THE EAST EUROPEAN river system was an ideal road for international long-distance trade and, beyond any doubt, it was well known to the Scandinavian Vikings not only as a concept, but in great detail. Scandinavian sources name eight East European rivers: the Northern Dvina (Vína), the Western Dvina (Dýna, Seimgol-Dýna), the Dnieper (Nepr, Danpr), the Neva (Nyia), the Don (Tanais, Dún), the Volga (Olkoga, Olga/ Alkoga), the Kama (Kuma), and a river not far from Polotsk named Dröfn. These names occur from time to time in the sagas, but in aggregate they are known to us from two lists: from the anonymous þula known under the title Á heiti (“River names”) and the geographical treatise enumerating great rivers (in AM 544 4o and AM 194 8o). Only the Northern Dvina obviously belongs to the early layer of the ethno-geographical nomenclature (see above, p. 25), as it is mentioned already in skaldic poetry.

The Northern Dvina

The river Vína is known from a large number of sources: skaldic verses, sagas of various sub-genres, geographical treatises. The majority of scholars are prone to think that Vína was nothing but a designation of the Northern Dvina, the most serious argument in support of this view still being the existence of consonant names of this river in the Old Icelandic (Vína), Finnish (Viena), and Russian (Двина) languages. Out of the numerous interpretations of the hydronym (Northern) Dvina the most acceptable seems to be the one— not taken into account by Max Vasmer in his Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, but added to the dictionary entry in the Russian translation by O. N. Trubachev— that explains this name as related to the Russian word 𝝏ва “two” (Vasmer 1986, 1:488). Likewise, in Sigismund von Herberstein's Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (“Notes on Muscovite Affairs,” 1549): “The province and the river Dvina took their name from the confluence of the rivers Yug and Sukhona, for Dvina signifies two or double in Russian” (Herberstein 1988, 155).