thousands of runestones in Sweden during the 11th century; at that time the Swedes arrived as mercenaries and traders rather than settlers. In the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries runic memorials had consisted of runes on wooden poles that were erected in the ground, something which explains the lack of runic inscriptions from this period both in Scandinavia and in eastern Europe as wood is perishable. This tradition was described by Ibn Fadlan who met Scandinavians on the shores of the Volga. The Fagerlöt runestone gives a hint of the Old Norse spoken in Kievan Rus, as folksgrimʀ may have been the title that the commander had in the retinue of Yaroslav I the Wise in Novgorod. The suffix - is a virtually unique word for "leader" which is otherwise only attested in the Swedish medieval poem Stolt Herr Alf, but in the later form grim. It is not attested as a noun in the sense "leader" in West Norse sources. In Old Norse, the basic meaning of the adjective is "heartless, strict and wicked", and so is comparable in semantics to Old Norse which meant both "wrath", "king" and "warrior". Other runestones explicitly mentioning warriors serving the ruler of Kievan Rus are one of the Skåäng runestones, the Smula runestone and most famously, the Turinge runestone which immortalizes the dead commander with a poem: The Veda runestone is of note as it indicates that the riches that were acquired in Eastern Europe had led to the new procedure of legally buying clan land, and the Swedish chieftain Jarlabanke used his clan's acquired wealth to erect the monument Jarlabanke Runestones after himself while alive and where he bragged that he owned the whole hundred. Slavic sources The earliest Slavonic-language narrative account of Rus history is the Primary Chronicle, compiled and adapted from a wide range of sources in Kiev at the start of the 13th century. It has therefore been influential in modern history-writing, but it was also compiled much later than the time it describes, and historians agree it primarily reflects the political and religious politics of the time of Mstislav I of Kiev. However, the chronicle does include the texts of a series of Rus–Byzantine Treaties from 911, 945, and 971. The Rus–Byzantine Treaties give a valuable insight into the names of the Rus. Of the fourteen Rus signatories to the Rus–Byzantine Treaty in 907, all had Norse