Among the Rus
Ibn Fadlan’s Unlikely Adventure
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Voyages & Ventures is a series for readers who love their history daring, human, and just a little bit muddy. From half-mapped continents to diplomatic longshots, these books retell the world’s most ambitious journeys with a storyteller’s eye and a historian’s rigor. Big personalities, big stakes, and the sometimes ridiculous realities of exploring the unknown – no hero worship required.
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Among the Rus: Ibn Fadlan’s Unlikely Adventure plunges readers into one of the strangest and most gripping travelogues ever penned: a ninth-century Arab bureaucrat’s unwilling trek from the glittering halls of Baghdad to the frozen fringes of Europe, and into the heart of Viking fire rituals, Bulgar conversions, and cultural confusion on an epic scale.
In 921 CE, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was sent north with a letter from the Caliph – and a deep reluctance to leave home. His mission? Help convert the Volga Bulgars to Islam, deliver royal blessings, and try to survive the journey. What followed was a months-long slog through corrupt border towns, desolate steppes, theological mishaps, and one of the most haunting funerals in history.
Told with dry wit and relentless historical precision, Among the Rus brings to life a world rarely seen through modern eyes: where Scandinavian warriors barter on riverbanks, Turkic tribes debate faith under the stars, and the cold isn’t just uncomfortable – it’s existential. Along the way, Ibn Fadlan scribbles, frowns, corrects other people’s ablutions, and accidentally becomes the first outsider to chronicle the Norse world from the ground up.
This isn’t a tale of conquest or triumph. It’s about what happens when the ideals of an empire hit the icy wall of lived reality – and the man caught in the middle chooses, instead of retreating, to observe with unsparing honesty.
For lovers of travel writing, medieval history, and improbable heroes, Among the Rus is a sharp, immersive, and often darkly funny journey into a world of burning ships, half-frozen mosques, and diplomacy conducted in furs. It’s what happens when a scholar of sacred law is dropped into the snow with an inkpot and told to figure it out.
He did. And we’re still reading.