (PVL: 23). Incidentally, if, following the chronicler, Askold and Dir undertook the journey in that same year 862 when Rurik settled in Novgorod, this implies that the route to Constantinople must have been known and used by the Norsemen already before that date (Paszkiewicz 1954: 139).

The Scandinavian origin of the two names, Askold and Dir, has long been recognised. Relying on Jóhannesson (1956: 307), Pritsak (1981: 175; see Schramm 2002: 354) cited the “usual etymology” of Askold, from Old Norse Hǫskuldr, that is, *hǫss-kollr ‘grey-head’, in which the first element, hǫss usually implies a wolf-like grey. In his seminal work on the linguistic interrelations in Early Rus’, Strumiński (1998: 160) provided a slightly different etymology of Askold. According to him, the name comes from *HaskuldR ‘(Be) an unfriendly enemy’ (to your adversaries), a form without the u-umlaut. Interestingly, Pritsak and Strumiński did not concur on the etymology of the name Dir. Pritsak (1981: 175–176) maintained that Dir, from Old Norse d ýr, originally meant ‘an animal or beast’, ‘a wild beast or deer’ (Jóhannesson 1956: 507–508; Schramm 2002: 357). He also argued that, although in the Germanic languages the word almost always referred to deer, in Russian the corresponding word, zver’, is the most common taboo-word for ‘bear’, as bjǫrn ‘bear’ is in Scandinavian and Germanic; so, according to Pritsak, it is possible that in eastern Europe dýr meant ‘bear’.