The present volume is dedicated to Scandinavian lexical borrowings in Old Russian, a topic, that has been discussed for almost 300 years, and approaches the issue from different points of view. In the first part of the book, the author deals with the specific problems that any researcher of this subject necessarily has to meet, being the so-called Varangian controversy over the beginnings of Russia that has had a strong ideological impact on the results of many hitherto publications and that is far from closed even today. The second part comprises a linguistic analysis of three borrowings in Old Russian legal language that belong to a group of historical terms, denoting ranks in social and administrative hierarchy. The book aims for the most objective possible and critical approach based on conscientious and thorough work with primary sources. Its attention is focused especially on historical-semantic development of the chosen words, revealing a fascinating tale of their journey through the whole European continent, going back to surprisingly ancient times.

Hana Sterikova is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Scandinavian section of Department of Germanic Studies at Faculty of Arts, Charles University. She completed her PhD in Slavic philology in 2019 and specializes in historical and contact linguistics, North Germanic and Slavic philology and Natural Language Processing. This book presents a re-edited version of her doctoral thesis and is the author’s second monography, following »Rus v období smuty očima švédského špiona: Zpráva Petra Petreia z roku 1608« (Rus’ in Time of Troubles through the eyes of a Swedish spy: the report of Petrus Petreius from 1608, Prague: Karolinum 2021).