Reddit reviews Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (Penguin Classics)

The accounts of Ibn Fadlan's travels are a quick and fascinating read--he's remarkably dispassionate and non-judgmental about the exotic customs he observes for a travel writer of his time. This Penguin edition includes a ton of other little scraps from various other Arab and Persian travelers about encountering tribes and nomadic peoples from around Central Asia down to southeastern Europe.

Central Asian history is so absolutely weird and wild and bewildering and fun. It's so strange to think about what were basically the same bunch of folks being gawked at and talked about by Chinese commentators and by Arabs and Franks, thousands and thousands of miles away. I'd also recommend this really nice brief history of the Silk Road.

Most things from the past will be unknown to most people - usually people know of the major stuff - not the minor details.

You might consider reading original material from scholar/travelers from China to India (the advantage of reading original material - esp. for a writer - is that you get loads of detailed material which is relevant for you and you may notice it - although it may not be relevant for the wider picture a historian maybe painting - so there will be details which will be valuable to get a sense of the environment).

For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxian

and his accounts of visit to Taxila (Greco-Buddhist university - in present day Pakistan - which was part of the greater India in pre-1947 era):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxila

Or this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanzang

another link for him:

http://www.chinabuddhismencyclopedia.com/en/index.php/Xuanzang_or_Hsüan-tsang

There are many other original travelogues you can read to get an idea of that period and region.

You can read Al Biruni's India - which chronicles India as he experienced it in 1000 AD - the variations in Hinduism as were apparent to him. He bitterly criticizes one of his contemporary Muslim conquerors for being brutal (Mahmud Ghaznavi who is remembered by both Muslims and Hindus for his aggressive actions against hindus and their temples).

And these are all modern looking books - i.e. since the people/scholars who wrote these were perceptive etc. So Al Biruni's India includes some details about variations and the types of people.

https://www.amazon.com/Alberunis-Abridged-Library-Al-Biruni-1993-05-01/dp/B017POL2C8/

As aid to Al Biruni's critical recounting of the state of India around 1000 AD (much of the book is very technical examination of things) - you may consider reading some of the British journals of the people of India - where they documented for each region the tribes and their oral history (as an effort to understand them so they could rule them).


There are many books about history - Ibn Khaldun's Preface to his history of the world is one of the most famous books of science/observation (The Muqaddimah) - but you could peruse his voluminous history of the world - which would be somewhat fanciful - and this again would be around 1000 AD.

https://www.amazon.com/Muqaddimah-Introduction-History-Princeton-Classics/dp/0691166285

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Biruni

If you have interest in the European region from 900AD - there are some travelogues by Muslim scholars/travelers who went north into european lands (the inspiration for the movie starring "The 13th Warrior" starring Antonio Banderas):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120657/

The 13th Warrior

https://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlan-Land-Darkness-Travellers/dp/0140455078/

Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North

Again these books come across as very contemporary - as their writers analyze each group of different (to their eyes) people they meet. It also gives secondary insight into the details of those periods.



Although slightly later than your time period - from the 1300s - you can read Ibn Battuta and his travels all over - and his fanciful descriptions of the people he meets:

https://www.amazon.com/Travels-Ibn-Battutah/dp/0330418793/

I'll be quite frank in saying that I haven't read Ibn Fadlan in either the original or in translation, but after looking into the question, as is so often true of Arabic texts, you don't have a lot of choices.

Unless you speak something other than English, there are basically three translations in print:

https://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlan-Land-Darkness-Travellers/dp/0140455078/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503110083&sr=1-1&keywords=ibn+fadlan

and:

https://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlans-Journey-Russia-Tenth-Century/dp/155876366X

and:

https://nyupress.org/books/9781479899890/

In his introduction to the last one, which is also the most recent chronologically published, Montgomery notes in regard to the other two translations:

> My translation aspires to
lucidity and legibility. James E. McKeithen’s excellent PhD thesis
(Indiana University, 1979) will satisfy the reader in search of a crib
of the Arabic. There are two other translations into English, by
Richard N. Frye (2005) and by the late Paul Lunde and Caroline
Stone (2012). They are both admirable: Frye’s is very useful for the
studies he provides alongside the translation, and Lunde and Stone
have produced a nicely readable version of the work. Both, however,
effectively promote a version of Ibn Faḍlān’s text dominated
by Yāqūt’s quotations.

Which is to say the commentary of the compiler from which Ibn Fadlan's text is recorded (i.e. we don't actually have Ibn Fadlan's tex to translate from.)

Montgomery's introduction is worth reading in full as I think it will explain some of the problems in preparing a translation from such a source:

https://nyupress.org/webchapters/Montgomery_Mission_Introduction.pdf

In particular, Montgomery is trying to shave off the outside commentary, as a result his work is considerably shorter.

Frankly, to a lay reader, I'm not sure it would make much of a difference.

If you have any other languages, particularly German, there may be other translations that are worthwhile.

Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness is something you should look in to, it deals with Fadlan's accounts of the Volga Vikings among other observations. As for people who were raided not many spring to mind aside from historical accounts after said raids(Such as the Frankish Annals.) The problem with these is they aren't always accurate and are usually biased but that doesn't mean there isn't some truth to them! Sorry I couldn't turn up more but best of luck finding what you're after.

A library and interlibrary loans (if you can find a place that does those) are going to be your best friends if you're looking at getting basically anything in print. A lot of the resources we rely on are very rare.

I've never seen a book about modern slavic paganism by a pagan that is reliable.

The historical books I recommend which can be found online are Chronicle of the Slavs and The Russian Primary Chronicle. One that is on amazon and not too expensive is Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. These texts are the closest we get to primary texts, and are all really important histories that talk about Slavic pagans. More obscure historical texts and chronicles can be found in excepts on this page.

The Song of Igor's Campaign is an ancient epic poem which has a bit of information contained about Slavic paganism. It's not too expensive on Amazon, and I have a this copy on my altar right now that I read from sometimes during ritual. It has some good commentary. A barebones pdf can be found here.

The Mythology of All Races (Celtic and Slavic) is pretty valuable because Jan Machal synthesized a lot of not-English and disparate sources, including rural folk practices, into a digestible resource. It's afterword about Baltic paganism is also really important because of its close relation to Slavic mythology. Like /u/trebuchetfight said, Eliade's A History of Religious Ideas Volume III is pretty good (even though its section on Slavic religion is only ~20 pages iirc).

Similar secondary sources include Russian Folk Belief by Ivantis, Russian Fairy Tales by Afanasyev and Perun: God of Thunder.

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None of these sources are really going to tell you what Slavic neopaganism is or how to practice it, though. These are sources from which we can collect small details and weave together an actual religious practice. An example of this is a ritual format I wrote about here, based largely on the sources above.

You should read Ibn Fadlan's The Land of Darkness.

Don’t force it. Keep your heart open and listening to God, explore other ideas, relax, read John as if it were the only gospel you had in a world that idolizes physical and psychological domination of others, treats life as cheap and places hedonism above all. Read this and understand that the world honestly described is the natural state of man before the gospel. And maybe then try reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I was a teenager when I started to drift away, I read the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, French and German philosophers, stoics, all sorts of stuff. I also went through a period in my life where I saw a lot of the bad nature of humans, almost in a banal way in hindsight. Christ really did bring something special and unique to humanity, and it took me a long time and exposure to appreciate that. I was lucky in the sense that I was able to step aside from the Church but God never let me go from his hand. I’m not sure it would have helped me to hear this back then, but I was unable to appreciate Christ’s revolutionary message because I was jaded living in a very secure and peaceful world as a very young man. I was very, very lucky for that but the irony was that I couldn’t see how bereft the world was from that vantage point. Like I couldn’t appreciate why the world needed Christ because I confused the truly good things as being the product of man’s doing rather than God’s. I’m not the most eloquent about that, just speaking off the cuff, but I hope it helps a little bit. Keep your heart open to God and listen to the Holy Spirit always - you’re allowed to do that no matter what else you read, do, or believe, and I found after many years that it ended up being my lifeline. Now I’m truly grateful for Jesus, fear the Lord and my personal relationship with Him is very real.

Well the Poetic Edda would be where you start. It's all the stories of the norse mythology. I bought two transcripts of two texts that were written in old icelandic and in arabic. Book 1 was about the discovery of Vinland (North America) by the vikings. Book 2 one is about an Arab who wrote down what he saw when he met Vikings. This is the only detailed account that we have about a viking burial.

I recommend them very highly, but the Poetic Edda would be what you're looking for ;)

I also recommend reading this, which is what Crichton based the premise of his book on:
http://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlan-Land-Darkness-Travellers/dp/0140455078/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419520500&sr=8-1&keywords=ibn+fadlan

Ibn Fadlan, a real person, wrote about traveling north from Baghdad and meeting vikings. He didn't go on an adventure with them but he described their rituals.