Gostomysl

Gostomysl (Гостомысл, ) was a legendary 9th-century prince or posadnik of Novgorod, who was introduced into Imperial Russian historiography by Vasily Tatishchev (1686–1750).

According to Tatishchev, who claimed to have derived his information from the now-lost Ioachim Chronicle, Gostomysl was elected by the Ilmen Slavs as their supreme ruler and expelled the Varangians from what is now northwestern Russia. But the alleged Ioachim Chronicle is considered by researchers to be the most dubious part of the so-called "Tatishchev information", and widely believed to be a later fabrication, perhaps by Tatishchev himself. The legend of Gostomysl was much aired by the writers and composers working in the nationalist milieu of Catherine II's reign. However, the historians Gerhardt Friedrich Müller and Nikolay Karamzin gave no credit to Tatischev's story, believing that the very name of Gostomysl resulted from a misinterpretation of two Slavic words - gost' ("guest") and mysl' ("thought"). Gostomysl's existence is doubted by virtually every modern historian.

The name is not an artificial derivation as was previously thought. It was indeed recorded in 844, when Louis the German defeated "rex Gostomuizli" of the Obodrites. Besides, the story of Umila's dream bears striking similarities to the account of Harald Fairhair's birth in some of the Norse sagas, which treat the genealogical tree seen in a dream by his mother on the eve of the childbirth as a symbol of the Hairfair dynasty of which Harald was the author. Gostomysl's rule is associated with the confederation of northern tribes, which was formed to counter the Varangian threat in the mid-9th century and embraced the Ilmen Slavs, Krivichs, Merya, and Chud. Sergey Platonov and Aleksey Shakhmatov believed that the capital of the confederation was in modern Russa and Gostomysl could have been one of its leaders.