Ibn Fadlān and the land of darkness

I feel very privileged to be able to read such ancient texts as Ahmad Ibn Fadlan's travel memoir and the other writings that make up this volume. Even in translation - and I think Lunde and Stone have done a brilliant job here - the Arabic travellers' voices shine through and it is fascinating to think that Ibn Fadlan's account was written eleven centuries ago! I was already aware of Danish Vikings invading and settling in the UK and Ireland, but didn't know they had wrought havoc right on down to what is now Portugal and Spain, or that their Swedish compatriots had journeyed east and south into Jewish and Islamic lands. Known to Arabic writers as the 'Rus', these Vikings (who would become Russians) displayed wonderfully outrageous and uncouth behaviour in the eyes of the pious and fastidious Muslim envoy. I could almost imagine Ibn Fadlan's raised eyebrows, but he strives to still record an unbiased and factual account of these strange northern warriors.

This Penguin edition would probably be best read as a paper book because its maps are only at the beginning - fine to keep a finger in the page of a paperback, but infuriating in an ebook! My geographical knowledge is well-known to be useless so I frequently struggled to remember where all the various kingdoms and empire boundaries were. As well as Ibn Fadlan's account, we also get to read an account written some two centuries later of similar travels by Abu Hamid al-Andalusi. The lands are much the same, but the ruling tribes and their religious beliefs have changed and this continues through the third section of short writings by a number of other travellers. I found the short accounts hard going by the end as there is extensive overlapping of observations and ideas with some writers 'quoting' (or copying!) their forerunners. Fact and folklore often blend too and there are hints of tall stories starting to come in - were the sled dogs really as big as donkeys?

As someone new to this subject, I ended up experiencing this book along a couple of parallel tracks.

First of all: if you are new to this subject – Read the Appendices First! I jumped forward and read them when I was almost finished with the narratives, and wish I had done so much earlier.

The book is divided into several parts:

Intro materials: Chronology pages, Introduction (we would even say, read the Appendices before the Introduction), various Notes, several pages of Maps

Part I: The Book of Ahmad Ibn Fadlān 921-922

Part II: The Travels of Abū Hāmid al-Andalusī al-Gharnātī 1130-1155

Part III: Passages from Other Geographers, Historians and Travellers
(there are 43 of these, dating from 830 to 1349)

Appendices (4)

Back Materials: Glossary, Bibliography & Notes

The main narratives from Ibn Fadlān are straightforward enough. The maps help with place names and travel routes, but after a while I stopped trying to keep up. Parallel tracks here and throughout include the foregoing, plus “why don’t they teach us this in school?” and “this would be perfect as part of an undergraduate elective on this subject” because there is so much here that either dovetails into one’s earlier education – or opens up windows into unexpected realms. I also struggled with the personal names; they tend to be long, and unfamiliar to the American ear. It might be helpful to listen to this as an audiobook some time (which would have other drawbacks).

The rest of the book got to be less enjoyable. It’s to be expected that a compilation of material about the same topic (travel in certain parts of the world) would get repetitive. The many notes were helpful for contrasting and comparing how different writers reported on various topics, especially, for example, “Gog and Magog.”

What went unexpounded but was certainly in our mind at least, was the contrast between the descriptions (including other works) of the travellers here – and Western Europeans of the 9th and 10th centuries, especially. “England” before 1066 was nothing like the Arab world of the same time period.

This introduction to III, 2, for example, speaks volumes:

(page 99) " Ibn Khurradādhbih (c. 820 – c. 911) served for many years as director of the barīd, the Abbasid postal and intelligence service. He was a friend [of] the caliph Mu’tamid (reigned 870-892) and wrote on musical theory, literature and geography. His Kitāb al-masālik wa’l-mamālik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms) is the earliest surviving work of descriptive geography in Arabic. Later geographers, including Istakhrī, Ibn Hawqal and Muqaddasī, augmented and perfected this form by incorporating their own observations and those of knowledgeable travellers. We know from citations by later authors that we possess only an abridgement of his great work. "

Which brings us to yet another parallel track, again related to education. As it happens, we focused on Medieval Literature during our college years, decades ago. It was rather a given that Western European art, history & literature were all that mattered, with a nod to Islamic influences on the art and architecture of the lower Iberian penninsula, if we recall correctly. While for the most part these courses were from the English and French departments, the same was true of Art History classes and other interdisciplinary studies designed to cover a time and place which was hardly as homogeneous as our imagination liked to paint it. Fortunately we have been seeing improvements in the popular imagination.

There were also Slavic studies at our university, and likely Asian as well …. but no intermingling amongst us, academically. Looking back on that now, I can unequivocally say that this was to our detriment.

So while Ibn Fadlān is just a smattering, just a taste, of a topic, it seems like a fairly accessible taste of a critical, and probably still critically underrepresented in American/Western education, part of our shared human history.