IN THE STUDY of Old Norse names for Old Rus’ two toponyms, Garðar and Garðaríki— that were considered to have been interchangeable variants of one sole name— have rarely been distinguished. The majority of scholars, however, studied only the place-name Garðaríki, which is younger than Garðar and is more widespread in the Old Norse texts.

The interpretations of Garðaríki vary. Thus, the compilers of the Icelandic– English dictionary (first published in 1874), Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, believed that the name had been “derived from the castles or strongholds (gardar) which the Scandinavians erected among the Slavonic people” and that the word told “the same tale as the Roman ‘castle’ in England” (Cleasby, Gudbrand Vigfusson 1957, 192). Vasiliy Tatishchev, the author of the first major work on Russian history (eighteenth century), understood Garðaríki as “the Great Town” (Tatishchev 1962, 283); however, in Russian historiography the translation “the Country of Towns” became traditional (Pogodin 1914, 31; Klyuchevskiy 1923, 157; Tikhomirov 1956, 9; Grekov 1959, 305). The position of Russian historians was formed, probably, not without some influence from Vilhelm Thomsen, who supposed that in those cases when the place-names were connected with Eastern Europe the Old Icelandic garðr came to mean exactly what the Old Russian городъ “town” meant (Thomsen 1879, 83). Elena Rydzevskaya, in a special paper dedicated to the analysis of this toponym, arrived at a conclusion that “Garðaríki was in fact ‘the Country of towns,’ as the Russian historians translated the term, but the word garðr in its structure did not have its usual Old Norse meaning, but was a kind of popular etymology, an attempt to adjust a foreign word to a similar word of one's own language” (Rydzevskaya 1978, 151). Undertaking the analysis of all East European place-names with the root garð-, Elena Melnikova concluded that “in the eleventh through the twelfth centuries, the toponym Garðar, that has completely lost its relation with the original semantics of the word garðr, is being transformed, according to the X-ríki pattern that serves for the designation of a state formation, into Garðaríki” (Melnikova 1977a, 206– 7).