Dr. Wayne Bartlett

That could take a whole range of guises.

They could be leaders in the army or even the navy, obviously given the Viking background, pretty useful in that.

They could also be a personal bodyguard for the emperor himself.

one particular group called the Varangian Guard, they become very heavily linked with the Byzantine emperors as his personal bodyguard.

Very important position.

Obviously, they're in close proximity to the emperor of the day.

So that gives them a position of trust, but also a position of power, which they could sometimes potentially abuse.

And on occasion, they probably did that.

So yeah, very much prized warriors for hire, which the Byzantines used, though they're not always completely trusting of them for very good reason.

So it's a little bit of a strange relationship.

They're glad to have these people there because of their military martial prowess, but they're also not always completely trusting of them, which made for a very interesting dynamic, to say the least.

Well, yeah, there are one or two references to his physical appearance.

Very, very striking guy.

In fact, famously at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, the other end of his life, Harold, the King of England, offered him seven feet of ground, of English ground as his kind of grave.

So there's a very sort of direct reference to how big and striking he was there.

At all the accounts we have with him, they do major on his physical strikingness.

But again, we have to be a little bit cautious here because Sagas tended to make, to give a modern equivalent, Hollywood idols of their leading figures.

It's quite normal to say that Harold or whoever the subject matter at the time is, is the most handsome man ever.

And, you know, he's a giant, all of these kind of things.

But very interestingly, there is a 10th century account by a guy called Ibn Fadlan, who was an Islamic ambassador from Baghdad, who saw the Rus firsthand.