- Oroech Is Generally Supposed To Be A Mistake For Noroech,
NORWEGE Or Norway, Which Is Probable Enough.
But considering the Asiatic
sources of most of our author's information, it is also possible that
Oroech represents WAREG.
The Waraegs or Warangs are celebrated in the
oldest Russian history as a race of warlike immigrants, of whom came Rurik,
the founder of the ancient royal dynasty, and whose name was long preserved
in that of the Varangian guards at Constantinople. Many Eastern
geographers, from Al Biruni downwards, speak of the Warag or Warang as a
nation dwelling in the north, on the borders of the Slavonic countries, and
on the shores of a great arm of the Western Ocean, called the Sea of
Warang, evidently the Baltic. The Waraegers are generally considered to
have been Danes or Northmen, and Erman mentions that in the bazaars of
Tobolsk he found Danish goods known as Varaegian. Mr. Hyde Clark, as I
learn from a review, has recently identified the Warangs or Warings with
the Varini, whom Tacitus couples with the Angli, and has shown probable
evidence for their having taken part in the invasion of Britain. He has
also shown that many points of the laws which they established in Russia
were purely Saxon in character. (Bayer in Comment. Acad. Petropol. IV.
276 seqq.; Fraehn in App. to Ibn Fozlan, p. 177 seqq.; Erman, I. 374;
Sat. Review, 19th June, 1869; Gold. Horde, App. p. 428.)
[1] This Ukak of Ibn Batuta is not, as I too hastily supposed (vol.
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