In the
Primary Chronicle, he is known as , probably a slavicized version of the
Old Norse name
Ragnvald. mentioned a possibility of the association of the name with the East Slavic words
рог and
володеть (the opinion of a 19th-century
anti-Normanist historian
Stepan Gedeonov, who argued for the Slavic origin of Rogvolod in his
Varangians and Rus; Debugking the Nortmann Myth), noting, however, that there is no evidence against the foreign origin of the name. ==Life==