"Maǵûs"[170] means in the west the same northern people, the Scandinavians, whom in the east the Arabs called Rûs or Warangs, which word they may have got from the Greek "Varangoi" (Βάραγγοι) and the Russian "Varyag."
All that the Arab authors of the _oldest_ period have about the North, and that is not taken from the Greeks, they got through their commercial connections with Russia; but it is not until the ninth century and later that anything worth mentioning appears, and even in the tenth and eleventh centuries their ideas on the subject are very much tinged with myth. Professor Alexander Seippel in his work "Rerum Normannicarum fontes Arabici" [1896], printed in Arabic, has collected the most important statements about the North in mediæval Arabic literature, and has been good enough to translate parts of these, which I give in the following pages. I have also made some additions from other sources. In an earlier chapter (pp. 143, ff.) several Arabic authors have already been quoted on the connection with Northern Russia.
The imperfection of Arabic script and its common omission of vowels easily give rise to all kinds of corruptions and misunderstandings; this is especially fatal to the reproduction of foreign words and geographical names, which explains the great uncertainty that prevails in their interpretation.
In the oldest Arab writers, of the ninth century and later, there is little or no knowledge of the North. We are only told in some of their works that furs come from there, and that the ocean in the north is entirely unknown. Abu'l-Qâsim Ibn Khordâḏbah (ob. 912), a Persian by descent and the Caliph's postmaster in Media, thus relates in his "book of routes and provinces" (completed about 885):[171]
"As concerns the sea that is behind [i.e., to the north of] the Slavs, and whereon the town of Tulia [i.e., Thule] lies, no ship travels upon it, nor any boat, nor does anything come from thence. In like manner none travels upon the sea wherein lie the Fortunate Isles, and from thence nothing comes, and it is also in the west." "The Russians,[172] who belong to the race of the Slavs [i.e., Slavs and Germans], travel from the farthest regions of the land of the Slavs to the shore of the Mediterranean (Sea of Rum), and there sell skins of beaver and fox, as well as swords" (?).