In 945, the Drevlians murdered Olga of Kiev's husband and sent ambassadors to propose she marry their prince instead. She buried the first delegation alive in their boats, burned the second in a bathhouse, massacred five thousand more at a funeral feast, and then burned the capital down using birds. She ruled as regent for fifteen years, outmaneuvered the Byzantine Emperor, converted to Christianity, and was eventually canonized as Equal to the Apostles. The monk who wrote her story needed her to be a monster first so the conversion would land. Whether he also accidentally preserved a record of a Viking widow's mortuary ritual for her slain husband is the actual historian fight.

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SOURCES AND RECEIPTS

Primary source

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, translated and edited by Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Medieval Academy of America, 1953). This is the foundational document. The Olga sections cover her accession, the revenge sequence, the Constantinople visit, and her death. Available via Internet Archive. Read it before you read anything else about her.

The historian fight

Heidi Sherman, 'Grand Princess Olga: Pagan Vengeance and Sainthood in Kievan Rus,' World History Connected 7.1 (February 2010). Free online. This is the source for the Scandinavian mortuary ritual argument and the hagiographic framing analysis. Sherman is the most useful single article for this episode and the one that opens up the real historical debate.

Broader context

George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia (Yale University Press, 1976). The most readable English-language history of the period. Covers Olga's reign and the political context for both the Drevlian conflict and the Constantinople visit. Cheap used.

Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750-1200 (Longman, 1996). More recent and more analytically rigorous than Vernadsky. Sherman cites it heavily. Useful for the economic and political background.

Byzantine corroboration

Leo the Deacon, The History of Leo the Deacon: Byzantine Military Expansion in the Tenth Century, translated and annotated by Alice-Mary Talbot and Denis F. Sullivan, Dumbarton Oaks Studies XLI (2005). This is the Byzantine source that independently corroborates Igor's death. Leo's account that Igor was tied to tree trunks and torn in two may be embellished, but it confirms that a violent death occurred and that it was notable enough for Byzantine chroniclers to record.

On the absence of English scholarship

There is no dedicated English-language scholarly monograph on Olga of Kiev. This is a genuine gap. The scholarship in Ukrainian and Russian is extensive. In English she remains in chapters and articles. Zofia Brzozowska's anthology of hagiographical sources (Studia Ceranea, 2015) exists in Polish and is not available in English translation. This is noted here because it is worth knowing, not as a complaint but as a fact about the state of the field.

In 1249, a crusader army marched on Cairo, the Sultan of Egypt died mid-invasion, and his widow decided nobody needed to know. Shajar al-Durr, purchased at a slave market, forged a dead man's signature, broke a crusade, captured a king of France, and put her own name on the coins of Egypt. The chroniclers who wrote her story all worked for the people who came after her. So she answered in architecture instead. This one has ships carried on camels, a constitutional argument built out of grief, and the most suspiciously perfect murder weapon in medieval history.

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Primary Sources

Ibn Wasil. Mufarrij al-Kurub fi Akhbar Bani Ayyub. Mid-13th century. Excerpts translated in Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades. Translated by E. J. Costello. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

al-Maqrizi, Ahmad ibn Ali. Kitab al-Suluk li-Ma'rifat Duwal al-Muluk. Early 15th century. Written approximately 150 years after the events described. Principal source for the account of Shajar al-Durr's death; used here as evidence of the later narrative tradition rather than as a contemporary record.

de Joinville, Jean. The Life of Saint Louis. c. 1309. Translated by Frank Marzials in Memoirs of the Crusades. London: Dent, Everyman's Library, 1908. Full text available via the Internet Archive. Modern translation: Caroline Smith, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.

al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Ismail. Sahih al-Bukhari. 9th century. The hadith on female rulership invoked against Shajar al-Durr, transmitted from Abu Bakra, appears in Book 88 (Afflictions and the End of the World), Hadith 219.

Secondary Sources

Ruggles, D. Fairchild. Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Humphreys, R. Stephen. From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193-1260. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977.

Schregle, Gotz. Die Sultanin von Agypten: Sagarat ad-Durr in der arabischen Geschichtsschreibung und Literatur. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1961. In German. Cited via Ruggles.

Gabrieli, Francesco, ed. and trans. Arab Historians of the Crusades. Translated by E. J. Costello. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Between 1945 and 1950, five people disappeared in the wilderness of southwestern Vermont near Glastenbury Mountain. A 74-year-old hunting guide who knew the area well. An 18-year-old college student in a red coat. A 68-year-old veteran on a bus. An eight-year-old boy. A 53-year-old hiker taking a shortcut to camp. None of them came back. In 1992, a writer named Joseph Citro called it the Bennington Triangle. The cases are still open.

If you want to help keep the lights on, Moxie in treats, and me caffeinated enough to keep posting episodes, you can toss a few dollars in the tip jar:

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Sources

Joseph A. Citro, Passing Strange: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

Bennington Banner, November 1945; December 1946; October and November 1950.

Burlington Free Press, December 1949.

Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (New York: Liveright, 2016).

Tyler Resch, Glastenbury: The History of a Vermont Ghost Town (Charleston: History Press, 2009).

Sharon A. Hill, "Bennington Triangle Cases," Doubtful News, doubtfulnews.com.

Vermont State Police, institutional history and Welden case records, available at vtrooper.com.