Nenasytets

Included as curiosity, the Nenasytets cascade on the Dnieper river might have been named an eið for what was a portage due to a dangerous, 2.4-km stretch of rapids. This is a topic unto itself and, grossly simplified, originates in Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’s De Administrando Imperio (DAI, c.950), written in Byzantine Greek and based (in part?) on second-hand information from a Bulgaro-Macedonian source¹, and possibly others. He lists seven cascades² in Greek, attempting to transliterate old Norse and Slavic names, some of which seem to be translations of the other, but in which direction is debated. However, while most reports of cascade No.4, Nenasytets  (> ‘Insatiable’ in Ukrainian), refer to its noise, it’s cascade No.3 that Constantine calls Γελανδρι (Gellandi, ‘Roaring’), while Nenasytets itself he names as Αειφορ (Aeifor) in Norse or Νεασήτ (Neaset) in Slavic, the latter said to mean ‘pelican’ because “that’s where they nest”³ (they don’t, preferring calmer waters, including those of the Zaporozhian [lit. below the rapids] floodplains⁴, perhaps a simple trope of the Christian mindset, see Footnote 7). The prevailing interpretation of Αειφορ is Ei-forr / Ey-forr⁵ (ever-fierce or always-raging), or perhaps for it being the only one that never froze in winter (but not that compelling to warrant thus naming the rapids). Further, most subsequent (Slavic) names refer primarily to its potential danger, as does the Ei-forr name. But there is also modest support for an Eið-forr reading (portage-cataract, where forr could indeed mean fierce/violent, but see Footnote 9) where the 10^th-C name might reflect a ð-less eið, closer to its PIE root *ei- (to go, see main article), but evidence is short⁶. Again, given the Norse love of literary devices such as kennings, the name could even be a pun involving both meanings. But what could add support for the Eið-forr interpretation is actually simpler than all of this: human error. The written word carries significant scriptural weight, especially when couched by authoritative historical sources where perhaps too much credence (or devotion) is being given the original text. Given Constantine’s two fumbles (out of seven, the pelican⁷ and possible 3^rd vs 4^th name-switch), his questionable description of Rus boats as μονοξύλων (monoxyla), or glorified dugouts, a simplification of what is known about Norse boats of the time⁸, the compounding multilingual room for mistakes⁹ between the scribe’s transcription of a (probable) eye-witness’s later recollection¹⁰, the DAI material becomes as reliable as that of Jacobus of Voragine or the gossipy parts of Bede. The passage raises more questions than answers. While there are reasons to suspect that this might be one of the earliest examples of an eið-name on record, essentially, we don’t know.

¹     Danylenko, Andrii; The names of the Dnieper Rapids in Constantine Porphyrogenitus revisited; 2001; see §2.3, pp. 45-47

²     According to modern Ukrainian geography, there are 9, often called ‘barrages’: Ненаситецькі Пороги (Nenasytetsʹki Porohy).

³     Rough translation of Constantine’s “διότι φωλεύουσιν οἱ πελεκᾶνοι”

⁴     According to Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan: “Il ſe trouue auſſi le long de ces fleuuee (sic) des oyſeaux qui ont vne ſi grande gorge, que dedans ils y ont comme vn eſtang où ils conſeruent du poiſſon vivāt afin de le manger au beſoin…” (Along these rivers birds are found with a very large throat inside which there is a sort of basin where they keep fish alive in order to eat them when needed); Description d'Ukranie; 1660; p.84. NB: It looks like it, but it cannot be guaranteed he was referring to actual pelicans, and his reference was more general to Ukrainian rivers anyway. Be this as it may, the Rosy Pelican, aka Great White Pelican (Pelecanus onocrotalus), known in Ukrainian variously as Пеліка́н роже́вий (Pelikan rozhevyy; pink pelican), баба рожева (baba rozheva; mother* pink) or баба-птиця (baba-ptytsia; mother* bird) has recently been seen in Zaporizhzhia’s Great Meadow (Великий луг: Velykyi luh). NB: *баба, which I translate as ‘mother’ in the warm and familiar sense of the stereotypically ageless local village woman, is already a more vernacular Slavic word for pelican and, lacking any documentary evidence of their presence, its ready naming and usage is indicative enough that the bird had to have been common enough to merit it.

⁵     Name also attested on the 10^th-C G280 Pilgårds runestone as Æifur.

⁶     SAOB’s entry for ed does give d-less forms such as early Swed. dialectal e (with or without a d) or ee and äidä, revealing considerable variability.

⁷     The ‘pelican’ trope raises another set of questions. The actual reasons for injecting the name ‘pelican’ are unknown, but a couple of points are worth considering 1) Slavic nejasyt(ъ) can mean both ‘insatiable’ (here, for boats) and, in some Slavic languages, ‘pelican’ (as well as ‘glutton’, or even ‘owl’; interested readers should consult Shapiro, Michael; Slavonic *nejęsytъ 'pelican': The Perpetuation of a Septuagintal Solecism; 1982); 2) It features prominently in the highly-influential 2^nd-4^th-C Christian bestiary Physiologus: “having first killed its children for spitting in its face – the pelican sprinkles its blood over its dead young for them to live again”. This would contribute to an appealing but mixed Christian metaphor where the pagan Rus run the gauntlet of rapids as rite of passage into the budding fold of Byzantine Christianity, or from (all-consuming) gates of hell to salvation, Olga’s conversion still being some years away (dating rather hazy).

⁸     Humbert, Benoît; La circulation des Scandinaves dans la Rus’ aux IXe-XIe siècles; 2015.

⁹     The three different spellings of his forr/fors – Ουλβορσι (Ulvorsi), Αειφορ (Ei-forr / Ey-forr) and Βαρουφορος (Barouforos) – could be 100% accurate, or not. The latter example of -φορος (phoros, from Anc.Gk φέρω (phérō, to bear or carry) – typical of what could even be called “Christianophoric” writing following the legend of a St Christopher bearing the Christ child safely across a river and later iterations on the same naming principle, along with the above-mentioned symbolic ‘pelican’ – could suggest a Christian reading cloaking a pagan name. If, as is not impossible, all three of these were originally the same Norse sound wrung through the language mangle into approximate and satisfying meanings, it might explain the loss of a straightforward Occam’s razor in which all three were simply X-, Y- & Z-eið (portage cascade) where irrespective of the level of danger they may all have been worthwhile skirting around rather than lose valuable goods.

¹⁰    According to the following linguistic chain: 1) local Slavic and transient Norse, 2) a possible koiné or ‘business’/needs-must pidgin of sometimes extremely limited vocabulary (see, for example, Tohu in main dictionary) essential for communication between counterparts converging on a labor-intensive and perhaps profitable stretch of river, 3) reported by a single(?) Bulgaro-Macedonian speaker and perhaps corroborated by a Norse member of Constantine’s pre-Varangian guard entourage (although he never went there himself, Egil Skallagrimsson would be a good example of brutal warrior with the heart of a sensitive, yet vindictive, poet) then 4) compiled in Greek by a scribe of uncertain familiarity with any of the source languages. To use a common expression: what could go wrong?