Russa no. 36. The oldest of these letters (no. 526) is from the 1080s, and refers to Asgut from a village in the vicinity of Lake Seliger which was on the road between Novgorod and the central parts of Kievan Rus. Another letter (no. 130) is from the second half of the 14th c. and was sent to Novgorod from another part of the Novgorod Republic and mentions the names Vigar' (Vigeirr or Végeirr), Sten (steinn) of Mikula, Jakun (Hákon), and the widow of a second Jakun. The most interesting of the letters (no. 2) mentions a place called Gugmor-navolok, which may derive from Guðmarr, and two people living in the vicinity called Vozemut (Guðmundr) and Vel'jut (Véljótr). Perhaps a Guðmarr once settled near a portage (navolok) on the route to Lake Onega and naming traditions were preserved in the settlement until the 14th c. It is unlikely that he was a new settler because there are no traces of 14th c. immigration, nor are there any Scandinavian remains. It is likely that his people adopted the local material culture but kept the family naming traditions. Sten, the man from Mikula, could be a visitor from Sweden or Swedish-speaking Finland, but the other letters suggest people who had Norse names but were otherwise part of the local culture. They appear together with people of Slavic names and take part in the same activities, and they lived in scattered villages in the North-East periphery of the Novgorod Republic. The area was visited by Novgorod tribute collectors in the 11th century, and was integrated in the republic through colonization during the 12th and 13th centuries. Since Varangians were part of the administration of Novgorod they likely ventured in the area and sometimes settled there. The use of their naming traditions in the 14th c. show the conservatism of some of the Rus traditions. The runic script survived for some time in remote parts of Kievan Rus, as evidenced by two finds. One of them is a weaver's slate spindle-whorl found in Zvenigorod in the South-West part of Kievan Rus. The whorl has the runic inscription si{X}riþ, representing the Norse female name Sigrið on the flat top and two crosses and two f runes () on the side. The whorl is dated thanks to being found in a layer from the period 1115–1130, when the settlement grew and became a town. No other