Roslagen

59°31′30″N 18°24′30″E / 59.52488°N 18.40820°E / 59.52488; 18.40820

Roslagen is a coastal area in eastern Uppland in Sweden. It constitutes the northern part of the Stockholm archipelago and extends north along the coast. The old designation for the area was Roden.

In the Viking Age, Roden was divided into skeppslag ("ship districts"), each responsible for supplying ships and crews when the king issued a call to the leidang, the conscript navy system. Unlike the inland hundreds, Roden lay outside the regular division of the Uppland folklands. It mainly covered the coastal areas of Tiundaland and Attundaland, sometimes reaching into Gästrikland, and in some sources even included islands further south such as Lidingö and Värmdö.[1]

Over time, especially from the 1500s onward, the term Roslagen came to be used more generally for the entire Uppland coast and even some inland areas.[1]

A person from Roslagen is called a Rospigg, a modernized form of rosbyggiar ("inhabitant of Roden").[2] The area also gives its name to the endangered domesticated Roslag sheep, which originated from the area centuries ago.

Etymology

The name Roslagen is first attested in 1493 as Rodzlagen.[1] Before that, the area was known as Roden (from Old Swedish roðer, "rowing"), which referred to the coastal districts organized for naval defense.[3] The second element -lagen comes from Old Swedish lag, meaning a group or team acting together, the same word that appears in skeppslag ("ship district").[3]

The name Roden itself may be attested already in the 11th century on two Uppland runestones (inscribed i roþ and i ruþi).[3] It was called roþi by Northmen in the 11th century that wrote down the words on the Uppland Runic Inscription 11. In written medieval sources it appears in the 14th century (Rodhinum 1316, Rodhin 1344).[3] Roden was later contracted to Ron (attested in 1545 and 1608) before it disappeared from common usage, and Roslagen became the established name.[3]

Ruotsi, Rus' and Russia

Etymologically, Roslagen or Roden is the source of the Finnish and Estonian names for Sweden: Ruotsi and Rootsi.[4][5]

Swedes from the Roslagen area also gave their name to the Rus' people and Russia (see Names of Rus', Russia and Ruthenia).[6] The scholarly consensus[7] is that the Rus' people originated in what is currently coastal eastern Sweden around the eighth century and that their name has the same origin as Roslagen.[8][9][10] According to the prevalent theory, the name Rus', like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden (*roocci).[11] is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row" (rods-) as rowing was the main method of navigating the rivers of Eastern Europe, and that it could be linked to the Swedish coastal area of Roslagen.[12][13] The name Rus' would then have the same origin as the Finnish and Estonian names for Sweden.[13][14]

Communications

The region is served by the Roslagsbanan, a narrow-gauge railway network from Stockholm, going as far north as Kårsta. The motorway E18 goes through Roslagen between Kapellskär and Stockholm.

Nature

The hiking trail Roslagsleden crosses the region starting in Danderyd and ending in Grisslehamn.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Roslagen — från forntid till nutid Archived 2018-08-13 at the Wayback Machine (in Swedish). Vätö-Sörgårdens samfällighetsförening.
  2. ^ Hellquist, Elof (1922). Svensk etymologisk ordbok (in Swedish). p. 654. Retrieved 2025-10-11.
  3. ^ a b c d e "Svenskt ortnamnslexikon: R". www.isof.se (in Swedish). Retrieved 2025-10-03.
  4. ^ Benedikz, Benedikt S (2007-04-16). The Varangians of Byzantium. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-03552-1.
  5. ^ The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text Translated by O. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor ISBN 0-910956-34-0
  6. ^ Harper, Douglas. "Russia". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  7. ^ "The Vikings at home".
  8. ^ worldhistory.org
  9. ^ "The Vikings (780–1100) | Essay | the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History".
  10. ^ "Swedish Vikings and the Eastern World". Archived from the original on 2020-03-28. Retrieved 2025-10-11.
  11. ^ Saarikivi, Janne (2022). "The divergence of proto-Uralic and its offspring". In Bakró-Nagy, Marianne; Laakso, Johanna; Skribnik, Elena K. (eds.). The Oxford guide to the Uralic languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-19-876766-4.
  12. ^ Blöndal, Sigfús (1978). The Varangians of Byzantium. Cambridge University Press. p. 1. ISBN 9780521035521. Retrieved 2 February 2014.
  13. ^ a b Stefan Brink, 'Who were the Vikings?', in The Viking World, ed. by Stefan Brink and Neil Price (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 4-10 (pp. 6-7).
  14. ^ "Russ, adj. and n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/169069. Accessed 25 July 2018.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.