General Notes

[large-G675.FTW]
Burke calls him Great Duke of Russia. Snorri Sturlasson cal
l him Prince of
Holmgarth and shows his children as Holti-Nimble, Vissivald
, Ellisif.
Donald Lines Jacobus (1883-1970), the "Founder of S
cientific
Genealogy in America" wrote an article in The American Gene
alogist (TAG)
9:13-15 entitled "The House of Rurik."  I quote:  "To corre
ct the many
errors that have appeared in print, and to aid those who fo
llow the pastime
of tracing "royal ancestry," the following condensed accoun
t of the early
Rurikides is here printed.  It is based in large part on "G
enealogies et
Mariages Occidentaux des Rurikides Russes du Xe au XIIIe Si
ecle," published
at Rome in 1927 as Vol. IX, No. 1, of *Orientalia Christian
a.* The author,
N. de Baumgarten, is probably the best living authority o
n early Russian
history, and every statement made on the fourteen genealogi
cal tables of
his monograph is fully supported by the citation of contemp
orary documents
and chronicles."
I am not attacking Jacobus, who is a giant among ge
nealogists and
certainly needs no defenders.  Neither am I disagreeing wit
h Alexander
Agamov, in Moscow, who has pointed out that there is no cre
dible evidence
that Rurik was ever "Prince of Kiev" and progenitor of th
e line beginning
with Igor, Grand Prince of Kiev, who married Olga. I hope A
lexander Agamov
is reading this.  Some historians and genealogists, Russian
s in particular,
have taken sharp issue with the theory that the Kievan Ru
s was founded by
a "Dane" rather than a "Slav"----and the evidence for "Th
e Varangian
Theory" seems fragmentary and inconclusive, at best.
G. Andrews Moriarty and Walter L. Sheppard in TAG 2
8:91-95 also
quote the N. de Baumgarten material as authoritative [speci
fically
"Orientalia Christiana, No. 119, N. de Baumgarten, "Aux Ori
gines de la
Russie," p. 79.  Both Jacobus and Moriarty/Sheppard headlin
e their charts
with "Rurik (d. 879) Grand Prince of Kiev."  Jacobus probab
ly did not read
10th to 13th century Russian. But--- some of us may.
For anyone who might conceivably have access to th
e original, 1927,
N. de Baumgarten source---is it provable that, "every state
ment made on the
fourteen genealogical tables of his monograph is fully supp
orted by the
citation of contemporary documents and chronicles?"
Or, is it possible that Jacobus and the other exper
ts simply
trusted in N. de Baumgarten's scholarship and professionali
sm---and did not
really check out the facts themselves. The Editor of a jour
nal, such as
TAG, certainly cannot check out every fact and document him
self. But, in
this particular case, Jacobus gives the N. de Baumgarten ma
terial his
personal imprimatur, as cited above [TAG 9:13, Paragraph 2]
So----has N. de Baumgarten in his "Orientalia Chris
tiana"---dealing
with "The House of Rurik"---been totally discredited by sub
sequent rigorous
scholarship---or does his judgment still seem credible to s
ome serious
scholars----or are there alternate explanations?
This is an intriguing question of interest to man
y folks who are
descended from Anne of Kiev (c. 1024-c.1066) [Anna Yaroslav
na] who married
Henry I, King of France.