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FROM THE AL PS TO THE BALTIC

Thus this whole area received Western European culture and was connected to the Western Church.

Ali the problems I have mentioned here were the subject of a conference in Kieł in 1994 with scholars from the entire Baltic region. It resulted in two substantial volumes in German and English with the title Rom und Byzanz im Nordett, edited by Professor Michael MCiller-Wille. The question of Western and Byzantine influence is discussed in all its aspects - archaeological, epigraphical and histo-rical, including such matters as burial customs. The two volumes are now the current reference work on this subject and should be studied by any one with an interest in the Christianisation of the North.

Some of the suggested proofs of a Byzantine influence in fact dissolved into thin air. One of these is the case of Bishop Osmund. According to Adam of Bremen, Osmund was an Englishman, who came to Norway and then to Sweden as a missionary. After studies in Bremen he went to Romę in order to be consecrated bishop but failed. Instead he turned to 'a Polanian archbishop', in all likelihood the Polish archbishop of Gniezno, who consecrated him. For some time he was bishop at the court of Emund, the third Christian king of Sweden, but without the consent of Bremen and therefore frowned upon by Adam. According to the Liber Eliensis, a collection of privileges from the Abbey of Ely, he returned to England and stayed at the court of Edward the Confessor. There is a monument to him in Ely Cathedral. Osmund's life-story gives a good impression of the mobile and sometimes chaotic life of the missionaries during the eleventh century but seems to have taken place entirely within the Western Church. It is true that the population around Kiev were also called Polanians ('plainsfolk'), but the Metropolitan of Kiev Rus⁷ would hardly have been mentioned in such terms, and the idea that Osmund had been consecrated by him is most unlikely. His adventure in Gniezno rather reminds us of the importance of Poland in the Baltic region, which tends to be generally overlooked.

For the same reason the hypothesis of an Eastem influence as far west as Iceland is equally suspect. In Ari Thorgilsson's Islendingabók, some of the bishops mentioned are said to have been ermsker, and these are also mentioned in the old Icelandic law-book, the Gragas. Already in 1874 the theory was put forward that these bishops may have been Armenians, and this fairly wild guess sometimes appears also in modem literaturę. Morę reasonable is the opinion that they came from Ermland on the Pomeranian coast, which had many contacts with Scandinavia. Also these bishops seem to have belonged to the Western, not to the Eastem Church.

A third hypothesis, that the Swedish rune-master Ópir should be identified with a certain priest Upir in Novgorod is too weak to need discussion. It would only make sense if we really knew anything about Russian activity in Sweden at that time, which is not the case.

Far morę interesting is the undeniable presence of some Russian loan-words in early Finnish and Estonian. They are words such as Finnish raamaltu, 'Bibie', from Russian gramoła (= Greek grammata), risti, 'cross' from Old Russian krestu,

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